A sign on the highway
It was the summer of 2018. Pixie and I were driving from Texas to South Florida with the back of the car packed to the roof with paint party supplies.
That was the business model. Drive east, teach a paint party, drive further east, teach another one. We slept in the guest rooms of family and friends along the way and ate whatever was in their fridges.
It was a blast. Also totally irresponsible.
That first summer, I had only enough money to get us TO Florida. Not enough to get us home. The plan was that I would teach a paint party once we got there, and that paycheck would bring us back.
That was the whole financial plan.
A steady paycheck used to matter so much to me. People who lived without one seemed crazy. How do you sleep at night not knowing what is coming in?
Then I was one of them. Still didn’t sleep great.
Somewhere in there I got comfortable making quick decisions on very little information. Which is a nice way of saying I was easy to talk into things.
On this particular trip, Pixie and I were driving to my friend Mindy’s house.
It was one of those long stretches of road where you stop looking at the clock because it only makes it worse. We had snacks, the radio, and about a hundred more miles than either of us wanted.
Then I saw a sign advertising Disney and Universal Studios tickets.
That’s all it took.
I was tired and my kid was bored and a sign on the side of the road said tickets, so I pulled over. There was no plan. No scheme. Just a woman who needed to stand up and stretch her legs and thought, well, maybe we will get something out of this.
Nothing about that was a plan. That’s just how my dumbest decisions have tended to start, on a day I was tired and not thinking very hard.
The man at the counter
He was nice. They always are.
He explained that they could give us a free night at a hotel and tickets to Universal Studios. All we had to do was sit through a presentation the next morning.
Pixie was deep in her Harry Potter phase. DEEP. The kind where you have opinions about wand wood and you have picked your house and you would like everyone at dinner to know about it.
So when the man said Universal Studios, what I heard was Harry Potter.
Then he asked if I was married.
I said yes, because I am, and because it didn’t occur to me that this was a trick question. Turns out there was an income requirement, and married couples qualified differently.
He looked at me, and then he said that since my husband wasn’t here with me, I should just say I wasn’t married.
I knew.
Let me be clear about that, because I’ve had a lot of years to be honest about this story. I knew in that exact second that this wasn’t a good idea. My gut said no in a voice I could hear.
And then I did it anyway.
What I told Pixie
Here is where I would love to tell you I dragged my poor child into a scheme against her will.
That’s not what happened.
I told Pixie she needed to be quiet and act interested during the presentation. She was already interested. The place had mini golf. It had a bathroom roughly the size of our kitchen at home. If it had been up to her, she would have signed the papers herself and asked if we could move in on Friday.
She was in on the part about her dad too.
Bobby and I were going to be serious, but not married. That was the story, and Pixie had zero problem with it.
Harry Potter World was on the other side of that presentation. Her favorite thing in the entire world, one morning away.
As I type this, I’m cringing on the inside.
It was a small, silly lie told to get theme park tickets. Neither one of us had to be talked into it. We both wanted the thing, so it was easy, and easy is the whole problem.
I’m fairly sure she would have told that man we were a family of circus performers if it got us through the gate.
The nicest condo Pixie has ever seen
They put us up for the night, and the condo was really cool.
A valet took the car at the door. Somebody else carried our things in. The whole treatment.
To this day, Pixie will tell you it’s the nicest condo she has ever seen. If I’m remembering right, it wasn’t all that.
That night I ran the numbers in my head.
One night. One hour in the morning. Then tickets.
It seemed like such a good trade. That’s how these things always feel while you’re inside them. The cost is behind you and the reward is out in front of you and every hour that passes makes quitting feel a little more ridiculous.
I could have gotten up right then and driven to Mindy’s.
I didn’t.
One hour from Butterbeer
The next morning we went down for breakfast and the presentation.
We were ONE hour away. Sixty minutes of sitting politely in a room while someone showed me slides about ownership opportunities, and then somebody was going to hand me those tickets.
I could already taste the Butterbeer.
Pixie ate her breakfast. I sat there feeling pretty pleased with myself, which is always a sign that something is about to happen.
Bobby wasn’t there.
Which means I couldn’t have bought the timeshare even if I had wanted to.
Not that I wanted to. We were never buying a timeshare, not that morning and not ever. We were there for Universal tickets and nothing else, and I would have sat through any slideshow on earth to get them.
Is this your husband
The manager comes over to our table minutes before the presentation is scheduled to begin.
He holds his phone out toward me and asks, “Is this your husband?”
On the screen is my Facebook page. Bobby is right there in the photo.
I’m shocked, which is ridiculous, because I’m the one who lied. There’s a beat where my brain scrambles for any door out of this room.
So I say, “We’re serious, but we’re not married.”
He keeps looking at me.
And I fold, because I’m a terrible liar and always have been. I tell him yes. That’s my husband.
I feel like I’m in the principal’s office. Forty years old, a business owner, a mother, sitting in a breakfast room getting caught in a fib about my own marriage by a man with a phone.
He is perfectly polite about it.
Before he walks us out, I tell him about the guy at the counter on the highway. How that man specifically told me to say I wasn’t married. How he said it would be fine, no issues.
The manager isn’t surprised at all.
He explains that the guy on the highway only gets paid if somebody books a room. That’s the whole job. Not a sale, not a happy customer, not somebody sitting through a presentation and going home satisfied. He gets paid when a person agrees to stay the night.
So he says whatever he needs to say to make that happen.
Then he escorts us out of the room.
Pixie didn’t even get to finish her breakfast.
The parking lot
I walked up to the valet stand, and instead of the full service we got on the way in, a man handed me my keys and pointed at a parking lot with hundreds of cars in it.
I walked my daughter out to find our own car among a few hundred others.
We didn’t get the Harry Potter tickets.
I want to be clear that nobody was cruel to us. They were completely within their rights, and honestly, they were nicer about it than they had to be.
There was nothing to be mad about. I just had to carry my own keys.
Filling a room
What the manager told me landed harder than getting kicked out did.
The guy at the counter wasn’t scheming against me. He wasn’t a bad person. He was answering a completely different question than the one I thought we were discussing. I thought we were figuring out how to get my kid to Harry Potter. He was filling a room.
And the thing is, I had all the information I needed before any of that. My own judgment told me no in the first thirty seconds.
I outsourced my decision to a stranger who had no reason to care how my morning went.
The drive after
We got back on the road, and we were laughing about it before we even reached the car.
Because nothing had actually changed. We were pointed at the same place we had been pointed at the day before, with the same plans, in the same car. The night hadn’t taken anything from us and it hadn’t gotten us anything either.
That’s the part that stays with me. All that pretending, and the whole thing put me right back where I started.
I didn’t save a single minute. I didn’t gain one thing I didn’t already have.
Pixie remembers the mini golf and the giant bathroom and thinks the whole thing was a great adventure. She isn’t wrong. It was a good night and a ridiculous morning, and we still laugh about it.
What I know now
I’ve told this story a lot of times, usually for the laugh, because the image of me getting escorted out of a breakfast room by a man holding up my own Facebook page is genuinely funny.
But writing it out, it’s not really a story about a timeshare.
What I actually learned in that parking lot wasn’t “don’t lie,” although yes, obviously, don’t lie. It was that the shortcut didn’t get me anything. Not time, not tickets, not one step closer to where we were headed. I cut the corner and came out in the exact same place, one morning later.
There are going to be things in your business you want to skip. Because they are hard. Or you don’t think you’re talented enough. Or maybe they are flat out boring and you would rather do almost anything else.
And somewhere along the way, somebody will offer you a faster way around it, and it will sound so reasonable.
I still pull over sometimes. I get tired, and things sound good, and I’m not always as smart as I would like to be. The difference now is that I know where the detour lets out, and it’s right back where I started. That morning I walked out of that hotel with exactly what I walked in with.
Pixie got mini golf out of it, so honestly, she came out ahead.
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