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greybetaI was talking to my sister yesterday, and she asked who had managed to bring me back into society. I said it was Phil (a.k.a. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wldntulk2knwwho. Of course, she asked me who Phil was since I barely talk about my friends.
With the benefit of hindsight, I thought about it and recollected…
At most colleges these days, they have some freshman orientation camp before the official school year starts. It helps to know the layout of campus and make some friendships without the pressure of classes beating down on you. As luck would have it, they put a certain electrical engineering major along with a certain chemical engineering major at one such camp
The EE and Chem E felt the bond of engineering and discovered that both were on full rides to the University. They were walking back from the orientation class, expecting to break off from each other to go to their respective dorms. But wait, they started walking towards the same dorm. What a coincidence. They got off on the same floor…and started walking towards the same suite! As fate would have it, they would be suitemates for their freshmen year.
They were in the same physics class together and studied together often (the night before the test). They were also duped by free pizza to join the dorm student government. If they had been told what lay ahead of them for making that choice, they might have refused because of the dangers that lay in store. Alas, those unaware of the danger will step into it anyways.
One day in the spring of his freshman year, the EE now double majoring in History was talking to a red-headed girl he had befriended in his freshman honors class, much to his consternation. They were antipodal in politics but developed an understanding through several spirited arguments (now whether she always won those debates or he let her win is up for debate). She asked him to join the Student Senate. He thought about it and decided to do it on foppery and whim. After all, how bad could it be?
(Digression: The answer to a rhetorical question is obvious. Like, if someone asks, “Don’t you know who I am?”, the answer is obvious. If you have to ask, the answer is no.)
Well, the EE told a few friends to put him on their ballot. If he won, then God willing he’d do this senate thing. The first vote was 5-5, as some other guy apparently had the same idea. The runoff vote was 18-18. In these rare cases, the Student Senate itself decides between the candidates.
If the EE had to make a real speech that Tuesday night, he would have been hard pressed to actually come up with one. However, he was saved from doing so by his opponent’s absence, who had apparently forgotten to come that night. And as the EE was sworn in, he became slightly afraid of parliamentary procedure. It was the most unnatural thing to him, having to direct questions through the chair and raising points of order.
Ah, but at that first meeting the EE had to decide which committee he wanted to be part of. No one had put down the Financial Allocations Committee, which doled out money to the student organizations on campus. The EE overheard that FAC was a lot of work, but he shrugged and signed up for it anyways. Foppery and a whim.
Turning to the fall semester of their sophomore years, the Chem E now approached the EE about joining Student Senate. The EE promptly replied that his friend was insane. And the Chem E confirmed that fact by restating his intention to join the Student Senate. So now the Treasurer and Vice President of the dorm hall government was representing their dorm in the Student Senate.
The Chem E won his election, fair and square. He also joined FAC, despite the fact that there was a rule that senators from the same dorm couldn’t be on the same committee (as with most rules, they’re only enforced if they’re useful). The FAC Chair that year was a garrulous and forceful young man. The EE noticed that while people despised the FAC Chair, they actually listened to his arguments.
The FAC Chair that year decided to split Chair duties into an Allocations Chair and a Bills Chair. The Allocations Chair would take care of the allocations process itself while the Bills Chair would cover conference travel bills. The EE, having risen to the status of second seniority simply by staying in FAC for half a year, was selected to take over as Bills Chair.
At the time, the Student Senate utilized “confidential criteria” to undercut padded numbers from organization. So someone might send us an estimate of $832 for four people, but they were only eligible for $200 per person. Now you might ask how someone couldn’t figure out the numbers through a simple regression. Well, the organization was only given the total amount so it would be difficult to even come up with the regression off total amounts unless one were really sifting through all the conference travel bills.
The EE and Chem E did not talk much during their first year in Senate. Rather, they observed how to construct one’s arguments for future use. And they worked on the tenuous allocations process. One hundred fifty plus organizations versus the six members of FAC. After that, the current FAC chair was elected student Treasurer and the EE and Chem E became Co-Chairs for the allocations committee. They were prepared to tag team their way to improving Senate.
However, they were not prepared for the sudden resignation of the student Treasurer during the summer. In the Constitution at the time, the chair of FAC was then elevated to the Treasurer position. However, at this time, there were co-chairs so now it was a question of which one. Simple expediency solved this issue. The Chem E was in Tulsa while the EE was back home, so the Chem E was the obvious choice.
But now their plans to tag team improvements had fundamentally shifted. Normally, the FAC Chair and Treasurer are opposed in philosophies, one legislative and one executive. And now suitemates were in this position. They discussed how this would change things and agreed to work as best they could through it. In the meantime, now in their junior year, someone else needed to be elevated to the Allocations Chair. The girl known as “Smiles and Sunshine” would now be counterbalancing “His Most Bitterness”, who was now the clear Senior Chair for the committee and responsible for all of its wrongdoings.
Being the Senior Chair is a terrible responsibility. No matter who you are, people will hate you because you’re the one responsible for giving them money. And they’ll always wonder why, why couldn’t he give me more?
Also, by mere attrition, the EE had become the most senior senator in terms of length of duty. As such, he was chosen as the Parliamentarian for the Student Senate despite the fact that he despised such formalities. He became known for coughing when someone failed to direct their question to remind them to formally observe the rules, even doing this to the professor who served as the advisor for the Senate. He also was known for being the Senate Storyteller, which he used to tell rambling fables for the heck of it.
And then something unexpected occurred. As his lasting legacy, a senator from FAC introduced a bill of “open sunshine”. This perturbed the Senior Chair so much that he wrote a quite lengthy post on his intragovernment boards about it. Yes, the Senior Chair was being asinine about a good idea; nonetheless, someone had to play devil’s advocate. Something screamed inside of him that told him to oppose this measure with every once of his energy.
The Senior Chair confided in his Treasurer friend that he would resign if this bill passed. This was despite resounding approval from the rest of the Student Senate outside of FAC, including the red-headed girl who had returned to Senate after volunteering for a Democratic state senate campaign in the disappointing 2004 election. The Senior Chair took time to explain his reasoning to his committee, which understood them since they also understood “confidential criteria.” The irony was that he couldn’t explain it to the rest of Senate without comprising the main value of confidential criteria.
What many people don’t know is that the Senior Chair went out and researched the history behind confidential criteria. After pouring through countless Senate Minutes, he discovered that the reasoning behind confidential criteria was not recorded because the meeting had been closed. Interesting, a closed meeting producing confidential criteria. His suspicions were later confirmed when he discovered an old school newspaper article questioning the validity of the new criteria system. He wondered how the criteria survived with all the outcry, but then he realized inertia has a powerful effect in bureaucracy. Once something is in place, it is difficult to remove it.
As part of that inertia, the Senior Chair used some dastardly tactics to stall the bill in Senate. It was not going to pass easily through even if he had to be a bastard about it. The Treasurer backed him as best he could, but they could not stop the overwhelming sentiment to bring this up for a vote. Debate was closed and the vote came up. Then the Senior Chair motioned for a roll call vote.
This was a breach of parliamentary etiquette. Most bills past with senators raising their hands for yes, no or abstention. A simple record of how the vote went was left in the minutes. But a roll call vote requires each senator to state his or her opinion alone, with their vote recorded in the minutes. In other words, the Senior Chair wanted to know exactly who was for and who was against this change and to make sure the results were recorded for posterity.
The results were not a surprise. Only members of FAC voted against, the rest of Senate voted for. After all, “open sunshine” was a good idea. But if it was to be implemented, the Senior Chair would rather someone else do that hard work. After that contentious meeting, the Senior Chair informed the Treasurer that he would be resigning as he had stated earlier. And yet, the Treasurer did not allow his friend to resign.
The argument was a familiar one. If someone was going to implement the change, who better but someone who hates it? That’s because someone who hates the change will try to find everything wrong with it, which will end up improving the final product. Much later, the Treasurer would tell his Senior Chair friend that the main reason he had argued so was to save the finances of the student government. If the Senior Chair resigned in protest, the Treasurer would have followed, thereby causing rancorous havoc on the government. The Treasurer explained to his friend that he should take the higher ground and enforce these new rules to the best of his ability.
So with a sense of duty, the Senior Chair returned bitterer than ever. In fact, he started becoming facetiously bitter, noting pet peeves out loud in Senate. He was known to say, “Questions that can be answered by reading the bill make me bitter” and “Questions that can be answered by having the bill in front of you make me bitter” and “Questions that can be answered by paying attention to the questions already answered make me bitter.”
And yet, the Senior Chair did work to improve the allocations process. With an updated webpage, the Student Association as a whole had an opportunity to jump to the internet. One of the first things to go up on there was a FAQ about all the new allocations and conference travel rules that would be coming to light. The Senior Chair also created a template for conference travel bills, saving many future senators from hunting down a travel bill in their binders to copy off of. He also helped create the first electronic packets, which had its fair share of problems but a step forward nonetheless.
No one really thinks about those kinds of things, as they take them for granted once the generation that provided that step forward has moved on.
And oddly enough, the Treasurer and Senior Chair “went beyond hating student government to loving to hate it.” So much so that the Treasurer’s girlfriend and future fiancée joined Student Senate just to see what it was about. She’d later as the Clerk, taking over for the Secretary in case of an absence.
At the end of their junior years, the Treasurer and Senior Chair decided to form a ticket and run as a President/Treasurer combo. Unfortunately, their lack of organization sealed their doom. They mistakenly believed their electoral losses would be the end of their student government careers.
But just when you’re out, they’ll call you back. The Treasurer returned to Senate while the Senior Chair became a Justice. Also, the Senior Chair became the Opinion Editor for the school newspaper and shed light on some of the bills passing through the Senate. They also encouraged other students to positions within student government.
By now the EE had become a History major. The Historian and the Chem E reminisced about the old days. Only the Chem E knew the truth behind the bitterness of the Historian. The Historian had used his overly comical bitterness to soften the blow when he had inane points. They also knew that allocations was a monster that could never be tamed. Its appetite was insatiable, and no matter how much future senators tried to fix it, it could never be fixed. The allure was in trying to do it.
And one day the Historian dropped off the face of the earth. It would take awhile, but the Chem E searched far and wide for his old friend. He tracked him down and dragged him back. In many ways, the Chem E was the only one who could snap his friend out of his reverie.
Because friendships forged on the battlefield are not easily forgotten.
wldntulk2knwwho. Of course, she asked me who Phil was since I barely talk about my friends.With the benefit of hindsight, I thought about it and recollected…
At most colleges these days, they have some freshman orientation camp before the official school year starts. It helps to know the layout of campus and make some friendships without the pressure of classes beating down on you. As luck would have it, they put a certain electrical engineering major along with a certain chemical engineering major at one such camp
The EE and Chem E felt the bond of engineering and discovered that both were on full rides to the University. They were walking back from the orientation class, expecting to break off from each other to go to their respective dorms. But wait, they started walking towards the same dorm. What a coincidence. They got off on the same floor…and started walking towards the same suite! As fate would have it, they would be suitemates for their freshmen year.
They were in the same physics class together and studied together often (the night before the test). They were also duped by free pizza to join the dorm student government. If they had been told what lay ahead of them for making that choice, they might have refused because of the dangers that lay in store. Alas, those unaware of the danger will step into it anyways.
One day in the spring of his freshman year, the EE now double majoring in History was talking to a red-headed girl he had befriended in his freshman honors class, much to his consternation. They were antipodal in politics but developed an understanding through several spirited arguments (now whether she always won those debates or he let her win is up for debate). She asked him to join the Student Senate. He thought about it and decided to do it on foppery and whim. After all, how bad could it be?
(Digression: The answer to a rhetorical question is obvious. Like, if someone asks, “Don’t you know who I am?”, the answer is obvious. If you have to ask, the answer is no.)
Well, the EE told a few friends to put him on their ballot. If he won, then God willing he’d do this senate thing. The first vote was 5-5, as some other guy apparently had the same idea. The runoff vote was 18-18. In these rare cases, the Student Senate itself decides between the candidates.
If the EE had to make a real speech that Tuesday night, he would have been hard pressed to actually come up with one. However, he was saved from doing so by his opponent’s absence, who had apparently forgotten to come that night. And as the EE was sworn in, he became slightly afraid of parliamentary procedure. It was the most unnatural thing to him, having to direct questions through the chair and raising points of order.
Ah, but at that first meeting the EE had to decide which committee he wanted to be part of. No one had put down the Financial Allocations Committee, which doled out money to the student organizations on campus. The EE overheard that FAC was a lot of work, but he shrugged and signed up for it anyways. Foppery and a whim.
Turning to the fall semester of their sophomore years, the Chem E now approached the EE about joining Student Senate. The EE promptly replied that his friend was insane. And the Chem E confirmed that fact by restating his intention to join the Student Senate. So now the Treasurer and Vice President of the dorm hall government was representing their dorm in the Student Senate.
The Chem E won his election, fair and square. He also joined FAC, despite the fact that there was a rule that senators from the same dorm couldn’t be on the same committee (as with most rules, they’re only enforced if they’re useful). The FAC Chair that year was a garrulous and forceful young man. The EE noticed that while people despised the FAC Chair, they actually listened to his arguments.
The FAC Chair that year decided to split Chair duties into an Allocations Chair and a Bills Chair. The Allocations Chair would take care of the allocations process itself while the Bills Chair would cover conference travel bills. The EE, having risen to the status of second seniority simply by staying in FAC for half a year, was selected to take over as Bills Chair.
At the time, the Student Senate utilized “confidential criteria” to undercut padded numbers from organization. So someone might send us an estimate of $832 for four people, but they were only eligible for $200 per person. Now you might ask how someone couldn’t figure out the numbers through a simple regression. Well, the organization was only given the total amount so it would be difficult to even come up with the regression off total amounts unless one were really sifting through all the conference travel bills.
The EE and Chem E did not talk much during their first year in Senate. Rather, they observed how to construct one’s arguments for future use. And they worked on the tenuous allocations process. One hundred fifty plus organizations versus the six members of FAC. After that, the current FAC chair was elected student Treasurer and the EE and Chem E became Co-Chairs for the allocations committee. They were prepared to tag team their way to improving Senate.
However, they were not prepared for the sudden resignation of the student Treasurer during the summer. In the Constitution at the time, the chair of FAC was then elevated to the Treasurer position. However, at this time, there were co-chairs so now it was a question of which one. Simple expediency solved this issue. The Chem E was in Tulsa while the EE was back home, so the Chem E was the obvious choice.
But now their plans to tag team improvements had fundamentally shifted. Normally, the FAC Chair and Treasurer are opposed in philosophies, one legislative and one executive. And now suitemates were in this position. They discussed how this would change things and agreed to work as best they could through it. In the meantime, now in their junior year, someone else needed to be elevated to the Allocations Chair. The girl known as “Smiles and Sunshine” would now be counterbalancing “His Most Bitterness”, who was now the clear Senior Chair for the committee and responsible for all of its wrongdoings.
Being the Senior Chair is a terrible responsibility. No matter who you are, people will hate you because you’re the one responsible for giving them money. And they’ll always wonder why, why couldn’t he give me more?
Also, by mere attrition, the EE had become the most senior senator in terms of length of duty. As such, he was chosen as the Parliamentarian for the Student Senate despite the fact that he despised such formalities. He became known for coughing when someone failed to direct their question to remind them to formally observe the rules, even doing this to the professor who served as the advisor for the Senate. He also was known for being the Senate Storyteller, which he used to tell rambling fables for the heck of it.
And then something unexpected occurred. As his lasting legacy, a senator from FAC introduced a bill of “open sunshine”. This perturbed the Senior Chair so much that he wrote a quite lengthy post on his intragovernment boards about it. Yes, the Senior Chair was being asinine about a good idea; nonetheless, someone had to play devil’s advocate. Something screamed inside of him that told him to oppose this measure with every once of his energy.
The Senior Chair confided in his Treasurer friend that he would resign if this bill passed. This was despite resounding approval from the rest of the Student Senate outside of FAC, including the red-headed girl who had returned to Senate after volunteering for a Democratic state senate campaign in the disappointing 2004 election. The Senior Chair took time to explain his reasoning to his committee, which understood them since they also understood “confidential criteria.” The irony was that he couldn’t explain it to the rest of Senate without comprising the main value of confidential criteria.
What many people don’t know is that the Senior Chair went out and researched the history behind confidential criteria. After pouring through countless Senate Minutes, he discovered that the reasoning behind confidential criteria was not recorded because the meeting had been closed. Interesting, a closed meeting producing confidential criteria. His suspicions were later confirmed when he discovered an old school newspaper article questioning the validity of the new criteria system. He wondered how the criteria survived with all the outcry, but then he realized inertia has a powerful effect in bureaucracy. Once something is in place, it is difficult to remove it.
As part of that inertia, the Senior Chair used some dastardly tactics to stall the bill in Senate. It was not going to pass easily through even if he had to be a bastard about it. The Treasurer backed him as best he could, but they could not stop the overwhelming sentiment to bring this up for a vote. Debate was closed and the vote came up. Then the Senior Chair motioned for a roll call vote.
This was a breach of parliamentary etiquette. Most bills past with senators raising their hands for yes, no or abstention. A simple record of how the vote went was left in the minutes. But a roll call vote requires each senator to state his or her opinion alone, with their vote recorded in the minutes. In other words, the Senior Chair wanted to know exactly who was for and who was against this change and to make sure the results were recorded for posterity.
The results were not a surprise. Only members of FAC voted against, the rest of Senate voted for. After all, “open sunshine” was a good idea. But if it was to be implemented, the Senior Chair would rather someone else do that hard work. After that contentious meeting, the Senior Chair informed the Treasurer that he would be resigning as he had stated earlier. And yet, the Treasurer did not allow his friend to resign.
The argument was a familiar one. If someone was going to implement the change, who better but someone who hates it? That’s because someone who hates the change will try to find everything wrong with it, which will end up improving the final product. Much later, the Treasurer would tell his Senior Chair friend that the main reason he had argued so was to save the finances of the student government. If the Senior Chair resigned in protest, the Treasurer would have followed, thereby causing rancorous havoc on the government. The Treasurer explained to his friend that he should take the higher ground and enforce these new rules to the best of his ability.
So with a sense of duty, the Senior Chair returned bitterer than ever. In fact, he started becoming facetiously bitter, noting pet peeves out loud in Senate. He was known to say, “Questions that can be answered by reading the bill make me bitter” and “Questions that can be answered by having the bill in front of you make me bitter” and “Questions that can be answered by paying attention to the questions already answered make me bitter.”
And yet, the Senior Chair did work to improve the allocations process. With an updated webpage, the Student Association as a whole had an opportunity to jump to the internet. One of the first things to go up on there was a FAQ about all the new allocations and conference travel rules that would be coming to light. The Senior Chair also created a template for conference travel bills, saving many future senators from hunting down a travel bill in their binders to copy off of. He also helped create the first electronic packets, which had its fair share of problems but a step forward nonetheless.
No one really thinks about those kinds of things, as they take them for granted once the generation that provided that step forward has moved on.
And oddly enough, the Treasurer and Senior Chair “went beyond hating student government to loving to hate it.” So much so that the Treasurer’s girlfriend and future fiancée joined Student Senate just to see what it was about. She’d later as the Clerk, taking over for the Secretary in case of an absence.
At the end of their junior years, the Treasurer and Senior Chair decided to form a ticket and run as a President/Treasurer combo. Unfortunately, their lack of organization sealed their doom. They mistakenly believed their electoral losses would be the end of their student government careers.
But just when you’re out, they’ll call you back. The Treasurer returned to Senate while the Senior Chair became a Justice. Also, the Senior Chair became the Opinion Editor for the school newspaper and shed light on some of the bills passing through the Senate. They also encouraged other students to positions within student government.
By now the EE had become a History major. The Historian and the Chem E reminisced about the old days. Only the Chem E knew the truth behind the bitterness of the Historian. The Historian had used his overly comical bitterness to soften the blow when he had inane points. They also knew that allocations was a monster that could never be tamed. Its appetite was insatiable, and no matter how much future senators tried to fix it, it could never be fixed. The allure was in trying to do it.
And one day the Historian dropped off the face of the earth. It would take awhile, but the Chem E searched far and wide for his old friend. He tracked him down and dragged him back. In many ways, the Chem E was the only one who could snap his friend out of his reverie.
Because friendships forged on the battlefield are not easily forgotten.
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-13 01:57 am (UTC)