I was on a business trip in Washington, D.C. last month, the intent of which was to attend a supplier conference for a major customer and also help lobby Congress on behalf of this customer. I had scheduled a few meetings with members of Congress--one with a Senator himself and another with the staff of a Representative from my district. I live in Connecticut, so neither meeting was with someone I line up with particularly well politically, but last year at the same conference, I met a Democratic Representative from Connecticut, as well as the Staff of a Senator, and both meetings went well. I flew into D.C., which is rarely my mode of transportation to that particular destination, but almost always my preferred transportation for business trips. I met up with two of my friends from college who I still keep in touch with and hang out with multiple times every year. I grabbed a beer with one and the two of us went to meet up with the other friend at an upscale Michelin Star Restaurant with incredible food and wine. We spent the evening together and I got an Uber back to my hotel room, tentatively planning to meet up with them again the following evening.
It started to snow that night, but being from Connecticut, this was not the kind of snow that worried me in the slightest. The morning portion of the conference went on as planned the following day, but then I found out that things run a bit differently in D.C. than they do in Connecticut when it snows. The roads looked fine to me, but apparently a few inches of snow shuts down that city. Both of my Congressional meetings were cancelled, and both of those offices were closed due to the weather. So I ended up back in my hotel room for the afternoon, working from my laptop via VPN.
At some point, while answering urgent e-mails in my boxers and beater, the fire alarm went off.
You've got to be kidding me.
I sat there for a few seconds pondering what I should do. Was this an actual fire? A false alarm? Should I run for the exits in what I was wearing? No, I couldn't do that. I threw on some jeans, a jacket, and a cap, and walked out into the hallway. Everyone was evacuating. The fire alarm also had voice instructions saying not to use the elevators. For some reason, the stairs were not near the elevators. An older gentleman and I figured out that the stairs were down the hall, and so we went down six flights of stairs to the exit.
Immediately upon entering the staircase, a girl coming down from the floor above caught my eye. She was a stunningly beautiful brunette in a college sweatshirt. A word came out of my mouth.
"Hi."
I didn't know what else to say, and it was probably a weird thing to say in the middle of an evacuation.
"Hey."
"So much for anyone trying to nap."
"Yeah, I was just getting some work done."
"Me too, but I had just finished a quick nap and had to throw some clothes on."
"Same. Did you see any smoke?"
"No. Probably a false alarm. Hopefully."
It was a false alarm. There was some working being done on the hotel, and it somehow tripped the fire alarm on several floors. But in the few minutes we were standing outside in the snow before a hotel employee called us all back in, the two of us began an interesting conversation.
As it turns out, I ran into the one other conservative-leaning person in D.C. She told me she was here because she was lobbying Congress in favor of school choice, and she went on to tell me all about school choice and her own experience with it. I went from being mildly in favor of school choice to being very much in favor of it. On the elevator back up, we were still talking, so we sat down in the seats outside the elevators on my floor for the next hour or so. This girl was fascinating person. She came from a large family in the Midwest, was a Christian with a Catholic upbringing, and benefited from school choice during high school. She said she wasn't very political, yet she was here lobbying Congress for school choice, and she had participated in the March for Life. But overall, she seemed like a Conservative-leaning Libertarian much like myself. She had met several members of Congress, as well as Betsy DeVos, and said she would likely meet with Mike Pence at some point. She was intelligent, moral, and gorgeous, with a bubbly personality and a smile to match. And there I sat, in my shitty plaid jacket that I had thrown on over my beater, realizing that I soon had to go to dinner with the others who were there for the conference, as well as the higher-ups who worked for the customer and some Congressional Staff members.
"Hey, I can talk to you for another few hours, but I need to get back into my suit and go to a dinner. What are you doing in a few hours?"
"Nothing. Just getting some work done."
"Can I get your number? You want to go out for a drink after dinner?"
"Sure. We can't go for drinks though."
"Oh..."
"We can go to the Restaurant in the lobby, and I'll get a Coke or something though. ...I'm 19."
"Oh! Sure. That sounds great. I'll text you when I get back."
She put her number in my phone, and we went back to our respective rooms.
As it turns out, she was only there because her flight had been cancelled, and she had to switch hotels because the one she was staying at didn't have any space left for an extra night. While it was one hell of a chance meeting, I was not going to hit on a college freshman. However, I was most certainly going to meet up with her later that night. I told my friends who I had seen the previous evening that I would see them the next day instead, and I put my dress pants, shirt, jacket, and tie back on for the dinner reception.
I met some good folks at the reception and had a few good conversations, great food, and two glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. I texted her when I got back, changed back into jeans and a plaid shirt, and we met in the hotel lobby and headed to the hotel restaurant. I ordered a hard cider, she ordered a coke, and I bought her dinner too. We stayed there for the next three hours just talking. There was barely a break in conversation. She was a talented girl who was an athlete and dancer during high school, and was now in her first year of college, planning to become an Optometrist. We essentially exchanged our life stories, and as conflicted as I may have been about it, when the elevator stopped on my floor at the end of the night, I simply gave her a hug goodbye and walked off to my room.
When I got back to my room, I realized how ridiculous it was that I even met this girl in the first place. Finding anyone in D.C. who leans conservative is a task, and my friends sometimes think it's hilarious to tell girls we're talking to in bars that I voted for Trump, which goes over as swimmingly as you would imagine. But the number of things that had to go wrong for me to have met this particular girl was laughable. It had to snow hard enough in D.C. well into March, such that her flight was cancelled and all my afternoon meetings were cancelled. But all of the other people in her group had to have flights that were not cancelled, so she would be relocated by herself to another hotel, at which there had to be a system malfunction that caused the fire alarm to go off. A fire alarm that I was pretty pissed off had even sounded in the first place, though it turned out to be the best thing that happened all day. There was a note from hotel management under my door when I got back, apologizing for the disturbance of the false alarm. I laughed to myself and kept it.
I guess the point of the story is that sometimes a lot of bad things happen, and they can be pretty annoying at the time, but they can end up happening for a good reason. If you're a Christian, it's like Romans 8:28, which states that "all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." And another point of the story is that sometimes you can find the needle in the haystack, or the other conservative-leaning Christian in Washington, D.C. And maybe yet another point is that you should leave your hotel room if the fire alarm goes off, but probably put on some clothes before doing so if you don't see or smell smoke. Also, the girl I met is Hispanic, which I only mention because it will piss off the same people who are now saying that Kanye West is a member of the alt-right who doesn't care about black people since he supports President Trump, which is truly hilarious if you remember a specific Kanye comment about President Bush. It's all as priceless as the looks on the faces of Mike Myers and Chris Tucker that day... Life is weird.
