Throwing Poo

Several months ago I joined the board of a local hunger charity in hopes that the experience would help me to hate people a little less.  Especially poor people.  I really hate the poor, with their loud, grumbling stomachs and their constant begging for free medicine to cure their awful children of the rickets or scabies or gout or whatever. 

Plus, I needed put some credit on my “Get Out Of Being An Asshole Free” card.  It’s been an angry couple of months.

Anyway, a big part of my regular “paying” job is to spend colossal amounts of time attempting to convince the local boards throughout our organization to make fewer idiotic decisions.  While I think I’m pretty good at my job (and would surely be an improvement over you at yours), the vast potential for improvement all but guarantees success. 

So I thought that joining a local board would be a neat little twist for me.  Instead of trying to sway people away from the alluring glimmer of stupidity, I can just say, “Listen, dipshits, I do this for a fucking living.  If we were making a decision about purchasing a colostomy bag or fixing macaroni & cheese from a box, then we’d ask you.”  

Volunteering is good for the soul.

Here’s the thing though: volunteers are inherently lazy.  People who sit on boards will gladly let you make the decisions. Gladly, as long as you do all the actual work which results from the decision.  Then, once it’s done, they will linger around to scrutinize your work like an IRS agent who’s been assigned to audit a titty bar.

Here’s another thing: extremely smart people mysteriously lose IQ points when they volunteer. Having worked with volunteers for over a decade, this one has always perplexed me.  I’ve seen everything from business executives standing around watching old women stack boxes of t-shirts (“Oh, do you want us to help them?”),  to young professionals with college degrees ask me if they should put the coffee cups over by the coffee pot.  It is a truly amazing phenomenon.  It’s as if the mere good intention of volunteering caused some sort of massive, temporary head trauma. 

Here’s the last thing: lazy, stupid volunteers like…no, expect…to be made to feel good about their lazy, stupid efforts.  Everyone in the biz knows this.  It is a sunk cost of doing business as a charity.

And in my new role as a volunteer board member, it is the thing I have struggled with the most. 

After every board meeting, our Executive Director (the senior paid staff member) takes a few minutes to share an anecdote about someone who was helped by the organization.  I’ve learned to tolerate this. 

Last week, however, in the “spirit of the holiday season,” instead of an anecdote she decided to read a children’s book.  Not a passage from a children’s book.  Not a few pages from a children’s book.  This overweight, sixty-something woman rose up from her chair, moved to the middle of the room and performed an entire fucking children’s book, complete with voices, animated gestures and animal noises to a group of adults.  It was like watching the severely-disabled bastard child of Captain Kangaroo and Nurse Ratched perform her very own made-up one-woman show. 

The moment was surreal.  I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone, and it took every bit of my will to not jump up and scream, “What in the name of all that is decent and sane are you thinking?!   Please, please tell me you are drunk.  Please, just say it so I have a plausible reason to wipe this retarded episode from my mind without another thought.  Otherwise, someone will have to been thrown off the room of this building tonight.” 

But I didn’t.  I just sat there and stared at my notebook for the longest 20 minutes of my life.

Now I hate people even more.