The man threw the ball.

The ball was thrown by the man.

Can someone tell me what the difference between those two sentence are, other than tense? Nothing, right? They get the same point across, right? So why do we need to spend so much time arguing over which is better? Is our time not better spent doing something productive? Or at the very least, arguing about something worthwhile? It frustrates me to no end that we spend time on things like this. I didn’t travel across the country to come to a meeting so my time could be wasted.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the organization I belong to. I like what we stand for. I like the majority of the people involved, and I like the conference that we put on every year. It’s just the ticky tacky little crap that I hate.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago I went to my very first committee meeting in Chicago, with the Chairperson, Vice Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, and 4 or 5 other members. The big wigs, if you will. Our task was to flesh out the agenda for the large board meeting we were having the following month. We met in a hotel suite, and talked about many issues that we were interested in. Fund raising was the last issue we had to deal with before lunch time. Now, fund raising is something important to any organization that wants to survive, correct? It took us 5 whole minutes to figure out what we wanted to propose, and who was going to propose it. FIVE minutes. So our next task was getting lunch. It took us TWENTY minute to decide what toppings to get on the pizza. Twenty minutes. Four times the amount of time we took on fund raising. Twenty minutes. To choose pizza toppings.

It’s been 5 years since that day, (I have a hard time letting go, I know) and some things haven’t changed. Our committee meeting in August set up the agenda for this weekend, wrote language for policies we wanted to introduce, and outlined plans of actions. Today we went over the same language and policies that we’d written earlier. One of the women who helped write this stuff in August, starts complaining about it today. SHE HELPED WRITE IT! What the hell is she doing? So, what should have been a 15 minute conversation, turned into a 55 minute argument.

The man might have thrown the ball, but I’m about to throw a fist. Or a fist will be thrown by me. Whichever.