...When All is Said and Dunn

It all started a couple of years ago. My son was playing his first year of baseball at Temple City National Little League. By the end of the season my wife was unhappy with some of the flaws she had seen that were inherent in the system, so she decided to write a letter to the Board of Directors. “Be careful,” I warned, “you could end up getting more than you bargained for.” But she wrote the letter and sent it anyway.

After the Board received and read the letter, they contacted Stacey and asked her to come to the next Board of Directors' meeting. “No” I said, “It's a trap!” I knew my wife and her inability to say no to anyone but our kids. She would be easy prey for them once they lured her into their lair. But like a lamb to the slaughter she went. I could smell the blood in the air.

Upon her return she seemed satisfied with the events that transpired during the meeting and that they had commended her on her observations. Oh no, she took the bait, they've got her now. It would only be a matter of time before the other shoe drops. I won't say anything now; I'll just wait and see.

Sure enough as the next season approaches the new President, Kristen Dearth, knowing a sucker when she sees one, asks my wife to join the Board of Directors as the Director of Publicity. Before I knew what happened, SHE said yes and WE became the new Directors of Publicity. Or I guess I should say she became the Director of Publicity and I became her assistant.

If I was to be volunteered for something I was going to help her the best I could. So I took the plunge head on into the deep end of the pool. I did not want to become one of those volunteers that I bitch about all of the time, the ones who either do nothing at all or worse yet, an inept job.

My wife was driven, making flyers, writing articles, and publishing newsletters, and finding places to advertise anywhere she could. She, with a little help from me, was doing a fabulous job, a marvelous job, unfortunately too good of a job. Because her good work was not only getting noticed by National Little League, the people at American Little League and AYSO were noticing as well.

As of today, she is now the Director of Publicity for all three. I did mention the fact that she can't say no, didn't I? So here we are volunteered to the hilt and trying to keep all the factions happy at the same time. So far, so good. My wife is quite the juggler and is managing to keep all of the balls in the air at the same time.

This is not to say that occasionally a clown does not come rushing up in a blatant attempt to knock the balls from your hands. The best you can do is to swerve, duck, and keep the balls moving, otherwise you are doomed. Sometimes you can see it coming; other times you get blind-sided.

This week's case in point, which should have been a simple exercise and had been in the past, became a frustrating example in why a lot of people don't volunteer. The product of an ineffective administrative decision at the school board offices. The task at hand, dropping off flyers to be included in the schools' Wednesday folders for National Little League sign-ups. (By the way, they are tomorrow, 9-1 at Live Oak Park.)

For those of you who don't have kids in school, every Wednesday the elementary schools send home a folder containing announcements that the parents need to know about. Last year all we had to do was count out the right number of flyers for each school and drop them off. The schools put them in the folders, done.

This year they have made the system so difficult to deal with, it was though I was asking for nuclear launch codes. The flyer had to be faxed to the Superintendent's Office where she, the Superintendent, had to approve it personally. They informed us that they would then send us an approval form that needed to be attached to the stack of flyers. Without this all-important approval, your flyers would not be distributed. We were told that it would take “24 hours or less” to get the “approval form”.

With this knowledge in hand, we faxed the approval request over on Sunday, granted not a work day, but how long could it take on Monday morning to look at a flyer and say O.K.? Apparently not a day. All day Monday we were informed that the Superintendent was “behind closed doors” and would look at it as soon as she came out. At the end of the day Monday, we were informed that she had left the building, with Elvis, without looking at our flyer.

At this point my wife is desperate. She had spent hours counting out 3,000 flyers into groups of 20 or 33 (depending on the size of the class) and was starting to believe they would never get distributed. After multiple calls by both my wife and myself to the Superintendent's office on Tuesday, we finally get the “approval form”, which turns out to be nothing more than the flyer with the Superintendent's initials at the bottom. Wait a minute--where's this Holy Grail of a form I've been waiting 48 hours for? At least make an attempt to fake me out, hand draw a form with crayons or something.

How about the fact that we were asked that from now on to give the Superintendent a week to review our flyer and give her approval. Say What?? How could it possibly take a week to decide if sign-ups are appropriate for our children to know about. If the issue is that she is too busy to look at it in less than a week, than let's rethink what duties of hers she must delegate this important decision to.

Is this really a task that is so vitally important to the School District that the Superintendent has to stop what she's doing to look at and approve flyers? I would think that a secretary or even an aide could look at it and approve it. How about letting each school decide for itself if this is an appropriate flyer to be sending home. Is it appropriate to let our parents know that Saturday is Little League sign-ups? I would hope that the Superintendent has more important things to be concentrating on, like our kids' education.

What do they think we are going to put in there? White Supremacist propaganda or maybe some subliminal messages hidden in the text so when you read it backwards you would follow Satan? Perhaps they're afraid we will be sending out a recall petition to all the parents so we can find a group with better time management skills.

Hey, now wait a minute, that last one is not a bad idea.