Meet the Black Crow. This perpetual trophy is awarded at the end of each year to the most impressive orienteering-related stuff-up within the club. The award is the highlight of the orienteering presentations as all club members get to vote for the most deserving recipient, and potential recipients are given their chance to argue as to why they should not win. It is the duty of every club member to be on the lookout for nominations throughout the year. The following nominations are presented as submitted with no identification of the author or the name of the unfortunate subject of the piece.
Black Crow 1. We’ll call this fellow Horace. He was at an event at Mt. Korong. Having finished packing up his car he was trying to decide the best way to turn the car around on the (very) narrow track. After a close inspection of the verge he decided, although rather thick sand, it was firm enough to do the full U turn and come back onto the track to exit. Half way through the U turn he discovered his error. The sand was NOT firm enough.
Editor’s note: this is not the same “Horace” who performed this action ~5 years ago at Korong. Yes, it happened again!
Black Crow 2. This happened on a Friday and looks at the definition of “next”. Two men, Fred and Felix, were arranging a meeting. Fred emails Felix on Friday 12th Feb and arranges a meeting for next Wednesday, the 24th (as quoted in the email); Felix says great, we can meet at my place – next Wednesday (sadly missing the ‘24’ bit). Felix contacts a couple of other people and passes on details of the meeting on next Wednesday (the 17th). So one other person rolls up to Felix’s place on the 17th — but that’s all –no meeting, but a pleasant chat. The next day rather terse emails were exchanged between Fred and Felix and all was revealed.
For using “next” when it wasn’t the next, a nomination to Fred.
For not reading the e-mail properly and missing the date, a nomination to Felix.
Black Crow 3. The following took place at a recent Space Racing event at Kennington Reservoir. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent (note that at the club presentations there are no innocents — people involved in all BC’s will be identified).
It was a foul afternoon – cold, with a wind borne drizzly rain drifting into the BBQ shelter from across the reservoir. The kids were out on the course, some reporting in a bit early, some with disturbing reports of one of the SI units missing from its lockable plate. When we had finished with the results the controls were picked up and, sure enough, SI unit 44 was missing from its little box. It was cold, raining and just on dark so the organiser (let’s call him Percy) packed the car and went home, deciding to go out first thing the next morning to look for the missing bit. It so happened that Percy’s son George was home from interstate and he offered to go for an early run and check it out which he did, with no success. Later in the morning Percy himself went out, searched again, with no luck. Then the keeper of this set of units (Claude) was brought in, did lots of technical stuff and found out the SI stick number and the sequence in which the controls were punched – this was confusing and did nothing towards finding the missing bit. Anyway, after twenty four hours of searching around the bush, analysis and several exchanges of e-mails Percy received an e-mail, the last sentence of which read: “—- by the way did Arthur (part of the course setting team) tell you that he found 44 (the missing unit) in his car?”
