Slide the City

Several months ago, Jaime told me that her friend Erin had invited her and our friend Whitney to work with her over the summer at an event called Slide the City. They'd fly into various cities on a Friday, run a giant city-sized slip 'n' slide event on Saturday, and fly out Sunday morning. All expenses paid and a cool $750 on top of that. I said, "Get me in on that." 

Unfortunately, Erin had already filled her crew spots, but there was one weekend in June that Jaime couldn't go so I got to fill in for her. I was super pumped! The event was in Hampton, Virginia - not far from Virginia Beach. I flew into the Norfolk, Virginia airport and saw immediately that they were into love, so I figured this was going to be a good weekend.

I was already out of school for the summer, so I had Erin get me an early flight so I had some time Friday evening to do some exploring in the area before the event on Saturday. I thought I'd maybe have enough time to go to the beach, but traffic was crazy. By the time I got in, I had just enough time to go for a nice run through the historic part of Hampton, which was beautiful! Running is a great vehicle for exploring new areas. 

I was feeling pretty good about the weekend, then over dinner Erin told us that her experience at her previous event had been terrible and stressful. And then she described what we were going to be doing. And then I thought about quitting.

We started work Saturday morning at 4 AM. We worked pretty much nonstop until 12 AM. That's a 20-hour work day, folks, and it was no joke. We set up the slide, which was like 600 feet long or something and set up all the tents - registration, merchandise, etc. Once they got the water running, though, they realized there was something wrong with the pH levels or something, so the Board of Health or someone (listen, I was in charge of registration and merchandise so I wasn't really privy to a lot of the water details, ok?) wouldn't let them open the slide until it was fixed, which was like impossible....or something. What I do know is that we opened two hours late, which led to a lot of really upset people. To their credit, most people were pretty reasonable, but it was still a pretty intense situation. To add to the madness, it was crazy hot so people were passing out and freaking out because they didn't bring water. So the fire department came and started spraying water everywhere. That's great for hot people, but not great for computers and papers. They chose to set up their spraying station right next to our registration tent, effectively flooding everything, only furthering the chaos. It was nuts. But it finally ended. And we finally cleaned everything up. The last several hours were torturous and I could barely move my body - all of my joints were screaming and my patience for know-it-all volunteers was wearing thin. But then I got back to my hotel room and as I was taking a shower, I thought to myself, "Oh that wasn't too bad. I could do that again." I seriously don't know what's wrong with me.

Truth be told, we really did have fun. Whitney and I were in charge of registration and merchandise and neither of us had any idea what we were doing so we had a great time figuring that out together. The hired workers and volunteers we were in charge of were such hard workers and so much fun. I was consistently impressed with the positive attitudes they had in a stressful situation. It was hard to say goodbye to them after their shift, knowing we'd probably never see them again and wondering how we'd become so fond of them in just ten hours. Working through adversity really brings people together, you know?

After twenty hours of work in ninety-degree heat, I'm not sure why not one of almost three thousand people at the event hit on me. One of the great mysteries of our time.