The phone rang. Year four.

I was buried under tech writing, training, and conference work while still flying internationally on top of it. Two businesses and a flight schedule, and somewhere in the queue, Judi.

I picked up. She told me who she was.

“You. Again,” a statement, not a question.

Same ask. Private RoboHelp training. Same answer I’d given her for three years running: I don’t do private trainings.

She caught me in a weak moment.

“If you lose my number and never call me again, I’ll give you the training.”

No Wi-Fi, a hundred feet of Ethernet cable, and machines to hook up. Somewhere in the middle of running cables, I tripped over the cat’s porcelain bowl and landed flat on my back, right on top of it. Hard.

I couldn’t get up. Hit a nerve, or something close enough to one. I was home alone, but Elaine, our housekeeper, and a lot more than that, would be there any minute, so I wasn’t scared. Just annoyed.

I had my phone on me, so I called Judi.

“You are NOT going to believe this, but…”

I told her there was no way I could do a training that day.

“Oh, no worries,” she said. “I’ll bring a blend.”

“What the hell is a blend?”

She explained. Aromatherapy. I was vaguely familiar with the concept back when that meant I owned zero bottles of essential oil, as opposed to the fifty-some I have now.

Elaine got there and helped me into a kitchen chair, normally my favorite chair in the house. Not that day.

Judi was 35–40 miles out. I sat there and waited.

She walked in with this little bottle.

I laughed. “You think that’s going to fix this?”

She opened it and put this wonderful-smelling stuff all over my back. I was fairly sure she’d lost her mind, and I was starting to question every decision that had led to this woman standing in my kitchen with oil on her hands and a RoboHelp manual in her bag.

Twenty minutes later, the pain was gone.

Not better. Gone.

So we did the training. Four years of no, one trip over a cat bowl, and a bottle of something that worked exactly the way she said it would.

That was over thirty years ago.

Somewhere in there, we started editing each other’s books and Chicken Soup submissions gratis, because by then, we were friends, not clients. We’ve done holidays at each other’s homes. I edited one of her submissions again this morning.

A few years back, she called about a huge gig, editing manuals for a national corporation. We split the project, sticking the other with the part we didn't want. The conference calls were torture, but the project went into the box where finished projects go.

If you asked either of us to sum up that whole project in one word, I’m sure we would agree: "EWWWWW!"

One morning last spring, she called. We picked up right where we left off—we always do—except this time I told her I was finally building Renegade Retirees and that I wanted to write up the whole deal: the call, the fall, the blend, all of it.

She thought it was hilarious.

Meanwhile, I taught her how to use Claude as a thinking partner. A month later, she had three books in the can.

I told her if I ever needed help, she’d be my first call. The call went out within a few weeks. She's now my workshop partner.

Thirty years ago, I made a deal to get rid of her.