Negative Deficit

When you are lacking time and imagination to draft a new post for your stale, moldy blog, but you aren't quite ready to throw it out with last week's pitas, you can always resort to dissing some old geezer from yesteryear.

Yesterday I heard the name "Abba Data", the name of a networking firm in the area, and my thoughts returned to the days when I served as a trustee representing my township on the district library board. Oh those grand and glorious wonder years, oh to be 25 again. Actually, I was more like 27-29, but anyway...

I could have written a book, or a least an entire blog, on the characters that represented the other 5 rural townships and the actual village in which the library was located. Holy smokes. First of all, the median age of the board members was 127. And I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of the members had never left the state of Michigan. In fairness, there were a couple sharper individuals as well. One was the wife of the town dentist and the other was a high school English teacher. Regardless, the meetings were long and intense. Far too intense for a library that serviced fewer than 1500 card-holding patrons per year. But the budget was tight, if not completely blown most months, so we were constantly reviewing expenses and proposing new ways to save money without limiting services.

Should the pages have to clock out to use the toilet? Should they receive a 5 cent raise, or no raise at all this year? Could the library save money by offering dial-up internet service rather than highspeed? And why was it even necessary to offer computer usage in the first place?

Abba Data might have been able to offer some helpful cost-saving solutions if anyone on the board could have pronounced it properly. Abba Dabba is how it came out most of the time, especially from the lips of the elderly interim chairperson who we will call "Ron", not to protect his identity, but because I can't rightly recollect his real name. He would say the funniest things. I wish I could remember more.

Anyhoo, in one heated discussion he pounded the table emphatically stating that this library could not continue operating on a negative deficit. =)

And it didn't have to. One of the main objectives while I was on board was to pass a tax millage increase to generate more funding for operational expenses as well as a brand new facility. It passed by a wide margin the summer after my term expired and the project was completed the summer before we moved from the area.

Oh, I just remembered his name was Dan.