Thank you, Bill

21st April, 2009 - Posted by Jon -

With my first post of gratitude, I want to honor my friend Bill. This won’t surprise anyone that knows him–Bill is the kind of guy who’ll drop whatever he’s doing to help a friend, and that’s exactly what he did this weekend. Lisa and I and the girls stopped by Bill’s house on Saturday morning, just to say hello, and ended up chatting for about an hour while our girls played together. Bill asked what we were up to that afternoon, and we told him we were going to tear the decking off our front porch. “Do you need a hand?” he asked. “No, we’re fine, it’s no big deal–it’ll just take us a few hours,” I responded. (In hindsight, this was either a white lie or a naive underestimation.) Bill insisted that he’d love to help, and told us his friend Pete, who was visiting from New Hampshire, would come along.

So Bill and Pete showed up with their flat bars and hammers after lunch, as the rain started to fall, and set to work demolishing our porch. It took the four of us about two hours to rip the porch to pieces, and it was about a million times more fun than it would have been if Lisa and I had been working alone (with the girls tugging at our pant legs).

I’m writing about this in part because I want to publicly thank Bill (and Pete) for their help, but also because it represents the sort of sharing that we at Sharonimo hope to promote. The sharing of resources can lead to, or go along with, other kinds of sharing, like the sharing of work and the sharing of time. Our project and event planning feature is designed to promote the more active and involved sharing that happens when people get together to work or play–on community service projects or at potluck dinners, for example. It’s this kind of sharing that really builds community and makes lives better.

Lisa and I didn’t decide to demolish our porch until the day that we did it, and it seemed a small enough project to do on our own, so we didn’t use Sharonimo to plan it–but if we’d thought ahead a bit (and realized what we were in for), we could have logged in, created a project and invited our friends to hang out and help out. I’m sure Bill would have signed up, along with three or four other friends, because that’s what friends do. So the next time you have a project to do–painting your house, perhaps, or planting a community garden–I hope you use Sharonimo to organize it, and that you have at least one friend like Bill to help.