You don't have to be too widely-read to recognise this line from Robert Frost's most ubiquitous poem, "The Road Not Taken". Back in 1996 I looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth, and then took the other, just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim.
Years earlier I had computerised two colleges on the ANU Campus, Ursula College and John XXIII College, when the latter, having heard of my previous background as management consultant overseas, called me in late 1996 for an urgent consultation. What I found was a college in a state of disrepair, with millions of dollars in debt, with declining student numbers, and an overstaffed and demoralised workforce who had outsourced all essential services to grossly profiteering contractors.
For most of my working life I have leaped out of bed each morning to embrace a new challenge, and here I saw both a new challenge and an opportunity to leave my mark on the world, and, yes, since this was a religious college, to give something back at the end of a fortunate life, and so I took on this almost impossible task for an almost 'pro bono' fee.
I still had my own Canberra Computer Accounting Systems to run, but soon realised that to keep John XXIII College afloat, let alone turn it around, would take all my waking hours and become a "live-in" job.
As in any failing organisation, what good staff there may have been before had already jumped ship, leaving me with a handful of idle staff whom I sacked together with all the profiteering contractors. I then hired a very small and very dedicated team of people with whose help I was able to fully refurbish the run-down college, pay off all its debts within three years, and make it one of the ANU's colleges of choice.
Thank God that I'm an atheist, or I would've been even more disgusted by the way the Dominicans treated me when the job was done. Even the reference was given most grudgingly. VERITAS VI VERITATIS indeed!
"I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by" - which has left me totally disgusted with all men of the cloth.
