Not long after the KAOS Trial back in November, my CARO Advanced Team Certificate arrived! I was so thrilled because it’s our first CARO title in 2 years!
As I admired the certificate, something didn’t seem quite right. Finally I realized that under the “Registered Name” portion of the certificate it read B.A. Bearacus, RAMCL, RNT…this couldn’t be right – we earned our final Excellent leg and Excellent Title in June of 2009 under judge Renee Will and I had the certificate on the wall to prove it. So assuming maybe it was a simple typing error, I emailed the person responsible for printing title certificates to let her know of the error and her reply to me was that according to CARO records, we earned 3 Excellent legs under one judge and would need another leg under a second judge to earn the title. She did state that there could be an error with the CARO records and the best way to rectify things would be to find and submit my score sheet for the leg that was incorrectly recorded.
This is where I started to panic…I have a title spread sheet in Excel for pete’s sake! How could I have overlooked that detail? Maybe the stress of owning a business really ISgetting to me and I’m losing my mind!
To put my mind at ease, I immediately went to check my rally book, where I keep my CARO handbooks, my judge’s trial records, past courses and, our past scorecards and qualifying ribbons. After a bit of rifling, I discovered that I only had score sheets for the latest titles – not to worry though, I knew where the rest were at home – at least I knew what room they should be in. Once I arrived home, it became painfully clear that I really am a pack rat but that keeping everything and keeping everything in one placeare two completely different things.
Every judge and trial secretary must keep their trial records for at least one year. It was well beyond a year but I still contacted the judge who we earned our last leg under and she still had the trial records. I was able to scan the trial record and sent it to CARO to have the leg and the title credited in the database and a new certificate was issued.
Now I have all my score sheets and title certificates arranged in their own binder in chronological order with the latest score cards first and you better believe I’ll be keeping track of every qualifying scorecard from now on!
The lesson to you all is to:
1. Always keep your qualifying score sheets in a safe place (A binder works and so does scanning them all and saving them electronically)
2. When it comes to Team runs, if one partner takes the scorecard the other should photograph it for their records – sometimes you know your partner, sometimes you don’t.
3. If you are a CARO member, keep an eye on your dog’s ID page after every trial so that you can catch any errors as soon as they crop up.
Ayoka Bubar BA, CPDT-KA 