The four hour problem

If my phone hadn’t been on vibrate, I would’ve missed the call from Marty. I was sucking tasteless festival lomain noodles through my lips when my buddy asked, “So, when is Bradoween going to be?”

“Hold on,” I said, swallowing a noodle and waiting for the inevitable roar.

For three seconds, the noise sucked the oxygen from the air and buried brain in my bowels.

“What was that?” Marty said through the St. Louis cell signal.

“I’m at a LeMans race in Houston.”

It was an answer he didn’t expect and — a couple weeks earlier — I would never have expected to have given. But, that’s my life right now. I go places I don’t expect to go to see things I don’t expect to see and end up talking to my friends from the grandstand of a car race.

As such, I meet a lot of people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. Today, I met a girl who astounded me in a way few people have the power to do. It wasn’t that she was good looking (which she was) or that she was smart (which, too, she was). It was that she could make anybody do anything she wanted them to do. I mean, several times today, I honestly thought I’d found the droids I was looking for, and then decided I had not. For a few hours, I was beating my company’s brand into the collective conscious of several thousand LeMans fans. Part of that pounding involved the hiring and management of models to hand out my company’s t-shirts. Crystal was one of the models.

During one particular moment of t-shirt frenzy, a time when I wasn’t sure we could move our shirts any faster, Crystal said, “I bet this would be a lot more effective if we had a golf cart and worked the crowd on wheels.”

“Good idea,” I said, “but we don’t have a golf cart.”

I’ll be damned if she didn’t requisition a golf cart from two dazed cameramen and convince them to drive her around for long enough to unload a case of shirts. A fluke, I thought…until she did it three more times with three different golf cart drivers.

This kind of mind control went on all afternoon.

“Let me ride your moped,” she said to a guy. You know the rest.

It’s meeting people like this girl that teaches me how some people with certain attributes and opportunities can succeed where others with the same attributes and opportunities fail.

Now, a twelve hour day has ended and I’m facing what I call the “Four Hour Problem.” If I go to sleep now, I have to wake up in four hours to catch a flight home. I know that I won’t be able to go to sleep for at least 45 minutes. I know that if I set my alarm, I WILL hit snooze and likely miss my flight. However, I know that if I try to stay up until my flight, I will probably want to sleep in two hours (and then, again, might miss my flight). Furthermore, I know that either way, I’m going to feel like shit all day tomorrow.

If it wouldn’t be so inappropriate, I’d wish that girl were in the hotel lobby — just so she could tell me what to do.