Booze and parents don’t always mix
As much as parents are adults, they can still get messy after a few glasses of wine. During one particularly boozy event, the little boys’ room became a wet room when a few dads had trouble with their aim over the smaller than normal urinals.
It never rains but it pours
I’ll never forget the year we tried to hold our fair during an absolute monsoon. It started bucketing down on the Monday of that week and didn’t stop. The whole of the Saturday was torrential rain. We ran around borrowing tents and gazebos to try to keep things dry, but as you can imagine, not many people came. Things got worse when we put the borrowed tents up in the hall to dry. No one had told the caretaking staff, and when they came in on the Sunday, they sent everything to off-site storage. It took a few days to reunite the tents and gazebos with their unhappy owners.
Advertise, advertise, advertise!
The PTA had planned a car boot sale for the last weekend of the month. For the first one we’d had loads of sellers and only a handful of buyers, so we stepped up the advertising. We bought a huge banner and made signs to direct people. Loads of buyers turned up, but only two sellers came!
Don’t clash with big events
We held our summer fair early one year, but we hadn’t checked the date with enough of the parents. There’s a big Muslim community in our area and the fair clashed with Ramadan, meaning a lot of the parents couldn’t eat or drink between dawn and sunset.
What’s that smell?
We were holding a jumble sale, but as we put one bag of items out, a decidedly musty smell filled the air. Most people avoided that corner of the room!
