ON CALL

This is one of those things that should be easy. Being on call is supposed to be having a pager or cell phone so you can be contacted, but you don’t have to be at the office.

We decided to start this concept at City Hall after some dummy decided that we ought to be available for answering questions from the citizens on the weekend. And unfortunately I was hungover during the council meeting when this was brought up. So instead of doing like I would have normally done and had it buried in a committee I said okay.

Well I can definitely say this is one idea that didn’t die soon enough. Oh it did have merit to some degree. I thought so at the time. It was a great way to impress the public that we cared.

It might have worked if they didn’t actually bother to call and find out we didn’t really give a crap. At least not at five am on Saturday morning or two am on Sunday morning.

When some clown bothers to call and wake me up to ask which form you fill out for a permit to burn trash at five am on Saturday morning it doesn’t make me a happy camper! I probably wouldn’t have coped better if they guy didn’t decide to tell me his life story in the process. Like I really cared.

I did finally recover from that intrusion when I got another call. This other moron wanted to know if you needed a license to house sit. Well duh! Like he needed us to tell him no.

That was the beginning of a very long weekend for me. And you can be sure that afterwards the last thing I planned on doing was to spend another weekend answering stupid questions on a cell phone early some Saturday morning.

However, before I could get the other council members to accept it as stupid I let each of them take turns being on call. And with the exception of that insipid do-gooder, Lance Allworthy who naturally didn’t get any calls the whole weekend, nobody else objected when I suggested we should discontinue the idea.

Fortunately there was no public outcry when we did stop the program. We did get a few calls during the week from people who wanted to ask question about weekend calls. But at least I didn’t have to deal with them.

So now, I do enjoy knowing my cell phone won’ be ringing at five am on Saturday for stupid questions. Providing you don’t count my nephew Neville. With him if he’s been out partying all night he could call at any time.

Only in his case the questions are normally stupid regardless of when he calls. But being family at least I don’t have to talk to him without telling him what I really think.