To Serve and Deflect

     Flattery will get you everywhere. At least, that is, when you’re dealing with me.

     “We really need someone with your insights and experience,” the head of my kids’ school said when she asked me to join its board. That was all I needed to hear.

     What she really needed was my money, of course. And what’s truly sad is that I knew that was really what she needed, but my fragile self-esteem craves flattery so I said “yes.”

     Even sadder still is that I don’t have anything like the money she thought I had. So her well-executed flattery wasn’t nearly as profitable as she'd hoped.

     Ten months later, I’m sitting at a long table late at night staring hard at a piece of paper in my lap so as to make it appear that I’m engrossed in some intensely analytical exercise related to something written on the sheet and not just averting my eyes from hers at the head of the table.

     She’s just finished another “someone” plea, as in “we need someone to…” or “it would be great if someone would….” In this case, someone needs to chair the fundraising committee as it launches the school’s next capital campaign. I’m not looking, but I can see what’s happening: her eyes are boring holes in each trustee’s head, one by one, scanning back and forth, as we stare down, our minds desperately searching for plausible-sounding excuses that’ll explain why we’ll be out of town and working around the clock and tending to a dying father and unable to use a phone or the computer for the next six months.

     One glance at that Gorgon turns you into a volunteer.

     The silence is excruciating. People, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Soon one of us must crack. Please, oh please, just let it not be me.

     I don’t have to be here. Yet here I am. Not for the first time I wonder: Why do I do this?

     It isn’t the flattery, for that stopped the minute I joined the board. It isn’t my sense of duty to the school and my community, for I have none. It isn’t the contacts I’m making on this board, for my goal is simply to avoid these people, arriving just before meetings begin and racing out the door as soon as they end. And it isn’t to support my kids, who attend this school, for since joining the board I’ve seen enough of this school’s sausage-making that we’re applying to send them to other schools. We’re out as soon as we get in.

     Actually, I suppose in a sense I am here to support my kids. When applying to other schools, you must get the head of your current school to write a (hopefully) glowing recommendation for your kid. The problem is, submitting the recommendation form to the head of school telegraphs your intention to leave the school. In other words, you’re now a traitor.

     You have hope if the head of school hates your guts so much she’ll do anything to ensure you leave, even if that means she has to swallow the bile and write a few nice words on your recommendation form.

     Or maybe she thinks she has a chance to keep your youngest because the better school down the road isn’t expected to have any openings at his level next year.

     Most of all, it helps if she’s just about to launch a major capital campaign and needs lots of money from your friends and acquaintances. So if you must leave, she hopes you leave quietly. Preferably with a good word for the school if anyone asks. And preferably after making a sizable donation to assuage your guilt for abandoning the school at its hour of greatest need.

     It’s the guilt, after all, that explains why I remain on this board. She peddles a particularly potent strain of guilt, blending constant crises with appalling sacrifices, in order to cement us in our board seats and goad us into looking up when she’s looking for yet another someone.

     The school is always teetering on the brink of something, which is why she always needs someone. That’s the constant crisis method of management. It works best when the people you manage aren’t motivated. I may be projecting a little here, but judging by the deafening silence at the table tonight, most of my fellow trustees share my lack of motivation. Each of us is thinking: “If I don’t volunteer, I will destroy the school, pushing it and all our children and the dedicated teachers and staff over the precipice to their doom.” That's the guilt talking.

     I said “most” trustees are unmotivated because there are two trustees with boundless motivation. Not enough to cover the board’s collective deficit (hence tonight’s need for yet another someone), but enough to subject themselves and their families to such extreme hardships in service of the school that it puts the rest of us to shame. Their appalling sacrifices, though repellent on one level, stoke strong feelings of guilt at deeper levels. How can I refuse to co-chair this year’s silent auction when last year Arthur did it all by himself, personally wheedling and cajoling free goods and services from over 100 local businesses to support a school that caters to the rich? How can I refuse to donate more when Alan took out a second mortgage on his home when the school had that liquidity crisis?

     How can I, indeed? Yet I do.

     Still looking down.

     Someone PLEASE crack!

     This is getting unbearable. She’s never held out this long before. Thankfully I have this paper in my lap, a paper so fascinating its hold on my eyes looks to be permanent. Do I have a pen? It would look even better if I was writing on the paper, jotting notes or making calculations or something, for I am a busy man, and busy men never stop working, projects everywhere all the time, the last guy you’d ask to do anything. But if you want something done, ask someone who’s busy. Damn! Surely she knows that. Wrong strategy. But if she did call on me, I’d pretend I didn’t hear her, engrossed as I am in this utterly absorbing piece of paper. And if she raised her voice and called on me again, I’d pretend I didn’t hear the original question for my mind was elsewhere, on this paper in my lap to be exact, and it would look so much better if I only had a pen, for the paper is nearly blank, a save-the-date for this year’s school carnival, hardly the sort of topic to occupy my mind, or any mind, for more than a few seconds. It would look so much better if I could just scrawl some figures on it.

     And that’s when I looked up. My pen, somewhere on the table, eluded my blind reach, forcing my eyes up long enough to find it, which was all the opening she needed to pounce, triumphantly bellowing my name for the all the room to hear that I was the someone.

     As they looked up and breathed a collective sigh of relief, some shaking their heads at their close call, a few maybe taking pity on me and my family for undertaking this appalling sacrifice, I flailed momentarily, unable to meet her gaze, looking down reflexively, hoping it would all go away, but of course it wouldn’t, and I knew that, and that's when I felt a heretofore unknown strength growing in my body, along with a backbone, for I realized then that I also knew something else:

     I’d already played the trustee card.

     Last week we interviewed at the school down the street, and my wife, per our carefully-plotted plan, let it drop in the context of something else that I had been busy at a trustee’s meeting, and at that the admissions officer perked up immediately, for she now knew two essential things about me: I had trustee-level bucks, and I was sufficiently vain and gullible to subject myself to the appalling sacrifices expected of a school trustee. We could see the visions of dollar signs dancing in her head. When the admissions officer called the headmaster in to meet with us, an honor he rarely bestows, or at least that’s what they wanted us to think, for they mentioned it several times, I knew with a high degree of certainty that whether or not the head of our current school wrote a good recommendation, our eldest would be getting a fat envelope from the new school in a few weeks, which meant my youngest would soon be classified as a “sibling of a current student,” which meant he’d rocket to the top of the waiting list, which meant I no longer needed any of this, if I ever did.

     Now looking into her eyes, meeting her gaze, daring her to blink, I cleared my throat, the room went silent, and I regretted to inform her, I said, that unfortunately we couldn’t undertake the assignment. We had just committed to another project, you see, one that may not be as important as the school’s capital campaign, but one that’s nevertheless close to our hearts: bringing clean water to West African villages. I know it’s not much, but these simple water pumps have ripple effects: They allow the village girls, for the first time, to attend school, their lives previously devoted to fetching water from distant wells. The new pumps also help eradicate the scourge of the guinea worm, a truly nasty creature that breeds in pools of filthy water surrounding old-style water holes where it attaches itself to the bodies of its victims, feasting on their innards as it grows to lengths of three feet or more, all the while inflicting a burning and debilitating pain. The pumps, and their clean water, also help these people fight off many other fatal diseases and hideous afflictions, nightmarish conditions so distant from our lives that our pampered minds can’t even conceive of them.

     If only I’d known you’d need me to chair the school’s capital campaign. But I didn’t, so now my hands are tied. What can I do? I am so sorry for this.

     Now she’s looking down. As are the other trustees.

     And now I’ve got to find me a water project in West Africa. Quick.

Comments

[R J Keefe]

It may be my imagination, but I believe that I awoke an entire apartment building this morning with the bellowing laugh that the audacity of the great West African pump scheme surprised out of me.

[DarkoV]

If the headmistress of the school were truly perceptive, she'd try to recruit you to head the advertising/copywriting dept of thet school rather than wasting your talents sitting in the brood of the trusteeship.

As the husband of a private school teacher, I can only offer you the succor that teachers in such schools know what a sacrifice it is for parents like you to 1) Pay the high tuition, 2) Pony up some more trustee/board money, and then 3) Have the "privelege" of serving in the board.

We all know all kids in private schools should be treated the same, but reality and volunteerism have a funny way of affecting all involved. I'll guarantee that your kids are treated differently and, frankly, they should be. Let the other kids with parents who minimize their contact with the school gather their chutzpah and gripe about that.

I compliment you on your volunteerism; I envision little African kids already queuing up for a pail of water.

[Kcidrub]

I'm glad to see the wheels turning again. True, you have no obligation to us, but I found myself worrying over these few months that something untoward had happened. Such is the nature of "friendship" these days. I worry about my kids and my wife and the anonymous guy on the blog.

But now that I know you are desperately seeking a water project in Africa to do your part in saving the world -- and avoiding fund raising-- I can breathe again, though I probably should be looking at a global warming initiative to keep me from the next committee assignment.