More Robert Fulghum

Okay, so the story is that as a young man Robert Fulghum worked at a small resort hotel. They were fed lunch but the cost was deducted from their paychecks. One week, he says, they had two wieners, a mound of sauerkraut and a stale roll every day. After a difficult week he found the final straw was a menu for the following two days with, you guessed it, sauerkraut and wieners. That was it, he was quiting. The only person around to vent to about the food, the boss, and life in general was the night auditor, who's name was Sigmund Wollman. What follows is profound:

"...I'm sick and tired of this crap and insulted and nobody is going to make me eat wieners and sauerkraut for a whole week and make me pay for it and who does he think he is anyhow and how can life be sustained on wieners and sauerkraut and this is un-American and I don't like wieners and sauerkraut enough to eat it one day for God's sake and the whole hotel stinks anyhow and the horses are all nags and the guests are all idiots and I'm packing my bags and heading for Montana where they never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut and wouldn't feed that stuff to pigs.

I raved on in this way for twenty minutes and needn't repeat it all here. You get the drift. My monologue was delivered by blows on the front desk with a flyswatter, the kicking of chairs, and much profanity. A call to arms, freedom, unions, uprising, and the breaking of chains for the working masses.

As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman, the night auditor, sat quietly on his stool, smoking a cigarette, watching me with sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He's got good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin, coughed a lot. He like being alone at the night job - gave him intellectual space, gave him peace and quiet, and even more, he could go into the kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to - all the wieners and sauerkraut he wanted. To him, a feast. More than that, there's nobody around at night to tell him what to do. In Auschwitz he dreamed of such a time. The only person he sees at work is me, the nightly disturber of his dreams. Our shifts overlapped for an hour. And here I am again. A one-man war party at full cry.

'Fluchum, are you finished?'

'No. Why?'

'Lissen, Fluchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know what's wrong with you? It's not wieners and kraut and it's not the boss and it's not the chef and it's not this job.'

'So what's wrong with me?'

'Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don't know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem.

'If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire - then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy.'

'Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night.'"

He goes on the say that later when he heard someone describe a moment of enlightenment he knew exactly what that meant...

"There in that late-night darkness of the Feather River Inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked my butt and opened a window in my mind...for thirty years now, in time of stress and strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I'm ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks: "Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?"

"I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference."