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APCUG Reports
July-September 2007

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Improving Your Chances When You
MUST Lend Your User Group’s Equipment
Sam Wexler, APCUG Advisor
President, Valencia Falls Computer Club
swexler@apcug.net

We have all received requests from other groups to borrow your club’s equipment like a multimedia projector, laptop or anything else. For some you know it is OK, but for others you know deep down inside your projector is either not coming back, coming back in pieces, or even worse, coming back with a problem that will occur during your next speaker’s presentation. If you don’t lend it out then you are looking at some bad feelings, maybe among members of your own club. There is also the case when you want to use your club’s equipment at another club’s function to which you belong. What do you do?

Our Valencia Falls Computer Club has a multimedia projector that we have loaned many times to many different groups and have had no problems (yet). We have only one rule: when any equipment is borrowed, a body goes with the equipment, the body is responsible for its safe return and the body must be a member of our club’s Board. To firmly cement this rule, propose it at a club meeting and ask for a show of hands where no one in their right mind will vote against it.

When a request is received to borrow anything, the immediate response is for the requestor to find a body. If the requestor has any problem with the rule, then tell them you are simply following the request of 100% of the membership and you are subject to impeachment if you did not honor it.

Try it and see if it also works for you!