November 16, 2005
Holiday Shopping
So I had a nice trip down memory lane today when I saw a new poster at work.
Vendor Day.
From what I could gleen from the poster, it looked like they bring in outside vendors who purvey their arts, crafts, Mary Kay products and other crap so we can get our Holiday Shopping down without having to leave the comforts of our secured office. What a craptastic idea!
This immediately made me remember a memory from Morgan Elementary School I had long since forgotten. The Santa's Helper's gift shop. For a good 6 years of my life my parents received the crappiest of crap gifts made in some sweatshop overseas for the sole purpose of holding paper in place or keeping pens organized or sorting blue water while proudly proclaiming that they were the number 1 mom or dad in the world. I'm surprised that even at that young age, the irony of everybody buying number one parent paraphanelia went over my head. And then I got annoyed realizing that the school district was endorsing and supporting kids spending their parents hard earned cash on this crap because some vendor wanted to make some easy cash.
And then this also brought back to memory those wonderful fundraisers that were a total scam. Where some poor shmuck would come in and try and convince a bunch of middle school kids to go door to door to sell overpriced crap so that they could win valuable prizes like a football telephone or an FM radio without a proper FM dial. Remember those radios where apparently you were supposed to be able to calculate the proper angle between 89Mhz and 98Mhz so you could tune into 91.5?
And then this brought me to my memory of my great Sociology teacher who despite being quite a below average teacher had the incredible testicular fortitude to walk around the halls with zebra pants and a mullet way past when people thought those fashion disasters may have been popular. Every morning during morning announcements he would set up shop for the first 15 minutes of class so that the fat kids who didn't eat enough at home could buy his Wholesale club candy and juice at extortionist prices. Of course the money wasn't going to some sort of charity, but instead towards some sort of twisted fund that supported his addiction to having his hair have that wet look 24 hours a day on any given day.
Posted by Bryant at November 16, 2005 03:40 PM
Comments
If memory serves me correct, one year the Santa Helper folks actually brought in a guy in Santa getup to lure in more kids. I'm pretty sure this resulted in a classmate being asked by said Santa what he wanted for Christmas, to which my fellow 2nd grader replied 'nothing you ass, I'm Jewish.'
One result of the incentivized fundraising drives you mention which still amuses me is the fate of the prizes when the kids don't make it to a sufficiently high enough level to get the prize they really wanted. A good 10-20% of the glasses in use at my parent's home proudly display 'Class of 1997' or some other year with no relevance to any member of my family. How were these glasses acquired you may ask? My dad ran yearly fundraisers of the kind described above - the glasses are abandoned fundraiser prizes from the kids who didn't quite make it to the crap radio level.
Posted by: MP at November 18, 2005 04:46 PM
I still have fond memories of the Wacky Wheel: "The fun never ends, because it never begins"
Posted by: Noah at November 21, 2005 02:46 AM