I helped my community yesterday.

My workplace asked me to participate in a United Way event at a local elementary school. The theme was "Survivor" and it meant our team would be competing against teams from other companies in tests of smarts and athletics. Unfortunately, it was more smarts than athletics, but that was okay. It was like 120 degrees and humid outside, so smarts were fine. We were all paired up with a child from the elementary school where the event would be held.

Before I begin, a little bit about the school first. It's located in the northwest corner of Jacksonville. Anyone that knows anything about the northwest corner of Jacksonville knows that you don't willingly go there. Ever. All you'll find are pawn shops, gun shops and the occasional Hardee's. Along with lots and lots of low-income housing and industrial districts. It's not the nice part of town, by any stretch. Yet here in this area of town is a beautiful little elementary school. It's an "A" school on Florida's odd grading scale thing they do. It has good kids, which is even cooler, considering the backgrounds and neighborhoods they come from are not particularly conducive to good kid behavior.

Our group had six kids, three boys and three girls. This worked out well, since we had six men and six women from our company. The kids were happy to be paired up with us, since our group's oldest member was in his early-30's. Every other team was full of 40-50 year olds, so they felt a little better when we actually knew some of the TV shows and music they were talking about. Of course, we adults lamented the fact that we all knew the words to Technotronic's "Pump Up The Jam" which was released three or four years before any of these kids were born (it was one of the "Jock Jams" type songs they were playing on the PA during lunch). Why our brains have the capacity to remember the words to that song and not a thousand other much better songs is beyond me. The kids also loved our team because of Patrick. Patrick is awesome. He has gold teeth (some diamond-studded), braided Allen Iverson-type hair and never took his sunglasses off the entire time we were there, indoors or not. The kids could not get enough of him. While the other teams were making up cheers (one of the required activities) we were making up dumb nicknames for all the other teams. It was great. Let it be said that I never had any school spirit... And still don't, obviously.

We went outside to start our events. The first involved us picking ten letters and then using those letters to make as many words as possible. Ten of us wore letters, the other two were supposed to arrange us however we needed to be to form words. Needless to say, it didn't work out that way. It pretty much became everyone shouting words and running around in circles with Patrick screaming loudest, unintentionally trying to get us to misspell everything. We came in 4th out of eight teams. That wasn't gonna cut it.

The next event was a race, where we were supposed to use two boards with four bungee cords on them with a team of four using the boards like skis to move forward. That looked way too hard and required way too much coordination, so we decided to lay the first board straight, walked across it and then just tossed the one in the back to the front, kind of doing the boards leapfrog style. We beat every other team by at least a minute, some almost five minutes. Smarter, faster. Our kids liked it because it gave them more time to talk trash at the other teams who were struggling big time. Needless to say, we had to reign them in a bit. Even if they were showing some competitive spirit there.

After that was a "brainy" event. It was a list of 20 word puzzles. You know, the kind where they have something like "you/just/me" and it means "just between you and me" or "GESG" means "scrambled eggs." I kind of took over on this event, I've gotta admit. I tried to give the kids a chance to get some right, but they just weren't getting anywhere with it. Patrick was no help, shockingly. Everybody wanted to win and something had to be done. I got down to it and rattled off twelve of them in a row, kind of taking everyone by surprise. The kids must think I'm an athletic, non-paralyzed, non robot-voiced Stephen Hawking now. If they knew who Stephen Hawking was, that is. We ended up with 15 out of 20, because some of them were pretty dumb. "HO" was "half-hour." We were too busy snickering at "ho" being on there. Sorry. I also missed "PAS" meaning "incomplete pass." I'll be ready for next time, though. We ended up tied for first in that event. Rock.

The next event involved putting together a giant puzzle, with around 30 pieces. The pieces were about two feet wide or so, and we had 5 minutes to keep putting it together as many times as we could. Whoever had the fastest single time after 5 minutes was the winner. We put it together in about 65 seconds the first time. We eventually got our time down to 45 seconds, which was pretty awesome because we heard one team cheering at about the four minute mark after finally getting it put together for their first time. Clearly, we were dealing with amateurs. 45 seconds earned us 1st place in yet another event.

The final event involved the cheers we came up with earlier (or hadn't bothered to do, as was our case). We had to go give our team chant in front of three judges. We really hoped our victories in 3 of the previous 4 events would be enough to carry us to the title, because we were pretty much screwed in this one, especially compared to the other, much more enthusiastic and much dorkier teams. What we ended up with involved the three boys (who had all seen Drumline way, way too many times) doing a dance routine and the rest of us in the back clapping and then doing some chant about the east, south, north, west and our team being the best or something. We were not the best at that event, sorry to say. School spirit was again the loser on this day. We came in 7th.

Was it enough? What do you think? Would I have written a post this long if not? After the coordinator told us how, "everybody was a winner," and how it was great that we, "were all such good sports," (despite my team being horrible sports, to be bluntly honest -- I mean, the only chant we were good at was when we told the other team to "FALL!" during the event with the boards) our team was awarded first place. One of the dorky teams we had made fun of earlier even made a chant up for us. Needless to say, it was better than our chant. The kids were absolutely thrilled at winning, which made all of the, "You better not touch that puzzle piece or I WILL hurt you, Deronte..."s worth it. Actually, no, I never said that. Somebody else did. Honest. We all gave the kids bags full of goodies like bobbleheads and t-shirts and other stuff, which was loads of fun. The kids thanked us for being the cool team and winning, which really did feel good.

If your office ever asks you to do something like this, you should consider it. It certainly beat a Friday afternoon in the office stuck in a cubicle staring at a computer screen. Besides, I got a cool medal that looks like this:



Pretty cool, even if Patrick said it needed more "bling." I disagreed, its blatant copyright infringement seemed to do the job just fine. Anyway, you guys deserve at least one picture for reading this far and receiving so few jokes for it.