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Continued: John Olson: The mind's eye in action

There has been so much stunning news -- from Petters to Palin to Wall Street perfidy -- and yet this was the best story I heard all week. It's about my coworker, Ryan, the get-it-done guy.

Show Ryan a dead end, and he sees an eight-lane freeway to Jupiter and proceeds to build it out of straws and cocktail napkins.

He was working late one night last week and decided he'd better pick up something for his wife on the way home. A two-glass bottle of champagne should do the trick, he calculated, and he pulled up to Haskell's on 9th Street and ran inside.

As he darted back out to the car, a woman stopped him: "Three guys just stole your briefcase out of your car and they went THAT way." He raced off toward the Nicollet Mall.

Everything was in that briefcase. His financials. His computer. Confidential, personal, maybe even compromising information. Nothing was backed up. You would happily trade a vestigial organ to recover this briefcase.

The culprits had evaporated into thin air, of course. His mind was racing. What would you do? Call 911? Curl up under the Mary Tyler Moore statue? Not Ryan.

He ran back to his car and drove to Block E, the former clay cast for urban decay that has become a model for gussied-up decay.

He searched for "the biggest, baddest guy I could find" and called him over. The man walked up, tentatively, and Ryan made his pitch: Find my briefcase and I'll pay you $100 cash, no questions asked. Here's my cell-phone number.

Ryan drove off. Ten minutes later, his phone rang. "I've got your briefcase. Meet me on the corner of 4th and Hennepin."

Ryan drove up and spied the suspected gangster standing across the street with the three suspected miscreants. "I'm not coming over there; you come over here," Ryan said. "No cops?" "No cops."

The guy walked across the street, and they made the exchange: cash for briefcase. Everything was there, checks and all. End of story. Fade to black.

Who thinks like this? Really, who? And what can we learn from it? That downtown is being run with impunity by cartoon thugs? How dull.

No, it's really about the fabulous connections hidden just below the surface in life. Say you have a Methodist broker who failed to tell you that your money-market fund was going to break the buck. So you go to the biggest, baddest Methodist you can find -- say, Garrison Keillor -- and you say, Gar, bring some Methodist shock and awe on this flunky broker.

Your family reunion in Laughlin, Nev., is imperiled by the Sun Country bankruptcy, so you call the 800 number on a Fingerhut catalog and demand to speak to the supervisor of the supervisor.

There's no telling where this goes.

Ryan didn't tell me what happened when he got home, but I'm thinking he changed diapers, started a fire and poured the champagne into two prechilled, fluted, plastic champagne glasses. He said nothing about the business of the night.

The news of the day has been pretty rough, I know, but I also know there's more than one Ryan in this country, and we're going to come out OK in the end.

John Olson is an advertising executive in Minneapolis.

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