Friday, 30 January 2009
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Wearing Many Hats
What do you have to be good at to be a camp director? Roast a marshmallow without burning it up? Maintain a smile and motivate 400 people to have fun in the pouring rain? Be able to explain to a mom why it's a good thing that her daughter hasn't called home all week? Well, these are some handy skills. But probably the most important one is to be versatile: be a "jack of all trades" and "wear many hats". Because it turns out that camp directors end up doing a little bit of everything.
Jeremy and I were talking about this earlier in the week when, suddenly, our main database failed to properly produce the beautiful merge letters we were used to getting with a few simple keystrokes. So we quickly switched hats and became "database troubleshooters". Now I have to admit that, at first, all I wanted to do was smash the offending machine (see photo). Try and try as we might, we just ended up with more paper to feed into our shredder. But then we remembered, "We're camp people. We can fix anything!" And so I put down my hammer and we went to work and, eventually, solved the problem.
That's how it is in the camp world. One minute we're interviewing a counselor applicant, the next we're creating a new web page, then we're consulting with a nurse about updates to the camp health plan, followed by planning the construction of another ga-ga pit, after which we're updating menus, figuring out bus routes or designing a staff training session. On any given day we might be writing articles for our newsletter or collating and stapling it together. We might be planning the summer camp budget or sorting out the unclaimed lost and found for the charity bin. We could be planning a reunion party or opening the mail.
Some of it is exciting, some a little less so. But since it's all about camp, we love what we do. If "variety is the spice of life", then we have very spicy jobs!
Tom
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