Frostbitten Fingers

In my continuing quest to save the university money, I thought I would collect the ice needed for the sculptures that Jan Zink seems to believe are the key to our donor's checkbooks. I'm only too afraid that in the face of her failure, her next plan will be to demonstrate UNCG's suitability as a recipient for donations by lighting things on fire. Apparently, she is operating under the assumption that our alums haven't experienced some of nature's most basic wonders...maybe she should try accurately predicting an eclipse?

In any case, I had nearly finished collecting what I believed would be a reasonable amount of snow, when somebody sent me pictures of the kind of things that Zink would be expecting from her frozen frivolities. I may have to move to Boston. I don't think it's coming down hard enough here to be able to deliver her fix.

I wonder how much it is costing to provide valet parking at these shindigs? After all, the people who work here have to PAY to park here. I wonder how much money the university could raise if it didn't have any employees. Probably none. So maybe a better investment would be to reduce the cost for parking for employees. I don't think these glitz and glam tactics are fooling anybody.

I guess I also can't help but wonder if we couldn't have found any sort of reusable but elegant ornamentation that could be used...we do have art and design departments on campus.

After all, we can't get raises, fix our buildings, or even keep our jobs since the budgets are being cut and cut and cut, right?

And, all of our financial woes are just coming down to us from Raleigh, right??

So, there's no chance that once the money that comes to the university is being spent in a way that is causing its faculty, staff, and students to suffer, right??

And since everything is ordered from Raleigh, there is no way that we could decide, for example, not to use it on ice sculptures but rather to pay for anything else, right??

Because that would mean there was a failure on the part of our leadership, not some hardship that we just have to deal with...and that would mean that we should demand that our leadership stop failing.

RIGHT?!?

Oh, I see.

We don't have a financial crisis. 
We have a leadership crisis. 

It's going to take a lot more than ice to heal that injury.