More Stories From Camp

Alarm Clocks

At camp, Sachi and I were LITs (Leaders in Traning). There were three girls and one boy of the LITs, and we had a male and a female counselor. The first time our female counselor had her day off, she set her alarm clock for us and left us to go to bed and get up on our own. However, somehow we had actually set two alarm clocks without realizing. So the first one goes off and we all wake up. Melanie climbs out of bed and turns it off. Then we all started changing in our sleeping bags, when suddenly, another alarm clock starts ringing. AHHHHH! We were all changing and none of us wanted to go turn it off. Eventually, Melanie got up and turned it off.

So the next week, our counselor had another day off. "We've got to set the alarm clock," someone noted, but no one actually did it. When we were about to go to sleep, Sachi asked, "Did anyone set the alarm clock?" None of us noticed her say that, so we didn't respond and she assumed it was set. We all went to sleep. Suddenly I wake up to the sound of the 9 and 10 year olds (whose living area the LITs share) getting ready to go down to breakfast. I look at my watch: 7:30! We were supposed to be up by 7:15. Normally they wouldn't be going to breakfast until later, but today it was this unit's duty to do K.P. (setting up the dining hall for meals), meaning we were supposed to go early. So anyway, I woke the other LIT girls and we quickly got ready, condensing about 15 minutes of preperation into about 7. We rushed down to the dining hall in time to help KP, and our counselors never knew about our little problem with the alarm clock.

Oops...

One of our favorite things to complain about was how the LITs had the job of cleaning the ort buckets after every meal. Ort is the remaining food people leave on their plates, and at camp we all dump our ort into a bucket and weigh it to see how little we can get. So every meal, we have to take the emptied ort buckets to a spot between the dining hall and the mini bathroom where there's a hose. We turn on the water, the pick up the end of the hose and squeaze the "trigger" (only word I can think of to describe it) and water shoots at high speed into the bucket, washing to remaining bits of food off. Then we have to throw the water, a difficult and amusing task that unfortunately is not the topic of this story. So one day, I had to go to the bathroom durring lunch. I walk over to the bathroom thingy next to the dining hall, to find that the space between it and the dining hall is flooded with a huge puddle! What is that! I wonder. Suddenly, a thought occurs to me and I check the hose. It wasn't spraying water, but it was steadily dripping. Since the water doesn't come out unless you push the trigger, I had forgotten to turn off the water. However, although it doesn't spray water without pulling the trigger, it drips. The dripping had accumulated enough to become nothing less than a giant puddle!

A few minutes later, I heard one of our counselors walk by and say to himself, "Where did that giant puddle come from?!"

-Rebecca

P.S. After that occasion, sometimes that same spot was flooded from the rain. Every time I walked by a rain-induced puddle I would get scared and think, "Did I remember to turn off the hose?"