Urbanity awaits

Well, the backwoods tour is done, and Friday we're on to the more "urbane" world of Charlotte, if that's indeed the right word for it. At least there's cell phone service there.

I needed it the last couple of days, too, as I got a voice mail from my boss indicating that he just quit. Yikes! His last day is my last day of vacation. And who do I get for a new boss? My old one. From before the current one. For now. It may be temporary.

I'll tell you, corporate america, I can't be gone too soon. Playing musical managers is frustrating, for them and their workers.

Life is simpler in the backwoods. Driving up into the hills today to ride a "scenic railway" (once an old logging train),



I caught a local AM station in the car. You know the small town kind where for news they read the minutes from the school board meeting. Seriously. They actually did that today. :)

I used to work for one of those radio stations during college in the backwoods of far northern Wisconsin. In addition to broadcasting live from the county fair and interviewing the prize winners from the cattle judging, part of my job was to announce the lunch menus for the school and the senior center. I tried to make hamburger hotdish and tuna casserole sound as exotic as I could, by reading it with a foreign accent and playing 1960's "cool jazz" in the background. I'm not sure it helped.

So anyway, one of the news items on this radio station was a recap from the Spring elections. One community may have violated WV state elections law by only having the polls open from 5-7PM. That's all they could manage because of a lack of qualified poll workers. The reason they were unqualified was that the WV election law states that poll workers can't be related to people on the ballot, and that eliminated almost everybody in town. :)

I'm not kidding. This was a real news item from rural WV hill country. But as it was, during the two hours the "non-kinfolk" poll workers were available, they still achieved a 30% voter turnout. That community had 74 potential voters, of which only 30 were registered. Twenty-one showed up. At least it was an odd number so there wouldn't be a tie. Imagine the problems if they had to hold a runoff.



But on a two hour train ride through the Allegheny Mountains, one did manage to slow down. It'd be nice to stay that way.