Ping Pong Dumb Ass

Reading bamf's post about the camper that got kicked out of camp for drinking beer reminded me of something that happened to me during one of the plaque competitions. Not because it had to do with beer or getting kicked out, but because he mentioned being a child of senior staff. See my Dad was a director of one of the units. A lot of people thought that if you were a child of someone on staff you got special privileges. Some kids, who in this post shall remain nameless, did receive a little bump from their respective parents from time to time. It was different for me and my brother.

We were expected to help counselors. If there was work to do we were involved (from before work week). If I was caught doing something against the rules (which was a LOT) I got double the punishment. I am lucky that I was never kicked out. Because you know, if the rest of the senior staff had caught me or my bro doing anything like a banishable offense, we would have been gone in seconds. There were some perks though. The main one for me was that I got to go to camp for free. We were not wealthy enough for me or my brother to go to camp unless my parents worked there so that was ok.

A select few counselors used to treat me a little differently, though. They were not keen enough to figure out that I wasn't getting any special treatment. One of these people was named Matt. He was the counselor that threw something like salt or hot sauce in someone's eyes in tent 1 while they were sleeping. Actually, I think it was another counselor. Maybe some of you remember this winner. Anyway, this guy would give me crap all the time about plaque. He would whisper "it's fixed" every time I would walk by him and he was with someone who could hear. This happen to be the summer that my plaque team was in last place and we had a chance to win something during one of the multiple events. I think it was tennis, ping pong and there was a staring contest or some type of arm wrestling and some other things going on.

So, I elected to play ping pong because I like ping pong and no one else wanted to do it. I won the first match and in the second match, Matt the counselor was the "referee". Right from the first serve, Matt started to taunt me. He would say stuff like "your father can't fix this" and "you suck" and he mentioned a girl that had dumped me the week before. The guy she dumped me for was standing there watching, too. Matt also would say "miss it" every single time I would hit the ball. It was really humiliating for a counselor to do that to me. It was like being back in my neighborhood, hehe.

So, he kept talking to me the entire match, over and over. It was so bad that the kid that I was playing actually told him to stop and he was winning. Little did he know, my Dad actually took me aside at the beginning of the session and told me that he had to let my team be crappy because some of the counselors had complained that he was trying to stack it. I understood but my Dad is one of the fairest people I know and I could see that he was hurt by the whole thing because he would never try to set up his son's team. It just went against his morals.

In the end, I lost the match and Matt, the ping pong dumb ass won that round. He is one of those people that never should have been a counselor. He was so mean for some reason and so stupid that he could have caused a lessor kid some serious damage. But I fought back, in my own way, on the field. The next session, I was plaque captain and my team won (even with the disadvantage that my Dad was forced to work in). So, Matt B., you jerk, I hope you had a good time picking on a 14 year old kid when you were like 20, too bad that kid didn't flinch.

Ah. I'm glad I got that out.