I R retire. There is little enough to amuse me in the Winter evenings, now that I've given up YouTube; gone half throttle on The Blob; and can only spend so long eating dinner and washing dishes. Then I remembered that January is Credit Union AGM season and checked on the web for the date. It was only there that I discovered the option to not get mailed a 36-page booklet with the accounts & agenda for the last financial year. I filled in the no mail application on line and got a phone call the next day telling me a) I was 5 weeks beyond the deadline b) my AGM bumpf had been sent the day before c) I was no mail registered now & forever d) the AGM was scheduled for 8pm Weds 29 Jan 2025. If they want to get more members saving the cost of a stamp, they could be more proactive on the comms.
I thus more or less obliged myself to leave home in the dark, with 1°C on the car-dash, and drive 20km to bear witness. I dumped our glass-trash in the bottle-bank [✓] on the same trip. There were 12 'officers' on the top table, three employees getting some overtime [I hope! they get paid buttons], and . . . 19 members incl me. The average age of the latter was about 70. It took 90 minutes to cover the 20 item agenda.
Gotta say that much of the information was given redundantly in different reports by auditor, chair, different sub-committees and it's all in the AGM booklet anyway. And without a powerpoint prez, reading a lorra numbers off a sheet is kinda useless, There were three different elections, which were tallied by 'independent' CU-volunteer tellers and all officers up for re-election were re-elected. We weren't told how many people voted "not this person for the love of Mike" which is the only really interesting info. In the past I got snitty about starting the meeting with an invocation aka Make me an instrument of your peace supposedly by St. Francis of Assisi. And also about failures to embrace modern tech [heck, even PPTx is an Ask!] These are related: if you're going to attract a younger, more techie, class of volunteers, let alone muslims and wiccans, ya gotta ditch the "Invocation". Vote for next year: Prayers Out Powerpoint In.
The Blackstairs Film Society BFS [MultiPrev] was killed by Coronarama but also a little by its niche interest. Years ago, an acquaintance from the next county came once to a BFS event [was it Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley?] and never again. A while later, I caught up and asked why we didn't see him at BFS more often. hhmmm, he mused, drive 20km in the dark in February as temperatures plummet, to sit in a drafty hall bundled up in a plaid rug watching a sub-titled film about Mongolian tractor drivers? OR stay home and pop another log on the fire??
The CU-AGM feels a little like that, because logistics and regulations require a Winter AGM, but the CU has their own incentives. As part of our community's social glue and a public good, in the run up to the AGM, they shake down all the local businesses for contributions to the door prize. Everyone who braves the weather and rocks up is given a single raffle ticket. While the election ballots are processed, the ticket stubs are drawn and winners get to choose from a number of prizes. In the before times, the top prize was a rural appropriate ½ tonne of peat briquettes. Most of the prizes seemed to be sundry vouchers in envelopes. My ticket was 399, and my hopes dashed a little when the first tik drawn was 398 and I was, like, wrong wrong almost right. But I was tangling myself in the gambler's fallacy because the numbers came, in >!data!< order: 398 394 382 392 387 384 388 385 389 399 393 383 390. 382 to 399 more or less matches my [N = 19] members head-count. The top table having, appropriately, recused themselves from the lottery. 13 prizes among 19 people is just about [cw: The Late Late Show is a hateful grabfest] one for everyone in the audience. My 399 was quite a ways down the list but I had the choice of a) two bottles of indifferent plonk b) a €30 voucher for the butcher c) a bottle of Jameson's d) a tin of biscuits the size of a Yaris spare wheel.
In Jan 2024 there were 3940 members. In 2024, the CU acquired 92 new members but the total membership increased to only 3960. That suggests that 72 members of the Credit Union died last year. The national death rate in Ireland is 7/1000 but it is 18/1000 in the CU membership - nearly 3x higher but not as high [39/1000] as the death rate for Irish pensioners. Pensioners happily [in the fullness of their years etc.] contribute 84% of all deaths despite making up only 15% of the population. So CU membership skews higher than median age; but CU membership who turn up for the AGM skews higher still.
Ho hum, nothing a few hot whiskey's won't cure.
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