Why I, personally, can NEVER support #Freegle

So this is a rewrite of the previous blog by the same name after it was strangely deleted. I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, so I'm assuming this is probably something I did. Still, I've changed my password to be on the safe side :)

Imagine you're an office manager for a law firm (for the sake of this example, 'Freecycle Associates'), your duties include organising the filing, opening and closing the office, answering phones, speaking to new clients, managing existing clients. You know, the usual stuff.

Now, imagine you become unhappy with your employer, you start to look around for new work, you find a startup company (for the sake of this example, 'Freegle Associates').

However, you like your office, your chair, you have your name on one of those little plaque things on your desk and your name is so very eloquently etched onto the frosted glass door to your office.

So, you speak to your new employer, make all the arrangements, and one Friday night, you decide that over the weekend, you're going to make that move.

Now, all seems fair enough so far, right?

Well, instead of actually moving to 'Freegle Associates', you instead change the locks on all the office doors, all of the 'Freegle Associates' staff are invited into what used to be the 'Freecycle Associates' office and all of the clients files are kept inside the same building.

So, Monday morning comes along and the 'Freecycle Associates' CEO says "Hold on just a cotton pickin' minute, you can leave the company, that's your decision, but you've kept all of our stuff, including our client files!".

"Well..." you reply, "...the way I see it is that I handle the client when they call, I'm the one who gets their coffee when they come in for an appointment and I'm the one who spends all that time filing their paperwork".

Well now, call me crazy, but as lovely as I'm sure you may be as an office manager, I'm going to go ahead and assume that the reputation and name of the law firm is the reason clients give business to the company. They don't arbitrarily choose a law firm because it's the first one they flipped to in the phone book (although, that's a possibility, I don't think it represents the majority).

So, if you, as an office manager want to go work for 'Freegle Associates', good for you. You'll be performing the same job, but to take something that doesn't belong to you isn't right, it just isn't.

So...you still with me?

When Freegle moderators decided they didn't want to stay within The Freecycle Network, I for one wish them all the success in the world. Go off, create a group, if you do well, people will join; if you don't, so be it.

But, to do so by simply renaming the group, disabling any Freecycle accounts and moving on (thus keeping all the members that had joined a Freecycle group) isn't fair to the members that joined that Freecycle group, it isn't fair to The Freecycle Network and it isn't fair to those of us who continue to volunteer our time to Freecycle.

Freegle, in my opinion, conducts itself inappropriately in this manner. And because they continue to do so, I, personally, can NEVER support Freegle.

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,836 groups with 6,577,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by going to freecycle.org and entering it into the search box. Have fun!