Types of people

There are repeated motifs of all sorts in life. Some are common but repeat subtly; others might take years to recur, but could be near identical to the previous iteration. It is bizarre but strangely common sense that these thing happen again and again. History does repeat as human nature duly ensures.

About ten years ago a few months prior to a birthday, I had an idea that kept me awake: my party could be a scavenger hunt. Throughout the night I thought of several devious clues; I thought of the venue, tahaki reserve below Mt. Eden; and then I started to prepare. It was hard work! Each idea needed a lot of time and sweat to bring to reality, even a "simple idea", to take a photo from a particular angle and get participants to go to that location to take their next clue, needed an old school camera, photo development and putting photos in envelopes. Then the envelopes just had to be fastened to a site the morning of the event and a few prayers that neither the elements nor random curious people would take them away. It really was the realization of my kind of event. I'd enjoy participating, and my mind would have been perfect to solve each of the riddles. You can imagine the problems that arise from this though. Most people are not like me. And clues conceived in the wee hours of the morning are hardly like to be solvable.

And that's how it played. I'd got people into teams, had everyone do face painting and then sent them on Mission Impossible. I just sat around while others did it, a kind of a weird way to spend a birthday. The sitting was eventually interrupted by confused cellphone calls and after an hour or two I called off the hunt. My party guests were good natured about it but I always get a bit embarrassed thinking about it. My big unreasonable dream realized to mystify and tire my friends.

And so it too was another person's big dream in our company. She conceived of an awesome event before the company awards night, an amazing race event where all teachers, after a tiring days' work, would run around the city solving clues and becoming better teammates in 30 degree evening heat. Yeah, on paper it looks bad and it's truly a triumph of the human spirit that half of teams made it through, one team spent three hours out doing it before completing it and having dinner at 10pm... Most, I assume, will only look back on it happily with the distance of hindsight. I dodged this bullet by virtue of my dodgy knee. I'd helped out as a course marshall in a trial run (where the trial team amusingly went there own ways in frustration after a disagreement over a clue), then served as a phone-a-friend helpline.