Complaining about certain volunteers who just need to not bother anymore

As part of the committee that organizes and runs a local sci-fi and fantasy convention here in town, I'm always amazed at the entitlement of some folks. Both attendees and volunteers.

I think this year was the first one where there wasn't a complaint about how expensive it is to attend, although we routinely get at least one complaint about not being able to pay a lower price just to get into the vendor area. Although there was one lady who wanted to get her money back because it wasn't what she was expecting...although it's not like we're not a known entity, complete with a website and Facebook page she could have checked out. After she was told no refund, she went right back to the vendors room so clearly she knew what she was getting into.

Anyhoo...

Volunteers.

Okay, the committee itself is composed entirely of volunteers - we don't get paid - but the majority of us take the planning and running of the event very seriously. If we don't, then we shouldn't be on the committee in the first place. I'm also of the opinion that if you aren't committed to doing all of the hours that were volunteered for in the first place, then don't volunteer for so many hours in the first place. 

We have one girl who does this every fucking year since she was told that she would not be an assistant volunteer coordinator ever again because she was so useless at it the one and only time she was chosen for it. She does ONE shift on the first day she is scheduled for, goes shopping before or after her shift, and then suddenly she is sick and can't do anymore of the shifts she is scheduled for. Every damn year.

The comment was made about this person on Saturday pulling the same stunt she does every year, and the volunteer coordinator made a decision that the person is only going to be getting ONE shift next year, and if she asks about it she will be told that she has an obvious pattern of doing this. She did it to me for the events I had been volunteer coordinator for too! We all figure that she only volunteers so she can hit the vendors area without having to pay to get in and makes it appear like she's a 'dedicated' volunteer by signing up to do shifts all three days the convention is open. It's become pretty obvious that she's only there to shop. And she has been more than a bit of a snarky bitch the rest of the time because she feels that because she's been around for so long that she can do what she wants. Um, how about no? There's a reason she was never picked to be an assistance volunteer coordinator ever again - she was useless the only year she was picked because she couldn't answer a damn thing and seemed unwilling to actually, I don't know, do her job in the first place.

Another volunteer may end up not being back because we don't know where we can put her. She doesn't want to be on the Info Desk (and I don't really want her there because she can't follow instructions at all) so she said she wants to be on Registration Desk next year...only to find out that the committee members who run that don't want her there because she can't figure out how to use the tablets with Square on them and won't follow instructions there either! She's nice enough, but she is not a good fit for, well, pretty much anything sadly. If she can't even keep straight what colour wrist bands we're using for a particular day or the entire weekend, we can't even put her on a door to check the wristbands!

One of the committee volunteers was next to useless as well this year, and I don't think he's going to be on the committee for much longer when it becomes clear that he is not going to have any responsibilities next year. Simply put, we can't rely on him at all.

Last year he was put in charge of the Info Desk, and utterly failed. On the Sunday of last year's convention if I had not been at the desk when we opened to the public that day there would have not been a committee member manning that desk at all. He didn't show his face until a couple hours after, and even then he was not in any shape to be a representative of our convention - hungover does not even begin to describe him.

This year he was supposed to be handling drink runs and then helping out where we needed him. He dropped the ball on the drink runs and explained it away as being on call for his job - he's a 911 dispatcher at a call center with several other people able to take the calls on days he is scheduled off. And to my knowledge, they don't have people on-call on their days off. I'm not the only one who questions this, but either way he was told that he wouldn't be doing coffee runs for the remainder of the convention as we would just figure out something else for those. So he was put back on Info Desk but he made it clear that he didn't care, and actually told me that he didn't give a damn because it wasn't his job anymore. It wasn't technically my job either, but somebody from the committee needed to keep things in order. And if I had realized that this was his attitude before I took a stroll around the convention to finally check things out, I would have left somebody more responsible in charge of making sure things were handled while I was gone. It's a miracle I was able to figure out who had signed out which radios during the time he was covering for me, because he hadn't bothered with a single entry even though he KNEW full well that this is what he was supposed to be doing.

After I had figured out that mess, I decided that next year I would take on the responsibility for the Info Desk. It hasn't been claimed by a committee member since the one who had been handling it had been unceremoniously removed from the committee for a number of infractions, up to and including starting a drunken fight after the convention a few years ago and being seen downtown wearing his committee shirt while blindingly drunk and demanding people buy him drinks because he was a member of the committee. Obviously it needs somebody to take care of that, and I don't mind being that person because for most of the time I've been at all associated with this particular convention I have found myself handling the Info Desk, even only as just a regular volunteer...and I was often handling it by myself then too!

Honestly, I think most of the stuff that went sideways this year can be corrected for next year. Especially the planning stuff that we discovered hadn't gotten handled until way too late in the game. But at least we didn't have to wait on opening to the public or anything like that, so it could definitely have been a lot worse.

Speaking of worse...

I found out that the convention that I now refuse to have anything to do with turned out to be a clusterfuck just as I expected it would. The third day of that convention was a write-off due to the organizer being really late - many vendors packed up as soon as they could actually get into the venue rather than risk trying to stick it out. He didn't make enough money from attendees to cover the venue fees, let alone what he still owes from the other three events - it didn't help that he said that the entry fee was 'pay what you want' so many folks paid nothing at all. And I know that he lied yet again right from the start, because he'd originally said he wasn't going to be the one running it yet told the media that he did it on his own 'as an apology' to those he screwed over the previous year. Okay, about the previous THREE years, dude?

I also found out why he was decided to set up his own convention back when he was still on the committee for the convention I'm now a part of. He took it upon himself to entirely redo the convention's website - despite it not being his responsibility at all, and not having permission to make any changes either. He screwed it up bad enough that they had to pay somebody to fix up what he had screwed up and try to get it back to what it was before he touched it. It probably would have been easier to just scrap it and start over, that's how bad it was. The aftermath was that he was told off, rightfully, for doing something he had no business doing so he got mad and decided that he was going to 'get revenge' by having a better convention than the original one. Not that he succeeded at all, obviously.

Anyhow, it's past time that I went to bed. I have to be up way too early in the morning for work. Ugh.