Back when we were kids, we’d always head up to Nantucket in the summer. It was so exciting! The second the station wagon pulled in, we’d rush off to find friends from summers past, and then we’d go to the beach. And for a few years—it was sort of a tradition—one of the first things we’d do was build a sandcastle. No, not the kind you make by flipping over one of those crummy plastic buckets. These were big and sprawling, with cool towers and arches and all that.
So nothing felt worse than coming back the next day and seeing that some jerk had kicked our sandcastle over! That’s why one year we decided to put a lot of rocks inside, so that anyone who tried to kick it would get hurt. We were so excited!
Well, you can imagine how we felt when we found that sandcastle kicked over. Even worse, there was no sign that the person who did it had been injured—not even tracks in the sand suggesting a gait of intense pain. I guess that we had pictured someone running up and doing a big, soccer-style kick. (You know kids and their imaginations!) But it had more likely been a gentle nudge, and that wasn’t enough to break feet, much less drive glass inside them. (We had loaded the sand with broken glass in case the rocks didn’t work.)
We weren’t about to give up, though! Our next thought was to keep people away from the sandcastle altogether, by digging a deep trench around it. And not just any trench—this one would be camouflaged, and it would be rigged to collapse on the jerk who fell in, burying him alive and asphyxiating him with crushing pressure! We waited until our parents were asleep, then snuck out of our summer houses to work through the night. It was all very exciting.
But kids can be so shortsighted. We never considered how close to the dunes we were digging, and, in the morning, a big section of them slipped into the trench. And, man! You know beach authorities and their precious dunes. They treated it like some huge environmental catastrophe, roping off the entire area, including our new sandcastle. Then a lifeguard accidentally stepped on it!
The lifeguards also found the punji sticks that we had put at the bottom of the trench, and, instead of leaving them where they belonged, he locked them inside the lifeguard hut. Same with all the ampoules of hydrofluoric acid. We were really mad. Those were our punji sticks and acid ampoules! Life can seem so unfair when you’re a kid.
What else was there to do? Retreat into the remaining dunes and lay the biggest trap yet? One that would send a hail of knives and swords (“borrowed” from the local army-surplus store during one of our patented late-night raid-and-burn-and-destroys) into the jerk who tried to knock our sandcastle over?
Definitely! Once again, we worked through the night, sharpening the blades and loading the slings. We were so focussed that we barely spoke, although someone had had the good sense to bring a drum and bang it ominously. No way were we going to fail this time.
But guess who the first person on the beach the next morning was? It was one of those weird metal-detector guys, and our pressure-plate trigger set off his sensor. The guy bent down to take a closer look, and our death volley went flying right over him, which meant that we couldn’t even treat this as a test run to see whether the twists and notches that we had put into the blades actually did make them stick better into flesh. And, when the guy looked up and saw the blades, he acted all proud, as if they were his “haul,” and carried them away!
To top it all off, the second he left, one last sword went flying, and—you guessed it—cut our sandcastle right in half. By that point, we just had to laugh. Even Billy, who had been in the sword’s path. Yep, after Billy retrieved the part of his scalp that had been sliced off, he held it high and laughed and laughed. Kids! They think they’re invincible!
Whenever I tell that story to the new banking associates, someone always asks if we caught the guy in the end. I explain that that’s not the point. The point is that we kept trying, and that our firm values that kind of tenacity over all else! But after getting that across, I’ll take them back to my office so that they can look at the guy’s skeleton, move his arms around a little, maybe put some funny sunglasses on him (still on “beach time,” eh, buddy?). As a manager, you have to show your human side every now and then.
