For decades it sat next to my office phone. The alphabetized Rolodex was my handy go-to reference file. For those not born in the last century, the directory’s spindle was stuffed with business cards, names and numbers.
Rolodexes have been tossed, along with phone booths, fax machines and other assorted old-school business relics. Hello, digitized contact lists. As sporty as this technology is, you still have to know whom to call. Here are two examples from this past weekend.
But first, in my personal library, there is a book entitled Why Smart People Do Dumb Things by Mortimer Feinberg, Ph.D. and John J. Tarrant. Neither of these authors know me, but what I did Saturday could qualify for a mention in their next edition. But first they’d have to verify whether I was “smart” or not.
Based on what I did with my Kubota RTV 900, I say that I am dumb. I knew better. But after a long, hot day of farm work, I decided to add coolant to the engine. I knew not to open the hot radiator cap, but still I opened the wrong plastic reservoir. Oops. I had just goofed, pouring antifreeze where only hydraulic fluid should go.
I snapped a photo and sent a text to Jeffrey at the Kubota dealership. He confirmed what I had already figured out. Dumb, dumb. He texted instructions of what I should do. I knew the smart thing to do was go to my contact list and phone Adam. On the second ring, he answered.
Adam said, “I’ll stop by tomorrow.” With that, I was off to the auto parts store to buy a siphon pump. On a hot Sunday afternoon, Adam and I (99 percent my friend) reversed my error. As I watched the big man crawl under the machine—on a hot gravel driveway—I praised the value of friendship and the truth of the ancient saying, “It ain’t what you know. It’s who you know.”
The second example is tied to Adam Nation, too.
We were in the storage/shop barn when Adam pointed and said, “There’s a hawk.” Sure enough, we could see it perched on a steel-beam rafter. “He’ll die in here,” Adam said, “Let’s see if we can get him out.” However we tried to encourage the hawk to exit, the bird kept flying away from the open door. Adam thought of our mutual friend, Ben, the Hawk Master. But Ben wasn’t available. I thanked Adam, handed him a bottle of cold water and sent him home for a late supper with his family.
The next morning, I spun my mental Rolodex. Our friend’s name—our son Alan’s neighbor in Cornelia—popped up. Joel Volpi has been a registered falconer for more than 50 years. Alan reached out to Joel. All the while, the hawk declined to take advantage of a wide-open overhead door.
But enter Joel.
The expert placed a sparrow—in a small wire cage—on the concrete floor and backed away. Bingo. The hungry bird swooped in for breakfast, only to have his talons tangled in the monofilament trap that Joel had engineered outside the cage. The sparrow was unharmed, as was the Cooper’s hawk that the master falconer was holding. And just like that, the hawk was soon flapping its way to freedom.
As Joel drove away—just as Adam had done—I reminded my “dumb” self that “It ain’t what you know. It’s who you know.”
Here’s to “Rolodexes,” old-school and otherwise.
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
