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lagilmanOkay, the bucket of water story.
It is, um, 1980. The Carter and Reagan campaigns are in full swing. My mom is working at the local regional YWHA as their director of PR. As such, I tend to get wrangled into helping at a lot of events. In this case, the Special Olympics the Y is hosting.
As part of this, we get a Special Visitor. I can’t remember at this point if it was Bush Senior or Mondale. He didn’t really make much of an impression, either way, except that he/his crew walked off with one of our microphones and never a) returned it or b) paid for it. Nice. But that’s only the background for the story, not the story itself.
The day starts off clear and warm. By mid-morning it’s HOT. As in, "do we want to call this thing off for medical reasons, it's so hot," HOT. By mid-afternoon, the volunteers are spending most of their time making sure participants have enough water inside them, to prevent folk from keeling over.
And through it all, because of the Veep’s flying PR visit, we have SecSer guys walking all over the place. Wearing dark suits, dark glasses, dress shoes and perfect (gelled) hair. And they look _miserable_. Professional, but miserable.
So when a pair (they really do seem to come in pairs) start to fuss about some display or another not being approved (it was too close to the Veep’s speaking spot? I honestly don’t remember) and they don’t take well to being told "this is our event, everything is set up this way for a reason, adapt to it or go away, damn it,” the decision was made by... someone, that the problem with them was that they were all just so hot, they were cranky. And if we didn’t do something soon, we’d have passed out SecSer guys all over the place and that would be bad PR.
Keep in mind, during what follows, that not only was I only thirteen, I was a pretty young-looking thirteen. Young, and innocent-looking, despite the comments some of you are problably muttering under your breath right now.
Anyway. The guys started to get into it with the person running that event. And we (being my volunteer-buddy and I) came up and offered them water. Being nice and all. They declined, and kept arguing. The event was about to start. The athletes were starting to mill around and get confused and nervous. So I went off and grabbed a bucket of water we were using for really bad dehydration/heat stroke cases, and, well.
I didn’t dunk them too badly. Didn’t get their sidearms. Or their mini-micro headsets. Just enough to cool them off a little....
And they were pretty good sports about it.
My mom did eventually hear about it, though. She wasn't quite such a good sport. But everyone else on staff thought it was pretty funny.
And that's the story.
It is, um, 1980. The Carter and Reagan campaigns are in full swing. My mom is working at the local regional YWHA as their director of PR. As such, I tend to get wrangled into helping at a lot of events. In this case, the Special Olympics the Y is hosting.
As part of this, we get a Special Visitor. I can’t remember at this point if it was Bush Senior or Mondale. He didn’t really make much of an impression, either way, except that he/his crew walked off with one of our microphones and never a) returned it or b) paid for it. Nice. But that’s only the background for the story, not the story itself.
The day starts off clear and warm. By mid-morning it’s HOT. As in, "do we want to call this thing off for medical reasons, it's so hot," HOT. By mid-afternoon, the volunteers are spending most of their time making sure participants have enough water inside them, to prevent folk from keeling over.
And through it all, because of the Veep’s flying PR visit, we have SecSer guys walking all over the place. Wearing dark suits, dark glasses, dress shoes and perfect (gelled) hair. And they look _miserable_. Professional, but miserable.
So when a pair (they really do seem to come in pairs) start to fuss about some display or another not being approved (it was too close to the Veep’s speaking spot? I honestly don’t remember) and they don’t take well to being told "this is our event, everything is set up this way for a reason, adapt to it or go away, damn it,” the decision was made by... someone, that the problem with them was that they were all just so hot, they were cranky. And if we didn’t do something soon, we’d have passed out SecSer guys all over the place and that would be bad PR.
Keep in mind, during what follows, that not only was I only thirteen, I was a pretty young-looking thirteen. Young, and innocent-looking, despite the comments some of you are problably muttering under your breath right now.
Anyway. The guys started to get into it with the person running that event. And we (being my volunteer-buddy and I) came up and offered them water. Being nice and all. They declined, and kept arguing. The event was about to start. The athletes were starting to mill around and get confused and nervous. So I went off and grabbed a bucket of water we were using for really bad dehydration/heat stroke cases, and, well.
I didn’t dunk them too badly. Didn’t get their sidearms. Or their mini-micro headsets. Just enough to cool them off a little....
And they were pretty good sports about it.
My mom did eventually hear about it, though. She wasn't quite such a good sport. But everyone else on staff thought it was pretty funny.
And that's the story.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 08:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 08:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 08:42 am (UTC)Also:
Young, and innocent-looking, despite the comments some of you are probably muttering under your breath right now.
No muttering... the "looking" part makes it completely believable. :p
no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 09:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 10:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 02:52 pm (UTC)In retrospect, it was astonishingly stupid. But if you can't be stupid when you're a teenager, well, hell, isn't it in the age description?
(Now I'm stupid in more adult ways, yes, thank you for pointing that out)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-04 06:14 pm (UTC)Any embellishment is not the fault of anybody here, mmkay? ;-D
We're just following tradition! O:-)
Thanks for the story.
--
Banazir
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 06:03 pm (UTC)