Hey Everyone, TL;DR, respect the DOC facilities and vehicles, and be a team player. Also, read the bullet points below so you don't get fined... Now for the longer version... If you're a leader in the club or find yourself on trips often, or even just occasionally, please readthis PSA. On behalf of the vehicles and cabins assistants, as well as our wonderful facilities coordinator Mike Vecchiarelli, thank you for respecting the clubs vehicles, cabins, and other shared equipment and spaces. It is your collective care for the public use objects in the DOC that makes the crazy job of maintaining all of them just a little more realistic and possible. Having said that, with our fleet of 9 DOC vehicles, 8 DOC cabins outside of the grant, and facilities like Oak Hill, it is nearly impossible to keep on top of all that needs to get done. Mike V. is an incredible person, and does an unbelievable amount of work to make sure that us students can spend as much time enjoying the outdoors as possible, and very little time handling all the "dirty" work of cabin, vehicle, and facility maintenance. The cabins and vehicles assistants (students) do their best to help lighten the load, BUT YOU TOO CAN MAKE THE OPERATION OF THIS CLUB JUST A LITTLE BIT SMOOTHER! Some very quick, simple things that you (as a leader or a trippee) can do ON EVERY TRIP to help out with vehicles are as follows: * Make sure to clear snow or other loose material off of a club vehicle before you take it on a trip. It is not only dangerous, but also illegal in Vermont and New Hampshire to operate a vehicle with snow on top of it (with fines ranging up to $500). * Make sure a vehicle has at least 3/4 of a tank of gas left in it after a trip. Keep in mind you write your name down on a log sheet before a trip, so we can keep track of who consistently fails to refuel vehicles. Benefit of the doubt, but if its right around 3/4 of a tank, fill it up... * When you return a vehicle to its parking spot, park it straight and within the lines. It only takes one bad parking job in the lot behind foco to force everyone else to park poorly around you. Also, the club gets fined if our vehicles ever enter into the handicapped parking space next to the club spots (including on the dashed lines between the actual spots). * At the end of a trip, do a quick sweep of the vehicle to make sure that all fo the emergency equipment in the vehicle is in place (fire extinguisher, sand, shovel) and that there is not loose trash lying around. All of these things combined take only a couple minutes, but when they add up across vehicles over the course of several trips, they turn into many hours of work for Mike and the assistants, but mainly Mike. Sorry for the long email, and once again, thank you for respecting the club's vehicles and facilities. Please think of them not as "OPO's" or "the DOC's," but as "ours." YITOOD P.S. Thanks for all your hard work, Mike! _____________________________________________________________________________ Sign up to get financial aid on any DOC-related activity: http://outdoors-dev.dartmouth.edu/opo/finaid.html