martin connolly
This review is about summer camps. I can’t speak to anything else they offer to the community. My kid went to summer camps there last year and had a great time. It sucks that they only accept PayPal, so that’s not great for tax purposes but whatevs. The registration process is needlessly outdated and difficult. This year, instead of printing out the pdf, scanning it, paying on PayPal, and never hearing back from them, I decided to visit in person in hopes that the process might be more streamlined. Alas, it was worse. The website says 8am-6pm. At 9:05, no one was there so I called the posted phone number. A person answered and told me to wait a minute and she would send someone over. Sure enough, 5 minutes later a disheveled gentleman wandered in from the street and—without a word to me—entered the door code and shuffled inside. He grunted toward a back office and I waited at the front counter. While I waited in silence, every three minutes or so a loud electrical crackling sound would spark up from some unknown corner. It sounded like a dozen marbles being dropped onto a hardwood floor. The first time, it startled me (I thought a breaker had popped), but by the third or fourth time it had happened I was used to it. And still the man that had let me in was wordlessly typing away in the nearby office. I felt like I was in a Netflix show about a dystopian bureaucracy. After 15 minutes I had had enough and decided to move along with my day. 3 minutes later, I received a cryptic phone call from the same woman I spoke to originally, and she asked me why I had left. The paperwork was ready and I should return immediately. I did, and the door was still locked. The disheveled man was gone, but I peered through the window and saw a crocheted orange doll with a blue hat had taken his place. I spent the next 3 hours running errands and then returned just before 1pm. The doors were still locked so I called the number again. It went to voicemail so I left a message asking if there was a good time to come in to sign up my kid for summer camp. 10 minutes later (almost home) I got a call from the original person again. She explained that most of the summer camp weeks were full. I asked her which weeks were not full, as I was very flexible. She seemed annoyed because that would mean “looking at the books.” After reiterating that I was flexible, she agreed to “look at the books” and call me back. She never called back. Anyhoo, very weird. I’m glad my kid had a fun time last year but I’m not disappointed that she won’t be going this year. Maybe they are understaffed or underpaid—who knows! But if I wanted my kid to get the same David Lynch experience as I did then I would just jump into her room while she’s sleeping while wearing a red dress and talking backwards.
