My Bad

Life is rampant with unintended consequences. Upon completing my last blog, I sent an email to Ferndale's mayor, police chief, city administrator, city council members, and the community resource center's coordinator, the last more because I consider her a friend, whom, I know to be deeply interested in our local community. The email was brief and contained three intentions. The first to express appreciation for the time the mayor, police chief and city administrator had put into the town hall meeting they'd held. The second to point them to the blog which I'd written in response to the town hall meeting. The third to hopefully create a positive impression of myself.

The following day I left home early, to find out that I am suffering "fractured tooth syndrome" in my number three molar and to do some volunteer work at the Ferndale Community Resource Center. I returned home to an angry and vocal spouse.

At 10 am, during my absence, the phone rang and a man, who refused to identify himself launched into a tirade at my hapless and unsuspecting wife. As I understand from my wife's report, the voice on the phone was ranting about how we couldn't be who we said we were because our address wasn't even in the county assessor's records. My wife, who had read my blog, was completely unaware of my email and was forced to piece together what the call was about while at the same time enduring the vehemence and rudeness of the caller. After refusing to identify himself, ranting at her, and apparently unwilling to give my wife an opportunity to provide a meaningful response, the caller hung up.

I suppose that the caller thought himself safely anonymous. Caller id and some quick research identified the caller as one of Ferndale's city council members. Shortly after having received my wife's report of events, I called Councilman X. I identified myself by name and stated that I was calling regarding his earlier call to our home. Councilman X, immediately launched into a tirade about how I had to be misrepresenting myself because my home address did not exist. I assured him that it did exist. That the address had been changed nearly a year ago and that I have a letter from the city planning department, explaining that they'd made an error in assigning the original address to our home and that they were changing it.

What is so ludicrous and ironic about this whole address thing is that it began because we were unable to authenticate our address with on-line resources, specifically the US Postal service. A visit to our local postmaster concluded with the postmaster and myself walking across the street to discuss the addressing issue with the city planning department. The city planning office told me that they needed to research the matter and would get back to me on the matter. About a week later I received the following via snail mail, EXHIBIT A. In the letter we received, the city planning department the assured me that they would notify all the appropriate governmental agencies about the change. I, on the other hand, was responsible for notifying the rest of the world about the change of address.

As last year's election season rolled around, I remained quite concerned about this address change and it's potential impact on my ability to vote, so I took a copy of the letter to the county assessor's office and presented it along with an address change form to insure that my right to vote and have my vote count would not be compromised.

I have no explanations why Councilman X, was unable to validate my address with county assessor's office, nor why he was unable to find any record of the address in the city's file as he claimed. I assured him that I'd look into the matter.

Returning to my conversation with the councilman. After numerous attempts to get him to drop the address issue I finally was able to ask him what he thought about what I'd written. "Too wordy" he responded. "I couldn't understand it because it was too wordy". He repeated himself with slightly modified negative phrasing several times concluding with a lecture on what was the "appropriate" manner in which to communicate with public officials. By this time, I was pretty dumbfounded by his entire rant. I told him that my wife wanted to speak with him and he hung up.

Now I would agree with Councilman X, my style can be considered wordy. I prefer to consider it thoughtful, rich in detail, rhythmic and lyrical in tone. In any event, I am sorry that he found it difficult to read and understand. On the other hand, I spent the better part of a day documenting the ideas and rationals that I had in response to the town hall meeting. It was the equivalent of several type written pages I am sure. I used my blog as the medium because it affords me the opportunity to explore my thoughts in an informal and personal manner. I invited Councilman X and others to read my blog as I did not feel obliged to create some formal rebuttal or plan in response to the town hall meeting. I believed that sharing my thoughts as I'd written them would be a sufficient contribution to the community discussion.

In the absence of facts, we often rely on speculation. Subsequent to our conversations with Councilman X, my wife and I speculated on the councilman's apparent lack of education and/or intelligence, the source of the aggressive aspersions he cast at us, his extreme rudeness, his condescension, on and on. In the end, we had to conclude that not knowing Councilman X we had no honest way of judging him, so in the end I concluded, my bad!


PS. Here's an executive summary of the above for Councilman X. "You behaved like an asshole! I trust that there is more to you than that."

Gayland Gump
2127 Poplar Drive
Ferndale, WA 98248-9179
360-671-3077

If you doubt the legitimacy of this address please see EXHIBIT A. If you are a "birther" and actual documentation is meaningless to you then you are way beyond anything I can say or do.