A few months later I flew into Denver International Airport with Katy. Her mom took us out to breakfast before we headed to Enterprise to pick up my vehicle for the week. Things started off a little shaky but I chalked that up to new car nerves. I’d rented enough that weren’t mine in the years before when I lived in Chicago to know that it always took about 20 minutes to figure out what all the bells and whistles of each one were.
Then we got to the mountains.
When I’d been asked about my comfort level driving a 15-passenger van earlier in the year I hadn’t given it a second thought. It wasn’t a task I had ever done before, but how hard could it be? Plus, did I mention Blondie was playing this festival? I would figure it out, no problem. Turns out driving in the mountains was actually terrifying. The fact that I was doing it in a giant van felt like I was on a rollercoaster that had somehow gone off the tracks. I was starting to question my capability to do the job I’d been hired for that week.
The second day of driving I woke up barely able to walk. Turns out keeping your foot hovering over the break for 2 hours while hurtling down a mountain can do some damage. I didn’t dare tell Katy that I actually wasn’t qualified for this job she’d hired me for, choosing instead to stay silent and try to drive with my left foot down the mountain. The first band I was supposed to pick up had a delayed flight and my phone was almost dead, so I hobbled into a local Target to pick up a charger. At the last second I grabbed a copy of “Mariah Carey’s Greatest Hits”, thinking the CD would bring me some much needed relief and inspiration. To this day I have no idea why I didn’t also pick up a bottle of aspirin.
When I finally made it back to the festival and dropped the band off for their sound check I couldn’t hide my pain anymore. I was escorted to the medical tent where the doctor informed me I had a “stress sprain” and shouldn’t drive long distances for the rest of the week.
Things got better after that. Since my medical issue meant I couldn’t drive to the airport, I was put in charge of all the in-town runs. That mostly meant picking up weed for whoever wanted it from the local dispensaries (we were in Colorado after all) but I also got to be the personal chauffeur for the bigger band’s tour bus drivers. We’d bond as I told them about driving the same switchback roads they’d just come up and compliment their clearly superior driving skills. If you didn’t know, tour bus drivers always have the best stories and after a couple compliments, they’d start telling them all. Recently I heard a statistic, originally from a Hewlett Packard internal report, that says:
“Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.”
On the last day of the festival I asked Katy, who’d hired me and then had to cover when I wasn’t up to the full job description, if I had let her down. She said, “the importance of a floater driver cannot be understated. It actually worked out ok! Now, you wanna go watch Blondie from the side of the stage??” Victory!
Photo Credit Katy Nielsen
Photo Credit Igor Stepano