Survival of the Fittest

A few months ago, at the height of the snow accumulation in Crested Butte, the janitors at the Crested Butte Community School had their hands full.  Every day we'd get a call over the loudspeaker to remove snow from something or other.  One fine mid-February day, Jaime and Shawn were called down to the office and asked to shovel out the slides. I had developed tendonitis in my wrist at that point, so I got to stay inside and mop the cafeteria.  After I finished my task, I went outside to find Shawn and Jaime in the playground.  You see, we had at least 6 feet of snow covering the playground and, apparently, some kids insisted on sliding down the slides.  These are the plastic tubular slides, so the end of each slide was completely covered in snow, making the slides more like dead-end tunnels.  Needless to say, the kids, determined to use the slides, would slide down the slide and get stuck.  They would try to climb up the slick plastic, but to no avail.  On some level, this is hilarious.  On another level, the idea of these kids getting trapped in these inescapable plastic tunnels is a little frightening.  

As the story goes, these kids were third graders.  Obviously, third graders know everything. And, they know so much that they go against what their teachers say, knowing that they are able to escape from everything.  And, in order to save these kids from themselves, the janitors had to come to the rescue.  

The punchline for this story, however, is that while Jaime and Shawn were digging escape tunnels for the slides, a first grader came outside.  He asked the janitors what they were doing. To which the Janitors replied, "we are digging out the slides so that kids don't get stuck in them."  The first grader looked at Jaime and Shawn with an expression of disgust and proclaimed, "Well, that's stupid.  Everybody knows you're not supposed to go on the slides."