I have been very quiet here lately. Very, very quiet. And this is partly because I feel as though I have nothing interesting to say* and partly because the only interesting things have been both enormously stressful and involving other people who don't deserve to be written about, even on a pseudonymous blog.
Oh, and I'm busy.
Busy? Even while a pandemic continues to rage?
Oh yes. Busy.
Because it is the end of the football season, and the start of preparing for the next football season. A season that only starts on 11th September, but one for which we must start organising now.
So I am going to attempt to get back into the swing of writing by giving you some vignettes into the life of volunteering at a grassroots club.
And we'll start with the FA website.
The FA website. When you phrase it like that, it sounds as though there might only be one website. And there is. Sort of. I certainly only have one username and password. But an injudicious click of a link and I find myself somewhere that bears almost no resemblance to where I came from. I have (so far) identified at least five different websites that all pretend to be part of the FA. Each has clearly been written by different people. Each has different designs, colour schemes and menu layouts. Why should this bother me? Well... I have, for reasons that are probably good, volunteered to become a Welfare Officer for LittleBear's club. This has involved additional training. Online courses, webinars and questionnaires. All of which is accessed through MyLearning. Not, it is important to note, through MyAccount. Though MyAccount does have a subsection titled My Learning, this is categorically not the same as MyLearning. Spaces matter don't you know?
Having completed all required modules, and acquired nice green ticks next to each one, my training was marked as 83% complete. There was no means of determining what the remaining 17% was, or where to find it. I tried asking my County Safeguarding Officer. She asked me to send her my completion certificate. I explained I couldn't because of the aforementioned missing 17% and thus absence of certificate. She asked for the completion certificate. I explained (with screenshots) why I couldn't send it to her. She asked me for the completion certificate. There were brick walls that were more rewarding to bang my head against.
I asked the FA, via a bizarrely complex web form, in which in the "other comments" section I resorted to begging for help. "I just want to be a Welfare Officer! Please help me!" Then, magically, for reasons that have never been clear, my course was marked 100% complete and I was the proud owner of a certificate. And then the FA emailed me to say, "we've looked into it, and your course is complete. What's the problem?" Sigh...
So now I was qualified. Right? Wrong. MyLearning showed that I had completed the course. But My Learning, over on MyAccount, did not know this. My Learning did not think I had completed any of the course. Do pay attention to the typography here. Spaces matter. Remember how the County Safeguarding Officer wanted my completion certificate? Remember that? Well, it turns out, she needed me to send her the certificate that the FA website issued to me, so that she could upload a copy of it to the FA website, to be attached to My Learning record on MyAccount, so I could then be registered as a Welfare Officer. Yes, really.
So here I am, as a Welfare Officer, and it has been my great joy** to discover that there are several more sections of the FA website that I now have privileged access to. Guess what? They look nothing like the rest of the site.
* I could, of course, write reams, almost every day, in which I rant about the government, but I'm mostly sure that most of you are as tired of the shit-show as I am, and being permanently angry is exhausting.
** It really hasn't.
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