Well, isn't that SPESHIAL? |
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The following is a purely fictional fable, intended to prod new chapter officers to think a bit about the commitment that must accompany their acceptance of positions of chapter leadership and responsibility. Once upon a time, in the mythical land of Hyperbureaucracy, there was a purely fun, purely volunteer organization dedicated solely to spreading joy throughout the realm and bringing simple pleasure to its inhabitants. The members called the organization S.P.E.S.H.I.A.L. (Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Supreme Happiness In All the Land). SPESH, as it was fondly called, had a healthy disdain for bureaucracy. After all, its purpose was fun, not organizational game-playing or personal glorification. Unfortunately, such an organization (comprised, as it was, of fallible humans) needs some kind of structure and leadership, lest it founder and sink in the stormy seas of competing leisure activity. So although the organization disliked bureaucracy, it elected a group of officers who lovingly attemped to guide and nurture the organization. The officers accepted the various responsibilities entrusted to them by their peers--their brother SPESHers--and became dedicated to serving the group. Most of them tried throughout the year to provide thoughtful guidance and to conduct the business of the group, even though it consumed an astounding amount of time. They tried to do their best. Sometimes they made mistakes and sometimes they even squabbled, but they did a pretty good job and they never lost sight of their love for each other and for the organization that had trusted them with these positions of leadership. They got precious little formal praise for their efforts, but for most of them the joy of SPESHing and pride in doing their jobs well was sufficient reward. Alas, one of the officers (the person with the important job of Vice President of Getting Other People to Join Speshing) began to lose sight of the group's goals, and began to substitute his own. Alas, his own goals turned out not to be compatible with the commitment that he had made to the group. Suddenly the responsibilities that this person had gladly accepted, months before, began to go unfulfilled. The wayward officer became evasive and stopped communicating with the group. He began to use the organization as a springboard for his own interests. The group wanted to believe in its heart that he was really doing his job and was just too busy to let others know. The group waited (quite a while, it turned out) for an opportunity to ask him directly what he'd been doing in fulfilling his elected responsibilities. When they finally got the chance to ask, he was incensed! The nerve of these people, asking if he'd been doing his job! "I don't report to you," he roared at his brother SPESHers, "I report only to the president!" Whoa! Major Danger Signal for a SPESHIAL officer: do you find yourself justifying things in terms of bureaucracy? If you start thinking of your SPESH job as a node on an organization chart, and of your responsibilities as being to yourself or to some other node on the chart instead of to your SPESH brothers and the organization for which they stand, you're probably in deep philosophical trouble. Asked why he hadn't participated with the group for so long, he said, "I decided to take several months off from SPESHing to spend with my family." Asked how he'd managed to survive so long without his beloved SPESHing, he said, "Well, actually I've been SPESHing all these months with some other groups." He didn't even appear to notice the colossal contradiction between the two parts of the explanation. He eventually announced his resignation--not to his brother SPESHers, of course, but to the President node on the organization chart. Someone was finally appointed to fill his vacant position, and the long-dormant but important job began to hum with activity again. The organization was back on track. Although the group had suffered from the long period during which the important job wasn't being done, they decided to treat the whole series of events as an object lesson (don't let this happen to you). Each of the newly elected officers resolved to constantly monitor himself for symptoms that indicate that he might be losing sight of the real goals of his participation in this wonderful thing called SPESH. They lived happily ever after. |