I have been impressed for years with one of the opening scenes in "Beer" (1985). A man who may been having a mental episode and is definitely depressed and having a bad time, pulls a gun on the bartender and orders all the customers to get into a paper lunch bag he has tossed on the bar. He is a good shot with that pistol as he proves when a cop rushes in, gun drawn, and the man shots the gun out of the cop's hand. The customers try to reason with the man, asking him to stop and think. Not a single customer can anywhere nearly fit in the little paper bag. The cop's pistol is laying on the bar, quietly being shoved back and forth between customers reluctant to touch it and get involved. One of the reluctants is tired of having the pistol back in his vicinity and he tosses it in the air, in a random direction. As luck would have it, the pistol smacks Mr. Desparate in the forehead. The blow knocks him down and several customers leap on him.
So what shall we do when the situation is impossible? We have many options:
Forget about the situation and move on to something else
Wait patiently for the situation to change
Take a random step and follow up on any fortuitous results
Fall to your knees and pray that unseen forces come to your aid
If you have time, offer to pay someone else to solve the problem
That's five options and I am sure you could come up with a dozen more. Certainly, details of the situation matter. The threat of being shot is much more immediate while the threat of being audited just hangs around being bothersome. The immediacy of the situation matters as do costs and benefits involved. Schools and textbooks often take up complex situations but they usually solve problems that are well defined. It's what we do when the situation is truly impossible that we use our special intelligence and any breaks luck gives us.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
