**The power's still out at work (see last post) but I found a draft post I wrote in November that I never published. Enjoy!**
I got an email today from the director of a local science and engineering fair. It reminded me of a funny (yet rather pathetic) experience I had a year or two ago.
My sister had a "friend" who'd met me one day a couple years ago. About a month after I'd met said "friend," my sister said to me over a family dinner that her "friend" wanted to set me up with someone. I was quite nervous about the situation as I'd only met this "friend" one time but my sister explained that they'd both talked and thought that maybe this would be a good setup as, apparently, the guy they wanted to set me up with was an engineer/math guy of some sort (aka... geek), so we might be good together. (I'm ok with geeks, mostly.) At the time I was desperate for a date, as you'll see as you keep reading. I agreed to be set up and then a month or more went by and I figured the subject had been dropped. (Inside I was screaming, "Yay!" Cuz we all know how much we LOVE blind dates!) Once again, though, the subject came up and my sister and her "friend" had thought of a great way for me and this guy to meet that wouldn't be as akward as an official date.
Just to make this clear right now, I would've rather gone on a date!
Anyways, their grand idea was that I would volunteer to be a judge and this science and engineering fair that this guy was partly organizing. I don't know why but something inside me (the spontanious, yet sometimes un-thinking side) prompted me to go for it. Plus, I thought I'd heard about something at work where I could get paid for the day if I was doing engineering-type volunteer work. That turned out to be a false rumor but I'd already agreed to help so I went with it.
There are 2 reasons I've decided I will never, ever again be a judge at any kind of competition:
1) I'm not an unbiased judge. Example: Most of the judging I did at the science fair was on projects done by kids who were in elementary school. I'm too easily swayed (for good or bad) by cute little girls with bows in their hair, or little guys dressed up in tuxedos, or little elementary school snobs with glasses who are using words so big I don't even know what they mean. I tried really, really hard to remain impartial but it was so hard not to tell some of them that it looked like their parent did their project for them or that they were going to have to learn some social skills because nobody likes a fake or a know-it-all.
2) I went to 2 hours of "Judge Training," spent 8 hours talking to kids and mingling with the other "geeks" who'd volunteered to judge out of the goodness of their own hearts, and the stupid boy never even once came to talk to me. I invested 10 hours of my own free time in which I would've rather been doing ANYTHING else and he could even put forth the effort to walk across a hallway and introduce himself. Oh, he KNEW it was me, and I KNEW it was him, but there was never any talking. So anyways, the real second reason is cuz I just have bad memories of when I was a desperate dater.
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