An excerpt from A Tale Told by an Idiot — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A tragicomical memoir in progress.
You Sound Surprised
It was the mid-2000s, and I was a few months into a job in the International Operations Department of the Australian Red Cross. On paper, I was responsible for the physical and psychological health and safety of around 120 aid and development workers, spread across 22 countries. All of them were in places of conflict or natural disaster. It was rare to go more than a few days without one of them being unwell, injured or caught up in a critical incident of some kind. It could be anything from a toothache in Tibet, with no dentist in sight, to dengue fever, to being robbed at gunpoint.
At the time, one of our aid workers was on life support in an intensive care unit in Geneva, after an emergency evacuation out of Sudan. I wasn’t sleeping well. One line played on repeat in my head, usually at night with the lights off: She’s going to die, and it’s all your fault.
That was when the next notification came in. Another delegate had been held up at gunpoint.
As soon as I could, I called her to find out what had happened and how she was doing. At first she was pragmatic and didn’t show much emotion. As stories go, it was fairly straightforward. She’d been walking the streets outside the gated compound where the team lived, and outside curfew hours, I might add. A man approached her, pointed a gun her way and demanded her bag. Given his intense look and the gun, she handed it over. She was shaken, and she’d lost her bag, but overall, she said, she was okay.
There was one part, though, that didn’t sit well with her. As she went on, her tone rose and she grew more distressed. It turned out the in-country manager had raised his voice at her over what happened and told her off for leaving the compound after curfew. The more she told me, the more upset she became. She then said that, because of the manager’s reaction, she was considering resigning and coming home.
So now I had a problem. I needed to deal with her “traumatic experience,” and I also needed to repair the relationship between her and her manager.
Fortunately, I had good resources on tap, and no, not HR. I had Rob Gordon, a clinical psychologist. At that point in the job, I didn’t know him well. And at that point in my life, I was a little sceptical of psychologists. At this point in my life, I still am. Sort of.
I called Rob and briefed him. The aid worker was relatively okay despite being robbed at gunpoint, I explained, but she was very distressed by how her manager had responded. Rob obviously picked up on my frustration, because his reply was calm and short.
“You sound surprised.”
So I went through it again and repeated the key points of the situation.
“You seem surprised.”
I told it a third time, a little louder.
A pause. “Yep. You definitely sound surprised.”
We went round like this for a while. I told the story, and he told me I sounded surprised. I began to question the sanity of the man on the other end of the phone. Is this guy stupid? How does he not see the problem here?
Eventually, Rob changed tack.
“How long have you been doing this job now, Jeremy? About six months?”
I confirmed it.
“And what have you observed about the managers in the organisation so far?”
That was all I needed to get up on my soapbox. I told him about a culture where managers seemed dysfunctional, couldn’t relate to their staff and struggled to handle problems as they came up. Time and again, they made things worse. The colleague in Geneva was a case in point, and so was this one.
When I’d finished my rant, Rob asked one simple question.
“Well, if that’s the case, why are you so surprised?”
That was followed by an awkward silence. From me, of course, not him.
It stopped me in my tracks. At the time, it was a bruise to my ego. In hindsight, it was one of the most useful lessons I’ve ever been given. It was the beginning of understanding the nature of people, and of no longer assuming that the title of manager means competence. Over the years that followed, across different sectors and into more senior roles of my own, I was reminded of it again and again. When something went wrong in a workplace, managers and HR often made it worse. Then they rarely stopped to reflect, learn or repair the fallout. They just kept moving forward, head in the sand and ego in the driver’s seat.
Rob’s point was simple. Pay attention to how people actually are, and you’ll be less surprised when they behave predictably rather than ideally.
I’d love to say that was an original insight from a man on the phone in Melbourne. Turns out a Roman emperor got there first. Around 1,850 years ago, Marcus Aurelius began his day by telling himself he’d meet with “the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious,” and that none of it should throw him. He gave himself Rob’s pep talk every morning. I had to be told three times over the phone.
As for the aid worker, she stayed. And I started, slowly, to be a little less surprised.
As for Rob, it took me a while to work out exactly who I’d been calling stupid under my breath. He’d spent his career, since the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983, helping traumatised communities and emergency workers recover after disaster, at a time when very little was known about the lasting effects of trauma on communities. By the time I rang him in a huff about a manager raising his voice, he’d already worked through the aftermath of Port Arthur and the Bali bombings. Christchurch, and plenty of floods, fires and cyclones, were still to come. He went on to shape how the Red Cross and government agencies support communities after disaster, and in 2021 he was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia.
So, turns out he knew his stuff. Turns out I’d also done exactly what he’d just pulled me up on: I’d made up my mind about someone before I really knew them, and been caught out.
And turns out Rob would become an important part of my journey for things to come.
Sorry — you'll need to buy the book when it arrives to find out how this story plays out.
Written by: Jeremy Limpens