Setting the Record Straight Re: Friday Night Prizes
Hi folks,
I must admit that I'm a little taken aback by this thread.
I hope there's a lot more intended humor in it than I'm reading (this is quite possible, because I'm still pooped from my wonderful weekend and my not-so-wonderful 11-hour airport & flight marathon) and that none of you are sitting out there feeling angry or resentful about the prizes that were awarded on the Friday nights of our Road Trips.
Just to be cautious and sure, and to set the record straight, I do want to say a few words about those prizes, on behalf of the Coordinators and Cathe and staff.
The Friday night "Road Tripper Special Recognition" prizes are intended to be a simple, smile-inducing icebreaker to help Road Trippers get to know a bit about each other. What we give away varies every year, depending on many factors including balancing other things in our overall Road Trip budget. And there also is no "set" number of categories or winners -- this varies each year, too, depending on how much prize "stuff" we can accumulate and on what interesting "winning categories" we can dream up when we review your biographical information. We try to creatively maximize the number of winners. So, for example, we don't do any "repeats" -- August's "youngest" Road Tripper AND the next-to-youngest August Road Tripper both also happened to be part of our three prize-winning "Mother and Daughter" pairs, so we "disqualified" them both and we gave the "Youngest Road Tripper" prize to the actual "third-youngest" August Road Tripper. This seemed the fairest thing to do, and we strive to be fair.
We also try to be as accurate as we can be in choosing "winners", but please understand that
we are limited by the information that we have about you -- and ALL we Coordinators know about you is what you tell us on your Who's Who book submissions.
For the August Road Trip, a lot of you chose not to participate in the Who's Who book. Some of you who did participate in the Who's Who book didn't choose to disclose your age. Some of you didn't choose to disclose the city you live in. We did not have access to street addresses for ANY of you. You can see that, for this Road Trip particularly, our "database" was imperfect.
Given the fact that our database about you is limited, some mistakes are inevitably going to happen despite our best efforts. Several of you approached Debbie, Lorrayne and me after the "awards ceremony" on Friday night to tell us that you were upset because we'd left you out of a category, or that we'd made a mistake and you should have won a category. (And yes, Ame, we knew you weren't kidding.
) Cathe and Chris immediately gave us a few extra items so that we could give prizes to every one of you. As far as I know, everyone who came to speak to us with a complaint was given a prize without further ado or investigation. We were
glad to do that, because our objective was for every Road Tripper to feel happy and satisfied.
My point is simply that we all -- we three Coordinators, Cathe, Nancy, Chris, the Four Seasons staff -- tried our best, folks, as we honest to goodness always do. We're sorry if we left any of you feeling that we overlooked you unfairly. We really intended for the Friday night "awards" -- and all of the many Road Trip giveaways -- to have the exact opposite effect on you: We wanted them to feel welcoming, pampering, fun and inclusive.
If you have suggestions for how we might improve the Friday night "Road Tripper Special Recognition" prize selection process, please be sure to include your ideas on your Road Trip Survey, or e-mail them to one of the Coordinators. Thanks!
