395 - Improvise, Adapt & Overcome

0:00Bruce Whipple:Improvise, adapt, overcome is often a philosophy that's attributed to the Marines and one which serves them and you well. And I wanted to share with you an incident that happened over the past few days, which was a great example of that. and it also reinforces to me that just because you have obstacles in your way does not mean that you have to quit. So let me tell you what that situation was. We have, my wife and I, not taken a vacation in too long a time, but we wanted to get down to New York to end up going to our granddaughter's 70th birthday, meet with several of her family members. I've got a pretty small family, as in other than my wife's family, I'm the only one that's left living on my side of the family.

0:59Bruce Whipple:So we get up, we take my vehicle, and we start to drive down to New York. It's about a 420 mile trip. About a little more than halfway, I get onto the Massachusetts Turnpike, pop into the left lane, always driving way too fast, typically about 80 miles an hour. And all of a sudden, my vehicle starts limping, loses power incredibly. I'm in a left lane, reasonably busy turnpipe reasonably dangerous situation so I moved over to the the right-hand lane and I asked my wife to quickly get on Google and go ahead and find the nearest Ford dealer if we were in Maine this would have been a long distance but we were in a really populated area of Massachusetts, and it wasn't.

2:02Bruce Whipple:So she says that, well, there's one six minutes from here. So we limp our way to there. I end up going in and talking to the service people. Most of them are incredibly busy. I explain the situation to the customer service person. She says that they don't know when, but they will get it in as quickly as they can, and then let me know what needs to be done. Okay, so what do I do at that point? I could end up saying, look, we're going to end up missing all these celebrations. We'll just get a hotel here until the vehicle is fixed. But that's not what we did. I said, can you get me to a rental car agency?

2:47And they said, yeah, we'll call you a ride. So they did that. The first one hurts, said, no, don't have any cars for you. go to the airport in Hartford, which is over an hour away. That didn't make any sense. So I said, thanks, but no thanks. Then went to the second car dealer rental, which was Enterprise. They did have a car, a very small car compared to what I was driving, but that was the only car they had, so we took it. We then took off to New York. We got to New York. We ended up checking into the hotel and at 520 when most dealerships would have been closed they called me and they said they analyzed it.

3:35They think they've fixed it. The problem was that when you had some transmission work done and they refilled the transmission they put a quart too much fluid in it which then became hot and became foamy and became having the transmission not work the way it should. So it was a relatively easy fix. So I said to my wife, well, why don't I go back in the morning and I'll get it? And she said, you want to drive all the way back 200 miles to pick up your truck to come back here where we're going to go buy there on Monday. Well, that was a smarter solution than mine. So I said, yes. So we ended up doing that, getting my vehicle today, They were able to get back to Maine, fine, and everything worked out the way it is.

4:27But it reinforced to me that most of the things we do, there is always a way to get them done. Some people would have said, well, I never would have thought to get a rental car agency, or I never would have thought to do this or do that, wouldn't have thought to get to a Ford dealership. But those aren't superhuman events. It's just that I'm wired such that I look at how to fix things. And so quitting is not an option that I take. And for the most of the successful mentees I had, it's not one they take either. And I'm not saying that this is a special trait for me. It's not. What I'm just saying is that you will do much better if you say, okay, stuff happens.

5:19Stuff always happens. And that is not going to stop our mission. The improvise, adapt, overcome. That's a pretty good mantra for you to remember and use. So I hope that helps. Was this expensive compared to if we had just driven through? Yes, but I will also go back to the dealer that didn't do it right and let them know what they did wrong. That I ask them to confirm it and then we'll figure out how to resolve the situation. But if nothing else for their staff that treated me well in the past, it certainly appears as if they screwed this up. And it certainly appears that they ought to go back, look at what they did.

6:06They could count the number of quarts that were put in and then have a talk with that tech about what the outcome was of his or her mistake. So I hope that helps. I hope you remember Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. There is almost always a solution if you look for it.