“Serving overseas as a small-town boy from America is intense, stressful and humorous! Enjoy a light-hearted story with me from our last 20 years overseas!”
—Matt
The second mishap is the one that gets you
It is so easy to give advice and so hard to remember your own advice you’ve given when it’s needed for yourself. I have always told my sons, don’t worry so much about the first mishap, but rather the second one you make. It is like driving on a narrow country road with just a bit of gravel on the shoulder. When you feel your passenger side tires slipping down the asphalt onto the gravel, that is not good. However, far worse is yanking the steering wheel hard left to get it back on the road and the vehicle comes flying across the center line with oncoming traffic. It is the second mishap we take to compensate for the first mishap that gets us in trouble often times.
On traveling from small-town America to overseas, the Covid-19 pandemic created additional problems and our family had to separate on our flights– I had one flight itinerary and my wife, and a son had another itinerary. We left at different times for our first flights from the Fort Wayne International Airport, caught up with each other for a half hour in an airport after our second flight, and then I got to our overseas apartment four hours ahead of my wife and son after our third flight. My wife had been concerned that if someone broke into our apartment, we should make it hard on them to find our vehicle keys, so she made sure they were well hidden. The only problem is that she forgot where, so I couldn’t pick them up at the airport (to avoid a taxi) after their last flight until I found the keys. Going with little sleep and much jetlag after two days of travel didn’t help jar our minds to remember.
She was about to leave for her last flight when I inadvertently found the keys, not so sneakily hidden in our nightstand. Probably the first place a thief would look? Well, I grabbed the big ring full of keys, zipped out the front door and down the steps to our underground garage, to make sure the vehicle started -“Yes, it started!!” I zipped back up to our apartment to call my wife and let her know that I could pick them up, before she got on her last flight. I then realized that I had separated the key to the house from the big ring of keys (as I didn’t want to lose all the keys on a trip, so just brought the house key, which I had just left in the apartment). I was now locked out with no phone and my wife would be arriving in four hours. Our front door has 10 bolts, yes, 10 bolts, so no slipping the door open without a battering ram from medieval times.
I tried to be productive during those four hours and went shopping, washed the dirty vehicles, etc., but it was all the same – my second mishap of being locked out was probably a bigger mishap than the first one. After a mishap, be extra vigilant for the second one.
Something similar ever happen to you. Contact me and let me hear your story!
mattsmishaps@gmail.com Matt’s Mishaps, PO BOX 114, Grabill, IN 46741
