It was the spring of my senior year and my ‘give-a-damn’ was definitely broken. I had maybe 6 weeks left of classes before graduation and was enjoying the bittersweet stretch before all my friends were fixing to scatter to different parts of the country to start their lives. We went out four nights or five nights a week, only went to the classes we needed to for graduation, took frequent trips to the beach.
I was in a few student organizations that dealt with food supply and processes. One day, I receive a phone call from a professor of mine that she had a group of students she was taking to a convention in Las Vegas. It was basically a collection of national grocery store chains and end users of processed foods. Anyways, there was a student who had to back out at the last minute, and her hotel room and flight were already paid for. They were leaving the next week, and she wanted to know if I wanted to go as a replacement.