Multi-factor authentication

A friend was asking me about multi-factor authentication apps or just authentication apps.  So, he, unfortunately, got an earful.

We are not doing well with regard to authentication.  We never really have.  Oh yes, I know all the theory.  I have taught it for decades.  Authentication is based on something you have, or something you know, or something you are.  But actually implementing that seems to be really, really difficult.  And it's getting much *more* important, rather than less, that we have reliable and usable authentication.

First of all we went with something you know.  Passwords.  And, of course, everybody chose really stupid passwords.  1 2 3 4 5 6.  I actually got a letter, just this past week, setting up a session, and using that exact password.  When I got into this field, apparently you could get into 75% of all computer systems using the passwords love, or sex, or secret.  Then there was everybody who used their birthday, or their pet's name.  So, for years we have been trying to convince people first to pick reasonably strong passwords, and then, eventually, trying to move away from passwords all together and to some other kind of authentication.

Lots of companies have tried to sell something that you have as a form of authentication.  I have carried various one-time password devices.  Yes, I suppose it uses a password, but it might do a challenge and response type hashing of the password, or a password generation based on the time, or some other means of verifying a non-replayable password, and one that the person can't choose, themselves, in order to avoid all the problems with stupid password choice.  Then there were the various USB keys that you could stick into your computer and use as authentication.  Once again, something that you had.  But, of course, everybody had to agree on which of these systems would be used universally.  And, of course, no vendor would agree to use somebody else's system.  Which is probably a good thing, because that would have meant that we had a monoculture in terms of authentication, and therefore a single point of failure in terms of authentication for absolutely everything.

What people seem to be using these days, in terms of multi-factor authentication, is a secondary backup which, once again, involves something you have.  But, in this case, the something that you have is slightly more reasonable, in that it's a cell phone.  Everybody has a cell phone these days.  Everybody has a cell phone, and, indeed, an awful lot of people are getting rid of their landlines.  So, if everybody has a cell phone, then everybody has a cell phone number, and, as a backup to the password, and an implementation of multi-factor authentication, the system can send you a text with a PIN or code that you have to enter in order to verify that it is, in fact, you that knows your password, and just entered your password in authenticating to the system.

Which I find annoying.  Yes, I have a cell phone.  But I also still have a landline.  I'm a dinosaur, and keep technology around far too long, remember?  And I am not the type of person who walks around with my cell phone actually glued to my hand.  I occasionally turn my cell phones off.  As a matter of fact, when I am home, mostly they are off.  So, when I'm sitting at my desktop computer, and trying to sign on to something, it's a royal pain to have to go, get my cell phone, turn it on, and only then be able to do the secondary verification that, yes, it is me trying to sign on to my account.  For which I have long and complicated passwords, thank you very much.

Now I'm really not sure why, but an awful lot of companies have decided to get into the market, selling authentication, but relying on the fact that you have a cell phone.  Yes, I suppose that there is SIM swapping.  And, if some scammer knows your cell phone number, they can go and get a cell phone, and then, yes, when somebody sends you a text with some kind of pin in it, they can get that message as well as, or possibly instead of, you.  So, yes, I suppose that there is a vague point about authentication apps, on your phone, being somewhat more secure than simply texting a PIN.  But, other than that, in terms of the convenience of multi-factor authentication, using these authentication apps, I have the same objection.  Why should I have to keep my cell phone on, and with me, all the time?

(Yes, yes, I am well aware that convenience is the enemy of security.  I have been teaching that for decades as well.)

I actually only use one authentication app.  It is the BC Services Card.  Now, when I talk about the BC Services Card, I have to explain that the BC Services Card is not, in fact, a card.  It is an authentication app.  It runs on your phone.  It is actually a quite well-designed, and very usable, system.  It had better be.  I well remember sitting in on a presentation when they implemented the very first part of what eventually became known as the BC Services Card.  At that point it was just the public key infrastructure for what would, eventually, in the fullness of time, become the BC Services Card.  So, the BC government (and primarily Gary) have had thirty years to work on the background structure, and how it will work, and how it will work with other systems, and how other people will be able to use the BC Services Card, and how other companies will be able to use the BC Services Card, and how even the federal government will be able to use the BC Services Card, for authentication.  I understand (although I haven't yet tried it) that you can actually use the BC Services Card to sign on to your bank.  Congratulations Gary!  It works.  I had to sign up for it for something that I had to do with the death administration when Gloria died.  I can't even remember what it was that I had to do.  As a matter of fact, although I have come across an awful lot of possible uses for the BC Services Card in the intervening years, I have only actually used the BC Services Card about once every two years.  This means that using the BC Services Card isn't exactly a daily occurrence.  So, each time I have to use it, I have to relearn, all over again, how to use it.  Every time I have had to use it, it has actually been much less traumatic than I always expected to be.  It works.  It works well.  And I was even able to switch it from one phone to another without too much trouble, when I got my new phone.  (I did have to take both phones into the Service BC office.  I suppose that I didn't necessarily have to, but I was definitely nervous about the process, and I figured it was easier to just go into the office then to try and figure out how it worked by myself.)

The BC government, and all the people that I know who work in aspects of the BC government programs which use the BC Services Card, insist that it is very useful, and that everybody knows about it, and knows how to use it.  This is absolute nonsense.  Every time I talk about the BC Services Card, I have to explain that there is no actual card.  I have to explain that it is an authentication app.  There are all kinds of things that you can use the BC Services Card for.  But almost nobody actually knows that there is a BC Services Card, and what it is.  For the most part, unless your wife dies, you don't have to use the BC Services Card.  You can sign on to your bank using some other means.  You can sign on to the Canada Revenue Agency using some other system or method.  The BC Services Card could be very useful.  But it isn't required, and so almost nobody uses it.  If more people used it, and if more people had it ... well, that's sort of the problem isn't it?  If more people had it, more companies would use it.  If more companies used it, more people would have it.  It's a really good system, but you have to get both people and companies to actually use it.  Nobody is going to get it until it becomes useful to them, and no companies are going to offer it, as authentication, until more people are using it.  Catch 22.

But there is, of course, fairly widely used, yet another authentication boondoggle.  This is the fact that, if you go to some website where, in order to use it, you are supposed to have an account, but you don't have an account with this particular system, you can sign on with your Facebook account.  Or your Google account.  Or your own account with one of the other systems one of the other information technology giants, where a lot of people do have accounts, and they provide this form of online authentication.  You sign on with your Facebook username and password, and Facebook authenticates, to the system that you actually use, that you are you, and you should be allowed to use their system.

As I say, a number of the tech giants are starting to get into this particular service.  Once again, everybody would like to be the system that everybody else has to rely on.  One company that is interested in getting into this field is Open AI.  Yes, the people behind ChatGPT.  Now, personally, as far as I can tell, large language models, and generative artificial intelligence, are a solution in search of a problem.  About the only service that generative artificial intelligence seems to have been able to get anybody excited about, is code generation.  So ChatGPT is writing a whole bunch of code for a whole bunch of companies.  (Well, really it's more of an "autocomplete on steroids" function that searches existing code bases.)  (And, I suppose in doing that, that they can't do much worse than an awful lot of the programmers out there.)  But, in terms of authentication, I am less sanguine about the capabilities of hallucinatory generative artificial intelligence.  Since we can't trust the text that these systems produce, why should we trust the authentication that they, supposedly, verify?

VM - G - 2.13 - governance - requirements

Functional and Assurance requirements

In the world of information security, we make a distinction, in determining our requirements for a tool or a system to help us, in regard to the requirements.  We specify two types of requirements: functional requirements, which have to do with the actions of the actual tool; and assurance requirements, which answer the question is the tool doing actually performing, and is the tool actually doing what we intend it to do.

These two different types of requirements can, in fact, be applied to pretty much any task that we asked anything, or anyone, to perform.  What is it that we want done, and how do we know that it is being done, and that it is effective.

I I got what I thought was a nice illustration of this idea one day when I was getting lunch.  I was in a store that sold sandwiches of the types known as hoagies, or hobos, or submarine sandwiches (presumably because of the general overall shape).  When you are eating in a restaurant, or getting food from a takeout place, you will know that there are signs, in the washrooms, saying that all staff have to wash their hands after using the washrooms, and in between every order that they prepare.  This is good hygiene, and pretty much everybody understands why it's there.  This has to do with the functional requirements of preparing food.  You want to ensure that people the people involved in preparing, or serving, food, have clean hands, and definitely hands that are not contaminated by germs transferred from somewhere, or something, else.

The thing is, the only *assurance* requirement that there is that this functional rule is followed is the sign in the bathroom.  Sometimes there may be a sign at the counter instructing the staff that they have to wash their hands between each order.  But, if you pay attention, you will realize that the staff are mostly facing *away* from that sign, and that they actually very seldom wash their hands between one order and another.

But in this particular shop, every time the staff made a sandwich for someone, they pulled a couple of disposable plastic gloves out of a box and put them on.  The disposable gloves fulfill the same functional requirements: being sure that any germs that are on the food preparers has don't transfer to the food that is being prepared.  And, indeed, because the use of the gloves is immediate and fairly easy, it's fairly plain to see that, as they move to somebody else's order, they throw away the gloves that they were wearing, and put on a new pair of gloves.

The functional requirement is the same in both cases: making sure that germs don't transfer from the preparer's hands to the food.  But the assurance requirements are much different.  In terms of determining that the food preparers wash their hands every time they use the washroom, well, you really can't check that out unless you go to the washroom with them.  But, with the gloves, you can see that they put on the gloves.  You also can see that they throw away their gloves when finished with your order, and put on a new pair of gloves when they go to prepare somebody else's order.  So, while the functional requirements for both hand washing and gloves are the same, the assurance requirements are much stronger for the gloves than they are for the hand washing.  Gloves have it all over hand washing in terms of the assurance requirements.

This is something that should be applied to the management of pretty much any task, whether for a commercial enterprise, or for volunteers.  There is the functional requirements of the task that you want done.  Those are generally specified.  But the *assurance* requirements, that the job actually has been done, and that the task that is performed has some effective results, is generally given rather short shift.  Very often, when we send volunteers out to perform a task, we asked them to fill out some kind of report as to what task has been done, how many times, and if there were any incidents in the performance of the task.  To a certain extent, this does fulfill the assurance requirement.  The job has been done, and, a certain number of times.

But there is that sort of second half of the assurance requirement: was this task effective?  That is something that relatively few managers actually think about.  There's an awful lot of work, both paid and volunteer, that gets done, and is a complete waste of effort.  No one has ever checked on the assumption that what we are doing is, in fact, having some kind of benefit.  Think about this some time.  How is it that you know that what you are doing is, in fact, effective?

(In other management literature, some of this issue of assurance requirements is covered under what is known as "metrics," or key performance indicators.  But that's a topic for another time.)

One of my volunteer jobs is community policing, and one of the tasks that we undertake is speed watch.  We take down a lot of statistics: how many total cars do we see, how many of them are under the speed limit, how many are roughly at the speed limit, how many of them are driving about ten kilometres an hour over the speed limit, and how many of them are driving twenty kilometres an hour over the speed limit.  (For this last set, that's the group where we take down the license plates, and they get a polite but pointed letter from the local police.)

The data and statistics that we collect go to the provincial motor vehicle authorities.  Presumably, over time, they can see what the average speed is at the different places where we set up speed watch.  A much more immediate, and significant, assurance requirement to which we pay attention is the fact that we can measure the speed of cars more than half a kilometer away.  We can see that someone who comes into our zone at seventy kilometres per hour, by the time they get to us (and have had the time to see that we are set up), may be traveling thirty-seven kilometres per hour.  We can also see when someone, quite far away from us, slams on their brakes, and the front end of their vehicle is suddenly a lot closer to the ground.

We know we are having an effect.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Luggable dream

I had a dream this morning.  Unusually, when I woke up from the dream, I remembered the dream.  Even more exceptionally, in my case, what I could remember of the dream kind of made sense.  It was about ordinary things, as far as I can remember, and it wasn't totally bizarre.

What I can remember of the dream related to the old luggable computers.  Those of you who are as old, or almost as old, as I am, and worked with technology in those dim and distant days, may remember these suitcase sized "portable" computers.  Originally most of them ran on the CP/M operating system, and later versions ran on PC or MS-DOS.  Most of them had dual five and a quarter inch floppy disks for storage.

As I was waking up from the dream, but still in that fuzzy half state where you're not fully into the current world, I was thinking that these machines would have been in a bit of difficulty these days, since it's hard to get five and a quarter inch floppy disks anymore.

Actually, it's pretty much impossible to get five and a quarter inch floppy disk *drives* anymore.  I don't think that they're making five and a quarter inch drives anymore, and, unlike the three and a half inch floppy disks, nobody ever made, or sold commercially, a 5 and 1/4 in floppy drive with a USB adapter.  Somewhere around here, in my much reduced tech junk pile (or piles), I probably still have a three and a half inch floppy drive with a USB connector.  It has, of course, been a long time since anybody sold a computer with either three and a half, or five and a quarter inch, floppy drives actually installed.

I actually had, and was very proud of, one of the relatively rare Canadian made luggable computers.  It was a Canadian made, and physically exceptionally well designed, Hyperion computer.  Dual floppy drives, of course, and a rather beautiful machine in terms of its ergonomics and overall design.  It did have one fatal flaw: the read only memory, the basic programming that ran everything else, was only designed for PC/MS-DOS version 1.0.  That meant that there was absolutely no possibility of ever installing a hard drive in one of these machines.

(It, along with so much other technology that I had hoped to donate to a computer museum one of these days, went in the mass furor and clear out as Gloria was dying [and slightly before we actually knew that Gloria was dying], while the girls were throwing me out of the townhouse, and moving me to Delta.  There were $120,000 worth of, primarily technical, books that went in that clear out, and more than a couple of trunks full of old computers, old laptops, various kinds of boards, and a whole bunch of ancient technology.)

And, speaking of ancient technology, and five and a quarter inch floppy disks, it reminded me of all kinds of ancient storage media, a lot of which went in that clear out.  As well as a whole bunch of three and a half inch discs, and 5 1/4 inch discs, a whole bunch of eight inch floppy disks went.  There were also various formats of tape storage, including some nine track tape reels.  I never actually worked with punch cards, but I did have an opportunity to play with them at one point, and so there were a bunch of punch cards that went, as well.  I didn't still have any, but I do remember doing some educational programming with twelve inch laser video discs.  (As far as I can recall, the total storage capacity of video on those twelve inch discs was about thirty minutes of video.)  All kinds of storage, all kinds of memory, all kinds of files and information.  All lost, like tears in the rain.

And the dream reminded me not only to write down the thoughts about storage, and ancient storage, and luggable computers, and ancient technologies, but also about multi-factor authentication, and also about my dead phone.  And I was awakened out of the dream at four in the morning, and I've got all these ideas swirling around and have to get them down or I'll never get to sleep, so I guess I'm up for the day.

VM - G - 2.12 - governance - planning levels

In any kind of management there are three levels of management and planning: operational, tactical, and strategic.

Operational planning and management is short-term.  It deals with the day-to-day, and the immediate task.  Most of the operational planning for your volunteers office or department will probably fall to the volunteers themselves.  The volunteers are, by and large, going to be undertaking tasks generally independent of you for immediate direction.  They will be ensuring that they have the resources that they need for the immediate shift, or task, that the necessary group of volunteers have shown up, that they have the right equipment and determine by asking you whether anything has recently happened that changes the task that will probably have been planned by you previously.  As noted, this is primarily done by the volunteers themselves, although they will get direction from you as to any changes, and will report to you in terms of resources expended, damage to equipment, successful completionism task for otherwise, and any administrative details and reports that detail to completion of the tasks.

Tactical planning and management is primarily your job.  This deals not necessarily with the individuals day-to-day tasks, but with midterm planning.  You will be keeping an eye on the overall inventory of resources and equipment, the hours of work by the volunteers, noting who is doing too much and is in danger of burnout, and who is not doing enough and may need a bit of encouragement,  and keeping track of the completion of tasks or the failure to complete tasks, and the types of tasks that are completed, and possibly types of tasks that aren't.  You will be noting the details of the reports that the volunteers turn in.  You will be planning for the future, ordering supplies, not only as needed, but sometimes possibly *before* needed, in order to ensure that the resources are available to the volunteers when they are needed.

Strategic planning and management is larger in scope, and longer in term.  This is going to be primarily involved with the Board, or senior management of the organization.  This is generally beyond the scope of your job as a manager of volunteers.  This is going to involve the perception of the organization within the community, for issues of fundraising and resource acquisition, and overview of the objectives, long-term and overall, of the parent organization, and whether there need to be changes in the tasks that the volunteers should be organized should be encouraged to pursue, and the position of the organization within the larger community over the long term, trying to look at least five years down the road.

The thing is, that these three levels of planning and management apply to any kind, and any level, of management.  You, as a manager of volunteers, have operational tasks that you need to address every day.  You need to the reading the reports that the volunteers turn in to you.  You need to be noting who shows up for shifts, and who possibly is late, or doesn't show up at all.  You need to keep an eye out for attitudes, and signs of tension, between the groups of volunteers that are working together.  You need to know individual problems that may happen on individual shifts, but which happened consistently, and therefore may indicate a need for additional training of the volunteers overall, to address this particular problem.

Reading of the reports is operational.  The analysis of the types of problems that show up on the reports, and considering that further training may be necessary is going to be tactical.  You also have overall tactical management that you are going to be needing to deal with in your job.  Ensuring that volunteers are showing up for shifts, to cover the tasks as necessary.  Recruiting new volunteers on an ongoing basis to fill any vacancies as people leave the organization.  Planning attendance for any kinds of events within your larger community as may be appropriate to your organization, and to the volunteers that you have.

But there is also strategic planning and management that you need to undertake in your own job.  You are reading the operational reports from the volunteers, and, from your analysis of that, planning what you need to report to senior management, or to the Board, in terms of changing needs or priorities.  You may also need to strategize, again, with data that you are receiving from the daily operational reports, educate, guide, or simply influence the decisions that senior management and the Board may be making that affect you.  You are going to be making representation to senior management in terms of your overall budget, even though salaries for the volunteers are not part of what you need to budget for.  (Perks, equipment, appreciations, and parties for the volunteers are part of what you have to budget for.)

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

MGG - 5.53 - HWYD - Dead phone

I keep my tech far too long.  I have *no* idea how old my desktop computer is.  One of my laptops is over twenty years old.  I bought a new phone last year because my old ones were running out of memory/storage.  Even though I install only minimal apps on them, and clear off pictures as fast as I can email them to myself, I *had* to get something with more room.  So, I moved my SIM chip, and mobile phone number, to a new phone with more memory, and a higher resolution camera.

But, of course, I didn't get rid of the old phones.  I can still use them for email, and dictating, and my calendar (an absolute necessity, these days), and WhatsApp, and tracking walking on Google Fit.  The old phones don't have phones numbers or SIM chips, but using them for those things saves battery on the new phone.

And you may have noticed I said "phones."  Plural.  When we first got a cell phone (and I was *very* late to the game on that) we immediately realized that we had to get *two* phones, because the only time we *used* the phones (back then), was to call each other.  So, one of the old phones is Gloria's phone.

Which has now died.  For the last few weeks it has been difficult trying to charge it, and yesterday it just absolutely refused.  I've tried it with the various chargers that I have, and it's just dead.  (Cruelly but appropriately?)  *My* old phone still seems to be working, so I'll carry on using it for email, etc, etc.

I find that I'm having trouble with the idea of throwing Gloria's phone away ...

I have realized, that I have a way, workable but slightly inconvenient, to resurrect, and even keep using, Gloria's old phone.  Since we always had two phones, and mostly they were the same phone, I can switch the batteries on the phone, and use my phone, to charge the battery for Gloria's phone.  Then I can put the phone the battery back in Gloria's phone and actually use the phone.  As I say, it's inconvenient, and slightly kludgy, but it's possible.  I probably won't actually *use* Gloria's phone, but I can get it back into working order, and probably pursue some way of doing a factory reset on it, so that I can safely send it out for recycling.

Which, along with the dream about the luggable computers, got me thinking about the fact that I use computers and devices far too long.  I actually don't know how old these phones are.  I know that they are more than six years old at this point.  Actually, over the roughly thirty-five years that we had cell phones, Gloria and I only had four sets of phones.  Our first was a pair of Nokias, so that's how far back this started.  Our second set of phones were a couple of flip phones.  And in that generation, Gloria had a pink flip phone, so we actually didn't have quite the same model.  The next generation were Samsung cell phones, with slide out keyboards.  (The girls were demanding that we start texting.)  And then there were these current Samsung Galaxies, once again the same model, and so able to interchange the batteries.  Last year these phones got to the point where, while they still worked, I ran out of space and memory on the phones, and so had to go and buy something more updated, with larger storage and memory.  (Oh, I probably should throw in there that, as a prize at some vendor seminar or trade show, I did actually have a Windows phone for a time.  I never got an account for it as a phone, but I used it for quite a while as a kind of a mini tablet, and it had the best camera of the phones that we had at that point.)

What did I want to say about phones, in this regard?  Probably that I use them in weird ways.  I keep them far too long.  The Windows phone still worked when I had to get rid of it, but the Windows cell phone operating system, which it ran on, couldn't be updated for that particular model (a later Nokia, as well) of phone.  That meant that the apps on the phone couldn't be updated, either.  And, eventually, all of the apps stopped working, as everyone was switching to https, and none of the apps on the phone would connect in that way.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/02/mgg-552-hwyd-555-1212.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/12/mgg-6oo-gloria-introduction-and-glorias.html

VM - G - 2.08 - governance - support requirements of enterprise

Address and support the specific requirements of the enterprise

In information security, as previously mentioned, we have to make sure to point out to our professionals that security is there to support the specific requirements of the enterprise.

There are two reasons to emphasize this particular point.  The first is that it is vitally important, in a field where we are the experts, and the people who are managing us very often do not understand the threats, vulnerabilities, and risks specific courses of action, and implementing different types of technologies, to remember that we are there to support the business.  Unfortunately, all too many of my colleagues simply look at the risks, and not at the benefits of the technology.  Technology should always be implemented with an awareness of the vulnerabilities and risks involved, but simply because a technology presents a risk is no reason not to use it.  You have to mitigate the risk, in order to use it, but all too often my colleagues will say that we simply can't use this technology.  Security therefore gets a reputation as "the knights who say 'no,'" and is seen as opposed to business.  This should not be so: security is a vital support for the business, and we should be careful not to run afoul of the perception that we are there to impede everybody else's work.

But the second reason to emphasize this point is because of those "specific" requirements.  It is important to consider what the business is doing, and pursuing, and which type of security is most important to it.

This may seem to be far afield from that of volunteer management.  It's not.  You always have to remember that, whatever the objectives and tasks of the volunteers in your volunteer office or department, they are part of a larger organization.  The overall organization does not exist simply to provide tasks to the volunteers.  The volunteers, and indeed, the volunteer office or department itself, is there to support the objectives of the parent organization.  We always have to make this clear to the volunteers.  And, as the person managing the volunteers, you are the one who has to make this clear to them, and keep repeating it every time individual volunteers seem to be pursuing ends of their own that are not those of the parent organization. 

That's a delicate task: reading the riot act to the volunteers, while, at the same time, trying not to do away with their motivation to continue volunteering.

But, once again, there is a second reason to remember that we, as volunteers are there to support the aims of the parent organization.  And this is the specific requirements of the parent organization.

One of my, very long-term and extensive volunteering has to do with the provision of support for those who'd have been affected by some kind of disaster.  We were responsible for making sure that people had the basic necessities for life in the aftermath of such an event, for a short period of time.  As such, we had authorization to call upon certain levels of funding, and provisions, in order to distribute to those who did not have the necessities of life.  But, at one point, I was volunteering in a location where there was a significant population in chronic need.  I remember feeling rather uncomfortable at various meetings where the idea was discussed that, since there was some oversight of the provisions that were available to us, but very little detail in regard to specific events, it would be possible for us to divert the emergency provisions to those in chronic need.  This might seem to be a kind thing to do, but was not the specific intent of the parent organization, and it would be possible to say that doing this kind of diversion of provisions was a kind of fraud.

But the issue of specific requirements of the parent organization can be viewed in other ways, as well.  Most particularly, it means that there is no "one size fits all" of volunteer management, any more than there is one size fits all in security.  Each volunteer organization is going to be unique, and is addressing a unique need, in a unique situation.  This is why, in this particular series, I may be seen as providing very broad brush and cliched recommendations for how to pursue volunteer management.  It's basically impossible to get too detailed.  As soon as you do, you start running into situations where those specific actions in terms of volunteer management actually conflict with a number of volunteer organizations who don't quite fit that pattern.

Yes, your job as a manager of volunteers is difficult.  No, I can't give you a cut and paste, checklist set of specifics of how to manage your volunteers.  That's just the nature of volunteer management.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

BBQ and back pain

Last week I helped out at a pride barbecue event at a church.  (Wait, a pride event?  At a *church*?)  I helped out with a bit of the setup, and then I took over barbecuing the hot dogs. 

There is a bit of an art to barbecuing for a large group of people.  You have to keep track of how much stock you have in reserve, and you have to send people for more if the reserves get low, and you have to ensure that you have enough hot dogs barbecued, and ready to go into buns, for the people who are likely to show up in the next five minutes (and, of course, nobody ever signs up, precisely, for when they are going to show up), so you have to do a fair bit of guessing, and a fair bit of scanning of the crowd, and noting who has recently arrived, and you have to put uncooked hot dogs on the grill, and you have to move the cooked wieners to the upper outside corners of the grill, so that they don't get completely charred, and, in between all of this, you have to put you have to split open the (usually rather dehydrated) buns, and then put a cooked wiener into the bun, and roll up the hot dog in a napkin (so that people can pretend that nobody has ever touched this hot dog before them), and put it on the tray, where you should have at least three, but no more than five, hot dogs for those families who are going to suddenly show up and all want hot dogs, and ...  It's a non-trivial task.

It helps if anyone else understands the needs, and comes to let you know how many people have showed up in the last couple of minutes, or help open up buns, and roll up the hot dogs in the napkins, or find out whether you are down to the last two wieners in the batch and might possibly have to have somebody run to the kitchen to find out if there are, in fact, any more wieners on hand, but nobody ever does.

Doing this on a portable barbecue, placed on a utility table, means that you may spend two solid hours kind of hunched over, making sure that the wieners are getting cooked, but not too charred.

I didn't really realize, until the event was over, just how sore my back was.  I mean, in a way, it's my own fault.  I have arthritis, and I have degenerating discs.  What did I *think* was going to happen?  Why didn't I pay attention to how my back was feeling, as it was going on, rather than staying hunched over the grill for two hours, and ending up in serious pain?

Well, good point.  The thing is, when you are focused on a task, and particularly when you are focused on a task for other people, you aren't paying too much attention to your own situation.  You aren't looking for signs that you could be in trouble.  You aren't paying attention to your own needs.  While you are making food for everybody else, do you, in fact, need something to eat?  On a very hot day, are you drinking enough water?  Given that you are probably drinking more water than usual, are you paying attention to eating something with salt on it, so that you get enough salt to replace the salt that is being washed out of your system by the extra water, and by sweating on a hot day?

So, why am I telling you this?  Is it just a complain about the fact that I, alone at all the population of Port Alberni, know about time and motion studies?  No, there are a couple of important points to make.

First, in terms of grief, and pain, and depression, and other distresses of the world, I have, at various previous times, noted that volunteering is good for what ails you.  If you are in difficulty, and you can't think of a way to address your own difficulty, help someone else.  Volunteer.  Join a volunteer group.  Help out with the barbecue at somebody's event.  Sit and listen to that boring person, whom nobody else will listen to because all they do is keep recycling their own petty problems over and over.  Help somebody else.  If nothing else, you will forget your own problems, if only for a little while.

And the second point is, as a volunteer manager, pay attention to your volunteers.  Your volunteers are going to get stuck into that same mindset.  They are going to forget their own problems.  They are going to be focused on solving the problems of others.  They are going to forget to pay attention to their own needs.  You have to look to their needs.  And, of course, it's not easy, because they aren't even paying attention to their own needs.  So, you are going to have to pay attention, and you are going to have to interrupt them, regularly, in order to make sure that they are, in fact, fine, rather than just *saying* fine whenever you ask, "How are you?"

Your volunteers are focused on others.  You'd better be focused on them.  (And, of course, by extension, every once in awhile you had better stop and think, am I okay?)

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

The Liberalist-Fundmentalist Split that formed the "United" Church (of Canada)

Happy One-Hundredth Birthday, United Church!

On the occasion of the United Church of Canada's 100th anniversary, I suppose that I should address the liberalist/fundamentalist controversy, since the United Church only exists because of the liberalist/fundamentalist schism.

I suppose that I should go back to the Reformation and the Enlightenment.  Actually, I suppose it all started with Jesus, and the discussion over what was the greatest commandment.  The greatest commandment was to love God, but there was a second commandment: to love your neighbor.  I suspect that this is where it all started.

Okay, let's jump forward to the Reformation.  At this point, we do have, in a sense, the united church, although, at this point, they use the word "catholic," rather than united.  But, for about 1500 years, the church has really been concentrating on the first commandment: love God.  Yes, there have been a few people who have tried to interest people in the second commandment, to love others, but, for the most part, they are mostly concentrating on the commandment to love God.  And the fact that it is a commandment.  The church was really very heavy on commandments.  The fundamentals of the Christian church.  The commandments of God.  And they use God primarily as a bit of a threat, to keep people following the commandments.

At least the ones that they like.

But, as I said, now we have the Reformation.  And the Reformation people, while still saying that you need to love God, also tend to emphasize, fairly strongly, the command to love your neighbors: that is, other people.  And this moves into the broader culture, and philosophy, in terms of the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment tends to say that, in terms of an overall view and even philosophy of life, you should be considering other people.  You should be loving them, and you should be running your life so that you are doing things for them, and helping them.

And this sort of seeps back into the church.  Actually, by this time, churches.  Because Christianity is no longer completely united.  There are a whole bunch of different denominations.  Lutherans.  Anabaptists.  Reformed.  (No, I don't know whether the Reformed Church was called that because it started during the Reformation, or whether it was called the Reformation because the Reformed Church was so keen on it.  Ask your mother.)  And some of them tend to emphasize the fundamental loving God part, and others of them, while still loving God, tend to emphasize that you need to have that love of God express itself in loving other people.

And this goes on for about four hundred years.  Over that time, the individual denominations sort of even themselves out.  There isn't much difference, aside from how much water you use to baptize people, and whether you actually use wine rather than grape juice and whether you use one cup or a bunch of little cups for whatever it is you are drinking in the communion service, in terms of the overall theology of the different churches.  They all have factions that emphasize the fundamentals of loving God, and they all have factions that emphasize the more liberal aspects of loving your neighbor.

And so it goes until the first world war.

The first world war is pretty awful.  And tens of millions of men (and not a few women, nursing and driving and suchlike) come home from the trenches of the first world war kind of asking themselves how on earth is it that there can be a God who can allow such horror on earth.

And all of these people (well, I suppose not *all* of them ...), with all of their questions and PTSD, come back to their churches.  Some of them addressed the horror that they have seen by *leaving* the church.  Some of them addressed the horror by leaning into the fundamentals of loving God, and just ignoring the horrors that are in the world.  And some of them addressed the horrors by leaning into the more liberal ideas of loving your neighbor, and trying to address whatever horror is around them in the lives of others.

And, over the years, the two camps (of fundamentalism and liberalism) get into squabbles about which of these two commandments is the more important.  And the various denominations form liberal and fundamental wings.  In many cases, an individual church will address itself more to the liberal side, or more to the fundamental side.  And those who are more comfortable with liberal ideologies tend to join those churches that are more liberal.  And those who are more comfortable with the more fundamental ideologies tend to join those churches that are more fundamental.  Sometimes whole denominations tend to move to the liberal, or to the fundamental, side.  But sometimes a group of churches, either fundamental churches within a denomination that is primarily liberal, or liberal churches within a denomination that is from a merely fundamental, will split off and form a new denomination.

In Canada, a number of churches on the liberal side of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist denominations decided to band together, and try to unite the church--in typical church fashion by splitting and forming a *new* denomination.  This became the United Church of Canada.  (Actually, the "of Canada" part is kind of redundant.  The United Church originated in Canada, and, for the most part, the United Church is in Canada.  By and large, any other "United" churches were started by mission church plants from Canada.)

Actually, this story resonates with me very strongly, for two reasons.  I am a Baptist (where our motto is, "I'm a Baptist, and *nobody* is going to make me a Christian!").  The Baptists are the most shismatic Christian denomination that there is, and I have the statistics to prove it.  Baptist distinctive are that we are non-creedal, so we don't tend to split over theological issues, since we don't have a statement of belief to disagree about.  But we also believe, very strongly, in the priesthood of all believers, and in the independence of the local church.  So we tend to split about all kinds of other important topics, such as whether or not the members of the choir should wear choir gowns, or whether we should replace the pews with chairs, or, having replaced the pews with chairs, what the "one true" layout of the chairs should be.

The other reason that the formation of the United Church resonates with me is that the same liberalist/fundamentalist schism that formed the United Church in Canada, led to the creation of an entirely new Baptist sub-denomination in British Columbia.  The Baptists are primarily a fundamentalist denomination, but certain of the churches in British Columbia decided that they needed to become even *more* fundamentalist (and less liberal), and so banded together and formed a new sub-denomination.  You may have heard of the Three Greenhorns, who were three of the original settlers in the Vancouver area, and who, because of holding a good deal of land in a rapidly expanding urban area, eventually became quite wealthy.  John Morton, one of the Three Greenhorns, was a Baptist, and, in his will, he left a large portion of his fortune to the "regular" Baptist Church.  By this, of course, he meant the majority Baptist Church, the Convention of Baptist Churches, in British Columbia.  However, in order to lay claim to this fortune, the new sub-denomination officially registered itself as the Regular Baptist Church of British Columbia.  This led to a huge, and lengthy, legal battle over the probate of John Morton's will, finally resulting in the Convention of Baptist Churches receiving about a quarter of the money, the Regular Baptist Churches receiving about a quarter of the money, and a whole bunch of lawyers receiving approximately half of the total amount of money that was originally intended for the churches.

VM - G - 2.05 - governance - volunteers vs paid staff

Volunteer vs paid staff tensions

One of the issues that I have seen, over and over again, in regard to the management of volunteers and volunteer organizations, is the division between paid and volunteer staff.  This is likely an issue that you, as a volunteer manager, will encounter, since it is likely that you are a *paid* manager, of *unpaid* volunteers.

One of the main ways that this tension shows up is in regard to volunteers complaining about hours of work.  Volunteers tend not to be very concerned about their hours of work.  Volunteers, very often, are volunteering because they do not have many calls on their time.  They want something to do with their time.  So, very often they are not too concerned about a shift running longer than the expected, or overtime hours or rates.  After all, they don't get paid, so they don't get paid overtime, either.

But paid staff *do* get paid.  And, by and large, they get paid either by the hour, or they get paid a flat rate salary for a specific number of hours per week.  And, very often, they have other calls upon their time.  They have a home life.  They may have a family.  They have other things to do, and so they are very concerned if they are asked to do additional duties that would require them to stay beyond their regular hours at work.

This is only one of the issues that might create tension between paid staff and volunteers within the same organization.  But it may begin to illustrate the problem.

Volunteers are volunteering motivated by the belief that the task that they are performing is important.  They are doing important work, and they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart.  If, therefore, the job is important, and they are doing this important work with no remuneration, very often they will assume that they can call on paid staff to assist them in this work, since the paid staff, after all, *are* being paid for pursuing the same objective.  The paid staff, noting that they are paid for a certain number of hours, and that they are fulfilling their duties diligently, and to the best of their ability, may resent extra requests for extra work or tasks, tasks that may lie outside the scope of their job description, and extra work that may require hours beyond their usual hours of work.

Hours of work may not be the only issue.  There is the aforementioned topic of job descriptions.  Once again, volunteers are there because they think the organizations objective is important.  If they are pursuing the objective, they generally don't worry too much about whether a particular task that they are doing, if it is in pursuit of the overall objective, is something that they were told about during volunteer training.  They will, very frequently, take on additional tasks if they think they can possibly do them.  (Indeed, one of the reasons that volunteers may take volunteer work, is so that they can learn new tasks that they haven't done before.)  Paid staff, however, may be a bit fussier about taking on additional tasks that aren't listed in their job description.  After all, they will be facing some kind of job review, at some point, and performing a task poorly may reflect negatively on their job review, and possibly on their future salary.  Therefore, they may not wish to attempt a job that hasn't been described to them, or for which they have not been trained.  So, paid staff may not wish to undertake new or novel tasks, and may object to requests to help out with them, and may have valid reasons for objecting to this work that is not part of their job description.

As noted, this tension may be particularly acute for you, as the manager of volunteers.  You are probably being paid for this job of managing the volunteers.  You are being paid for a certain number of hours of work per week, and the volunteers may well be performing work at times outside of your normal hours of work.  So the volunteers, in regard to hours of work, may object to the fact that they are working, and you are not.  In regard to the hours of work, very often shifts may either be going filled, or be difficult to accomplish with minimal staffing levels, and the volunteers may feel that you, as their manager, should step in to help out that times when not many volunteers are available.  If you agree, you may end up working twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week.

In regard to tasks, the situation may be even more complex.  After all, you are the manager of the volunteers.  You train the volunteers.  You describe, to the volunteers, the tasks they are to perform.  They should, and quite properly, expect you to be able to do anything that they do.  However, there may be things that some of the volunteers do well, that you don't do *as* well.  (I recall a time when I was training technicians to align fibre optic cable connections.  They regularly got 97% transfer efficiency.  I'm no good at manual dexterity.  The best *I* ever did was 30%.)  It may be better to let them do it.

You may not wish to address this issue up front with staff and volunteer training.  It's something that people are apt to ignore in training, and talking about it can create problems where none existed before.  However, keep an eye out for this type of tension between the two types of staff.  Make sure that both paid and volunteer staff know what to expect from each other.  Be sure to remind the volunteers that paid staff should not necessarily be burdened with tasks beyond a specific set.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

I, for one, welcome our hallucinatory AI therapist overlords ...

I've done a fair amount of research into griefbots (or thanabots, or "restoration" systems), primarily those that try to "replace" your dead person.

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/04/griefbots-1-intro-and-ai.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/04/griefbots-2-dating-apps-and-ai-friends.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/04/griefbots-3-errors-hallucinations-and.html

As you may suspect, I'm not an avid fan.

Out of the blue, I have come across a site from David Kessler, an otherwise unobjectionable disciple of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

His site has an AI you can talk to ...

I'm still not sure how I feel about AI "therapists."  I know that they can be quite effective: they are polite, persistent, and never argue.  At the very least they never start any sentence with "At least ... ," which all too many *people* do.  With something this potentially dangerous, I'd like to see at least a *tiny* bit of research before rolling this stuff out to see who commits suicide.  The grief.com site does, at least, lead off with "This discussion is solely educational, not medical or mental health advice. This does not constitute an ongoing or therapeutic relationship. Please consult a healthcare and/or mental health professional for care. For medical or mental health emergencies reach out to emergency services right away. This is only for 18 years and older."

And today I found this article about Replika sexually harrassing users, some of them minors.  Replika is one of the griefbots and, although I have no actual experience with it, is the one I've known about the longest.  (It started becoming public around the time that Gloria died, and originally used email from your "loved one" as source material, and, of course, I've got tons of email from Gloria.)

The article notes the business model of Replika puts romantic or sexual roleplay behind a paywall, which can, in a variety of ways, promote sexual content in the public, free, or lower cost versions of the system.  It is *extremely* likely that the system is "trained" to promote extended, continuing, or upselling levels and use to the clients.

Grief table of contents and resources

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html

Grief table of contents and resources

Grief table of contents and resources

These are links to various postings over the last few years, specifically dealing with grief, and mostly providing some kind of resource for others.  It's hard to say that there is any particular order to it, although I seem to have put most of the generic (and newer) stuff up front, and the older (and less applicable except in specific situations) later on.  I'll probably be adding stuff over time.

Grief cliches

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/grief-cliches-1.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/grief-cliches-2.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/grief-cliches-3.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/grief-cliches-4.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-cliches-5.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-cliches-6.html

Men's grief/Grief Guys

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/03/grief-guys.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/12/grief-guys-3.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/12/grief-guys-4-introduction-and.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/01/grief-guys-materials-and-resources.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/03/grief-guys-guide-to-comforting-bereaved.html

Grief/caregiving/end-of-life bibliographies

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/12/grief-bibliography.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/caregivers-bibliography.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/05/end-of-life-bibliography.html

Memoirs of a Grieving Gnome

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/mgg-1a-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-grief.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/mgg-1b1-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-fiona.html

Grief scams

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/grief-scams.html

Why do people fall for grief scams?

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/why-do-people-fall-for-grief-scams.html

Griefbots

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/04/griefbots-1-intro-and-ai.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/04/griefbots-2-dating-apps-and-ai-friends.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/04/griefbots-3-errors-hallucinations-and.html

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/i-for-one-welcome-our-hallucinatory-ai.html

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3yZYa8O6uZLvFIJkUpXQd2

Facing grief podcast

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7hgfa5TemyZ9WHsDWmHJj2

Grief sermon series

Sermon 22 - Grief Illiteracy

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/03/sermon-22-grief-illiteracy-and-series.html

Sermon 4 - Grief and Dying to Self

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/01/sermon-4-grief-and-dying-to-self.html

Sermon 7 - faith and works, and intuitive vs instrumental grief

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/sermon-7-faith-and-works-and-intuitive.html

Sermon 8 - Listening

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/03/sermon-8-listening.html

Sermon 10 - Why Job

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/03/sermon-10-why.html

Grief alumni tea

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/05/grief-alumni-tea.html

Everything you need to know about grief counselling, you can learn from Holly Cole

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/01/everything-you-need-to-know-about-grief.html

Societal grief and misbehaviour

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/03/societal-grief-and-misbehaviour.html

Societal misbehaviour and pandemic grief - conspiracies

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/04/societal-misbehaviour-and-pandemic.html

BBQ and back pain

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/bbq-and-back-pain.html

Where's the line between "negligence" and "scam"?

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/wheres-line-between-negligence-and-scam.html

Grief biz

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/01/grief-biz.html

SYN/ACK: Let me know if I can ever help you out

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/synack-let-me-know-if-i-can-ever-help.html

Loneliness

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/11/loneliness.html

Grief memes

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/12/grief-memes.html

Hair Grief Burst

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/12/hair-grief-burst.html

Oneshotted

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/02/oneshotted.html

Joy (2)

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/11/joy-2.html

Social network failures

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/06/social-network-failures.html

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html

Grief cliches (6)

Find and learn from role models

I am really, really ambiguous about this one. 

On the one hand, I strongly recommend finding some kind of grief support group.  This may be your friends, although that is unlikely.  People who have not suffered bereavement have a very difficult time understanding bereavement.  You may be fortunate enough to join a grief support group which continues after its formal close.  Grief support groups are composed of people who, by definition, understand bereavement.  Unfortunately, most grief support groups seem to end when the formal group ends.  However, if you find a grief support group that continues, you are fortunate, and will find a great deal of support, help, and insight, from the other members of the group.  It may not be simply a grief support group remnant.  One of the hospice societies with which I had some connection had a Saturday tea, which anyone who had taken either individual counseling, or group grief support, through that hospice society was allowed to attend.  (I referred to it as the Grief Alumni Tea.)  There were people from different grief support groups, and some who had just had individual counseling, but all were bereaved, and all were able to provide support, and insight, to each other.

The thing is, these groups seem to be quite rare.  There do appear to be some similar groups which exist online.  I have not, myself, been able to find one.

However, this doesn't exactly sound like what the author of this list had in mind.  These groups are not exactly composed of role models.  The author of this list seems to have some kind of grief mentorship in mind.  I strongly suspect that he sees himself as some kind of a grief mentor.

I'm not quite sure how useful a grief mentor, or role model, would be.  As the more recent grief literature has it (somewhat in opposition to the misuse of the five stages of dying as five stages of grief), "everyone grieves in their own way."  Then there is the continuum between intuitive and instrumental styles of grieving.  While there is no dichotomy, and probably most people will have something of a mix of intuitive and instrumental styles of grieving, the grief work involved tends to be quite different.  If you are an intuitive griever, and happen upon an instrumental role model, it likely won't do you an awful lot of good.  If you pick a role model who grieves in a different way from you, it might not be particularly helpful.  It might, most commonly, give you the message that, yes, everyone grieves in their own way, but *you* are doing it wrong.

It is probably much safer to go to someone with formal counseling training.  These people are much more likely to understand the traps involved in being too doctrinaire in terms of how someone else should handle a difficulty as traumatic as bereavement.  Simply looking around and finding a role model, and asking them to be your mentor, probably is not the best course of action.

Focus on who you are becoming

Yes, that is likely reasonably good advice.  I say "reasonably," because it can be difficult to achieve.  It may be difficult to see who you are becoming, while still in the midst of grief.

In addition, this is likely more appropriate to those who are on the instrumental side of the grieving continuum.  Those who are grieving in an instrumental manner, will be focused on planning, and on the future, as well as based in cognitive types of grief work, which will be most appropriate to analyzing who you are becoming.  Those who are intuitive grievers will likely require grief work that concentrates more on the past, and more how they are feeling in the midst of the grief work and process.

Find a new identity

Isn't this just saying the same thing in a different way?  Also, it's not necessarily terribly easy to find a new identity.  I have been trying for three and a half years, and I really can't say that I have found anything like a satisfying new identity.

Believe life will get better

Okay, I think we're into toxic positivity again.  Yes, some level of positivity is probably good, at least in terms of a distraction from a constant stream of negative thoughts.  But it can be really, really difficult to believe, in the midst of a desperately tragic situation, that life will get better.  And if you aren't able to force yourself to believe that life will get better, it just becomes one more thing at which you fail.

Believe you will survive

This is probably a bit better.  It's not quite as toxically positive as believing that life will get better, and it's probably more realistic.  But we did cover it already.  Very few people actually die of a broken heart.  (Although some of us, sometimes rather desperately, wish that we could.)

Identify and dispel grief myths

It's hard to react to this one, since I have trouble figuring out what this guy had in mind in terms of grief myths.  In general, most of the population, being terrified of actually thinking about, or talking about, yes, lost, or grief, has very little idea about the reality of all of the above.  However, in a sense, I am trying to do just that.  This entire list seems to me to be comprised primarily of myths about grief.  So, yes, I would say that you should try and dispel myths about grief.  But it's hard to do that when all you are told is dispel myths about grief.  A little detail might be helpful.

Let grief be your friend

I've got to admit, my first reaction to this is, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

I suppose that the one thing that I could say is about this is: don't fight grief.  Grief is going to happen.  If you have suffered a loss, you have to grieve.  You have to go through grief work.  You have to process the grief somehow.

But, of course, that "somehow" is the basis of "everyone grieves in their own way."

Quite aside from the fact that you have to do it, there are some benefits to grief.  There is the old phrase about "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."  But, generally speaking, while what doesn't kill you may make you stronger, it usually makes you less sensitive.  Grief is rather unique in that, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger, but it also makes you *more* sensitive.  Your grief probably isn't going to help *you*.  But it will make you someone who is more attuned to, more sensitive to, and more able to accurately respond to the distress of others.  The distress of others may not be grief, per se.  It may not even involve loss, although generally speaking it will.  But your own grief will make you someone who is better at responding to the trouble, distress, and grief of other people.

Be a stress buster

Well, yeah, we can all use better ways to handle stress.  But I really think that this one comes under the heading of easier said than done.

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html

VM - G - 2.04 - governance - organizational roles and structure

Volunteer management - VM - G - 2.04 - governance - organizational roles and structure

Organizational roles and structure

Organizational structure, for a volunteer organization, tends to be a bit flatter than in a business enterprise.  Even a small business might have senior management, middle management, frontline management, and the employees.  However, even rather large volunteer organizations will tend to have only senior management, volunteer management, and the volunteers.

As a volunteer manager, very often it is just you, and the volunteers.  And, very often, because you are managing the volunteers, and the volunteers are doing all the work, you may start to hold the view that senior management is less important than you are.  After all, it is a volunteer organization, and you are managing the volunteers.  The volunteers are doing all the work.  So, what is it that senior management is doing?  It is easy to come to the attitude that you are of primary importance to the organization, and senior management is just there because somebody has to talk to the Board.

Actually, there are some areas of normal business enterprise that operate in quite similar fashion, and I have worked in one of them.  In the field of information technology, we are quite used to the fact that senior management, very often, doesn't actually understand the technology that we are dealing with.  If we are working in a technology company, we are dealing with the technology, and so, what the heck is management doing?  In information security, this separation is even more apparent.  Information security is a very small population within even the information technology world.  So, those of us who work in information technology not only have to understand the technology that senior management doesn't, but even the security aspects of the technology that our direct managers don't understand.  It is quite easy to start to take the attitude that we are the only ones who actually understand what is going on, and that all the levels of management above us really have no idea what we are doing, and do not understand the situation that we see, and the risks that the entire enterprise is facing.

It's easy, but of course, it is wrong.

Senior management is responsible for everything in the enterprise, whether it is a business, or a volunteer organization.  Senior management understands the objective, and understands, overall, the larger risks that the organization is subject to.  Senior management understands the finances, and the ability to obtain more finances, and the ability to obtain other resources necessary to the objectives of the organization.  They probably have a better grasp on that than we do, even though we understand, in far more detail, what the organization is doing in pursuit of those objectives.  But our objectives, in the organization, are not simply our frontline tasks.  We are accomplishing those tasks,.  But sometimes the tasks might even need to be set aside, for a time, in pursuit of the larger objectives.

As a manager of volunteers, your job is to manage the volunteers, to support the volunteers, and, particularly, to support the volunteers in pursuit of the tasks that they accomplish in pursuit of the larger organizational objective.  Your job is not, necessarily, too decide on, or finalize, or even pursue that larger objective.  Your task is to manage the volunteers.  You have a complicated task in doing that.  Your job is big enough, and difficult enough.  Sometimes senior management may not give you the resources that you feel you need.  And, of course, in directing the volunteers, you are closer to the front line, and the tasks that are being accomplished there.  But senior management, and the Board, need to look at the larger picture.  They need to look at the overall objective, and whether or not that objective even still exists.  They also have to ensure that the organization, itself, continues to exist and to pursue that objective if needed.  They have to, in a sense, ignore the immediate needs of the front line tasks, in pursuit of the larger objective.  They have to understand the larger environment within which your organization exists.  The community, that has the need, that the organization's objective pursues.  The community, and especially the business community, that can support the organization with resources and finances.  The overall community, and the general population, within which they have to build goodwill, and promote the objectives of the organization, and fundraise.  That's *their* job.  You do yours.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Grief cliches (5)

See suffering and loss as part of life

Okay, I am *extremely* tempted to just go into yet another rant on toxic positivity.  Yes, I suppose that there are those who have been able, all their lives, so far, to see the world through rose-coloured glasses, and who never have had a loss, and who have never had any significant suffering.  If there are such, and they actually do not believe that suffering and loss is a part of life, then they are actually *suffering* from toxic positivity, and, yes, in that case, they need a dose of reality.

However, for the rest of us, it is possibly not terribly helpful to tell us to see suffering and loss as a part of life.  Yes, we have suffered.  Yes, we have had losses.  So, yes, we know that suffering and loss is a part of life.  But just saying that you need to recognize this is unlikely to be of any help in your grief journey.

Be aware of limiting beliefs

Once again, it is tempting to lump this in with the foregoing.

But, yes, there are some, and probably many more than those who think that suffering and loss is not a part of life, who feel shattered, and may, actually, believe that they cannot get through this.

Very, very few people actually die of a broken heart.  There are some few who do.  I don't know that anyone has, as of yet, determined the risk factors for those who, under severe emotional stress, actually have electrical signal malfunctions in their cardiac muscle.  But it does, very rarely, happen.  So, the belief that you cannot survive this is probably false.  (Some of us would *like* to die of a broken heart.)  And the belief that you cannot survive this, and you cannot get through this, is definitely going to be a limiting belief.

The belief that you are never going to be happy again is also a limiting belief.  Being happy, while still grieving, can be very strange.  People who have suffered a severe loss, and are grieving, may find that, when they find themselves experiencing happiness, pleasure, or even joy, feeling guilty about their happiness.  But you can enjoy things, even after a serious loss.  So, the belief that you can never be happy again, and there could never be any pleasure in your life again, is a seriously limiting, and incorrect, belief.  You have to work against falling into that trap.

If you have lost a spouse or partner, it's possible that you may think that you can never love again.  If you have lost a child, you may believe that you can never love another child as much as you loved the one that has died.  Once again, these beliefs are almost invariably false, and you need to fight against them.

Reframe your perspective

I think that this one needs a bit of context.  You may have a proper perspective.  You may have a reasonable perspective on what the loss means, how important it is to you, and whether this loss means that your life has no meaning anymore.  Simply saying that you need to reframe your perspective is not necessarily either true or helpful.

Renew your purpose

Yes, a significant loss in your life can make it feel like your life has no meaning, and no purpose.  When Gloria died, I lost my best friend, I lost the person that I most wanted to talk to at a given time, I lost my wife, and, since I had been her caregiver for a decade, I also lost my job.  So, yes, the meaning and purpose of my life took a pretty major hit.

I have tried to find a purpose, since, and, by and large, I have failed.  I have tried writing.  I have tried different *types* of writing.  I have tried to get involved with teaching.  I have tried quite a variety of volunteer work.  I have even tried gardening (and why I am gardening I *still* have absolutely no idea).  I still have no new meaning or purpose in my life.  I can't renew the purpose of my life, because I was taking care of Gloria, and Gloria doesn't need taken care of anymore.  So, I would say that your purpose, and the meaning in your life, can take a hit, and you may need to find something else.  Certainly renewing is not always a possibility, and finding a new purpose can be very difficult.  Considering your purpose, and considering pursuing efforts to find a new purpose, should be something that you should think about.  But just blankly saying "renew your purpose" is probably not helpful.

Embrace tears as healing

As I have previously noted, I don't have any particular problem with tears.  However, I'm not sure that I, necessarily, see tears as healing.  Yes, you may have to cry.  And it's all right to cry.  There is nothing wrong with crying.  Some people feel better after crying.  I, myself, don't.  But I don't fight against it either.

If you feel better after a good cry, good.  If not, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything wrong with you.  I don't think that there's anything wrong with crying, but I don't think that there's any magic healing in them, either.

Volunteer management - VM - M - 1.04 - motivation, know staff

One of the very common questions that recruiters and human resources people are taught to ask in interviews is what I call the "what do you want to be when you grow up" question.  Usually this is phrased as "where do you see yourself in five (or ten or twenty) years."  The reason that recruiters are taught to ask this question is to see if someone has a career plan.

Most of the time, and particularly in my field of work, it's a pretty stupid question.

Now, there are some people, like Chris Hadfield, who had a career plan.  They followed it, and they got to where they wanted to go.  Chris Hadfield wanted to be an astronaut.  There is a pretty common career path to follow if you want to be an astronaut.  However, very few people actually get to *be* astronauts.  And I'm absolutely certain there are quite a number of people who, like Chris Hadfield, wanted to be an astronaut, and followed the plan, and never did, actually, get into space.

My field is information technology.  Information technology changes.  New types of technology are discovered, or created.  Software is developing all the time.  Hardware, possibly in its basics, still mostly follows the von Neumann architecture, as it has for the past seventy years.  However, we are now coming into a major change in technology with regard to quantum computing, and so, once again, not only the software, and the means of developing software, but the actual hardware platforms are going to radically change.

In information technology, constant change is here to stay.

When I started to work with computers, I didn't even know that there was a thing called information security.  And I have worked for a great many technology companies over the course of my career.  Even within information security, I have specialized in different domains at different times.  I didn't plan it.  I had no idea, for the most part, specifically where my career was going to go.  For the past 40 years, I could have described myself as a systems analyst.  But the systems, and the type of analysis that I did on them, changed constantly.  I suppose that my career plan could best be described as I see the next problem, and I solve it.  While it has worked for me, it isn't exactly a plan that allows you to give details of what you are going to do in even five years, let alone twenty.

If I am honest (which I do not feel obliged to be with anyone foolish enough to ask this idiotic type of question) I have never had a career plan.  Not in the way that the recruiters seem to see it.

Okay, this is a very long-winded way of leading into the fact that you have to know your volunteers.  Yes, as Pfeffer said in "The Human Equation," you have to know your people; both your customers, and your employees; in any business enterprise.  You have to know the strengths, and the aspirations, of your employees.  You probably don't have to guide them, but you may get better results out of them if you direct the area that they might next want to work in, and ensure that that particular field is something that they are good at, and interested in.

But it is much, *much* more important in volunteer management.

In business management, your employees are there because they want a job.  They want to get paid.  They want to be in a business, where they can make contacts, for other types of work, and other types of jobs, if they aren't particularly satisfied with the one that they are working in now.

That is not the case with volunteers.  You are not paying them.  They don't need a job, if they are willing to work for you, for nothing.  They don't need the money.  They don't necessarily need another job.  (If you are a fortunate enough to have young volunteers, who are looking for contacts to get into the job market, then well and good.  But realize that those particular volunteers, are, basically, looking to get a job which is going to ensure that they don't have time to work for you.)

Some of your volunteers may have too much time on their hands, and are looking for something to do to fill their hours.  However, in the first place, in our fast-paced modern society, those people are extremely rare.  In the second place, if that is why they are volunteering for you, they could easily turn around and volunteer for somebody else who *does* pay attention to them.

All of which is by way of saying that you need, really *really* need, to get you to know your volunteers.  Get to know why they are working for your particular organization.  Is it a really desperate desire to address the need that your organization fulfills?  Are they interested in the need that you're organization is devoted to, or are they primarily there for the camaraderie and fellowship of their colleagues who are also working to address that objective?  Are they just filling in time?  Are they particularly interested in the task that you have them doing?  Are they interested in having a regular time of volunteering, every week at the same day and time?  Are they interested in doing a variety of jobs, and learning something new all the time?  Are they interested in one particular task, and only one particular task, regardless of the needs of the organization?  Do they get along with their volunteer colleagues?  Is there something that they would rather be doing, and are you just the closest thing to what they actually want to do?

You need to know the answer to all of these questions, and more, to ensure that you can motivate them to help with the tasks that the organization needs to have done.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Grief cliches (4)

Read books on grief and loss

Yes.  With some provisos.

Grief can be the weirdest thing that you have ever encountered, particularly since our society refuses to talk about it.  It can make you feel like you might be going crazy.  Getting some information on what grief is, and what you might expect, is probably a very good thing.  Yes, you can get help from grief counsellors, and grief support groups, but there are some problems.  It's hard to tell whether counsellors actually have experience with, or training in, grief, aside from those who do work with hospice societies.  Those who do work with hospice societies tend to be in high demand, so you may have a long wait time to get started.  Grief support groups are more available, but many societies running the groups have requirements that you have had at least some counselling before getting into a group, so, once again, there may be a delay in availability.

Books are immediately available.  But, like counsellors, it can be difficult to tell which books can be helpful, just because it has "grief" in the title.  As a resource for the hospice society for which I volunteer, I have started a bibliography of grief books (as well as bibliographies for caregiving and end-of-life care).  All of the titles listed in the bibliographies have full reviews linked to them, so that you can get details of what the books might be good for.

Eat healthy

Yeah, it's a good idea.  But possibly easier said than done.

Yes, any major disturbance in your life, and grief is definitely a disturbance, requires that you have the best physical resources that you can.  This includes health, this includes sleep, and this includes a healthy diet.  Yes, diet and exercise is generally helpful in pretty much any situation.  So, yes, eat healthy is not exactly bad advice.

However, simply saying eat healthy may not be terribly helpful to a lot of people.  We are, after all, talking about grief here.  And, specifically for men, you may never have had to consider what a healthy diet is.  If you are grieving because you have lost your wife, you may have lost the person who has cooked for you, for possibly the majority of your life.  So, how are you supposed to even know what a healthy diet is?

And, as someone who does know how to cook, and who did the majority of the cooking during the time of our marriage, I can tell you that eating healthy, and preparing healthy meals, is harder than it sounds.  If you are grieving, very likely you are at least partially depressed, and you are probably having difficulty just getting through the day.  In the initial stages of grief, you are using pretty much all of the energy and resources that you have, just grieving, and surviving the grief.  You don't have time to think about meals.  You don't have the energy to consider, in detail, how to eat, and what kind of a diet is best for you.  And, certainly, you want to take the easiest path to having a meal.

The easiest path, unfortunately, isn't particularly healthy.

Our society provides us with quick and easy meals, that aren't particularly healthy.  Overly processed food is readily available, and it tends to be fairly cheap, partly because it also tends to have a long shelf life, and therefore it's easy to manage it once you buy it and get it home.  You can simply open a box, or a bag, or a package, and start eating.  A lot of the stuff doesn't need to be refrigerated, and, even after you open a bag, it can stay on the shelf after you have satisfied your immediate hunger, until the next time you are hungry.

But, while it is easy, and relatively inexpensive, and easy to manage, in terms of being available when you are hungry, it's not a healthy diet.

It tends to be high in starch, and sugar, and salt, and the types of fats that aren't particularly good for you.

Healthy foods tend to be vegetables.  They also tend to be fresh.  Even when they are prepared, in some way, that gives them a longer shelf life, they, those materials, because they are nutritious, tend to grow things that are bad for you, like mold.  These types of foods, that are good for you, tend to go bad, over time.  They tend to have to be refrigerated.  You have to remember when you bought them.  You have to keep checking them, to see how old they are.  You also have to keep checking them to see if they are growing mold, or smelling bad.

They also tend to be more expensive.  Because they tend to go bad, they have a shelf life, and because they have a shelf life, they have greater requirements for being freshly harvested, prepared, and shipped to market.  And all of that costs money.  So food that is healthy for you tends to be more expensive than food that isn't particularly good for you.

And food that is good for you tends to have to be prepared.  You need to have a variety of foods to have a healthy diet.  Even if you are eating vegetables, and a lot of vegetables can be eaten raw, they still have to be peeled, and scraped, or scrubbed, and cut up into bite sized pieces.  So food that is healthy for you tends to be a lot more trouble to prepare.

This is hard, and it takes effort.

And then there's even more effort in figuring out what mix of foods, all of which require different preparation methods, you should be eating in order to have a healthy diet.

So, yes, eating healthy is a good idea.  But just saying to people "eat healthy" isn't particularly helpful.

Take a road trip

In general this would seem to come under the category of a distraction.  And, as I have pointed out, a distraction, and anything that might be pleasurable, is probably good.

It's also something new.  Going on a trip generally gives you something new to see, or encounter, or experience.  And anything new, and learning anything new, is probably a good idea.  You are faced with an entirely new situation, and your life has changed from what it was.  Learning something new helps you in the process of learning a new life.  It's practice for building a new life, and so it's helpful in that regard.

But simply, randomly, going on a road trip, or taking a vacation, or even going to visit friends or family, can be really difficult.  After Gloria died, a lot of people suggested that I take various types of trips.  A relative who really liked going on cruise ships suggested that I go on a cruise.  I'd never gone on a cruise in my life, either with Gloria, or before I met her.  I (still) have no idea of what to do or expect on a cruise.  Other friends kept on inviting me to come and stay with them.  Yes, I'm sure that going to see them, in their home, which I hadn't been to, would have provided some new sensations.  But it also means that I have to move, I have to plan the trip, I have to do the actual traveling, and then I'm stuck in their situation, and their schedule of life, and I'm already facing a major change in my *own* life.  I don't look forward to putting in an awful lot of effort, and then being stuck for several days following someone else's rules and ideas of how you should live.  I am already in a situation where the way I thought life should work isn't working.

One cousin did come to visit.  And then suggested that they wanted to go on a road trip to somewhere nearby.  It's definitely a tourist destination, and, in fact, even though it was only a couple of hours drive, I hadn't gone there.  They invited me to come along.  That way I didn't have to do anything.  I just had to sit in the car for the ride.  They did the driving, and it was only going to be a day trip, so it wasn't any major commitment of time.  I enjoyed it.  It was very nice of them.

So, yes, some type of trip could be helpful.  As a distraction, or simply for the novelty of it, and the practice in encountering new situations and adapting to them.

But, as with so many other items on this list, it's easy to say, and not so easy to do.

And, once again, it would be very nice for somebody to do this for you, but it's harder than it sounds to do it for yourself.

Learn a new skill

Yes, this is a good idea.

As I say, you are facing a change in your life.  Probably a very major change in your life.  Doing anything new helps with what psychologists call neuroplasticity.  This is the ability of your brain to adapt to know skills, new situations, new requirements; pretty much anything new in your life.  Building neuroplasticity by learning something new is a good idea.  It will help you adapt to your new life situation.

(And, once again, it might be easier to say than to do.  So, don't beat yourself up if you can't do it right away.)

Focus on what’s left, not what’s lost

Okay, in general, possibly a good thing.  Being positive (or, more importantly, not constantly dwelling on the negative), is, overall, a good thing.  If you can do it.

But this is just *way* too close to toxic positivity for me to recommend it to anyone who is actually grieving.

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html