Whoever’s responsible for coming up with the expression ‘Better sleep on it’ should be shot. It sounds even more impressive in French, La nuit porte conseil. The French person who translated it should be shot twice.
Sleeping on it doesn’t work for me. Often, if I retire for the night with an unresolved issue, I end up not sleeping at all. It never fails. As petty as it may be at the outset of the night, that tiny woe that creeps into bed with me appears to blow up and out into a gigantic monstrous chagrin that ends up tormenting me during the dead of night. When that happens, I end up tossing and turning all night. I toss and turn with a vengeance. I’m very adept at tossing and turning. Madeleine’s grandfather actually had a word for the kind of heavy duty tossing and turning that I engage in. It’s called ‘vernailler’, a derivative of the word ‘ver’, which means worm, an imagery which tends to be kind of cute, except when you think of a 200 pound naked worm in bed squirming around, it kind of looses its cuteness....I digress.
Anyways, the more vernailling I do, the less sleep I get. The less sleep I get, the more stressed out I get with the thought of being tired the following day. This vicious sleepless circle usually ends with getting up the following morning exhausted, and fighting with your spouse because you’ve spent all night tossing and turning in the same bed as her, looking at her in her deep serene rejuvenating sleep, and unavoidably, jealousy rears its ugly head because you can’t sleep and she can, and she starts looking like a beached whale, and because you’re so tired the following morning and can’t think straight, you tell her that she looked like a beached whale during the night, and you forget that women don’t like to be referred to as beached whales, or any fat mammal come to think of it, beached or un-beached, especially first thing in the morning, even though you insist that she was a pretty, serene beached whale, so she gets upset and tells you to keep quiet if you don’t have anything good to say, and you feel like a jerk, an exhausted jerk at that, and the vicious sleepless circle lives on... I digress again.
Anyways, back to that fateful sleepless second night last year at the Riviera Hotel in Conakry, where and when I spent all night crunching figures hoping to come up with a plan to present to my Australian friend Greg the following morning. Did I succeed in crunching numbers? Yes I did, all night long. Unfortunately, whichever way those numbers were crunched, they just didn’t add up to what I had hoped for. Furthermore, it didn’t really make any sense to me that this community was bringing in these two unknowns that were costing them an arm and a leg to bring in, which only added to the financial quagmire that I would later have to resolve as director of the school. So, did I have a plan? Yes I did. My plan was to not accept the job.
The first half of the sleepless night was busy coming to the conclusion that I was not going to accept the job. The other half was to figure out how I was going to tell all these fine people who had brought me all the way from Vancouver just to be told thanks, but no thanks. I went for breakfast and e-mailed Madeleine a message telling her in no uncertain terms that this African safari was probably not going to happen. So, how is it that after making that decision, I am here today, a year later, sitting at my computer in my apartment in Conakry writing this blog, with practically a whole school year as Director under my belt? Let me quickly and simply summarize what happened that day.
1-) Greg picked me up and we went for coffee. I did not waste any time telling him what the result of my sleepless night was. I told him I was wavering.
2-) “Mate, are you telling me you won’t be taking the job?” asked the distraught Australian.
3-) “No that is not what I’m telling you”, replied the wavering chicken-livered Canadian, “but I do need to be convinced that this is not a lose/lose situation for both the school community and me”.
4-) Greg beseeched me to hold off making a decision before I met with the US Ambassador, and by all means, not to let Her Excellency know that I was wavering.
5-) We went to the US Embassy, met a lot of people who do what embassy people do, whatever that is. Among them, none other than the Ambassador of the United States of America, a very petite lady with a massive presence, who came into the room, shook my hand, said something like ‘We are so lucky to have you Dr. Lemoine, and things are really looking up for that school. I’m sorry I can’t stay longer and chat with you, but I have a meeting with the President”. Could almost hear the theme of The West Wing playing in the background.
6-) As Greg and I were walking out of the Embassy, I turned to him and said ‘Boy, that is one dynamite of a lady. If there’s anyone on the planet that could convince anyone of anything, she is sitting right here in this Embassy.”
7-) “That’s great Mate, so that means you’ll accept the job?” asked the not so distraught Australian.
8-) “Still sitting on that fence Greg, but I have to say, after that encounter, that fence is somewhat leaning in the opposite direction from where it was leaning this morning”, answered the always wavering Canadian.
9-) We returned to the school and I opened up my hotmail. Madeleine had replied to my morning e-mail. She had written something like, “you are a better judge than me because you are actually there to assess the situation, so whatever you decide will be ok with me. However, I have to tell you, if we don’t make it to Conakry and Africa next year, I’ll be disappointed.”
10-) That is the e-mail that made me fall off the fence and destined us to a few years in Africa. I signed my contract that afternoon.
So was it the right decision? The jury is still out on that one. Time will tell.
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