So, when the powers that be at my small high school, decided to sell candy bars as a way to raise money, I was disinterested. And said so. Of course, no one gave any consideration whatsoever to anything I had to say.
The day the candy bars arrived, I came back from lunch to find four boxes of them at my desk. I said something about declining to participate and was told that wasn’t an option. Everyone had to take at least four boxes to sell. With a twenty-five per box count, that meant I was supposed to sell one hundred candy bars! Not a likely scenario.
I asked what we should do if we didn’t sell them all and was told to bring back any unsold candy at the end of the fundraiser. That was all I needed to hear!
The candy sat at my house for two weeks and I didn’t sell a single one. When the fundraiser was over, I returned all of them - minus the four I’d eaten! Actually, my mother had sold four or five of them, so I suppose I should say I returned most of them. At any rate, the folks at my school were not impressed.
They shouldn’t have been surprised. This wasn’t the first time I’d demonstrated I wasn’t the fundraising type. They’d tried to get me to sell a number of things - unsuccessfully. And still they didn’t learn.
A few months later, someone at the school came up with the idea of having a jogathon - a lot like a walkathon, only faster. This I could do, I thought. I did like running.
The way it worked was, instead of having a set distance; we would run around the track for three hours. Our sponsors would pay according to the number of laps completed in that time. Apparently, this new idea of a fundraiser had been designed with me in mind. Everyone knew I liked to run and despite being considerably shorter than most, I was fast and had a lot of endurance. I was then, expected to win. They even offered incentives - first through third place prizes for the most laps completed and thus, the most money raised. Bribery. That’s what I called it.
I did win - in a way - tallying up one and a half times the number of laps as the next closest runner. Everyone was excited and making a big deal out of the fact, I’d actually gotten involved. That is, until they looked at my sponsor sheet, which I had dutifully turned in as required. It was completely blank.
They shook their heads and stared at me. I’d run three hours for nothing. “You didn’t get any sponsors?” one of the teachers finally asked.
“Uh, yeah, I sort of forgot about that,” I said. “But I did participate by jogging. And,” I reminded them, “I did have the most laps.”
No, I didn’t win any prizes.