I agreed to be a volunteer at a conference today, as I had some time on my hands and I got the conference tickets for free. I awoke at 5 am on a cold winter morning, to travel from Cologne to Duesseldorf to be there at 7.30 at the welcome desk. I was surprised to see that there was no organiser to greet or brief me, nor did I see one for the next hour or so. Now I didn’t really mind, and I asked the others what to do and just fell in. However, after nearly 3 hours of standing and handing out registration batches, I decided that no one was coming to release us from our duties, so we gave up our “posts” and joined the conference. I was annoyed to find that I had to buy myself a coffee, received zero thanks from any organiser. Sadly, this isn’t very rare at all. I fail to understand why event organisers take the work of volunteers for granted. My very first job was as a Volunteer Manager for the Games in Delhi. My boss was not overbearingly bossy, but he insisted on certain ways of
"A dawn to end all nights, that's all we hoped it was"