Just Call Me Betty

As in "Crocker".

I have baked 3 dozen brownies and four dozen cookies tonight. The brownies are going to be phenomenal-- when I licked the beaters after everything was in the oven, the batter was screw-dinner-I'm-sticking-with-this good.

The cookies... I'm not so sure about.

The baked goods are for tomorrow's faculty luncheon, hosted by the public interest society in a blatant attempt to bribe the professors to give generously to the cause (i.e., our annual fundraising auction). A lot of people signed up to bring cookies and brownies. I figured that, trends being what they are, there will be at least one professor on some variant of the Atkins diet. Therefore, I bought low-carb cookie mix. Now, I have no experience whatsoever with low-carb cooking. I don't do diets, especially any diet that forbids entire classes of food.

When I went to bake, I found that the low-carb thing is accomplished by using almond flour instead of wheat flour. Therefore, I can't use my usual MO, which involves "jazzing up" mixes with different flavorings and spices. I made three batches of about 18 cookies each. The first was white, the second, red, and the third, green-- in keeping with the hawaiian luau (is there any other kind of luau?) theme for the auction. The first batch came out fine, judging soley on the appearance. the second was... okay. The third was horrible. The cookies fell apart as I tried to remove them from the baking sheets. I think I salvaged only a third to half of the batch.

The thing that has been insanely frustrating in working on this auction is the number of people who can't be bothered to lift a finger for the tiniest thing. This auction is our major fundraiser. This has been explained in painful detail to everyone in the public interest society. In fact, the main purpose of the group is to raise money to fund summer grants for students that accept unpaid public interest work. If we don't raise money, we don't fund grants. It's that simple. Adding even more incentive (at least, you'd think so) is the fact that the grants are given to the students at Our Law School with preference given to people who were active in the public interest society. In fact, most people join the group just to earn "brownie points" toward getting a grant.


There is very little asked of any individual member. We run a snack table and everyone is asked to sit at the table to sell the stuff 1 hour per week. It's not open at the end of the semester when everyone needs the time to study and write papers. This is not a major imposition, if you ask me. We also ask people to help stage the auction. This would be a major job if one person had to do everything herself, but if you spread the work among 30-40 members, it shouldn't be too onerous on any one person.

With that in mind, our sponsor list of over three hundred businesses was divided into lists of about 10 names each. LaPresidente, Masshole, and I set up, printed, assembled, and mailed all of the letters ourselves over winter break. We asked that every person in teh group take a list and call the people on it to follow up on the letters we sent out. Not hard. In fact, last year, we had a committee that did all of the follow up work, and I was on it. I called 40 or so people ALL BY MYSELF. It is truly not a lot to ask for someone to call 10 people. It shouldn't take more than 2 hours all together, even if you can't get some people right away. If you don't ask people, they conveniently "forget" or "lose" your letter and you don't get anything donated. Again, we didn't wait for people to figure this out on their own, we spelled it all out for them.

No one seems to be doing their calls. Scratch that: the usual couple of people who are working their asses off all the time are doing the work and the lazy ass people who got summer grants last year and are trying to weasel out of fulfulling the reciprocal obligation imposed by their acceptance of the grant are not making their calls. Donations are NOT coming in at the pace you might like. Last year, we received $4000 monetary donations from local law firms. This year, I think we've got $500.

And then there's the luncheon. There were three sign up lists at the last member meeting: one for coming to the luncheon to chat up the professors, one to bring 2 bottles of soda to the lunch, and one to bring some sort of dessert to the lunch. Everything else is being taken care of either by University Catering or by LaPresidente. On Monday, I took each list and sent emails to the people on that list as a reminder. And immediately started getting whiny emails from more weasels... I mean from fellow students. "I didn't sign up to do that" (uh, then why did you sign your name and email on the list?) "I don't want to bring the thing I signed up for" Well, then why did you put your name on the list? And my personal favorite, one of the aforementioned previous grant recipients, who does NOT do her table shift BTW, who finds it too onerous to bring the 2 bottles of soda she signed up for. When I emailed her back to tell her that we really, really needed her to bring it, she replied that IF she brought soda, she could only bring ONE bottle. What is that? There are, within a two block radius of Our Law School at least four places that I can think of where a person can take a nip over a short break to pick up two bottles of soda.

And you know that these are the people who will be first up when it comes time to apply for grants, all full of pure bovine excrement about their "sincere commitment to public interest work". As long as it is no inconvenience or trouble to their busy, busy schedule, I suppose.