I’m really angry and frustrated about some things that are happening in my personal life, so here’s a post that’s not about losing weight.

I do a lot of volunteer work for my sport. I come from a family of perpetual volunteers who would drop anything to help another so the idea of putting back into things that I value comes naturally to me. It always confuses me that other people don’t feel this way, but I can understand that some people just don’t care enough to put back, or whatever it is doesn’t have such a profound effect on them as it does on me.

However, I can never ever understand people who disrespect work that volunteers do. I organise the entire schools league for underwater hockey. It’s a lot of work, usually 5 hours a week on top of physically being at the pool for 8 hours a week on top of that. This is a huge undertaking to a person generally, and I specifically make significant sacrifices to my personal life to accommodate this. I work 20 hours a week, attend university full time and also volunteer with other organisations. It’s a huge chunk of my life that I could be spending working, studying or at home with my boyfriend, that instead, I am dedicating to others.

The issue started on Friday night when another volunteer criticised what I was doing, saying that I was supposed to be ‘helping the sport’. It really upset me that he would say that when he KNOWS the work and effort I put in to help the sport.

Throughout the year Marcus and I have also got a lot of flack from other volunteers for selling gear to players. They have said that we put making profit above our jobs as volunteers.

This annoyed me for several reasons – firstly, I am the only one out of the two of us who has a role as a volunteer. Secondly, I drop everything, and have lost sales so I can make sure that things are running smoothly. I have even advised people go elsewhere. And, most significantly of all, we have put all of the profit back into purchasing a 4 camera-camera system to live-feed and record games – it’s the most high-tech system out of all UWH camera systems in the world, and has cost us thousands of dollars – more, in fact, than we have made selling gear.

Any time I ask for help from the rest of the committee (who are volunteers themselves) I either get no response or a response so late that it is rendered useless. I know that I can’t expect them to help all the time and I don’t. I do, however, expect at least some acknowledgement that they aren’t assisting me so I know at least that they’ve got the message.

It infuriates me how much people take for granted the work that volunteers do and have the balls to criticise it. Please, please, please, make an effort today to thank someone in your life who you know does a thankless job. It’s those little thank yous and smiles and the teeny bit of help that you give that makes it all worthwhile.

And if you are a volunteer, I sincerely thank you for all of the work that you do. If it wasn’t for you, life would be much harder for someone else, so take heed of the fact that someone out there values what you do.

Remember; never, ever knock a volunteer.