The Unreliability of Strangers

I have whinged in the past about how difficult it is to prise a response out of people when making enquiries. Well, back in April, I made more than 100 enquiries about collaborative partnerships for various projects that I have in mind for the Big Lottery Well-being Funding Initiative.

Most of the contacts were given to me by Big Lottery - there were descriptions of the areas in which people were interested, and the name and contact details of the person co-ordinating the initiative. Despite supplying a document with live links (just think how easy it would have been to test the validity of the addresses), more than 40% of the email addresses were mis-quoted. One of the most laborious tasks that I had was experimenting with various permutations of names or tracking the organisations via Google to try and work out what the domain name should be for the email address.

Some people responded and snarked that they weren't too sure of what was happening in their organisation because they were having a re-organisation, so effectively, "Why are you bothering me?". These were the named contacts who had agreed to be listed as co-ordinators on the Big Lottery contact list. They were all paid to answer these enquries and to do so as part of their responsibilities. It mightn't be pleasant, but they were the named contact.

As for the others, over the past 11 weeks I have been waiting for responses. And waiting. This week, I had enquiries from several interested parties who all wanted a write-up, that day (I had 5 such demands on Tuesday). Some of them have since got back to me to tell me that although it is a good idea, they are now too busy to participate in any funding bid (not mentioning that they have faffed about for 11 weeks and chose to leave it too late). Others have taken my write-up, not sent an acknowledgement, and I have no idea whether or not the collaboration will go ahead.

I am usually a strong advocate for relying on the kindness of strangers but the heat has finally got to me. You can only rely upon the unreliability of strangers - particularly those who are in salaried positions that are protected whatever they do or fail to do. Snarl. Of course, there are many qualifications to that last sentence, but I am feeling hot, sticky and unreasonable, and definitely in a mood to snark. It's either that or reducing a pack of chocolate Hobnobs to shards along with emptying out a tub of ice-cream.

So that's me, mildly off to carry on writing proposals into a void of non-response. The deadline for the Big Lottery initiative is July 28 - after that, I can stop writing. Unless one of the proposals goes forward to further consideration, of course and I need to do more writing...

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project