Post 7: Frustrating day

Well, everyone has their up days and down days. Most of my days have been great recently, but not this one... at least not so far.

It all started with me being volutold (volunteered and told what I was to do...) to be the ride coordinator for Spring Retreat. I've never gone to a retreat for Crusade before, so I don't know really how far away it is, how to get there or how coordinating rides is usually done. So, I asked people for help which seemed to be pretty scarce. Eventually I talked to Stacy Coleman who ended up emailing me with vague details as to how to handle it.

Well, I didn't know that Lake Ellen was in a different time zone and didn't know how far away it is. I asked a whole bunch of people when we should meet up at the Rosza sign for departure. Nobody knew the answer to that, but I got a few suggestions and someone said 5 maybe. Well, I figured being a little early is better than being a little bit late, so I pick that time. Then I'm told to make sure everyone has a ride and people who need to go late or early would be able to get there and back.

So, I decide to email the Crusade list and ask everyone that if they're going, they should email me telling me whether they're driving (and how many people they can take), or riding and whether they need to leave early or late or not. I get some emails back, but not from everybody. Well today, (the day of departure), I get an email finally with a list of all the people who are going to retreat... so what do I do with that? Well I figured I'd put together a spreadsheet together so I can sort people out and make sure everyone has rides with everyone. It took me like 2 hours+ to put that together trying to iron out all the inconsistencies with people leaving at different times and assign people as appropriate according to what I was told people were doing.

So at this point, I send out another email with the list of people and who they should go with. Well, after I send this out, it is THEN that people feel it is important to finally email me and tell me they already had other plans and were leaving at a different time rather than earlier when I first asked about it. All of a sudden people have all these different driving plans that I wasn't told about and I'm supposed to coordinate all this? So, I'm forced to send out yet ANOTHER email to the whole list (which is a lot of people), and by doing so essentially spamming them, explaining to them that they need to completely forget about the spreadsheet I just sent out because it was so messed up at that point to just meet up at the sign at 5 or as soon as they could make it. I also told them we'd probably be leaving around 5:20-5:30 since apparently that's the norm.

To make a long story short: next time I'm volunteered to do something that is somewhat significant by myself,especially regarding things I've never done before or don't know anything about, I'm Not going to do it unless I have someone else teaching me how to go about doing it first. I was trying to help people out and have it run smoothly by making that list, but instead it caused more of a headache for everyone.

All that aside, I am very excited for Retreat. Luckily I have a little bit of time to relax before hand. Hopefully people won't be too mad at me for making everything so confusing. My day's gonna be turning around really quick and it'll be awesome by the time everyone's rides are taken care of! I got that out of my system and now I'm ready to go! woot!

Thanks for readin',
later!