saints is like a well oiled machine...not.

i have to chuckle sometimes because we do unintentionally mislead the public...i mean really look at how big we are, and what good work we do with the animals every day.

ok, well lets be honest here...that is only half the story.

that is the part of the hands on animal care that we do really well. and we do it really well for 2 reasons...we have paid staff monday-friday with specific job expectations that they have to fulfill and we have a fairly large and experienced pool of volunteers on the weekends (and a few during the week) who also complete specific routine daily animal care needs.

but for the admin kind of things...like answering phones, emails, website, legal stuff, answering incoming requests, or questions about geriatruc or palliative care with people's pets and PR liason things...there is only nicole and me....and i am not even checking the voice mails right..i stuck nicole with that too!

she and i both work fulltime and i have all of these guys at saints to worry about and nicole has her own mini crippled crew...plus we both have our own families and personal obligations too.

so in this regard, the saints machine is sort of like both of our cars....she has a dead battery right now and i have no front brakes.....we somehow manage to chug along at our own not very efficient pace....occasionally dropping bits of the saints machine along the way.

and we can apologize all that we want but the bottom line is...it is unlikely to change until saints has enough of an income to pay staff to fulfil specific expectations as part of their job.

nicole and i just try to do because there is no one else but neither of us really want to, we are both hands on animal people....not organizational administration guru's.

we do take care of the really important shit like payroll, accounting and legal responsibilities because we do pay others to keep on top of that properly....sigh...writing those cheques out each month tho, does make me cringe.

i had to chuckle a couple of weeks ago when an email came thru saying they knew we were full from the voice mail message, (which also meant they heard the part that we would not be returning surrendering phone calls)..but asking us to take the 2 elderly dogs because they had to move. i did not answer the email so she sent another to chris...this one was kind of pissy demanding an immediate answer from us. chris sent it on to me..i sent an email back saying that we were full the same day and the person responded saying her friend took the dogs and they didn't need us anymore anyway.

honestly..sometimes i think places like saints are not the final but very first option that comes into folks heads. do you know what it would take for me to send my dogs here?...like the end of the road with a bulldozer behind me and a crumbling cliff at my feet..then i might toss my dogs over here rather than have them fall off the cliff with me.

oh wait, thats wrong....i do actually make my poor personal dogs live here so that example's not right..i will think of another one later but i have to get dressed right now before the new possible staff person arrives....or maybe not because i will have lost that train of thought by then and be on to something else.