Commissioning

A friend recently asked me for advice on how to do well as a Camp Commissioner. Seeing as I have not posted in a while and this sort of information is likely to be of interest to more people than just her, I figured that I would post this here on Observ3, rather than simply replying to her message (that, and I truly hate sending long, somewhat important messages through closed systems like Facebook).

This post is written from the perspective of a 4X Camp Commissioner at Camp Lions, Pipsico Scout Reservation. Depending on your camp’s management structure, you may or may not find this especially useful… but I hope it is entertaining.

Survival

The most important thing to remember when you are a Camp Commissioner: Tell people to bugger off. Seriously. The entire job of a Commissioner can be summarized as, “Make people happy and solve problems”. This sort of job naturally leads to being the first person in the office every morning (even if you have to break in because your damned boss won’t give you a key) and the last person out most nights. That tendency is worsened if your camp has internet access in the office. But even the best Commissioner is still a human being living in the biomedical cesspool that is a summer camp. So if you find yourself in the position of Camp Commissioner, be sure to get out of the office at a reasonable hour. When is that? If the Program Director has left, and the Camp Director is long gone, you should probably be thinking of leaving… or at least locking to doors and calling a few friends to come play LAN games.

Speaking of other staff: Tell them to bugger off! Especially the wannabees. you know the type I’m talking about. The first years desperately looking to hang out with the “cool” veteran staffers. The second years who have grown weary of picking on the first years and think themselves entitled to hanging out with the veterans. And above all beware the CITs. They might not be as mean spirited as second-years, but no other species in camp is as clingy, filthy, and chigger ridden as the 15-year old CIT scuttling about looking for approval from his (or, God forbid, her) new big brothers and sisters. All of these invasive, yet necessary, species will get on your last nerve in minutes flat. Remember that you were one of them once, smile for the first 2 minutes, then tell them to go away.

But remember to smile for those 2 minutes. And occasionally toss one of them a candy bar. Why? Because nothing is so useful to a Commissioner (or any senior staffer) as Minions. Where clingers-on sap your life and carry infectious miasmas of Camp Crud about their persons, Minions are a boon to any experienced staffer. A few kind words and the occasional packet of Easy Mac will go a long way to ensuring that you will rarely have to run all the way to the waterfront or personally beat an out of line staffer. A well trained Minion may well run the occasional Trading Post errand, sweep the admin building floor, or retrieve an empty lantern from a campsite. Pick one or two Minions in Training from amongst the staff helpers in training each year. Invite them to the occasional D&D or LAN game, but be sure to keep them at arms length. If a staff helper in training proves himself useful as a Minion, treat them well and use them to recruit others. Eventually, a well-trained and maintained Minion may even become a friend or “family” member.

Now that we have dealt with the essentials of time management and staff relations, how about some practical issues:

Campsite Inspections

You should inspect campsites every day. Yes! Every. Day. This will be your primary exercise and excuse to get the hell out of the office when the Program Director is throwing a fit about Merit Badge changes or you have that little itch at the back of your neck that means “the camp director is about to disappear for the whole day on a buy-run and if you don’t get out of here right away you’ll end playing office bitch for the whole morning and most of the afternoon”.

When inspecting campsites be sure to take points away as often as possible. You’ll feel like a cold-hearted bastard, but you need to do it… at least in the first couple of days. If you show the slightest hint of mercy early on, be ready for sloppy campsites and a raft of poorly deserved Honor Troop awards. Look for everything from obvious health and safety violations (shit all over the latrine seats, campfires burning unattended, hatchets left atop piles of dirty clothes in the middle of the campsite) to little things like flecks of foil wrappers just outside of tents and incomplete fireguard charts.

And don’t be afraid to accept bribes (of the food variety) and stand around chatting with Scoutmasters. So long as the food looks safe, eat it! Troops are unlikely to poison a Commissioner… on purpose. If you drink coffee, accept it at every turn. I don’t drink coffee, but I gladly sipped at my hot chocolate or Nalgene of water at every friendly campsite. Speaking of which, bring a Nalgene with you every day. If you are not draining at least 1, maybe 2, liters of water on every inspection round you will get dehydrated.

And be prepared for anything in the campsite. My first year a troop from Shenandoah rearranged the leaders’ tents into tight circles around decks constructed from the platforms of stricken tents, while the boys set their tents together into something resembling a viking longhouse. There was the year that the normally tight-knit Mormon units began arguing mid-week and actually started stringing up ropes throughout the site to divide each troop’s cluster of tents from the next. And I’ll never forget the leaders (male and female alike) who tried to hermetically seal their tents with extra tarps and duck tape.

Be sure to inspect tents, but don’t take too long. Rainy days will take longer because you’ll have to open the flaps to check. On sunny days though, don’t even bother opening a closed tent after the first day. Simply count any occupied tent with closed flaps as if it were the filthiest of residences. Scoutmasters will grumble, but it will save you time and teach the Scouts to keep their flaps open. Of course, if a troop never opens their flaps and doesn’t seem to care about scores, you will need to check to make sure that the filthy buggers don’t need a visit from the Medic or chat with the Camp Director.

Lanterns, Lawnmowers, Ranger Speak, and Scoutmaster Idiocy

They will fight you, they will grumble, they will get angry, but they will keep their spare fuel in the fuel locker. No other way about it.

As for lanterns… (muttered words of a profane nature).

Make it clear to Scoutmasters that they should drop off all lanterns at the Commissioner’s shed by the end of merit badge sessions if they want them filled or cleaned. Sure, you will need to fill the occasional lantern at the last minute, but you do not want the Scoutmasters to be in the habit of not realizing that they need fuel or a wick until dark. Speaking of wicks: Order them from the Ranger ASAP! And be sure to order the right size. Most lanterns at camp at either 1/4 or 1/2 inch wicks (I can’t remember), but the Ranger has a large supply of old oversized wicks. Unless you want to spend the summer cutting wicks in half and wrestling them through crappy lantern feeds, be sure to order the correct size!

Remember that the Ranger calls motorized weed wackers “weed whips” and hand-swung weed wackers “idiot sticks”. In the divine order of Camp, consider the Ranger to be your chief oracle and commander of all sacred knowledge. Sure, he may answer to the Camp Director, but while Camp Directors come and go, the Ranger is THE RANGER. For 10 months out of the year he is practically alone up there at camp. So when you ask the ranger for something, use “Ranger speak” and always be specific.

Scoutmasters will inevitably complain about the condition of their site. So put them to work! Provide weed whips and lawnmowers and shovels and saws. Just be prepared for idiotic scoutmasters who cannot be made happy. Where one scoutmaster will be happy as a clam toiling behind a lawnmower all day, another will go off on a self-righteous tirade when he discovers that a nail on the rear-underside of an unused tent platform is sticking out an eighth of an inch. Smile. Nod. Apologize. And hit the frickin’ nail with a hammer as loud as you can a few times. While you’re at it, hammer in a few extra nails that don’t actually do anything and he’ll probably leave you alone for the rest of the day. When that city slicker scoutmaster tries to pull his twenty-years-past stint in the Marines as evidence for his encyclopedic knowledge of the dangers of the “poison” (poison ivy) overrunning (growing in a few remote spots) his site, just smile and offer him some work gloves and a hatchet. When he turns you down and demands you do your job, assure him that you will be by as soon as you have time… and then forget all about it.

That covers most of the basics of being a good Camp Commissioner. I’ll leave off with a few short don’ts:

• Don’t sleep in the handicraft director’s bed half the day
• Don’t spend the other half of the day trying to find porn on the handicraft director’s computer
• Don’t let the Camp Director give you an assistant. Minions are far more useful and far less belligerent.
• Don’t play full-screen video games during office hours (see first section).
• Don’t made sadistic jokes about the Assistant Program Director (if one exists).
• Don’t be afraid to do crazy shit. When you come across a campfire still burning in a site, use the Troop’s water cooler of coolaid to put it out!