Rota

And so August rolls round, and with it a new rota is up on the notice board.

I say "rota" - of course there's actually more than one rota, as the Liturgical Rota only has the official Worship roles for each Occasion: Leader, Readers, Sub-leader, Tea-lightifer, Acolytes, Carrier of the Archdruid's Hat, Guardians of the Pebbles, Singers, Musicians and Girls with Tambourines. The Tasks we Pretend are Equally Important Rota covers coffee-making, greeting, counting money, overhead projection, children's work leaders, locking and unlocking the Moot House, and so on. The Building Related Task Rota covers flower arrangers, cleaners, those who apply yoghurt to the Moot House walls, gardening and sweeping the gravel in the car park. The Pastoral Rota determines who is to make which home visit, who is due to staff the Drive-in Counselling Service (mottto - your problems sorted in ten minutes or your money back), who is on the 24 hour tea light advisory phone line, and who is managing the hand-fasting interviews this week. Meanwhile the Rota of Rotators organises all the other rotas, in the vain hope of stopping people being on three jobs at once.

Please can you ensure, if you have to swap one of your responsibilities, that you inform every one of the people responsible for all the other rotas. It's all turned into a bit of a chaotic system, due to the number of interlocking jobs and rotas. You find that if you arrange to exchange your cleaning duty with someone's turn at being acolyte, then they have to swap with the gardener and as a result someone else has to do a home visit or it will clash with their Reading. We got to the point where someone arranged to swap coffee-making a couple of weeks ago, and as a result of all the knock-on swaps a Royal visit to a new nursery school was carried out by Axl Rose. And we don't want that happening again. He'd never heard such bad language.