Drawing the Short Straw

I got the chance to go to Ft. Worth for a day to attend the Texas Republican Straw Poll tomorrow.

According to the Texas GOP, they've never held one, and theoretically, candidates come and speak and delegates vote for "their" candidate and there's a winner declared and everything. Then said winner gets a big PR boost and so on. Since so many states are going ahead of Texas in the primaries in the Spring, they've billed this as possibly the only chance to help choose a candidate.

Which, when you think of it, is a really crappy thing, but that's a rant for another day. We shall not speak of the Electoral College either, though I support it. I was an inch away from being an actual Elector three years ago. Par-tay!

Anyway, So I'm all excited to be in on this thing. Then I start reading news reports (never do that.) It seems even Mike Huckabee has cited a conflict with the event and has bowed out. So we're stuck with 2 candidates; Ron Paul and someone who I've never heard of.

Yeah. Texas gets the shaft.

So I'm driving about 500 miles round trip and spending $160 before meals and gas to go vote for people who aren't even there.

Shoot, when I'm dictator, the democratic process is really going to get a makeover.

(Nearly) Instant Karma

It's been a long summer, but now school starts in five (FIVE!!!) days and the PTA wagon has begun to roll. Except it hasn't.


The president cancelled the planning meeting we expected. Which is okay, except it wasn't rescheduled, and we had a major event to put on yesterday, namely the teachers' Welcome Back Lunch. Nobody ever told us how many people to prepare food for, how long they had to eat it, nothing. So we winged it as best we could, and we managed to feed everyone for under $3 a person, which still blows me away. But that's another story.


In the middle of planning this lunch, J (who chairs hospitality) had to take a break and go up to the school to see the teacher class lists and find out which kid got which teacher. While she was there, S walked up to do the same. They chatted with other people around and compared teacher names until G walked up. G is school store chair, and S and I had been picking up bargain school supplies all month for the school store since G couldn't/wouldn't come with us.



A side note: when you can find poly folders that sell for $1.50 on sale for 50¢, I'm there. Especially when we can sell them in the store for $1. PROFIT! WOOT!



So S sees G and decides she has to say something about G not shopping with us. From across the drive S shouts "Hey, you're falling down on the job! We've already got you a ton of supplies and you need to get busy!"



G comes in and tries to calm S down, or at least get her not to be so loud. It seems G's husband is going to be laid off in three months and they have to be very tight with money. That's why she hasn't come shopping; she can't front the money.


S snaps in G's face and says "Uh uh, no way, you could have had Fish go with you with the checkbook, since she's treasurer." And on and on.


J was mortified witnessing this, and her daughter-in-law who was right there was ready to smack S down. Now, what S said was indeed true, G didn't have to front any money, but it was so out of line, it didn't matter where she was right. There were a dozen people around, and S, though she resigned the position, had been slated to tackle volunteer coordinator this year, and I bet many people still thought she was in that position. What a testimony to how well we treat our volunteers! All year, before S quit, we'd been talking about how we'd get more people in, make PTA more inclusive. Ha.

So J called me to tell me all this stuff, and I couldn't believe it. I'm closer to S than anyone, but since I wasn't there, I didn't feel I could say anything to S about it. It would look like so much gossip. J said she would bring it up, and found an opportunity the next day, and S did call G and apologize. So far, so good. However, one of the president's closest friends had been at the school when all this went down. Nobody knows if the president was informed, but it's certainly possible.

Fast forward to this week, when we're hosting the lunch. Now, to this point the president has been invisible. No responses to e-mail, rare callbacks, no meetings, nothing. She has been working, true, but still school is days away from beginning and there's nothing on her end. So the prez walks in right when the lunch is beginning and chats and walks around. After the principal gets up to introduce her to all the teachers, the prez starts introducing us, the worker bees.

(The reason S quit the volunteer position, which I must include here, is that the president kept postponing a meeting with S and blowing her off over getting an early start for the year. S prepared new documents for the position, including a new sign-up form, and the prez just flat refused to look at it, saying the old one was already submitted and translated, so the new one wasn't needed. All this wthout having opened the document and taken one look. Yeah, I'd be a little upset too.)

When the prez gets to introducing S, she says "This is S, and she's a quitter." She goes on to say how S had a medical issue that kept her from taking on the duties (which was true, and also S's cover story) but you could hear, no you could feel the awful silence in the room.

I made sure I wasn't in the immediate vicinity when the prez later walked up to S and said "I was just kidding." S didn't take that well at all. She went on to rail about it the rest of the day, as I would likely have done in her shoes. But deep inside me there was this voice, this little voice that kept chanting, like a mantra: "Karma, Karma, Karma."

Neither J nor I have the courage to walk S through the obvious similarities, but we were both thinking it really loudly. So much so that we couldn't look at each other the rest of the lunch, for fear of giving it away in our faces.

Now I think the prez was way out of line, especially since the rest of us are plodding along effectively leaderless, but if S gets the message even a little bit, perhaps it was all for the best.