Language alert:  This entry contains a few bad words.  Some were said by others and I quote them here. At least one, however, is all my own doing.  There are times when only one word will do.  I apologize in advance for the sensitive souls among you.

We’ll get to (and hopefully conclude) the venting.  Before that, I have to say something about my day.  As good as yesterday was at work…well….today was equally bad.  Remember how everyone was thrilled to death with the stuff I was writing for them yesterday?  This morning, they started sending me instant messages about changing just a few little things – and those little things basically would require me to rewrite entire projects.  When I explained this to them, and mentioned that I’d be happy to do it, but that they’d have to put in a new official request (I get reviewed based on those requests, folks), a couple of them tried to argue with me and tell me that what they were asking didn’t involve any big rewrites and I should be able to take care of them with just a few tweaks here and there.

After I got annoyed enough, I sent them the code so they could see for themselves that they didn’t know what they were talking about.  When 75% of a web page is comprised of variables, loops and logic, “a few little tweaks” ain’t gonna cut it when you’re asking for data from a different database.

I got my new requests eventually – and my PM got to knock some heads, which she’s been itching to do for months.

I had lunch with Joe (the director).  We ate some Thai food at a place near my old office and talked a bit about brass bands, what we’d like for our own band to do this year, an upcoming brass festival, and (you know it!) Bob.  He gave me a Black Dyke CD after we ate (do yourself a favor and listen to some of the sound clips), so I had a nice chance to listen to some of it while driving back to the office.

Joe’s given me a number of brass CDs over the years.  He’s just nice that way.

For dinner, I raided my pantry and freezer and made some stuff that sounds absolutely disgusting, but it tasted pretty good.  It contained mild sausage, carrots, chicken stock, black beans and acini de pepe.  I put all of that in a pot, added some garlic, curry, cumin and chili pepper; and let it simmer for about 45 minutes.  Anybody got a good name for it?

Ate some of that (I have leftovers) while watching 30 Rock and now, at 8:15, I’m sitting in my bed trying to work up the energy to finish my brass rant without falling asleep first.

Onward to venting.

As I recall, I left off my last rant with the beginning of the email thread that finally convinced me to quit the board.  Bob had criticized the board’s best effort to keep the band from tearing itself apart and was still whining that nobody on the board had offered to vacate their seat so that new people would be guaranteed to move onto the board.

I’m going to have some fairly long quoted passages following.  I sincerely hope Bob never decides to google the exact texts of our emails and stumbles upon this blog, but I guess that’s a chance I’ll have to take.

So I sent him an email and asked him exactly what he was trying to accomplish.  I agreed with him that the meeting wasn’t perfect, but that it was a start.  I told him that the agenda had been released quite late, in part, because he had been arguing against it.  I reminded him that there had been a lot of very personal things said by some in the band – generally aimed at Joe – and that those comments were what prompted us to use not only an agenda but also an outside moderator.  And I told him that I really did like him and that we’d had a lot of good times together, but that I agreed with the general sentiment that his constant negativity was wearing quite thin and had me considering quitting the band altogether.

His response to me was troubling.  After initially denying that he was being negative (it was just something that everyone thought – and everybody had it wrong), he launched into a monologue about how hard it was for him to stay on the board and how he’d considered quitting; but that he felt a duty to stay on and “ask the tough questions” – for the good of the band, of course.  Then he hit me with this:

What everyone seems stuck on is this concept of ‘personal attacks’. No, this is just business. …I think you don’t give members of the band enough credit for personal discretion and an unwillingness to hurt the feelings of a friend in a public manner.


I’m not TRYING to do anything other than ask the questions I feel are important and/or necessary for my duties as assigned me by the board. If my doing so seems negative, and unproductive then this board and this group are doomed to mediocrity. Someone has to be willing to ask the difficult, and often, unpleasant questions.

Call me a cynic, an old fart, a moron, or just mean person, but I call bullshit.  The main agenda for “The Players Committee” (and I’ve been putting that in quotes every time because I refuse to accept it as an organized group) was to get together at a bar and bad-mouth Joe; and Bob was right there with them.  So no, it’s not just business.  It is personal.  And no, I don’t give some members of the band – specifically the members who’s actions resulted in all the turmoil – credit for personal discretion.

And the idea that the band would be “doomed to mediocrity” if not for the selflessness of Bob…I didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically or be outraged.  Let me say something here in black and white: The GBB is not a mediocre band.  After hearing a lot of other bands, I can say that I don’t think it was mediocre during its first year.  After ten years, it’s among the best in the country, which might explain that, while our local reputation is non-existent, we are known and respected pretty universally on the national brass band scene.

So I waited a day before I responded to Bob, hoping that my tone would die down a bit, and then I sent him the following note (I’ve changed a few names, and I’ll try to remember what I changed them to if I have to reuse them later in this tome).

Bob – 

The only “tough” question I’ve seen on the table recently is whether or not Joe is to remain the conductor, and I daresay that that one question is what prompted the strict “no names” agenda, which I agreed with.


There is no more cause to point to Joe as the cause of any perceived mediocrity in the band (I don’t agree with that assessment, btw) than there is to point to Pablo’s consistent note cracking during solos, Matthew’s inability to play a roll, or my own problems centering pitch. We are a volunteer organization, we’re all learning and growing, and the band’s opinion certainly seems to be that we don’t kick people out because they’re not as good as somebody else might be. If Joe was unable to read music or didn’t bother coming to rehearsals, that’s one thing. The fact that he’s not as good as Fiedler is quite another.


… Whether you were aware of it or not, I was told that Pablo told Rich, Betsy and Michael that he planned to present Joe with an ultimatum during their proposed ore-survey lunch. …It is the perception among many people that there is a group that wants to pin whatever problems we have on Joe, and I DO think an unstructured meeting could have easily gotten way out of hand….


This was our first open meeting. Some issues were aired, some ideas were floated, some suggestions were made, and – most importantly – the band as a whole was given a chance to see that the board will listen. They were also invited to contact any or all of us with any problems via the web, email, or in person. Your initial response to all of that seemed to be, “Yeah, well that agenda certainly wasn’t very helpful,” and to me that’s negativism.


… when we actually DO do something as a board, even if it isn’t perfect, it irks the hell out of me to have one of our own board members immediately point out the warts.


I just wish you’d see the bright side every now and then or at least not shine a spotlight on the imperfections and then say, “Nothing personal. It’s just business.” It’s not a business. It’s a community group, and it’s a good one…

I’ve watched bands get destroyed because of politics and I don’t want it to happen to this one.

I don’t think that was overly harsh, do you?  It was just a “lighten up, buddy.  We’ve got problems” type of thing.  Bob didn’t see it that way, and he responded in an extremely annoying fashion – by returning my email with his comments interspersed throughout it, in which he glossed over some points, argued with others, obsessed with others and attempted to steer things back to his pet project – seating a new board.

To my point that the only tough question was the one of removing Joe, he responded, “That question has not been asked yet. The seeming tough question for me right now is the board, its membership and elections.”

To my statement that there was no reason to point at Joe as a weakness, he said, “I’m not sure I, or many others would agree with you. …We are a volunteer organization, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to be the best we can be.”

When I mentioned the bit about Pablo stating that he was prepared to issue an ultimatum, Bob ignored the meat of the paragraph (heavily cut in the quoted passage above), and fired back with what was to become his favorite denial: “Who told you, that Pablo told Rich etc…. Hearsay. I never heard such an ultimatum.”

My comment that I thought his comments about the meeting were negative prompted this, somewhat curious, defense: “I really wish people wouldn’t interpret my words, to make them ‘seem to say’. I choose my words carefully, and I mean what I say. If I had meant, ‘that agenda wasn’t very helpful’, I would have said so. I didn’t.”

In other comments, he flatly denied that he’d ever “pointed out warts” in the board’s plans, he attempted to impress me with the long list of non-profit boards that he’d served on previously, he again stated that the board had done next-to-nothing since it had been formed, and he reprimanded me for suggesting that our band was not a business.

After reading his responses, I was in full “I will kick your ass mode,” and so responded to him as he responded to me – by inserting my comments below the comments he had made to my original comments.  I began by asking him what was so important about replacing the board when he fully admitted that the board didn’t do much.  To his assertion that “many other people” would disagree with me about the fact that not everyone is as good as everyone else at their job, I asked him if he – or any of those many other people – would be willing to excuse themselves from the band when I showed up with a bunch of graduate students who could eat their lunch.  I pointed out that, almost unanimously, the band had said that it did not want to have open auditions for seats on a regular basis.

His trite little thing about “…that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to be the best we can be” sort of set me off a bit.  I’ve never liked that expression, and I told him so.

And I must say that “aspire to be the best that we can be” is a cliche that has never made any sense to me, and doesn’t in this case. “The best that we can be” in what sense? The best that we can be with a better conductor? The best that we can be with all-professional players?


The best that we can be is just that. We try our best – and our best might not be as good as somebody else.  So what?

And then we got to the whole “ultimatum” question.  This was really the heart of the whole problem, as I’ve made clear in the three entries I’ve devoted to this.  So I tried to lay it out for him in a calm manner:

Look, boss. Betsy told me what was said to her and Rich, in the presence of Michael, and which was alluded to in Pablo’s letter to the board. Stop playing with semantics, Bob. 

Obviously, this “players committee,” which has had “several formal meetings,” and of which you are a part, is unhappy with things. I was told by someone to whom Pablo spoke that he used the word “ultimatum,” along with “all of the principal players” two days before a private meeting was to have taken place between you, Pablo and Joe. 

If that was simply to have been a “we have concerns about communication” meeting, then I’d have to say that you, as a board member and as member of the “players committee,” were obligated at that point to bring it before the board. If, however, it dealt mainly with Joe and people being unhappy with HIM, then a lunch would make more sense. And as McKenzie had said to me “I’m quitting because of Joe,” I see no reason to disbelieve what Betsy told me about Pablo’s proposed ultimatum.


And you know, I believe it was said; so whether it was or not is really not the issue. If I believe it, it is a threat to my band. I will, therefore, keep it in mind while making any decisions about the band.

I responded in like manners to all of his other comments, quoted himself back to himself to show that his carefully-chosen words were exactly as negative as everyone said that they were,  told him again that the board had indeed done a few things, and – above all and in almost every point – let him know that it perceptions that were causing trouble.  The perception by the board that there was a group threatening to quit.  The perception by the board that Bob was working against it.  The perception by some that the band hadn’t won at the championships because of the conductor.  I hammered away at that, doing whatever I could think of to make him understand that the best course of action was to get positive about things and move forward.

He responded with another long list of comments, defenses and denials.  Particularly the denial that an ultimatum was ever considered – this in spite of the fact that I’d tried to explain to him that the truth or fiction of that particular incident was completely irrelevant.  It was out there, and it needed to be addressed.

In an effort to lighten things up while needling him, I got some clarification on the whole “ultimatum” conversation and send him the following:

Bob – I wanted to clear everything up, so I asked Betsy exactly how that conversation went between her, Rich and Pablo.  Here’s what she told me (I paraphrase). 

P: I want to have a conversation with Joe because several of us have issues with him. All of the principals are willing to quit the band if there aren’t changes made.


R: Okay


P: I’m not going to make an ultimatum or anything.


B: Sounds like you just did.


So. My bad. Pablo did NOT say that he would present Joe with an ultimatum.

Silly, isn’t it?  We’ve got a got telling two board members that he and “all of the principals” (interestingly, Betsy IS one of the principals) would quit if Joe didn’t – and then saying that it wasn’t an ultimatum.  I thought it was hilarious.  I thought BOB would think it was hilarious.  I thought he and I could chuckle at Pablo’s gaffe and get back to being buds and playing our horns and yada yada yada.

Instead, I got this message the next day.  It has bad words in it.  I apologize.  I’m not going to edit it in any way – except for the name changes, of course.

TWD…Pablo Portopotty here. This has got to stop RIGHT NOW. If I need to personally set the record straight, then so be it. I have personally met with Joe; couple that with the survey results and anything that needed to be said is in the open. What is below is NOT accurate. It is biased with personal feelings and omits MANY followup conversations with Rich that MORE than clarified the intentions of the group of players I spoke for. Tell Betsy that she and I need to talk ASAP!

I’m tired of this bullshit and I will not tolerate another minute of it!

Pablo Portopotty

See, Bob had opened up that final “conversation” email that I’d sent him on his phone and had shared it with Pablo.  Not the entire 25,000-word exchange that he and I had been having – just that one little snippet about that “ultimatum” that I thought was funny.

I instantly ceased all correspondence with Bob.  Having shared so many quotes from our emails in this blog, it may seem sort of hypocritical of me to say it; but I generally do not share private emails with people – particularly when those people are at the center of a storm of controversy and I am attempting to smooth things over with someone who I assume is also trying to smooth things over.  I did not respond to Pablo, or pass on his message that he wanted to talk to Betsy.  I did not smile and play nice when he gave me a half-hearted apology two days later at a rehearsal.  I merely acknowledged that I’d received his note.  And when Bob sought me out during a break in that rehearsal, and asked in a jovial way, “Are we still friends?” I looked him in the eye, smiled warmly, and replied, “No.  We’re not.”

A week later, I sent an email to the board’s executive committee, informing them that I would not be on the board this year – and nominating Rich to be the new secretary (a position that Bob had thought was going to be his, thereby ensuring that his spot on the board would not be one of those being elected).  I did not inform Bob that I’d done this, and – when we actually did hold elections last December – he was more than a little miffed to learn that the existing board, when electing the new officers, had voted in Rich as secretary instead of him.

This would probably be a good place to end this little rant, but I’ll throw in an epilogue just to bring it all up to today.  In the open election, Bob did manage to retain his seat, and one person from the “Players Committee” took my open seat.  The person (Bob’s backer) who had quit before me to “get away from the drama” was replaced by another guy who I think will do fine, although I don’t believe he’s all that gung-ho about the band per se.

Some crucial mistakes were made with the election.  For one thing, it wasn’t widely advertised, and not everyone in the band was at the rehearsal when the votes were cast.  Among the absentees was Bob.  A bigger mistake may have been that, in spite of being chosen as secretary (and therefore ineligible to be voted for by the general membership), Rich’s name was on the ballot.  In fact, he received more votes than anyone else.  It was postulated (quite rightly) that the votes that he garnered would have been cast for someone else and could have had profound effects on the election results.  I honestly believe that, had we thrown out the election and done it over, at least two more of the “Players Committee” would have been seated on the board.  Because the actual tallies had been shared with the old board prior to our giving it a thumbs-up/thumbs-down, I believed that Joe and Betsy would have lost their seats.

So I made it my goal to screw Bob in my final vote on the board.  The new president had approved the election.  Joe had approved it.  The treasurer had approved it.  One other person had approved it.  Bob had rejected it.  Betsy and Rich both rejected it.  I approved it.

The new board was approved by a 5-3 vote.

Not surprisingly, enough damage had been done late in the year to destroy the band’s morale.  In September, October and November, I had tried to get the board to vote on our attending the championships this year.  Each time, the vote was stonewalled.  Bob didn’t want to go.  Joe continued to say that he didn’t care one way or the other.  Betsy and I wanted to go.  Rich, for God-only-knows what reasons, kept stalling by polling the band (in three separate polls, the band – by slight majorities – wanted to go) and by saying that we needed to research the costs more carefully (Joe and I had provided flight fares, van rental estimates, and were working on getting numbers for a bus).  The three other board members refused even to take part in the discussions, much less give an opinion.

So no vote on the championships was taken until after the new board was seated and after yet another polling of the band took place (this one with a slightly larger majority in favor of going).

The new board voted, 7-2, to skip the championships.  We have no major events planned for this season, save for the slim possibility of a brief New England tour in June.

I’d love to do that tour, but I’ll be honest: I don’t want Bob in my home state.

He’d probably fuck it up.

TWD

For those of you who’ve never seen the movie Running Scared, never mind.  For those that have, please read the title of this entry in a Billy Crystal voice.  That’s the way I meant it.

Tonight was the night that I was going to finish the “Why I Hate the Board” story, but after an extremely long (and satisfying) day at the office, I just don’t feel like making myself relive all that garbage.  Maybe we’ll do it tomorrow.

I got to work before 9 today (which is worthy of a post all by itself) and didn’t leave until nearly 8 tonight.  It was one of those days when my clients kept asking for stuff that I knew how to fix – and so I kept fixing stuff, living for the inevitable “You rock!” emails that followed each problem that I solved.

To put it mildly, this was a pretty good day, and it made me tired – in a good way, of course.

TWD

Interestingly enough, my monologue regarding “Brass Band Bob” will have to be interrupted tonight – because I have a rehearsal. I’m there now, actually – it’s break time.

In spite of interruptions, conference calls, and a general malaise at work today, I did manage to get a few things done. Figured out the answer to a problem with nested loops that was killing me yesterday, then added a number of (I think) really nice enhancements to the Mobility dashboard and its drill-downs.

I ended up working longer than I meant to and went straight from work to Panera Bread for a non-dairy dinner with Betsy. I had chili.

Panera is just down the road from the S.A. Temple, where I currently sit.

Break is over. Back to band. We’ll be reading “Penlee.”

TWD
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:N Druid Hills Rd NE,Atlanta,United States

So let’s backtrack a bit and pick things up with the survey that went out shortly before the looming “ultimatum lunch.”

As I think I’ve already shared, the main beef that most of the “Players Committee” had was with the band’s director.  In order to save myself keystrokes, said director will henceforth and forever be known as “Joe,” and to really understand a lot of what is to follow, you need to know a bit about him.

Joe is exactly 11 months older than I am, is also a transplanted New Englander, has an extremely quirky sense of humor, and has been intimately involved with brass bands for at least 30 years.  He got his start playing with Salvation Army bands, but oddly isn’t a big fan of sacred music.  In spite of being an employee of the S.A. to this day, he’s much more interested in and educated about more technical pieces.  He once regaled me with a story of how he and his college roommates would sit on the couch under the S.A. flag in their apartment all day – blasting contest music on the stereo while binge drinking and watching silent porn.

I guess that sentence could give you the idea that Joe is somewhat of a character.

In the summer of 1999, Joe and one of his colleagues at the S.A. went out to lunch and had a discussion about forming a secular British brass band in Atlanta.  As the story goes, they took notes on a napkin regarding where to rehearse, how to fund things, and potential players.  Actually, that’s not just a story.  I’ve got a picture of the napkin somewhere.

A few days later, I got a call out of the blue from this guy I’d never heard of asking me if I wanted to play an instrument that generally didn’t play, reading treble clef (which I did not do) and playing a type of music that I’d never before heard.

So I gave it a shot and fell in love with it within 30 seconds after the first rehearsal started.  Since Joe worked very close to my office, he and I started to have lunch together fairly often, talk about brass music, and get to know each other.  Joe told me about the competitive aspect of brass banding (I had *no* idea that that sort of thing went on), and he and I and a couple of other guys attended the championships in 2000 and 2001, at which point I told him that it would be really cool if our little band to do that type of thing someday, but that we just weren’t good enough.  He surprised me by telling me that he thought we’d probably do okay if we ever decided to try it.

In the background, Joe was basically running all operations of the band by himself.  He was involved in getting the majority of the band’s traditional instruments from Besson.  He beat the bushes for performance venues.  He bought all of the music.  He found rehearsal space.  He set up the legal corporation.  He helped land our first major donation (from The Home Depot, if you can believe that).  And when the band eventually did decide to go into competition, and the other director (the other guy who doodled on the napkin) didn’t have time to commit to it, Joe became the only director.  It’s not overstating things to say that Joe built the band from the ground up and made it successful basically on his own.

So that should be enough background to let you know that I like Joe, I respect his musical talent and I know that he knows more about brass bands than I ever will.

When I first began to realize that the “Players Committee” had it in mind to replace him and was blaming our supposed lack of competitive success on him (remember, this band has never gotten less than 2nd in competition, and has won twice), it didn’t take me very long to choose which side I was going to be on.  Any threat to Joe was, realistically, a threat to the band’s existence.

By the time the surveys were distributed, I was aware that Bob had been taking part in the “Players Committee” discussions, a fact that didn’t thrill me at all.  Bob further annoyed me (and others on the board) by sending an email to the board regarding the survey as soon as it was distributed, saying, “While I was happy to receive the questionnaire from Rich, I believe for this to be truly effective and productive for the group, this should be sanctioned by the board…”

To my mind, this was Bob jumping in to criticize the effort, largely because he had not been consulted about it.  Interestingly, I tended to agree with his sentiments.  The survey was designed and distributed with no input from the board as a whole.  It simply appeared in my mailbox one day, and I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a tool for the board to use or not.  Still, his instant criticism irked the hell out of me.

I should add now that, by this time, it was fairly general knowledge that I’d been selected to serve on NABBA’s board.  I believe that Bob took that little bit of trivia as yet another sign that he’d been wronged.  After all, I’d never even heard of a brass band 10 years earlier.  Previously, Bob and I had generally managed to ignore band-related conflicts in our dealings with each other, but there was now a definite tension in the air.

I wandered through the Duluth cemetery over the weekend, and attempted to leave my mark.

As expected, the 7 or 8 members of the “Players Committee” all used the survey to basically say one thing.  To wit, “We need a better conductor.”  While the surveys were technically anonymous, it didn’t take a genius to read various responses and know who had penned them.  Everything was blamed on Joe, and I do mean everything.  If not for Joe, the band would compete at the highest level (The Championship Section).  Joe devoted too much time in rehearsal to warm-up.  The band’s intonation was bad because of Joe.  The band wasn’t fun because Joe occasionally used profane language.  Our recording session was terrible because Joe didn’t take the time to explain the meaning of “The First Nowell” to the band (I can’t make this stuff up, folks).

When the board met to go over the survey results – along with that letter send by the “Players Committee,” there was a very clear division in the room.  On one side of the line was Bob.  On the other side was everyone else.  While discussing what was to be done, Joe made reference to the unstated ultimatum by saying, “If it comes down to they leave or I leave, I can tell you this: I’m not leaving.”  Bob, while being against open auditions for every seat in the band, wondered in an email to me later, “What makes Joe untouchable?  If I didn’t think I was contributing, I’d have decisions to make.”

In an attempt to convey that the board desperately needed to provide leadership to make it past a looming crisis, someone said, “We don’t want the inmates to running the asylum.”  Bob fixated on and took exception to this in an email to the board a few days later.  “…we also need to be mindful that these are NOT inmates. These are individuals that donate approximately 200 hours per year or more, to this organization. As such, we should all be viewed as part-owners of the organization, and as such, our actions as a board should be carefully considered to properly reflect the will of our co-owners.”  He also began to lobby vigorously for the election of a new board, proposing that 6 of the existing 9 board members step aside.  He did not volunteer to be one of the 6.

It was decided that a full rehearsal should be set aside for a band meeting to discuss the issues that had come up on the survey.  In order to keep things as civil as possible, an outside moderator was hired to run the meeting and, late in the game, a strict agenda was written up so that we could have a discussion about the issues that had gotten the most responses on the survey: The attendance policy, the goals for the band, and an audition process.  Bob’s reaction to the agenda, sent to each of the board members for approval before being sent to the band, was immediate:

While I understand the desire to control the agenda for this meeting, and to prevent a feeding frenzy, should we, as the board, be controlling it to this amount?


Given the view, even held by many board members, of the board having been less than perfectly effectual over the past two years, perhaps we should allow for a little (controlled) open commentary during the meeting?

In spite of further protests in this vein, Bob was outvoted and the agenda was passed.

The discussion then turned to competition in 2011.   Bob was adamant that the band should not bother with competition on a national scale and should instead focus on growing the local audience.  When it was pointed out that the band made its most dramatic improvements in the ramp-up to competition, he responded that the same improvement would be seen if the band concentrated on other projects.  When it was noted that basically all of the band’s promotional material was a direct result of our participation at the championships, his take on it was that that sort of promotional material didn’t mean anything to a local audience.  When the comment was made that participating allowed us to mingle with other brass bands, he asked, “…what does this do for our primary purpose?”

And he continued to push for the election of a new board, in spite of the fact that our by-laws do not allow for it.  “Surely if we want to, we as a board can change the mechanism between now and December to allow for direct election of board members.”  Eventually, the board agreed to hold such an election, with the stipulation that the sitting board would choose three officers from among itself and the remaining six seats would be open to anyone who wanted to run for them.  After an election was held, the sitting board would rubber-stamp the results – this was done in order to abide by our by-laws, which do not allow for a general election of the board.  Bob was not happy about this compromise, but he agreed with it.

A few weeks later, we had the band meeting.  It went okay.  Not a lot was set in stone, but people had a chance to comment on things that bothered them (most troubling to menu was the prospect of having to audition for their seats) and give suggestions for what would make the band more enjoyable.  It seemed as if the crisis had been averted.

Bob’s response to the meeting was in all of the board members’ inboxes before most of them had gotten home from the meeting.  “The meeting tonight was a good gesture, but a flawed one in my opinion…The agenda was….not appropriate….”  As he had also taken a veiled shot at the board during the meeting itself (when asked about increasing our exposure through mailers, Bob had volunteered – rather tersely – “I tried to do that last year, but the board voted not to fund it.”), Joe was in no mood for Bob’s negativism so soon.

Joe responded to all, “[Bob], why do I so often sense that you are an agent against the very board on which you serve? Sorry if that sounds like a personal attack. It isn’t meant to and I hope I am not violating any protocol in asking this. You seem to have separated yourself from “us” on most every issue. You are part of board discussions but seem to distance yourself from the decisions. I know not everyone gets their way all the time, but we still vote as a board and should present ourselves as a board.”

Bob responded in a typically maddening way.  “I don’t feel I am an agent against the board, but do often find myself standing alone in decisions…. When the moderator asked why the mailer idea didn’t go anywhere, the truth was the answer I gave….I also find myself being the one person on the board most often willing to ask the difficult or unpleasant questions, if this makes it seem I am an agent against the board, so be it.”

Two things have to be noted here.
One is that the few quotes that I’ve included in this post do not do justice to the actual volume of verbiage that Bob can throw out there, and those who aren’t directly involved with Bob in this business probably cannot figure out what is so infuriating about his attitude and demeanor.  You’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that Bob had pushed everyone to the breaking point.

The other thing is that, by the time Joe had sent his email, I’d already sent my own to Bob – the first of the private thread that I mentioned in yesterday’s post.  It began:

“What do you want?  Just between you and me.  What exactly are you trying to do here?”

And my next post will take it from there.

Yeah.  I’m a tease that way.

TWD

I said last night that I’d unload on the band’s board of directors today.  After I started typing this, I found myself going on and on and on, and I realized that there was no way I’d be able to get the entire story into a single post.  Therefore, if you don’t want to read about this garbage, then you won’t need to bother coming back here for a few days.  This is going to take a while.

I first joined the board, along with several other people, about two years ago.  For the first year or so, we were basically an inefficient but harmless group.  If a gig came up, we voted to do it.  If we had to spend money to bring in an outside conductor, we voted to do it.  If new players were needed, we voted to have auditions.

Basically, we did nothing except conform to the structure that the band’s by-laws demand.

Last year, however, things went sort of nuts.  As you recall, the band again came in second in the second-level (“1st Section”) of the North American championships.  We lost by a point to the same band that beat us by three points in 2009.  This finish was apparently unacceptable to a small group of people in the band.  One of those people was a member of the board of directors.  For purposes of simplicity, I’ll call him Bob.

Let me retract something.  Bob probably didn’t care at all about the fact that we got second place.  He was more upset with the fact that we competed in the championships at all.  I can only speculate about why he didn’t want to compete, which I will do now – first by establishing a few background facts, and then by rambling.

Bob, who is in his early 30s, is quite proud of the fact that he’s been involved with brass bands for 20+ years. He loved the genre and its main face in America (NABBA) so much that he applied to be on the NABBA board of directors about three years ago.  Unfortunately for him, he submitted his application shortly after he had widely distributed an email which was extremely critical of the organization and had originally been sent to a sitting board member.  How Bob got the email, I don’t know; but he wasted no time in sending it to basically everyone that he knew, urging them to complain to the existing board.  He didn’t have all of the facts of the issue, nor did he make any attempt to get them.  He simply blasted the organization.

It was not surprising, therefore, when he was not selected to serve on the board.

Shortly thereafter, he began lobbying to have our band stay out of the competition.  We went anyway,  but before doing so, the existing board of the band (consisting then of just the three officers) decided to sit a full board (you may recall that this was one of the recommendations put forth by the planning committee which I – and Bob – served on.  Perhaps it was a bad idea).

Bob and I both applied to be on the new band board, and both of us were selected.  As I said earlier, for the first year, not much was done; but Bob did manage to make it clear that he was going to attempt to run things his way – or at least make it very difficult for anyone else to do something that he didn’t want.

And, as I’ve noted, Bob didn’t want us to compete.

He nearly got his way two years ago, after nabba’s board inexplicably changed some key rules of competition in their September meeting, which caused a fairly substantial outcry from member bands.  I didn’t like the way the rules changes were handled and I was willing to vote with Bob to keep us out (and I think we might have had at least one or two other people vote with us); but the big board eventually rescinded the rules changes (and had a major shake-up of their own), and Bob ended up being the only one to vote against our participation.

Now…we’re back to where we started.  We competed, we came in 2nd, and a few people (notably a couple of the new players who joined the band as a result of the auditions) apparently began meeting at a bar after our rehearsals to complain about this.  Their main theme was one of, “We could win at the highest level if we had a better director.”   Over time, this self-named “Players Committee” came to include key personnel  from nearly all sections in the band.

It also included Bob, who didn’t bother to inform the board of directors that this group existed, or that there was general unrest, or that they were discussing the idea of hitting the director – who is also the band’s founder, and who has done more than anyone to keep it afloat for the last decade – with an ultimatum: “Either you step down or we’ll all quit.”

A few days before this proposed ultimatum was to happen, some on the board got wind of it and – in an effort to calm things down and cut the legs off of a rebellion before it started – a survey was sent to everyone in the band asking them what they liked, what they disliked, what they thought needed to change, how they felt about competing, etc.

It had the intended effect, as it’s tough to complain that you’re never consulted about anything when you’ve just been asked, in writing, for your opinions.

The board got together about a week later to discuss the survey results and to read a letter which had been drafted by “The Players Committee,” complaining about various things.  One name noticeably absent from this letter was Bob’s – he began insisting that he’d never had anything to do with the group.  He also began openly challenging anything that was brought up in board meetings or on the phone or in email and even during a special “clear-the-air” meeting that was arranged, with an outside moderator, for the entire band.

He also began insisting that he wasn’t challenging anything – he was simply “stating my opinion.”  Nothing was ever personal – “it’s just business.  My feelings don’t come into play.”  Nothing was uncalled-for, rude or hypercritical.  “I just want for us to be the best we can be.”

In a very short time, Bob managed to alienate the entire board.
Even the one board member who was usually in his corner quit abruptly, saying, “I don’t want to be involved with this drama.”

A few days after that, after I’d read one of Bob’s emails to the board which was pointlessly critical and had several people fuming, I sent him a private email and asked him point-blank what it was that he was trying to accomplish.  At that point, I considered Bob to be a friend; but I didn’t pull any punches in my email.  I told him that he was being rude and counter-productive and that his involvement with a group that was actively working against the board (the “Players Committee”) was, at best, suspect and that he needed to tone things down before he ended up tearing the entire band apart.

I expected him to see my email for what it was, which was an attempt to calm things down without embarrassing him in front of the rest of the board.  He was, as I said, a friend.

His initial response – along with all of his responses in what became a private email thread between the two of us – pretty much blew me away, destroyed whatever friendship we’d had, made me dislike other band members who I’d never really thought about before, and ultimately convinced me to quit the board myself…before I completely lost my temper and ended up in jail.

We’ll get into that tomorrow.

TWD

For the second straight night, I ended things off (before bed) by siting in a tub full of hot water – infused with some sort of oil that’s supposed to make my back less itchy in cold weather.  It worked yesterday, so here’s hoping it works today too.

I was going to write a bunch here about other things, but I don’t feel it right now.

Tomorrow, however, I’m going to vent about the brass band board of directors.

Stay tuned.

How’s it going, Al?  🙂

TWD

I have nothing to add tonight.  I’m simply typing this to keep my string of posts going.

For dinner tonight, I had jambalaya.  It really is the perfect food – particularly during No Dairy January.  The picture in this entry was taken during a game against Western Carolina in November, 2004.

The Post A Day suggested topic for today was, “Why did you start a blog?”

Initially, I was inclined to blow that topic off, as I have all of the suggestions.  Then I looked at what I’d done today (that’d be nothing, friends and neighbors) and figured I’d give it a shot.

The long and the short of it is that I started this thing because I was lonely.  I’d been divorced for about 18 months (separated for a good deal longer than that), had recently had a major falling-out with a girlfriend, was watching my best friend die a slow death, had been seeing my company shrink steadily for close to two years, and I wanted to do something to make myself feel better.

Blank pages have always comforted me.  When I was little, there wasn’t much that I liked more than a brand new notebook because it had all those clean pages just begging me to write something on them.  In high school and college, I’d quite often bring a notebook with me to orchestra rehearsals (where the tuba didn’t play much) or honor band rehearsals (where most of the work is done with the woodwinds) and pen conversations with myself.

I know that that sounds wrong, but it’s not.  I transcribed conversations between two voices in my head.  If you’re wondering, there was no plot.  There was no thought.  There was just knee-jerk writing stuff down. A typical conversation may have started off something like this:

• What are you doing here?
• Why would you ask me that?  I’m always here.  You’re the guy who’s always late!
• Well excuse the hell outta me!  I didn’t know we were punching a time clock!
• Dude, you couldn’t punch your way out of a wet diaper. 
• Oh that is SO mature of you.  What are you, 6?
• That’s not what your mom said last night.
• My mother was in church last night, you moron.

 …and so it would go for pages at a time.  The two voices never liked each other, they never actually made much sense, and only occasionally did they realize that there was a third person there – the guy holding the pen.

The men’s soccer coach and his son watch some American football. Two of his players that year are in the pros today and both have played on the US World Cup team.  One of them, a guy named Dempsey, is one of the best players in the world. 11/2/2004

Either just before or just after I got married, I managed to lose all of the notebooks with my conversations in them.  That’s always bothered me, as I had fun going back and reading some of the back-and-forth years later.  Not to mention the fact that there were other things in those notebooks that I liked.  Short stories, poems, letters that were never mailed….I even started a play at one point about a guy named Ralph Jenson.  Who he was is anybody’s guess.  I called myself Ralph Jenson for about two weeks during my junior year in high school, and the play had the character set as a knight.  He was on his way to rescue a damsel, I believe.  I don’t remember the female character’s name, but she was based on Fara Lockaby, who was my girlfriend at the time.  A number of other high school friends also had characters based on them.  I was probably 50 pages into writing the thing when I let it drop.  Like the conversations, it was never really meant to be anything.  It was just a way to pass time.

When computers started becoming fairly standard – somewhere around my junior or senior year at college – the comfort that I got from a blank piece of paper somewhat naturally evolved into a comfort that came from that blinking green cursor on a blank CRT screen.  My mother had a Kay-Pro “portable” computer that she used to type papers for college kids, and I sometimes borrowed it from her for my own papers.  More often than not, I’d end up writing essays about nothing or short stories or deliberately bad poetry – just because I liked filling up that screen.  And when I had a printer, it was a bonus.  I could fill up the computer screen first and then print out my garbage onto blank pieces of paper.  An epistolary two-fer!

Somewhere around the house, I still have some of those writings.  I used one of them as a part of my portfolio quite regularly when, in the late 80’s, I was bouncing around trying to land a journalism gig.  It (the story) was basically just a description of an evening that I spent on a sand dune at Myrtle Beach, SC.  For some reason, I thought it might show newspaper people that I could write.

After I moved to Atlanta and found out the hard way that I wasn’t going to land a job with a paper, I started writing my own.  It was called “The Thermonuclear Arrow” and was a completely tongue-in-cheek newsletter for my darts team, “The Terminators.”  Published weekly (“published” being a strong word…I usually printed out about 10 copies for my team), it chronicled the team’s successes and failures during league play, enthralled readers with stories of what the team did for fun when not playing darts, offered advice to young dart players, and even followed the harrowing story of Lex Luther, a team member who was brutally murdered by our team captain, Dan Briley….until it was discovered that Lex wasn’t actually dead.

I still have several issues of the newsletter, too.

So early one morning in June of 2005, when I was feeling sad and lonely and desperately wanted comfort, I sat down at the table in my breakfast nook, opened up my laptop, and said to myself, “Self – there are about 40 trillion blank pages on the internet, so why don’t you fill a few of them up?  Just write something.  It doesn’t have to be about anything.  Nobody’s going to read the stuff anyway.”

And there it was.  Stuff Nobody Reads.  Stuff that really was never meant to be read.  It was just stuff to make me feel better.

Generally, it still does.

TWD

Worked at home again today, thanks to very cold temperatures last night that turned most of the surface streets around metro Atlanta into skating rinks.  I drove to a convenience store to get some coffee this morning, but decided that that distance (about 1 mile total) was enough.

You think I’m kidding about the skating rinks, right?  Check it out:

The day wasn’t half bad, work-wise, though.  I got a new request from my PM asking me to use jQuery to enhance a report that I wrote late last year.  Having never used that set of tools before (though I’ve wanted to), I was a bit leery of the assignment; but an hour or so on Google and 30 minutes of experimenting did the trick.  Client’s happy, PM is happy, and I learned something new today.

One of the trucks in the neighborhood gives testimony about the recent ice storm

It certainly looks like I’ll be home again tomorrow at this point.  With the exception of about an hour today when the mercury pushed up into the mid-30s, it has been bitterly cold (for Atlanta) all day.  Temps tonight are supposed to be in the low-mid 20s, so I don’t see the roads being any better in the morning than they were today.

I heard the other day that there are eleven (11!) sand trucks in the Atlanta metropolitan area.  People wonder why a decent winter storm can knock this city on its butt for a week…

I also woke up with a cold this morning.  Have been sneezing my head off for most of the day and going through kleenex like whatever a good metaphor is for going through kleenex.  Don’t know where that came from, other than maybe the fact that I haven’t been outside for more than 30 minutes in the last three days.

Wish I had more to write about, but my house just isn’t all that interesting.

On the No Dairy January front, for those of you keeping track, I had noodles in a cup for lunch and rice….just freaking rice….for dinner.  Yum.

TWD

I’m not going to do a post today.

Oh wait.   I just did.