Tradition Eight Checklist

From the http://www.aagrapevine.org/stepsTrads/checklist.php website:

“Do I sometimes try and get some reward-even if not money- for my personal AA efforts?”

 I was working with a conference several years ago and a bunch of drunks had been given the task of going shopping for some food items for the hospitality room.  As usual, they weren’t exceptionally organized, so they were in a big hurry to buy all those groceries and get back to the conference before the big angry mob showed up without any food.  Well these guys were gone forever.  We were starting to wonder if they’d made off with all the grocery money!  Then someone spotted them walking through the angry mob carrying all the food and my sponsor asked: “What Happened?”  I can’t tell what he really said but by the look on his face, it wasn’t pleasant.

“Well, we’d been making pretty good time, we got there, stormed the grocery store, got all the food and we were making a mad dash back to the conference.  That’s when we saw the red lights.  Then we looked down and realized we were going really fast.” I seem to remember something like 60 in 35 or close to it!  Again the sponsor wanted some answers quick. “So Why did it take so long for him to write you a ticket?”

… here it comes…

 ”Well we had to explain that this carload of people and groceries was late and we are supposed to be serving a hoard of A.A. members at that big hotel up the street.  They’re having an AA conference and they’re all waiting on us.”  I know they started singing like mockingbirds.  They told that cop EVERYTHING.  About the service positions they held, how they’d been appointed and chosen and that they were each members of AA and on and on because they thought they might get out of ticket.  Like it makes good sense.  They thought “Surely he would recognize our good deeds and ‘let this one slide’….”  Heck, I was new enough that if I would have been able to drive, and was in that situation, I probably would have done the exact same thing.  I was just glad I was there to learn it without feeling the sting directly.

I’ve often wondered if they’d have even made it back at all if that cop would have pulled the rap sheet on everyone in the car!

That day, I learned a couple of things.  Some things don’t have to do with this topic.  But what we do for AA is part of the debt we already owe it for giving us back our lives.  We work anonymously, we contribute freely and we learn to give freely without having any strings attached.  Anytime we try to use the name Alcoholics Anonymous to better ourselves, we end up making ourselves look stupid and we damage the credibility of our program.