When I was hired to work at the Apple Store in September of 2014, the first order of business was a week of training off-site. I expected a week of heavy-duty technical training and was excited to show off to my trainers and to my co-workers how much I already knew. After all, I had talked my mom into getting the first Macintosh in 1985, I was an early adopter of the iPhone, and I had one of the first iPads. Plus, I had set up an all Apple office in 1992 when such a thing was nearly unheard of.
It turned out that technical knowledge was not a requirement for the job. Rather, what Apple’s hiring team had been looking for in the extensive process (3 Interviews for a retail job!) were people who would work collaboratively and who could figure out how to solve problems. In fact, I had people in my hire cohort who used competing products and had never touched an Apple device. They did just fine. We spent the week of training learning about values and culture, not hardware and operating systems.
On the job, every day customers came to the store with questions or concerns about their devices that you didn’t know how to fix. But saying “I don’t know” was not only unhelpful, it didn’t move the ball (or the pointer) forward. “Let’s find out together” is what we said, to signal the beginning of the journey toward learning and understanding for the customer and for oneself. My favorite customers where the ones who presented something challenging: a lost password, a text message that had ‘disappeared.’ It was so satisfying to restore photos to a device that replaced one that had been dropped in the port-a-potty. Nothing takes the stench out of dropping your phone in the toilet like having your data restored intact.
So too, are we are required to solve challenges as we move from whatever our lives in the Covid pandemic have become to whatever they will be as Covid risk decreases and and we emerge from our chrysalises. This will also be a kind of journey.
My version of resilience it turns out, is not embracing flexibility in response to change, it is adapting as much as I have to and no more. In the last 12 months, I have gotten used to going almost everywhere by starting up my computer, not my car. I have attended more town council meetings this year than in the last 22 years I have lived in Washington Grove combined. Yes, I was just too lazy to walk the 6 minutes to Town Hall at 7:30 pm, but turning on my computer and logging into zoom, I can just about manage. And as lazy as I was before Covid, I am even lazier now. I’ll admit, more than just accepting much of our new way of living, I’ve grown to like bits of it. Because, well, I’m used to it and it never involves staying out past bedtime!
But just when the ‘new’ normal became ‘just’ normal someone came up with a vaccine against the darn thing and whoa! here comes more change. But we aren’t changing back to the ‘old’ normal. That normal is gone forever, they say.
What will the new, old normal look like? Well, we don’t really know and that is what throws us off kilter. As strange as it was to start wearing a mask in public, it will be stranger to not wear one! Shaking hands? Hugging? Kissing??? You must be insane! I will need documentation of anti-body response before we bump elbows!
What I have always suspected turns out to be true. There is no normal. Just when you get used to X, X changes or Y does. We are constantly required to solve old, new problems. The problems are often like something we’ve seen before, but different enough that the solutions that worked before must be iterated, like a vaccine that needs to be tweaked to be effective against new variants. Sometimes the old solutions don’t apply at all and we must start from scratch, but that is rare.
In my work as the director of a small nonprofit, people would sometimes ask me what I did. I would usually reply that my job was to solve problems. A day or a week usually went something like this: problem presents, solve problem, new problem presents, solve problem, new problem presents, solve problem. Keep going until there are no more problems left to solve.
Often two or three problems presented simultaneously. Turns out, all of life works pretty much the same way. Problems present constantly and we try to solve them as best we can so we can move forward with the mission. But in life as at work, we spend way more time solving problems than thinking about the mission. At times I’ve thought that solving problems actually IS the mission. We keep solving problems until there are no more problems left to solve or, more accurately, until we are no longer able to solve problems.
So now as we begin to emerge from Coronagedon, there is a yet a new problem to solve. How do we being to solve the problem I’m calling, “What now?”
Let’s find out together.
Extra: Here is a poem, I wrote last year as we were beginning life with Covid.