I'm a Little Chronologically Confused

Uncle Ken:  Between your half dozen or so posts on the subject of the Christmas lights, I seem to have lost track of the chronology of events, but I think I've gotten it straight now.  As I understand it, you have submitted your petition and the board has agreed to take its survey.  So when are they going to take this survey, or have they already done it?  You might need to stay on their case to make sure they are not just stalling until it's too close to Christmas to do anything about it.

I remember "winning" one of my grievances at the paper mill.  They agreed to do something, but they still hadn't done it a year later, so I filed another grievance.  The plant manager said that he didn't understand the need for the second grievance because he had already agreed to do what I requested in the first grievance.  I tried to explain to him that I didn't ask him to say he was going to do it, I asked him to actually do it.  This college educated executive looked me straight in the eye and claimed that he didn't know what I was talking about.  Funny thing is, they actually did start doing it the very next day, but they never admitted that it was because of my grievance.  When I got my written answer a few weeks later, the plant manager still insisted that the issue had been resolved a year ago and there was no need to discuss it any further.

There is a back story to this that I wasn't going to tell you but, the more I think about it, I think I will because it's relevant to another point we have been discussing.  Each department had a written, negotiated, and signed overtime procedure agreement that was ancillary to the main contract.  This means that, although it wasn't printed in the contract booklet, it was nevertheless as enforceable as the main contract.  I had been working in another department for several years and, when I returned to the papermaking department, I found that our procedure had not been followed for some time and nobody seemed to remember that we even had a procedure.  I dug up an old copy, reproduced it, and posted it all over the place to no avail.  That's when I filed the first grievance.  My contention was that, if nobody wanted to follow the old agreement anymore, we should negotiate a new agreement, but nobody on either side of the table wanted to do that, so that meant the old agreement was still in force, like it or not.  Yep, that's the kind of prick I was in those days, and some would say that I still am, but I won my point nevertheless, and that's what really matters.

Meanwhile, back at the border:

https://a.msn.com/r/2/AACrYer?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

https://a.msn.com/r/2/AACrSVA?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

Ken and the Kondo Board Part Four

The petitions were not legally binding and I knew that.  Later I learned that had I gotten 200 unit owners it would have meant something, I don't know what.  Forced the board to reconsider the issue I think, but that is what I have accomplished anyway.  When I was pressing my petition into reluctant hands I only asked for residents and did not distinguish between owners and renters.  Well I didn't want to ask people a lot of questions.  Renters are kind of second-class citizens in the condo.  I know it makes a certain bit of sense because renters don't have the same stake in the building as owners, but sometimes when I hear the board members talk about renters there is a certain curl of the tongue that I find unpleasant. 

Anyway it takes a bit of mettle to approach people coming home from a hard day of work seeking the solace of home sweet home and thrust a petition for what many will consider a petty matter into their work weary faces.  I was a little proud of myself for that.  Ego is a factor in all this.

Okay over two evenings I got 110 signatures, renters and owners alike, I estimate I approached about 140 people and the 30 who didn't sign were split between those who wanted whites only or in some disturbing cases no lights at all, and those who just didn't give a shit at all.  What stirred my heart a bit was those who didn't have lights themselves, and who didn't care what the towers looked like at Christmas, but felt doggone it, people ought to have a right to have whatever kind of lights they wanted.

I scanned my petitions and added them to maybe a little too florid letter pressing my case and sent them to an email that is supposed to go to all board members.  I say supposed to because at least one board member told me he never got it.  Well it doesn't go to each individual's email but to their board email.  Like I take my watercolor class at Truman college and because of that I have a Truman email somewhere that they would use to communicate with me, but I don't know how to find it, and I wouldn't bother if I knew because who needs another password.  I think that is the case with that board email.  I had hoped that I would've gotten some response from the board members about that but I got none.

But it was officially on the agenda for the next board ,meeting and when I went there every board member had a printed copy of my petition and my letter in front of them.  It was here that I first learned for sure (I had heard rumors about it previously) that the board had been divided when they voted on the issue, so I had allies who were on my side.  Well not on my side personally, but on my side of the issue.  I didn't know from looking at them which members were on my side of the issue and it wasn't clear from their questions who they were.  Again it is like arguing with a bunch of strangers who all know each other.

I pressed my case, hard enough to make my case but not so hard as to piss people off.  When I get fired up my tongue gets loosened, and if pushed hard enough I go to insults, but I checked myself before that happened, and I guess I did alright.  In the end the board voted to reconsider the case and to take an official survey (they have the tools to do that).  When I heard they were going to take the survey I felt that I was on the road to victory and breathed a sigh of relief.


I know Beagles is in favor of poring over the legal papers, but I am not, for reasons I have given previously I believe the power is in the people who make the rules and it is there that I focus my efforts. 

Beagles's idea of a hundred people showing up at the board meeting is pure fantasy.  I don't think I have ever seen more than ten, and usually it is about five people at the board meeting.  I knew that I could get a hundred or more to sign my petition, but to actually show up at the meeting is a bridge way too far. 

The Collective Castle

Uncle Ken:  A man's home is indeed his castle but, in your case, it's a collective castle that you share with a thousand or so other home owners.  Although it's called "Marina City", I don't think that it meets the legal definition of a municipality, more like a corporation or a cooperative.  When you bought your piece of the castle, you signed away some of your sovereignty, but not all of it.  The only way to determine what rights you signed away and what rights you retained is to read the bloody contract.  A lot of guys would have read the contract before they signed it, but better late than never.  If the contract refers to other documents, you need to read those as well.  I am guessing that the board itself operates under some kind of constitution or charter which describes the scope of its authority and any limitations thereof.  It is not unusual for a governing body to try to usurp powers that have not been duly assigned to it.  If they get away with it, it may establish a precedent that becomes more difficult to overturn as time goes by.

The petition you are circulating sounds like an advisory petition, not legally binding on the board, but possibly useful in persuading it to change its mind.  What might have more impact is if a few hundred of your like minded neighbors would show up at a meeting.  No need to shout, chant, or carry signs.  Nobody falls for that shit anymore.  Get together beforehand and come up with a written statement of your position, have somebody read it to the board in a calm, respectful, but assertive manner, and  give a copy to each board member.  That's enough for now, let me know how it comes out.

Meanwhile, back at the border:

https://a.msn.com/r/2/AACo1kH?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

Ken and the Kondo Board Part Three

I think I have previously narrated my experience with the board, and how I learned that the board was actually divided on the issue, and so I was facing both friends and foes, but from the way the board questioned me, because there were so many of them and only one of me, it was hard to tell who was who.  We had recently had an issue of what color to paint the condos after the current cement work which is being done (another issue) is completed, and they sent out a survey showing five different kinds of off-white, which frankly all looked the same to me, so why couldn't we do that in this case?

Nope, nope, just can't be done, they had put a lot of work into this and in order to make a change they would have to send out some kind of notice and they complained about the cost.  I have since learned that it would be like three thousand which comes out to three bucks a resident, big deal.  I pulled an idea out of my head, what if I did a petition, actually I wasn't even sure if it would be legal and in accordance with condo rules, but the board collectively shrugged.

I was alternately fired up and maybe a little daunted by the idea, and wouldn't it take up a lot of time?  In all of these battles with the board I get fired up so I force myself to do nothing for a couple days so as to have a cooler head to assess my next move.  When I decided to go down to the concourse with my clipboard and numbered sheets of notebook paper I crossed my Rubicon.


Here I have to say to Old Dog that I am not merely content with observing my colored lights from inside my condo, I want to see them from the street also, and I want to see the the colored lights of the other residents also.  It reminds me of one of those Suburban streets where everybody goes all out for Christmas and lines of cars full of wide-eyed kiddies slowly prowl down the street.  Also as I observed, it is a matter of principle.  All my life I have hated things like dress codes, all those nagging niggling petty little constraints, I just hate them.  Not only do I want the right to choose my own form of lights for my balcony, but I think everybody should have that right.

See and that's one of the reactions I got when I was pressing my petition into the hands of passers by with better things to do.  Some people didn't put out any lights on their balcony and were indifferent to how the condos looked from the street, but, they felt it was the right of people who so chose to have whatever kind of Christmas lights they want.  Is not a man's home his castle? 

First they came for people's lights and I said nothing because I had no lights, then they came for people's grills and I said nothing because I had no grill, and now they are coming for my LazyBoy by the window and there is no one left to defend me.

That sort of thing.  I get fired up, I feel like I am at Valley Forge.  That's why I take a couple days between action to cool off a bit.  It's fine and dandy to be right, but it's more important to get the right thing done.

Rage Against the Machine

Reading about Uncle Ken's battle with his condo board brought this slogan to my mind.  I'm pretty sure that I didn't make it up, I must have seen it on a tee shirt or something.  Wanting to give credit where credit is due, I just googled it.  (Aren't you proud of me?)  Come to find out, it's the name of a radical teenage delinquent commie rock band that has been around, off and on, since 1991.  Nevertheless, I still think it's a cool slogan and an apt title for this post.

I usually wouldn't be interested in a controversy about Christmas lights on a tall building in a big city, but it's obviously important to Uncle Ken, and he's a friend of mine, so now I'm interested.  My previous advice about taking legal action may have been premature, but I still think that it wouldn't hurt Uncle Ken to search the contract for loopholes just so he knows what he has to work with.  There also may be a constitution and by-laws under which the board is supposed to operate.  Uncle Ken seems to be still trying to work with the board, which is probably the right thing to do, at least for now.  My impression is that they are just giving him the old run around but, being closer to the problem, he would be a better judge of that than I am.  If, at some point, he deems it necessary to take a more adversarial stance,  I would be happy to give him a few pointers.  I have been in a few scraps with the Machine myself, you know.

Meanwhile, back at the border:  The Boarder Patrol people in El Paso, Texas broke the record the other day for the largest single group of illegals intercepted at one time, something like 1030.  Their total for the whole day was about twice that, and it's a rare day anymore that they don't process at least a thousand.   President Trump seems to have abandoned his post, last I heard he was taking tea with the Queen of England.  The image of Nero fiddling while Rome burned comes to mind.

Lux Fiat

Uncle Ken's battle with the condo board reminds me of the time when I was a janitor at a high-rise apartment building on Lake Shore Drive.  It was a summer job, and the building was pretty new, twin towers of 28 stories each.  Not a tall building by today's standards but still a swanky structure in the late 60s.  The apartments were all rental units, this being before the condofication of the housing market,  but even without a draconian condo board there were rules, one of which I thought was a little goofy.  All of the rental units had roll-up shades for the windows, and they could not be changed.  If you preferred Venetian blinds or drapes, tough luck.  The building owners wanted the building to look a certain way, and that was that.

This sounds like the actions of Uncle Ken's condo board, during the holidays they want Marina City to conform to a certain aesthetic standard and have gone so far as to put it in writing.  They want white lights, fine, let them have them.  But Uncle Ken should quit wasting his time wrestling with the greased pig of a rules committee and put his creative mind to work.  All the board cares about is how the towers look from the outside, right?  They want to see white lights twinkling in all of their glory but does Uncle Ken care about how it looks from the outside?  Probably not.  He wants to see colored lights as he gazes out the window; at least this is my understanding.  To make everybody happy it's necessary to design and build a little housing for each light that uses colored filters so from the outside the lights look white but from the inside the lights are colored.  Although this may tax Uncle Ken's crafty capabilities it is early June with plenty of time to figure everything out before the holiday season and a fine way to keep him busy.  There are other possible solutions using mirrors and prisms, taking advantage of the fact that white light is composed of the three primary colors of red, blue, and green but that could get a little complicated and, although a cool project, not worth the time and trouble.

Ken and the Kondo Part Two

Shortly after that cat kerfuffle the condo board president died.  I guess he was a nice enough guy, people speak well of him, but not so much his wife Donna who took over and started a reign of terror.  Well she spent our money like water renovating our lobbies, which were perfectly fine the way they are, at a great cost, and she spent money here and she spent money there and there was nothing to do to stop her because she had a majority on the board who would always vote her way.  And there was nothing that could be done to stop her, except that she was up for election.

Surely some revolution was at hand, surely the Clean Slate was at hand.  I wasn't really connected at this time.  After like twenty-five years of living here I knew a few people on my floor, and there were maybe a handful who I nodded at in the hallways but really didn't know.  But there was a Marina City facebook page that I was a follower of and it took up the case of the Clean Slate.  I was on the periphery of this.  I went to a couple of meetings and maybe I posted two or three times on that facebook page, but I was there the day the vote was held and evil queen Donna was voted out along with her lackeys.

You know there had been some talk of looking into the questionable activities of the evil queen.  A lot of valuable stuff was torn out of the lobbies during the renovations and to this day nobody knows what became of them.  There was some talk of setting her adrift on a gasoline-soaked boat in the river and shooting fire arrows at her.  Okay that was just me talking.  In any event nothing like that happened once the Clean Slate took power.  I have to think that, now that they were the top dogs, they didn't want to set any precedence for former board presidents and members.

Since then I have become more active in condo activities.  I have my monthly Art Club (I had envisioned it as a bunch of arty types pursuing their various arts and having high-toned conversations about esthetics, but the reality has turned out to be me and two or three regulars mostly gossiping ) and every year I have an Eggstravaganza (eggs an dye and Easter candy provided), and a Punkin Palooza (pumpkins and carving tools and Halloween candy provided), and sometimes I go to board meetings.

Late last fall the notices for the whites only lights came up in the elevators.  I was all like WTF, but then I noticed that people were still shining their multi colored lights and nothing was apparently being done about it, and I thought well, the board has realized the error of their ways and are just not enforcing it.  Well ok, I could live with that.  But then this spring the announcements went up that people would be penalized for having multi colored lights, that got my attention.

What I have learned from the board is that they didn't enforce their whites only rule earlier was that it was newly promulgated and Christmas was getting into gear and they thought they would put it off until next year.  A good point could be made, and I have made it, that if they didn't enforce it last year they could just as easily not enforce it this year, or forever.  But the board gets all authoritarian and says, no, rules must be enforced.  I look around and I see all sorts of rules not being enforced, but I don't bring that up, because there are a lot of them and just one of me and I don't know their ways and I just want to get this little thing (colored lights at Christmas) done and it's not going to help my case if I piss them off.


In answer to Beagles's question of why don't I just put up my lights, it's because I am afraid of being fined.  Also there is the principle of the thing which I will go into in more detail later in this series.

And I totally agree with Beagles that it's better to have a rule against loud noises coming from your apartment than to make a rule that there can be no dogs, or stereos, or anything else.  And in fact there already is such a rule.