July 19, 2013
Dear Everyone:
The annual ARMA Regional Leadership Conference last weekend was a
rousing success. (ARMA =
Association of Records Managers and Administrators.)
Lots of useful information, lots of great presentations; everyone
came away bubbling with enthusiasm, which will carry over into our Board
of Directors Planning Meeting next month.
“Our” being the Mt Diablo Chapter, of which I am, once again, the
vice president.
The position of vice president has some ups and downs.
UP: You don’t really
have to do anything. As long
as everyone else is there to do their job.
DOWN: If someone else
isn’t there, you do their job.
For example, if the Chapter president can’t make a meeting, the
vice president takes over the responsibility.
If the secretary doesn’t show, the VP takes the minutes.
If the treasurer is out, the VP takes care of the money.
And so on…
So, as long as everyone else stays involved, I don’t really have to do
much. Or, as they say, I can
do as much as I want to do.
“You get out of ARMA as much as you put into it.”
As for the actual Conference, it took place aboard the historic
Queen Mary in
Long Beach, California.
The reason it’s “historic” is that it was originally launched in
1934, between the two World Wars.
Technically, it’s the RMS Queen
Mary, of the
Cunard White Star Line.
If that sounds familiar, yes, that was the group who ran the
infamous, if somewhat short-lived,
Titanic. I did some
research.
The ship was named after the current
Queen Elizabeth’s
grandmother, the
mother of (among others)
Edward VIII and his younger brother,
George VI.
Edward was the self-centered snip who threw over his
responsibility, country and family for “the woman I love”, abdicating
his throne and dumping it into his brother’s lap.
If you saw the movie,
The King’s Speech, Mary was played with icy indifference (“just get
over it, Bertie!”) by
Claire
Bloom.
As for the ship itself, it measures approximately 1019 feet long.
To put that into perspective, the average
professional football
field is about 360 feet long.
The building I’m currently working in is about 600 feet, give a
few yards one way or the other.
And the aforementioned Titanic comes in between at a mere 882 feet.
The Queen Mary was converted
into a hotel, with “staterooms” that are probably a lot larger than the
original spaces, complete with bathrooms.
When our maternal great-grandparents
crossed over the
Atlantic in
the late 1800s, they probably didn’t have anything as elegant.
There is a guided tour, which I did not take (I was, after all, there to
work at the Conference), that tells you all about the ghosts said to
haunt the ship. If I did run
into a ghost, it would probably be some long-lost guest wandering
through the hallways, trying to find his way back to his “stateroom”
from the ice machine “just down the hall”.
Meanwhile, back at the office…
Now that I (finally!) have access to the computer, there’s a whole raft
of “compulsory” training to take, from corporate policy to Information
Risk Management to Health, Environment and Safety.
These are the
computer-based training modules that all employees
and contractors are required to complete, no matter how many times you
may have seen them before.
They range from boring to boring
to
boring…zzzz.
Huh? Time for the
Assessment already?
In other words, Situation Normal.
Love, as always,
Pete
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