I did it I did it I did it
Apr. 7th, 2011 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomOkay, so, my high school every semester takes a weekend-long trip to northern New England (New Hampshire then, Maine now), called the Hancock weekend. My sophomore year, I was Cookie Coordinator for Fall Hancock—it was my job to make sure we had enough cookies to provide snacks for 130 teenagers for three nights. As a result of this, I found myself the evening before Hancock on the train back to Beverly at 8:00pm, among a carful of tired people who had been working late and were coming home late, with a colossal sack of cookies on the seat beside me—way more than we would have ever needed at Hancock.
I was 15 years old; this is literally almost half my life ago. But ever since that night I have regretted not passing out cookies to every person on that train and brightening their day just a little.
Today, I finally got around to doing something just a little bit like that. This morning I went out and boughtnine ten packages of Oreos and Chips Ahoy and what have you, and from 10:30am to 1:30pm I stood out on Locust Walk, among all the students advertising their dance concerts and whatnot this weekend, shouting "Cookies! Free cookies! Seriously, I'm handing out cookies for no reason!" I think, at least, that I brightened at least a few people's day; I'm glad I did. It was about time I did that; I'd been concretely intending to eventually do something like that for ages and ages.
Some thoughts:
I drastically overestimated how many cookies I'd be able to give away in three hours—I only got through half my stock. [EDIT: Actually, it wasn't as bad as that. Now that I've had time to check, it looks like I bought ten and had three and a half boxes left afterward, not nine and four and a half as I thought.] I was kind of surprised by how few people took me up on the offer, actually. I suppose this has something to do with a lot of people being in a hurry to get to class, the fact that Penn students have to more or less condition themselves to ignore people shouting at them on Locust Walk, and perhaps the patent unbelievability of the idea that someone could be standing alone handing out Oreos without some kind of ulterior motive or gimmick. Several people independently asked me "What's the catch?", or at least "What are you doing this for?"—like, now that I had their attention I was going to ask them to donate money to something or sign up for a trip to Israel or something. I guess that's not that surprising, but it is kind of disappointing that it makes people so unlikely to stop for a cookie; in particular during the rush times around noon and 1:30 when everyone was hurrying between classes it could get very frustrating. When I managed to catch someone's eye out of that crowd, though, and they came over and asked "Wait a minute, you're actually just handing out cookies for no reason?", it absolutely made my day.
There was some kind of children's festival going on at Penn today, which means there were a whole lot of, like, big groups of nine-year-olds on Locust Walk today. I always shut up when I saw them coming; I would have loved to give cookies to a more appreciative audience, but I totally didn't want to start encouraging second-graders to accept cookies from strange adults.
On the other hand, when what looked like a high-school group went by, on their way to perform at the children's festival, their teacher or conductor or whoever called out "Hey guys! It's your lucky day! Cookies for no reason!" and they basically cleaned out my first box of Oreos. That was one of the highlights of the day for me.
Several people said to me "I don't want a cookie, but I think it's really awesome that you're doing this." It was really sweet of them to go out of their way to stop and say so.
A lot of cookies went to the people who were doing walkshifts next to me, for the Middle Eastern dance and swing dance concerts. They seemed like pretty cool people.
Now I've gotfour three and half boxes of cookies I didn't manage to give away. I can't keep them, since Passover starts in like a week. Maybe I'll try going out again tomorrow to give away the rest if the weather stays nice, but I don't think it'd be any fun to do this in the rain. I'm having people over Saturday night for gaming; maybe I'll be able to feed some of the rest of the cookies to them.
I was 15 years old; this is literally almost half my life ago. But ever since that night I have regretted not passing out cookies to every person on that train and brightening their day just a little.
Today, I finally got around to doing something just a little bit like that. This morning I went out and bought
Some thoughts:
I drastically overestimated how many cookies I'd be able to give away in three hours—I only got through half my stock. [EDIT: Actually, it wasn't as bad as that. Now that I've had time to check, it looks like I bought ten and had three and a half boxes left afterward, not nine and four and a half as I thought.] I was kind of surprised by how few people took me up on the offer, actually. I suppose this has something to do with a lot of people being in a hurry to get to class, the fact that Penn students have to more or less condition themselves to ignore people shouting at them on Locust Walk, and perhaps the patent unbelievability of the idea that someone could be standing alone handing out Oreos without some kind of ulterior motive or gimmick. Several people independently asked me "What's the catch?", or at least "What are you doing this for?"—like, now that I had their attention I was going to ask them to donate money to something or sign up for a trip to Israel or something. I guess that's not that surprising, but it is kind of disappointing that it makes people so unlikely to stop for a cookie; in particular during the rush times around noon and 1:30 when everyone was hurrying between classes it could get very frustrating. When I managed to catch someone's eye out of that crowd, though, and they came over and asked "Wait a minute, you're actually just handing out cookies for no reason?", it absolutely made my day.
There was some kind of children's festival going on at Penn today, which means there were a whole lot of, like, big groups of nine-year-olds on Locust Walk today. I always shut up when I saw them coming; I would have loved to give cookies to a more appreciative audience, but I totally didn't want to start encouraging second-graders to accept cookies from strange adults.
On the other hand, when what looked like a high-school group went by, on their way to perform at the children's festival, their teacher or conductor or whoever called out "Hey guys! It's your lucky day! Cookies for no reason!" and they basically cleaned out my first box of Oreos. That was one of the highlights of the day for me.
Several people said to me "I don't want a cookie, but I think it's really awesome that you're doing this." It was really sweet of them to go out of their way to stop and say so.
A lot of cookies went to the people who were doing walkshifts next to me, for the Middle Eastern dance and swing dance concerts. They seemed like pretty cool people.
Now I've got
no subject
Date: 2011-04-11 07:01 pm (UTC)