I should know better

I`ve just spent most of Sunday in a Dog Club committee meeting - a real "why am I doing this" experience.

I was putting the case for our fledgling Club Weblog over the smudgy duplicated out of date Newsletter that goes out twice a year.

I`ve had more satisfaction and raised self-esteem rodding drains.

These committees always fall into the same formulaic structure, however well intentioned they may be. The same types always gravitate to them.

So you have to break through the barrier created by The Walking Encyclopaedia ("We made a commitment to a printed newsletter in nineteen-hundred-and-frozen-to-death";
The Silent Passenger; The Tablets of Stone Merchant {"We`ve ALWAYS done it this way"}; Mr Blobby ("Blobby!"); The Career Committee Man ("What`s in it for me?") and
The Sleeper ("Could someone give Senga a wee nudge?")

And then you hit the solid wall of the Dinosaurs.

We have a lot of dinosaurs. One of them rattled her bony dorsal plates, switched her wrinkly armoured tail and snorted:

"Our members don`t choose that sort of thing. They expect a printed newsletter. After all, it`s all the pet members have."

Now pet members are not an unusually spoilt minority - they are simply members who have a dog but don`t take it to dog shows. They are every bit as sensible and computer
literate as the rest of us. I tried to visualise her view of them. I had a vision of a little old couple clinging to each other in a gale, outside a wee cottage on an island
somewhere west of Rockall, watching a little boat making yet another attempt to reach them, and murmuring anxiously:

"Never mind the supplies - I hope to God he`s brought the Dog Club Newsletter!"

Well., I was sent home as a cyber-rebel charged with the task of printing out the content of the Weblog and sending it out as a smudgy duplicated out-of-date Newsletter twice
a year.

I think I`ll take up flower arranging..............