This takes place when I am working at a summer camp. We have a group of kids that range from first to fifth grade. We have a field trip the next day, and I am calculating how many sack lunches we need the cafeteria ladies to make for us. A coworker offers to drop the paperwork off because it’s on her way as she’s leaving for her break.

Coworker: “Why did you put down forty-five sack lunches? Isn’t that too many?”

Me: “[Other Coworker] and I usually add a few more just in case. Someone might forget to bring their lunch from home, or one of the older kids might want seconds. Helps the other chaperones or teachers, too, in case they forget one as well. Or if we get a last-minute drop off. All the lunches usually always get finished off, so nothing goes to waste.”

She doesn’t say anything and walks away.

Based on how my schedule is set, I clock in for work right as we are loading the bus for the field trip, so the other coworkers were supposed to make sure we have everything for the field trip. It is now lunchtime, and we are handing out lunches. I have eight kids still in line for a sack lunch and realize that we are out.

Me: “That’s weird. We should still have twenty more lunch sacks. [Coworker]? Is there another box of lunches on the bus?”

Coworker: “Huh? Oh no, that was all that I requested.”

Me: “All that you requested? What about the sheet that I filled out that said forty-five lunches?”

Coworker: “Oh! I thought that was way too many to ask the cafeteria ladies to make, so I changed it to twenty-five lunches before turning it in.”

I stare at her for a moment.

Me: “…but we have thirty-three kids that need a sack lunch.”

Coworker: “I figured that more would bring their own lunch, or not all the kids would be that hungry. It’s not that big of a deal!”

We ended up having to use the summer camps’ credit card to buy extra lunches for the kids who were left, and of course, there were no seconds for our older kids, who were still hungry.

Ironically, because we serve the kids before the adults, [Coworker] also didn’t get a sack lunch, but she didn’t seem to agree with “it’s not that big of a deal” when it was her missing out on a sack lunch. Our director was not happy with [Coworker] when she found out that’s why we had to use the credit card to buy more lunches. We never let that [Coworker] drop off the sack lunch request form again, either.

This is a story from the 1990s, when I was working as a Councilor in Training (CIT) for a summer camp. I was sixteen, and this was my first time working with kids whom I didn’t babysit.

We had a problem kid, whom I’ll call Maddie. Maddie was one of those kids who thought the rules didn’t apply to her and had a very bad habit of jumping on people’s backs from behind and saying “Surprise!” in a very excited tone. I was only one of two CITs for a camp of thirty-odd junior kids, and it was my first year, so I was struggling to establish boundaries.

The first time Maddie jumped on my back, I said:

Me: “Hey! That’s dangerous! If you jump me by surprise, I could fall and hurt you!”

Maddie would just laugh and run off.

About a week after camp started, we were at the beach for the 4th of July fireworks. I’m nervously hanging out with my kids, because it’s dark and the beach is crowded. Suddenly, Maddie jumped on my back, and I made a split-second call. I knew how to stage-fall from theater, and I figured that the girl could handle me falling on her onto sand as opposed to a wooden floor. 

So, I collapsed backwards bonelessly, landing on her. She screamed. I immediately got up, checked to make sure she was fine (she was), and then I explained:

Me: “Jumping on people is not okay.”

She never did it again.

Many moons ago, I used to help run a sports scheme for my local municipal area in my country during the school holidays. Kids aged five to twelve could come along, their parents would pay a heavily subsidised small nominal fee, and get a cool four-hour sports session of soccer, basketball, tennis, etc. It ran very successfully and was really popular.

Around halftime, there would be a break to get a drink and a snack. There was a little 7-Eleven-style store just around the corner from the field/grass where we ran the scheme, so kids could get refreshments if they had money. We tended to walk everyone down there as there was a nice seating area outside the shop.

The trouble was, the kids started buying the most sugary snacks, candy, and drinks they could, and ended up hyper for the next hour, then had a sugar crash and were irritable little horrors for the final half hour. Magically, they’d all be fine about pick-up time.

To get around this, I banned the kids from buying anything sugary, and only savory snacks or fruit with water could be purchased. This lasted two days before the entitled parents of these little darlings complained to my boss that I wasn’t letting their kids buy whatever the h*** they wanted.

I was told by my boss to just let them buy whatever they wanted again, because apparently, “you’re not their dentist, it doesn’t matter what they buy!”

Fine, you wanna play rough, let’s do this.

From then on, we didn’t go to the shop at half-time, we went forty-five minutes before the end. They had just enough time to get super annoying and hyper before it was home time, then their parents had to deal with their sugary carnage at home. I kept it that way till the end of the summer and felt so much delight at these entitled a**holes having to deal with their own kids being awful, day after day.

The next summer, nobody complained when I went back to regulating their purchases at snack time. Win-win!

Volunteering at a summer camp, I am helping put together “pillow treats”: little candies with a nice note on them for the campers to find on their pillows before bed. As I’m adding the notes to the candies, I realize we are going to run out of candy well before we run out of notes. I go to the volunteer in charge of the pillow treats.

Me: “Hey, are there any more candies for the pillow treats?”

Volunteer: “No, I bought two packs of sixty and printed a hundred and twenty notes, so that should be enough.”

Me: “Well, we’re out of candies and we’ve got about twenty notes left.”

Volunteer: “What?! I know I ordered enough!”

We dig through the trash and pull out the bags that the candies came in. She points to a big circle with numbers in it printed on the front of the bag.

Volunteer: “See?! Sixty!”

Me: “…calories per serving.”

She stares at the bag blankly for a second before closing her eyes and laughing at herself in chagrin. I manage to locate the actual number of candies in the bag (fifty, located on the nutritional info panel), and we are able to supplement with a different kind of candy to finish the pillow treats.

My eight-year-old daughter went to a church-sponsored day camp with a friend of hers. She came home giggling.

Daughter: “Mom, at the snack table, they had a bowl of apples and a bowl of cookies. There was a sign on the apples saying, “Take only one. God is watching.” But the sign on the cookies said, “Go for it. God’s watching the apples!””