Inappropriate Voices Revisited Twice Over

I am so glad I had my weekly lunch with my son yesterday. My sanity would not have survived if I didn’t have at least one good experience during the work day. I had to hurry through the lunch because I had to be back in Worcester for a public hearing. The lunch provided its normal surge of good feelings and intense pride in the young man seated across from me.

Lunch Yesterday. Thank God!

Then I definitely had to face the music, not once, but twice. The law requires we hold public hearings when we are making changes to the bus routes. Our overall boss always holds more than is required in his efforts to allow everyone a voice. This would theoretically be a good idea, anywhere but Worcester. I’ve written before about the frustration of dealing with people who will never be satisfied by anything and make it their life’s work to simply be contrarian. Worcester, a big city run like a small town, is a perfect breeding ground for this type of inanity.

Meeting 1

We held two meetings yesterday and more than half of the crowd attended both meetings and said the exact same thing in both meetings, at length and shrillingly. They seem to take a perverse pleasure in making wild accusations based simply on their own somewhat unbalanced view of the world. There were some good, honest citizens who showed up with honest concerns and some good ideas but that valuable dialogue gets sidelined by the morons who use these meetings as their soapbox to infuriate anyone who has the poor luck to be within listening range. That was me for more than three hours yesterday. Like I said, I really needed that lunch.

Meeting 2

I returned home emotionally exhausted from holding my tongue, not easy given some of the comments. My wife seemed to sense the mood and provided her usual spirit lifting help. I ran across her "plan" for the party and I'm glad she understood it. Luckily for me most of the action items were crossed off. She really is remarkable at organizing these things and could do it professionally if she ever had a mind or confidence to do it.

"The Plan"

She proudly proclaimed that she had administered the Storm Stress drug to Buddy by herself without assistance. Buddy was heading outside when a clap of thunder went off directly over the house. This immediately sent the wonder pooch into his normal panic. My wife wrestled him into his thundershirt and somehow got ten drops of the drug into his mouth. Wonder of wonders, it actually seemed to work, although this was a small storm. I’m sure Buddy’s unique metabolism is working overtime to build up a resistance to this new attempt to freeze his meltdowns. I’m trying to figure out how to get it into the punch we serve at the next public hearing.