Monday I had the day off and looked forward to spending the morning skiing with my grandkids. I arrived at Alta ski area early and eagerly awaited their arrival. When my son pulled into the parking lot, he delivered the bad news that my oldest grandson had forgotten his jacket which also contained his ski pass. I could hear my grandson crying inconsolably in the car and I felt really bad for him. Instead of giving up on the situation, I started thinking about solutions to the problem that didn't involve driving the hour back home to get the jacket and pass.
Coincidentally, yesterday I found myself facing a tough computer problem for work and I found it difficult to face it. Instead I wanted to give up and drop the issue in someone else's task list. I spent the morning skiing at Alta but I would eventually have to show up for work. I knew I would be working until 8pm so I had the freedom to ski until 11am. I thought how easy it would be to just quit my job and spend the rest of the winter as a ski bum. That would not be financially prudent and so I skied my last run and headed to my home office.
My work problem related to setting up a Digital Clean Room (DCR) in Snowflake. I'll spare you the details but it looked like the configuration details were entered correctly as I could see my team's data set as well as the other team's. When I went to connect the two, the system tried to do something and eventually spit out an error. The error indicated my team had misconfigured something and so I researched how to fix it. After about an hour of in-depth searching, I confirmed I did not have the correct permissions to fix the problem and so I created a very detailed e-mail to the team and made sure to include someone that had the power to set things right. I then followed that e-mail up with a direct e-mail to the person with proper permissions to fix the situation.
I had done the best I could and waited for my colleagues in Japan to start their day as they had the permissions necessary to get things working. Once they arrived in the office, the DCR started working correctly and the problem no longer existed. I could move forward and didn't need to quit my job.
So what happened with my grandson? My daughter works at Alta's ski school and I knew they have extra ski clothing in the event a kid shows up unprepared for the weather. I walked into the ski school, found my daughter, and quietly asked if she had a ski jacket we could borrow. She quickly found one in my grandson's size and I walked it up to my son's car. Then I escorted my son and grandson to the ticket office where we looked at getting a single day pass to replace the forgotten season's pass. It cost my son $5, which will probably come out of my grandson's souvenir budget the next time we go to Disney World but we solved the problem. We then had a wonderful morning skiing.
Everyone enjoyed the ski day and midway through it, my son remarked that he now understood why I left him in the car one ski day when his ski pants broke. He was 17 at the time and perfectly capable of coming up with a solution without my help. Instead of waiting for me to finish skiing, my son went into the resort ski shop and asked for some duct tape and didn't take "No" for an answer. Once he had the tape, he gave his pants a temporary fix and then joined me on my second run. We had a good afternoon and didn't let a broken side-zipper ruin the day.
It is not uncommon to avoid problems when we encounter them. It happened to me when I faced the DCR problem. The best thing we can do is stop and take a deep breath. Then we need to look at all possible solutions and pick the best one. Fortunately for my grandson, I possessed some knowledge he didn't have and could craft a solution that didn't involve a lengthy drive nor an expensive purchase. Asking for help is how I solved my DCR issue and also how my son solved his ski pants one. You just need to be sure to ask the right source for help.
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