Another minute or so of fame

Last night during our City Council meeting - I work at all of them - we had a sort of changing of the guard as three Council members left office and three new ones took the oath of office. A small thing was planned to say goodbye, hand out a plaque or two and take a short break to allows for some details such as changing out nameplates and some other small items.

One of these small things was simply changing names on the voting board. Simple enough. Except that the Asst. City Clerk, Anita, came in to ask for a screwdriver to speed along the process. Since we were on a short break I went out to help. Good enough until we started trying to slide in the new name plates into the old slots. (Can you spell new wine into old wineskins?) I guess the sign company that made the new ones made them just slightly thicker than the older ones because the new ones - especially one in particular - just didn't want to slide in. So we turned the voting board piece on its side and somewhere Anita came up with a high-heeled ladies shoe which she promptly turned into a hammer. She did quite well actually and the name slid into place.

But my point here is this: While we were tending to these piddly little details two photogs from two local TV stations and (unbeknownst to me) the still photographer from our local newspaper, focused their attention on us. There are at least six people in the room whose lives are going to be very different from this night on as they either end their segment of public service or begin a new time on City Council. But the media chose to focus on our pounding away with a shoe. Thinking back, no wonder Khrushchev got out his shoe at the United Nations back in the 1960 - he knew how to get attention.

Anyway for those who want to see, here's a link to the paper.