Round and round

How's your week been? Mine's been interesting. Here's a random snapshot.

Bosses quitting on a Tuesday totally suck! Especially when they take you out to lunch under the guise of "Let's all celebrate," only to begin the meal by preluding the announcement of your group's impending doom with, "Now, there's no such thing as a free lunch..." And they wondered why we spent the rest of the day in a shell-shocked trance.

Weird old-men clubs with funny animal and/or telephone-related names? Interesting places to give a presentation. Or, in my case, click through the PowerPoint while someone else gives the presentation. 'Cause that's why I went to Cambridge: to hone my slide show skills. That, and improving my ability to butter up large-nosed, 80-year-old white guys who want to wow me with their tales of anti-Communist activities in 1970s Siberia. Hell's yes, that's what they pay me for! Ladies and gents: your tax dollars at work.

Kitties freaking rock. Especially nice kitties that still let you touch them after vet visits involving blood draws, matted hair removals, and ear mite treatments. I don't think I'll tell the nice kitty that he has to go back to the vet for a full day soon...yeah, we're ignoring that part because the possibility of his being diabetic or in kidney failure is too depressing to contemplate right now.

Oregon drivers?? SUCK. Turn signals, people. They actually didn't install them in your car just for show. Speedometers are also important, because they tell you when you're going 25 miles over the speed limit so you know that maybe you should use those little blinky turn things before you swerve in front of my car without notice. I swear, if you hit me, I will break your arms with your own turn signal lever.

The public process? Dear god. Nope, sir, no, you can't build a tunnel through them there acreage. Little thing called liquefaction. Liquefaction. You know, "smash, crash, bang," instant catastrophe? You don't see why it has to be that way. Well. I know your brother-in-law's second cousin's daughter draws bridges for her industrial art class. That does not make you an engineer. Please go away. Please? Oh, you want to fill out a public comment record. About a tunnel. Sure, just step right here while I get a form and a big stick. It's to hold the paper down while you write. Yes, it is. Now, just look that way...

It's a bit disheartening, really. We have a public process in place so people don't wake up one morning and discover major infrastructure projects running through their neighborhoods. But when a handful of nutty people dominate the entire process, and you have to treat them like they're sane? I wish we could have a cut-off point at six months or a year, where you're just SOL if you didn't get your comment in on time. We waste so much money trying to reach everyone, when half them don't have anything to contribute (but do anyway) and the other half don't care. I'll write seriously about this at some point, but for now...I'm wondering if the process is broken, or if this is just how it has to be when you want to create a collaborative process.