The Fourth R

When I was in college, the band put on an elaborate city-wide scavenger hunt once a year. I only did it once my junior year. Through a variety of circumstances I ended up on a team with several younger trombones and we hurtled around Atlanta in an old minivan finding and deciphering clues.

Since it was the band, there were shenanigans. The instructions said to bring, among other things, water guns and towels. One of the trombones I was with brought his Super Soaker, and once when we encountered another team at a clue site he shot it at their car and almost got them. We definitely weren't near first place but we were progressing decently until the evening when things started getting weird. We reached a clue site where the clue for our team was defaced. We called in to the command center and the person on the phone said they were calling us cheaters and jerks who didn't deserve to go further in the competition. Because the guy shot a Super Soaker! It was confusing that they were so mad when they said to bring water guns, and since he didn't get anybody wet (much). They claimed he almost got a laptop inside the car wet. But still that didn't have anything to do with us cheating at the clues. In any case we ended up stopping a clue later or so.

But the disturbing part was afterward. The competition had a website that listed the teams, and after the competition, the winners. A few days after the competition I noticed on the website that they had posted on the website that our team were disqualified for being cheaters and jerks! I forget the exact phrasing they used, but something along those lines. Our entire team's real names listed with defamatory comments. You found the website when you searched for our real names.

I was MAD. One guy shoots a Super Soaker and our whole team gets vilified on the Internet? Whiny, over-share blog aside, I'm very conscious of my "internet presence" and don't want false, negative comments about me online. So I tracked down the event organizers and called.

The thing was, each year the scavenger hunt is organized by the previous year's winners. And alumni can play, so with their advanced age and additional resources they tend to win. The organizers that year was a group in their 30s who had long since graduated and supposedly moved on.

So I, a 20-year-old college student, called and argued with the lead organizer guy, a married engineer in his mid-30s about why it was inappropriate for his team to defame innocent parties for a stupid water gun. He was so irrational and so unreasonable (though they did finally take it down), I had this thought over and over: "I shouldn't have to be the adult in this situation."

I've been feeling like that lately. I'm an adult. And a defining characteristic of being an adult is being reliable.

Being reliable is returning emails and phone calls promptly.
Being reliable is showing up prepared and on one time.
Being reliable is keeping plans and not changing them unnecessarily.
Being reliable is doing your job.

I'm really tired of being reliable when very few other people are.

I'm tired of being the adult.