WPP Fandango

It's possible the lousy weather we have been threatened with for the last couple of days will arrive today and actually be here when I get up (I'm not up now; I was but now I'm not. It's a computer thing and no one understands). Most Saturdays I get to sleep in until 0630 or so unless I'm in the blood tests cycle which I am as of this week. I did two sets last week, one for a doctor I'd seen the week before and the other for someone I started out seeing on Wednesday and actually saw Friday afternoon (talk about a commute!).

I had blood drawn yesterday and will have some more drawn next weekend as well (I do Saturdays because they are all 'fasting' tests-what ever became of slowing tests?) and it's too hard to make happen during the work week. Anyway, the blood tests yesterday morning meant I blew off a hearing on most of the public safety portions of the municipal budget whose hearing was oh bright early yesterday. Trying to combine my 'get 10,000 steps in' regimen AND the tests AND the budget hearings didn't work.

I caught up with a sporadic contemporary at an event at mid-morning, the grand reopening of the first store in a dead-on-its-feet-not-too-long-ago mall whose ownership changed hands last fall and whose new operators have vowed to bring back. It's a nice ladies clothing store-think of it as Victoria's Secret without Secrets (especially if we're talking this Victoria)) and we fell into laughing about all the folks who showed up in City Council chambers the night the developers introduced themselves to us, and the keen interest in what was going to happen and questions about the near and long term future fielded that night.

Fast forward seven months and it's the members of the City Council, all the members (you couldn't say about about the last Council) and some of the other staff from City Hall and me and my guy. In the ladies store. Being cool and everything, of course, and I look up, after admiring the colorful displays and all the new window treatments and lighting effects and smile as an unkind thought crosses my mind. Just then I realize Herr Rosencrantz to my Guildenstern is smiling to himself as well.

We're watching the sales staff of the store who had to be worried they would have jobs when all of this got said and done, smiling as they share pastries and a box of coffee chatting and laughing with the members of the Council, oblivious to the fact that every one of the 'concerned citizens' who made it a point to make a point that night, mostly obscured by clouds, in Council chambers have just too much else they are worried about now to come and see the first fruits of this new partnership and collaboration at the Norwichtown Commons.        

They'd have found the time if the effort had foundered or had failed entirely. Perhaps they're still waiting on the latter or even counting on it. Schadenfreude ist auch ein freude. Sorry you had to make due with your WPP on a pretty decent Saturday morning. The biggest problem with abandoning a sinking ship that doesn't sink is that hellaciously long swim back to shore. Good luck with that cold comfort and change.
-bill kenny