Cash Monies and Picket Lines

So it's over. f-day has come and gone. We made $12,500 yesterday, with more to come in stock pledges and in the mail. This is an improvement over last year's sad $8K, so I feel good but not thrilled. I'm able to breathe now - and I slept 17 hours yesterday.

I called home to give my parents the report - (they are surprisingly interested in this part of my "job.") My mom was all, "Wow! That's a lot of money!" But for some reason, it never seems like enough. One of our volunteers commented that when the total was announced, there was no celebrating; he thought it was a shame because that's a whole lot of cash. Maybe we were just exhausted, or maybe we don't really know how to celebrate our accomplishments, I don't know.

So when I called, I was feeling a range of emotions about the whole event. To make me laugh and take my mind off of analyzing everything (which I'm very prone to doing), my mom told me the following story, which has kept me laughing until now:

Yesterday my dad didn't go to work as usual; instead he was going to protest poor labor practices by standing on a busy street corner in Columbus near the entrance to Easton Towne Center. The plan was for five or six of his fellow union workers to join him with placards denouncing unfair hiring at a certain business, which stood behind them in the distance.

Unfortunately for Mario P., the others didn't show, save for his sidekick, affectionately known as "the Midget" by his fellow workers. So Mario and the Midget stood on the corner, braving the chill and wind with their signs held high, with the Rat towering in the background.

Rat, you ask? As Mario tells the story, he mentions this detail matter-of-factly: "Yeah, we were standing there, and it was so damn cold, and the Rat was blowin all over the place in the wind."
The Rat turns out to be an inflatable creature standing fifteen feet tall. It is red with gray accents.

When we asked why they chose a rat as their protest mascot, he also answered us very simply, as if this was most obvious. duh. "You know, the owner, the guy's a rat, you know. He's a RAT." I'm sure most people driving down Morse Road in rush hour will understand the symbolism.

Because the Rat was causing them so much trouble, blowing around and all, they decided to move closer to the building. And by closer I mean they tied the Rat to the building. It didn't take long for a police officer to come by and explain that the building was private property and they'd have to relocate the Rat back to the street corner.