The 39th Annual Meeting

[davidn]

One of the problems that we're told our condo association faces is convincing people to come to the board meetings, and honestly, after last night I can see why. It's held in the cafeteria/assembly hall of a local primary school, and there's a nice gesture in providing biscuits and soft drinks at the start, but after that they do a decent job of sapping your life force out. It began with the president of the association timidly mumbling into a microphone in an accent nobody could understand, and then Ben Steining her way through the latest village newsletter that we'd already read, competing with the equally monotone hum of a milk refrigerator at the side of the room. Then someone from the finance office got up and honestly... read out a spreadsheet.

There was an election for three board member positions for next year, where everybody who was on the board and has been for the last five hundred years was re-elected again. One of the younger candidates who we liked did quite well - we were the youngest people there and she was the only one who looked like she might have been born in the same century as us - but the village population seem to be too set in their ways to allow someone proposing any new ideas on to the board, and telling the "parking fine" joke during her speech couldn't exactly have helped, either. Nevertheless, getting 88 votes out of the half-dead audience was a fairly admirable result.

Then we won a month's free condo fee at the end in a raffle, which suddenly made it all seem worthwhile. Though honestly they might have more success if they just gave everybody $20 off or so for the month for being present and staying awake throughout.

Comments

[davidn]

It's quite large - there are 308 houses, I think, and the elected winners were only about 10 to 20 votes ahead of her (every house gets three votes), so it's only about a third of the population.