Thursday, October 14, 2021

Reunion Advice

It was fine. However I have learned something for next time: the formal events were mostly a waste, as we had sparse contact with anyone we remembered or had desired to see again; but the informal events that we and other friends had arranged in advance, seeking out the people we were most interested in, worked out quite well. 

Also, next time we will stay within walking distance of the campus rather than circle endlessly looking for parking places.  Colleges have parking problems all the time anyway, worsened for all football games, not just Homecoming.  Add in that this was two sets of alumni classes, both the 0's & 5's and the 1's & 6's, and top it all off with the postponed commencement of the Class of 2020 and there was nothing I could find closer than half a mile for one event. There are a few B&B's nearby, and I didn't even check the AirBnB's.

We discovered the college had named a building after a friend of mine.  I asked his wife why this had happened. "Guilt."  It seems that his last job before retirement from the school was Director of Covid Operations, which involved not only difficult decision-making with very real downstream consequences either way, but talking with all the government official and agencies, politicians, factions within the college, special interest groups, and media.  The people you would pay any money to get away from, basically. It's not a large building, but still. It doesn't happen to many people unless they give millions of dollars to a place.

1 comment:

james said...

In other settings (weddings, end-of-series banquet, etc), large round tables and DJ's are death to any kind of friendly conversation.