So I was headed to work one morning and my car battery started to sound sickly as my engine turned over. Unfortunately I wasn’t headed straight to work, I went to the gym first… and by the time I got back to my car, the battery was completely dead. (I guess that happens in Arizona in the summertime.)
I called AAA, and found out my membership had expired. So I had to renew it before they would send a tow truck. They told me it might be an hour wait. I called my office manager after that, and asked him to cancel my first hour and a half of patients, apologize to them profusely, and try to reschedule them. He texted me back a few minutes later and told me that he’d had to offer a pretty substantial discount to one of the new patients, because she was upset that she would have to wait so long to get in for an appointment.
I was not in a super awesome mood at this point.
When the tow truck driver arrived, he didn’t see me at first and called my cell phone. The first thing he told me on the phone was that if he hadn’t found me and had driven out there for nothing, he’d already decided he was going to have a good day anyway. (Odd, I thought, but it did make me smile.)
When he finally found me, I was immediately struck by his resemblance to Zig Ziglar (whose book I was reading at the time — “See You At The Top,” which I highly recommend, by the way.) He wore a big smile, and told me within the first five minutes that driving a tow truck was his favorite thing to do, and he was so blessed to get to do it. He found out I was a doctor, and as he poured water into my car battery (Batteries drink water? I thought,) he told me that he liked cars for the same reason I like people (note that I did not say I liked people, he assumed this): because he got to diagnose problems using deductive reasoning.
His deductive reasoning, in this case, led him to conclude that my battery was fried.
So he drove behind me to the shop to buy a new one, and installed it for me afterwards. He took his sweet time doing it too, which would have annoyed me under normal circumstances, but I just couldn’t get frustrated with this guy. As he worked, he told me how much he loved his wife, and how he credited her (and Jesus, of course) with saving his life—and then he proceeded to tell me how he used to be an alcoholic and turned his life around. Now he’s in his early 60s, takes no medication, eats right, exercises often, prays hard, loves his family and continues to give thanks for blessings that happened to him 20 years ago, even sharing them with a total stranger.
Before I drove away, I shook his hand and thanked him for his attitude, because I’d really needed it.
I want to be more like that guy!
This is amazing!