Catastrophe And The Reality Distortion Field

Years ago, I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. One of the most striking concepts in the book was what one of the top engineers at Apple called the reality distortion field, a Trekkie term co-opted to describe how Jobs made the impossible seem plausible to those in his immediate vicinity and overcame their objections to reach unlikely outcomes.

I'd have dismissed the concept out of hand if I hadn't had a single, serendipitous experience that made me a believer.

It was the late 90s, I was a broke medical student, and I had flown from SF to NYC to serve as best man in the wedding of a friend I'd known since birth - literally. Our mothers met while sharing a room in the maternity ward following our respective births, which were separated by one day.

The plan was to arrive in time for an early rehearsal dinner, spend the night on my brother's couch, and reunite the following day for the nuptuals, dinner and party. Another childhood friend who rounded out our trio (I'll call him Tre) would synchronize his arrival with mine.

I met the groom and Tre in the early evening in front of the designated restaurant, where we tossed my carry-on bag into the groom's car trunk before heading into an early rehearsal dinner with extended family and new friends.

In a moment no one gave much thought to, the groom stepped out briefly during the meal to receive our rented tuxes from another party who had kindly picked them en route, and rearranged them among the luggage in his trunk to minimize wrinkling.

After dinner, in the waning twilight, Tre and I accompanied the groom to his car, intending to retrieve our bags and head to our respective crash pads -  only my bag was not in the trunk.

Color draining from his face, the groom recounted taking my bag out of the trunk to accommodate the tuxes. He could have sworn he'd put it back in, but the more he considered it, he acknowledged that he must have left it out on the curb without realizing it.

Unsure what to do next, the three of us jumped into the groom's car and drove around the area, hoping we'd find the opportunistic thief toting the bag awkwardly along the sidewalk.

After twenty minutes of fruitless driving amidst crescendoing anxiety, the groom pulled over to the side of the road. The combined pressure of keeping the peace among tense family factions, planning logistics for a multi-event wedding weekend, and now losing the best man's luggage finally caused him to snap. Hands still fixed on the steering wheel, he began crying uncontrollably.

I thought reflexively of my lost bag - I could afford few precious things at the time, and one of them, my new Handspring Visor digital assistant (a more budget-friendly version of the sexier Palm Pilot) had been in that bag. That momentary thought was quickly overshadowed by the pitiful groom in the driver's seat.

Tre, riding shotgun, looked uncomfortably back and forth between me and the groom.

I took a deep breath, made eye contact with the groom through the rear-view mirror, and made it up as I went along:

Me (looking deadly serious): Listen carefully. Tre and I have just traveled a long way and spent a lot of money to celebrate with you, and we do not intend to let your misery come between us and a good time. So you have exactly ten minutes to feel lousy.

Groom (sniffling through a snot yoyo): Ten minutes?

Me (lightening up): Yup, after which we are all going to find a shoe store to buy me something that pairs better with the rental tux than the tennis shoes I'm wearing.

At this point, the bride called on the cutting edge brick of a cell phone that the groom was the first in our trio to own. He explained the situation through slowly drying eyes, concluding:

Groom: ...so I have ten minutes to feel bad until we start having a good time again.

Me: Actually, seven minutes.

Groom (cracking a smile at long last): I guess I'm now down to seven minutes.

The groom hung up, Tre flashed me a smile of relief, and we reoriented our hunt from nabbing a bag thief to finding a shoe store open late on a Friday.

The remainder of the wedding weekend was an absolute delight.

To this day, I still own that pair of dress shoes (the most expensive I've ever bought).