When I was a young buck in jr. high, I was recommended for, and eagerly agreed to, Junior Achievement. It's basically a geek club for prospective future pointy-haired bosses: You do an "IPO", selling shares to friends and family, and then plan and make (or acquire) some craft or spice rack, foisting it on family and relatives. Then you celebrate your profits. Or, if I recall correctly, you distributed the profits to the shareholders (who were generally the same people you sold the product to).

I don't believe any of this was overseen by the OSC (Ontario Securities Commission. Much like the SEC, but most of the power here lies at the provincial level).

Normally you do this program once, leaving room for future leadership-hopefuls to learn from it. There was a long list of kids hoping to get in, so it's not like they needed chair fillers.

Our first order of business was voting our "leadership committee". I decided that I'd go for one of the positions -- we're there to learn management and business administration, I thought, so it seemed the right thing to do -- so I went for procurement manager or something similar. Remember that you operate under the guidance and direction of local business leaders.

That's when us green recruits discovered that a group of individuals had returned to the program up to 4 times in a row, and were very chummy with the bona fide adults who led our group. For every position there was someone who'd done the same position multiple times, going up against the green recruits.

Despite the fact that I got significant popular support (my petition to the crowd was that I should be voted in because I was new to it, a message that really appealed to the audience. It's hard to be a tyrant in a real democracy, and this group seemed to be clamoring for noob representation), after taking the write-in votes outside and tabulating them, the two adults leading the program returned, ballots having been discarded, to proclaim that the existing incumbents were once again reelected.

What was left for the rest of us? Well, we got to do the manual labour, and we got to try to sell this stuff to people we knew.

We got to bask in the glory of our leadership team.

Nah.

I never went back. If they were using my ball, I would have taken it and gone home.

I've always pondered whether I was a sore loser, or whether this particular program was misrepresented. I lean towards the latter.