Transferred from my old blog: I am the President

February 27, 2004

Yesterday I chaired my first meeting of the Dining Society Executive since I became President at the AGM a few weeks ago. I was a little nervous, because there are a lot of formalities to stick to - like calling the meeting to order, motions to approve the agenda, adjourning the meeting after everyone has prattled on for an hour or so. And of course someone has to keep track of the meeting and write the minutes. So the first thing I did was appoint a secretary to handle all the minutes for me. that was Malcolm, new at SJC, and only attended his first meeting at the AGM a few weeks ago. He came out of that meeting as the Vice-president, and now he is also secretary. But then, I became Vice-president at my first meeting last year. I hadn't expected to come out the AGM as President either, but now that I am, there's no avoiding the fact that I am a lot busier.What do we learn from this? Don't attend meetings because you're curious about what goes on, be prepared to be landed with responsibilities!!
So some of the ground-breaking issues we discussed involved repositioning the salad dressings to the left hand side of the salad bar, rather than over on the right. Some people were finding that they loaded up with salad moving from right to left in the salad bar queue, then had to move back over to the right to get their salad dressing on top of the salad, disrupting the line of hungry residents. So we moved to but the salad dressings at the left hand side of the salad bar, and see what happened. By the time I got to dinner, half an hour later, the salad dressings had been moved. Erwin came along behind me in the line, and he got very confused about the change in the salad bar organisation. I suspect a few other people were unsure how to deal with the change. People like the have things changed, but then they complain when things actually change. What does that mean? It means that in fact, people just love to complain. Bryan pointed that out, and I think he's right.

I've been pretty tired this week, getting only 6-7 hours of sleep a night. Last night I think I should have gone to bed early. But instead we went to Koerner's to play shuffleboard. I had never played before, but after watching other people play a few games, I thought it would be fun to give it a try. At first I just took a few shots for Arash, in his game with Erwin. I didn't do too badly. Then we started a whole new game, and I teamed up with Adam (new to the game), and we played against Arash (long time player) and Malcolm (also new to the game). We thought Arash was going to kick our butts, but surprisingly, Adam and I kept on scoring, and Arash and Malcolm weren't scoring, despite Arash's expertise. I looked up at the scoreboard and it was something like 18-3 in our favour. Its the first team to 21 points who wins. A few minutes later, Adam and I took our glorious victory and I think I became addicted to this game! But with all of these things, somehow you can run on beginners luck for the first game, and next time I suspect I will play a crap game.