Did I ever tell you about the time I literally spent three full hours standing at my front door, trying to get myself to open the door and step out? Well, let me tell you about it now. It was quite the scene.
You guys have likely heard me talk about my technology businesses. Running a datacenter jam-packed with servers was part of that. That’s a business that never sleeps. The Internet never stops. Computers do not take breaks. Websites are ALWAYS available. That means that in that life, I was pretty much always working or at least on-call in some way. I am so happy to not be doing that any more.
Anyway, one day back around 2007 or so, I woke up to snow. Long Island isn’t Buffalo or northern Minnesota, but we can get some pretty big storms now and then. This was one of those storms. It was coming down pretty hard and accumulating quickly. I remember because I quite literally stood in fear and watched snowflakes pile up for three hours that day, looking through the glass in my front door. Since it was snowing and since we had no people to deal with in my business, I told my usual people that they did not have to go to the office/datacenter that day. No need to have them driving around in bad weather just to sit there and babysit web servers. We always had the option of working remotely, even back then. But there was one problem with that. If something did happen that required a pair of humans hands to be placed on some piece of equipment … someone would have to actually go there and take care of that.
Here’s where it gets fun.
Somewhere around 10 AM that morning as the snow was falling, I heard sounds coming from my phone that could only mean one thing. A pair of human hands were in fact needed at the datacenter, roughly 3.5 miles from my home. The first sound was a warning, but not yet cause for action. Yet when I heard it, I braced, and I could feel the anxiety rising quickly. Sure enough, two minutes later, the unthinkable happened. That second alert sound. They say that nothing is faster than light, but I beg to differ. Panic is faster than light. I was in an instant full blown state of panic with all the symptoms within what felt like maybe 4 nanoseconds. I was suddenly faced with the prospect of leaving the house, driving those 3.5 miles by myself, then going into what I knew was an empty building for however long it would take to fix the problem. Sometimes that was hitting a button, waiting five minutes, then leaving. Sometimes it was HOURS of work. HOURS. Alone. Away from my house. In the lower level of the building where phone reception wasn’t all that great so … limited options for “rescue”. You get the idea, I bet.
My dilemma in that moment was intense fear weighed against intense feelings of failure. If I called one of my guys to go take care of it, who even would I be? What kind of leader does that? I was the closest to the problem by far. It was easiest and therefore probably safest for me to go (discounting my extreme level of panic, of course). Nothing in my DNA tells me that it’s OK to give someone the day off, then revoke that simply because I am afraid of my own body. Yet, there I was, wresting with this situation and playing ping-pong in my head with the idea of going, or having someone else go, to fix this problem.
Be terrified, or be a shameful failure. An excellent choice to have to make, eh?
My solution was not exactly elegant. In fact, it was ridiculous. My solution on that day was to get myself dressed and ready to go, then stop at my front door and stand there while I changed my mind 15,000 times about what to do next. I was terrified of what I had to do. I was shaking. I was feeling that off balance almost dizzy feeling. My heart was pounding out of my chest. I would grab the door handle, then let go … over and over and over again while my mind raced and I simply could not make a choice.
I had set up shop in the demilitarized zone. No mans land. Not choosing one thing or the other. Locked in indecision that did nothing but fuel the fear.
I did not want to be afraid, but I also did not want to feel ashamed and like I was a failure. There was NO good choice there, so I made no choice. For three hours. Three solid hours on the panic rollercoaster at that front door, just wanting it all to end and knowing that I had no way out of this but to feel really bad one way or the other. My kids were pretty young. I remember them asking me what I was doing. I remember my wife gently trying to get them to leave me alone. She could see what was happening. She said nothing to me because I had asked that of my family. But I knew she was watching and in many ways, that made things even worse. Husband/father failure became part of the equation after a while.
It made things worse, but it also at some point became the tipping point for me. Failing as a business owner and a leader was incredibly hard for me to accept, but it did not outweigh the fear by itself. When I added the potential feeling of failure as father and husband, that was just too much. It took me three hours of agonizing indecision and back-and-forth before my aversion to that kind of failure won out.
I opened the door and stepped out.
I won’t bother with the mechanics of driving to the office, fixing the problem, or dealing with the understandably angry customer that had to wait that long. In the end that was all literally nothing compared to those three hours spend staring out my front door feeling like I was literally frozen in place. The whole trip took maybe 45 minutes - even in the snow. It was scary and really challenging, but in the end a non-event. Yet I let that turn into three hours that still stays with me to this day in the form of the memory and the story I’m sharing now.
Here’s what I took from that experience, that maybe you can take from it too. Make a choice. Then do it. I won’t tell you that I was always super decisive and never hesitated or faltered in my recovery after that. Of course I did. But never again at that level, for that length of time. I never repeated that kind of “stuck in the middle” thing for hours on end because that is, simply put, not helpful in any way.
When stuck between two hard choices, pick one. Waiting and waffling and thinking will not make those choices softer or more gentle. It will only make things worse for you. Everything in life has consequences, even when we are trying our best to engineer them away.
Do the thing and be afraid, or do not do the thing and feel like you failed. Either way there are lessons to be learned and both are transient experiences that we can get through, even when we are sure that we can not.
Thanks for listening or reading today. I appreciate it.
212. Three Hours At The Front Door