Thoughts on Chugging

So I’ve been a Fundraiser for Concern Worldwide for about six weeks now and thought I’d share a few thoughts.

Walk down any high street nowadays and amongst the shut-down shops and gloomy shoppers you’re bound to find a gaggle of bibbed up chuggers. These smiling faces, with their clipboards and their infectious idealism, inspire in the general public a wide spectrum of intense feeling. Some people don’t mind being asked for a chat and either agree goodnaturedly or walk on by with a smile and a friendly "no thank you". Others get angry. A minority express it with a terse and cutting comment like "there’s too many of you" or "get a proper job" or "get the fuck out of my face" or just "die, chugger!" But the majority walk on by stewing in their vitriolic spite, and go away and comment on the Guardian website in an attempt at catharsis. The thing I struggle to understand is this; how come these people get so wound up by fundraising? What is it in their character that makes them so full of hate?

Some of the answers they would give are as follows:

1. Chuggers don’t actually work for the charity they’re working for.

Well, you’ve got to invest to make a return. Face to face fundraising is a viable and cost-effective way of making a tremendous amount of money for charity. Would that money have been raised otherwise? So sure the charity has paid an agency £200, 000, but the agency gives the charity £2, 000, 000 at the end! And, in fact, some of us do work directly for a charity. I am an employee of Concern Worldwide.

2. Chuggers get paid too much.

We don’t have job security, we don’t get sick pay despite being at a higher risk of flu than you, we don’t get health benefits, or a pension, we don’t have an office with free tea and coffee and a water cooler, we don’t have a working loo, we don’t get to sit down in a comfy chair, we are standing in the street come sleet come snow for eight hours a day, and worst of all, we have to deal with the chugger haters. We deserve every penny after listening to some people’s venomous, racist views.

3. Chuggers invade my personal space.

Well fuck off frankly. Don’t walk in a public place if you don’t want your personal space invaded. For too long now our society has internalised into the individual’s bubble, and we have a radically reduced sense of community than say 200 years ago. People walk around with eyes fixed on the floor or their navel, and daren’t look up and see the stars, or those around them. Compare the British high street to a main road in the developing world – India, say. There, people clamour for your attention as you weave your way past chai stalls and shoe shiners, beggars, preachers, political activists, and hawkers selling everything from their bodies to fabric and tacky plastic crap. Where is that in Britain? That sense of fun and anything goes? Chuggers embody this international approach to human interaction. There’s you, here’s me; why shouldn’t I ask for a thirty second chat?

Ultimately when I’m standing on the high street asking everyone who crosses my path for a chat, I am seeing the broad breadth of humanity. I’ll speak to rapists, saints, murderers, cowards, comedians, poets, fraudsters, lawyers, teachers, corporate blood-suckers, and your mother, I’ll speak to people from every country in the world, from every class or caste, psychos, gypsies, mormons, slaves, people with withered hands and wonky eyes, preachers, policemen, the web-foot cocklewomen and the tidy wives, every one. In a Britain where the public don’t interact in public, the chugger embodies the beautiful diversity of this crazy world, uniting all he speaks to in his presence on the street. Some of us are haters, but the line of human evil cuts through the heart of every human being. . . so who are the ones who express it to a chugger? It’s an interesting question. Are chugger haters more likely to be rapists and murderers? I’m inclined to think they are. Because it’s so arbitrary, chugging, the way you react to this immensely positive profession must reveal something about your heart and your soul. Or maybe people just have bad days. It’s just a thought.

Chuggers are here to stay. We are a fixture on the high street now so why not just get used to us? This world needs to change. We’re happy to go to concerts to ‘make poverty history’ and wear a trendy wrist band, so we should be happy to accept chuggers. We’re just people who are trying to do a good thing in this world, and we don’t care if you don’t sign up! Don’t feel guilty for god’s sake! We just want to have a chat. And if you’re approached five times in a day, don’t see this as a bad thing. See it as five opportunities to do something truly amazing with your day. And, ultimatley, go ahead and take one of them.

Because that’s what chuggers are: an opportunity that gets in your face and facilitates the flow of the good from your heart to the people in this world who need you. A beautiful opportunity. So let’s all stop the hate.