Even Good Change is Stressful

I recently took my car to my favorite tire place with the expectation of a 2 hour fix. It turned into a 24 hour fix when they discovered that I had two nails in my tire and they didn't have a low profile replacement tire in stock.  Their late night revelation that I'd be without my vehicle until after lunch caused Gar to offer his Suburban as my work day transportation.  A seemingly perfect solution, since the tire store is less than a mile from home and my office is six miles away - and I had meetings scheduled starting early morning and his waking hours are much later.

This was a yucky, rainy day, with forecasts of high water and rampant street flooding.  Driving a sports utility vehicle rather than a sporty convertible would seem to be the perfect safe option for me, with another SUV available for my guys at home.

Though I've been driving forever, driving a vehicle twice the size of mine is challenging, especially in the parking garage. Parking the Suburban in my normal small reserved space between a garage pillar and another large SUV wasn't an option.  Trekking through the garages in contiguous buildings finally yielded 4 unclaimed spaces, providing the opportunity to park this tank in a designated space without concern that I might hit another vehicle. (One of my friends who normally drives an SUV that is quite a bit smaller than Gar's recently ran into her assistant's car in a parking lot, so I was hyper-sensitive to the possibility. )

This experience reminded me that it's easy to forget that changing an element of a familiar process can cause great discomfort, stress and angst.   I've been driving forever and am quite adept at maneuvering my small car. However, when the vehicle size changed, so did everything else about the experience.

At work, we sometimes forget that changing programs is equivalent to asking an adept small car driver to parallel park an RV.  Proficiency at a task is often severely challenged even when we provide better equipment.

Patience, training and practice are necessary to reap the expected rewards when we change equipment, processes or programs.