Win Big at the Raffel
Looking out the superintendent’s office window, our science teacher asked me how to spell raffle. Being a sucker for spelling, I spelled it–r-a-f-f-l-e.
He smiled wryly and said, “That’s what I thought–it’s misspelled on the marquee outside.”
Attempting to protect the school’s image (and let’s face it–I’d probably go into your yard and change a “For Sell” to “For Sale” sign or climb a billboard with a bucket of paint if it were misspelled), I went out to transpose the letters. The sign had been up for days. The message was announcing a softball tournament fundraiser and “raffel” for a former student who’d had a horrific motorcycle accident.
The softball tournament was a huge success, bringing in hundreds of visitors from all over the region the next day. Exhausted from sitting in the sun all day, I glanced over at the marquee as I slowly drove out of the school parking lot. Those black plastic letters jumped out at me.
Doesn‘t take a brain surgeon to predict this one–someone had gone to the trouble to change the letters around (surely the same culprit), back to the original misspelled “raffel.” I drove around to see both sides of the sign. At least this time they went to great effort misspelling it on both sides of the marquee, because the first time it was wrong only on one side.
The moral of the story: tenacity can be admirable, even when spelling isn’t.
