Author: Roger

But the Presbyterians are more bottom up, with the Session, elected by the members, much more in control of selecting a pastor than any congregational board on which I served in the Methodist church. And I served for about 7 years in the 1990s.

My current church called a pastor about five years ago. It didn’t work out, and he left after a year. I didn’t know WHY it didn’t work out until the pastor sent out a letter, explaining it. I found this all very fascinating. In my old church, there was always a massive rumor mill, but here, nothing. The Session took its responsibility in dealing with this personnel issue professionally and seriously.

So, then there was a year of reflection, and then we got an interim pastor. Interim pastors in the Presbyterian tradition are just that, a pool of folks who go from church to church filling in while the church gets ready for a new pastor.

Well, in this case, that involved doing a survey, and not a simple survey either. My wife was on the committee to select the survey tool before our daughter was born. Then they gave the survey to the members, had the survey tallied by the company that designed it, then the committee members set up times to discuss the results of the survey, not just one congregational meeting, but 6 or 8 weeks of neighborhood meetings in people’s homes. (We missed most of these, being sleep-deprived new parents at the time.)

Only then can the Session put together a Pastor Nominating Committee (PNC) to seek a new candidate. (There’s a couple other little steps in there.) The PNC has been working feverishly hard, and confidentially. It was only last Sunday that the congregation learned the name of the candidate, who will preach at both the 8:30 and the 10:45 service today. After the latter service, there will be a congregational meeting to decide whether to accept the nomination of the PNC. If they don’t, there will be a new PNC, and a new search. Or the candidate can choose not to accept the offer.

Last night, there was a pot luck supper, where the members got to meet the candidate, and the candidate introduced him/herself. (Since it’s still confidential until the church and the candidate come to an agreement, I’m using the type of language the PNC has been using for months.)

Our interim pastor, Joe, has been here three years, and if the church accepts the candidate, and the candidate accepts the church, he’ll likely be staying on until the transition this summer. In my time there, he’s been in the pulpit more than anyone. I’ll be said to see him and his wife Claudia go. If they go – won’t know until later today.

I think Presbyterians really should be called Methodists, because they are so METHODical.
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Steve Barnes, a reader of this blog, pointed me to his new political blog, Empires Fall. I told him: “Your website is mean, spiteful, and bitter. I’ll be adding it to my weblog this weekend.” He said, “Oh, I’m not bitter. This is the feeling formerly known as bitter. Now it’s called schadenfreude.”

1. How do you celebrate Earth Day, if you do? Did you used to? Was it an enforced thing, such as a school project?

2. Can what the individual does matter environmentally, or does industrial disease leading to global warming make the effort pointless and hopeless?

The very first Earth Day in 1970, the students at my high school, Binghamton Central, decided to pick up the grounds. For whatever reason, I concentrated on cigarette butts, maybe because I knew they were NOT biodegradable. In one day, I picked up over 1300 of them. My great pet peeve is people throwing cigarette butts out of moving car windows, for cigarette butts, according to this source, constitute the most common source of litter. It’s also a drag to be hit by one while riding one’s bike. And of course, there’s a potential fire hazard, since we’ve been in an Elevated Fire Awareness Alert pattern for a while around here.

I was a janitor, twice, once at a New Paltz department store, once in Binghamton City Hall.

When I was at my previous church, I was very active in doing litter pickup around the building. Since I lived nearby for a number of years, it was part of my self-appointed neighborhood litter watch.

In anticipation of our (unwelcome) office move next month, I spent much of yesterday wading through years of paper items I’ve accumulated over 13 years, filling a recycling bin.

So, the fact that my desk is a mess – and worse now than usual – does not contradict the fact that I would never throw even a gum wrapper on the sidewalk.
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I love this, Albany:

Free Shredding Day
Saturday April 22
9 am – 2 pm
6 Brown Road
Albany, New York
For information, call 518 459-2222

Directions:
Coming from downtown Albany on WASHINGTON AVE.:
Turn RIGHT onto FULLER RD. 0.6 mile
Turn LEFT onto WAREHOUSE ROW. 0.1 mile
Turn RIGHT onto BROWN RD. less than 0.1 mile.

For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. …”

The time between leaving FantaCo and starting the new job was actually quite rewarding. My friend Nancy Sharlet was dying of cancer, and I got to spend a lot of time with her at the hospital, then when she went home, on the phone, before she died on January 1, 1989.

I started to work at an insurance company in February as a customer service representative. I won’t tell you which one, except that it has a primary color in its name.

The first weeks were OK. It was in a classroom setting, learning about medical prefixes and suffixes, as well as customer service decorum. And, when we finally hit the floor, it wasn’t so bad, at least initially.

Then things started to change. They had what I felt was an adequate software to process dental claims. Yet they changed it to something that I found totally incomprehensible, ordered because somebody’s brother-in-law (or the like) had designed it.

The middle management seemed to like to ride one particular person who was processing claims slower than the rest. I had befriended this woman, and I was not surprised that she left to work in the relative relaxation that was the Postal Service. So they needed someone new to ride, and that was me.

About this time came the great purge. They laid off a few middle managers, but all of the clerks, who were runners for the customer service reps. I was never so disappointed NOT to have been laid off in my life. They ought to have fired the regional manager, who was making $600,000 a year to make bad decisions such as the dental software and this one:

The company wanted to change over to a new medical billing system at the end of the year. A customer service representative could have told them that they ought to process the 1989 claims on the old system, giving people 30 days to get all of those in, then start processing the new (1990) claims on the new system. Instead, they stopped processing claims on the old system on Christmas Eve. The transition took six weeks, rather than the two we were told it would take. The customers wanted to know, not so much about the status of their 1990 claims, as much as their 1989 claims that would help them work on their taxes.

The first call someone makes on a specific claim is handled by the customer service rep. Subsequent calls were placed on the supervisor call queue. By the end of January, about half the calls were supervisor calls. People just wanted to know if we had RECEIVED their claims, but since there were 40,000 envelopes in the basement waiting for this new batch processing system, I couldn’t tell them. I was supposed to tell the customers NOT to refile, but got into trouble when I just couldn’t do that.

Finally, in the beginning of February, the new system went up. However, no information was transferred from the old system to the incompatible new system regarding whether any of the deductible had been met. New claims were processed, often stating that the charge was applied to the already-met deductible. Thus, a whole new flood of irate calls came pouring in.

During this period, I looked out the window one day and saw an ambulance at the building we were about to move into. Then another one. Then a couple more. Then a bus. It turned out something was wrong with the ventilation system in that building and 13 people were taken to the hospital. Fortunately only a couple people were admitted, and those only overnight, as I recall.

But as soon as we made the move to this new building, I gave notice. And, even though I didn’t have a job to go to, I left on March 1, 1990. March 1 was significant for two reasons:
1) it meant that my health insurance would last until the end of April (had I left a day earlier, it would have lapsed at the end of March), and
2) it meant that I would not be working there on my birthday (March 7)

There were 16 people in my training class. By the time I left, 13 months later, only three were still with the company. Coincidence? Sure.