I have not quite attained the enlightened incompetence and a penchant for profound inanities of Peter Sellers playing Chance the Gardner in the 1979 movie ‘Being There’. But I think I am beginning to show some of those signs since I barely step out of the house.
Chance is a gardener who has never stepped out of his rich reclusive employer’s townhouse and walled garden in Washington. He has next to no exposure of the outside world until his master’s death. He is then thrown into the real world where he speaks in rather obvious generalizations which sound profoundly wise to others. Sellers ends up being a sort of wisdom dispenser for the movers and shakers in the nation’s capital where he tells the president "Spring, summer, autumn, winter . . . then spring again.''
Since I work from home and have developed a rather peculiar aversion to going out I sense I might soon lose some basic real world skills. Last evening I had an assignment to interpret a focus group in Chicago which meant my having to drive there, find the right building on Upper Wacker Drive, locate a nearby parking place and then walk to the appointed building. As apprehended, it turned out to be quite a task for me despite my old GPS which went haywire like me after approaching Wacker Drive. I took a convoluted detour as the GPS woman kept saying “recalculating”. At one point I even said to her, “Shut your trap.” Weirdly, she did not reply.
As I eventually stepped out of the parking garage I was intensely reminded of Chance and his predicaments. I had to ask a passer-by where Wacker was which he was kind enough to tell me. Getting inside the building was Task #2 since there was some construction going on and the main entrance was under a canopy. Then came Task #3 of locating the office. (I am taking literary liberties here.)
After the two-hour engagement, came Task # 4 of finding the parking place again followed by Task # 5 of locating the paying station. Then came the classic nightmare of all those who have parked in a multistoried facility. I remembered the aisle but had forgotten which level. I had even forgotten that I had taken pictures of the level on my phone as a reminder. It was not before I had gone through two levels that it remembered to look at the pictures. I found the right level and finally found the car.
Coming out of the lot and with GPS struggling to locate satellites I began driving blind in some random direction. However, as luck would have it, I was driving in precisely the right direction even as the GPS caught a signal and brought me home.
I see this as an example of how your individual evolution takes a subtly different direction as your working environment changes—in my case having to work from home and barely going out. My gait changes when I am in an unfamiliar surrounding like I was last night. I look visibly unsure like Chance. At the same time though, one’s muscle memory is so strong that were I to do it again in the next few days I would do it without a hitch.