I write about the club a fair amount. It is part of a larger parent organization in charge of clubs of all kinds from crafts to card games, recreation from individual exercise in large indoor facilities to golf or pickleball, and educational opportunities like a foreign language or learning how to garden in this particular climate. Some even involve getting groups together to travel, or show slides from places they've visited. Last time I checked there were something under 200 different opportunities for people to come together under their umbrella.
Of course those opportunities come with obligations and rules. A board of elected members make the really big decisions, like building a new recreation center and what activities can find their home there. Administrative offices handle the day-to-day, from taking in annual fees to participate, to authorizing tokens to members to open certain doors, to keeping staff in the centers or outdoor areas like golf courses for maintenance, or supervision in general including making sure dues have been paid before participation, to good & safe behavior in, say, the pools.
Our club interfaces with administration folks on a variety of levels. The more complicated our activities are, the more rules and paperwork to go with them. And we're pretty complicated. We have our own large room, within which we have equipment for a variety of activities, working with rocks, metals, and glass. Not all is jewelry as we have recently branched out into larger, unwearable glass pieces. We also have a store which sells what our members make, lockers where they can keep their supplies on site rather than taking them to and fro with each visit, an office with typical office equipment including file cabinets, a safe, two computers and a pair of copiers. We even have a well locked supply room where members can purchase supplies for projects, starting with small kits for introductions to skills via short workshops. When we graduate to working with silver, it will be sterling, guaranteed by our suppliers and the fact that it comes from our supply room. There is a library for further information on skills and ideas for using them, even a mini fridge and microwave so some of us don't have to leave to stop for lunch, and decorations for theme parties and store sales.
It's much more complicated than that, but this particular visit was due to our need to make an annual inventory of our furniture and equipment by item, quantity, location, serial numbers where appropriate, and estimated value. If that doesn't sound intimidating enough, the whole process got much worse for us just after I joined by a former president who decided our inventory had to include absolutely everything! Do you really want to go around counting our tubes of different polishes for lapidary or metals? If so, do you have to repeat it the next day when a new shipment comes in and an old empty something gets tossed? How about how many rolls of paper towels in the dispensers over the various sinks as well as in stands on tables? How many different hand tools should anybody care about and where they are among our many rooms and among any of 6 or seven kinds of pliers? Saw blades? Drill bits? Die punches? Templates? Measuring sticks? Portable vises? In fact the little things are kind of a sore point since a few here and there regularly "go home" with some member or another and are among the huge number of things which regularly get replaced.
What would logically be about a 5 or 6 page single spaced inventory is currently a 12 page one. And that's after a significant purge a couple years back. One of the administrative staff informed one of our officers back then that we needed to just "count the furniture and whatever plugs into something."
Would you like to guess how well that was followed? Even we knew that it was insufficient. There are a lot of heavy, expensive tools that aren't run on current, but still have to be included. Some partial purging was done then, but we still have 12 pages of headache to deal with. Three of us worked on it for two weeks. In addition to the ridiculous quantity of items, so many were the same thing in a different room, or jargon names so we had to find somebody who knew what bore that name because it wasn't our specialty.
Why do we need an inventory? A cynic might think is was to make sure we weren't taking home the large equipment from the club. The official answer is that it's all for insurance purposes. Should the place burn down, the insurance people need a justification for the humongous claim for replacing everything. No, any insurance company isn't going to reimburse the Rec Center organization for pencils, paper towels, chemicals, or miscellaneous supplies ad infinitum.
You might think it should still be pretty simple to change our inventory by simply dropping off 6 pages of little stuff. But there is a hitch. We very much need not to ruffle the administration's feathers, so to speak. Rumors are always rampant that "somebody" up in power is trying to close down this club. There was a mistake made back when I 'd just joined, a whole story in itself of who did/didn't do what and the consequences rained down from on high. We step lightly ever since. Paperwork has to be in on time and done well, every scrap of it. So a phone call had to be made.
That means by me, of course. I knew the person to contact, as I deal with her on a monthly basis at minimum. In explaining our dilemma, we got some information. But there were still questions. Specific details, whether this specific thing or category could be dealt with this way or that way. I wound up inviting her to come for a visit, along with somebody representing the insurance side of things for the organization's point of view, a give and take conversation with a tour to deal with specifics.
I was genuinely surprised by her willingness to come for a visit. It so didn't go with the hard nosed reputation or its intimidation factor. It was loosely set for a week ahead, confirmation to follow, since somebody was on vacation. I informed the others involved in the inventory process, hoping they wouldn't find the visit intrusive, but they welcomed the input and the chance for clarity.
They weren't exactly delighted that once final confirmation came through for the visit, it was with a ten minute ETA, when they didn't expect to show up in the club for another 45 minutes themselves. (I'm an early bird.) Both of them beat our visitors in however. Not because they they hurried up and got dressed and out of the house, but because our guests were half an hour late. It was welcomed breathing room, a chance to save face for not being late themselves, and time to take a breath and organize their minds around all the questions they needed to ask.
We are officially welcomed to make a listing of small hand tools without specifying types, quantity, locations. We just have to draw a line through all of them after preparing an addendum saying just the category and a value by adding all the previous numbers in the category together. Several other categories can be created the same way. The walking tour commenced at that point so multiple picky questions could be asked and rulings handed down that were specific and clear. Several things stood out, like the blanket statement that our supply room's contents wouldn't be counted. BUT our club is different from, say, ceramics, because our supplies are not clay but sterling and copper, with likely well over $10,000 value in there at any given time. An investigation of contents followed. We do actually have an in-club inventory system of those supplies which took a year to fully install, with barcodes on packages or items, which keeps track of quantity of everything as well as price. It also sends a notice when some item is in need of being reordered so we don't run out, especially when our snowbirds stock up before heading home so they can work on projects there, or again when they return so they can submit items to the store before our biggest sale days of our entire year, after Thanksgiving.
There were even things which weren't on the inventory which needed to be added, like our display items - cases, shelves, those things I call "fake necks" for displaying necklaces for lack of a better name. Our treasurer had wondered why the form wasn't done on an Excel spreadsheet because it would be so much easier to make those big changes to it that we were talking about. The simple answer was that the very ease of making those changes is the reason why the clubs weren't given the inventory forms in that format. It would be too easy for clubs to "lose" items if we could change the forms rather than just count what was there from previous years and note what is different. People started separating in smaller groups to look at various specialized details before we finally ended our meeting. It had started amicably and ended even friendlier.
Now we have 6 days to get the final changes in to them, but our top two people with those skills and experience are on it. I have a couple pieces of my own paperwork to complete and send in with the same deadline.
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