... of having your home address and telephone number in all of the Land Rover comics.
Not to mention being open and accessible to all of your members - even providing a sympathetic ear at 11.45pm on a Sunday night when the poor darlings haven't had 48 hour delivery service of their spare parts (not that spares is anything to do with me, but not to worry, eh?).
The pleasure of fielding calls for all committee members when they're on holiday is a sheer delight, as is being constantly on-call to help members with their technical and mechanical problems.
Many people could be mistaken for thinking that 'doing what you were elected to do', i.e., running the "Membership Office" - sending out
700 renewals each year, processing the returns and payments, sending reminders, sending out renewed members' membership cards, processing 100+ new members each year, stuffing envelopes and new membership packs - simply isn't good enough. Quite right too IMO.Such euphoria cannot, surely, be topped?
Well yes, it can...
Our Spare Parts chap works seriously long hours, frightening shift patterns even by Victorian standards, and devotes what little spare time he has left to enjoying his vehicles and serving our club and members. Every now and then though, we have to let him go on holiday, not to mention running his "life". At these times he doesn't do 'providing spares'. I know, outrageous isn't it!
Still, we can always call Martyn can't we? If we haven't got the service we think we deserve, simply call Martyn and have a rant!
Generally I will - as I said above, lend a sympathetic ear and try to gently remind members that this is a voluntary club, run by volunteers in their valuable free time. Most often this is quite fine for most members, however, once in a while ('once' in this case, means increasingly more frequent) someone really has to have a 'pop'.
Well, today was one of those 'onces', and I lost my temper BIG TIME.
The joy, oh the joy...