Three Cheers for Volunteers!

This blog needs a catchphrase. "Welcome back to the pound-for-pound greatest blog in...electronic pretend wrestling...?" Eh, fuck it.

Volunteering For the Sake of Volunteering
What is it about requests for FW favors that renders people incapable of saying no? Normally when people ask me for favors, my inclination is to scream obscenities or at the very least, sit there while my eyes glaze over. In FW land, people love to raise their hand when writers are called upon. "Yeah, I'm good for a match bro." No bro, you're really not. What you're good for is taking matches and sitting on them for months at a time. What you're good for is promising shit "tomorrow" when you damn well know it won't be written tomorrow. Don't get me wrong: we've all been guilty of promising "tomorrow" when we really meant "in two days." Whatever, it's fine. For some, though, "tomorrow" or "I'm writing it as we speak" really means "in two months." I don't know, maybe we're reading out of two different editions of Webster's, but I always took tomorrow as meaning "sometime in the next 24 hours." Are people operating on some sort of crazy fucking planetary remix time?

This isn't put on the Prez's, or the guys who run tournaments, or whoever. People are busy and need some assistance in getting the results out, and this ain't 10 years ago when it was expected that one or two guys would write everything. No, I'm talking about the kind and generous soul who raises his hand, takes a match or two, and sleeps on it for a month. Hell, sometimes they don't even write the fucker, they wind up handing it off; something which could have been done at the one or two week mark.

"I gotcha covered bro." No bro, you don't. The only thing you've got covered is my face with my hands in amazement that people actually volunteer for shit they never had any intention of doing. Hey, while you're at it, why don't you volunteer at the soup kitchen next Friday. Don't worry, when Randy the Homeless Disc Jockey is standing there with an empty bowl, I'll tell him you've got some shit going on and you'll hit him up next week. If my lady ever volunteered to suck my dick and left me hanging with blue balls for a month, I'd surely dump her ass or find myself a new "volunteer."

I think it takes more effort to volunteer and come up empty handed than it does to say nothing at all in the first place.

"In for a match!" No, get the fuck out for a match. Take a vacation, sit on your cat, escort your grandparents to the bingo hall, milk a cow, build a treehouse, jerk off with your left hand, do something else...but don't volunteer to do something you clearly don't enjoy doing. People get busy, things come up, it's all understandable...until you volunteer. Then it all goes out the window. You volunteer for things when you know you have the time to do them.

"Sorry man, I got struck by lightning, my house burned down, my dog was in the hospital, I had a date (ROFL...No), the government declared my neighborhood a demilitarized zone, somebody stole my watch and I'm pissed, I was diagnosed with Herpes-simplex, I had a fever...but anyway, the match won't be done. Or it will. Who knows?"

Look, tragedies happen, circumstances arise, but it's clear when something is just straight bullshit. When Edmunds and Nova had law school stuff come up, they let people know and they left...simple as that. When people have gotten seriously sick, or there were deaths in the family, etc, they usually let a Prez know and quietly take some time. What they don't do is wait until a month's gone by and say, "Oh dude, my family was burned alive in an incinerator...life sucks right now...SEE YOU FOR THE NEXT RP CYCLE!" I don't care dude, scrap out the fucking ashes, spread 'em around Lake Tonnawanda, and get to writing that match you promised us FIVE FUCKING YEARS AGO! Your family didn't randomly burn alive, they committed suicide at the thought of your lazyness. They were ashamed to have you as a son and decided to leave their mortal coil.

I know what it's like to get too busy for my own hobbies. Hell, I took five years off from this stuff because I lost the desire to do it for a while (plus I got banned...but eventually lost desire).

Volunteering and then disappearing, though, is something completely different. Other people got their shit in on time, other people RP'd...so what the fuck is the hold up? Really, this shit is not hard to write. One match? Come on. That's nothing. If you wrote a paragraph every other day, you'd be done in two weeks.

And don't even get me started on missing shortforms...that shit's just inexcusable. Fucking Johnny the Retard at the Special Olympics could shortform a match. Of course, Johnny can't do that cause he's STILL WAITING ON YOU TO SHOW UP FOR YOUR VOLUNTEER SHIFT!

Some things are worth the wait. Sex is worth the wait. A million dollars is worth the wait. Getting your black belt is worth the wait. FW cards? Not worth the wait...ever. Ever. Fucking EVER. The lost momentum is never worth whatever happens on the card. Some league's can withstand lost momentum, other's can't. Either way, it's never a good thing. It just gives people incentive to put in less effort the next time around, because there's no reasonable time frame in which they can expect results. It doesn't matter if you're just waiting for a win, waiting for a storyline to progress, or waiting to RP your next opponent...whatever payoff you're lookng for has been delayed, all on account of one or two guys who decided to volunteer for something they couldn't produce.

Comments, people, comments. Praise me or rip me a new one...there shall be no comfortable center!