Saturday night, while I thought I was helping a close friend with a work-related seminar, I was being setup for a surprise 40th Bday party. Now the background:
A couple of months back I received a phone call from Jonathan, my CP (the guy who builds/maintains my prosthesis), and asked if I would help out with an upcoming CP seminar, as they needed a ‘patient model’ to demonstrate new feet from a leading prosthetic distributor. Of course I said I would, and was looking forward to it. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I get a call from a salesman from Otto Bock, the company manufacturing the feet I was going to demo. The conversation was short, but he gathered all the needed info so that he could bring the appropriate equipment for the seminar (I even found his contact info online when I was going to call him a week ago). During our conversation, I was told that I would be a ‘contract employee’ for Otto Bock for the day, and I would either be paid for my time, or I could pick one of the feet I demo’ed and keep it. That decision was a no-brainer, as prosthetic feet run in the thousands of dollars. Needless to say, I was pumped for the seminar, and had spent several hours reviewing the line of feet from Otto Bock (that just sounds weird, doesn’t it?).
Saturday comes and I spend time fixing up a rider lawn mower donated to me by a good friend and then I mow both my lawn and my neighbor’s. Get cleaned up and head south to OKC … to help out a friend. We were supposed to meet at his clinic office to gather needed tools. We were also supposed to do some needed maintenance on my present foot, as I had blown out the shock earlier in the month. After spending a few minutes in his office, we proceeded to the seminar. Jonathan’s wife was with him, but she was just dropping us off and then going to see her parents. When we got to the hotel of the seminar, she decided to go in with to see if there was anyone she knew there. As we entered, Jonathan mentioned it was in the "Appaloosa Room" and I looked at the display case for directions. Imagine my suprise when I saw “Appaloosa Room: Ron King – Happy Birthday”.
Major rewind in time: Three years ago my brother turned 40 and in celebration, my mom threw a suprise party for him. I knew mine was coming, I just had no idea it would be two weeks early or that Jonathan was up to his eye-balls in it!
Back to Saturday: Turns out we went in the front door because Jonathon was afraid we were too early. At one point while headed back to the Appalooa Room, Jonathan’s wife stopped to go to the bathroom (another attempt at time stalling). While she was away from us, I asked Jonathon what my mom had put him up to … he acted all innocent and said he didn’t know what I was talking about.
We get to the room and everyone yelled SUPRISE!, which it was, and we had an wonderful evening. The only sad part was:
Turns out mom made an appointment with Jonathon about three months ago to start this whole thing. Jonathon even got the guy at Otto Bock to play along, since he knew I would probably look the guy up for some reason. It really means a lot that so many people knew about this but went out of their way to insure it was a suprise.
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