Volunteer refuses to come back after being bossed around, given no water, no bathroom breaks, and nearly having her phone confiscated, gets emails a year later telling her she needs to be a better team player

Author image for Etai Eshet
Etai Eshet • Editor
Jun 22, 2026 10:30 AM EDT

Unpaid volunteers are a special resource. They cost nothing; they show up out of pure goodwill, and the correct way to manage them, if you ask the manager in this one club, is apparently to treat them worse than paid employees while also expecting more

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  • Oh. I'm an actual volunteer. I don't have to help.

    For the last two years two friends and I have been volunteering for an event near us that raises money for a local club. We are not members,
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  • but a friend of ours is and the organization didn't have enough members to manage everything so we volunteered. It is actually for a pretty good local cause-although
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  • not local for us it's for a town about an hour away.
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  • Members are required to do so many hours of volunteer work for the organization annually, at this event of one of their other events.
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  • Our job one year was taking tickets and handing out the goody bags to the public. That was actually kind of fun.
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  • The next year was babysitting a tent where alcol is served to make sure no one leaves the area with alc ic drinks.
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  • We took the early shift starting at 7:30 am- understanding we would be relieved at noon and could then enjoy the event.
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  • We didn't get bathroom breaks (we asked, but were told we had to get someone to take our place and no one ever showed up). We were standing in the 'doorways' of a
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  • This manager’s move is to let the volunteer show up, hand them the worst job, and then slowly reveal that the shift they agreed to is actually just the opening act of a much longer commitment nobody mentioned upfront. No water, no bathroom breaks, no sitting because it does not "look right." But please, make yourself comfortable standing in the heat for nine hours while we figure out if we even like you.

  • was told I was going to be "reported." This person held out their hand and told me to give them the phone and I could get it back when I was done for the day. I just said 'no, thank you.' and put it in my pocket.
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  • standing in the 'doorways' of a huge tented pavilion in 85-degree heat and never given water and we were discouraged from getting it ourselves since it would mean leaving the entrance unattended.
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  • We were also one per entrance so we didn't even get to talk to each other and could only text during the long periods when we were just standing there.
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  • At some point I was told off for checking a message on my phone. I was 44 years old, and told the person that they couldn't tell me when I could look at my phone. I
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  • I didn't respond further because my mother was long deceased so who were they going to "report" my naughtiness to? I haven't been told off that way since I was a 12 year
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  • old getting in trouble for not paying attention during class, I'm not a child and that person was not my teacher or boss. I'm not handing off my expensive phone to a stranger to 'hold onto' until I was 'done.'
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  • When noon rolled around we were told we couldn't leave yet because our replacements weren't there yet. One of us got relieved around 12:15 so we took turns relieving each
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  • other to use the bathroom and get water. At 12:30 I finally got tired of waiting and went to tell one of the organizers that we were leaving in 5 minutes and they needed to replace us now.
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  • At first they told us no, we needed to wait until more volunteers showed up and they might need us there 'for a while.' I said absolutely not. We had stood next to the
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  • entrances for over 5 hours in climbing heat with no water and no chances to use the bathroom. We were not allowed to sit because it
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  • didn't 'look right.' I'm only in my 40's but I'm not willing to stand with no relief for hours on end.
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  • They found people but told us they were "disappointed" we couldn't stay until the end which would have been after 9 at night. I told them we were never signed up for that long, I was told that our leaving 'early' would be "noted."
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  • So this year rolls around and I just now got an email giving me this year's assignment.
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  • I wrote and explained that I didn't sign up and I had other plans for the weekend (I don't, but I'm never doing it again).
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  • I got an email back telling me that it was non-negotiable, I had not yet volunteered at all this year and that this year I needed to be more of a
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  • team player. They brought up my 'infractions' from last year which included looking at my phone around the public and leaving early.
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  • They also pointed out that I wasn't respectful to leadership of the organization when I was corrected about the phone because I said that I would keep my phone on me and
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  • would continue to check in with my friends when I wasn't busy. I was told that wasn't appropriate and wouldn't be tolerated this year.
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  • It took me an hour to just let all that soak in.
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  • I wrote back explaining with excruciating politeness that I was not a member and had never been a member. I also elaborated that I was not even a person who lived in
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  • their community to benefit from the event but that I traveled to come and help because I thought it was a good cause (apparently no one connected us to the friend who recruited us and I left her out of this).
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  • Then I outlined what went wrong last year. That as a 44-year old I was not going to be told off for briefly checking a message from one of my friends asking if I needed water since I wasn't allowed to leave. That
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  • we signed up from 7:30 am to noon and were told that we were supposed to stay until 9 pm, and then heavily guilted when we firmly said no.
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  • I further explained that as an unpaid volunteer I was treated very disrespectfully by leadership and was not planning to support the organization with my time going further, so please remove me from the list.
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  • I got an email back not quite apologizing, and saying that everything had been "misunderstood" because members understood they might be asked to stay late and everyone assumed my friends and I were members.
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  • I was also reminded that it was club policy to not have our phones with us during club events. The email went on the state that they already
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  • had my jobs assigned for August and it was important that I was there on time because otherwise I would be putting them in a hard spot.
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  • I wrote back and said that the rule about phones would not apply to me since I was not a member, had never been told about club rules, and wouldn't follow that one when
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  • I was in the situation they put me in. Further, I didn't want the club to suffer from any misunderstanding because if I did volunteer I would leave at the time I had agreed to
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  • because I would not even stay an extra five minutes this time and didn't want to have an issues for the club due to that.
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  • I added that the other two people I volunteered with were joining me in my plans that weekend and would not be able to help either.
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  • I signed off that I hoped everything went well but that going forward if there were unpaid volunteers that were not required to spend a day working for free they should not treat them the way they treated us.
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  • And the phone thing. Someone decided that a grown adult checking a message from a friend asking if she needed water was a disciplinary situation requiring confiscation. The audacity required to hold your hand out and demand a stranger's phone because they briefly looked at it is genuinely impressive. That is a level of self-importance that takes years to cultivate.

    The best part of this whole dynamic is the follow-up email. Not an apology, not acknowledgment that the arrangement was unreasonable, just a breezy "there seems to have been a misunderstanding" and a new job assignment for August. Organizations that run on volunteer labor have a stunning ability to confuse "you were nice enough to help us once" with "you are now legally ours."

    The correct response to being told you are not a member and will not be returning is not to send a third email about showing up on time. It just is not.


     

  • I haven't heard back yet.
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