Slide the City is a pretty cool concept- A 1,000 foot water slip n' slide made on a street in the city. You can pay to slide once, pay more to slide three times or buy an all day pass to slide as many times as you want. I did find out that they work with the city to find the best location for this slide- for both sliding down the hill and water flow for this. Again, this is a cool concept but it went down as an epic fail for Slide the City and Columbus, Ga.
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Several weeks ago my friend Brandi and I decided to volunteer this event. We had on and off discussed getting involved in things and volunteering. Both of us decided this would be a good place to start. We were so very wrong. Our scheduled volunteer shift was 2pm-7pm. Once all of the volunteers for our shift arrived, we had a very brief pow-wow and were taken to our spot. We were excited and thought that we had scored the best possible volunteer spot of the day- the bottom of the slide. Our job was to slow down sliders and to keep them out of the bottom of the slide (which EVERYONE wanted to go in] because it had a water pump that filtered the water and pumped it back up to the top of the slide.
[This was before the madness ensued]
I should mention that the event began earlier that day and up until around 2:45 or 3 the water pressure was not enough to actually slide down the slide because there was not water down the entire slide. I am sure you can imagine that the people who paid for this experience were upset. Also, all day only two of the three lanes were open for sliding. The wait time for the slide was extra long due to the combination of one lane being closed and the inability to actually 'slide the city'. After the water pressure picked up people were actually able to slide down. The problem here is that it was just two girls against the city of Columbus. Most people did actually listen and slow down/stop before hitting the end with the water pump. We managed to grab many of those who didn't slow down before they hit the end- grabbing their tubes/legs/hands/whatever we could grab to make them stop. If this were a sports event- we would be the goalies. The next problem was having that group of a**holes who didn't listen. The ones who purposely slide in the end or go in there anyway after we had stopped them. I was knocked down a few times, but poor Brandi was completely wiped out by people several times. Frustration was building. Not to mention the super creepy old man who had a child's pool noodle/water gun squirting young, attractive women with water. [and who had been asked/told to stop many, many times] Even after being told to stop he remained at the bottom of the slide, sitting on the side-creeping away. Brandi even went so far as to tell one of the people 'in charge' and they did nothing.
We became fed up with the few people that simply would not listen and the lack of help/assistance from the coordinators and decided to leave around 5pm. Feeling that we were doing the right the thing, we went out of our way to find one of the people 'in charge' to tell them why we were leaving and that there was now no one working the bottom of the slide. She didn't even care why we had left or even care that we did leave. Then she had the audacity to ask if we could help clean up and pack up the volunteer tent/supplies. After picking our jaws up off of the floor we just said no and left.
The thing I am going to take away from this is that this is one experience and I refuse to let it ruin my stance on volunteering. You get out of the world what you put in. Don't let a bad experience ruin your good nature.
xo-M
"A bad system will beat a good person every time."
-W.Edwards Deming
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