Needle, Meet Haystack

Over the past few months on NSS, I’ve talked about my butt, hearing problems, radioactivity, racism against bees, and even traffic school instructors.  But this week, it’s a little different.  Because this week, you find out about one of the worst things I ever did.

So if you love funny-sounding German feelings, get ready for a bit of daily schadenfreude.

You see, I’m a huge fan of the grand gesture: helping out or giving people something so grandiose and over-the-top that it’s talked about for a while afterwards.  The feeling that I contributed to a person’s life and happiness is a big thing for me, so I try to do it whenever possible.  Sometimes, I even try to do one of those for an entire group.

It was back in my Senior year of high school at the end of the first semester.  I was in the International Baccalaureate program with about four dozen other students, and we had become a close-knit group, sharing almost all of our classes with each other for the past three and a half years.  Since everyone was so stressed over finals, I decided to do something nice: write holiday cards for every one of them.

So I grabbed the IB student directory and went down the list, finding nice things to say to every one of the other students (even the ones I didn’t like or get along with), and by the end of it all, I had an impressive stack of cards to hand out.  So when the big day came, I was feeling very proud of myself.  Not only was I studied up and ready for the final, but I had something that would help to cheer up everyone that I had become close to over my high school career.

Turns out I was wrong about that.

The thing about the IB program is that it’s kinda like the Mob: there’s only one way out.  Except that it’s not in a pine box or at the bottom of the Hudson wearing cement shoes, but by dropping out of the program.  What had started as an IB class of around 250 students in my Freshman year was whittled down to less than 50.  So if you were using the directory (like I was), you would only really need to take names off of the list to figure out who was still in the program.  And with only one IB school per district, the numbers stayed small.  It’s not like anyone could ever transfer in to the program.  Well, not unless they transferred from another school in another district that had the IB program and did it at a time after the directory was published.

I think we can all see where this is headed.

So I handed out all of the cards to each and every person…except for one.

I didn’t realize this until she came up to me after the test and asked why I didn’t give her her card when I gave them to the rest of the class.  And honestly, I had become so completely wrapped up in the event of writing the cards and getting everything just right that I hadn’t made her one.

I’d had enough leftovers to give a card to every teacher, advisor and faculty member involved with the program that I’d had direct contact with that year.  Hell, I had enough to give myself one.

So I lied and said I’d left hers at home, and would bring it the next day.

I didn’t.  In fact, I forgot to ever bring her a card.  And after graduation, I never saw or heard from her again.

So now, whenever I plan out any sort of grand gesture, I take a step back and make sure I’ve covered all of my bases.  Because no matter how good it feels to do something nice for a bunch of people, it always feels worse when there’s someone you forgot.