Public Office

I did my clothes shop­ping last night, and the bane of my clothes shop­ping exis­tence con­tin­ues. It is impos­si­ble to find pants in my size, espe­cial­ly when I’m look­ing for a cer­tain style. The guy at Dil­lard’s told me that I should drink more beer until I have a 40-inch waist­line, because then I can shop in the Big and Tall sec­tion. I just want 34x34 flat-front pants with­out cuffs, one or two pairs in wool and one or two pairs with a slight pat­tern. A her­ring­bone would be excel­lent. Two pairs black, one char­coal, one dark brown.

I did man­age to snag a pair of dark blue pants at The Gap for $20 that were in my size, but I refuse to drop $98 for one pair of pants at Express Men, no mat­ter how awe­some they are. I picked up 3 more MX shirts from there, they were on sale and those shirts fit me per­fect­ly. I final­ly got some nice black dress shoes as well. They were expen­sive, but if I’m going to be wear­ing them 40 hours a week I want them to be as com­fort­able as pos­si­ble, and these are more com­fort­able than my Spezials.

I start my new job on Mon­day. I met anoth­er coun­ty employ­ee last night who gave me her card because she wants some work done to her site, and peo­ple keep ask­ing me if I’m going to improve the Audi­tor or Recorder sites. God knows they need it, but those sites are of the few that my divi­sion does­n’t have a hand in. Peo­ple keep direct­ing me to the Sum­mit Coun­ty site, which has GIS and MIS tools in addi­tion to oth­er great data­base lever­age to serve coun­ty res­i­dents. I have a feel­ing I’ll be spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at how oth­er places around the coun­try do their sites in order to get some ideas on usabil­i­ty and imple­men­ta­tion.

I love the fact that I’m in a posi­tion where I can bring the aver­age per­son­’s ideas to the table and maybe imple­ment them if all works out. Even though I’ve not even offi­cial­ly start­ed yet. Even though I was­n’t elect­ed, I’m still hold­ing a pub­lic office, and a respect for ser­vice to the pub­lic was prob­a­bly unknow­ing­ly instilled in my by my grand­pa. That’s some good moti­va­tion.