Egg Hunt Autopsy (warning: 2544 words)

Last December, CWRU held what is quite possibly the last ever Robotic Egg Hunt at the Science Center. It coincided with the weekend when I started to feel really under the weather. Since then, I've thought about the Egg Hunt quite a bit, and I still have a lot of concurrent and incoherent thoughts on the subject.

To sum them up, I'm glad the Egg Hunt is over. It's easy to take a statement like that the wrong way, so let me do some preliminary damage control by saying one thing: I liked the Egg Hunt. I liked the idea, I like the execution. It was fun. It was educational. It was a good example of everything that can go right in the learning process. The Egg Hunt was the culmination of a course that is probably the favorite course in the minds of many a CWRU graduate. The Egg Hunt was a unique and creative way to teach problem-solving, micro-controller programming, physics, electrical engineering, and even structural dynamics.

For the few of you who don't know about the Egg Hunt, it was a course taught at CWRU in which students built robots out of Lego building blocks and tiny motors. The robots had to locate, identify, and collect pastel-colored eggs in a specially designed arena. Then, they had to deliver those eggs to a specific nest in order to earn points. The trick is that these robots weren't remote-controlled, they were completely autonomous: after their builders turned them on, the robots followed their programming exactly, for better or for worse, and human intervention was strictly a no-no.

Now, why, if I've already stated that I liked the Egg Hunt, am I glad that it's over? A few reasons. My only real involvement with the Egg Hunt was procedural. The students built the robots and the professors taught the course. They held the Egg Hunt off-site at the Science Center, and so I was in charge of making sure the Science Center was ready to receive them.

I won't go into specific detail about all the steps necessary to make an Egg Hunt happen at the Science Center. There are phone calls to be made, and faxes to be sent, and I did pretty much everything from reserving the room six months in advance to stacking and unstacking chairs on game day. All of this was a lot of work, but if anything it got easier every semester. I've learned from my mistakes, and as the protocols evolved to become more complex, so did my methods of making sure they were still faithfully executed. It got to the point where I kept a box with the Egg Hunt logo taped to the side under my desk year-round that held my 1-2-3 kit for getting everything done. The laborious need to dot every 'i' and cross every 't', while quite possibly my least favorite part, was also the least of my problems.

The real problem with hosting the Egg Hunt was (for lack of a better way to put it) that I was in charge of making it happen. And no one at the Science Center, at times even myself, knew what to make of this fact. My first Egg Hunt was December 2001, and it was pretty much forced on me by an assistant director who couldn't figure out how else to get it done. My predecessor had run it a couple of times in the past, and when he left, it naturally fell to me to take over the job, despite the fact I had absolutely no idea whatsoever how to make it happen. Forget starting from square one: I didn't even own a copy of the board game. And I made it clear that I had no experience doing anything even remotely related to hosting a special event. "It's technical," they said. "So you're the only person who can do it." Now imagine that phrase being said in the least-flattering manner possible and you'd have some idea what it was like getting strong-armed into playing host.

That first Egg Hunt went rather well, all things considered. It was touch and go at times. I didn't know what needed to be done, and no one could tell me. I contacted the professor and introduced myself. He gave me a basic rundown of what was going to happen, and what he needed from me. I did my best. Though I made a few mistakes, the Egg Hunt still happened and, in all honesty, that's what was most important. Over the years, I fixed my mistakes for the next one, and then I'd encounter a completely different problem that I hadn't anticipated. Then I'd make sure to be prepared for it, too, for the next Egg Hunt. It was a continual process of iterative improvement. I have a hard time now seeing what the big deal was back in 2001, but I understand that I was nervous and just plain dumb.

Of course, management was no help there. Management was never any help whatsoever. Management seldom is. No one really understood what the Egg Hunt was, or what it involved, or why we did it. And any time I asked for help, I was ignored. And there were plenty of occasions where I was handling it just fine, thank you very much, and I'd get a short parade of nosy people in neckties giving me orders and advice. I generally ignored them right back.

This is the heart of the reason why I'm glad I'm done with the Egg Hunt. There was an unnecessary amount of politicking going on, and it made me miserable. I never got any support from the Marketing department in promoting the event, even just adding a short comment about the tournament to our website, which would have cost them all of maybe ten minutes of one woman's time adding the text. Eventually, I just gave up trying to pull that tooth. The last three Egg Hunts received no site promotion other than what I put together myself or that the Public Programs department graciously added to their daily schedule. I was upset that Marketing refused to help me in the same "What can you do?" way that you feel whenever you get behind someone who clearly cannot count to 12 who's pushing his behemoth cart into the express lane at the supermarket.

I became content just to let the rest of the Science Center ignore me while I just went off and held the Egg Hunt however the hell I saw fit. I was In Charge. Except for this one guy, who shall remain nameless save for the fact that he wasn't in my department and had absolutely no connection to Eggs, Hunting, or special events whatsoever. He was just really power-hungry, and he tried on multiple occasions to smooth himself around the Egg Hunt. He was the only person who treated it like some kind of community project, something the Science Center did and so everyone at the Science Center could weigh in with their thoughts.

For the record, that concept is total bullshit.

I don't mind harmless offers of advice, or even an offer to help out. This guy did neither, instead focusing for a day or two every other year to thinly disguise his attempts to get his hooks into my Egg Hunt. No, it wasn't anyone in Marketing, though that would be rather ironic. He was just a random executive making a power play. I would just ignore him. I'm sure that, being used to the lifestyle of leather chairs and memos Re:'ing other memos, he could not understand why his plots to grab the helm were just disappearing. They weren't failing, they weren't garnering backlash, they were just evaporating into nothing. takeover.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 Ah, the power of apathy.

Eventually, he got the idea that he shouldn't just try to take the Egg Hunt away from me. He should make my boss do it. After all, I had no business being in charge of the Egg Hunt in the first place. I wasn't qualified, and it wasn't in my list of job duties. I took over because I was the last person at the meeting to say "Not me!" The official rationale was that the Egg Hunt demanded great technological resources that, since most people here are little more than Luddites with a mean streak, I was best suited to oversee. The "great technological resources" meant a live webcast of the event. And as far as I was involved, I had little more to oversee than providing an internet connection for the professor's PC. I kept doing the Egg Hunt because I was the only person on staff who had any clue what was going on and, for a time, it was good.

The professor got promoted to another position, and that meant no more Egg Hunt for him. Since he was the living breathing body and soul of the course, the other two professors attached to teach the class had little recourse but to stop offering it. It was roughly as though both Larry and Moe quit the Three Stooges and left Curly Joe all alone to "figure something out".

Knowing full well that this was likely the last Egg Hunt, I was initially very saddened. Remember what I said: I liked the Egg Hunt. The event itself was a lot of work but also a lot of fun, and I was getting paid to let college students fight each other with Legos over plastic eggs. What soured me to the experience was this jackass exec, who had left me alone for quite a while, gratefully.

Problem was, the Science Center had just come under new management, so everybody started clamoring to show off their leadership abilities. I suspect that with the sorry state of all of this executive's other work, he was anxious to get his name at the top of a very short list of a successful project.

[I should digress immediately here to ponder the meaning of the term "successful". Fact was, I was interested in one thing: getting the event up and running, quickly and smoothly. The tournament was free and open to the public, and I had no intention of tracking attendance or any other quote-unquote metrics. Students were doing this for a grade, and that was key. The event would continue whether there was an audience or not, and I was not about to try to corporatize what was, essentially, an elaborate final exam. Given the total lack of enthusiasm in promoting it that I'd received my first few times trying, I was content simply when the audience would consist of so many parents and grandparents that I'd have to provide additional seating. The Science Center never made any money on the Egg Hunt, and I am proud to say that I fought a quiet little guerilla war to keep it that way: I invented a neat-sounding phrase of quasi-Latin to describe this philosophy: Scientia gratia scientia. I have no idea if that's correct Latin or not, but the sentiment holds true. Besides, if the Science Center wanted to capitalize on the Egg Hunt, maybe they shouldn't have put me in charge of it.]

So the Egg Hunt may not have been successful from a financial standpoint, but it was more important to me than that. This bonehead exec got the idea to "leverage it" into something more, and finally he took his plans to my boss, who also had nothing to do with the Egg Hunt. My boss liked the idea, probably because he could then put his name on that list, too, and I was Cc:'ed a short flurry of e-mail messages about all sorts of great ways we could change the Egg Hunt in the future. Meetings were suggested between them, plans were planned, and dreams were dreamt. All of this occurred over a single day – my day off – so I couldn't quickly respond to any of this with an abiding "Reply to All" that consisted solely of "The Egg Hunt is part of a CWRU course that is not being offered after the end of the current semester." I suppose it would be sour grapes to add "P.S. Now you want to get in on this? A day late and a dollar short, suckers!"

Finally, finally, the support for the Egg Hunt was coming from upstairs, and I know that there was very little I could have done to keep it down-to-earth and untainted by suit-think. I still don't know exactly what to make of this. I only wanted a little help at first, and it wasn't until the ousting of our president that people started taking notice. If we hadn't changed chiefs, I don't doubt I'd still be upset at the Egg Hunt ending. Now, my imagination still races with thoughts of what might have been done to it to pervert it into some self-aggrandizing bank-booster. Would all of these things have been bad? Not at all. The Egg Hunt probably would've gotten some press and maybe another 45-second spot on the last segment of the evening news. But it also would've been taken away from me.

I hate to sound like a control-freak, but I am. Putting someone else in charge of the Egg Hunt would've been a potential disaster, especially considering that that flurry of e-mail didn't once include anyone asking me, the only person in the building with any Egg Hunt experience, my opinion on anything. There wasn't a single "Toby, should we...?" or "Toby, what's your take on making....?" It was just two neckties patting each other on the back. "We will do this." "Yes. It will leverage our synergies." I can tell you right now I would've been pulled from the Egg Hunt without so much as a "Thanks for your work." Someone else would've been put in a position to royally screw things up, and though I have complete faith that they would've tried to put someone competent in charge of hosting the Egg Hunt, let's face it: the only reason you could have to pull Jim off a three-year commitment he is expertly trained in and give it to green-behind-the-gills Joe is a political one.

I wouldn't have been asked to give input on the future direction of the Egg Hunt any more than the Secretary of Transportation would ask the construction worker where the interstate he's building should go. That idea still bothers me. These guys already had a vision, and I simply wasn't part of it. Oh sure, I'd probably be asked to train someone. And I can clearly envision it: "Tell this woman in thirty minutes everything she'll need to know to do your job." And I wouldn't feel comfortable turning all Egg Hunt duties over to, by definition, a first-timer. From a view of the big picture, the ending of the Egg Hunt is an unfortunate event, but the timing could not have been better. Had the Egg Hunt continued (and be hosted by the Science Center), it would not have kept the same level of quality – and independence – that I strived to provide for it.