Small crisis puts character on display: an adventure in finding a hero.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: MANAGEMENT - Column

It started as a nightmare!

After being on the road for two weeks in a motor home on the way to this year's Kentucky Derby, I scraped the back end of my rig along part of an auto-hauler trailer in a crowded Cracker Barrel parking lot.

I had been slowly following the signs to "RV and Truck Parking" when I was distracted by a car darting across my path ... and then I heard that awful scraping sound. In my mirror I could see what I had done. I was able to disengage simply by turning the wheel so I moved away and drove to the parking lot.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The damage wasn't too bad, but a pipe was bent into the little wheel on this car carrier, and it wasn't going to move. None of the hundreds of people around seemed interested. The car attached to the auto-hauler trailer had plates from Michigan, and so I started through the crowd asking people at random, "Are you from Michigan?"

A few minutes later, I found the owner of the car and trailer, and the fun began.

He was a big guy, well over my 6-foot-3. He looked like a fighter or wrestler and he had lots of tats (I kept telling myself that didn't mean anything) and wasn't happy when I told him what I had done. I could hardly blame him.

But the real warrior in his party was a woman who then burst on the scene shouting at me, telling me "what a jerk I was and how come was I just standing around instead of trying to fix their car." I weakly protested that up until then I had been looking for the owner, but I didn't get much credit for that.

While I was beginning to move in ever-increasing circles looking for something to bend the little pipe off the tire, a guy showed up with a tire iron. He stuck it in the pipe on the car-hauler and three of us, the guy with the tats, me and the new guy, pulled on the bar. But we needed something bigger and stronger.

The new guy took this on as a challenge. He mumbled something, walked off and returned with a slightly bigger but thinner bar. Same guys pulling. Same result.

Then the new guy mumbled something like, "visualize, analyze and improvise" and wandered behind the Cracker Barrel, returning with a stout bar about 6 feet long. It fit right in the pipe and was long enough to...