Quote:
Originally Posted by ariesrising
I'm one of those people that would probably wait until the whole event is over, then tell everyone afterwards so that no public embarassment would ensue. But I'm a wuss=)
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Wow...these are tricky situations. Especially when the feelings of so many are involved.
This actually happened to my son (These kids were 6 and 7 years old at the time). He was the clear cut winner of a Pitch, Hit and Throw contest for baseball, but the volunteer who was recording scores put his scores under the wrong child's name. The minute the other child's name was announced the entire place fell silent. Well, I started to clap and took the other little boy to the stage (I was team mom). Everone else was clapping too by then.
Quickly the judges added a "tie" for my son because they realized their mistake. Needless to say it made the other little boy's confidence rocket because he was having a terrible year at home (his parents were divorcing, etc.) and he was actually a good little player.
There was another situation where the local hometown royality contest had a scoring mistake so in the end, 3 girls were named "princess" rather than just the traditional 2. There were only 4 girls in the running that year. Well, they turned out to be a beautiful court and all would have been fine in a perfect world until someone who had nothing to do with the contest decided to stir the pot and write a horrible letter to the editor about it. Well needless to say the 3rd Princess was devistated and the royality committee wrote a very nice letter and took responsibility for their mistake, but said, what did a 3rd Princess really hurt and why make everyone come away from the contest feeling really bad for "the odd man out" when this was supposed to be something to showcase all the great young women of the community?
Granted, sometimes being able to add a "tie" or another winner, for warm and fuzzies "OK". But, when the stakes are higher I just don't know how a situation like that can be played off. Sometimes things just go wrong due to human error with no way to "fix" it in a nice way.
Look at how the miscommunication flew about the trapped WV minors being alive when in reality they were not. That was unfortunate and couldn't be "fixed".