I have been a part of acts that can be transferred to the field, unnoticed if we are not careful.
I have spent a little less than two weeks in the waiting room for ICU, with my family, watching over my dad. After most of the days of high stress had passed and we all relaxed a bit I noticed something peculiar.
There were three elevators at the end of the waiting room, that all of us had used for over a week.
One day, one of them was out of service and was on the ground floor with a barricade around it with
DANGER printed three times! It was on the end of the group.
My brother and I came up in the center elevator and sat down with our brothers and sisters.
We asked the others if they had noticed the signs. Some had and others had been one the fourth floor from earlier.
As we sat there I noticed that folks were using it, so I pointed it out to my brother. We didn’t think about it again until we went back down to get a cup of coffee [emoji477]️ from the cafeteria.
We used the center elevator because it was there first.
When we stepped out, we noticed that the “Out of service “ elevator was still open and blocked. We got our coffee and returned to our group.
Shortly after getting settled into our nest, I watched the doors open and people got out. I pointed it out to my brother and he started to freak out a little bit. Then the doors opened again and people walked in...!
We explained it to the others and as they left and returned, they too reported the same things.
Nothing had caused us to notice which one we used for the last week, until one of them was down.
Now we were paying attention to everyone that used that elevator... no longer was it just us. We had the attention of most of the folks in the room, focused on that one elevator. They started using the center elevator also and were amazed every time anyone would step out of that one elevator.
Folks all over the room were theorizing all manner of possible solutions.
About midnight, I couldn’t stand it any more. There had to be some logical explanation.
We hatched a plan to have two of us go down in the center elevator and split up and return in different elevators. Clearly this would prove a theory, one way or another.
When I got into the only other working elevator and stepped out of the mystery elevator, pretty much everyone in the room was baffled [emoji50].
We stepped out at the same time, but I held my door open and started to step back into it, my brother grabbed my shirt, as if the elevator was gone! I’ll admit that he scared the crap out of me.
But I could see the floor and trusted that it was there, but he had a fear of entering an elevator backwards!! Big time!
Now keep in mind that everyone in the room was watching at this point and everyone gasped when he grabbed me. At this point there was more drama in the waiting room than the ICU.
There were people that went so far as to use the stairs!
After another half hour of guessing, I had all the guessing that I could stand.
I entered that mystery elevator and went to the ground floor and made a video with my iPhone.
I videoed the trip down, and stuck my right foot out and the path to the cafeteria and back and continued as I pressed four and the screen that showed which floor I was on until I stepped out and panned the same way as I had done while downstairs then forward, so that everyone knew that I had not tricked them.
The video cleared up all of the confusion.
The ground floor was set up one hundred eighty degrees from what we could imagine.
When I panned the camera to the left on the forth floor I realized that the cafeteria was under the ICU wing.
We had not noticed any of this, until one single defining thing caused us to doubt our simple minded thinking.
How often do we continue to see things as we expect them to be in the wilderness as we walk down the same old path, the same old way?
I, for one, hope that I will challenge my old thinking 樂.
#/;0{>~
P.S. Dad is back to his normal life again. I had not mentioned anything about this publicly until he was okay.
I didn’t want to drag everyone down with it.
And has anyone noticed that the symbol for platinum used by the Spanish was a crescent moon with a gold symbol
Hope all is well with you and your family. Please hurry back.
