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This is going to be long, but I am exhausted, frustrated, and I need to rant it out. So here we go...
:rant:
They say that no good deed goes unpunished. Boy, they aren't kidding. Let me tell you a tale...
As some of you may know, I am a Sunday School teacher, which may amuse some and horrify others. Every year, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, our town has something called Town Decorating Day. We set up Christmas trees all through the town and the community decorates them. We end the day with a nighttime parade, called the Parade of Lights, where a whole bunch of local businesses and organizations make Christmas-themed floats, and parade through the town. Every year, my Sunday School makes a float, and we enter the parade. It's cold (VERY cold), it's long, it's crazy busy, but it's fun and it's worth doing. Among the necessary ingredients for our float? A wagon, a truck to pull the wagon, a generator (to power the lights) and hay (for the children to sit on).
This year, we had what seemed like an ideal situation: one of the parents of some of my students offered to provide everything, we just needed to decorate the darn thing and let her take care of the rest. The kids LOVE doing the float, and her daughter, in particular, was REALLY looking forward to being in the parade this year (it was to be her first time on the float. She wanted to be an angel. It's all she's been talking about for the past couple of months.) However, the minister warned me that because the woman was having some pretty serious personal problems, she might not be able to fulfill her commitment. So I approached one of the other parents (well, grandparent in this case), who quickly whipped up a back-up plan if the first woman fell through. I, and the minister, didn't want to go forward with the backup plan UNLESS we knew the first woman was going to back out (we knew she's very fragile right now, and didn't want to insult her by basically yanking the rug out from under her), so the minister tried to get in touch with her. She was unable to reach her, but spoke to a close friend of hers, who said that Woman A would come through, and if she was unable to, he would pick up her slack.
We got the wagon last week, and it was sorry looking. To say the least, it was rickety. It was made of wood, but most of the wooden planks were rotten and there were oak board put over some of the planks to make up for that. However, there were still many gaps in the floor of the wagon...it was no place for little kids. The plan was to use the hay to make up for it. The little kids would sit on hay bales, the older kids would sit in the middle where it was safe. It was agreed on that Woman A would meet us at 3 pm with the hay and the generator so that we could test the lights and get the hay set up. She doesn't show. I gave her until 3:45 before I headed to the church to help get the kids in their costumes. The parade was to start at 5:00 pm and the wagon had to be at the starting place at 4:30. I'm starting to worry...what if for some reason she doesn't show up? We had spoken to her THIS MORNING, so she knew what she had to do and where she had to be.
At the church, we got the kids in their costumes, and I ran back to the place where the float had been left to see if she had picked it up. It was now 4:30. The float was gone, so I knew she had come to get it. I just had to trust that she had the hay and the generator ready to go. So we head up the starting place...the float is there, along with her truck, and the generator. There is no hay, and she is nowhere to be found. Her daughter WAS there, but she couldn't say specifically where her mother was. Time was ticking away. None of us had her cell phone number, and her daughter didn't know it, and her friend didn't even REALIZE we needed hay in the first place. Myself, the other teacher, and the parents, realized that without they hay in the wagon, it just wasn't safe to put the kids in. It was 5:00 pm. There was still no sign of her, and the floats were starting to line up for the beginning of the parade. We decided to call off the float and simply find good places for the kids to watch the parade from, rather than wait for her to (maybe) show up at some point. The kids were very disappointed (especially her daughter, who, as I said, had been wanting to do this for MONTHS), but they handled it like champs. One of the kids told me 'You need to find somebody RELIABLE next year.' This from an 11-year old. :P But she was right.
I'd had a bad feeling about the float all day. It was too late to come up with a plan B...it was sink or swim at this point. We sank. Ah, but the icing on the cake was yet to come. I ended up watching the parade with a couple of the kids, and who should be in the parade but the woman...driving our float, sans Sunday schoolers. I...we...were horribly embarrassed. She hasn't even come through on the hay, there wasn't enough to make the wagon usable, and to add insult to injury, she decided to drive the float anyway when we decided not to put the kids on it. The minister and I bent over backwards to try to spare her feelings by giving her a chance to uphold her commitment, and she let us down, she let the kids down, but worst of all, she let her daughter down.
Epic. Fail. I feel like a horse's ass at this point. Well, we'll do our best to make it up to the kids. We're thinking a pizza party, and we'll do our best to make the Christmas pageant as much fun as possible, because the kids love that, too. Live and learn - next time we will make sure we have somebody RESPONSIBLE to help us out. There is a lot more to this situation than I put in this rant, because the whole story is much longer and more dramatic than even this, but you get the idea. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a big deal...but I put my heart and soul into the Sunday school, and for us to fail so spectacularly is very upsetting for me.
So, if you read all of this, thank you. I appreciate it. Now let me find a wall to bang my head against. :banghead:
:banghead: :banghead: :banghead:
:nuke:
:rant:
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