Starting over

We spent the weekend rewriting the Jefferson Davis plan. For the past two months there have been major problems that we have ignored and the central office finally laid down the law.

There were a few issues the central office freaked out about:

1) Our vision statement and goals were written after our projects. In a normal planning word, the vision comes first, then the goals, then the projects.

2) The projects that we identified had little relationship to the disaster. We wrote about how the County needed a county wide free wireless internet access. What does that have to do with flooding and high winds? How does that help the county get over the disaster.
It doesn’t.

3) The projects did not follow the proper form. The central office wanted goals to be simple, county wide goals like, build 10,000 housing units. Everyone wrote long complicated justifications for the projects in the goals section.

(Part of the reason people messed up the goal section is because of the design of the form where you list the projects.
The form goes
1) Name of project________
2) Goal__________
Humans are predisposed to write a description of the project in the first large empty box.)

So, in any case, with four days until the projects are to be finalized, the central office freaked out and sent a team down to make us rewrite the vision, goals and projects. This would be fine because it would have made the plan better.

The part where it melted down was the person they sent down had no tact. He flipped to a blank page on a flip chart and said, this is where we are starting. We are throwing out everything you have done so far and starting over. Literally those were his words.

Not surprisingly, we all responded aggressively. The projects in our plan were chosen by the citizens and approved by the council. It would be a betrayal of the locals to throw that all out and write new plans behind closed doors.

So, we argued for hours about this and we fought every step of the way because we thought he was trying to start from a blank sheet, as he said.

In the end, all the central office wanted us to do was come up with better goals, dump the stupid projects that had no relation to the disaster, rewrite the others to emphasize how they contributed to recover, and fill out the forms correctly. Still a lot of work, but no where near as bad.

I have to say, this shit is draining. We spent 17 hours in meetings over two days this weekend when all they had to say was say, here are our three issues. You minds well call 15 hours of meetings about making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

We had a huge, gut wrenching fight because the person was to stupid to speak tactfully.

I need to get out of this mad house.