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In reply to the discussion: Who Was Your First Presidential Vote - DU Poll [View all]DFW
(54,477 posts)The one year of my life that I went to a boarding school, I hated it with a passion. Alumni included both generations of Bushes, so no one should have been surprised, but the place in the States I was going to before sucked, too--I lived in Spain for a while in the interim--in those days (I'm told it's better now, and Obama sent his daughters there), so I took the chance. oops.
But I got my revenge at graduation. To me, it was an insignificant prank, but to the all-important alumni and the class rah-rah jocks, it apparently was a serious scandal. Victory!! What happened was this: my brother, who was a student at a "rival" school across the state line, was at my graduation and was with me when we were all herded together for our class picture. He started trying to crawl over my classmates to get out of the group before the picture was taken. I stopped him and said, "why bother? Neither of us is ever coming back to this place." So he took his place next to me, and the school didn't even find out about it until months later that a ringer from their bitter rival was in my class graduation photo.
To some of the alumni and the school administration, this was the equivalent of Katrina hitting the ninth ward of New Orleans. Apparently it was a thorn in their side for years after, which delighted me to no end. Now, they keep writing me for contributions, and I keep writing them back that instead of pleasing the alumni that were dying off, they might have considered terrorizing the new kids a little less while they were there. I had a horrible time there, and if they were so concerned with alumni contributions from me, the time to address that was while I was there as a future alumnus, not trying to make amends 20, 30, 40 and 50 years later. But don't cry for them, Argentina. There were still enough Bush types in that class to keep them awash in alumni contributions without my meager participation.