MAO Nationals Fail

I just came back from Tennessee yesterday and naturally I'm going to tell you all about it. Whoo! Best intro ever!

Complaints first. The competition was horribly organized. On every single test, at least a few questions had to be thrown out because they were defective. This could have worked out two ways. It could have raised your score or lowered it. Unfortunately, mine was lowered. But it wasn't lowered like five points, it was lowered a whole TWENTY points. They threw out four questions that I got right (it's a conspiracy I swear). Also, several times the answer keys were switched with other tests, resulting in an angry math nerd riot. Don't even get me started on the speakers. I could have settled for a boring speech but NOOOOOooooo. One of the speakers HAD to make a vain attempt at being funny. What made it worse was that he kept on going as if everyone was enjoying his speech. We were then treated to a long and tedious version of his life story rather than focusing on what was going to happen at the competition. His catch phrase was "ladies man" and he kept saying it over and over as if his entire speech was structured around those two pitiful words. By the way, if I ever hear someone say "ladies man" in a certain tone, I will brutally torture that person. (rawr) The list goes on: the food was comparable to cafeteria food, they played unfitting soft classical music as people ran up to the stage to recieve their awards, rafting in the rapids was replaced by a semi-interesting tour of a cave with water in it, and the room service in our hotel wouldn't make one of our beds because there was a sock on it. Room service lady quotes: "I can't make your bed because you left item on it." I think many people agree with me when I say that the Tennessee MAO convention was the worst Nationals competition to date.

Other than that, I had fun. The fact that I was rooming with some of my favorite people made the trip a lot more tolerable. Not to mention that one of them brought a Wii so we could play Super Smash Bros Brawl all day and all night. Cards went around every few hours, pool was during almost every break time (until our sponsor banned us from pool for being late to a test), and almost all of us won trophies. Dollywood was an okay theme park. There were only three good rides in there, one of them being the Mystery Mines which features a ninety degree pull to the top of a hill and a ninety degree drop to oblivion. It also has real fire which comes close enough so that you can feel the heat but not close enough so you burn. All in all, I think the competition for our school was a success considering we didn't have our whole team there. Our sponsor was pretty happy with the results.

Notice that the complaints paragraph is considerably larger than the compliments paragraph. I'm still tired and I think I still have some left over motion sickness.

-June