It may surprise you, but in high school, I was a member of the science club.
But, then, science club at my school basically amounted to one field trip a year and printing “SCIENCE CLUB” next to your name in the yearbook. EVERYBODY joined science club, because you didn’t have to do a thing, and you got to go on a field trip. And there’s not many places to go in Memphis, so it’s most likely you’ll end up somewhere fun. (Spanish field trip? The zoo.)
(besides that, most field trips involved going somewhere like the Pink Palace for an hour, then dropping us off at the mall for 3 hours. Our field trips ruled.)
So as you can imagine, a science club field trip involved the whole upper school, 7-12. I think when the science club field trip came around, maybe 20 people were left at the school, haha. My senior year, the field trip ended up being taking us to a Titanic exhibition that was in town. For the occasion, the school got one of those giant fancy buses for the older students to ride on, and the younger students were in our 2 school buses (says something about the size of our upper school, doesn’t it?) The driver for the fancy bus was this older man, like 80, I swear! But he was nice, and got us downtown no problem.
They had arranged for us to eat at the Spaghetti Warehouse, and when we got there, the parking lot was empty. So our bus driver pulls into two parking spots out in the middle. The school bus drivers are a bit smarter and park to the side, because when we come out, the parking lot is PACKED and the fancy bus is stuck in the middle of it all. So we all pile in, and the old man driver starts trying to work his way out of this parking lot. You know, he’s inching forward then backing up, then inching forward then backing up… I swear he does this for 15 minutes, before BOOM!
He knocks the rearview mirror off one of the cars next to him.
Just as the car’s owner is coming out the door of the Spaghetti Warehouse.
He jumps out and starts trying to put the mirror back on. We all have the windows down of course, so we hear all of what’s going on. He sticks the mirror back on and goes “There, see, it’ll stay!” – followed by the mirror falling off again.
We’re all too tickled, but when he gets back on the bus, he starts CRYING. This poor little 80 year old man just starts crying in front of all of us. He said he was going to lose his job now and he didn’t know what he would do, etc, etc.
Then we all felt bad, and somebody started taking up money to give to him. I think we had about $100 that we gave him when we got back – a nice gesture, but YEAH THAT’S GOING TO HELP WHEN HE LOSES HIS JOB. Way to go, I guess maybe we could fix the mirror.
I don’t even remember anything about the Titanic exhibit. But on the way home, he for some reason took a different route than the school bus drivers and got us on this little back road… keep in mind this is one of those GIGANTIC buses. We were all wondering what he was doing, because we all KNEW this road was tiny, and had this really weird little narrow S shaped bridge in the middle of it. Well, sure enough, he gets to the bridge and has to maneuver his way over it, going back and forth until he finally fits through it.
So that was the story. Yay.