Though I have never met a Baltimore Oriole, I have a brief, personal connection with one specific Oriole — Cal Ripken, Jr.<\/p>\n
In 1998, on summer break from the University of Richmond, I took a job with GEFA (formerly First Colony Life Insurance) in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was a job in their financial accounting department, and it basically amounted to applying payments to customer accounts.<\/p>\n
Early in my time there, maybe my second week, I was at lunch with several other summer break college students in my department. At the span of almost twenty years, I can’t tell you their names. We had a conversation that went something like this.<\/p>\n
PERSON 1: I’ve heard that Shaq has an account here.
\nPERSON 2: Shaq? I love Shaq!
\nPERSON 1: Michael Jordan, too.
\nPERSON 3: They’d never let us work on accounts like that.
\nME: I have to agree with that. We’d never deal with someone famous.
\nPERSON 2: Why do you say that?
\nME: Because we’d have access to their personal information anytime we accessed their accounts. Phone number. Address. All of that.
\nPERSON 1: Yeah.
\nPERSON 3: Yeah.
\nPERSON 1: I bet only people who have been here for a long time and are trusted get to work with famous people.
\nPERSON 2: Damn. I love Shaq!<\/p>\n
A few mornings later, a stack of paperwork dropped on my desk. The payments to process that day.<\/p>\n
I worked through the pile. Punch in the account number. Compare name on the data screen (in OS\/2 Warp!) to the name on the paper. Enter payment details. Process. Repeat.<\/p>\n
Two hours in, I punched in the account number. Read the name on the screen. Blinked. Read the name on the paper. No, I hadn’t made a mistake.<\/p>\n
Cal Ripken, Jr.<\/p>\n
All of the personal details were there on the screen — his address, his phone number, his beneficiaries, the amount and type of the policy. I read it. I did not commit any of it to memory.<\/p>\n
I applied the payment. I put the paperwork in the completed stack. I moved on.<\/p>\n
A month later, a stack of paperwork dropped on my desk. Payments to process. In the afternoon, there was Cal Ripken again.<\/p>\n
Then, my next to last week before I went back to Richmond, in my daily paperwork, there was Cal Ripken.<\/p>\n
In 2007, I won tickets at work for Opening Day at the Aberdeen Ironbirds. I called up my dad, and I took him to the game; we had seats in the first row, right behind home plate. During the pre-game ceremony, fifteen feet away from me on the other side of the screen, there was Ripken. I smiled. If he saw me — or even noticed me — he have had no idea who I was, that for three months in the summer a decade before I had been the person who kept his life insurance policy up-to-date.<\/p>\n
As encounters with an Oriole go, mine is a strange story, but it amuses me to think of it.<\/p>\n
Inspired by Camden Chat<\/a>‘s Fanpost Friday<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n Though I have never met a Baltimore Oriole, I have a brief, personal connection with one specific Oriole — Cal Ripken, Jr. In 1998, on summer break from the University of Richmond, I took a job with GEFA (formerly First Colony Life Insurance) in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was a job in their financial accounting department,Continue reading “Cal Ripken and My College Summer Job”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29978,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[575,4423],"class_list":["post-29977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-baseball","tag-baltimore-orioles","tag-cal-ripken-jr","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}