Thursday, December 29, 2011

We Have A Situation....

“We have a situation here.” - Webb Knudsen

When the whole family is on the ski slopes you do not want to get a cell phone call announcing a ‘situation.’

When I received Webb’s call, Andie and I happened to be together at the Comstock lift so I knew Andie was okay and since Webb was making the call I assumed that he was the reporter and not the victim. Which left Brent, Paige, and Korey.

In my mind’s eye I immediately conjured up all three unaccounted for in our party in various states of distress. Surely someone had taken a bad fall. I’m a pro at envisioning all worst case scenarios.

In fact, my imagination went from broken wrists to broken legs to possible paralysis before Webb had time to explain what the actual situation was. As it turned out, the situation did not involve injury on the mountain. The situation was an error with the house we’d rented.

Apparently, Northstar housing and Brent had different check out dates in mind. The Northstar cleaners arrived to prepare the cabin for the next renters and found it filled with our stuff. When they reached Brent, who has happily boarding with no plans to leave Northstar, it turned out that we made the mistake, not Northstar, hence we would need to uproot and move from our cool cabin to another unit.

The disruption was annoying but we all sprung into action and moved our gear in record time.

I noted a couple of things from the debacle:

First, many hands do make light work. Initially Brent and I were planning to move everyone’s stuff but when everyone pitched in the task went much faster.

Second, they say you can tell a lot about people from how they handle adversity. While this wasn’t a major life challenge, it was a minor disruption and I’d say we were pretty good sports about the inconvenience. Granted, it was our fault, but still, nobody threw a tantrum, nobody blew a gasket.

Finally, when Webb called me I was worried someone was hurt. So, when it turned out to just be a lodging issue I was so relieved that I probably handled it all better. If I had been told about the mix up without the overlay of my initial fear that someone in our group was hurt, then I might have been more bothered by the news. But, because I was so delighted that no one was injured, the housing troubles weren’t so bad after all.

The condo we switched to didn’t have a hot tub (darn!) but we boarded and skied safely for the rest of the day! All’s well that ends well!