Surviving the Blue Gatorade Tsunami

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By Jack Edwards

My wife recently informed me that I’d volunteered to help out at a fundraiser. This has happened before. So far, I had narrowly survived these bouts of my wife’s generosity of my time. In this case, they needed parents to staff the concession stand at our daughter’s school during a football game. Some vague percentage of the profit would benefit some vague aspect of her cross country team – perhaps paying off the coach’s gambling debt. (Official Lawsuit Avoidance Notice: My last comment is a joke. I don’t know if the coach even plays Go Fish. The fact that he was observed sitting at the high stakes Baccarat Table at Caesars last summer proves nothing.)

It turned out that my wife had volunteered both of us. She signed us up the same night as friends of ours, who for the purposes of this column I will refer to as “Lisa” and “Dennis” because their names happen to be Lisa and Dennis.

I decided to put on a happy face. If my wife was willing to devote her time to the cause, heck, the least I could do is stand shoulder to shoulder with her. My respect for her dedication to the cause continued to grow right up to the point she disappeared. Yes, the day before the event, she hopped on a plane and took off. (Some lame excuse about needing to attend a board meeting of an organization that helps needy children in foreign countries.)

I decided to do the only thing I could. I started practicing my cough. When you call in sick you have to slip in at least one authentic sounding cough, two if it’s a really important event. This was a one cough event. Unfortunately, my wife was one step ahead of me. She had somehow developed an inkling that I might skip out. This was perhaps due to my negligently telling her that I was planning to skip out. She contacted Lisa, and they jumped into action like tag team professional wrestlers, only instead of climbing up on the ropes with folding chairs and flying off to body slam me, they used text messages.

Defeated, I showed up. To my surprise, the time flew. My shift started at 7:30, and before I knew it, I looked at my watch and it was already 7:35.

I was relieved to find that Dennis was not given a candy-related assignment. I felt very strongly that his selling candy would be a direct conflict of interest. You see, Dennis is a dentist – a Pediatric Dentist. I would have had to have intervened.

My assignment was to stand behind the guy taking orders at the window, and when someone ordered a drink, to retrieve it. Only I didn’t need to listen to every drink order, because every drink order was the same. We had every soft drink available, but the only drink anyone ever ordered was blue Gatorade. I don’t drink Gatorade, but if I ever do, I’m going to drink the blue flavor. They must put crack cocaine in it or something. We sold gallons of it. By then end of the first quarter of the football game, we had to call the Gatorade hotline for emergency reserves. Three forklifts worked in unison offloading pallets of blue Gatorade though the back of the concession stand. We were ceremonially placing the bottles in the cooler and then retrieving them before their temperature had dropped a degree. We were serving lukewarm blue Gatorade. And the masses were guzzling it down like camels.

So, once again, I survived my wife’s generosity. But I sense that wherever she is right now, I may be volunteering for something even more challenging. So I’m doing the only thing I can. I practicing the perfect cough.

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