ORIGINAL: MikeL
You must have missed a good portion of the deleted posts. More than one person said they don't do business over e-mail. Of course, the person who made the biggest stink about that happens to be a retiree, but hey... Not all of us have been exposed to the modern workplace. You also must have missed the "we never did it that way before doing it that way was possible" messages.
I saw a significant number of the deleted messages, not sure if it was all of them or not....no real way of knowing. I will submit, though, that an individual saying he doesn't do business over email (that was Horrace, if I remember correctly) is not the same as saying AMA shouldn't use email. I don't believe he said that. And further, the "we never did it that way before" seemed clearly to me to be a comment about the few who may not have an email for AMA, not a blanket statement that email is not a useful tool. IOW, (my paraphrase) "AMA got along OK before email. If there are some that don't have email now, then AMA will still get along".
Welcome to how change happens. If you want to move an initiative forward, it takes time. Sometimes you have to speed that up. It's not unreasonable to expect that the AMA wants to use e-mail as a means of fast, inexpensive communication. You and I agree on that. If the AMA wants to be able to contact all of the SOs this way, then putting a hold on the club charter is the way to do it. Very few people have an honest difficulty in fulfilling this particular requirement, particularly the people posting here.
This isn't asking anyone to push a boulder up a hill. It's not requiring anything that is difficult to accomplish. They just want to have the cheapest, fastest means of communication available as an option to them (the AMA). Would they hold up a club charter if a name were missing? Sure. A phone number? Sure. And guess what? If they want to require an e-mail address for the SO, that's pretty far from being unreasonable.
I don't think the people here who take exception to AMA holding up charters for lack of an email address are speaking for themselves. I think what they (and me, for that matter) are saying is that:
1. The reason AMA has singled out the SO for this requirement is for quick notification of safety issue. There is really no other real justification for it being the SO and not just one of the other officers.
2. Holding up a charter will just end up with either a dummy email on the paperwork, or a real email that was set up for someone who doesn't have a PC. That's the work-around that you (I think) and others have suggested.
3. Such a work around pretty much torpedos the reason for the email in the first place. As I've said, it's a good idea, implemented without enough thought.
And I think this has probably become the proverbial dead horse at this point. Don't you?
