The Goat Pen

so every year for the past 5 years I've participated in Relay for Life.

If you're not familiar with Relay for Life, its a charity event that local communities put on to raise money for cancer, sponsored by the American Cancer Society.

In our community it was huge, almost a carnival like atmosphere -and we attended as part of the boy scouts. Groups would get together - church, business, schools - and create teams that would set up a booth at the location the event was being held. My towns Relay is always held at the high school around the track and it would be packed with groups selling baked goods, grilling burgers and dogs, walking tacos, games, face painting , etc.,

3 years ago the people involved with it resigned and the person working with ACS quit, so they asked for new volunteers. Only a few people signed up and for the past 2 years its been a disaster. It went from being a 1 day event that raised $80K to raising $11K - no one showed up for it and only a few teams signed up.

Because I had to be there for scouting, I decided last year, for some reason I've yet to coherently remember, to volunteer along with my wife to help with the event this year.

So we started meeting in September , first at the county level and I got my first inkling of what I signed up for. As various community teams showed up - Brown county for example had 9 people show up to head their event, Anderson had 8, Clermont had 14, our group had 4 - with my wife and I making up 2 of the 4. The way this is structured to be a successful event, you have 4 team leads who are supposed to head up teams of 3 or 4 people on their own.

By November our group had grown to 7, with one guy being some weirdo who showed up at the planning meetings but wouldn't sit with us so I think he was just a random creeper, and 2 college girls who showed up , volunteered to do a bunch of shit and we never saw them again.

So we trudge on thru the winter planning this thing - setting up sign up booths at schools - I personally went to our local high school and two surrounding vocational schools and a private catholic school trying to get kids to sign up. I went to local business - gamestop, penn station, lykens oil, kroger, meijer, lowes, butterbees , the ford and chevy dealerships, etc asking them to participate in one form or the other.

What I've learned is , its incredibly hard to do this kind of work, especially if you don't live and breathe it 24/7.

I wasn't driven by the same motivations as the others - while I've been affected by cancer as much as anyone else, my motivations were simply to not attend an event that sucked - and I tried to do whatever I could to make it better.

So I lined up food trucks to show up for the event, I had a guy on tap to have fireworks at midnight, I had commitment from restaurants to provide food, gamestop to bring in a video game table , prize donations for games, on and on

and this became all consuming - this and the event I'm planning at work in late July has just taken away my summer from me. And by late April I'm starting to get serious burnout from begging all these people and having to follow up with all these people and to meet with all these people, etc.,etc

Finally the week of the event rolls around and its just one issue after another, the tent people don't deliver the tents so I have to beg the local swim club next door to let us borrow their cheap old broken ass tents, the guy that promised to have a craft table for kids setup tells his job to fuck off and burns me on freebies from there, the company providing free inflatable slides and jump houses calls us up and says they can't do it for free, we have to pay them $200 per now , etc

And of course I check the weather on Tuesday and it shows that TD Bill that is hitting Texas is going to roll into our area on Saturday.

I take Friday off from work to setup tents so its just me, my son, my wife and the 2 other people from the event, and we're trying to setup this goddamned circus tent that I'm pretty sure was designed to be setup using elephants but by now its clear we going to get a ton of rain, and I've been out in tents enough times in the rain to know that you don't try to do anything productive under a big tent during a heavy rain.

Saturday comes, deluge of rain as predicted, two of the smaller tents have collapsed, the tables and chairs are soaking wet under the big tent from wind blowing the rain in, the food trucks cancel, the inflatable guy cancels, the fireworks guy is a no show, of the 60 cancer survivors returning RSVPs , 14 show - and the event starts out as a huge disappointment. We end up moving to the junior high school gym to have the luncheon , abandoning the circus tent and setting up with a few booths inside the gym until 3pm - our contract says we have to be out of the gym by 3pm and we're trying to decide if we cancel the thing or not (its scheduled from noon saturday to 6am sunday) and just as 3pm rolls around the rain stops so we move everything to the track - and by 5pm we're kind of back on schedule with a blazing sun and crazy humidity.

The rest of the evening was just non-stop one issue after another - the guy we asked to emcee the event went awol so my redneck sounding ass had to get up there on make announcementa, one team had a sign that said "kicking ass for cancer" which some church objected to, just shit like that for the next 5 hours.

Finally around 11pm we showed a rated G movie on a large homemade movie screen (using my computer and projector) and that gave me about an hour to hide and rest.

So around 4am we see lightning in the distance and decide to tear everything down - and true misery is being up for almost 24 hours, running your ass off to where you have blisters on your feet, your legs are chaffed, you're sunburned, dehydrated and you have to tear down this circus tent thing that takes about 6 people to carry to the truck 200 yards away, take out trash, fold up chairs, move tables, etc all under the threat of a serious storm about to hit

After all is said and done, we ended up raising $20K which is a far cry below what we had hoped.

I'd like to say that I'm in it for the long haul but I'm never going to volunteer to do anything like this again. It was just frustration after frustration and all my wife and I could say yesterday after sleeping off and on for the entire day was "thank god this shit is over". I wasn't looking for accolades for doing this - but I kind of see my participation in this as a huge failure. I can honestly say I did all I could think to do with this and I didn't even come close to hitting the mark. It will go down as one of the least rewarding experiences I've ever been involved with in my life.

Now I have to try to function at work today and get my mind back on my job and the event I have to run in July (for which I'm paid to do)

"Because I had to be there for scouting, I decided last year, for some reason I've yet to coherently remember, to volunteer along with my wife to help with the event this year."

Maybe that's where I hooked up with her in my dream...

if you screwed her on a football field with a bunch of teenagers around you.......

the funny part of this is my son and daughter headed up a team.

She did henna tattoos, face painting, tie dye T-shirts and cookies/brownies with her friends.

My son and his friends setup a couple of Wii's and charged $1 for kids to play 10 minutes.

They got to hang out with their friends all night and had a blast. They both want to do it again next year.

No, I just played with her nipple...

No good deed goes unpunished.

sardis wrote:No good deed goes unpunished.

Your story beats mine by a mile:

I did something sorta similar with the American Heart. I'm. A longtime instructor in BCLS (CPR, essentially), ACLS (advanced cardiac life support, where you teach when to defibrillate and the drugs to give), and PALS (the pediatric advanced life support).

Volunteering my time to teach these classes went from once a month, to almost every weekend because other instructors blew it off and they called me. People bitched about failing, and lost cards in the mail, and a million other things.


Now, I write a check as my contribution. It's sad, but Sardis' advice above is kinda true.

hedge wrote:No, I just played with her nipple...

you must know her well - she demands that during sex

Are there Cliff Notes or do I have to read the whole thing?

I'd hate to interrupt your busy schedule

I'm proud of you, eCat, for what it's worth.

To me, the moral of the story is that if you want to get something like this done, you need at least 20 people all giving a significant part of their time. You should have been a member of a large church. They could have provided the necessary labor with sufficient commitment. Say what you want about organized religion, their institutions can give you the necessary support to get these things done successfully.

no you're right on that.

Its actually an excellent idea and I'll pass those thoughts onto the two remaining people on the team.

If a large church took ownership of the event, I can see it being successful.

AlabamAlum wrote:

sardis wrote:No good deed goes unpunished.

Your story beats mine by a mile:

I did something sorta similar with the American Heart. I'm. A longtime instructor in BCLS (CPR, essentially), ACLS (advanced cardiac life support, where you teach when to defibrillate and the drugs to give), and PALS (the pediatric advanced life support).

Volunteering my time to teach these classes went from once a month, to almost every weekend because other instructors blew it off and they called me. People bitched about failing, and lost cards in the mail, and a million other things.


Now, I write a check as my contribution. It's sad, but Sardis' advice above is kinda true.

yep, considering my out of pocket costs for this - where I had to take up the cost to cover whatever initiative we tried and came up short with volunteers, I'd be better off just writing a check.

I sent the ACS representative a nice email thanking her for giving me the opportunity to volunteer for a worthy cause and passed on Brooklyn's suggestion that a church may be a more organized approach than a loose band of volunteers. I let them know that I'd be helping my kids run teams next year but I would step down from taking a lead role next year.

My wife has been trying for years to get me to for homeless shelter volunteering

I spend every day listening to tales of woe/heartache/disease/suffering/malingering/disabilitiy at work
you take it home with you after work but you don't want to go listen and see more tales of gloom despair and agony

besides if only 50% of the country is working doesn't that leave the other 50% to do the volunteer work?

My kids participated in Relay for Life when they were in HS and the next day was always painful after they stayed up all night. Now, my company is the biggest sponsor to the local event (different HS town). We mobilize our work force to make it meaningful and profitable for the ACS. We sponsor t-shirts, activities, and have our marketing team and sales force present with give aways. (I sometimes get my pic in the local paper with an oversize check). Its the capitalistic version of Brooklyn's "get a church involved'.

we have a couple of sponsors who are more than happy to cut a $1K check but as far as involvement goes, we don't have it.

I asked my company to get involved and they told they didn't do that sort of thing. United Way has their hooks into alot of these companies and its hard to get them beyond that.

Another thing that de-motivated me. When I first started they talked about how ACS has a 1-800 hotline kind of thing for cancer patients - maybe they can't pay an electric bill or need a ride to the store - and ACS would attempt to cover the costs from funds generated by the local charity work. A way to keep it into the community. I felt really good about that, especially hearing about the cost of life saving cancer drugs.

I'd been preaching that mantra to the business and groups I hit up and about a month before the event, the ACS person told me they stopped that .Now the 1-800 number refers them to local churches or other community support groups instead of doling out money.

Kind of shitty I thought.

eCat wrote:I'd hate to interrupt your busy schedule

Well you did!

Alot of times you wish you could disappear like this guy did....Except maybe choose a warmer climate. A long read.

http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit

yea I read that guys story, its fascinating

Its nothing short of amazing this guy could live in the winters of Maine with not much more than a tent - and wouldn't make fires to keep warm because he was afraid of being seen

He said when he heard some kind of bird, he knew the worst of winter was behind him.

unused thread to easily find Goat Pen Bracket

https://yho.com/tourney?g=90335&k=8e9a0 ... oc_trk=lnk

my wife reminded me this morning that today is our dogs 1st birthday

I reminded her that its a damn dog