When Girls Cry

I must admit I have made girls cry before, but usually it's because they were close to me. At least in all the cases I know of, I knew their name and we had been acquaintances for more than an hour. That was not the case on Tuesday.

I may or may not have mentioned this before but in addition to working for the BRA and at Borders I work as an Intramural Referee for Northeastern (I will post more about this some day) and have done so for over a year now. Tuesday was the finals for both Hockey and Broomball (a sport which deserves its own post in the future) which is always a fairly nerve racking shift because adrenaline is high and people really want that Championship T-Shirt (the lengths they go to for a shirt).

On this day I am tasked as supervisor (yeah I'm not much of an Underling at this job, oops) to collect all the IDs. Well as it happens a girl meekly comes up to me as I am collecting Husky IDs and checking off their names on the rosters and she says;

Girl: "Is there anyway I can play without my ID, I lost it today and didn't have a chance to get a new one"

Me: "I'm sorry but it is University policy that all players must turn in a NU ID in order to play"

To this she starts to tear up and I'm just standing there shouting on the inside "Oh god please please please please don't cry!"

But she does.

A lot.....

And I don't know what to say, she cannot play, it is University policy, there is nothing I can do short of something getting me fired. And I understand why she can't, there is too much liability at stake for us to let her play. I feel like shit, but rules are rules. The worst part about it was that I knew she had been thinking about it from the moment she couldn't find her ID. She had been dreading the moment when she would walk up to the man with IDs (in this case it was me) and ask if she could still play. Now her mind was probably about 95% sure that she couldn't play but there was probably 5% that thought that maybe she would get someone to fudge the rules and let it slide, which is why she still came to the game and asked if she could play. It is because of that 5% that she didn't cry until the moment when I converted that 5% of hope into 5% of despair (Just call me the destroyer of hope, the Anti-Obama). I made her cry. Without me there would have been no crying that day. That is how I interpretted that situation.

Northeastern, where you spend $40,000 to make girls cry!