Nashville to Boston and back with a wine connection
Adventures Of A Black Belt Sommelier
The Ultimate Uber trip
I welcome back to Adventures of a Black Belt Soleilé, thank you for joining me. Back when Uber first launched I thought it would be really cool, maybe it would be really cool to be part of this new technology that had been created. I was actually the third person in Nashville to sign up to be a driver. The manager for Uber and Nashville met me at a Starbucks and downloaded the hop on my phone if you can imagine. Things have changed a little bit with Uber since then. I did it for a few years. One night I picked up this young woman at an apartment building in downtown Nashville. She was headed to the airport. She had a lot of luggage. When we got to the airport, she realized that she was about an hour late for her flight. She'd missed her flight by an hour and she had a meltdown in the front seat of my car. She had a meltdown in the front seat of my car because the back of my car was so full of her luggage there was no place for her to sit. She was basically, I asked her why she was so upset and she said, "Well, my tickets are not refundable and I have to be in Boston by 9 o'clock Monday morning and I don't have any place to go." So I said, "This is an unbelievable coincidence but I am leaving tomorrow morning to drive to New York City. And if you'd like, I'll take you to Grand Central Station and you can figure out the rest." Well, she was overjoyed as you can imagine. She called some friends, they said she could stay with them that night. I took her in her luggage there. Next morning I went back, picked her in her luggage up, went to U-Haul, picked up the U-Haul van that I was using to drive to Boston and then went to my client's house to pick up his wine collection that I was driving to New York to deliver to Zaki's to be auctioned off at their next auction. See there's the soul of the A connection. And we headed east towards Knoxville before heading north towards New York City. We were about an hour outside of Nashville when I asked her, "You know, we've got 16 hours to kill. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about yourself." And she said, "Well, I grew up in Miami and when I was 12, my parents divorced. I stayed with my mother. I've actually never seen my father again. When I was 14, my mother threw me out of the house and I've been on my own ever since. I was homeless for a little while. I eventually was adopted and lived in several adoptive families during high school. I found out later that she'd been pretty badly abused and all those, by all those people who adopted her, well, not really adopted, but foster care." And but she did really, she said, "I did really well in school. So when I graduated from high school, I had some scholarship offers and the best combination of financial aid and academics was at Northeastern University in Boston. So I need to be there for my first class by nine o'clock, tomorrow morning. And if I do well this semester, I'll graduate in May with a degree in economics." She fell asleep and she pretty much slept the whole way. I hadn't really thought things through, I told her when I suggested that she bribed with me that she could pay for some of the gas and do some of the driving, but of course she didn't have any money to pay for the gas and she couldn't do the driving because the car was rented in my name. So I had to drive the whole way and the other thing I had thought about was the fact that we couldn't really stop because she didn't have any money to pay for a hotel room. So we drove straight through, it's a long drive with no sleep. We got to New York City, well, just south of New York City and I started thinking about this young woman with all these bags. She was, I think she was 27 to take in her seven years to get through college because what she'd done was she would pick a city in America that she thought was interesting and go there and get a job and work until she had enough money to complete the next semester. That's why she'd been a natural, she had a job in Nashville that she'd been saving her salary to pay for the next semester tuition at New York Eastern. So I just decided to keep driving. There was an enormous traffic jam in Boston that morning and as a result it was 22 hours toward the door, that we finally did get to her dorm about 7.30 on Monday morning. I helped her carry her bags up to her dorm room. She did make it to her first class. We exchanged contact information. I took a three-hour nap on her unmade bed in the dorm room and I left a little money for her to help her out on her desk. After I'd taken enough long enough nap that I felt safe driving again, I headed back to New York City to White Plains, New York to deliver the swine d'Azakis for their auction. Then I spent the night in a hotel room and headed back to Nashville. I would occasionally wire Sandra a little money to help her out. We stayed in contact. About a month later I picked up a woman downtown downtown Nashville and in the course of conversation she told me that she was in human resources with the Regents Bank. I told her about Sandra, that Sandra was getting ready to graduate with a degree in economics from Northeastern University and was a really, really special young woman. Maybe she'd like to interview her and as it turns out Regents Bank in Nashville hired Sandra when she graduated from Northeastern in May. The chances, I'm not a mathematician, the chances that out of all the, I think at the time there were 4,000 Uber drivers in Nashville, the chances that I would pick Sandra up on Saturday and she needed to go to Boston and I was headed to New York are so miniscule. Then the chances that I was the driver that picked up this woman with Regents Bank and that I had picked up Sandra a month before, are so miniscule that I don't think they're even calculable but they certainly was an incredible coincidence and I did both things. I haven't talked to Sandra in a long time. We kind of disconnected after that, I don't remember why but I haven't talked during the long time. I hope she's doing well. If she sees if you happen Sandra, if you happen to see this by some strange chance, I hope you're doing well, I'm proud of my little role in your success in life. Thanks for tuning in to Adventures of a Black Bolt some of you this morning. If you're enjoying my episodes, I hope you'll consider following us or sharing it with friends and leave a comment. If you'd like, I'm certainly interested in what you have to say. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful Sunday.