TEST, ZEST AND BEST

How come a test is assumed the way you always decide who is best at something? Ain’t that sort of presuming the test is a fair one?

Over at STINK we have all kinds of tests. Only our boss, Dr. Hemoglobin calls them contests. And the winner is someone who he calls the best at whatever the contest was about.

All of that is okay of course. And once and a while Otis or I actually win some contest. But not as often as either of us would like.

The reason we have trouble winning more often is because of a little thing called the “rules.” Yeah it is sure funny how you can change the rules so just about anyone can win.

Actually I guess the big thing isn’t so much the rules, but the judging of them. That isn’t always bad if the judging makes sense, but let me tell you sometimes at STINK it just gets plain silly from my point of view.

I don’t want to bore you with the many ways this happens, but you can sure tell when our boss sort of has the winner picked out before we even have the test. It is sort of easy to see when he goes up to one person and asks them their hat size for a crown. Is that obvious or what.

Then we have the contest, whatever it happens to be. And if the person he wants to win didn’t win then we end up with what he calls overtime. After that he’ll change the contest someway so low and behold the person he wants to have win will end up winning.

The funny thing about all this stuff is that he seems to think we don’t recognize how it works. I guess in part we all never complain because from time to time we get our chance to win something.

So I suppose that is the good part. Well sort of. The big problem with that is normally whenever there is a really cool prize he makes sure that old rat boy, Junior Hemoglobin wins.

Unfortunately there are too many times we don’t find out that Junior is going to actually compete till the competition starts. We’ll be standing there and dreaming about winning that contest and getting that prize when Junior will show up.

When that happens you can be darn sure that zest for the contest sort of ends. At least for the grimefighters. As for Junior, well when you know you are going to win you can be sure he doesn’t lack any zest. In those cases the only time we get any zest is when we find out that cool prize we thought was made of something else turns out to be made of cheese. Kind of brings a zest of relief to our faces.