Good evening,
everyone! I am currently serving my shift as night watchman/sentry, in the
cafeteria area of Lafayette Urban Ministries. There are three of us volunteers
tonight. The other guys names are JT and Phil, both chiseling away at 178 hour
community service requirements after receiving DUIs. They’re both really easy
going and cool to work with; whenever I have a question regarding what I need
to do they’ll show me or just let me know. I guess I can forget all about the
training, because the actual volunteer work is nothing like the training lady
described. The first words my supervisor, Tim (a 28 year old California native,
with a medical-marijuana card), said to me were, “Marcus, you go through that
training?” Assuming that he was going to ask me to perform one of the tasks so
carefully outlined in our volunteer handbook, I too enthusiastically replied, “Yeah,
I took the class!” Tim promptly shouted, “Well forget all about it! I do things
differently,” and walked off into the kitchen.
Wow, that must have been nerve racking learning that all of the training that you stressed about earlier was not going to be used, but I guess that is just how it goes sometimes. It is nice that you had two other volunteers to work with that could show you how to do something if you were unsure. It sounds like it was a lot more relaxed of an experience compared to what the training sessions made them out to be which could be seen as a blessing in disguise. At least you still got to count the training sessions towards your volunteering time. You could always say that adds to the volunteering experience because training, unfortunately, is rarely like the real thing when it comes to doing odd jobs for any organization. At least that has been my experience with my volunteer work at Wolf Park. I love volunteering there, but it can sometimes be frustrating not knowing how to do something because you were told to do something impromptu.
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