Fiascos, the best ones, are when you're trying to do something amazing, stretching beyond what your normal expectations are and then falling on your face in a spectacular way. The best moments, for a true fiasco, are when you someone starts to reach beyond their bounds, improving themselves, making them becoming something better than what they are by their own nature, and then falling back to their normal nature.
There's a lot of them, and in any good life, you're going to have a dozen and a half of them on a yearly basis, but some times you've got better ones than others. With that said, I've got options for which fiasco we're going to tackle, let's go for a high school moment that everyone tried to look past and pad, but in reality it was a full fledged fiasco.
We all know that I'm a big fat nerd, and as part of that, I was part of my high school's science olympiad team.
Yup, I'm a big ol' nerd. For those that don't know what this is it's a series of competitions that a school puts together a team on, and you compete with other schools for the title. The competitions are things like making a bridge from balsa wood that needed to hold a certain weight, or making a musical instrument that must be able to play a specific range, or just straight up physics/chemistry/astronomy, or whatever else quiz that you'd take.
There's a slightly less known fact, that in some states and areas, this thing is competitive. There is even a national competitions with 50 teams coming together and ranking against each other, to try to see who is the biggest nerd of the nerds.
Here are the results for the first year -
Here are the results for the second year -
For either one, you're looking for Las Vegas High School, and you'll notice that our scores were a fiasco each year that we went to nationals.
The problem with Science Olympiad nationals, was that there was no reason that we should have been there. In the state of Nevada, there was no competition. There was no competition in our school district, there was no competition in our area, and the only place that we had to deal with any sort of competition was when we did a state wide competition that pulled from the entire state, about four other teams. Even on the worst case scenario when dealing with things on state, we would get fourth place in an event. The thing was that a few people on the team that really knew what they were doing and had specialties in their areas were carrying the team. Those two or three people were the reasons we were going to nationals, and the rest of us just grabbed on to their coat tails, claimed that we were studying and preparing for what was ahead of us, and got beat like a read headed step child when we finally got there.
I'd like to think that I was one of the people that carried, and I knew what I was talking about (I mean, I got decent scores on what I was doing, at least I didn't get dead last like some of my other cohorts) but we were all in it together, so we all were part of the fiasco.
The problem with everything, wasn't just that we thought that we were hot stuff because we were state champions, but because for some reason that I still don't understand, we didn't think about traveling to nationals. We thought that we'd bring the same things, pack the same way, and do exactly what we did for state (which was just a small road trip away) for the airplane trip across the country to a place we had never been before. This might not seem like much, but you have to realize that some of these categories require some pretty complicated machines and materials.
These things aren't friendly to pack. There was an entire event to make the lightest planes that you have ever seen in your life.
The lists of projects only increases, and the first problem we ran into without even knowing it, was how to get all of our stuff across the nation. We packed our gears, got ready, and then we realized that once we were there, that everything that we had shipped was broken. The things that we had spent months building were destroyed, and no amount of super glue and duct tape could fix them.
The only thing that hit us any harder was that in our state competition we doubled up on topics. We didn't have a 'full' team, we did enough work so that we would double up on events. I wasn't just in charge of the music competition, I was also involved in the biology competition, the astronomy competition, and a few others. The problem with this is that when we got to nationals, we realized that our system of doubling up on topics and events was going to bite us, and it bit us hard.
You see the problem with the organization of the events was that quite often, on the day of the event, a few of us would have to be doing two things on opposite sides of the university campus at the exact same time. All of that time spent studying in multiple topics, being better than anyone else in that specific topic, ruined because we had to figure out how to put a warm body in the chair to be there at the competition. Suddenly people that had no experience in a specific competition were being forced into them, saying that hopefully they knew enough about the topic that they'd be able to fill in any blanks.
Together this meant that we had broken gear, our teams were mixed up, and most people weren't prepared for the topics that we were facing. By the end of the day we had been stuck in tests asking professional levels of questions that even college students would have difficulty answering, and knowing nothing about them. We went from being the comfortable Nevada state champions, to being beat down and shown just how stupid we actually were. It was a fiasco.
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