>Actually, this is a really good question. Perhaps you could start a >precedent with your church customers that no piano would be "admitted" to >the church without the approval of the piano technician, the services for >whom would be borne by the person considering making the donation. Hi Z!, That might work with good advance warning that the dreaded do-gooders were afoot. Most times, the arrival of the small shiny "CheapestKind" piano universally surprises EVERYONE. Having been purchased specifically as a sort of guerilla donation/invasion (with or without political or power play overtones) by a well liked and generous individual that nobody wants to offend, they don't get refusal rights. I have, rarely, actually identified ripening do-gooders before the fact and tried to head them off at the pass with a little pre-disaster education. I'm batting about 50%. Do-gooders seem to be mostly gland driven and somewhat education resistant. It's like when you were a kid and Aunt Aphasia gave you that bright orange hand knitted bicycle cozy for Christmas. At least it matched the three armed sweater you got from her last year. Had she only asked first, it would have saved a lot of needless angst and waste. Do-gooders never seem to ask though, do they? So as not to spoil the surprise, I suppose. > I sort >of have an arrangement like that at a nearby nursing home, and have been >able so far to keep some pretty undesirable stuff at bay. Now THIS works great when someone tries to "donate" an old piano to an organization through regular channels. I get frequent calls from my churches as this comes up, and have managed to keep a lot of old ghosts from acquiring new haunts under my care this way. Often, the piano involved is one I condemned myself just last week in the donator's home, which pleases me somehow. <G> >Now to talk some of my church customers into replacing some of the existing >pianos that really don't function as such, and are really too far gone to be >worth fixing. Why of course -- solicit for donations on the condition that >any piano under consideration must be approved by the technician (me). Sounds good, and on rare occasions it even works. Mostly though, they can't get rid of the current piano because it was donated to the church by dear old Aunt Aphasia, in memory of someone special to her, and they can't offend her by replacing it. Maybe they could get her to knit a cover for it. Ron N
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