This is a story of Darcy Rezac's from WORK THE POND! and it's downright spooky. It goes like this:
While a sophomore at McGill University in Montreal, I traveled to the West Coast one summer to complete officer training as an army engineer. Westbound, my aircraft got laid up in Winnipeg, the Prairie city where I was born and lived until the age of two. I hadn't been back since. I needed a place to stay for the night, so I phoned a classmate and close friend, David Farmer, who was working in Winnipeg that summer. "Come on over," David responded. "I'm sure my landlady won't mind. Tell the cab driver the address is 944 Somerville Avenue."
David's landlady, Dr. Borthwick-Leslie, turned out to be a welcoming and fascinating person--the first woman graduate of the faculty of medicine in Winnipeg.
After half an hour of chatting over a cup of tea, she asked, "Was your father invalided in the army and sent back to Winnipeg from England at the end of the Second World War?"
"Yes," I replied.
"Come with me," she said, escorting me to the back porch. "Do you see that small handle at the bottom of the screen door? Your father put that on so that you and your two brothers could open it. You lived in this house until you were two years old. I bought this house from your father when your family moved to Montreal."
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
The John Hunter Story
This is the first story in WORK THE POND! Use the Power of Positive Networking to Leap Forward in Work and Life (Prentice Hall). The authors chose this story because it is so typical: it's the kind of thing that could happen to all of us...and does!
"It was a warm summer's evening and John Hunter was patiently waiting in line to see The Phantom of the Opera. The musical had just opened on Broadway. John, a self-admitted "Phantom nut," had flown in from the West Coast just to see it. Over the noise of the traffic, John heard a man speaking Spanish. Many years earlier, John had worked in South America as an engineer for the energy firm Petroleos de Venezuela and was fluent in Spanish. For no other reason that to practice his Spanish and speak to someone else in the line, he turned and started chatting. To his amazement, John realized that this man was his Venezuelan manager's boss--someone he hadn't seen in over fifteen years.
Two months later--out of the blue--John was invited by an international engineering firm to be a senior consultant on a large Venezuelan energy project. Guess who had put John's name forward? The man in the line." Copyright Darcy Rezac. All rights reserved.
"It was a warm summer's evening and John Hunter was patiently waiting in line to see The Phantom of the Opera. The musical had just opened on Broadway. John, a self-admitted "Phantom nut," had flown in from the West Coast just to see it. Over the noise of the traffic, John heard a man speaking Spanish. Many years earlier, John had worked in South America as an engineer for the energy firm Petroleos de Venezuela and was fluent in Spanish. For no other reason that to practice his Spanish and speak to someone else in the line, he turned and started chatting. To his amazement, John realized that this man was his Venezuelan manager's boss--someone he hadn't seen in over fifteen years.
Two months later--out of the blue--John was invited by an international engineering firm to be a senior consultant on a large Venezuelan energy project. Guess who had put John's name forward? The man in the line." Copyright Darcy Rezac. All rights reserved.
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