February 3, 2017
Dear Everyone:
First and foremost: Errata.
Mea culpa. Oops.
I forgot to mention in last week’s Letter that “Alice” also works in
Sales. Or, as she put it:
“What am I,
chopped liver?”
Well, of course not! I like
“Alice”, always have. I hate
liver, chopped or otherwise, always have.
When I was a college student, living in
Morocco, the
school’s cook got into the habit of serving liver for dinner on the same
day each week. Once we
figured out the pattern, a lot of us would take the local bus, which
cost the equivalent of about a nickel, into the city,
Casablanca, that
weeknight for a “real” meal at some inexpensive restaurant.
It wasn’t necessarily great; but
it wasn’t liver. When the
cook figured out what we were doing, he randomly changed the day of the
week and continued serving liver, which continued to be disgusting.
As for last week’s rant, about the garbage situation, the
Waste
Management Facilitation Service (WMFS) company is still “working the
kinks out”, but things appear to be slowly improving.
In the meantime “Patty”, the
Homeowner
Association (HOA) Board member who originally pushed through the
change in WMFS, has set off a new contretemps.
(A French word meaning, “tempest in a teapot”.)
Our Property Manager, “Michaela”, sent a proposal from a roofing company
to replace the roof on the clubhouse to all three of us Board Members.
When the same company replaced all the roofs about ten years ago,
the clubhouse was omitted, probably to save money as the HOA was reeling
under the discovery of many, many imperative repairs that were needed.
“Patty” promptly demanded “at least 3 bids” for the job.
When I pointed out that she hadn’t required multiple bids when
she wanted to change the
landscaping company, or the WMFS company, she fired off a strident
reply, from her cell phone, complete with all caps, accusing me of
personally ATTACKING HER!!!!!
In Other Words: “To two
parts hysteria add three parts self-importance.”
A quiet email a few days later from “Michaela” and “Patty”
suddenly decided that using the same, fully-vetted, roofing company
would be OK with her.
My concern about “Patty” is that she doesn’t seem to realize that
changing things does not automatically produce an improvement, something
vividly illustrated by the current
political situation.
People thought they were voting for Change.
What they got instead is a bizarre cross between a six-foot
Tweety Bird (“Tweet!”
“Tweet!”) and a shoot-from-the-lip
Yosemite Sam,
with a generous dollop of the
Tasmanian Devil thrown in for good measure.
Example: Donny, the Trumpet.
getting into a “Twitter War” with the
Prime Minister
of Australia over an already established agreement regarding
refugees from Africa
and parts of
Southeast Asia. This is
rather like sub-letting an apartment, then blowing a fuse over a
stipulation in the original lease.
Something Donny should know about.
But let’s give the man his due:
At the age of 70, he’s had 65 years of extensive experience in
exactly how to act like a five-year-old.
Then there’s one of his first
Executive Orders
to
prohibit visitors from certain countries whose population is
predominately non-Christian (i.e., Muslim) from entering the United
States. Of course, his
Trumpettes insist that this is Not A Ban (NAB), it’s Just A Precaution
(JAP).
Listen: That whirring sound
you’re hearing is
Thomas
Jefferson, along with the other co-authors of the
First Amendment,
spinning
in their graves.
Love, as always,
Pete
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