How to be a winner or an alpha male?

A clerical error causes wrong teenage contest winner to be crowned, error found, how should it be fixed?

• A community group has a yearly contest to sell admissions to a local festival. The reward is a college scholarship and queen/king title and several parade appearances for the winner plus an 8% commission for all contestants. A queen is crowned and less than an hour later an error in addition is found and another person should have been crowned. It is decided that both should get a scholarship, the person who should have won would eventually become co-queen but in the meantime should pretend that she did not win. A week later, it is announced that there are now two queens with no other explanation on why, no acknowledgement that the second girl actually won the contest. How should this have been handled? Is the true winner justified in being upset or should she just be glad she is getting the scholarship and suck it up as the first queen says? Should the group that holds the contest do anything further or should they just "lay low"?

• Answer:

  It sounds like the people who made the error or ran the contest are worried about looking bad for their error. Trying to hide their error makes it look even worse. They should announce their error, give the rightful winner her due, give both girls scholarships as the two highest performers, and let them both appear in parades, and give them the credit they deserve. Covering up mistakes is unsavory and looks hypocritical. Whoever was responsible for the error needs to make sure nothing like that will happen again. Live and learn.