January 12, 2007
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The Daily News
1 Well, the computer seemed to work the night before last. For a while, I thought the thing had walked into a bar.
2 It just wouldn’t boot up. I had it written off as dead.
3 So it goes.
4 But suddenly at around 6 a.m. yesterday, it fired up, and I was able to at least finish writing the DN and publish. Unfortunately, I can’t send bulk from the school computer, so it looked as though I had finally missed a deadline.
5 The irony of that is that I never really tried e-mailing it from the new campus. The REAL reason I didn’t mail it was that my frabjous mind remembered mid-day that I had written the DN and that I HAD finally mailed it, even though I hadn’t mailed it.
6 Don’t get old, boy.
7 So really, I didn’t even remember that I hadn’t e-mailed it until I began writing TODAY’S DN last night. I caught my lapse and repaired the job from the night before and was able to get yesterday’s DN sent out last night, technically not missing a deadline, and then I was also able to write today’s DN last night so that it could get to you this morning, which hopefully it did.
8 Is that confusing?
9 Zeimerz man.
10 And I got so busy the last two days that I never really had the time to think about the DN while at work yesterday, so I forgot that I hadn’t mailed it until last night, when I finally did. ..you see,it all started when we had a series of meetings…
11 Don’t get me going.
12 Moving On Segue: Meetings: Anyone who knows me knows how much I adore meetings.
13 The thing about jobs is that they would be great if we didn’t have to answer to some guy in some department above us who wants to improve things, and who demands accountability.
14 It reminds me of that scene in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles when Brooks, with a Groucho jacket that says “GOV” on the back has a meeting and says to his staff, “Gentlemen, we gotta protect our phony-baloney jobs!”
15 Truer words, truer words.
16 So three-hours into it, you look at all the people at a meeting and clearly rigor mortis has set in.
17 Nah, I’m kidding. I always marvel at how much improvement goes on once all the accountability is finally finished and people could go back to doing their jobs.
18 I remember once, many years ago, when my dear old friend and confidant Ken Ponticelli sat in on a meeting with some of our more illustrious staff at YB.
19 I had already been to a million meetings with this particular crew, and knew that quite often a two or three-hour meeting would inevitably end with the fatal words, “Well then! I guess we’re right back to square one!”
20 This was a consistent pattern.
21 Kenny was Activities Director at the time as I recall, and midway through the meeting I saw him begin shifting, turning red, and tapping his fingers each time someone would argue some moot point to the point of death. And trust me, they would make SURE it was deader than a doornail before finally shutting up.
22 Of course, I was totally goofing on how he kept getting physically shaky, tapping his fingers, then his feet, shifting in his desk, and looking at the clock.
23 Finally, someone said, “Well then! I guess we’re right back to square one!” to which both his hands crashed on the desktop just loud enough so as to illicit a response from one of the silent majority. “Maybe we should just break for lunch…”
24 Ken instantly slammed everything into his binder and was almost out the door. Those of us in the KNOW knew better. Any time someone suggests lunch at a meeting, there is inevitably some lunkhead running the meeting who will say, “If there are no more questions, we can all take a little break…uh…yes…” followed by the inevitable doomsday nod to some snooty beancounter.
25 Naturally, this happened right when Ken’s right Nike was three feet ahead of his body and practically out the door.
26 Quoth the snit: “Before we break for lunch, can we just go around in a circle so that everybody gets a chance to be heard?”
27 I don’t remember exactly what Ken DID, but it was the equivalent of throwing an exploding boulder through a plate-glass window. He physically moaned, and mumbled recognizable curse words that to this day probably won’t get past Saint Peter. I was rollin’. It was downright Satanic, with slow motion and all.
28 When we finally got outside, he blasted through the door jamb like a running back bursting through a line. I thought he was going to cry, and he just kept almost taking the Lord’s name in vain, were it not for the letter H.
29 Different guy. Kenny is a devout Catholic, so he was pretty careful, all things considered.
30 To me, it was just another in a career of those sorts of meetings, but he was used to just having meetings with me and Fleming, which usually consisted of us acting like a good copy of Mad magazine on steroids. Never had he SEEN such nonsense!
31 The guy earned his money that day, let me tellya. He groused for the rest of the afternoon, ALMOST taking the Lord’s name in vain.
32 I think what finally calmed him down was when I reminded him that some day this would all be written up in the DN, and that it would contain hundreds of terrible similies, and that we’d be lauging about it…
33 I think that was the only time he ever struck me directly in the nose.
34 Well, that’s today’s DN. If there are no more questions, I think I’ll just say good morning and have at it.
35 …uh…yes?
36 Peace.~H~
