My cell phone rang, so I stepped out of the conference room to answer it. When I returned, the man sitting next to me (truth be known, he seemed just a kid) leaned over and whispered something.
“I got up to get a bagel, and I spilled coffee on your laptop.”
He pointed to the corner of my MacBook Pro.
There was no evidence of anything, such an absence of absence in fact, that his confession was admirable. And confession indeed it was, for spilled-liquid-on-the-keyboard is the one thing that invalidates pretty much any warranty or goodwill you might have with Apple to to fixed a borked laptop.
“Did it get into the keys?” I asked.
“No, just on the corner there,” he said.
What courage that took, what conviction. He could have just sat quietly thru the rest of the meeting muching on his bagel and sipping (what was left of) his coffee. And he could have flown back to California (whence he came), and our paths would never have crossed again. And so if there was something amiss with the laptop, it wouldn’t have been trackable back to him. But he confessed his spill.
And in the end, no harm was done.
In fact, I hope our paths do cross again. This is a man I’d work with (or for) any day.