Check Your Assumptions

In this challenging time, we are inundated with information from different sources about what is happening and what to do about it. I thought it timely to dust off an old blog that I wrote in 2016 about checking your assumptions which I have edited lightly to make it more reflective of the current situation.

In these times, it is important to personally check the assumptions that people are telling you to make. 

I was reminded of this lesson while swapping moving stories with a friend of mine recently.

A number of years ago, my father, uncle and I were helping my grandparents to move out of their apartment. My father had rented a large moving truck and we arrived early on a Saturday morning.

My grandfather wanted to load the truck from the thirty-story apartment building’s basement elevator and so my father had to attempt to back the large moving truck into the underground parking lot located immediately beneath that building.  

My father was concerned that the truck was too large to go into the parking garage, but my grandfather insisted that he had done this before with another truck and that if he could do it, his son-in-law should have the ability to do so as well.

I suspect it was this poke at my father’s driving abilities that made him forgo personally verifying what he was backing himself into.

You can guess where this is going. Turns out the truck that my father was driving was slightly larger than the one that my grandfather was apparently able to race like an Indy car around that underground parking lot. 

About half-way in my father hit a pipe. Rather a large pipe actually. The water main for the entire building in fact.

As I am sure that you can imagine, hitting one of those is a bad thing. From one end of the broken pipe, city water was being pumped in at high pressure and from the other, the entire water reservoir of the apartment building was draining out, all onto the roof of the moving truck. It was like being parked at the bottom of Niagara Falls and impossible for my father to exit the truck in that deluge. 

We learned that day that large drops in an apartment building’s water pressure will trigger all of its fire alarms to go off and so, at 7AM on a very cold Saturday morning, the entire population of that building had to troop outside onto the front lawn and wait for the all clear to go back in to their warm but now water free apartments.

It was a good hour later when deluge of water pouring over the truck finally abated and my father was able to sheepishly exit with pretty much every firefighter in the city and a mob of hostile pajama clad residents looking on.

My grandfather, uncle and I of course denied any relationship to the idiot driving the moving truck and tried very hard to look inconspicuous at the back of the mob.

My father, being the man that he is, shrugged off the nasty looks, ignored the firefighters trying to direct him out and personally checked the truck for damage and the path out the garage. Once my father was confident that everything was correct, he pulled the truck out of the building’s newly formed lake. 

My father and grandfather never spoke to each other about the incident again but since that day, my father likes to tell me that story when he is reminding me of the importance of checking the assumptions that people are telling you to make.   

Right now, there are a lot of different stories floating around out there about what is happening, what can help and what can hurt you. Please remember, where possible, to verify what others are telling you before making a decision that could affect the well-being of yourself and your family. 

Stay Safe.

This blog is dedicated to my father who has never said no when asked for help.