The Wrong Golf Cart
One of the helpful things they do at Main Street Summit (put it on your calendar!) is rent a fleet of golf carts piloted by college kids to chauffeur attendees to the various venues around downtown Columbia, Missouri. This way if you’re tired of walking or cutting your schedule close, you can always hop a ride.
So it went as I was finishing dinner on the second-to-last night of the conference with some small business operators when I looked down at my watch and realized that if I didn’t hurry, I was going to be late picking my son up from swim practice. So I excused myself from the table and started speed-walking back to the office where my car was parked.
That’s when I saw the kid driving the golf cart.
He was going south and I was walking north so I waved at him. He acknowledged my wave, flipped a U, and came to pick me up. I hopped in and asked him to take me back to the office.
“Where’s that?” he asked.
This was strange. That’s because the office is where the kids pick up the golf carts to start their shifts. But maybe he knew it by another name, so I told him just to go to 305 North Tenth.
“Thanks for helping out at Main Street Summit,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Now this was really strange. Didn’t he know who he was working for? I gestured to one of the banners hanging from the streetlight. “That. That conference,” I said. “Isn’t that why you’re out here driving a golf cart?”
“No,” he said. “There’s a concert tonight, and I thought I could make a few bucks moving people around.”
That’s when I saw the instructions on how to venmo him taped to the dashboard.
“What are the odds?” I thought to myself.
Fortunately, he was a nice kid majoring in finance at Mizzou with aspirations of becoming a commercial real estate developer. We talked about that for a bit before he dropped me off at the office. I venmo’d him a few bucks and that was that.
The point is I figured it was a pretty safe assumption that on the second-to-last night of Main Street Summit every golf cart driving around downtown Columbia, Missouri, would have been working for us. It turns out that was not a safe assumption. And so it begs the question: If that’s not a safe assumption, what is?
Have a great weekend.
– Tim
