And Now For Something Completely Different
I know you were probably expecting some kind of blog post on Expo today. Don’t worry, I will put one together this weekend. Right now, I want to share with you an experience I had Thursday evening downtown. I was walking back to my car from a meeting (Nicky Blaines) when I heard someone call my name. Well, they didn’t call my name directly they yelled out “radio man”. Now seeing how Garrison and Amos weren’t around, I figured they were talking to me. So I walked over and it was a rather large woman who appeared homeless. She was engaging two out of towners and asked me if I believed there were homeless people in Indianapolis? I told her I believed there were homeless in Indianapolis and there were also people pretending to be homeless and were trying to pull a scam.
At that point she asked for money, I told her I don’t give to individuals, I give to charity. That was when she proceeded to lecture me. And somewhere in the inane banter I thought to myself “how does this ‘homeless’ woman know I’m on the radio? So I started going down the list. She has a radio which means she has an outlet which means she has electricity which means she has an apartment or a house. But then I thought you can’t see me on the radio so she either has a television and has seen me on RTV 6 or she has a computer and logs on to our station’s website and has seen my photo. Or course it could also be she’s read my column in the Indianapolis Star. I’m not quite sure what it was but it was pretty obvious this woman was not homeless. If anything, she was a prime candidate for type-2 diabetes, but homeless, I don’t think so.
I am all for helping people. I give to charity, my wife volunteers and gives at her church. But I don’t give to street beggars, especially the ones not smart enough to know how to really pull a scam and then have the nerve to get an attitude when you tell them no. So hopefully the woman who was begging will listen to me on the radio, watch me on television or read my work in the newspaper or on the Internet and take a hint. Or who knows, I might just see her downtown this weekend during the Expo festivities and I’ll tell her myself.
