No Dice

This week, all teams stationed in the Pacific region came back to McClellan Park's campus (9 teams in Louisiana did not) to debrief. A whole slew of Corps Members moved back to the previously unoccupied 3rd floor. My primal instincts kicked in and I got very territorial. To protect my turf, I shot angry glares at the friendly kids up and down the hall who tried to actually meet me and become acquaintances. How dare they disturb the peace and quiet I had become accustomed to (almost dependent upon) for the past 2 months. How dare they crowd into their rooms and chat as if they owned the floor when, in fact, I was it's rightful owner. Kids these days. No respect.

Along with these boisterious folks came my long lost roommate. He's from Wisconsin, automatically giving him a laid back nature and pearly white skin. The irony of our roommateship is that he will begin dentist school in the fall, while I am currently getting my teeth knocked out on a regular basis. We get along great. He's clean, I'm sloppy. But he's from Wisconsin, and thus easily manipulated into consistently believing that I will clean the room the following day. Cash, money........

This week has been incredibly laid back. All teams are back so that they can debrief their unit leaders on the work they did while away (or in our case, still here.) Let me briefly brief you on debriefs. Conducted via a 20 minute presentation, the debrief is not difficult. 10 team members (we now have 9), 2 minutes each. It's very structured, each person talks about a different part of our last project. No matter what we say (I'm pretty sure we could have a tag-team wrestling match instead of lecture and be fine), the unit leaders and other Americorps NCCC office workers say that they think "we'll do a great job" and "good luck getting things done". There's no grade. There's no incentive to do a good job, it just has to get done. I'm positive the office personnel that listen to the debriefs think we spend hours upon hours of brain storming and practicing the presentation. Some teams may do this, but mine sticks to a strict only-work-on-the-debrief-1-hour-prior-to-presenting rule. One compliment we received went something like, "...it's obvious you spent a lot of time rehearsing this presentation, and it showed!" Then again, they may just be so numbed from listening to about 20 debriefs that they have morphed into complimenting machines. It's difficult to say.

As an aside, my team position is POL, or Project Outreach Liaison. My job is to set up team community service opportunities outside of our daily duties (we need 80 hours to complete Americorps NCCC) and talk to organizations about our program and determine ones that could benefit from our help. The latter part of my position seems to be the most troublesome because it involves the dreaded cold-calling, which isn't SO bad, except that there's no force requiring me to actually do anything. It's difficult to take the intitiative without a boss reviewing your performance. It's college all over again. Put it off. Put it off. Date your notebook and write a heading for the notes you will take. Put it off. Check the organizations website again. Put it off. Before you know it you haven't done anything, exactly what happened to me this time around. I'm not worried about my lack of drive, but the way I've convinced myself that it doesn't really matter worries me some. But they have 3 professionals in the next building working on the same things, so why should I worry about it? I do try and tell any organization that I work with (whether its independently or at my project) about Americorps NCCC, how it could benefit them, etc. Isn't that enough?