Kay, I agree with you in assessing the sanity or legitimacy of some complaints our members and nonmembers may have. I also do not disagree with the other aspects of your comments. On the other hand, I also believe it is to our advantage to consider each complaint seriously from a number of sides. Legitimate or illegitimate, dissatisfaction can lead to loss of members or decisions by nonmembers not to join. I view this overall situation as a marketing or consumer relations issue. I believe you will agree that we need to improve our marketing of the League toward gaining members. To do this, it would seem that we need to be very careful that we avoid dismissing even screwy-sounding complaints too readily. Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director Great Lakes Division, ARRL 5065 Bethany Rd., Mason, OH 45040 Tel. 513-459-0142; E-mail k8je@arrl.org ARRL, the Reason Amateur Radio is! Members, the Reason ARRL is! -----Original Message----- From: Kay Craigie [mailto:n3kn@comcast.net] Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2006 2:45 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: RE: [arrl-odv:14446] FW: Ask this go to the ODV please Joe wrote, "Those dissatisfied with ARRL leadership are generally asking for us to stop those things we have no control over." I am reminded of a conversation I had last week with Dave Patton NN1N, who told me he'd been phoned by an irate elderly ham who said the ARRL had to get the space shuttle launched because that's important. Dave says the gent was not perceptibly drunk but was quite serious in admonishing the ARRL to get that spacecraft off the ground. I also had an perplexing conversation at a hamfest years ago with an angry ham who said the ARRL is responsible for global warming because we promote ham radio and ham radio uses electricity and electricity comes from power plants that burn fossil fuels. I couldn't smell anything on him that would account for that train of thought. So people really do have some pretty weird expectations and assumptions about the ARRL. Some of them, as Jim implies, border on the self-contradictory. When people turn out in the numbers they did in Ohio to vote in an ARRL SM election, it shows that members care about their organization. If these people were truly alienated and disaffected, they would not spend 39 cents on a ballot envelope and might not spend 39 dollars on a membership renewal. As long as we do not promise people that we can do what we can't do -- like launch spacecraft or make them young, handsome, and sexy again -- but rather promise to do the best we can on the day life brings us, I can look the members in the eye and feel not one bit defensive about the ARRL. 73 - Kay N3KN