AnonymousCoworker

For the past two years I’ve been getting newsletters from my community association about once per month. Each month they bemoan the dismal membership levels and the non-existent meeting attendance. And for two years I’ve been trying to make it to one of the meetings so I could tell them exactly what their problems are, but they kept distributing the newsletter that announces the time and location of the meeting on the DAY AFTER the meeting has taken place. Sometimes I don’t get the newsletter until a WEEK after the meeting has taken place. These newsletters are HAND DELIVERED. If they arrive late it’s because someone specifically fucked up. You can’t even blame it on the post office. It’s just stupidity.

The other problem, I found out after attending my first meeting last night (the newsletter was delivered a week early!), is that everyone on the board of the community association is older than me by about 30 years. Maybe 40. Of the 15 people at the meeting, everyone there looked like they had been retired since Gerald Ford was in office. This explains why they don’t have a website or email address. And why none of them have ever used the Internet. Ever.

I quietly took a seat in the back of the room and waited for the meeting to unfold. It started with a bunch of procedural nonsense of making motions to open the floor for revisions to the agenda for the evening, an agenda that existed only in the notebook of the president and that only contained two items: hear from zoning office, and hear from police. I was wondering if I could do enough damage to my brain with a plastic chair to forget the whole meeting when the guy from zoning took the floor. He explained that zoning should be called for just about three things: trash and old vehicles on property, commercial vehicles parked on residential streets, and businesses being run out of residences. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

People started shouting about different things but they all eventually settled on the day care services that people run out of their homes and how the children at the day care were always yelling and screaming, and how with 20 kids in a house the traffic on the street had become “gridlocked” in the mornings. These were the types of old people that act as the basis for all the “evil geezer in the woods that eats children” stories. They literally seethed with unbridled fury at the very thought of children. They hated kids. The conversation eventually turned to Halloween, and how on Halloween two neighborhood ruffians had shouted at a community member and her tween aged sons, calling them “effers” and “dykes” (wtf!?). Then the “neighborhood security” guy, aged at about 150, piped up and said that people noticed that cops had been shining their lights on peoples houses on Halloween and nobody knew why.

This then launched a huge discussion about how many trick-or-treaters people got on Halloween, and it seemed with our one kid we had the least. Another house saw only 10, but apparently everybody else saw between 88 and 150. The woman who saw 88 kept mentioning that she “had made 88 snacks,” and that she “gave out 88 snacks”. At first I figured she meant candy, but she then explained that she takes a bottle of Sunny Delight and uses a rubber band to attach a granola bar and a box of raisins to it. This is what she gave out to kids. The kids “love it” apparently, but I think it explains why we don’t see any trick or treaters. By the time they leave her house they must be thinking, “I guess we should quit while we’re ahead” and then don’t go any further. There was a fierce discussion about who had seen the most kids ever, but I think someone made a rule that you couldn’t count trick-or-treaters before the year 1900, so everybody gave up.

Then the two cops at the meeting stood up and explained how they were starting a “bikes on patrol” unit for our neighborhood. Apparently a police officer had been there at a previous meeting and explained the very same thing, but everybody had irrelevant questions anyway, all of which eventually degraded to people talking quietly, nodding solemnly, and agreeing that there were “numerous” houses in our neighborhood that were “making or dealing drugs in broad daylight.” However, when questioned none of the members could remember an exact address. Maybe due to them being physically decrepit and moments away from turning into dust, or because the houses they were thinking of probably didn’t have anything to do with drugs, and had everything to do with children. Hateful shrieking children.

Then conversation exploded again into three very important topics: whether the Christmas newsletter should be printed on red or green paper; an ugly new house with a big new ugly garage that everybody wanted to see torn down and couldn’t the police do something about it?; and whether the treasurer could continue distributing the newsletter on a street where a “schizophrenic” woman took all her clothes off and hugged the trees in her yard. The treasurer was easily 278 years old, and I was pretty sure that his genitals had been non-functional since well before the Kaiser was assassinated. And yet he was positively brimming with delight at the possibility of ogling a mentally ill woman. A vote of two people conceded that he could continue to deliver newsletters on that street.

Finally at the end of the meeting they asked me to introduce myself, and asked me if I was at the meeting because I wanted to raise any particular issues. I used the opportunity to register my dissatisfaction with the delivery of the newsletter and then suggested that a website and email address be added to the newsletter so people could stay informed without having to wait for the newsletter. When they stared at me blankly I said that I could create the website and the email address. When they continued to stare I said, “On the Internet.” Some said, “Oh!” while others continued to stare blankly. One person gasped, and I’m sure another recalled an episode of 60 Minutes where robots from the future came out of the internet to eat their diabetes medicine. Then they all looked at me like, “This man can control the Internet!”

The president thanked me, dismissed the meeting, and then called me forward to get my phone number so she could contact me “once I had the Internet set up.” She explained that she, “had an internet at work” but she was only allowed to “use the internet at lunch” and she could “only get so many internets at work” because “they monitor how many internets we send out and that come in” so she asked me to “keep her off any internets” that I send.

And thus begins my plan to stage a coup to overthrow the Community Board and replace it with a tyrannical governance of robots controlled by me. Via the Internets.