Out of Office: Ben Flowers

I bought a unicycle with my birthday money from a local hobby shop [when I was in the seventh or eighth grade], and I still have that unicycle today… I usually pull it out once or twice a year and put air in the tire and ride it up and down my road once or twice, just to know I can still do it.

I wasn’t very good at it at first. … I fell several times in our dirt driveway, but eventually, I got to be pretty proficient on it. And then our local YMCA had a group of unicyclists. We called ourselves the Y Wheelers.

You fall a lot, so you have to pick yourself back up again. It teaches you to continue to persevere even though you know you’ll fall sometimes … Back when I was doing it with [the Y Wheelers], I was a shy person. I think it helped me get out of my shell a little bit.

When COVID came, I was just trying to do something to raise morale [at the bank] … I brought [my unicycle] and rode around on all the different floors to get everybody to laugh and talk.