What we really did for our AmeriCorps hours.....

My house's submission to the jesuit volunteer publication "Out of Focus":

 

What We Really Did For Our Americorps Hours

By The Gresham Haus

We all know that Americorps is obsessed with numbers and stats. JVC Northwest asks us to record exactly how many people we served and the number of direct and indirect service hours, down to the quarter hour. As we all meticulously struggle to remember, "Did I spend 4.25 or 4.5 hours running stats on that excel sheet?" we all know that we do some other ridiculous work at our placements. Truthfully, some of our supervisors think that just because we are JVs, they can give us the lame jobs (which is true). These are some things that we counted into our Americorps hours, but didn't include in the service report:

·         Returned a Whole Foods shopping cart found on our property (4.25 hours)

·         Consolidated 18 bottles of conditioner into a more easily accessible pump conditioner
 bottle (1.25 hours [training])

·         Refilled 2,304 dog bones into our free dog treat container (.75 hours)

·         Searched dry food cupboards for moth's nests (3 hours)

·         Searched for rogue rats within our office walls because they won’t stop eating our cat and dog food after hours (3.5 hours)

·         Practiced company fire drills (0.5 hours)

·         Searched wildly, and conspicuously, for any company or store that would be willing to donate condoms to our organization (7.75 hours)

·         Made ghost decorations for Halloween (2.5 hours)

·         Played Battleship (aka relationship building) (0.75 hours)

·         Cleaned poop out of bathroom scrub brushes because someone thought it was a good idea to use them as plungers instead of using plungers as plungers (1 hour)

·         Forced awkward youth group middle school students to play stupid ice breakers (6 hours)

·         Volunteered at other organizations (6.25 hours)

·         Made greeting cards with collages of floating cat heads because a professional cat photographer comes to our organization every Tuesday to host an art class (2.75 hours)

·         Got haircuts because students from the beauty school donated their time to our organization, but none of the guests wanted haircuts, so we didn’t want to waste the beauty school student’s volunteered time (.75 hours)

·         Attempted to make a perfectly sized pinback button template, down to the millimeter, by shrinking and expanding an unusable button template with those God-forsaken things called copy machines. (3.75 hours)

·         Chased a client around Portland, when she was, in fact, not in Portland.  (2.25 hours)

·         Copied roughly 1,000 pieces of paper (9.5 hours...and counting)

·         Taped pictures of traffic lights to popsicle sticks (0.5 hours)

·         Took pictures of traffic lights off popsicle sticks only to attach to different popsicle sticks. (0.75 hours)

·         Tried to find breakdancing lessons for a client (1.25 hours) 

·         Tried to fix that cheap-ass office chair that I broke because I leaned back too far (.5 hours)

·         Argued with irate people on the phone about the lack of funding for energy or utility assistance only to be met with cries, swearing, and threats to the organization. Of these phone calls, approximately 18% of the time was spent attempting an explanation as to why our organization cannot give them any assistance, 68% of the time was spent listening to their stories and trying to be present while knowing exactly what our answers are going to be, 4.5% of the time was spent chewing on the end of my pen, 7.5% of the time was spent in awkward silence, 2% of the time was spent trying to figure out how to either transfer or hang-up calls on these complicated phones (60.25 hours)

·         Donated baby clothes to another non-profit, then asked for the donations back because we accidentally donated all of our baby clothes (0.75 hours)

·         Played heads or tails with a kid at the social security office (1.5 hours)

·         Gossiped about coworkers (8.75 hours)

·         Wrote this bulleted list (1.25 hours)