It’s great work experience

Alex Mahoney (19) is a keen gamer who spends two days a week testing donated computer games and checking games consoles for Martlets.

“It’s probably one of the more unusual volunteering roles. However, we get all sorts of games and consoles donated to us and we need to know that they work before we can sell them on to raise money for the hospice. 

We usually see Xboxes, Wii and PS2s but we do also get some quite unusual ones. We recently had an NES from the 80’s; that’s quite a vintage console and was a really rare thing to work with. 

I play games a lot at home, so I know when something’s not working properly and it’s great to be able to use my gaming knowledge in a good way to help a charity. It’s quite satisfying when you see something that you’ve worked on getting sold; you feel like you’ve helped out. 

Volunteering is helping me to gain experience of working and it’s shown me an area of work that I might like to try in the future, which I hadn’t thought of before. It’s also a lot of fun and the people here are very nice.”