Back in college I volunteered for the student programming board, which was basically a few teenagers with a shoestring budget trying to provide some social activity other than weekly blackout drunkenness.
The most valuable ”here’s what you can expect from life” lesson was the time we talked the theater department into putting on a murder-mystery dinner. Again, literally just a bunch of theater kids looking for a rare opportunity to act in the community, hosting a show for bunch of kids looking for a rare non-frathouse date.
I show up an hour before showtime to unlock the doors, and there are ****ing
protesters up and down the sidewalk. Our ads had attracted the attention of some theology students who were outraged at the idea of “commercializing murder”. So the dinner attendees, dates in tow, had to pass through a ****ing protest line. This was in a community of like 2000 people where everyone knew each other and (generally) looked out for each other.
One of the protesters made the mistake of leaving his MURDER IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT sign on the sidewalk, which I swiftly appropriated and which somehow ended up stapled to a frat house ceiling for years afterward.