Monday, January 31, 2011

Where's Hospitality?

This weekend was my debate squads tournament. The only job I did not want this weekend was working ballot return. I had worked ballot return last year and hated it so I didn't wan to do it this year. Guess what job I got. Ballot return *sigh*. Well Friday came and I got out of class all day to get ready for the tournament. The first thing I did to get ready was me, my friend Cheryl, and a couple other people had to stamp envelopes. There were three stamps so I had one, Cheryl had one, and the other people had one. They would stamp the envelope than give it to me, I would stamp it and then give it to Cheryl. Well at least six times (no exaggeration) Cheryl would think I was done with an envelope and would slide it over to herself when really I hadn't finished stamping it so when she would slide the envelope out from in front of me and I would stamp the table. Lets just say there is a table up in my schools debate room with a big green blob of the words "Do not wait for a timekeeper". After that me, Cheryl, and our friend Madi (we were the three working ballot return that day) went to make copies. Ugh, I have never made so many copies in my life! We made at least 5,000. One of the things we had to copy was these thank you cards to give to teachers for letting us use their rooms. Well for one thing we had to copy them onto yellow card stock. The machine we were told to use did not want to take the card stock. After about an hour we had only like seven copies and we were supposed to make 100. We finally called our debate coach to ask her what we should do and so she told us to use the other machine in there. Luckily that machine worked. Well there were two cards on each piece of card stock so we had to use a cutting board to cut the card stock in half. Well it was taking a while and we were in the teachers lounge and the teachers had told us we needed to be out by lunch. Well lunch started at 11 and it was 10:50 and we were out of card stock and needed like 20 more copies. So Madi went all the way to the debate room on the other side of the school brought back more card stock, started the copies and told me and Cheryl to finish the cards and meet her in another copy room. Well me and Cheryl hurried and barely made it out of the room before the teachers came. Also in the process of getting the cards together and leaving Cheryl cut me with the card stock. You know what a paper cut is like, well think about it with card stock... and the cut was almost an inch long, OW! Well we got all the copies we needed done so I had to go put up signs around the school. Our tournament was so big we had to use the weirdest rooms. Like one you had to go through a closet to get to, three of the four corners of the little gym, the stage of the big gym, and other odd places. Not to mention we were using rooms in the church across the street. The tournament finally started at 3 that afternoon. Before I was supposed to go to the ballot return table I had to help the extemp chairs and co-chairs do room check for the extemp rooms. So I checked each room three times and made sure all the rounds had begun. Then I headed for the ballot return table. As ballot return my job was that when the judges were done judging they would bring the ballots to us, we would check them to make sure everything that needed to be filled out was filled out and filled out right. Then we would put the ballots in a box to be taken down to the tab room. Seems easy right? Well its not so easy when you have like 40 people waiting in line to give you ballots. Then if there was anything wrong with the ballots guess who would get blamed? Yep, ballot return. Plus, where like the HI chair only needed to worry about HI situations, and the LD chair only needed to worry about LD situations, ballot return was involved in the situations of every event. Also we had a sign on the front of our table that said "Questions? ask me!" so we got a lot of questions. The most asked questions were "Where's hospitality?" and "where's the church" because a lot of people didn't realize the church meant the church across the street. We had to stay at the tournament until every ballot was turned in. Friday night we were there until 11:30, ugh. Finally the tournament was all over around like 7 O' clock and I got to go home, but some were not as lucky. If you hadn't turned in your judging forms on time you had to stay and clean the cafeteria which is where all the debaters hang out between rounds. I felt bad for the people who had to stay and clean that up.
     The whole weekend was stressful and caused me such a lack of sleep that Sunday I got sick. I had a little bit of a fever and just felt kinda off so I spent most of the day watching movies with my parents. Then this morning I was so sore and tired. My fever had gone done for the most part but I just felt so beat up, like someone had literally beat me up and I have a sore throat and keep coughing so I took some Advil and tried to get ready for school. Then my friend texted me that she was on her way to pick me up, so since me and my parents hadn't really said whether I would go to school or not I just said I would leave the decision up to them if I should go or not, but since I felt so bad my parents let me stay home, so yeah that's why I'm posting this in the morning during school hours, cause I'm home sick. Ugh I hate being sick, but hopefully ill be better tomorrow, but everyone is pretty much sure we will be having a snow day tomorrow so I may not be a school a whole lot this week.
     So that's the story of my weekend, not a very fun weekend, huh? Oh well. Well I hope you all had a fun weekend!

God Bless

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