The former general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, Sam Hinkie, joined Twitter today, and fired off 10 (numbered) tweets to introduce himself to his new followers. After a pretty obnoxious humblebrag about teaching at Stanford in his spare time, Sam dropped a bombshell of sorts:
9 | …watch tons of basketball, and soak up all that I can. Oh, and snowboard. For sure snowboard.
— Sam Hinkie (@samhinkie) September 14, 2016
So, how would Sam Hinkie go about buying a snow board?
It was a temperate Palo Alto Day and Sam Hinkie decided it was finally time to buy a snowboard. He walked into his den, picked up his space phone, and very methodically dialed the nearest store that sold snowboards.
“Hello, I am Sam Hinkie and I’d like to purchase a snowboard.”
“Well,” said the clerk over the phone cheerfully, “We got a lot of snowboards here!”
“Good, it is my intention to purchase one of them. One moment, I must look at my notes. Please hold.”
Four hours later, the man on the phone finally hung up, but Sam Hinkie still poured over his piles and piles of laminated spreadsheets full of snowboard lore, detailed mountain minutiae and complex equations such as “x-freestyle+freeride{ALPINE}/$$$-(AllMountainBoard)(y)(winter months).”
“Today, I am going to buy a snowboard,” Sam Hinkie told his family. His lips curled into a smile that did not touch his eyes.
Six months later, Sam Hinkie finally went to purchase his snowboard. He nodded to the clerk and walked toward a vast wall covered in beautiful snowboards and also some ugly ones. However, before he got to the wall he noticed that his shoe was untied. He knelt down and whispered “Trust the process,” to himself as he tied his wingtips. When he was done tying his shoe, he stood up and resumed his journey to the snowboard-covered wall. Another two hours passed as he stared at the wall.
Then, very abruptly, he logged into his online banking on the four separate iPads he carries with him everywhere and transferred lump sums of money to his coworkers for the rights to their used and/or cheap snowboards. Hinkie knew that if he one day owned enough terrible snowboards or enough snowboards that had never and would never be used, he might one day be able to trade them all for a snowboard that would change his life. Trust the process, he said, in his brain.
A salesman walked up to him and said in a very friendly voice, “See anything you like?”
“Yes. I’ll take that one,” Hinkie said, pointing to a fairly good- but not great-looking snowboard. “But first I must know about the aspect ratio of the board’s front curve compared to the angle of the mountain.”
“Huh?”
“No, I’ll take that one instead. I have no money. I have been burning my money all day because I got cold. In the end it will all work out. This I am sure of. Anyway, I have changed my mind yet again. That one is the snowboard I wish to buy from you.”
The salesman laughed, “I think you might be a little more comfortable with a smaller board, pal.”
Sam Hinkie stared at the man angrily for two minutes, then lovingly for an additional minute. “No, my friend. You never buy small. You can’t teach a snowboard to be big. It is just big. I want length. And width. In fact, I’ll take three of the exact same kind of snowboard. And give me eight snowboards that are in very bad condition, snowboards that might break under my feet as I ride them down the mountain.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
Sam Hinkie took a long swig of electrolyte water. “You don’t need to understand. In fact, you shouldn’t understand. Understanding things is the past. Just trust the process. And tell me once more about the sidecut radius.”
