Now Jim had been this doctor’s chauffeur for 10 years, and he had a great relationship with the doctor. He says, “Hey doc… I could give the lecture for you.”
The doctor chuckles and says, “Jim, I like you and everything and you’re a great guy, but in all honesty, you don’t really know about what I do.”
Jim responds, “You’re right, but I’ve been watching you give this lecture for the last ten years, I have the thing memorised: I could give it in my sleep! Plus, the doctors coming today are all from out of town, they have no idea what you look like, so they would have no idea I wasn’t you.”
The doctor feels really tired, so he sits back, thinks for a second, and says, “What the hell, I trust you, let’s do it.”
So they pull over to the side of the road, change outfits, and the doctor drives the rest of the way to the lecture hall.
When they get there, a hundred prominent heart surgeons are sitting in the auditorium, waiting for the lecture to start. The driver walks up to the podium in the front, and the doctor sits in the back with the driver’s hat on and looks around the room and thinks, “Oh god, what have I done! All of these doctors are famous and could squash my career if this lecture goes badly.”
The driver gets to the podium, coughs, looks around the room… and proceeds to give the lecture absolutely PERFECTLY! He hits every major point in the lecture, talks with eloquence and grace, and in general, gives the talk even better than the doctor ever did.
The doctor breathes a huge sigh of relief and then lays back in his chair and relaxes for the rest of the lecture. But then, as the lecture finishes and the lights go back up, a lump catches in the doctor’s throat as he realises one thing: he had scheduled this lecture with a question and answer session afterwards!
Among the visiting doctors, a couple of hands go up, and the doctor looks on in horror as the driver picks the hand of the most prominent heart surgeon in the entire country. He proceeds to ask the most complicated, detailed, mind-bogglingly complex question the doctor had ever heard after any lecture ever, and the room goes silent to see the how the famous heart doctor will respond.
The driver looks down and is silent for a moment. The doctor sitting in the back is petrified with fear; he knows there is absolutely no way the driver could possibly know the answer to this question: his career as a lecturer is over!
And then the driver looks at the surgeon that asked the question, points to the back of the room, and says,
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