back on the right track story

Back on the right track

- from the paper submitted to Larry Boehm, ENG 121 professor.

The right path, in my vision, is the road with happiness. Steven Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, says that ”happiness can be defined, in part at least as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.” I think I wanted it all, back in 1999, when I was almost 16 years old. I was doing something teens my age wouldn’t normally do. I was taking products from booths without the owner’s permission – booths were unconventional mini stores in Romania. I had a well-developed plan, everything was going smoothly, and I always got to sell those products here and there, until one day when my brother’s friend, Ovidiu Coarda – happen to be in one of those booths having a coffee with the sales girl.

My plan was very simple. I would’ve assured myself that there was only one person, the seller, in the booth – at a given time. My philosophy was that if he or she would run after me, eventually, they wouldn’t have left the booth unlocked just to catch me. It makes sense, right? Therefore, there was no failure in that quest for me.

Pretending I was sent by someone older to the booth to buy cigarettes and coffee, I would start to get to know the person first, and then ask for whatever I wanted. I could have asked for anything I wanted and he or she would have given it to me without knowing that I would be running without paying.

Anyway, the point is what I did was wrong, and no one should do anything like that. With Ovidiu Coarda’s help, I’ve never stolen anything ever again. One day, Ovidiu called the home number to reach me, and my brother picked up the phone. Ovidiu wanted to speak with me.. “How about that?” – my brother thought to himself, “Ovidiu doesn’t know my brother Ciprian; they have never even spoken with each other,” which was true. In any event, he handed over the phone to me, and Ovidiu introduced himself by saying he didn’t know me personally, but he remembered seeing me in church with my brother. He knew I was Daniel’s younger brother.

He emphatically advised me that what I was doing was wrong (…of course you can imagine that I wasn’t admitting anything, in fact to this point almost no one but him, me, and now you know this story). Well, let me tell you something, Ovidiu became one of my best friends to this day. His principled way of life had inflicted my own in such a miraculous way that I had become a totally changed person the years that followed…I am happy to call him one of my best friends, I appreciate him as much as I appreciate my own parents, my brother, my mentors, professors, colleagues, and every single one of my friends.

Ovidiu and his wife…