In the Supposed Interest of Efficiency

Rotation looks like a bug. Start there, because pretending otherwise turns this Tradition into superstition. Your group finds a treasurer who is genuinely good — books balanced, rent paid early, nobody has to think about it. Six months later he rotates off and the new one is slower. Multiply that across secretary, G.S.R., literature and coffee, and the group spends a real part of every year worse at its own business than it was last month. Every argument for keeping the good one is correct. Bill saw that argument coming and named the word it would arrive under (A.A. Service Manual): "In the future — at those times when the rotation system does not work perfectly — there will be the natural demand to throw it out in the supposed interest of efficiency." He doesn't deny the inefficiency. He grants it and refuses the trade anyway, because rotation was never buying competence. It buys this: no job in A.A. quietly becomes a person, and nobody has to be talked out of a role he's held long enough to call his own. It's also why the chair is open to you in two years.