Arrogance and Girl Scouts

I spent quite a few minutes last night trying to help my wife log into our local Girl Scout cookie-order Web site. She's the “Cookie Mom” for our daughter's troop and had to get the order in absolutely by 12:00 midnight or no cookies. So of course, at 8:03pm the Girl Scout server in use went hard down. When she had asked about a backup plan in case this happened, she was told by the paid Girl Scout staff that “it will work” and “there is no backup plan becasue it will work”. Then of course, when it does not, no one who knows anything is accessible. I looked into it more today and find their provider is Ars Nova Interactive, Inc. in Indianapolis, who ought to be taken to task for leading these folks to believe that they were being provided with a server that would be robust enought to survive the onslaught of last-minute cookie orders. So today the local Girl Scout Council acknowledges that there was a problem and gives the cookie moms until 2:00pm to complete their orders. Huh? Don't they recognize that perhaps some of these moms might actually WORK and might have a twee bit of trouble making the 2:00pm deadline? The arrogance that these folks display is driving me nuts. Even the girls think the paid staff folks are arrogant (as in “We know what's best”) and are put off by it. On top of this they raised the price of the cookies to $4.00 per box (from $3.00) with no significant raise of the share that goes to the Girl Scout troops actually doing the selling! There's an unverified rumor that troop leaders all across Texas refused to let their girls sell cookies this year unless the troop cut was increased to a reasonable level. Unfortunately the high-handedness of the Girl Scout's paid leadership ends up being a model of what NOT to be for these girls when they grow up. It's like the whole STUDIO 2B flail I wrote about a few weeks ago. It's a shame. I know Boy Scouts are far from perfect but a least we have a semblance of democracy and a system that makes the councils (and so on up the chain) accountable to the chartering organizations. [end rant]

Posted by Ray Trygstad | Category: Scouts | 01:42 PM