A letter to new employees from Steve Christie
Executive Director, Camp Crystal Lake
On behalf of the entire Camp Crystal Lake family, I want to welcome you to our team! We are looking forward to a very lively summer, but before we begin I need to highlight some changes to our personnel policy.
First and foremost, our calendar is a little different this year. We understand that most parents want to get their kids off to camp as soon as the school year ends, but we’ve made the decision to delay the start of camp until Saturday, June 14. This is an accommodation being made at the demand of our lawyers, but I mean, come on; this is the seventh time we’ve tried to re-open this camp, doesn’t it just make sense? I suggest you use Friday as a Yom Hashoah-esque day of remembrance to reflect on the decades-long genocide of attractive 20-somethings.
Second, I know in previous summers it has been our policy to hire one black, handicapped or gay counselor for diversity. For
obvious reasons, this policy has been discontinued.
When you arrive at camp, there will be several points of business we will have to address. After krav maga training, we will consider the matter of replacing our ridiculously outdated camp
theme song; I can’t believe we ever thought it was cool.
Speaking of which, our new dress code prohibits the wearing of crop tops. Gentlemen, I shouldn’t have to explain that this policy applies just as much to you as it does to our female counselors, but experience tells me that I absolutely must. Same goes for shorts, men. Everywhere I go, men seem to have figured out this whole wearing pants thing, then camp starts and – bam – batch city. So yeah, I need you to have at least 20 percent of your quadriceps covered at all times.
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the stories, so I want to make a promise to you: I will never ask you to lie about what kind of institution we’re running here. Our camp is very forthright about its history. Yeah, there were some murders, yes the United Nations deemed it a human tragedy, we’ve dealt with these issues and moved on. That being said, we do not acknowledge anything that occurred between 1984 and 1986; there was some shit with a psychic and zombies that we’d all just rather forget.
Some of you may wonder how we are able to be so open about a safety record that is, by any humane standard, simply reprehensible. We’ve actually decided to embrace it. The summer camp industry is very competitive, but it also affords us a certain latitude. You see, no decent parent would send their child to us. So we’re left with a clientele that really has no other options. I don’t mean like one of those 80s movies where our kids are a bunch of scrappy ne’r-do-wells who couldn’t afford to go to the rich-kid camp across the lake, I mean the kids who come to our camp can’t go to other camps because other camps have policies barring children who have deemed burdens of the state. We take the outrageously poor, children with drug-resistant forms of leprosy, that sort of thing. We’ve got juvenile sex offenders in spades.
If your best option is working here this summer, I fully expect you fall into one of these categories yourself, but again, my expectations are pretty low. As long as we keep Camp Crystal Lake one step ahead of Jerry Sandusky’s camp, it’ll be a great summer.
Sincerely yours,
Steve Christie
Executive Director, Camp Crystal Lake, a division of Halliburton
