You know you've wanted to. You know you've wondered all about it, what it's like, how you can get to do it.

Anyone who has ever set foot on a driving range — both golfer and non-golfer alike — has that one common curiosity, that one common desire.

To drive that range tractor enclosed by a big cage that picks up all the balls while people fire shot after shot right at you.

Actually, everyone starts out dreaming of hitting that slow moving beast with the perfect drive as it inches along 250 yards away. Hitting one still remains the highlight of my otherwise lackluster golf career.

At some point, this fantasy turns to the flip side of the tee box: Wouldn't it be awesome to be driving that thing around, hunkered down for battle, ready to take on the whole army of hackers who are trying to knock one right through that metal cage?

This curiosity calls to us, like a siren on some island ami the desolate sea of dead and overgrown driving-range grass. Yes, driving that range tractor would be the ultimate experience, at least in the limited world of range balls, tees and golf clubs.

For most people, this must remain a dream. The passport to the forbidden city of golf only comes with a minimum wage job at the course or range. Either you take a job there, or you'll never get to live the rush that is the range tractor. So I took the only logical course of action. I got a job at the course.

I'll never forget that day when I first stared the dream in the face. It was my third day on the job, a slow Friday afternoon. My boss walked down to the "Cart Center,"the garage where all the carts were stored, and asked if anyone wanted to "pick"the range.

Remembering Dead Poets' Society and all that talk about seizing the day, I volunteered without a moment's hesitation, "carpe diem" racing through my head.

My boss gave me a funny look and sort of chuckled. He walked over to one of the Cart Center veterans, a battle-weary high school senior named Brent, and said "Ted wants to drive the range cart."

They both then looked at me and laughed. Despite their strange reaction to my enthusiasm, I remained excited to be going out there and grabbing my own piece of utopia, one Titleist Super X range ball at a time. Still, a very small part of my brain, stuck somewhere back behind thoughts for my plans that night kept asking:

"What's really out there?"

In the course of the next couple of months, I found out a few more times than I wanted to. It all starts when they tell you that you can't drive the range cart too fast. It's not "good for it."

"What does that mean?"you ask. Well, so did I.

The range, being the gentle soul that it is, decided to show me.

"Not good for it"actually means that if you drive so fast that golfers can't use you as a sundial, half of the front axle will tear apart from the cart and the wheel will pop off when you try to make a turn.

And it was all downhill from there. There was the day a still-unidentified part of the cart was dragging from the bottom and I put a nice little streak of torn-up grass all the way across a practice green. There was the day one of the bag clips on the back of a normal cart broke and my industrial-sized trash can full of freshly picked balls spilled all over. There was the day the thing just started shooting oil all over the place and the people in the golf shop radioed down that my cart was smoking.

There was the time I was dumping balls from the bins into a trash can and some twelve year old did his best Happy Gilmore and sliced one into the tree right above me. In short, I found out why they laughed at my youthful enthusiasm that day back in May. Now I'm older, I've seen things and I've learned one simple lesson: Stay away from the range cart.

It has a mind of its own.

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