Volunteering at the Tourist Information Centre

Back in the dark ages, when I was a fresh young graduate still looking for permanent work (2007/8), I volunteered at my local Tourist Information Centre. I was not a travel blogger then, nor even a traveller. I had a vague idea that a gap year was a desirable thing but I had neither the finances for it nor parents willing to finance it. But I’d done my first ever solo adventure to Italy long ago by then and I was only a year or so home from my year studying in Switzerland, so travel was a small dim bub flickering away in the back of my mind. The TIC would get me out of the house a couple of times a week and a little experience in the travel & tourism industry wouldn’t damage my CV.

Travel & tourism industry, did I say? The trouble is, I live in a small rural town with a small rural TIC. Zero funding, it was staffed by volunteered and managed by volunteers and we paid the bills with the small profits we made from our retail section. Our customers were very much mostly locals and what we mostly did was sell local ice cream. Particularly to me. Rarely did I go home without at least a small tub. Occasionally a big one. The ginger was particularly (inexplicably) popular but I tended to gravitate towards chocolate or mint.

Oh, we stocked leaflets to local and local-ish attractions. I spent a lot of time arranging those. We sold National Express tickets, once in a blue moon. We sold a Book A Bed Ahead service, once in two blue moons (someone would phone and request a bed & breakfast booking. We would make it on their behalf). Once or twice I put together a little packet of local information and stuck it in the post in response to someone from out of the area who’d written to request it.

But mostly all we really did for non-locals was point them in the direction of our bus timetables and, more often than not, interpret them. I joke not, our main tourist service was helping them get out of here.

My main job, as the only non-retired volunteer, was to use the computer. I was a “computer whizz” (a phrase I have never heard out of the mouth of anyone under 60 and never from anyone who could switch a computer on unaided) and I could use Word Art to make posters and signs. They weren’t good. My taste in that sort of thing runs to the minimalist and my graphic design ability is about zero but I made what I was told and what I was mostly told was rainbow and wiggly, the kind that doesn’t exist in Word anymore. I didn’t mind making endless signs, even thought it was blatantly obvious where “leaflets!” were. What I minded was the constant refrain from the other volunteers.

don’t have time to learn that sort of thing.

Every. Single. Time. I very quickly grew to resent it. I may have started volunteering as an unemployed graduate but real, full-time work caught me less than a month after I started there. I was also running a Ranger unit, all by myself, with zero knowledge of the programme and with a group of girls who had been leading themselves for the last two years and were thus utterly feral. I was trying to write a book (I’ve been trying to write a book since I was about seven). I was trying to have the sort of interesting life a twenty-two-year-old straight out of university should have. And I was constantly being told that I had a lot of free time on my hands by a lot of retired people who volunteered because it was something to do with all their free time.

I stayed there two years. It took up a big chunk of my precious weekends, it grew boring, I wasn’t getting anything out of it and I was tired of being referred to as a computer whizz. And I’d learnt next to nothing about travel & tourism except that my town is not a tourist hotspot. I still have my official name badge, though.