Unwanted drama

[Yesterday: 3.5 miles]

We had a bit of a controversy at our house last night.

My lovely wife runs a facebook group for encouraging runners.  And she does it well, it is a very encouraging group.

One guy on there had signed up for a well-known marathon race but later he determined he could not attend.  So he cooked up a half-baked “contest” where people would answer some questions about their running and he would pick the best one and send them his race entry.  (Many races don’t allow this kind of transfer, but the particular one involved does allow it.)

So that was fine.  But then it turned out that  he didn’t like the results of his contest and he decided there was a well-deserving person who could benefit from his race entry and he decided to give it to that guy instead.

(Here’s where it starts impinging on my life!)

So, he got my wife involved to help put this together.  The well-deserving guy doesn’t have any money to go to an out-of-state marathon.  Wife and Mr. Guy decided to ask for contributions for Mr. Well-Deserving to be able to travel to the marathon.   And that might have worked… except that they were asking for contributions from the same people to whom the race ticket had been offered in the half-baked contest.

No surprise, but one of the few people who had entered the contest piped up and objected to the change of plan.  [The person who piped up has a history of unattractive behavior.  It is also generally assumed that this person most likely would not attend the race in question.  All this to say that it is easy to want to justify weaseling out of giving the race entry to them.]  Then Mr. Well-Deserving said he didn’t want to be the center of this kind of strife  (Amen!) and bowed out.

My wife and I got into a long, somewhat heated conversation, me asserting that Mr. Guy messed things up.  She pointed out that his heart was in the right place.  I pointed out a number of ways that his execution was poor.  The whole thing caused a lot of unnecessary heart burn.

And the official end of the half-baked contest is this weekend (!) so we may see a replay at that time when Mr. Guy either coughs up the race entry as he originally said, or doesn’t.

I don’t really care what Mr. Guy does with his race-entry.  I just don’t want his circus full of monkeys invading my house again.