Although I had heard the expression “the dog ate my homework” many times, it didn’t really make sense until it was put on me during a time of disaster many years ago.
Back in the days when we operated a large ad agency (by Wyoming standards), one of our key employees, Ernie Over, was in a bad car wreck. As I recall, he rolled his car at the top of Red Canyon outside of Lander and narrowly missed going over the edge of that precipice.
His car was totaled and he had to be cut out of the wreckage.
Now What?
Although hurt, Ernie survived and was hospitalized.
He had just finished an important public relations project and it was on his laptop, which was somewhere inside the wrecked car.
To make it worse, the deadline for the project was the next day.
And to make it even more awful, I was on vacation and far away from the office while this was happening.
I called our client and explained that I could not locate the wrecked car and also could not locate the aforementioned laptop computer, which contained the much-needed information.
“So, you are telling me that the dog ate your homework,” the exasperated client practically screamed at me.
“Uh, no, look, we had a really bad accident,” I stammered. “We are lucky nobody died. I am working as hard as I can to get this information to you.”
She refused to believe me and continued to accuse me to purposefully being late. She said she had recommended our firm to do the job and now we had blown it. And it really, really made her look bad.
“But,” I said, “it was a bad accident. It ...”
At that point, she slammed the phone down. I was no longer talking to anyone.
With a whole lot of scrambling and some great hustle by my injured colleague Ernie, we located the laptop, secured the information and got a version to the customer a few days after the deadline.
Lessons Learned
No matter how legitimate, excuses just sound like “the dog ate my homework” to some people.
Two important lessons came out of that experience.
First, to always having a back-up, which I learned the hard way.
This was way before the days of the cloud, where today you can store lots and lots of data.
But it also taught a second valuable lesson — do not wait until the last minute to finish projects. Always be early.
Over the years, I have had to learn the hard way how to avoid fiascoes, and here are some of my tips.
As a journalist, I spent a career being late to things. It became a pattern to arrive late and leave early. Now, I am rarely late to anything. It just makes sense if you have the time, why would you not show up early.
I gave about 40 talks to service clubs and chambers of commerce around the state from 2012 to 2016 promoting my coffee table books. I always stopped by the venue ahead of time to scope out of the room and to check out the mic.
It is surprising how often the microphones did not work or needed new batteries.
That is just one example of how important it is to be prepared.
What? Old Farts Club!
My last column about local coffee groups and how towns can have their “9 old men” generated a lot of statewide commentary.
It sure seems there are a lot more of these old guy coffee groups than I listed. Plus, it gave me a future list of places to stop by for some great gossip and some pretty good coffee.
That column also missed the opportunity to talk about the most famous of these coffee groups — the infamous “Deaf Row” coffee group in a small Western town made notorious by Wyoming native Ron Franscell in his book of the same name.
That is a truly outstanding book, by the way, as are most of Ron’s books.
My favorite Franscell book is the “Sour Toe Cocktail Club,” which might be the best with the oddest name in all of authordom.
My column generated the following tidbits on Facebook:
Marnie Lopez said: “We visited Guernsey while our son was up at the Sunrise Trades Camp for the week. We ran into the group there. They were an amazing group of men and very wonderful to us.”
Brad Willford called the group that meets at the Saratoga Inn every morning the “old farts club.”
Anita Gilbertson said her Gillette guys meet at the “local” most weekday morning. Most are retired and need to find themselves a job so they have something positive they can contribute to society instead of sitting around complaining.
Linda Fleming says even in little Baggs such a group meets at the Cowboy, while in big Cheyenne, Dale Wilen says he knows a group called the Grumpy Old Men’s Club in the Capital City.
Lee Ann Stephenson says these coffee klatches sound a lot like one she knows about in scenic Riverside, in far south Carbon County at the Trading Post.
Cathi Higgins Nicol says their group is called ROMEO, for Retired Old Men Eating Out. Her husband is one of them and “they discuss the same things day after day after day!”
In Rawlins, Deb Davidson says they have 9 old men who even morphed into The Neighborhood Watch. “Guaranteed they were the unofficial supervisors of every construction project in town.”
Gay Lynn Kettle Bath says she remembers a bunch of older guys always meeting at a restaurant for coffee in Rock Springs, back when she lived there.
In Wheatland, Gary Cass recalls going past the doughnut shops seeing regulars going in. As the years went by, the newer retirees joined in. He says it is not there anymore, but he is sure there are still places where men and women gather.
Please send me more info about your local coffee groups with your comments and ideas about them to bill@cowboystatedaily.com.
