Picture and Story 2

While this picture seems to be of me doing some sort of weird white-guy dance, there is really a rather interesting story behind it. Firstly- I am not dancing- I am in fact modeling what may be the ugliest pair of water-shoes ever.

Several years ago the company I worked for at the time conducted a retreat and strategic planning session in Rhode Island. There was a time back when the music companies were FLUSH with cash that we did these kinds of retreats for executives. The money spent back in the day was mind boggling.

There were about 30 of us and we stayed at an ultra-nice resort. After a couple days of meetings and planning sessions we got to have a bit of fun.

Our CEO had reserved a couple 12-meter yachts/sailboats (the kind that race in the America’s Cup) for our team to staff and race. The group was broken in two and we went through training for an hour or so. Our lovely and kind group assistant had made a run to Wal-mart to buy a selection of water-shoes for anyone that did not have proper shoes for the sailboats. I was one of them. And the only size 12 in the bunch were the horrible neon-yellow shoes in this picture.

Racing the 12-meters was amazing. Everything went great except for the accident.

During training we were told repeatedly that NO MATTER WHAT keep your head away from the hand-crank thingy (don’t recall the real name of it). If you are manning it and your hands slip off it will spin furiously and anyone near the crank pedals will get a nasty head-shot.

Sure enough, our friendly finance executive, David, got his head too close. It was a sudden and shockingly brutal attack. David went down for the count, and the blood flowed liberally. He was fine- just needed a couple stitches, but none of us wanted to cut short our day on the water so we called a speed boat from shore that came and picked David up and took him to the hospital. We were all somewhat concerned about him…but we had a race to win.






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