Murphy’s Law Strikes
Murphy’s Law basically states that if anything can go wrong, it will. Last week at BookSwim, Murphy’s Law held truer than anyone could imagine. Last week in New Jersey we had quite a heat wave going on and in our warehouse, temperatures definitely hit the triple digit mark. Tuesday morning I got a bunch of text messages and calls saying “the books fell over”. Now, that didn’t mean much to me until I arrived. What had happened is… the books fell over.
All of the books are on bookshelves, which are arranged like you would imagine: in rows. What had happened was one of the bookshelves cracked (presumably due to the heat) and it toppled over taking ALL of the other bookshelves with it. Imagine dominoes. The team spent the better part of the week putting the books back on the shelves… one by one.
So what did I learn through this experience? Crisis management. When something catastrophic happens (and it will), it’s best to take a few minutes to step back and reflect on the situation at hand. Understanding the priorities is also crucial to figuring out how to solve the newly created problem.
What I find most interesting is the way in which things happened. There are over 20 rows of shelving and any one of those shelves could have cracked but it happened to be the one at the end. The one that cracked COULD HAVE fallen the other way (where there are no other shelves), but instead it chose to fall in the direction of the rest of the books. Amazing, ain’t it?
So in short, I’m REALLY proud of the BookSwim team for getting it all together to put the books back and make the operation fully operational again. Truly an inspiring thing to be a part of. One thing that I wish we did was take more pictures. It would have been awesome to document the process of putting things back together, but I guess that’s just another lesson learned.
“Only after disaster can we be resurrected.” -Tyler Durden
