When you engage a consultant, you want them to focus on your issues and not get distracted by things around them that would get in the way of their successfully completing their assignment.
However, there are limits to just how focused you want them to be. Sometimes, there are important – even urgent – things the consultant should be able to recognize while he or she is focusing on the task at hand.
News reports from Bedford Falls, New York (I don’t really think it’s THAT Bedford Falls) describe how a computer consultant, who was driving a rental car, was so focused on following the directions on the car’s GPS system that he neglected to notice that he was crossing a set of railroad tracks THAT CONTAINED A TRAIN HEADING RAPIDLY TOWARD HIM!
Apparently, after the car got stuck on the tracks, he realized his error and got out and tried to flag down the train's engineer. Reportedly, he jumped out of the way just in time and the train slammed into the car at 60 mph; pushing it more than 100 feet down the track in a spectacular and fiery crash
It seems the driver was issued a minor summons and that he and his rental car company would be liable for resultant damages, estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The whole thing reminds me of some of the occasions where we’ve been called in to review a troubled project. However, in many of those projects, the consultants who were at fault didn’t even see “the train” before the project's fiery crash.
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