Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Snow day controversy?? You're kidding, right?

Let me get this straight.

With everything going on in the world economy, presidential politics, and foreign policy, we are transfixed by the poor telephone behaviour of a high school student and a school administrator's wife? No wonder the rest of the world thinks we are idiots-- we get worked up and polarized about insignificant nonsense like this, but stand back in total apathy when there's genocide and atrocities going on around us in the world.

Some things never change.

Newsflash: There's no innocent party here. Both the kid and the wife were out of line.

There's also no winner.

Prediction #1:

The Tistadt family will soon be getting an unlisted number. Mrs. Tistadt will learn to leave the PR stuff to the professionals who get paid to do it. The school system, reacting to the PR flap, will rush to create new policies to prevent this from happening again. The outcome of these new policies will be school system employees who become reluctant to communicate with their clientele for fear of violating those policies. Everyone gets less service as a result.

Prediction #2:

In a few years, when "Dave" Kori tries to get a full time job, the people who receive his resume will run his name through Google. They will find the archives of this news story and read about the manner in which he chose to exercise his first amendment rights. Would you hire someone with a history of using technology to publicly embarrass people to represent your organization? Or would you pick someone else who has shown restraint and can work within the system to get things done?

Now, can we PLEASE discuss something more interesting/relevant/significant/important to humanity?