22:36 - 12.07.05
Principles
My face could still light up a room from the sunburn this morning, dear diary. The only consolation was, that when I walked around the floor at work, almost everyone else had the same problem. The one woman who is very fairskinned had put a strong sun screen on and still burned. Just the angle of the sun and the atmospheric conditions I guess. I think we were all suffering a bit from heat exhaustion as well. The straight forward been-in-the-sun-too-long type and the other can't-sleep-because-it's-so-darn-hot manifestation. Maybe not hot by other standards, but nearly 29 C/86 F with no air conditioning, is pretty uncomfortable for we northerners.
The biggest challenge for me today then, was just staying awake. That continued until around noon, when an email came from one of the Texan specialists asking for some statistics from my project. Now as far as I'm concerned, head office is entitled to any data they require. Withholding such information would be like one of my poll staff for the election telling me it was none of my business how many voters had come to cast ballots on voting day. However, these questions were more of the "estimate and project" type and would be like me asking, before noon on polling day, how many total electors would vote, when would the count of ballots be complete and when would all the paperwork required be completed and turned in to me at the end of that evening. It isn't a reasonable question to be asked at that stage of the process, because of all the intervening variables. Also, because I am a consultant - say a poll clerk in the comparative narrative - it isn't even a question I should be asked. My supervisor has more knowledge of the total picture, as does the central poll supervisor in an election as well as more control over the execution of the project. If a poll supervisor has some other tasks to perform before taking all the ballot boxes in to my office at the end of voting day - say working with a team who lost control of their poll book at 3 or 6 pm during the "voter rush" in the afternoon - then even though my estimate for myself may be accurate,there would be no way that that supervisor could follow through with the delivery of my materials, because they have the other groups' work to reconcile and balance out first. Sometimes that can add a couple of hours to the process. When I ask for reports from polling stations, I only want the reports from the supervisors for that reason. The only time I would deviate from that is if I realized during the day, that the abilities of the supervisor were in question and I was forced to rely on someone else for a more accurate read on the situation. Last election, I had a situation in one polling station where one DRO was kicking up quite a fuss about how the supervisor was conducting polling day business. I sent out my trainer to assess the situation and found that there were problems with both the supervisor's behaviour and the DRO's. That caused quite a lot of distress for all the other workers who were forced to cope with the interpersonal power struggle and meant I worked far longer in to the night and through the next two days trying to clean up the mess they had made together. There seems to be a similar, significant struggle for power going on in this situation. I can't discern who or where the problem is originating from - probably a bit of both sides - so I feel like the proverbial political football. Stuck in the middle and defenseless and also the one most likely to get the kicking. Not fun.
I think that and the walk with my walking buddy at noon, set the scene for a real bout of depression for me tonight. My walking buddy is down on herself about family and work issues. Full of self doubt, because of what is being reflected back to her even though she feels as though she is doing the best she can in less than optimum conditions. She asked about the situation with my neighbours and the cats and I allowed I was feeling the same way about that as she was about her issues. Just feeding off each other's frustration I guess.
When I got home tonight I went and picked up my copy of Mosquito Creek Roundup from the post office. I had found a copy online in an Oregon bookseller's site and decided I wanted my own copy as an heirloom for my sons. I also want to ensure that what I put in to the the evolving family tree I'm developing online in one of the ancestry sites is as accurate as possible. That is especially important now that grandbabies are popping in to our family circle more frequently. Sometimes that sense of "roots" is all that keeps one anchored when adversity strikes isn't it? I looked at the article about my great grandmother being a founding officer of the women's group that fought for the right to vote for women here in Alberta. Then I thought about my grandfather - my Dad's Dad - and about the kicking he took at the hands of our federal government. You see, he had part of the contract for construction of the Canadian section of the Alaska highway during World War II. It was a joint nation project to create a line of defense should "them Ruskies" (russians) come calling over the Alaska panhandle. As a result, my Dad spent the war years growing up in Dawson Creek among the army reserves and the labourers brought in to do the heavy, dangerous work of building over and through the muskeg. At the end of the war, the Canadian Government found itself in major debt, because of the expenses of war and decided one of the ways that they would levy money was by imposing a retroactive tax grab of, I think, about 5% per war year on all existing Canadian businesses. That basically bankrupted a lot of companies, because it was a huge non-negotiable expense/fine out of left field that they could not have foreseen or budgetted for. My grandfather fought the levy in every court in the land right up to the Supreme Court and lost. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees spent on establishing a principle of fairness as my grandfather saw it - all for naught. He never really recovered from that loss I don't think. Anyway given that and other exploits of my relatives here in Alberta, you can see how I come by Don Quixote's "tilting at windmills" and "fighting city hall and winning" syndrome. I've been on both sides of those scenarios myself. In my great grandmother's case she succeeded, yet my grandfather did not - if one assumes the temporal sense. Yet, in the real sense of standing up for what believes in and being true to one's principle's at whatever cost there is for that, they both were successes. Need to remember that non-attachment to outcomes and other's perception of you when making those choices, don't I? Num yo ho reng ge kyo.
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