Orientation On the Floor

The night before leaving for Gainesville for orientation, I was getting a bit discouraged. I researched the heck out of Gainesville area State Parks, and I couldn't find any good prospects to pitch my green, two-man, REI tent for orientation week. Despite my hesitations, I stuffed my tent and sleeping bag into the trunk of my little Honda Civic, and I was on my way. 

Floating Canoes

When I first arrived at the bright, open and obviously LEED certified Hough Hall (pronounced Huff Hall), I finally figured out where that $36,000 tuition price tag was going. There is a giant news-ticker screen in the lobby, a room filled with a dozen Bloomberg super computers worth like $800,000 a piece, and there are printers and nice couches and nice everything. There are also glass canoes floating in the air with colored glass balls stuffed in them. My favorite find, though, the one that put me at ease for the rest of the day, was the shower on the 3rd floor. I wasn't going to smell like hippie for the week when everyone else was taking baths in Acqua Di Gio. 

I texted my wife in excitement, "They have showers!" "Awesome" she replied. Then I discovered break out rooms on the 2nd and 3rd floors. "They have rooms I could sleep in," I texted again. "Schweet!" 

For the record, my wife is amazing - I know I'm a tad strange and she appears to be calmingly cool with that. Like good ol' Dr Seuss said, "We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” 
   
Anyway, after the Hough Hall tour and sitting in room 240, I pretended to be glued to my iPhone, tending to all of those important messages important people get when they're in uncomfortable social conditions:
   
A friend from highschool (that I don't really know) posted up a picture on Facebook of her friend (that I didn't care about).
  
A tweet from Cabot came through my Twitter feed on how to make apple cheddar pie. Re-Tweet.

The first day of orientation was kind of fun. You begin by collecting branded laptop bags and nice Nike UF MBA polos that you'll be paying back for the next 30 years (with interest), and then you meet the UF MBA staff. The admissions team, or as the Director of the MBA program calls them, the SNL crew, gives a presentation on the demographics of your class. It sounds boring - they make it fun.
  
You meet Jim, the maintenance guy that pretty much runs the program. You meet Angie, who has the dismal task of following up to Sean Connery telling Trebek about the noises his mother made last night. Then you meet Alex, the skinny, well-spoken and witty Director of MBA. Alex told us that we are all now part of the UF MBA brand. In other words, "If you get drunk and sloppy and act dumb over at the Swamp, please don't wear the new Nike shirts we gave you." 
  
For the rest of the afternoon, you drink enough little bottles of Pepsi and Mountain Dew that the garbage you produce negates any of the carbon footprint that Hough Hall tries to reduce. After thinking about potentially a dozen simple ways to reduce this massive waste (bigger bottles? - now that's a smart MBA student thinking outside the box) and thinking about the gallons of corn syrup that were in the bellies of that room, I thumbed through a binder of colored papers.

As I was reading a pink paper that had a space for me sign my life away at the next day's team building ropes course, I couldn't help but think about my lack of sleeping arrangements. And then I met Josh. 

Josh manages some of West Palm's massive wealth, and I bet he's dang good at it. I would imagine that rich men appreciate Josh's conservative (but assured) investment suggestions, and that rich men's wives appreciate Josh's perfect jaw structure and youthful smile. Josh is also from a tiny little mountain town called Felton, CA, where my older brother lives - we instantly connected. We talked about Santa Cruz's waves and how his mom works in the same hospital as my sister-in-law. 
  
After lunch and eating some amazing peanut butter filled chocolate chip cookies (Fact: These peanut-butter filled cookies are the best part of the University of Florida MBA program. I take that back - these cookies are the best part of life.), we walked upstairs and Josh discovered I was a homeless transient who just put four peanut butter filled chocolate chip cookies in his pocket and didn't have a place to sleep that night.
  
Being the nice and open guy that he was and being scared that I was going to invite myself over anyway, he mistakingly asked me, "Hey man - you can stay with us tonight if you want." I jumped on this lead like a hungry salesperson who's got nothing in Stage 3 - Proposal Development, "That would be amazing." 

My spot at the Paramount

Josh hadn't thought this invitation through, or maybe he didn't expect to see homeless people in the MBA program. Either way, his hotel room at the elevator's-always-broken Paramount was already over-booked with three tenants, and I can only imagine what his conversation was with his two gracious roommates, Michael and Jason - "Umm - hey guys that I don't know yet. Mind if we have a questionable transient I found on the street sleep on our floor?" 
  
Needless to say, that night, me and a dozen cock roaches that were on growth hormones slept on an I-don't-want-to-know-what-those-stains-are-from rug between two beds. I slept like a log, but I'm pretty sure Jason slept with a knife clenched in his hand, just in case this homeless guy was going to pull a fast one.