I am a member of volunteer emergency services. We can be called at any time to help with things like floods, fires, search and rescue, etc. We train on Monday nights and sometimes on the weekends. We wear bright orange and often joke that we look like traffic cones.

A young woman who has just turned eighteen — the legal drinking age here — comes to one of our weekly training sessions to observe and see whether she wants to join. It’s the end of the night, and we are cleaning the truck.

Me: “So, what do you think?”

Woman: “Umm… Yeah, I think I might join, but you need to change a few things first.”

Me: “I’m sorry, but you want us to change a few things?”

Woman: “Yes. Orange just doesn’t work for me. Blue or pink would be better. Also, you need to make sure that I don’t get called on a Friday or Saturday night, and I usually sleep all day Sunday, so those days won’t work for me at all. And I absolutely can’t get dirty, so I won’t be doing any of that.” *Indicates members cleaning* “Oh, and I expect to be paid at least $1,000 a week starting today.”

I’m too stunned to say anything for a moment. I finally respond, trying not to laugh:

Me: “Umm… I think I’ll get my commander, and you can discuss your suggestions with him.”

I volunteer for an organization fifteen-plus hours a week. Part of my job requires updating the forty-plus members via email and the site. After realizing members aren’t reading anything posted or sent to them, I ask where we are going wrong.

Client: “Information on the website doesn’t work for us. We just don’t have time to read it. We’re too busy.”

Me: “What about email?”

Client: “We don’t have time to read emails, either.”

Me: “Texts?”

Client: “Sometimes, if we remember to check our phones. You know what would be really great, though?”

Me: “Sure, what works?”

Client: “Phone calls. Could you call us with this information?”

Me: “You mean you want me to call you and read all the information in the emails and on the website to you? All forty of you? Every week?”

Client: “Yes. We would prefer to keep things easy for everyone.”

In the summer of 2006, I was between jobs, so I sold my soul and worked for FIFA as a volunteer during the World Cup. I ended up in an information booth in the city centre of Nürnberg. It honestly was great fun, and all the visiting fans were really nice, especially the English. We were very happy about that since we had been warned to be careful of English hooligans.

Some of the England fans had come by car and parked in the city instead of out by the stadium. A few of them ended up at our booth because they couldn’t find their cars after the match. They were quite proud, though, that they had written down the name of the street they had parked on. They showed us a piece of paper that had “Einbahnstraße” written on it. We then had to explain that this wasn’t a street name, but a sign saying, “One-Way Street.” We did manage to find their cars, though.

Two days after the England game, a man in his early twenties stumbled up to our booth. He had gotten so drunk after the game that he had fallen asleep in a bush and missed his plane back home.

Since he didn’t have any money, we called his mum and then took him to Western Union to pick up the money she had sent him. We then booked him a flight and took him to the airport.

His mum sent us a thank-you letter for looking after her son.

All of them were absolutely lovely. It just goes to show that one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch.

I spent a little over two years volunteering as a focus group tester for a very large gaming company. The idea was to test the boundaries of the game to see if you could find flaws and/or crash the game, as well as provide feedback on the gameplay. When you signed up with these guys, they gave you an application with a questionnaire asking what sorts of games you were interested in playtesting for them.

My preferred style of gameplay involves as much violence, destruction, and slaughter as possible, so I selected every genre where it was theoretically possible to cause carnage: shooters, real-time strategy, fighting games, etc. You know, the fun stuff that is not meant for anything below M-Rated.

Pretty soon, I got my first call to come in for a group. I was super excited. What kind of game would I get to see? Would it have guns? Swords? Epic space battles?

Nope.

It turned out that the only part of my application the company actually looked at was my gender. I happen to have a uterus, so I was put into a group with six or seven other young ladies and told to provide feedback on a new browser-based Flash game about caring for virtual babies.

It was the most G-rated, brainless, idiotic pile of nonsense I’ve ever had the displeasure of interacting with. The focus group could have involved elementary school kids happily, assuming kids that age wanted to pretend to be a very watered-down version of a mommy.

And for some reason, the other girls were eating it up. They kept asking questions like, “Do we get to dress them up?”, “How do we feed them?”, and, “Do they talk?”

The more I listened, the more irritated I got. The staff clearly expected an easy session where all the young ladies had zero knowledge or intention to actually test the game’s ability to function under stress.

After about twenty minutes of listening to fluff noise, I decided to ask a few questions of my own.

Me: “Would it be possible to starve the babies?”

Staff: “No, that’s not possible. The babies cannot die.”

Me: “Oh. Then would it be possible to neglect the babies to the point of inducing a psychotic break?”

Staff: “No, absolutely not. The babies cannot go insane.”

Me: “Well, would it be possible to somehow pit the babies against each other in gladiatorial combat? If I give my baby a sword, can he learn to dismember the flesh of his enemies? Is my baby large enough to wield a submachine gun?”

The only answer I got to any of those was a horrified stare.

Me: “I filled out the questionnaire. Why did the idiots who are processing those only look at my gender and not my preferences?”

There was some sputtering and an awkward, vague excuse about a mistake happening “somewhere.”

About a month later, I was called back to playtest another game. This time, it was a tactical shooter. I dragged that game through the toughest trenches of gameplay and soon broke their physics engine by filling a room with corpses.

I continued to be a focus tester for the next two years, and they never again asked me to provide feedback about babies. As a bloodthirsty uterus-bearer, I couldn’t have been happier. Maybe from now on, they’ll think twice before automatically assigning work based on an outdated stereotype!

I was volunteering for a middle school robotics competition. After it had finished, some of us stuck around to help them pack up everything, including lugging the heavy tables the robots competed on to storage. One of my fellow judges showed up to help.

Judge: “I heard you needed some dumb muscle, so here I am.”

Me: “Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”

Judge: “Just to warn you, I don’t have that much actual muscle, but I’m extra dumb, so it evens out.”