Volunteers do not get paid; they do not have to be there. It would seem almost impossible to get fired from a volunteer job. However, I know someone personally who was fired from an organization that handed out food to homeless people. I have to say, she really put the work in.

The volunteer group is called Coalition for the Homeless. Volunteers meet at a church in upper Manhattan and drive around the city handing out food to people living on the street. It is really a wonderful group of people and I maintain contact with people I became friends with through the organization.

Here is how the person, whom I’ll call Stacy, got fired.

1. After completing our rounds we (the volunteers) would usually go out for dinner. The first night she came out with us she broke down weeping about the failure of her third marriage. People were sympathetic to a point but it kind of ruined the evening. It was an early warning sign.

2. She posted a picture of one of the other volunteers on a dating site in order to “help her with her social life”. The person whose picture was posted did not appreciate it.

3. One of the volunteers, Mike, was a recovering addict. Stacy informed all of us that Mike was destined to relapse and end up back in jail. As everyone really liked Mike and rooted for his success, this did not go over well.

4. She started stalking everyone (including this writer). She would call everyone relentlessly and leave urgent messages about nothing but insist that the person call her back “immediately”. The calls would get more and more insistent. It was unsettling.

(Let me put in the background that Stacy did not work. She had not worked in ten years. She was a forty-nine year old woman living in a very expensive apartment in Manhattan being financially supported by her wealthy parents. When she was not in therapy she was home calling people relentlessly. She claimed that she could not work or take public transportation because of the trauma due to the violence she had witnessed at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. That was her actual claim.)

5. She showed up one evening at the volunteer site, had a nervous breakdown and started crying and went home. It was all done to get attention. The next day she called everyone relentlessly and blamed different people (including this writer) for her mental breakdown.

So that was it for Stacy. One of the other volunteers, Lance, who kind of ran the show, told her that everyone was getting very uncomfortable about her volunteering with us and it would be better if she found some place else. Stacy responded by accusing us of not being good people and that we only did volunteer work to feel better about ourselves and that we were very selfish people.

Most people do volunteer work for the good of the community and to feel good about themselves. I certainly wouldn’t volunteer to feel worse about myself. On the other hand, but some people who do volunteer work are narcissistic freaks. I think Stacy did it so she could have a new group of people to listen to her tales of woe and feel sorry for her. Ted Bundy volunteered for a suicide prevention hotline and he murdered over thirty women. Ironically, he was pretty good at helping callers not kill themselves. I guess he wanted to do it. Whatever her motivations were, she probably went on to find a new group of people to alienate. God speed.