You're preaching to the choir. It's just, look. This is really difficult and frustrating for me, because I don't want to be doing any of this chairing and leading work. I've had hele's successor in Translation all trained up (and yeah, I didn't want to chair, but hele left, so what was I to do) -- I recruited her in November, just like I handed over I&O into Andrea's able hands. It went great, wanted to hand over in June. Then job emergency -- she went on hiatus. Exactly as The Horde hit. The other likely candidate? Disappeared on me. Survey workgroup? Ugh. Let's not talk about that, let's just say that was a grave political error on my part to think that I could just hand over the administrativa, and I'm still paying for that now. (Also, one of my most dependable people? Disappeared on me.) So I hear what you're saying, *I did it*, and so it's triply frustrating because *it still didn't work out*, and I have to be my own emergency backup. (Translation: entirely made up of people who started in *May*. Survey: everyone is at least as booked as I am.) Plus all these disappearances, it's getting me down. (It's probably me! Who knows.)

But the show must go on, right. And so I cut back on the work I do, say, in Translation except for the bare minimum (training the new people) and I feel awful. I just have to hang on and hope that my co-chair will come back and take over the reins as she said she would, and hope that I can somehow salvage survey (ha ha ha).

So you bet I'm speaking from very bitter experience when I urge candidates to, yes, start training now.

As for current Board, again, I can just say that the ones who would need to hear this most are not likely to, and for the others (say, Kristen and me) it's just so much more complicated and painful than what you write, cf. above.