Life is so unfair

I settled down in front of the TV on Thursday night and flicked through my cable-less channels. Nothing caught my fancy. I finally settled on the The Biggest Loser*--hoping to get a few pointers for myself, maybe.

The participants were preparing for one of their tasks. They two teams, red and blue, were instructed to get onto an escalator going downhill and climb. The winning team--the one with the last person still climbing--would get $10,000 to divide equally between the team members.

The team members took their places on two escalators, one for each team. The clock started ticking, and the five members of each team started climbing. The first two on each team didn't even seem to try. The first gave up in a little over a minute, and before two minutes were up, the second two also let the escalators carry them down. The third from each team tried harder, but also stopped soon after. The last two continued, trudging up, step by step, sweat pouring off them, huffing and puffing. The second-to-last member of the red team even came close to giving up but forced herself to keep going. Finally, it was down to the last person from each team. Neither would give up. Finally, the blue team's remaining member, a teacher desperate for the money, panted out his apology and stopped climbing. The remaining woman from the red team finally collapsed, and had to be dragged off the escalator when it reached the bottom.

The red team was ecstatic, no doubt about the money they would get to split between them. It seemed so unfair. Two of them didn't even try, and got to walk away with $2,000 each, thanks to the efforts of their other team members. Sure there's no "I" in team and they cheered the rest of the team on, but come on! I guess, in a way, that team was representative of all groups -- there are the slackers, the ones who do just enough and the ones who do their share plus the slackers' share. But it bothered me. The money should have been divided in proportion to the amount of time they spent on the escalator. At least that way, everyone would have been motivated to do their best instead of some of them leaving it up to the rest of team to do all the work.

Ah well, not much in life is fair, is it? And it's not like anyone's giving me $2,000 for climbing an escalator!

*The Biggest Loser is a show in which people who are significantly overweight compete to lose the weight. The winner is decided (I think) based on which team loses the most weight and one member of the team that loses less weight each week is voted off.