#177. Ranger Machine (Friday, February 7, 1997)

What was your best day…of failing the one job you were assigned to do?

On this day, I was nominally the leader. Functionally, I was anything but.

In my first-grade French Immersion class, Madame Blanc rotated a daily “chef” (“leader”) among the students. The chef read out the date and weather each morning and, on Fridays, chose two classmates to help pick up the Pizza Day order from the office. Beyond that, the main benefit was getting to lord the title over everyone else for a day.

Well, turns out I was the lucky one, because my turn as chef came on day number one hundred of the school year.

Yay! But Day 100 immediately presented a governance decision with lasting implications. We had been listing the number of each day in order on the mural, and now we needed a new color for the hundreds digit. My favorite color was green; but, in a decision I clearly didn’t dispute vehemently enough, I was overruled, despite my title, in favor of purple. Shameful, shameful leadership, and I’d be reminded of it every morning thereafter.

My next chance came with Pizza Day. I successfully named my best friend Andy Anderson and Ted—but only after the entire class mobbed me so aggressively that I fell off my chair and half-somersaulted backward.

The afternoon was a class party: movie up front, chips, cookies, pop—and by extension, dirty napkins, plates, crumbs, and a steadily expanding mess.

Through some unconscious force I still cannot adequately explain, I decided this mess was now my responsibility. I adjusted my chef hat—with “100” stapled to the front like a crown—grabbed the broom and dustpan, crouched under the nearest table, and began announcing in a mechanical voice: “Ranger Machine. Ranger Machine.”

Note: “Machine” is also French for machine. “Ranger,” meanwhile, meant arranging, not cleaning; “nettoyer” would have been more accurate. Madame Blanc was apparently too pleased to correct me. Also, “nettoyer machine” sounds terrible.

For the next hour and a half, while everyone else remained in full six-year-old party mode, I worked my way through the classroom cleaning tables and picking up scraps. Eventually the others started noticing. By the end, half the class was watching their chef crawl around cleaning up their mess, and Madame Blanc is impressed enough to have everyone thank me before the bell.

What possessed me to become this linguistically confused, sanitation-committed robotic entity for ninety minutes, I will never understand. But “Ranger Machine” became a standing persona in the class, with Andy and several others voluntarily taking up the role later that year.

And that was my only true act of leadership from my one special day in power.