Saturday, April 19, 2008

I Me Mine

I remain amazed by the absolute egocentrism of some people.

As I've mentioned before, I'm on the board of directors of my neighborhood's homeowners' association (I'm not a big fan of the HOA concept, but I ultimately decided that I can probably do more to protect myself from HOA intrusion by being a part of the HOA, so here I am). And as you may know, Georgia is in a drought... a bad one. Things are getting marginally better, but only marginally.

Our county government has voted to allow communities to open swimming pools; since our neighborhood has a pool, that was good news for all who use it during the summer. However, at the same time, the county's conservation director wrote and asked that extra water features like water slides be turned off for the season since they contribute to more water loss.

The board is talking about this and deciding what to do (I'm strongly in favor of doing what the county asked, because they have been very supportive of our community in the past... but I'm only one of five votes, so I don't know how it'll all work out). However, when one member of the pool committee found out that we might not open the water slide, you would have thought that we had said we were going to fill the pool in and make it a sandbox. He railed against the prospects, he threatened to stir up homeowner dissent, he implied that the pool would be worthless to the community without the waterslide... Ultimately, I had to discontinue e-mail exchanges because his tone remained so strident and polarizing.

Makes you feel sorry for all those poor neighborhoods that don't have a waterslide, doesn't it? How can those residents even bring themselves to look at their dreary pool?

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