Bored? Try Volunteering For Retirees
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If you just retired, and can't stand doing nothing, try volunteering for retirees. That means that you would still be doing the same work as you did before you retired, but you would be helping non-profit organizations and feel all virtuous. However, I have another motive, or several other motives for volunteering.
Don't you know if you can do brain surgery because you have never tried it? Well try volunteering for it. Sorry, I'm only joking...I think. Certainly if you try a volunteering for something new to you, you will be supervised until you can be trusted to do a good job. And that's why I became a volunteer.
No - I didn't want to do brain surgery. I had passed my bus-driving test, but no employer would consider taking on someone without experience. So I went in to the volunteer center in Perth. Boy, was that an eye-opening experience! I imagined an old lady searching through a file cabinet and saying to come back next week to see if any volunteers were needed then.
Instead, I had to wait in the waiting room until a member of staff was free, then was conducted into an office where the computer screen had been thoughtfully arranged so that I could see it.
The lady asked me questions, and zeroed in on my interests as I gave my answers. I'm not sure if the first layer was alphabetically arranged, because I noticed the desktop publishing section with page after page of requests, before we came to the driving section. The driving section was enormous, and we zoomed down and down until we came to the bus-drivers section. There were lots of pages of requests for volunteer bus drivers. I chose the one nearest my home, and I was in.
The first morning I turned up at the first two homes on my list, only to be told that they had stopped traveling months ago, and one of the ladies was dead anyhow. That made me about half an hour late, so everyone was phoning the head office to discover why I hadn't arrived yet. I got one mobile phone call from head office, but when I explained about the bad book work they shut up and let me get on with it.
You can be sure I brought the books up to date that day, removing about six passengers from the list. I tried to keep them up to date from then on, and after six years they were sending new drivers to me to share the driving, so that I could show them the ropes. I felt that I had learned to drive the bus properly.
However, life is change, especially for mouldy oldies like me, so I canceled my volunteer work to concentrate on my internet web page design. I can recommend volunteering for retirees for gaining experience, and fellowship between team members.
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