I love hanging around powerful people who know what they’re talking about (and you can have one without the other).
I love practical, powerful people who make things happen. These are not always the people with the big title and who have the big office and the secretary. Sometimes they are the secretary.
When I taught at Orchard Elementary, we all tramped through the main office every morning to check our mailboxes before heading to our classrooms. Marge, the school secretary, had flowers on her desk one day. I said, “Is it your birthday?” She said, “No. A parent sent them. And I didn’t even do anything.”
Well, of course, she had. She told me that after she had locked the office doors the night before and had headed to her car in the parking lot, she noticed one of our kindergarteners leaning up against the building. The school yard was deserted. The little girl’s mother had never picked her up.
So Marge took her back into the school, unlocked the office, looked up the mother’s phone number and called. She found out there was a miscommunication at home. Mom thought Dad was doing the picking up. Dad thought Mom was. Mom was embarrassed and raced to school to collect her little girl whom she found sitting next to Marge in the office, the two of them patiently waiting and reading a story together.