A NOT SO EASY RIDE
When I was seventeen, a friend and I wrote a letter to a juice company proposing they sponsor us on a trip across the country. A year later, that same friend and I were sitting on a couch watching a television commercial for an ad campaign called “[Juice Company] Across America.”
The commercial featured a guy who went around the country trying to get people to suck down their sweet drinks. This was the exact same premise my friend and I had suggested in our letter to the juicer the year previous. Back then, they’d written saying such a trip wasn’t in their budget. Apparently, it was the next year and they’d misplaced our contact information because we didn’t even get so much as a coupon.
On the other hand, I can’t really blame the juice company’s execs for recognizing a fantastic idea nor deciding against taking two minors up on their far-flung notion. The primary reason being that the trip I took across country a couple years later ended in a near-death experience. And that wouldn’t have reflected well on any corporate entity.