Muffed part 1

It took 51 years, but today I can honestly say I may, possibly, maybe mastered self-control. Possibly. The lucky recipient of today's monumental display of self-discipline was Muffy, the Chair of today's Community Outreach Committee. However, if I had throat punched her, a jury of my true peers would have completely understood.

Needless to say, I am not long for this committee. In fact, I am begging off from an event next month. Additionally, I am making myself unavailable for the next two meetings. Why? Because.

Please understand, this is not about hurt feelings or ego. It is about stupid ideas and the lack of logic when my reasonable ideas were ignored without any explanation other than, "it won't work." Which is what I heard. A lot.

There were two primary agenda items that pushed me to the brink.

Issue 1: The ongoing letter writing campaign for our overseas soldiers has hit a roadblock. The last association-wide get-together was from 5 to 7 p.m. on a Thursday and had zero participants other than the committee members. We have another letter writing day scheduled for October, but the goal is to be able to send out letters every quarter to our servicemen and women. The question on the table was how were we (the Community Outreach Committee) going to keep this campaign going and keep it top of mind to our fellow agents?

My suggestion: Why not set up a basket in the realtor association's classrooms with provided stationary (which we have) and a quick blurb about what we are trying to accomplish. There could be a second basket where completed letters could be placed. With three classes per day, and each classroom holding about 100 people, perhaps folks would take a moment to fill out a letter once in a while. We could place the basket next to the bottled water and perhaps ask the instructors to mention this to the students at the beginning of each class. If baskets were a problem, how about boxes? I would be willing to spring for WHATEVER DEVICE NECESSARY to hold said stationary and completed letters. Even if we got a 1 percent response that would be 90 people a week.

Muffy said no. It was too, "labor-intensive" to have baskets in the classrooms in the same building where the committee meets monthly and our paid liaison's office happens to be. She refused to open the idea up for discussion in the committee, only saying we needed to move on to a more "realistic" idea.

Muffy's Suggestion (I am not making this up): There is a blood drive next week. There are 40 spots in the blood drive. While these 40 people would be stuck, with needles in their arms, committee members would hand them a pen and stationary and order them to write a letter. They would then figure out another way to "catch" people and have them write letters in the next meeting.

This blog will be too long if I go into the other stupidity I dealt with, so that will be tomorrow's post.