Grandma vs. the Engineers

by Lisa Gillespie

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Photo by Talgat Baizrahmanov on Unsplash

It was two days after Christmas. Not many in the office after the holiday. I’d only been on the job for two months, working as an admin for an engineering consulting firm. I know absolutely nothing about engineering. Thankfully, my job was to format documents and spreadsheets and assemble reports, so no engineering degree required.

Except this day, there was nothing, and I mean nothing to do for most everyone there.

One of my favorite coworkers – I’ll call her Penny – who is exceedingly creative, came up with the idea to hold an Office Olympics.

While I tend to perform horribly at anything that requires physical skill or hand-eye coordination, I decided to participate in spite of being old enough to be the “office mother.” Frankly, now that I’m in my late 50s, humiliation isn’t such a scary thing, so why not just try and have fun?

Event number one, dubbed “Archery” by Penny, was a contest to see who could shoot rubber bands from their fingers and hit a paper cup, moving it from one side of a table to the other, ultimately knocking it off the far edge. I was quickly bested by every other competitor. In my defense, I think I did actually hit my cup once.

Event number two, I can’t remember the name it was given, was to stack plastic cups into a pyramid and then collapse them again while being timed. I made a respectable middle-of-the-road showing, but didn’t place in the top three.

The third and final event was called “Aviation.” Penny directed us to take a sheet of paper, make our best paper airplane, and whoever’s creation flew the furthest would win the gold. As I sat at the table with all of these young engineers, strategically making complicated folds and creases in their sheets of paper, I strained to remember the last time I made a paper airplane and how I did it.

A few minutes later, we lined up at one end of a long hallway and the final competition began. The first young man, whose airplane looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, thrust his creation into the air where it went immediately into a death spiral and hit the floor about six inches from his feet. The next young man produced his piece of paper that he had wadded up into a ball and threw it. Of course it made it to the end of the hallway, and while ingenious, he was disqualified for not actually making an airplane. One by one, my colleagues launched their entries, none making it more than a couple of feet. Then there I was, clutching the same simple paper airplane in my hand that I’d learned to make way back in Mrs. Garlow’s first grade class. I set my feet, took a deep breath, and flung my airplane forward.

It was as if time slowed down, as I watched my creation float, float, float, nearly six feet down the hallway before it came to a graceful landing. I had won! I’d like to say the crowd (small as it was) went wild, but when I looked around, I found several very young, very talented engineers, looking at me in disbelief. Bested by a grandma.

Best. Day. Ever.

Lisa Gillespie is a blogger and freelance editor. She writes about every day life in Central Ohio with her French bulldog, Lucie, who actually runs the place. Find her at https://substack.com/@writemyselfagain.