Today I was standing in as Kayak Guide for a friend of mine who has hurt himself. So I am driving about 80 miles roundtrip daily to work for him. I love to work for him because he tends to get customers that are willing to paddle. Willing to work. Understand that kayaking is an activity that requires effort. So this leads me to this morning..... I meet the clients, 3 couples. I try to size them up. As usual I am waaaay off. Meet couple numbah one: he is a car salesman (?) and she is a housewife (?). Couple numbah 2; he is an older man who is not used to taking direction from a woman and she is a ...........woman. And couple numbah 3: they are both executives for Nike.
We set out for our paddle.
Everything seems to be fine until I hear Nike Woman yelling behind me "I need to get off of this, I need to get off of this!!" and I turn and see a very panic stricken look on her face. She is on the verge of a full blown panic attack. And I decide that I am gonna talk her down. I think this because I can't stand to lose when it comes to getting people thru the entire trip. We get to the beach and i get them all suited up to snorkel. This should be an easy task..........well get them to wear the equipment works, but they had other plans. The men went in, the women didn't. I tried to get them comfortable to go in, it worked until they were 20 feet from shore and then Nike woman freaked. I give them their lunch and get them back on their kayaks and we start heading out for some more paddling and Nike woman freaked. I turned them around and told them to wait on the beach and I would come back later and pick them up. Oi! This just keeps getting better. So, to make this long story very short I had to drive over and pick them up with my truck. She was still freaking, but now it was because everyone will know that she can't paddle. And all I could think was "Get out of my car, and go back to Oregon!" So later I got to thinking, what kind of image are these Nike people supposed to project? These days very few people actually do something that requires some skill and guts. And to be honest you really don't have to be that gutsy to get in kayak and paddle. But everytime I take people out they remark on how gutsy and adventurous I am. 100 years ago no one would be saying that, knowing how to get from A to B would most likely be under your own power. This is such a rarity these days..........................What do you think???
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5 comments:
did you try yelling "Just Do It"?
nyuck nyuck nyuck...
You have no idea how often I want to............
like today for example.
oooh, I might be able to imagine.
Might even have written a little about it on today's post. The post really is about riding the old Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island, the lead-up just got extraodinarily long and I think that's 'cause you got me reminiscing about times I've had people go all stupid on me.
Yes, patience can be hard to come by when you are towing the client and know that they are sitting back there hold their paddles like chopsticks ("how do you use these things again?")
I did a trip to the Statue of Liberty once where I ended up towing a double most of the way back. If I had a dime for every time I glanced back and at least one of them wasn't even pretending to paddle it would've covered my post-paddle beer...
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