Pleasing none of the people none of the time

The thing about random memes on Facebook is that most of them, aside from being poorly spelled, poorly punctuated, and frequently involving utterly invented quotes, are complete tripe. They sometimes make me wonder whether I really know my friends when I see the things they link to. On the other hand, there's the odd thing that pops up that stops me in my tracks and actually makes me think.

Here's one of them (with apologies for spelling, punctuation, grammar and colour-scheme):

And the problem is, I am absolutely not OK with not being liked. In fact I spend an inordinate amount of emotional and mental energy contorting myself attempting to be liked. I volunteer, I help, I smile, I cook, I step up, I try so damn hard all the time to be a person other people will like. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn't work. The people who like me, like me anyway. And the people who are either indifferent to me, or don't particularly like me, are not going to have their minds changed by me spending hours of my free time doing things for them. They'll just willingly soak up my kindness and carry on with their lives, not liking me any more or any less than they did before. I am an irrelevance to them.

It would now appear that I have engineered myself into a hole. I have spent so much time contorting myself in desperate and futile attempts to be liked, that now if I stop being the ever-biddable, ever-self-sacrificing, ever-helpful me, I am resented for not bending over backwards. I am now expected to be all things for all people, and I am burnt out, unable to keep offering more and more of myself. And yet I keep doing so, because to stop, and to risk not being likeable enough is still unthinkable to my needy little mind.

Every day I receive emails, WhatsApp messages, text messages, phone calls, taps on the shoulder, all asking me for something. Sometimes it's a simple question about a date or a time, sometimes it's a request for information, and sometimes it's a request for help. But it's always something. Always requiring an answer, or effort, or work, or commitment. Worst of all is that sometimes it requires a decision. A decision that I know is not going to please at least one other person. And then my need to please slams up against my need to do the right thing, or my need to be clear and honest, or my need to be organised. It's not possible to be honest, and honourable, and moral and also please everybody.

I have to find a way to tell people things that they won't like. I have to find ways of telling people what I think or believe without worrying about whether they will or won't like it. 

I have to find ways of saying "No", without being paralysed by the fear of being disliked. I have to find ways of doing what I know to be right without spending hours agonising over the wording of the email that needs to be sent, and then days agonising of what I have (or more likely haven't) heard in reply. 

I have to find ways of accepting that I cannot please all of the people all of the time. I will be lucky if I can please some of the people some of the time. 

At the moment it feels like I'm pleasing none of the people none of the time.

 

Perils of cycling

 For those who like a bit of levity in their day... picture the scene... I am cycling LittleBear to school early for triathlon club. We're in a hurry, as we're always a little late for the 7:55-at-school start. Suddenly, there's huge resistance to my pedal stroke, and my bike slams to a halt. My long skirt has caught in the chain and wound itself round the rear hub. I lurch onto the pavement dragging my bike, and clutching my skirt to prevent it being pulled off entirely by the weight of the falling bike.

I try to contort myself, my skirt and my bicycle into position to disentangle myself, and then hear the dulcet tones of an Angel of Mercy. The neighbour whose house I have stalled in front of happened to be looking out of the window and has rushed out to help. 

She turns out to be dextrous and of delicate touch. As she gently eases the wheel round, inching the oily fabric out, a van pulls up and the slightly-less-dulcet tones of the chairman of our football club ring out, offering help. I sternly wag my finger and forbid photographs. To my surprise, and relief, he complies. Though he also mocks me. Deservedly. 

My Angel of Mercy completes the extraction of my skirt, without once needing to reveal my bottom to the world AND she then gives me a hair tie with which to bundle up the ill-advised skirt and complete my journey. We even got to triathlon club before they closed the gates.

I will not be riding in that skirt again. 

Football management vignettes #3

It's now been a month and half since I wrote anything here. Some of this is just the inevitable impact of a school holiday, and being busy, or away, or playing Minecraft with LittleBear. But some of it is because football has eaten my life. I thought that football had already eaten my life before now, when I was simply running a team, but I see now that I was painfully naive.

In July, I asked the Chairman of the club for some help. He helped, but just before helping, he asked me for a favour. Obviously I agreed. Devious bastard. Unfortunately the "favour" was stepping up to assist as a Welfare Officer for the club. This was something I was asked to do when another volunteer stood down two years ago, but I didn't feel I had time to commit to it*. There was no escaping this time.

For the past two years, the Chairman has been doubling up as the Welfare Officer as well. What I had not fully appreciated, is (a) the degree of mind-numbing attention to detail required to maintain the database of volunteers at the club and (b) the absence of mind-numbing attention to detail possessed by the Chairman. He cares passionately about the club, and about it being run well, and for the benefit of the children. This doesn't necessarily equate to a mind-numbing attention to detail however.

And thus it arises that I have inherited a system that is, to be kind, not entirely in top-notch condition. I also have not really inherited it. Instead I was asked to only be partially responsible for the system. Because partial responsibility for a complex system is definitely a strategy with no drawbacks. So, for most of August I took a relatively laid-back approach to my responsibilities: I reminded people that their qualifications were expiring; I sent out links to training courses; I gently explored the periphery of another arcane section of the FA's website.

But then reality started biting. I tried asking the Committee why we had so many people listed on our own spreadsheets who were not registered with the FA. Or who all the people registered with the FA, but not on the spreadsheets were. Or why we had so many people registered as applicants to volunteer, whose applications had seemingly been stuck in limbo for months, or possibly years. I was told not to worry about it. I was told that was too many questions. I was told The Spreadsheet Is King**.

I poked around a bit more. I asked the County FA safeguarding officer some questions. To start with she answered them. Then she started getting tetchy. Then she became quite vexed. Because the more I tugged at the threads of the anomalies I found, the more the entire jumper unravelled. 

I will not bore you with the excruciating details of the issues I found as I delved deeper, but suffice to say that for the past two weeks I have spent a minimum of 2 hours a night working on ensuring the right people, with the right qualifications are registered with the right teams. The season is about to start, and if a team's registration is not squeaky clean, that team (and potentially the entire club) will be suspended by the FA. In the first three days of September alone, I sent and received over two hundred and seventy emails. I spent, at a conservative estimate, 18 hours over those three days fighting with four spreadsheets, two wings of the FA website, the online Disclosures and Barring Service website and two email accounts***. I have had to book annual leave to cover the time I've spent beating my head against this particular brick wall.

In the end, I bypassed the rest of the Committee and just tackled the FA and all our volunteers head on. I decided not to sit back and ask polite questions, but to just get it done. To mis-appropriate the intended use of a key phrase from my Welfare Officer training: 

If not you... who? If not now... when?

There was a job that needed doing, so I did it. I still have qualms that I have trampled on rather too many toes en route. The fact that neither the Chairman nor the other Welfare Officer has replied to any of my emails in the past few days of frenetic activity is now making me feel distinctly anxious. But I am 99.9% sure I have both done things right and done the right thing. At the cost of a huge amount of my own time, energy and emotion. But the right thing nonetheless. I just have to hope other people see it that way...

* This was a grave error. Had I taken over two years ago, I would have inherited a nice tidy system, and this blog post would have read, "I have become a Welfare Officer. The End." 

** The Spreadsheet is Not King. The FA database is King, and Queen, and Courtiers, and Joker. If the FA database says you're not qualified to work with children, then that is the final answer.

*** A story for another day. A very, very tedious story.