Congrats to Fl Regional WFFA recipient Mr. James Payne

[nehalita]

Also, some funny stories:

The submission of the award
So I finish the essay at 8:00pm on February 23rd and sit back to relax. I sent it to Arefin and had him look it over.

At 11:30pm, I calmly come online and ask him if he submitted the award.
Arefin: "Wait I thought you submitted the award..."
Me: "What? I thought you did."
--uh oh---

So I rush onto cd and usfirst.org and try to figure out how to submit the award.
I go onto the firstawards website and think, oh... that's simple, I just have to make an account. That's easy!... WRONG.

Turns out, our other mentor, Mr. David Platt, had already made an account for the website. So we have NO Idea what the password is and by this time, it's around 11:45pm. I call him several times but he does not pick up. Note that the only people that knew I was writing one were Arefin Bari, Amanda Morrison, and me. So I give up but Arefin starts plugging in every password that comes into his head while I panic and crumble inside. He tells me around 11:55pm that the password was our school's name.

So I'm rushing on and had NO idea that I had to write in some extra information (normally I wouldn't have minded but I was in a bit of a rush with 4 minutes left). So I go in and realize that the pictures we were allowed to use we supposed to be attached separately. I thought they were supposed to be in the essay so I took out the pictures and resaved it and reattached it.

It's now 11:58pm and I am attaching my pictures and realize that my pictures are too large. I have to open them up in MS Paint, resave them to a smaller size and reattach them. I get two attached and realize... i have around 10 seconds left...at most

I give up attaching and press the "finalize" button. And I get:
YOUR TIME HAS RUN OUT. Or something like that.

...So I assumed it wasn't submitted. I was horrified and quite disappointed. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night.

So, when Tytus Gerrish runs into our pits on Friday while I was talking to a judge and filling out a survey and tells us we got the WFA... I was dumbfounded. I told him "we didn't even turn one in." So we run to the field and Mr. Payne goes to accept the award.

Mind you, Mr. Payne didn't know what the WFA was. He read about it but didn't realize how esteemed the award was and at that time, he didn't remember what it was. So he's accepting this award without hearing the introduction about the award or hearing the judge's wonderful introduction to our essay.

We recounted this story over dinner and explained to him everything that happened. He got a good laugh out of that one =).