While working on Three Rings the other day, one of our volunteers, Dan, was inspired to write a short article which I’ve submitted for consideration to be included in the next issue of the National Nightline magazine, Insomniac. In the UK & Ireland, most Nightlines benefit from Three Rings, and so the vast majority of potential readers of this short piece ought to be Three Rings users, and be able to appreciate it.
In case it doesn’t get published – or as a sneak peak for those of you who will get to read it later, if it does, I’ve reproduced the article in full, below. It’s titled “Never Forget How Great a Nightline is”:
NEVER FORGET HOW GREAT A NIGHTLINE IS
by Dan Q, former volunteer at Aberystwyth Nightline (1999-2004), current volunteer at Aberystwyth Samaritans, director of Three Rings Ltd.
As part of the ongoing task of developing new features for Three Rings, I recently had the serendipity to find myself with a little free time while a machine-intensive process ran on a backup copy of the Three Rings database.
My computer hummed as it made the calculations necessary to check that Nightline calendar data would be compatible with the new version of the system, due for release this coming winter. There are some exciting new features coming for the rota, and we want to make sure that these will work seamlessly with your current data, so we wrote a few programs to test it, first.
There’s a lot of data, these days – some Nightlines have data in Three Rings going back more than ten years! The program we’ve written produces rudimentary output as it goes along, so that if there are any potential problems (none so far!) that the Three Rings team needs to be aware of, we can trace what data might be affected. As it does this, it draws to the screen little plus signs, full stops, and other symbols. Each one of those little plus signs represent shifts at a Nightline, and each full stop represents a volunteer on duty on that shift. My screen quickly
filled up with output:
+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+...+..+...+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+
.+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+.+..+..+..+..+..+..
..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..+..++...+..+...+...+..+...+..+..+..+..+..+.On and on it scrolled – screenful after screenful of punctuation – and I was suddenly awestruck by the sheer magnitude of it all. Every single one of those full stops represents a student volunteer giving up their night to help their fellow students. As they scrolled by, I felt quite moved by the collective generosity that these punctuation marks represented: in the region of two-million hours of confidential student support, summarised in a string of dots.
I’m not sure that my words can really do justice to the beauty of what you’ve achieved, what you’re still achieving, and what you’re going on to achieve. The symbols that are flooding across my monitor certainly don’t cut it. But trust me when I say that your efforts are truly breathtaking. Let me put it at it’s tersest: keep up the good work, you unsung heroes.
If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at the promotional website for Three Rings, at www.threerings.org.uk.