Monday, January 31, 2011

Odds and Ends

Last Friday I attended an open house for the new Colliers International office in Columbia Gateway. The commercial brokerage division of this office is run by my colleague and long time friend, Rob Freedman. Rob and his crew put together a nice little ribbon cutting event with the county executive that featured the biggest pair of scissors I’d ever seen. It turns out these ribbon cutting scissors are the property of Bonnie Heneson Communications which makes sense since most companies only need a tool like this once.

As it turns out, I left the open house at the same time as Ken Ulman and I had the opportunity to chat with him outside for a minute. I know there is plenty of speculation as to Ken’s future political plans but he did let slip an interesting an tell tale comment. I asked him about his future plans for elective office and he responded that he enjoys “being an executive” as opposed to being a legislator, even though he had just finished putting in long hours dealing with the biggest snow emergency of the year…so far anyway.

And speaking of executives, there was a very funny column by Petula Dvorak in The Washington Post about the self importance of Washington area commuters and the recent snowstorm. Petula points out that forecasters “told us things were going to get ugly. The media warned folks for days that it was coming. We didn't listen.”

“Weather? Weather doesn't stop the work we do. We are Washington, and our subcommittee secondary group organizational mission-statement workshop cannot be stopped by snow!

The government urges "nonessential" employees to stay home. Ha! Who you calling nonessential? Admitting that the work you perform is not a vital, integral part of the fate of the world when you work in Washington is akin to admitting that you're not fabulous in L.A. or tan in Florida.”

The net result of this mindset was a ten hour ride home.

And finally, we should be thankful that for most of us in HoCo, our public utility is BGE. Two days after last Wednesday s storm, BGE reported about 20,000 customers were still without power, including about 2,200 homes in HoCo. Pepco, which covers most of the metropolitan area to our south, had over 100,000 people without power as late as Friday, including 70,000 in MoCo.

That sorry performance got them a trip to the woodshed with the governor.
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