Agreed, rain and dark and bad pavement markings are scary.
Agreed, rain and dark and bad pavement markings are scary.
I wish I had the option but got to go to work. I could go in later on rainy days but then traffic would be a nightmare going to and from work. Trading one crappy situation for another.Originally Posted by catherine
A friend who is my age has poor eyesight due to diabetes. She called me for an emergency trip across the river to another state to pick up a dog a couple months ago. It was at night and she couldn’t drive then and they were doing a dog pick up.
Working with hobby groups and in volunteer gigs, it’s just as bad as working a in real life job in some aspects.
A president of one of my organizations only answers about one in three of my email messages. So when he doesn’t answer I don’t know if:
1. He’s too busy to pay attention to it and it’s not a priority, So I should go ahead and do what I think it’s best
2. He has deep thoughts about it and he wants to come back later give me those thoughts
3. He’s annoyed by my question and is shoving it aside and will not answer
So this is déjà vu about my job when I worked. I only got answers from my boss about a quarter of the time.
And then there’s “fading.” While fading wasn’t as popular in the world of pay as it is in the world of volunteers, fading exists in both worlds. I am trying to untangle something that’s been an ongoing problem in my neighborhood association for a few years. Somebody took up the mantle about two years ago to fix it and she was very capable. She outlined her plan. Time went on and she didn’t continue in a particular board role but she was still in the background doing some work. Then apparently about six months ago she faded out and never announced “hey I’m gone now. “
The same issue that she set out to solve is still a problem and it has been made more complicated because we have to figure out work she did and apparently didn’t pass on to anyone else.
I will say this about volunteers and how they need to end their roles: I observed two little elderly ladies who had been quite competent in their lives but their minds were getting weaker. Both of them served as treasurers for two different organizations. Both of them surrendered their treasury duties in very clear ways by saying “I will not do this job any longer “and they relinquished all treasury materials to their organization.
In both cases I took over the treasurers job and it was interesting that the little ladies had been making the same errors – transposing check numbers with dollar amounts in the checkbook log. I think part of this is that these organizations wrote only about three checks a year so it’s not a skill that was often used. But again, they relinquished the job in the way they should. Good for them!
I’m seeing a fair number of little elderly ladies fading away and we can’t get an answer from them to the question “do you quit? “ So their role is not performed and in some cases that is a problem for the organization.
I never faded away. It’s really thoughtless. I always let people know so I can be replaced.
Yeah, it is thoughtless but in half of these cases of fading it is due to literally “less thought.” A lot of garden club ladies are in their 80s and 90s and their minds are fading. And then we add in Covid isolation which makes everyone worse.
That’s why I admire the two women in their mid-80s who gave up their treasury jobs as clearly and efficiently as they did everything else in the organization.
I've been fighting that in a couple of organizations.
In one, anyone who did anything for the organization became an officer (You collect pop cans and turn them in for money for the club? You're an officer! Here's your title!) which became incredibly unwieldy. People "faded", they had an argument with someone in the club and left the organization, they moved to Arizona for the winter and their job didn't get done for several months, they passed on, etc. Of course, they still wanted to vote on organizational business.
That was changed when we overhauled our charter and bylaws. Just five officers and appointees for special projects whose terms run no longer than a year (if the issue is still there, the new president has to appoint them or someone else to the position for another year). If you want to be in on the action, become an officer. None of this grandfathered for life do it when you feel like it and keep it to yourself business. And we have one place (cloud) where we record the stuff we need to know on a continuing basis -- who holds the key to our event venue, who's listed as a signer for checks, where our state paperwork is, etc.
At another organization, we needed to update our Web site for the coming year. "Dan" was kind enough to foot the bill for hosting so the club didn't have to pay for it. But he alone got all the notices from the hosting company. Now he's decided he wants to take a break from being so active with the organization. He didn't relinquish anything proactively, though. The current club president had to ask Dan for the password to the Web site when no one else could get into it to update it. It took a few weeks to get a hold of Dan. Thank the stars he wasn't run over by a truck or something... I'm now the Webmaster and when I changed the password, the president and treasurer were told what it is. We're not going through that again.
They're volunteer help and God love 'em that they volunteer as long as they do (that gets tougher all the time). But there still is the requirement to run like a business. That seems to be difficult for most people to understand.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
I am leading the rewriting of our bylaws for our 50 year old neighborhood organization. We are expanding the number of elected officers as current president wishes,As part of our pattern of adding a new elected officer about every 2 to 3 years.I've been fighting that in a couple of organizations.
In one, anyone who did anything for the organization became an officer (You collect pop cans and turn them in for money for the club? You're an officer! Here's your title!) which became incredibly unwieldy. People "faded", they had an argument with someone in the club and left the organization, they moved to Arizona for the winter and their job didn't get done for several months, they passed on, etc. Of course, they still wanted to vote on organizational business.
That was changed when we overhauled our charter and bylaws. Just five officers and appointees for special projects whose terms run no longer than a year (if the issue is still there, the new president has to appoint them or someone else to the position for another year). If you want to be in on the action, become an officer. None of this grandfathered for life do it when you feel like it and keep it to yourself business. And we have one place (cloud) where we record the stuff we need to know on a continuing basis -- who holds the key to our event venue, who's listed as a signer for checks, where our state paperwork is, etc.
At another organization, we needed to update our Web site for the coming year. "Dan" was kind enough to foot the bill for hosting so the club didn't have to pay for it. But he alone got all the notices from the hosting company. Now he's decided he wants to take a break from being so active with the organization. He didn't relinquish anything proactively, though. The current club president had to ask Dan for the password to the Web site when no one else could get into it to update it. It took a few weeks to get a hold of Dan. Thank the stars he wasn't run over by a truck or something... I'm now the Webmaster and when I changed the password, the president and treasurer were told what it is. We're not going through that again.
They're volunteer help and God love 'em that they volunteer as long as they do (that gets tougher all the time). But there still is the requirement to run like a business. That seems to be difficult for most people to understand.
Already the Board has become unwieldy in size and I think the next major bylaws rewrite will be to squeeze it down and trim off maybe up to half of elected officers. But I will be long gone by that time. Congratulations Steve on getting your officers reduced to five!
It’s kind of ironic that as I actively participate in this bylaws revision to add yet another position, I see that we really need to trim them. But whatever.
I do get to do something dear to my heart: cut out huge swaths of very detailed procedural yammering in our bylaws that were introduced by two presidents in particular. I had to do research on one of them to identify who did it.Another article that was impossible to understand (very specifically written for a contentious issue, now dead) was put into place by a friend of mine when he was president.The new people on the board have no clue what that is about when they read it.
We already have enough trouble with our organization not following bylaws so my main goal was to simplify it and write clearly the limits of the Board of Directors.
Steve, as for passwords and digital storage — that has been the most frustrating thing about my organization in modern times. They’re like demonic toddlers, their attention span is so short. The biggest problematic fade was with someone who was straightening up access points to all of our digital accounts. You could imagine the problems that resulted when she faded and we turned over two presidents within two months. I’m still trying to sort that out but my attention is not especially welcome yet they don’t know what they don’t know.
Lots of sympathy for the trials with volunteers. I rarely volunteer anymore and just for specific short-term projects with the parameters defined and signed off by the board.
As Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”
My sympathies. The hardest part about making that work for us is that many of the participants/officers are of a generation that finds using their phone for more than voice calls challenging (forget about the computer if they have one). The concept of a cloud or of a strong password that's changed when people rotate off the board each year is foreign to them. So there's the mechanics of how to actually get into the cloud site to add minutes and bookkeeping backups and education about why the password should change and why it isn't just last year's password with the year tacked onto the end of it.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
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