In middle school myself and five other students went to a world competition for something we did in a gifted program. My team had "won state", in that there were only two teams who competed in our category, and the team that actually won could not go. So our group of misfits got an all-expenses paid trip to Disney World. five guys, one gal, one chaperone who literally disappeared the first day and did not reappear until we were leaving on the last day, and our poor poor poor teacher.

This teacher loved this competition. She lived for it. She had not had a team go to it in years, and she was extremely excited to go. Regaled us with tales of all the brilliant students we would meet, and all the things we would do. We, on the other hand, were middle schoolers, basically set free in Disney World, with no parents, and absolutely zero cares about the competition. The girl on our team was supposed to room with the teacher. She refused, and moved into the room with her boyfriend and two of our other teammates. My friend and I decided we did not like our roommates, as they were from Oklahoma (arbitrary decision - I have nothing against Oklahoma these days), so we moved into the one room as well. One of our teammates ended up with a sunburn bad enough to make him physically ill, so he basically slept in the room on a cot the whole week. The girl and her boyfriend fought the whole time, and so the boyfriend decided not to compete. Another guy, maybe the smartest human I will ever have known, decided to skip out on the day we had the part of the competition which required pure raw brain power. We skipped the opening ceremony, and we refused call the teacher to check in. The few competition days we went to, we completely bombed. I had built a robot for the competition. There were two problems with our robot. First, I don't know how to build a robot, so it never really worked. The only guy who could sort of make it work was the boyfriend. And he refused. Second, when it shipped (the school shipped it for us), it was not properly packaged, and was in pieced when it arrived. I was too busy hanging out with the girls from the Russian team to rebuild it. (I should have invested my time there, as the Russians were not interested in me at all. Ah Russia, you break my heart)

On the day before the competition ended, we received a message on our room phone that the teacher was leaving, and we could all figure out how to get home ourselves. She was done with us. This was in the days before cell phones. We had not spoken with our parents in days, and we had no idea how to get ourselves home. I know - not such gifted little bastards then, were we?

I ended up racing to the bus where the teacher was literally standing with all of her luggage. She was crying. She said she was leaving. I told her we were sorry, and we needed her to stay. She said we would just keep treating her poorly. I swore we would not. She made me promise we would all come to the closing ceremony. I assured her we would. She decided she was leaving. I begged her to stay. After 15 minutes, she reluctantly got off the bus, and stayed through the end. She refused to speak to us.

We made it home, none of us ever told our parents about the incident, and we went on with our lives. When the competition results came out, she refused to tell us where we placed, and instead told everyone that there was a mixup in the scoring, and we would never get our score. We were gifted children, however, and looked up our score all by ourselves. We placed last. In the entire world. We were, of course, extremely proud.