Absurdist 58 examines this unsurprisingly fishy final agenda, still replete with five defective motions and still not providing useful management accounting for its primary revenue stream.

The Reorganization

For whatever reason, the package was reorganized to put the Bylaws Committee Reports and the NCS Guide Review Committee Reports at the front of the package, even before the agenda. The President’s empty report is properly placed at the end.

The packet’s files are numbered 01 through 08: the agenda is 01, the previous month’s minutes are 02, and so forth. A conventional packet would present them in ascending order. This one begins with 06, 07, and 08 before looping back to 01, 02, 03, and 05. File 04, almost certainly intended for the missing Awards Committee Report, has vanished entirely. Meanwhile, the Eyeball Report is listed on the agenda but appears nowhere in the packet. We can only assume the agenda team employed a proprietary sorting method called the Sore Thumb Sort, designed to make selected reports conspicuous while leaving everyone free to pretend the arrangement means nothing.

If cream rises to the top, what does that say about the position of the President’s non-report?

The Minutes Fix

We noted that the preliminary agenda called for approval of May and June minutes, which the Board had already approved at the July meeting. The update fixes that glaring error, reflecting the July minutes that are up for approval.

Congratulations, Doug and Clay. Good catch!

Proofreading was alive for a fleeting moment.

The Financials

While the financials are now included, they deserve further explanation.

The Club uses cash-basis accounting, yet the QuickBooks P&L is labeled “Accrual Basis.” That label is wrong and should be corrected in the accounting setup or report format.

More importantly, the reported $521.14 July net income is largely a timing illusion. Award preparation and mailing expenses were recorded as $0.00. Rich apparently submitted no reimbursement request for July, and no Adobe license payment was made. Those expenses therefore did not appear in the cash-basis report, even though the underlying costs did not magically disappear.

The report may accurately reflect cash received and paid during July, but it does not support boasting about July net income.

The Reports

The agenda caption, “Reports that are attached (See the table of contents on the first page to find them),” gives Directors the scavenger hunt they always wanted as children. Five reports are listed, but only four are attached. The Eyeball Report is named on the agenda but absent from the table of contents and packet. The Awards Committee Report fares even worse: it is neither listed nor included.

We covered the Bylaws Committee Reports and the NCS Guide in Absurdist 57. The President’s Report—or lack of same—is also old news. Following are notable changes in the report area.

Eyeball Report

The Eyeball Report is listed but not found in the table of contents or anywhere in the package. To be fair, we do not know whether this report was submitted or not. Last month’s report failed to reach the packet because Clay was too occupied with Fourth of July activities to deal with Mac’s email. The cause of this month’s disappearance has not yet been assigned an excuse.

Awards Committee Report

And that brings us to our monthly adventure with the Awards Committee Report. If Rich was too busy to submit his July expenses to the Treasurer, he was apparently also too busy to report what generated $494 in awards revenue. The report is not listed on the agenda, does not appear in the table of contents, and is nowhere in the packet.

The absence of an Awards Committee Report makes the financial picture we mentioned above even murkier. Awards revenue jumped to $494, well above average, but the Board receives no explanation of the volume, timing, source, or related expenses. Without that report, Directors cannot determine whether the increase reflects greater activity, delayed processing, a backlog, or some other cause.

Wasn’t the purpose of improving the Awards Committee Report to provide useful counts, categories, and revenue information to the Board? Apparently that reform had a shelf life of one month.

We hope this serious omission is covered in the Board discussion of reports, assuming the Chair does not find a way to sidestep report discussion again.

Perhaps we need a motion to compel the Awards Committee Chair to submit a timely and complete report each month. We do not want that, but we hope you see the humor in suggesting yet another fishy motion.

And yes, Doug and Clay, committee reports are indeed part of the meeting. Look it up.

Old Business

The Discord and logo projects carry over from June after disappearing entirely from the July agenda and minutes. Apparently both slipped beyond the range of the Board’s fish finder. The July minutes reflect no mention of old business. Our overworked Directors must have either decided to forego the pleasure of discussing a couple of red herrings or they simply forgot about them. We see this as a tacit comment on their importance to the Club and its members.

Sometimes, the best part of a fishing trip is sitting around, drinking beer, telling lies, and swatting mosquitoes.

So the Discord and logo projects will make a dramatic re-entry in August. Will the related discussion live up to its suspenseful promise?

Discord Project

As you may recall, this whopper was designated as the be-all and end-all to both Club internal and public-facing communication channels. Basing it on a popular gamer platform was novel and exciting until its proponents discovered some devils in the details. Several members pushed back, urging Directors to leave well enough alone.

Now we hope it is dead in the water, floating belly-up and awaiting disposal.

Logo Project

Hard to tell where this one is going. Is it alive or is it dead?

Schrödinger’s Logo returns.

The convoluted chronology is a wild ride through Board ineptitude. Strap yourself into the fighting chair for this one, you hooked into a feisty marlin.

Back in April, Dean told Gene to bring a proposal to the Board so the Board could approve it. In May, Gene brought a proposal, but suggested that it need not be voted on. Doug, somehow the voice of authority, said the matter was the President’s decision. Then, Dean said, “Go for it. I would like to see your plans…” The Chair added, “So you’ve got it. Run with it.” Apparently, he declared no need for a vote.

On June 13, before the June meeting, Gene announced the Logo Contest to the membership. Then, at the meeting, he told the Board.

At the June meeting, the discussion attempted to swim back upstream to its spawning ground. The President asked whether the Board had ever approved proceeding with the logo contest.

Gene was flabbergasted, while Clay attempted to rationalize some damage control, telling Gene to explain to the members that Board approval was needed, sliding the contest back a month. At the time, it seemed as if the matter would then come up for a vote in July.

So what happened in July, at that next meeting where the Board vote was to have presumably happened?

Nothing.

No mention of logos.

No old business on the agenda.

The issue submerged.

We can only wonder what poorly researched versions of the story will emerge in August. Seems like new details are added while others conveniently disappear.

Will the logo contest survive?

Or will yet another red herring find its way into the pickled herring jar at Stein’s Deli?

New Business: The Five Motions

No need to rehash the motions themselves. Nothing has changed there since we wrote Absurdist 57. However, a significant development has occurred in the form of pushback from ordinary members.

On two active area reflectors, the only two we know to exist, members have decried the motions and asked their area directors to vote against them.

We suspect that if more area directors were to poll their members for honest opinions about these rotten fish, they would similarly be repelled by the smell.

We have not encountered anyone publicly encouraging support for any of the motions.

The motions should never have been published. Four require prior Bylaws Committee review. The fifth is a preemptive fire drill that appears tailored to accommodate one favored member. More red herrings. A complete and unnecessary waste of Board time.

We can only hope that member feedback will influence the Directors to take their fishing fleet to more productive waters.

The Kumbaya Catch

The infamous July 22 gathering was sold as a private reset intended to re-engage Directors, restore focus, and improve how the Board performs its duties.

The first packet afterward arrived late, omitted any record of that gathering, excluded two listed or expected reports, presented a financially incomplete victory lap, and preserved five defective motions that should never have reached the agenda in their current form.

If this is the visible product of the Board’s renewed engagement, the Kumbaya session did not cure the dysfunction.

It merely taught the flounder to flap harder on the dock.

End note: We have yet to see the August Centurion. Its editor had resigned, but agreed to remain in place until a suitable replacement was brought on stream. Thus, it appears as if we still have a short-timer editor, but the printing presses have seized up.

Please view our catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 58: The Flapping Flounder appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Conspicuous by their absence are an Awards Committee Report, any record of the July 22 secret Board gathering, and anything resembling a substantive President’s Report.

The President technically submitted a report. It reads: “No report this month.”

And whither the notorious secret meeting?

If the purpose of that July 22 clandestine confab was to align the Board with its solemn responsibility to govern the Club and supervise the President, the first documentary evidence afterward points in precisely the opposite direction. The packet contains a flurry of motions asserting, restoring, or codifying presidential authority, while demanding almost nothing in return by way of presidential accountability.

We cannot prove that the perniciously private pow-wow’s purpose was to pacify the Board and prepare it for this package. But alliteration aside, the sequence creates an ugly appearance.

The Board met privately to discuss engagement, priorities, direction, and doing its job. Its next public packet proposes more presidential control and contains no presidential account of what he did during the month.

Whatever happened inside the bunker, the first visible product looks less like Board reform than executive consolidation.

Our Agenda Questions Answered

Before we analyze the motions, let us review the questions we asked before the packet was released. Of course, we set our sights low and we were not disappointed.

Were July minutes corrected?

Partially. “Special meeting” and Gary’s stated purpose are now included, but Clay’s concurrence and the record of the meeting’s subsequent occurrence remain absent.

But “special meeting” is in itself an indictment. Organizing the confab and conducting it in private and without notice to the membership is a violation of the bylaws. Thus, we hope Gary’s actual utterance remains in the minutes for the historical record.

Is There a Record of the July 22 Special Meeting?

No.

None. Mum’s the word. Schrödinger’s cat remains sealed in the box.

The meeting that was not a meeting both happened and did not happen.

What about the Motion for Formal adoption of the 2025 NCS Guide?

No.

This Guide was committed for adoption in the June 2025 Board meeting minutes by Dean, for implementation July 1, 2025, but that never happened. In the informal Zoom open membership meeting on July 15, in response to member complaints, Gary reportedly said he would make a motion for the next meeting for BoD approval of the 2025 NCS Guide. Clearly, what appears on the agenda is not that.

Did he forget, or what?

Dean and Clay instead propose a unilateral-looking amendment to the 2023 Guide while committee review remains underway.

Gary dropped the ball.

Any Mention of the Discord or logo projects?

No mention.

Two projects that consumed significant Board time and volunteer labor have vanished from the packet. Whether they are stalled, dead, or merely resting in the Club’s expanding attic of unfinished initiatives is anyone’s guess.

Is There an Awards Committee Report?

No.

It did not even achieve its customary mediocrity. It is absent. Not attached, not listed in Table of Contents. The 5-month-old fee update on the 100-Point Award application remains abandoned in the brush.

Anything Interesting in the President’s report?

“No report this month.”

That is the entire written account of the President’s July activities.

Page 11 is otherwise occupied by a photograph of Dean and a decorative 1776–2026 graphic. The graphic is arguably the more informative of the two.

No better illustration of the President’s desire for greater authority and diminished accountability could have been designed. In the same packet, the Board is asked to enlarge his authority over Club volunteers while receiving no meaningful account of his own work.

Authority is indispensable. Accountability is apparently seasonal.

Is the Packet used as an editorial platform?

Yes. Motions C and D contain first-person parenthetical commentary about suggestions previously made to Doug and Clay. A motion should state policy, not preserve somebody’s victory lap.

On the other hand, the Bylaws Committee issued an explicit finding restricting Doug to 3 strict functions. We view this as a positive development, which we will cover later in this critique.

Proofreading and document integrity?

Failed. The August agenda asks the Board to approve the May and June minutes, both of which were already approved in July, while the July minutes included in the packet are not actually listed for approval. The reports list skips from “c” to “e,” and the motions contain numerous grammatical, formatting, and typographical defects.

Those twenty hours reportedly spent by the Secretary assembling the package must have been directed at other tasks besides proofreading, such as inserting deficient, unreviewed motions, which we cover in the next section.

The Motion Parade

Whenever someone speaks up loudly or an air of controversy exists, reactionary motions emanate from likely sources. As we predicted, due to the desire to avert conflict at the Eyeball Board meeting, these clustered in August.

Five of them.

We found several of these motions to be defective in some way. Some should not be on the agenda without Bylaws Committee clearance, yet they appear. Others are flawed in concept.

As we mentioned above, one motion conspicuous by its absence is Gary’s publicly promised adoption of the 2025 NCS Guide. Apparently, Dean headed it off at the pass, replaced by Motion 2026-08-E, “The Buddy Rule”.

Our synopsis of this month’s new business follows.

Motion 2026-08-A: More Authority, Eventually Reviewed

Gary Slagle, Fourth Area Director and author of the motion, proposes restoring this language to the President’s duties:

“Shall be responsible for leading and directing the Vice President and all club volunteer positions, except elected Officers, Directors, and their appointees.”

The sentence immediately contradicts itself.

It expressly gives the President authority to direct the Vice President, then exempts “elected Officers.” The Vice President is an elected Officer. Apparently, the President both directs and does not direct the Vice President, depending on which half of the sentence survives observation.

Schrödinger has returned, this time carrying a motion template.

The justification asserts that the language appeared in prior bylaws and “appears to have been removed inadvertently” because the change summary does not mention its removal.

That is not evidence of inadvertence. It is speculation based on missing documentation. Before restoring broad presidential authority, the committee should examine the historical drafts, correspondence, committee reasoning, and Board action that produced the current language.

Then comes the procedurally inverted resolution:

“This language will be added to the by-laws (sic) under the President’s duties after review by the By-Law (sic) Committee.”

No.

The bylaws require applicable motions to be routed through the appropriate committee before they are placed on the agenda. Committee review is not a ceremonial blessing administered after the Board votes. If the committee recommends changes, the Board must know those changes before acting.

The proper sequence is review, recommendation, agenda, deliberation, and vote.

This motion proposes agenda, vote, review, and perhaps some later improvisation.

Absent a formal, preliminary review by the Bylaws Committee, it does not belong on the agenda. Why did the Chair accept it?

Motion 2026-08-B: Committee Chairs Hereby Admonished to Attend

Mandates that Standing Committee Chairs (Awards, IT, Bylaws) must attend all Board meetings. (Because if the President won’t file a report, he wants the chairs there to answer the heat).

Nothing is inherently wrong with asking committee chairs to attend when Directors have questions.

But “must attend all Board meetings” creates a new continuing duty. The motion never explains what constitutes an excused absence, whether another committee member may appear, who tracks compliance, who decides whether an excuse is valid, or what penalty follows nonattendance.

The implementation mechanism is an email from the Secretary informing the chairs that attendance is required.

Under penalty of what?

An email to their parent or guardian noting the absence?

These are unpaid volunteers. The Club cannot compel their physical presence. Its only meaningful enforcement mechanism would be removal or non-reappointment, yet the motion does not say who may impose that sanction or under what standard.

Before directing volunteer committee chairs to attend every meeting, perhaps the Board should require the President to submit something longer than “No report this month.”

The proposed policy was not well thought out. Once again, we will suggest some language that considers the inevitable contingencies.

“When a standing committee report contains a matter requiring Board discussion, or when a committee action item appears on the agenda, the committee chair or a designated committee representative should attend the meeting to answer questions. If neither can attend, the committee Chair should submit written responses promptly after the meeting.“

Finally, does this not belong in the bylaws? Otherwise it is a piecemeal motion destined to be lost in minutes submerged in Club backwaters.

Flawed motion. Might affect bylaws. Should be withdrawn and reconsidered.

Motion 2026-08-C: Agenda Repair

Motion 2026-08-D: YouTube Redux

These motions add formal Q&A and open-forum sections to future agendas and place a link to the meeting video in future minutes.

The YouTube proposal is harmless if the video remains supplemental evidence. It becomes harmful if anyone again pretends that video relieves the Secretary of preparing complete written minutes.

A video is evidence. It is not minutes.

The open-forum proposal requires more care. The current bylaws limit when non-Board members may address the Board. If the Board wants to establish a general member forum, that is a welcome reform, but the bylaw language must be reconciled. A Board policy cannot quietly override the governing document.

Vox Incommoda would gladly participate in the general member forum. We might occasionally have a question or two for the Board.

Both motions also contain first-person parenthetical commentary explaining that the proposals originated with the President and were previously suggested to Doug and Clay.

A motion about policy should establish policy. Save the congratulatory back-pats for motions recognizing volunteer service.

Both motions need work and potentially, Bylaws Committee review.

Motion 2026-08-E: The Buddy Rule Returns

Instead of Gary’s promised proposal to adopt the completed 2025 NCS Guide, Dean and Clay propose amending the September 2023 Guide on one of the most controversial issues now dividing the Club.

The motion would place Masters at the top during prelist unless they request placement in the general check-in section.

The NCS Guide Review Committee reports that it provided an excerpt from its ongoing work concerning Masters check-in order. Perhaps Motion E came from that excerpt. The packet does not say whether the committee approved the precise language, voted on it, or recommended immediate adoption before completing the rest of its review.

That omission matters.

The committee expects to complete its work in approximately four weeks. Yet this isolated rule is scheduled to take effect the day after the Board meeting.

So, what’s the rush?

Why modify the 2023 Guide piecemeal rather than complete the committee’s review and present a coherent document?

And, once again, for crying out loud, why did Gary’s promised consideration of the 2025 Guide disappear?

The motion also asserts that placing Masters at the top “has been our practice.” That is not neutral background. It is advocacy dressed as history, especially when the permissibility and application of that practice produced the controversy now supposedly being resolved.

Its practical effect is to codify the disputed accommodation at the center of the conflict.

And it does so with “Master’s” used repeatedly as a possessive, sentence fragments, spacing defects, and an implementation schedule displaying considerably more urgency than proofreading.

We hope these points emerge in discussion—except for the grammatical issues, for which there is no hope.

A Functional Bylaws Committee

We shift to the only positive sign for the Club. This month’s bright spot is the Bylaws Committee.

Responding to a request, the Bylaws Committee included a letter to the Chair delineating the role of the Club Secretary. After a review and discussion, the committee found that the documents are clear on the subject.

This should end any legitimate debate about whether the Secretary functions as a free-ranging procedural commentator, substitute parliamentarian, or auxiliary Chair.

The remaining question is whether the Chair and Board will enforce the finding. Or will the President’s “Motion A” power grab survive its bylaws challenge, clearing the path for Dean to tell Doug he can do whatever he wants?

The Committee categorically stated that after recognition by the Chair, the secretary may:

1. Clarify wording of prior minutes.
2. Ask for clarification of the wording of a motion.
3. Confirm whether a motion was properly noticed and distributed.

That is it. Nothing more.

The Committee was also careful to note that similar limits apply to the club Treasurer when that officer happens not to be an Area Director.

We regard this as progress. First, we have a real, substantive report from a standing committee. Next, we have some hard decisions set in concrete with cogent language.

We appreciate such positive developments when everything else appears to be heading south.

The Bottom Line

The July 22 gathering was sold as a reset intended to awaken the Board and restore Director engagement.

The first packet afterward does not show an emboldened Board demanding accountability from the President. On the contrary, it shows the President and Chair seeking to codify presidential preferences, compel volunteer attendance, amend operating guidance, and enlarge presidential authority, while the President himself submits no meaningful account of his activities.

Committee chairs must attend. Volunteers must be directed. Net Controllers must follow a newly codified procedure. The Secretary must place the President’s preferred items into agendas and minutes.

And the President?

“No report this month.”

So once again, motions lacking required committee review pollute the agenda. Doug appears to assemble and publish the packet, while Clay may exercise little meaningful review before it reaches the membership. That raises the larger question of who actually controls its contents. The pattern strongly suggests that presidential preferences fill the vacuum created by a passive Chair and an unsupervised Secretary. The formal agenda belongs to the Board. The practical agenda appears to belong elsewhere.

Clay may hold the gatekeeper’s title, but Dean appears to hold the keys.

If this is the new direction, the Board did not take back the rudder. It proposed bolting it permanently to the President’s chair.

Entropy does not leave power vacant. It delivers it to the loudest surviving organ.

Please view our catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 57: No Report, More Power appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

This will be the first of two essays in advance of the August meeting.

Absurdist 56 once again takes a jaundiced-eyed view of the Board’s secret July 22 meeting. It warns Directors that repeat performances betray the trust they established with their area members when they were elected. In connection with the August meeting, we ask what vestige of that clandestine confab will appear in the Club record.

The Arborist will sharpen his pruning saw for the second essay, which we will publish when the August Board packet is available for analysis.

Normalizing the Shadows

When the Board of Directors emerged from its secret July 22 Zoom bunker, we were encouraged to regard the gathering as a rare corrective exercise: a private “reset” intended to improve engagement, restore harmony, align priorities, and remind Directors to do their jobs.

We were told it was not a Board meeting “per se.” It was merely an informal working session in which eleven elected Directors could discuss their performance and share their feelings well beyond the hearing of Assistant Area Directors and the voting members they represent.

That was bad enough.

But now the grapevine is carrying a more troubling report: some Club leaders may be considering making these off-the-record “informal workgroups” a recurring feature of Board governance.

If that report is accurate, this is no longer an isolated procedural fumble.

It is the proposed architecture of a permanent shadow Board.

From Exception to Operating System

Let us be clear about what happens when private “informal workgroups” become routine.

If the Directors hold an unannounced private session before each official meeting to “build consensus,” “align priorities,” “discuss direction,” or “improve engagement,” then the official Board meeting ceases to function as the primary deliberative forum.

The debate has already occurred behind closed doors.

Positions have already been tested. Objections have already been softened. Alliances have already formed. Consensus, or something resembling it, has already been manufactured.

By the time members are permitted to observe the official meeting, the Directors may be doing little more than publicly ratifying private understandings.

The public meeting becomes theater while the private meeting becomes governance.

That is not re-engagement. It is disenfranchisement with a team-building vocabulary.

The Semantic Illusion

Supporters of this arrangement will undoubtedly return to the same linguistic defense:

“We are not holding secret Board meetings. We are merely conducting informal study sessions where Directors can exchange ideas.”

This is terminology management of the foulest order.

The Constitution and Bylaws cannot be bypassed merely by changing the title on the Zoom invitation. When all elected Directors gather privately to discuss Board priorities, organizational direction, executive oversight, future conduct, and how they will perform their offices, the issue is not what someone decided to call the gathering.

The issue is what happens there.

Calling it a “workgroup,” “retreat,” “study session,” or “alignment exercise” does not make meaningful Board deliberation disappear. A rose by any other name still smells as sweet, and Board business conducted in the dark still violates the representative trust on which this Club depends.

The Labrador retriever defense was unconvincing as a one-time excuse. It should not become standing Board policy.

The Shadow Board Problem

A recurring private workgroup would effectively create two Boards.

The first would be the official Board described in the governing documents. It would publish agendas, receive reports, entertain motions, record votes, prepare minutes, and permit member observation.

The second would be the shadow Board. It would deliberate privately, build consensus without scrutiny, establish informal expectations, and arrive at understandings that never appear in the official record.

The official Board would possess the paperwork while the shadow Board would possess the actual conversation.

That is precisely how institutional accountability disappears without anyone formally voting to abolish it.

Producing no minutes means no reliable record. Allowing no observation means no independent witnesses. No published agenda means no advance warning. And no formal votes means no individual accountability.

Directors can later deny what was proposed, promised, conceded, or surrendered because nothing authoritative records that it happened.

Plausible deniability is not an accidental benefit of secret governance. It is one of its principal products.

An Inspection From The Arborist

As Chief Timber Inspector, allow me to diagnose the condition in plain language.

This is systemic root rot.

To the self-described reformers on the Board: You cannot claim to be taking back the rudder from presidential overreach while steering the Board into a dark cave where the membership cannot observe what you are doing.

True reform requires daylight.

To the corporate team-building enthusiasts: private management retreats may be common in commercial organizations because executives manage paid subordinates inside a hierarchical structure.

The 3905 Century Club is not GE Capital.

Members are not line employees. Area Directors are not middle managers awaiting mission-alignment instruction. They are elected representatives accountable to the members of their respective Areas.

Their independence is not a defect to be corrected. It is the reason they were elected.

A Board does not become stronger by teaching its Directors to reach private consensus before appearing in public. It becomes stronger when Directors deliberate openly, disagree honestly, vote individually, and accept responsibility for the results.

A Preemptive Warning

“If nothing appears, the members will be entitled to ask why a gathering considered important enough to exclude them was not important enough to record.”

The August Board packet will appear in a matter of days.

Before looking for any proposals to institutionalize future closed workgroups, members should examine how the Board documents the secret gathering it has already held.

Will the July 22 session appear in the packet at all?

If it does, will the account identify who attended, explain why Assistant Area Directors and members were excluded, describe the subjects discussed, and summarize any expectations, commitments, priorities, or paths forward that emerged?

Or will the members receive a dense thicket of corporate language about engagement, focus, alignment, shared purpose, collaborative dialogue, and renewed commitment, carefully engineered to consume words without conveying information?

Will the document describe the gathering’s original purpose honestly, or will it continue the effort to transform a proposed “special meeting” into an innocent “informal workgroup” through repeated applications of semantic varnish?

Will the members learn what supposedly changed, what the Directors committed to doing differently, and how anyone will measure whether the exercise accomplished anything?

Or will the official record amount to a perfunctory note that some Directors gathered for tea, discussed baseball, exchanged warm feelings about service, and then dispersed without disturbing Club business “per se”?

Perhaps the meeting will vanish entirely.

That, too, would be an answer.

Without a Trace

A private session called to reset Board expectations, improve Director engagement, focus on members, prioritize goals, and redefine how Directors perform their duties should leave some documentary trace. If nothing appears, the members will be entitled to ask why a gathering considered important enough to exclude them was not important enough to record.

If something does appear, they should examine whether it preserves the event or launders it.

The Board cannot credibly claim that the July 22 session was consequential enough to awaken its Directors while simultaneously treating it as too informal to enter the Club’s institutional memory.

Will There Be a Repeat?

If that August 8 Board meeting packet, or the meeting that follows, contains any proposal, recommendation, hint, or procedural contrivance intended to institutionalize recurring closed “workgroups,” this essay should serve as advance notice.

Worse yet, if the Board organizes secret meetings furtively, to escape attention by the members, this represents a final step toward entrenching shadow governance.

Members should not accept a permanent shadow bunker.

A Sacred Trust

Elected Directors accepted a public trust when they took office. That trust requires proper notice, complete packets, meaningful reports, neutral minutes, open deliberation, recorded votes, and visible accountability.

Private conversations among individual Directors are inevitable. Small groups will exchange ideas. No sensible person proposes putting every telephone call, email, or casual discussion into the minutes.

But a recurring gathering of the entire Board to discuss Board performance, priorities, direction, consensus, executive oversight, and future conduct is something else entirely.

The distinction depends on substance, not vocabulary.

If the official meeting merely ratifies understandings developed in private, then the official meeting is no longer where governance occurs.

It is where governance is displayed after the fact.

Open the Shutters

The July 22 gathering was defended as a special corrective measure. Its public consequences remain to be seen.

Making such gatherings routine would be a different matter. It would transform a disputed exception into an alternative governance system, one deliberately placed beyond member observation and institutional memory.

The Club already suffers from missing information, vague minutes, defective reports, silent revisions, informal interpretations, outdated award applications, and decisions whose origins become impossible to reconstruct.

It does not need another mechanism for making its governance disappear.

The Arborist has plenty of ink, abundant sunlight, and no shortage of pruning metaphors.

Open the shutters.

Let the members see the tree.

Thanks for reading this latest Absurdist Paper. Absurdist 57 will be a critique of the Board packet for the August 8 Board meeting soon after it appears.

Please view our catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 56: The Private View from the Bunker appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

NCAA Patch Progress

Oh, yeah, you’ve undoubtedly been reading about deals that have been struck between college teams and corporate sponsors since the NCAA ruled that teams could sport advertising on their jerseys starting August 1. Several agreements are already booked. For example, tOSU will get about $17 million per year from JPMorgan Chase, while Notre Dame signed with SoFi for roughly $18-$20 million.

Meanwhile, Illinois and Moo U chose local institutional relationships. Busey Bank in Champaign is paying the Illiniweks $6 million per year, while MSU Federal Credit Union will pay the Moosters $4 million. This is a little more defensible than selling out to dissociated national financial powerhouses.

In other conferences, Arkansas chose Tyson Foods, a genuinely regional company headquartered in northwest Arkansas. That five-year deal covers all 19 sports and makes Tyson the exclusive sponsor even though NCAA rules would permit a second patch.

And the Big 12 decided that they would engage a sponsor for all the teams in the conference who will all wear Monster Energy Drink logos next year.

But Texas said no, at least for now. AD Chris Del Conte said the “burnt orange and white” would remain unbesmirched by garish logos. We’ll see how long he holds out.

Who Will Grace the PSU Jersey?

Let’s come back home to Dear Old State. Will our revered blue and white uniforms succumb to the greed impulse? All indications are that they will, given Pat Kraft’s comments at Big Ten Media Days. He implied that this was less a debate over whether to sell the space than a study of when, to whom, and for how much.

Kraft said Penn State was conducting a “deep evaluation,” determining the asset’s “real value” and exploring all possibilities. He acknowledged the uniforms’ historic character but also called jersey advertising part of the “new reality” and said Penn State must find additional revenue. He also stressed that the department would move cautiously and respect tradition.

Very krafty, Pat. Moving cautiously allows the market to settle down and establish some decent comparables. Instead of settling on a cheap local deal with Hi-Way Pizza, he can hit up Capital One. What’s in YOUR wallet, Pat?

Penn State should not accept Illinois money. Its brand, football audience and national following command a premium. Conversely, whether we want to admit it or not, Notre Dame’s independent national identity and Ohio State’s sheer commercial scale probably leave Penn State slightly below those two unless a bidder becomes irrational.

I know that we are all anxious to see those pristine, simple, beloved Penn State uniforms turn into a NASCAR pit crew haberdasher’s wet dream, right? Given that and a brief tour around the backwaters of social media, let us speculate on some potential sponsors for the PSU jersey patches.

UPMC

I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. Even as one of the largest employers in Pennsylvania and massive presence throughout the western half of the Commonwealth, they’re affiliated with Pitt, so why the hell would we ever want them on a Penn State uniform? Stranger things have happened where money is involved. Especially big money. But because I’m realistic about Pitt hatred, I share your doubts that this could ever happen.

Sheetz

Horrible colors for a Penn State jersey, but certainly a possibility due to local context. I grew up eating ice cream sandwiches from the freezer at the original Sheetz Kwik Shopper in Altoona, and I have watched “Sheetzes” grow from that store to a regional gas/fast food empire. Never doubt the power of the Sheetz brothers. But a convenience store chain might be shooting a bit low and the garish Sheetz colors would look like bloody bird diarrhea on a Nittany Lion jersey. 12-1.

PSECU

Just because Moo U. went with a credit union doesn’t mean that PSU shouldn’t. In fact, PSECU is already an official corporate partner of Penn State Athletics and previously served as presenting sponsor of the football season. The problem here, of course, is price. A $4-6 million annual deal might be plausible, but bigger bucks would be difficult for a credit union. 20-1.

Highmark

Highmark is already an All-American-level Penn State sponsor. It has statewide reach, substantial marketing resources and an existing athletics relationship. And best of all, its logo is BLUE. They could sell it as a connection to athletic health, community wellness, medical services, and similar bullshit. And they’ve got the deep pockets to make it worthwhile for both ends of the deal. 6-1.

PNC

PNC is not listed among Penn State’s current athletics partners, but it is Pennsylvania-based, has the financial capacity to challenge PSECU and would fit the emerging pattern of banks purchasing entire athletic departments’ uniform inventory. A PNC-PSECU bidding contest would probably delight Kraft and Learfield while causing both institutions to publish remarkably similar statements about education, community and shared values. 8-1

Pepsi

Pepsi is an All-American partner and the official soft drink of the Nittany Lions. It has ample resources and decades of experience bundling pouring rights, venue signage, digital promotion and sponsorship inventory. A Pepsi patch would be nationally recognizable but thoroughly generic. It would also suggest that every time Penn State spoke solemnly about protecting tradition, someone off camera was calculating beverage impressions. 10-1

Those represent a few thoughts I pulled out of my copious cloaca. I didn’t mention West Shore Homes because they already have a deal. Yet, they might be in the running.

What Do You Think?

I ask my six faithful readers to chime in with any rumblings about what logos might adorn the previously simple Penn State jerseys in 2026. What have you heard? Anyone know something I don’t know? (Don’t answer that literally).

Given the huge Beaver Stadium renovation bill and the necessary commitment to competitiveness in the NIL markey, Kraft needs to scrounge up all the capital he can muster.

But he must do so in a such a way that he will not alienate the faithful or, just as important, destroy the tradition of the plain, crap-free uniform. When the ultimate commercial sellout is announced, he will surely present it as a transformational partnership that shares Penn State’s values, supports student-athletes, advances financial literacy, improves community health, promotes innovation, protects the watershed, and perhaps rescues stranded kittens. Most of us will see through that and take it for what it is.

And halfway through the season, we will stop thinking about it.

The post PSU Pecuniary Patchwork appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

During the July Board meeting, First Area Director Michael “Sammy” Samulenas referred to the writer of these essays as “the guy who calls himself The Arborist, I’m sorry, The Absurdist, or whatever…”

We accept the promotion.

Vox Incommoda, formerly known merely as the Absurdist, will now also answer to The Arborist, especially when asked to inspect diseased organizational timber, prune deadwood, identify root rot, and determine whether the Board canopy is receiving adequate sunlight.

This was probably not Sammy’s intention.

But satire, like kudzu, grows where conditions allow.

The Arboreal Issue

The 3905 Century Club is not merely suffering from bad meetings, weak minutes, defective agenda packets, and presidential overgrowth. Those are symptoms.

The deeper problem is arboreal.

The roots are the Constitution and Bylaws. The trunk is the Board. The branches are the officers, committees, Area Directors, Assistant Area Directors, net operations, awards program, and member communications. When the roots are ignored, the trunk weakens. When the trunk weakens, branches grow wherever they please. And when the tree lives in the shade, receiving little sunlight, its growth is stunted. Eventually, the whole tree becomes misshapen, top-heavy, and vulnerable to the next stiff breeze from Alaska.

In fairness, Sammy may have stumbled onto something.

Perhaps the Club does need an arborist.

After all, what is organizational entropy if not unmanaged growth? A committee here. A presidential habit there. A defective motion grafted onto the wrong bylaw branch. A Secretary editorializing in the minutes like ivy climbing the siding. A Chair forgetting that pruning is part of the job. A Board standing below it all, staring upward, hoping gravity remains theoretical.

The Canopy Is Not the Root System

The Club’s leadership keeps admiring the canopy. Nets are running. Awards are being issued. Meetings are being held. Packets are being published, eventually. Minutes exist, sort of. Therefore, the tree must be healthy.

No.

A tree can keep leaves long after rot has entered the trunk.

Likewise, an organization can keep operating while its governance decays. In fact, that is how decline usually happens. Collapse is rarely theatrical at first. It begins with shortcuts, excuses, informal understandings, unchallenged habits, missing reports, vague minutes, late packets, defective motions, and Directors who confuse politeness with duty.

By the time everyone agrees the tree is sick, someone is usually already calling a closed working session to discuss mission alignment among the termites.

Ask the Arborist

The newly christened Arborist continues to receive questions about Club operations from people who should be able to get clear answers through current channels.

That is not because the Arborist holds office.

He does not.

It is not because his answers are binding.

They are not.

It is because the Club’s formal information structure has become so uncertain that experienced volunteers still seek unofficial interpretations from former officers who remember how the machinery was supposed to work before the vines took over the shed.

A recent example involved an Area Awards Manager reviewing a Call Area award application. The question concerned whether Hawaii, when used for the Sixth Call Area award, must appear with five contacts on each band or whether its use on one band alone was sufficient.

The rule says Hawaii and Alaska are not required for the Sixth and Seventh Call Areas, respectively, but if used, the applicant must list five contacts for each such state “as required by paragraphs 8(a) and 8(b).” The likely intent appears to be five contacts per band for each such state used. Another possible reading is that five contacts on a single band would satisfy the requirement for that state.

That ambiguity is the problem.

As in too many Club documents, the wording is imperfect because precision appears to have been treated as an optional accessory. Reasonable people can encounter the same sentence and arrive at different interpretations. When that happens, the answer should not become folklore. It should become an official clarification.

The Arborist Answer

Therefore, the proper answer was not merely interpretive. It was procedural.

The question should go to the Awards Committee, and it should reach the full committee. It should not be resolved unilaterally by the Awards Secretary.

That is the point.

The Club does not need more folklore. It needs official interpretations, recorded clarifications, corrected applications, and an accessible repository of frequently encountered award-rule questions. Otherwise, every ambiguous application becomes another private oral tradition passed from volunteer to volunteer, like governance around a campfire.

The Arborist Calls Keep Coming

Then, almost on cue, a prominent current member of the Awards Committee contacted The Arborist with essentially the same question.

He had searched the archives and found only a reference from around 2010 stating that the Call Area Award instructions had been rewritten for clarity. Whatever clarity resulted has not survived particularly well. He, too, could see reasonable arguments for both interpretations.

Consider the information chain now forming around one ambiguous award rule.

A current Area Awards Manager asks a former Awards Secretary.

The applicant asks the same former Awards Secretary.

A current Awards Committee member independently asks the same former Awards Secretary.

And the former Awards Secretary tells all of them that the matter belongs before the current Awards Committee.

Michael Corleone had Sicily.

The Arborist has the Call Area Award.

Every attempt to leave the organization’s operational machinery merely produces another question that current leadership cannot answer from its records.

The Limbs: a Functional Awards Committee

When this issue is hashed out by the Awards Committee, if it ever reaches that august body, it should be handled formally, with the decision ultimately explained in detail and published promptly in the monthly Awards Committee Report. If deliberation produces a clarification in award-rule language, the award application should be updated promptly.

And speaking of timely updates, here is a case in point.

Despite requests to the Awards Committee Chair, from me, my Area Director, and a member of the Awards Committee, the 100-Point Award application, which should have been updated to accommodate the March 1 fee increase, still has not been updated as we approach August. A simple editing change cannot be accomplished in five months?

The Awards Committee should operate transparently. Simple updates should happen proactively. They should not have to wait until they become a five-alarm fire drill.

But in an entropic organization, simple but important things are neglected, while the wheels of progress spin furiously through useless secret Board alignment sessions, pointless gamer messaging systems evaluations, and unneeded new logos.

Priorities, tree lovers!

Does The Arborist need to come back and show them all how this is done?

Accidental Malapropism, purposeful metaphor

The Arborist joke is funny because the malapropism was accidental.

The underlying condition is not funny at all.

When current volunteers bypass current leadership to ask former officers for interpretations, the organization has a knowledge-transfer problem. And when those former officers must add, “my answer is unofficial and non-binding,” the organization has an authority problem. Finally, when the safest advice is “make sure it gets to the full committee,” the organization has a process problem.

That is not one problem.

That is root rot.

Arboreal Exit, Stage Left

So yes, Sammy, perhaps “The Arborist” will do.

The Absurdist observes the absurdity.

The Arborist inspects the rot.

And right now, the Club’s governance tree needs less fertilizer, fewer slogans, more sunlight, a sharper saw, and Directors willing to remove deadwood before the next storm does it for them.

Please view our catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 55: Ask the Arborist appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Vox Incommoda’s scanner is constantly seeking signals from the void, the latest collection of which tell us the confab happened on Wednesday, July 22. Absurdist 54 analyzes the non-meeting whose details may forever elude the membership, although we might eventually expect to see a nebulously airbrushed summary. In this essay, despite having no knowledge of exactly what happened there, we will direct our attention to what should happen next.

Presumably, although the meeting was camouflaged as a non-meeting about feeling good and working together, its raison d’être was to accomplish something positive for the Club. Maybe no business was conducted there “per se.” But the stated purpose implies that future Club business should be conducted differently because of it.

Very well. Let us look for results.

Results, Not Feelings

If the Board emerges more engaged, more transparent, more assertive, more faithful to the bylaws, and more willing to hold officers accountable, then the meeting may prove useful despite its unfortunate secrecy.

If the Board emerges with nothing but warmer feelings, softer language, and the same old deference to presidential control, then the meeting was not reform. It was a private morale rinse.

The test is not what the Directors felt in the room.

The true test is what the members can see afterward.

Test One: The Chair

Will Clay improve, or will the Board replace him?

Despite one Director’s congratulations on the great job Clay is supposedly doing as Board Chair, dysfunction in that position is not difficult to detect. He demonstrates limited familiarity with the bylaws. His meeting management often seems tuned toward “how fast can we get this over with and adjourn?” He allows defective motions to appear on agendas and fails to route them through appropriate committees. He visibly and audibly expresses annoyance when Directors ask to be heard. He also appears far too deferential to the President, rather than accountable to the Board that elected him.

If the Directors are serious about re-engagement, they need to address the Chair directly. Shape up or step aside. That is not cruelty. That is governance.

Test Two: The Secretary and the Minutes

Will Doug stop treating minutes as narrative control?

His tediously ubiquitous editorial and procedural comments in the minutes have been covered here ad nauseam. He is anything but neutral in his characterizations of discussions, the most recent example being the whitewash of the character and purpose of the private Directors’ gathering in the July minutes. Like Clay, he appears too closely aligned with Dean’s preferences. He also appears either unfamiliar with the bylaws or too willing to reinvent them for convenience.

Will the Board give the Secretary clear direction? Minutes should preserve the Board’s record, not manage controversy, defend officers, or reshape history into smoother terrain.

If he cannot do the job properly, will the Board replace him?

A “but but but we can’t find anyone else” excuse would be telling. Competence does not become optional because recruitment is inconvenient.

Test Three: Packets, Reports, and Agendas

Will the Board insist on proper notice, timely reports, and accurate agendas?

We have said it all before. Between the Chair and the Secretary, handling of committee reports and meeting agendas has been haphazard. Multiple revisions appear before and after bylaw-mandated deadlines. Missing committee reports are hand-waved away with specious explanations or comments such as, “I received it, but I was busy around that time.”

Will the newly re-engaged Board put its collective foot down and insist on timely, accurate, complete agenda packets?

Will Directors discuss committee reports openly?

Recently, the Secretary asserted that committee reports are not “part of the meeting.” That was wrong. Committee reports are Board business and should be available for Board discussion. They are not decorative attachments stapled to an agenda packet so everyone can pretend oversight occurred.

If Directors are finally doing their jobs, committee reports should become regular subjects of discussion, not token paperwork embalmed in PDF form.

Test Four: The President

Will Dean retreat from unilateral control?

In all fairness, the current situation is not all Dean’s fault. The Board failed for years to assert its authority over the President, so naturally, the President attempted to fill the leadership gap. For some Directors, the lazy assumption seems to be that running the Club is Dean’s problem, not theirs. They are just there to vote for whatever appears in the packet. Others go along for the ride.

If this private gathering was truly about Directors taking their jobs seriously, then those who have operated in rubber-stamp mode must break that mold. They must evaluate the President’s proposals on merit, demand compliance with the bylaws, and remember that the President reports to the Board.

The Board should insist on a proper President’s report, presented, discussed, and challenged at each meeting. It should describe the President’s relevant Club accomplishments, pending issues, operational decisions, follow-up obligations, and matters requiring Board direction. It should not be a travelog, a Field Day antenna report, or a lightly disguised newsletter column.

The President’s report is the monthly vehicle for Presidential accountability to the Board.

Use it.

The President does not own the Board. The President answers to it.

Test Five: Members and Assistant Area Directors

Will Assistant Area Directors and members be treated as stakeholders rather than inconveniences?

A meeting exclusively for Directors, conducted privately, is highly unusual and almost certainly inconsistent with the representative spirit of the bylaws. Yet one occurred.

If one purpose of that meeting was to reacquaint Directors with their duties and reorient them toward strict adherence to governing documents, then the Board should make a simple pledge: never again conduct Board business in the dark.

Members are not obstacles. Assistant Area Directors are not nuisances. They are part of the representative structure of the Club.

A Board that claims to be focusing on members should begin by not excluding them from meaningful governance.

The August Test

The first real test will be the August Board meeting:

• Will we see evidence of change in the days leading up to the meeting?
• Will the packet be timely, complete, and accurate?
• Will committee reports contain useful information?
• Will Directors ask questions?
• Will the Chair manage the meeting competently?
• Will the Secretary record discussions neutrally?
• Will the President behave as an officer accountable to the Board?

Or will everyone emerge from the private working session with a warm inner glow, a fresh vocabulary of engagement, and the same old habits?

That is the test.

Not feelings. Results.

The test is not what happens in private communication via email or ccnboard reflector.

It is what happens in full view of the membership.

A Final Word

The Board says it met privately to reset expectations, re-engage Directors, focus on members, prioritize goals, and do its job.

Fine.

Without an official record, the members may never know exactly what transpired. We will therefore judge the meeting not by its private intentions, but by its public consequences.

Conducting the meeting privately gives Directors the shield of plausible deniability. If no official record exists, no one can easily be held to what was said.

So we will watch what they do.

If the Board becomes more engaged, transparent, disciplined, and accountable, we will acknowledge it.

If nothing changes, then the meeting was not a turning point.

It was merely another closed door.

Please view our catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 54: Trust, But Verify appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a famous thought experiment involving a cat in a sealed box, simultaneously alive and dead until someone opened the lid.

Ninety-one years later, the Board of Directors of the 3905 Century Club has achieved a breakthrough in administrative quantum mechanics: the Board meeting that both exists and does not exist.

Depending on who approaches the box, the top-secret gathering occupies two contradictory states. In Absurdist Paper #53, we examine the quantum entanglement between secrecy, semantics, and self-importance.

The Dual-State Boardroom

If a member cites the bylaws and asks for notice, an agenda, minutes, and member observation, the wave function immediately collapses:

“This is not a Board meeting. It is merely an informal workgroup, a casual exchange of ideas, a friendly digital coffee klatsch where Directors gather to admire each other’s antennas and discuss team spirit.”

But if an Assistant Area Director asks for access, or a member asks what his elected Director is discussing, the lid slams shut:

“This is a confidential governance discussion. Assistant Area Directors are not included. Members are not invited. Directors should not discuss the matter outside the approved circle.”

Quite a trick.

The gathering is informal enough to bypass the ordinary requirements of the bylaws, yet formal enough to require information control. It is casual enough to avoid member observation, yet important enough to discuss the Club’s mission, direction, focus, and future conduct.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

A Board meeting by any other name still smells like Board business.

Corporate Team-Building Culture Comes to Ham Radio

To understand how a volunteer amateur radio club arrived at a classified informal coffee klatsch, one must understand the soothing language of administrative control.

When a governing body becomes unruly, the bureaucratic instinct is not always to confront the underlying issue. The instinct is often to schedule a meeting about communication, cohesion, mission, alignment, collegiality, and moving forward. These are comfortable words. They sound adult. They even sound responsible. Plus, they have the marvelous property of turning accountability into atmosphere.

Cue the 1970s mood lighting and a facilitator asking everyone to share one word that describes their governance journey.

At the July meeting, Gary Slagle, K9GWS, did not propose a casual conversation about the weather, 40 meters, or who forgot to mute on Zoom. He said he would request a “special meeting” to seek “consensus among the board members.” He asserted that there was “no consensus, no common mission, no direction.” The Board needed to agree on “what the mission is,” “where we want to go,” “what’s important,” and “what we want to focus on.”

Chairman Clay Mayrose, WA6LBU, agreed that the Board needed to “come up with a mission and go forward.”

In any normal organization, gathering the Board to decide mission, direction, priorities, and future conduct would be called Board business.

But in the new quantum governance model, the same gathering becomes an “informal workgroup” the moment the bylaws walk into the room.

This is terminology management, not reform.

Be Sure to Clear It with HR

The mentality appears to be pure middle-management alignment culture. Gary seems to look at a group of elected Directors and see a team that needs facilitation, not a sovereign Board that needs to obey its governing documents. In that frame, Mac’s objection is not a constitutional warning. It is a classroom interruption from someone who has not yet absorbed the lesson plan.

But bylaws are not a lesson plan.

They are constraints.

The meeting is informal when the bylaws ask questions, confidential when members ask questions, and important when leadership wants its conclusions treated seriously.

Quantum management cosplay at its finest. Are the bylaws alive or dead? No one knows.

The Bottom Line

You cannot have it both ways.

If the big pow-wow is an informal chat about propagation, antennas, and summer QRN, then no one needs secrecy, exclusion, or information control.

If it is an executive summit to forge “consensus” and define the “mission” of the 3905 Century Club, then holding it behind closed doors without proper notice, member observation, and proper records violates the spirit and structure of the Club’s governing documents.

When a Board hides in a digital bunker to discuss governance while pretending the meeting is not happening, it is not practicing leadership.

It is playing corporate hide-and-seek.

We await the smoke signals from this junior leadership oriented team-building, alignment-seeking, mission-polishing, consensus-manufacturing waste of precious volunteer time. We cannot wait to write about the results we will never see in proper minutes. Still, we will take comfort in knowing that our Directors have been treated to the finest therapeutic vapors of 1990s corporate culture, where every governance failure can be cured by softer lighting, safer language, and a facilitator with a flip chart.

Pass the popcorn and pour the coffee. The quantum box is open, the cat is out, and more members are watching than the leadership seems to realize.

Editor’s Note: The Joke Has a Point

Although Absurdist 53 treats this episode with appropriate ridicule, the subject itself is not funny.

This Club is struggling to find its way back to functional governance. A private gathering of Directors, especially one framed around mission, consensus, direction, and unity, could become one of two things. Neither inspires confidence.

First, given the past performance of several participants, readily available for study in the Club’s growing cinematic universe of YouTube meetings, the gathering may devolve into a prolonged amateur legal debate about corporate law, bylaws, terminology, and whether a meeting stops being a meeting if everyone says “workgroup” loudly enough. Since no one in that room is authorized to render binding legal conclusions for the Club, that would be a waste of precious volunteer time. It might, however, serve one useful purpose: they could spend so much time arguing over the label that they forget why they gathered in the first place.

Second, if the meeting survives that opening fog and proceeds along its stated buzzword-laden course, the danger becomes more serious. The Directors may be urged toward consensus, mission alignment, common direction, and better teamwork. Those words sound harmless. They are not harmless if their practical effect is to suppress independent judgment.

Individuality: Not the Problem

Gary described Directors as “lone wolves.” But independence is not a disease. Area Directors are elected to represent their members, bring local concerns to the Board, question officers, challenge defective process, and exercise judgment. Their individuality is not the problem. Their passivity has been the problem.

The Club does not need a faceless blob of lockstep governance. It does not need Directors sedated by corporate team-building language until dissent feels impolite and obedience feels mature. It needs Directors who understand the bylaws, respect the members, ask hard questions, and remember that consensus is only valuable when it forms around duty.

The joke is Schrödinger’s Meeting.

The serious issue is whether the Board still understands what a Director is.

Please view our catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 53: Schrödinger’s Meeting appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

How a private Board meeting became an “informal workgroup” in the spin cycle.

Just when we thought we had enough evidence of the Board’s desire to conduct business in private under an assumed name, the July draft minutes supplied another self-incriminating tidbit. Once again, the Secretary, who works for the Board, called upon his creative writing skills to seriously misrepresent what two Directors said at the meeting.

This, from the same fellow who regularly insists that minutes should reflect what actually happened.

To refresh your memory, the July meeting ended with Fourth Area Director Gary Slagle, K9GWS, calling for what plainly sounded like a pre-planned request for a special meeting of the Directors. His words were:

“…I’ll be requesting Clay to set up a special meeting sometime in the next two weeks. So we can have a discussion and try to come to a consensus on the thing.”

Clay Mayrose, WA6LBU, the Board Chair, then added:

“…we need to come up with a mission and go forward. And I’ll figure out a time and…”

So there we have it: a special meeting, a discussion, a consensus, a mission, and going forward. In most organizations, that would be recognized as Board business. In this one, apparently, it must first pass through the Secretary’s spin cycle.

Creative Writing 101

Here is how Secretary Doug Wittich, N3VEJ, paraphrased the exchange in the July draft minutes:

“K9GWS announced that he is proposing a work group of all the directors to help determine what the focus and direction of the club and directors should be, since everyone is working without common mission. WA6LBU is being asked to schedule such an informal workgroup.”

Workgroup? No. Gary never mentioned a workgroup. The words he used—twice, in fact—were “special meeting”.

All the directors? That sure sounds like a full Board meeting to us.

Informal? No. Gary never said informal.

“Help determine” the focus and direction of the Club? Help whom? Themselves? The Board? The President? The mysterious governance pixies who apparently manage Club policy between meetings?

And that passive little gem, “WA6LBU is being asked,” does some heavy lifting. Asked by whom? For what exact purpose? Gary said he would request that Clay set up a special meeting. Clay said he would figure out a time. That is not the same thing as an informal workgroup, unless words have now been reassigned by executive privilege.

The most honest phrase in the misrepresented paragraph is, “everyone is working without a common mission.” May we suggest that the common mission should be running the Club and abiding by its bylaws and constitution? If that is the case, the Board need not meet. Mac, W6PNY, already hammered home the operative point in his comments on July 11. We are bemused by Gary’s perceived need to amplify, augment, or refute Mac’s cogent exhortation in an additional, private session, to say the least.

Heard with Our Own Ears

Lest anyone accuse us of putting words in people’s mouths, we transcribed the comments attributable to Gary and Clay from the live meeting and checked them against the YouTube video. We published the full text in Absurdist 50. Gary said considerably more than the short excerpt above, and the substance was consistent: the directors needed to get on the same page, define a mission, agree on a direction, and proceed from there. And he requested a special meeting where the Board could come to a consensus.

That is not casual conversation. That is governance.

Now the Secretary has softened the language to make the planned private session appear harmless, as though the directors intended to gather informally to discuss Spain’s 1-0 victory in the World Cup Final and perhaps extract a few leadership lessons about teamwork. But the actual words were about consensus, mission, direction, and going forward.

The paraphrased whitewash sticks out like a sore thumb. It looks pointed and contrived, and it fails in its mission to recharacterize a Board meeting as a casual gathering. So once again, we must ask: who or what does the Board think it is protecting by requiring this kind of obfuscation?

Perhaps this was merely sloppy interpretation by the Secretary. That is possible, though not especially persuasive. If so, the Board needs to take him to task and get the record fixed.

If Doug insists that minutes must accurately represent the content of meetings, then he should be held to that standard. It is his job to produce an accurate record, not to write creative fiction with a parliamentary accent.

The Spin Cycle

But if the President, the Chair, or the Board individually or collectively directed Doug to recast Gary’s and Clay’s comments to camouflage the meeting’s actual purpose and its apparent deviation from the bylaws, then we are no longer dealing with sloppy minutes. We are dealing with something much more serious: an official record being shaped to justify conduct the governing documents do not permit.

First and foremost, the Board is accountable to the members. The Club’s constitution and bylaws protect the members from a rogue Board or President by imposing rules on their actions. Directors tacitly agree to abide by those witten rules when they volunteer to serve the Club and its members. At the very least, they owe us members an explanation of why they cannot do so.

(And oh, by the way, we members do not expect our Directors to all march to the same drummer, whether that amateur percussionist is Gary, Dean, or Donald Trump. Instead, we expect our Directors to hold open meetings and engage in reasoned discourse, which necessarily includes constructive disagreement more often than not. Before the Club can embark on grand, unified Board narrative control projects conducted at a distance from its own membership, it must get its existing house in order. This means tackling difficult issues, rolling up sleeves, and getting hands dirty. Mac got it right and he is one of the few who are willing to do any real work. As for the rest, sitting in a meeting room singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” together in perfect harmony does not solve the Club’s pressing problems).

Please view our catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 52: Dirty Laundry and Laundered Minutes appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

No word from on high.

In Absurdist 51, we must express wonder at the groupthink of this governing body, which seems resolute in its determination to exclude members and even Assistant Area Directors from a discussion that, by its own description, concerns Board mission, direction, consensus, and future conduct.

What in the world could this self-important bunch be thinking?

Why the need for privacy?

Are they working on a patent for cold fusion, or what?

Shielding the Members From the Board?

Or is it the other way around?

Let us return to the obvious question no one in the procedural fog machine seems eager to answer.

Why must this proposed gathering be private?

Not technically private. Not rhetorically private. Not “we are just having a working session” private. Actually private. No notice to the general membership. No member observation. No Assistant Area Directors. No clear agenda. No proper minutes. No meaningful explanation.

The stated purpose, as expressed at the July Board meeting, was to seek consensus, develop a common mission, determine direction, decide what is important, and figure out what the Board wants to focus on. That is not idle chatter. That is not fellowship. That is not a few Directors leaning against the virtual water cooler, pondering whether 40 meters is open to Hawaii.

That is Board business.

Something to hide?

So again, why must the members be shielded from it?

• If the topic is Board mission, why should members not hear it?
• If the topic is Board direction, why should members not observe it?
• If the topic is how Directors will work together, why should Assistant Area Directors and members be excluded?
• If the topic is restoring Board authority, why begin by hiding the Board from the people who elected it?

The answers are not flattering.

• Perhaps the purpose is to spare the President embarrassment after a public challenge to his authority.
• Perhaps the purpose is to spare the Chair embarrassment after his handling of the bylaws became difficult to defend.
• Perhaps the purpose is to spare Directors embarrassment for having ignored their own duties for too long.
• Perhaps the purpose is to transform a discussion of presidential overreach into a soothing plea for unity, collegiality, and “moving forward.”
• Perhaps the purpose is to keep members from seeing just how dysfunctional their governing body has become.

None of those reasons justify secrecy.

They explain it.

There is a difference.

Whom Do the Directors Serve?

A Board acting in the best interest of the membership would not be afraid of member observation. It would welcome it. It would understand that transparency is not an inconvenience. It is part of representative duty.

The Directors do not answer to the President. We have said that repeatedly because the point apparently needs to be driven into the institutional skull with a railroad spike. The President is accountable to the Board.

But the next point is even more important.

The Directors answer to the members.

That is the missing hierarchy.

Area Directors are not elected to become a private governing class, huddling behind closed doors to decide how much institutional discomfort the membership may be permitted to see. They are elected to represent the members of their areas and to act in the best interest of the Club as a whole.

Get Your Priorities Straight!

The collective needs of the members come first. The organizational needs of the Club come next. The personal comfort, embarrassment, irritation, and convenience of individual Directors come a distant third, somewhere behind cleaning expired mayonnaise out of the refrigerator on the governance priority list.

• If Directors are making choices to protect their own comfort, they are serving the wrong master.
• If they are keeping members out because the conversation may be ugly, they are serving the wrong master.
• If they are hiding the discussion because the Board’s dysfunction may be visible, they are serving the wrong master.
• If they are trying to preserve the appearance of unity by suppressing public disagreement, they are serving the wrong master.

The members are not the problem. The members are not fragile children waiting outside the principal’s office while the adults decide how much truth they can handle. The members are the Club.

A Board that treats member observation as a threat has already revealed the defect in its thinking. It has stopped seeing itself as representative and started seeing itself as managerial. Worse, it has started treating governance as something done to the members, not for them.

That is how organizational entropy advances. Not always through dramatic collapse. Sometimes it advances quietly, through private meetings, softened language, sanitized summaries, and the creeping belief that the governing class knows best.

A Club with an elitist Board, insulated from member scrutiny and more concerned with internal comfort than representative duty, is not merely poorly governed.

It is a living, breathing definition of entropic collapse.

The Fog of Consensus

The language surrounding this proposed gathering is soothing: communication, consensus, common mission, direction, working together.

All fine words.

But fine words can also function as fog.

After the July meeting, the Board’s problem was not lack of harmony. The Board’s problem was that serious governance defects had finally been named in public: presidential overreach, defective process, passive Directors, weak chairmanship, report manipulation, and disregard for the bylaws.

So we must ask: consensus around what?

Consensus to restore Board authority? Good.

Consensus to follow the bylaws? Excellent.

Consensus to require transparency, minutes, proper notice, member observation, and accountable officers? Wonderful. We may faint from the novelty.

But if “consensus” means lowering the temperature, stopping public criticism, discouraging inconvenient Directors from speaking forcefully, or persuading members to stop describing the Club’s dysfunction, then this is not reform. It is suppression with a pleasant vocabulary.

A healthy Board addresses the conduct criticized.

A nervous Board addresses the critics.

That distinction matters. If the discussion turns from presidential overreach to “divisiveness,” from bylaws compliance to “tone,” from transparency to “airing dirty laundry,” or from member advocacy to “hurting the Club,” then the meeting’s real purpose will have revealed itself.

The subject will no longer be governance.

It will be narrative control.

The members should watch for that shift. We say “should” because they will not have the opportunity to do so if the Board conducts its meeting in the dark.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

The Problem is Not Vox Incommoda

Obviously, given that the agenda, if one exists, is hidden from public view, we do not know whether any Director or outside critic will become a topic of discussion. Perhaps not.

But if the conversation moves toward how to quiet dissent, manage criticism, or discourage public commentary, that will be telling. The issue is not whether critics are annoying. Critics are supposed to be annoying. The issue is whether their criticism is accurate.

If the criticism is wrong, answer it.

If the criticism is right, fix the problem.

But do not hide the discussion, rename accountability as discord, and then pretend that silence is unity.

Unity is admirable when it forms around duty. It is dangerous when it forms around avoidance.

Vox Incommoda strives to keep the members informed. We present facts, along with opinions drawn from those facts. Our work has clearly reverberated through the Club’s leadership structure, and some within that structure appear uncomfortable with the exposure.

That discomfort is not our problem.

It is the point.

If Club leaders respond to criticism by discussing governance farther from the membership rather than closer to it, then the problem is not Vox Incommoda. The problem is a leadership culture that treats member awareness as a threat.

Members should take note.

The rest is silence.

Please view our catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 51: WHY? appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Every so often, a scientific paper comes along that confirms something I have been preaching long enough to become tiresome. This is one of those happy occasions.

The paper, published in Frontiers in Physiology, is titled “The Power of Creatine Plus Resistance Training for Healthy Aging: Enhancing Physical Vitality and Cognitive Function.” Its authors argue that creatine monohydrate combined with progressive resistance training should be recognized as a safe and effective nonpharmacological strategy for preventing and treating sarcopenia.

In other words, my obsession with lifting heavy objects and consuming creatine is not merely the peculiar hobby of an old fart unwilling to go gently into decrepitude. It is a defensible anti-sarcopenia program supported by a substantial body of research.

Sarcopenia Is Not Just Looking Scrawny

Sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle strength, muscle mass, muscle quality, and physical function. It is associated with frailty, falls, disability, loss of independence, and reduced quality of life. The paper also notes an association with cognitive decline.

That deserves more attention than it receives.

Most people regard muscle loss as an aesthetic problem. Grandpa’s arms become thinner, his shoulders slump, and his pants hang loosely where his butt once resided. Everybody shrugs and says, “Well, he’s getting older.”

Yes, he is. That is precisely the problem.

Muscle is not decorative upholstery. It is the machinery that gets us out of chairs, carries groceries, stabilizes joints, protects bones, catches us when we stumble, and keeps us from spending our final years being hoisted from one surface to another by younger people with unfortunate attitudes.

Loss of strength also can become self-reinforcing. Movement becomes harder, so the individual moves less. Moving less accelerates the loss of muscle and function. Eventually, walking from the recliner to the refrigerator becomes the day’s major athletic event.

That is not inevitable aging. It is often aging combined with inactivity, inadequate nutrition, chronic disease, and an almost complete absence of meaningful muscular loading.

Enter the GLP-1 Era

This problem has taken on greater urgency with the explosive popularity of GLP-1 receptor agonists and related incretin drugs.

Let me state my position clearly. I am not opposed to these drugs. I take Mounjaro for Type 2 diabetes. Tirzepatide helped me lose approximately 70 pounds while dramatically improving my glycemic control. It has been one of the most effective drugs I have ever used.

However, enthusiasm for GLP-1 drugs has created a culture in which any reduction in scale weight is automatically classified as success.

Twenty pounds down? Wonderful.

Forty pounds down? Spectacular.

Sixty pounds down? Call the influencer and pose beside an old pair of pants.

Nobody asks what was in those pounds.

Not Just Fat

Weight loss is not chemically selective. The human body does not receive instructions to remove only the unwanted abdominal fat while carefully preserving every ounce of skeletal muscle. During substantial weight loss, some lean tissue is usually lost along with fat unless deliberate measures are taken to protect it.

In the DXA substudy of the SURMOUNT-1 tirzepatide trial, approximately 75 percent of the weight lost was fat mass and 25 percent was lean mass. That was a favorable ratio compared with many weight-loss interventions, but one-quarter of a large weight loss is not trivial. A person losing 60 pounds at that ratio could lose about 15 pounds of lean tissue. Lean mass is not identical to skeletal muscle, because it includes water and other fat-free tissues, but neither should it be dismissed as meaningless statistical debris.

For a 35-year-old with abundant muscle reserve, some loss of lean tissue might be recoverable. For a sedentary 75-year-old who began with declining strength, limited muscle mass, poor protein intake, and no history of resistance training, the same loss could push that person closer to disability.

Rapid weight loss can therefore produce a peculiar outcome: a smaller body that is metabolically improved but physically weaker.

The scale applauds. The quadriceps file a grievance.

The Drug Does Not Lift the Weight

GLP-1 drugs reduce appetite, which is their principal attraction. Unfortunately, reduced appetite can also make it harder to consume adequate protein and total energy.

People who previously ate too much can abruptly find eating to be a chore. Meals shrink. Protein intake becomes incidental. Some patients subsist on coffee, crackers, half a protein shake, and the gratifying knowledge that the bathroom scale has rewarded them again.

Meanwhile, the body is operating under an energy deficit. If it is not given sufficient protein and a compelling reason to retain muscle, it can use some of that tissue to help settle the accounts.

Resistance training provides that compelling reason.

The drug cannot do it.

Protein alone cannot do it.

Creatine alone cannot do it.

Walking alone cannot do it.

Water aerobics alone cannot do it.

A resistance band used for six minutes on alternate Tuesdays while watching television probably will not do it either.

Muscle must be challenged. The challenge must occur repeatedly, and it must progress as the body adapts. That is the meaning of progressive resistance training. It does not require competitive powerlifting, but it does require more than ceremonial movement.

What the Paper Found

The Frontiers paper is an opinion article, not a new randomized clinical trial. Several of its authors also have creatine-related consulting, research, advisory, or industry relationships, so the customary eyebrow should remain raised.

However, the paper did not construct its argument from supplement advertising and locker-room folklore. It assembled evidence from clinical trials, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, epidemiological studies, professional position statements, and regulatory assessments.

Among the findings it summarized:

• Creatine added to resistance training produced greater gains in lean tissue and strength than resistance training alone.
• One meta-analysis reported approximately 1.4 kilograms of additional lean-tissue gain in older adults taking creatine while training.
• An umbrella review of eight systematic reviews concluded that adding creatine to progressive resistance training improved muscle mass and strength in adults 65 and older.
• In one analysis of combined exercise and nutritional interventions, creatine was the only nutrient demonstrating a synergistic effect with resistance training on lean body mass.
• Creatine supplementation has also been associated with improvements in sit-to-stand performance and other measures of physical function.

The paper’s basic conclusion is refreshingly uncomplicated: resistance training works, creatine appears to enhance the response, and the combination should be promoted as a public-health strategy for older adults.

What They Recommend

The authors cite conventional recommendations for older adults:

• Resistance training two or three days per week
• Exercises covering the major muscle groups
• One to three sets per exercise
• Approximately 8 to 12 or 10 to 15 repetitions
• Loads in the general vicinity of 70 to 85 percent of one-repetition maximum
• Progressive increases in workload as strength improves

They also discuss creatine doses ranging from the familiar 3 to 5 grams per day to approximately 0.1 to 0.14 grams per kilogram of body weight per day.

The European Food Safety Authority has recognized a cause-and-effect relationship between creatine combined with resistance training and increased muscle strength in adults over 55. Its qualifying regimen involves 3 grams of creatine daily and resistance training at least three times per week at roughly 65 to 75 percent of one-repetition maximum.

This is not an endorsement of flapping pastel dumbbells around in a senior exercise circle while a relentlessly cheerful instructor plays music from 1967. The recommended loads are real training loads.

My Version of the Paradigm

I am 79 years old and rapidly approaching 80, which is not “80 years young.” Eighty is old. It took me almost 80 years to get here, and I refuse to have that accomplishment linguistically repossessed by smarmy euphemism.

My program is more extensive than the minimum described in the paper. I generally train five or six days per week, often for close to two hours. My wife tells me I train too often. My old body sometimes agrees. But I am a stubborn old fart. My training is divided so that muscle groups recover while others are being abused.

The program includes presses, rows, pulldowns, leg work, accessory movements, and heavy hip hinging. I use free weights, machines, dumbbells, barbells, a cambered Swiss bar, and a trap bar. I train for strength and hypertrophy rather than merely moving for movement’s sake.

My recent trap-bar deadlift work has included four sets of five repetitions at 265 pounds, followed by an easily completed single at 275. My goal is a 315-pound deadlift for five or six reps. My bench-press work has typically been around 135 pounds for multiple sets of five, with a longer-term goal of pressing approximately my body weight for four or five repetitions.

Given that I am an orthopedic surgeon’s midsummer night’s dream, with creaky joints, impingements, herniations, tendinopathy, and enough neuromuscular issues to be considered a cash cow, I believe that I have set reasonably reachable goals.

No Gym-Bro Bragging

These numbers will not disturb the competitive powerlifting community. They are not supposed to. The relevant point is that I am progressively loading my muscles at an age when society expects me to devote myself to shuffleboard and discussions about stool softeners.

I also consume approximately 135 grams of protein per day. At a bodyweight near 180 pounds, or about 82 kilograms, that amounts to roughly 1.6 grams per kilogram. My kidney function requires that protein intake be monitored rather than pursued with meatheaded abandon, so I have settled on a compromise intended to support training without pretending that chronic kidney disease is merely an administrative inconvenience.

I take 10 grams of creatine monohydrate daily. At 80 kilograms, that works out to 0.125 grams per kilogram, which lands squarely inside the weight-based range discussed in the paper. My recommendation is that if you are considering creatine, get pure creatine monohydrate powder with no additives. Claims of superiority for fancier formulations are generally false. And no creatine gummies. Those little sugar bombs have been analyzed by various labs and found to be inconsistent in the amount of creatine they actually contain. But I digress.

Back to the main point of this section, my program is not merely compatible with the authors’ model. It is essentially their model with more training volume, heavier loads, and a somewhat more obsessive operator.

Training Does Not Mean Ignoring Damage

Serious resistance training does not mean behaving stupidly.

Recall that I underwent surgical repair of an inguinal hernia last December. That caused a temporary training setback, as one might expect.

I have a cervical fusion with a historically broken screw, lumbar spinal stenosis, an elderly hip replacement, an arthritic knee, and more recently a combination of rotator-cuff strain and biceps tendinitis. My physical therapist has advised me to continue training but to stop or modify movements when pain exceeds an acceptable threshold.

That is not surrender. It is load management.

Exercises can be changed. Range of motion can be adjusted. Machines can replace free weights temporarily. Volume can be reduced. A painful movement can be removed while the rest of the body continues to train.

The choice is not between reckless lifting and becoming one with the recliner. That false dichotomy is usually offered by people who prefer the recliner.

The Cardio Reflex

Tell an older adult to exercise and his mind usually turns immediately to walking.

Perhaps it turns to swimming, bicycling, pickleball, golf, or a class involving coordinated arm movements and communal optimism. These activities can improve cardiovascular fitness, balance, mobility, recreation, and social engagement. Walking is especially accessible, and I do plenty of it. I hike, use a treadmill, and pay attention to aerobic conditioning.

But cardio does not make resistance training optional.

Walking uses the strength one already has. It does not reliably provide sufficient progressive overload to build or preserve all the muscle needed for continued independence.

A daily walk might help someone remain a better walker. It will not adequately train the upper body for pushing, pulling, lifting, carrying, or catching oneself during a fall. It also does little to prepare a person to rise from the floor, move furniture, hoist luggage, or perform the countless tasks requiring strength beyond repeated low-intensity locomotion.

Even lower-body muscles eventually adapt to ordinary walking. Once adapted, there is little additional stimulus. The body is efficient, which is usually admirable but inconvenient when we need it to retain expensive muscle tissue.

Resistance training gives the body a reason to maintain that tissue.

Cardiorespiratory fitness matters to longevity. So do strength, muscle quality, balance, and functional reserve. Presenting aerobic activity as the required exercise while treating resistance training as an optional hobby for vain people and former high-school athletes is a serious mistake.

Older adults need both.

Not one or the other.

Not cardio plus resistance training “if tolerated” when that phrase really means nobody intends to teach or supervise it.

Both.

The GLP-1 Prescription Is Incomplete Without Muscle Preservation

When physicians prescribe GLP-1 drugs to older adults, the discussion should not end with nausea, constipation, injection technique, and a target weight.

It should include a plan for preserving muscle.

Alas, many physicians, including the legendary Dr. DeLorean lazily neglect this important obligation. Certainly, prescription mills, also known as compounders, tend to either engage the patient with token exercise counseling or skip it completely. But a comprehensive, holistic muscle preservation plan is not optional no matter how badly they want you as a patient or client.

That plan should involve adequate protein, progressive resistance training, monitoring of strength and function, and consideration of creatine when medically appropriate. A bathroom scale cannot distinguish fat from muscle, and BMI is even less helpful. A patient can reach a celebrated target weight while quietly surrendering physical reserve.

Clinicians should care whether patients can rise from a chair without using their arms, climb stairs, carry groceries, maintain walking speed, recover from illness, and avoid falls. Those outcomes matter more than whether an electronic scale displays a satisfyingly smaller integer.

The current GLP-1 culture too often celebrates maximum weight loss as though the objective were to ship the lightest possible patient into old age.

That is not my objective.

My objective is excellent glycemic control, reduced excess fat, preserved strength, retained muscle, and sufficient physical capacity to remain independent and continue doing the things I enjoy.

Mounjaro is one tool in that project. It is not the project manager.

The Bottom Line

Creatine will not prevent sarcopenia while sitting untouched beside the coffee maker.

Protein will not preserve muscle that is never asked to perform meaningful work.

Walking will not substitute for progressively loading the major muscle groups.

And GLP-1-induced weight loss should not be celebrated without asking how much useful tissue accompanied the fat on its way out the door.

The paper validates the paradigm I have adopted: progressive resistance training as the foundation, adequate protein as the construction material, and creatine as a modest but useful performance and adaptation enhancer.

At my age, the goal is not to become young. That ship sailed while Eisenhower was president.

The goal is to remain capable.

That requires heart and lungs that can keep going, but it also requires enough functioning muscle to move the machinery. Any longevity program that treats resistance training as optional has omitted a major system component and should be returned to engineering for redesign.

Peptide Purgatory is a regular feature of this blog. For an annotated catalog of all my Mounjaro, GLP-1, and Peptide Purgatory updates, please visit my Mounjaro Update Catalog page.

The post Peptide Purgatory: Lose the Fat, Keep the Machinery appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

“Any Director who finds member observation inconvenient should reconsider why he ran for office in the first place.”

Vox Incommoda, sometimes referred to as “The Arborist” or “The Absurdist,” does not need to have been a tree surgeon to have heard the leaves rustling. In the wind is yet another inept entropy-masking maneuver, one that confirms the cynicism we expressed in Absurdist 49.

In that prior opus, we opined that a special meeting of Directors to get everyone “on the same page” sounded suspiciously like organizational therapy. We questioned whether such a meeting would produce reform or merely provide a soothing venue for everyone to agree that public disagreement is unpleasant.

We strongly suggested that they hold any such meeting in full view of the general membership.

A Note of Thanks

Our words seem to have resonated with some of you out there. The comments we received were quite flattering. And yes, we can assure you that we will continue writing these dispatches from the shrubbery. But we cannot please all the people all the time.

We do not expect our message to resonate with everyone. Healthy disagreement is essential to collaborative progress.

If the President and the Board find our words inconvenient, that is our intent. We are critical of governance because members deserve an advocate. Our essays aim to shake up the old order and work toward a better future for the Club and its members. Having viewed the creaky decision engine of this organization from the inside for a decade, we understand its serious and persistent issues. By commenting on them, we attempt to align our thoughts with the interests of the general membership, not the governing elite.

Once again, this arborist thanks concerned members for your support and for shaking the trees. You have produced copious low-hanging fruit, some ripe, some rotten. We will chew on some of it here and hope we do not require paregoric to forestall projectile vomiting.

What Is in the Wind

What we can piece together from the July meeting and general scuttlebutt, is that the Board apparently intends to proceed with some sort of potentially private meeting, without serving notice to the general membership, without a specific agenda, and under some suitably grandiloquent label dredged up from a 1985 corporate HR playbook to disguise its purpose.

We are told that the form of this proposed Directors’ meeting may not yet be settled. Good. Then let us be clear before anyone wanders farther into the procedural swamp: if this gathering is a Board meeting, it must comply with the bylaws. If it is not a Board meeting, it must not conduct Board business.

We are bemused by the notion that the Board feels it needs to shield itself from the watchful eyes of the membership that elected it.

Absurdist 50 asks whether the Board understands the concept of a meeting, no matter what they might call it, and whether it is best serving the interest of the membership by contemplating a dark session.

Just a Tea Party?

Recall that near the close of the July 11 regular Board meeting, Fourth Area Director Gary Slagle, K9GWS, proposed a meeting of Directors to discuss how they could better work together. At the time, this seemed to be a hasty and conveniently soothing suggestion from a Director who is typically more reactive than proactive. But it is not much of a stretch for this arborist to suspect that the seed for that blighted sapling may have been sown well before the opening gavel.

Early indications are that the proposed confab will be conducted without member observation. If this is true, we feel that the Board fears the consequences of airing its dirty laundry in public.

How can they get away with that? They apparently are banking on the simplistic evasion tactic of changing the name of the meeting to something that suggests it is not a meeting, Well, a meeting, by any other name, is still a meeting.

We hope some of these rumors are bogus. Our subject organization must conduct Board business in the open, as its own bylaws require. There is still time to do this properly, which would be a refreshing novelty.

What’s It All About, Gary?

Gary’s own statement confirms that the proposal was prepared long before the meeting ended, based on his comment that everybody would “see something in your email tomorrow.” Here’s the transcript of his comments:

“The problem the board has… you’ll see something in your email tomorrow — I was going to request that we have a special meeting try to get consensus among the board members. There’s no consensus, no common mission, no direction. And if you want to work together effectively, you gotta have those things. And everybody’s sort of a lone wolf here doing their own thing, and um I think the Board needs to come together and agree on what the mission is and where we want to go and what’s important to the Board.

“And the rest of the stuff that comes along, so be it. But we gotta decide what’s important and what we want to focus on. And we have not done that ever that I know of. So you’ll see something from me tomorrow and I’ll be requesting Clay to set up a special meeting sometime in the next two weeks. So we can have a discussion and try to come to a consensus on the thing.”

Have a discussion and come to a consensus? Special meeting? That is doing Board business, even if you change its name from “special meeting” to “labrador retriever” later on.

Say What, Clay?

Clay added some of his own comments: “I will state I agree with Gary. The Board has very little communications between all of us and it’s been that way long before I’ve been on the board. I think we just go with the flow and I agree, we need to come up with a mission and go forward. And I’ll figure out a time and—“

Come up with a mission? That sure sounds like doing Board business.

Gary and Clay’s own words defeat the word-game defense. They did not propose this as a social conversation, a training session, or harmless Director fellowship. Gary called it a special meeting and stated its purpose: consensus, common mission, direction, priorities, and what the Board wants to focus on. Clay agreed that the Board needed to come up with a mission and go forward. That is Board business. Calling it something else does not change its substance.

A private conversation becomes governance when Directors gather to decide mission, direction, priorities, and future conduct. If the Board wants to talk privately, fine. If the Board wants consensus, direction, and a path forward, then it has wandered into Board business. It must follow the bylaws like everyone else with a Third Grade reading level.

So what is this thing?

A special Board meeting? Then notice it properly. Do not exclude members from observing.

An informal Directors’ caucus? Then do not conduct Board business.

A damage-control gathering to lower the temperature and encourage everyone to stop embarrassing the President in public?

Now we may be getting somewhere.

The meeting’s purpose is not difficult to infer. We do not even need a power pole saw to prune away the irrelevant branches. It is all there for everyone to see. So, what’s the big secret?

“…agree on what the mission is and where we want to go,” uttered at the July 11 meeting, sounds like a euphemism for: let us stop airing ugly governance problems in front of the members, lower the temperature, get everyone back on the same page, and resume the comfortable undead shuffle of deferring to Dean.

Line up those rubber stamps. We are going to need them again, alas.

Calling It a Labrador Retriever

We are told that some Directors now understand the distinction between informal discussion and Board action. We are happy to learn of that sign of life. That is progress, assuming it survives contact with the next round of secret discussions.

We are also told that others appear ready to proceed with the theory that if a Board gathering is called something other than a meeting, the bylaws politely vanish. Call it a working session, executive session, caucus, salon, quilting bee, or labrador retriever. The name is not the issue.

That evasion fails.

The issue is what happens there.

If Directors merely talk among themselves, exchange views, and leave without decisions, directives, procedures, commitments, or conclusions later treated as Board action, then the gathering may be informal sausage-making.

If they discuss Board authority, presidential overreach, Board procedure, future conduct, internal discipline, committee control, meeting practice, agenda handling, or how Directors should behave going forward, and then produce a summary for the next Board packet, the Club is much closer to Board business than casual conversation.

The bylaws do not exist only when the Board finds them convenient. A Board cannot restore governance by playing word games with the documents that define governance.

So, Is This a Board Meeting, Already?

No one seems to understand, or perhaps no one wishes to understand, that the bylaws govern a Board meeting regardless of what label is pasted on it. The bylaws require Board meetings to allow observation by interested members. Special meetings require notice and an agenda to the Board, Assistant Area Directors, and the general membership. Special meeting agendas must be provided through the current Club method to members, Area Directors, Assistant Area Directors, and Officers.

There is no apparent loophole allowing Directors to conduct Board business in private because public discussion became uncomfortable.

If this is a Board meeting, it must comply with the bylaws.

If it is not a Board meeting, then it should not conduct Board business, establish Board procedure, resolve Board controversies, rehabilitate presidential authority, discipline dissent, or generate conclusions later laundered into the next agenda package as though something official occurred.

When they finally figure out what form this gathering will take, we hope it fits one of those two descriptions. A private gathering cannot be both informal enough to avoid the bylaws and formal enough to shape Board conduct. With apologies to Gertrude Stein, a meeting is a meeting is a meeting.

Or Is It Damage Control?

So let us call this what it appears to be, if it proceeds as rumored: a closed-door effort to sweep visible disagreement under the rug for the supposed good of the Club. The July meeting exposed presidential overreach, weak chairmanship, passive Directors, defective process, and internal distress. A healthy Board would address those issues openly, in a properly noticed meeting, with members allowed to observe.

A captured Board moves the discussion behind closed doors and calls it healing.

Call it what it is: damage control.

Hope Springs Eternal

We have reason to believe that some Directors are now trying, sincerely, to change the direction of the Club and restore the Board as an effective governing body. We welcome that. Indeed, we have been screaming for exactly that, though apparently some people needed the message delivered by bulldog at the July meeting.

But reform is not just attitude. It is process. If the Board wants members to believe that it is reclaiming authority, it should begin by following the bylaws in full view of the members it represents.

And if the President and the Board cannot live by the Club’s own bylaws and Florida statutory corporation law, why not just dissolve the corporation, scrap the bylaws, and do whatever they want whenever they want? Why bother with the charade of selective compliance only when it is convenient?

Whom Do the Directors Serve?

Throughout these essays, we have hammered home a simple point: the Directors do not answer to the President. The reverse is true. The President is accountable to the Board.

But that raises the next and more important question: to whom are the Directors accountable?

The answer should be obvious. They answer to the members.

Area Directors are not elected to become a private governing class, huddling behind closed doors to decide how much institutional discomfort the membership may be permitted to see. They are elected to represent the members of their areas and to act in the best interest of the Club as a whole. Conducting Board business in private, or even appearing to do so, does not restore confidence. It widens the distance between the Board and the members it is supposed to serve.

All this talk about mission, consensus, direction, and working together misses the point if the Directors forget whose interests are primary. The mission is not protecting the President from embarrassment. It is not preserving Board collegiality at the expense of transparency. It is not sweeping visible disagreement under the rug so everyone can resume the appearance of calm. The master to be served is the membership.

A Board that hides from the members while claiming to clarify its mission has already lost sight of the mission. The members are not spectators to be managed. They are the Club. Any Director who finds member observation inconvenient should reconsider why he ran for office in the first place.

A Club with an elitist Board, insulated from its members and more concerned with internal comfort than representative duty, is not merely poorly governed. It is a living, breathing definition of entropic collapse.

A Long Half-Life

A Director spoke up publicly about Board dysfunction and Presidential overreach. The fallout appears to be feigned introspection, engineered accountability, and hand-wringing over “the mission”, all taking the form of a “come to Jesus” session carefully shielded from the members.

Whether staged in advance or assembled opportunistically afterward, the structure is obvious. A public challenge to presidential overreach is answered by contrition, a volunteer-loss narrative, and a private meeting about unity. The issue then shifts from “Did the President exceed his authority?” to “Why are critics damaging the Club?” That is not reform. It is narrative repair.

We do not know whether Vox Incommoda will be discussed at this private gathering. Perhaps not. But if these essays do become part of the conversation, that will not be evidence of their excess. It will be evidence of their impact. A healthy Board would address the governance problems. A nervous Board discusses the person describing them.

But let us hope that our elected directors focus on who put them there, not on the annoying arborist they view as an inconvenient reminder of their shortcomings.

The Ultimate Test

Before any official decision, each Director needs to ensure that the answer to the following question is an unequivocal “yes”:

Is this in the best interests of the Club’s members?

Can anyone honestly say that a closed meeting meets that criterion?

A closed meeting would not cure the July fallout.

It would become part of it.

Please view my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda, occasionally incorrectly referred to as “the guy who calls himself Absurdist”.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 50: Behind Closed Doors? appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

We briefly recapped the July Board meeting in Absurdist 48. During that meeting, the Tenth Area Director issued a call to arms for Directors to start acting like Directors, especially in connection with a President who had increasingly stretched, blurred, or exceeded the limits of his authority.

The President sat silently through much of the meeting. The Board Chair, whose uncertain grasp of the bylaws became difficult to ignore, was defensive throughout. A member complaint against the President and another member was removed from the agenda after the Chair concluded that it did not belong there in the first place, a curious outcome for an agenda the Chair himself had issued. Directors were admonished to read and understand the governing documents. The Fourth Area Director suggested a special meeting of Directors.

The organic organizational upheaval had begun. Apparently, governance sometimes arrives late, confused, and without a clean agenda item, but it arrives.

Absurdist 49 focuses on three sequels to the July meeting.

First, the President issued a remarkable declaration that he had exceeded his authority in connection with the disputed NCS check-in directive.

Second, the President informed the Board that the Centurion editor, who was also the member named in the complaint removed from the agenda, had asked to be replaced.

Third, we will consider the proposed Directors’ meeting suggested by the Fourth Area Director, and whether it will become a genuine effort to restore Board authority or merely another well-intentioned fog bank.

Uncharacteristic Contrition

On Sunday, the day after the July meeting, President Dean Davis posted the following on the NCS reflector.

-- 
Dean Davis, KL7OR
President,
The 3905 Century Club, Inc.
(3905 Master No 80)
Hams Over IP Extension: 104069

The abject tone of this notice represents such a remarkable departure from Dean’s past behavior that we are impelled to peer beneath the surface. Indeed, one long-time member who has known Dean throughout his Club history privately commented, “I’m baffled because this isn’t the Dean I’ve known for 21 years.”

Preserving the Oblique References

Dean’s “well-intentioned effort to help members,” however, is the giveaway that the old Dean has not yet left the building. The effort in question was not a broad effort to help “members.” It was an accommodation made in response to the preference of one member, Buddy Spiegel, W3BS, after an NCS attempted to follow the posted NCS Guide.

While Dean has limited authority over net procedures, abusing that authority to accommodate a favored member who circumvented normal channels is not good administration. It is an abuse of discretion. Worse, it undermined the authority of an NCS who was doing his job and created yet another special exception for NCS operators to remember while running already complicated nets.

Rescinding the hastily implemented fiat rule was appropriate. Dean could have stopped there.

However, the final paragraph takes it a step further. Dean suggests that he is now reviewing his responsibilities and authority as defined in the Club’s Constitution and Bylaws. This is baffling, because those limits were already known to him. He voted to approve the most recent bylaws rewrite, which clearly stated the President’s responsibilities. The Constitution, reviewed twice under his watch, clearly places executive authority in the Board of Directors. The President is not the Board’s supervisor. He is an officer accountable to the Board.

Time will tell whether this notice represents genuine institutional self-correction, tactical retreat, or simply a pause while the next maneuver is assembled in the garage.

For now, Dean appears to be taking a step back from his power grab. In this organization, even temporary contact with the brakes deserves notice.

A Newsletter Transition, or Another Continuity Test?

Dean posted the following in the Board reflector.

--
Dean Davis, KL7OR
President,
The 3905 Century Club, Inc.
(3905 Master No 80)
Hams Over IP Extension: 104069

Buddy has asked to be replaced as Centurion editor. We thank him for his service and hope the transition is handled promptly, professionally, and with proper preservation of files, templates, mailing lists, publication records, and historical materials.

We will not speculate about the reasons for the Centurion editor’s requested replacement. Volunteers step away for many reasons, including family obligations, health, fatigue, and simple loss of interest. The proper response is not gossip. It is orderly transition.

A Leadership Move, or a CYA?

Focusing for a moment on Dean’s comment, note that he has presented the Board with “the opportunity” to help find a replacement. This could be read in more than one way.

Read charitably, it is a useful invitation for Area Directors to become more involved in volunteer recruitment. That would be a good thing. Area Directors should know their members, identify capable volunteers, and encourage broader participation in Club functions. If Dean is asking Directors to help identify and vet candidates, that is collaborative leadership.

Read less charitably, it is more like the old Dean. The request diffuses responsibility across the Board and creates a ready-made explanation if the position remains vacant: the Directors were given “the opportunity” and failed to produce a replacement. In that reading, the message amounts to, “If you are going to tell me I work for you, then you can find me a new editor.”

Continuity is the Key

Either way, the Board should treat the Centurion transition as an institutional continuity issue, not merely a personnel vacancy.

The outgoing editor should transfer whatever exists: source files, mailing procedures, publication records, contributor contacts, templates, artwork, mailing lists, and historical materials. If little exists, that is itself useful information. It means the next editor is not merely inheriting a newsletter, but rebuilding one.

The question is not only whether files are preserved. The question is whether the Centurion still has an editorial system worth preserving. If the answer is no, the Board should see the editor transition as an opportunity to restore the newsletter as a real Club publication rather than a thin wrapper around presidential messaging and recycled filler.

Volunteer transitions are not private arrangements. They are continuity events. The Club should stop relying on personality, memory, and accidental file custody as its records-management strategy, a system known technically as “waiting for the next avoidable disaster.”

Board Therapy, or Board Reform?

Shortly before the close of the July Board meeting, in the wake of the Board wake-up call delivered by Mac McCracken, W6PNY, Tenth Area Director, the Fourth Area Director, Gary Slagle, K9GWS, proposed a special meeting for Directors to discuss how they can better work together.

Let us say that we look upon such corporate folderol with a jaundiced eye.

Having spent time in management and as a consultant for organizations ranging from academe to nonprofits to Fortune 500 corporations, we have developed a healthy disdain for meetings held because no one wants to say directly what the actual problem is. Such meetings typically have a stated purpose and a real purpose. The stated purpose is usually communication, teamwork, collegiality, alignment, or some other soothing abstraction suitable for embroidered throw pillows. The real purpose is often damage control.

That may be the case here.

Solving for X

The ostensible purpose of this meeting is to explore better communication and collegial decision-making among the eleven elected Directors. These are adults, middle-aged and older. Why they need an after-school conference with the teacher to learn how to play nicely together remains unclear. Yet, after Mac’s pointed exhortation that Directors begin acting like Directors, no one apparently wished to say aloud that a meeting about “working together” might be beside the point.

The issue is not whether Directors are sufficiently cordial. The issue is whether they understand and exercise their authority.

Do we really need a special meeting to introduce Directors to the Constitution and Bylaws? To read them aloud as a group exercise? To discover, with communal astonishment, that the Board governs the Club and the President reports to the Board? Come on, now.

If Directors truly cannot fathom why they are on the Board or how they should conduct business, one meeting will not fix them. Some may show their true colors by skipping it. Others may attend, nod solemnly, enjoy the illusion of progress, and return home to business as usual. A few loyalists may try to redirect the discussion toward better relations with the President, as though the central problem were tone rather than control.

That would reveal one possible purpose of the meeting: to convert a discussion of presidential overreach into a plea for institutional niceness.

No.

The Board does not need therapy. It needs governance.

Same Cast of Characters?

If this meeting is chaired by the current Board Chair, who is himself part of the Board’s dysfunction, expectations should be restrained. The July meeting exposed serious problems with his understanding and administration of the bylaws. If Directors are serious about becoming an effective governing body, replacing him should be on the table. That is not personal cruelty. It is corporate hygiene. The Chair serves the Board. If the Chair cannot protect the Board’s authority, manage the agenda properly, and understand the governing documents, the Board should elect someone who can.

That is how a functional Board operates.

“Grow a Pair”

At the July meeting, Eighth Area Director Gene Marsh, W8NET, reportedly urged the Board to “get some balls.” Crude? Perhaps. Memorable? Certainly. Accurate? Increasingly difficult to dispute.

Still, we remain skeptical that this pusillanimous group can collectively grow a pair by scheduling a special meeting and calling it progress. A meeting is not reform. It is a room. What matters is what Directors do in that room.

If the meeting produces concrete action, it may be useful. In such a meeting, Directors would move the Club’s governance forward. They would:

• Define the limits of presidential authority.
• Reaffirm that the Board controls its minutes, reports, agendas, and committee processes.
• Establish that committee reports are subject to Board discussion.
• Require orderly volunteer transitions.
• Decide how Board packets are finalized and revised.
• Determine whether the Chair is capable of continuing in that role.
• Decide whether the President and other officers attend as participants, observers, or not at all.

In short, they should govern.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

It is also unclear whether the President and Vice President will be invited to sit at the table. That question matters. The Articles and Constitution identify the Board as the eleven elected Directors. Officers are not Directors merely because they are given courtesy votes. If this is a Directors’ meeting about restoring Board authority and organization, then it should be clear whether officers are present by right, by invitation, or not at all. A meeting about Board independence should not begin by muddling who belongs in the room. That would be too on brand, and we are tired.

Nor should the meeting be conducted in secret if its purpose is to reshape Board practice. The membership has a legitimate interest in whether its elected Directors understand their duties. At minimum, the meeting should be noticed, open to members, and followed by a written summary of conclusions and actions. If anything important happens, it should happen transparently. If nothing important happens, the members deserve to know that too.

The Bottom Line

The danger is obvious. The special meeting could become a performative session in which Directors sing “Kumbaya, My Lord,” congratulate themselves for attending, and return to the same habits that created the problem. The President would then have survived the July challenge with little more than a temporary apology and a fresh fog bank.

But the opportunity is also obvious.

If Directors use the meeting to reclaim their authority, correct their procedures, demand accountability, and make hard decisions about leadership, the July meeting may prove to have been more than a flare-up. It may have been the beginning of institutional recovery.

We are not predicting that outcome.

We are merely leaving room for the possibility, because even cynicism should occasionally stretch its legs.

Please view my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda, occasionally incorrectly referred to as “the guy who calls himself Absurdist”.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 49: Radioactive Fallout appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Before we comment on the meeting, we acknowledge the First Area Director’s unsolicited promotion of our essays. Although he referred to Vox Incommoda as “the guy who calls himself Absurdist,” we think everyone knew what he meant. For future reference, we are available to provide accurate promotional copy. We would hate for our free advertising to suffer from branding defects.

Absurdist 48 is a loose collection of comments on the July Board meeting. We applaud what may prove to be a seminal moment in the Board’s awakening, while recognizing that awakening is not the same thing as getting out of bed, finding pants, and governing.

Still, progress is progress. We take what we can get.

Minutes Discussion

The Board discussed May and June minutes, touching on editorial comments and extraneous items before voting to approve both. The key points here were that no one impeded the discussion, and the approval by acclamation process was abolished in favor of a roll call vote. Let us hope that this persists.

Financial Discussion

The Second Area Director brought up the point that award production and revenue appeared to be anemic, and wondered aloud whether the fee increase had anything to do with that, and how did it affect the budget. The Treasurer responded that we do not do budgets monthly and that a large percentage of the awards were PDFs so the Awards Secretary’s variable expenses are low as a result. He agreed to look at a comparison against last year to date offline, which will likely go nowhere. Meanwhile, the DX Area Director spoke up to say that the Club is running a surplus year-to-date, so we are doing OK.

Old Business

There was none. Really?

What happened with the logo contest? We thought the Chair had deferred that issue to July for a Board vote. Yet nothing at all suggested that the logo project even existed.

And what of the Discord project? No mention whatsoever.

New Business

At this point, referring to the complaint by Virgil, the Chair advised the Board that there was no new business because the complaint did not belong on the agenda in the first place.

Excuse me, but is the Chair not responsible for the agenda? If the complaint was placed on the agenda, the Chair needed to approve it. Now he is saying it did not belong there at all.

He is probably correct in his interpretation that the complaint should have been routed to the affected Area Directors before it was routed to the full Board. But that begs the question: How did it get on the agenda in the first place? Does anyone read the bylaws?

Since the complaint is against the both the President, a Seventh Area member, and W3BS, a Fourth Area member, this could get complicated. Virgil himself is a Ninth Area member, so as we see it, the Area Directors of the Fourth, Seventh, and Ninth areas need to discuss this among themselves and with the three members to attempt to achieve resolution.

Q&A

The Tenth Area Director requested the floor to deliver a prepared statement to the Board, describing presidential overreach and the Board’s complicity in allowing it to occur. Shortly after initiating his remarks, the First Area Director asked whether those words were actually from “the guy who calls himself Absurdist.” The Tenth Area Director, although annoyed by the impertinent question, responded evenly with an assurance that the words were his own.

He was challenged again by the Third Area Director, who asked for specific examples of presidential overreach. The Tenth Area Director responded with half a dozen clear-cut instances, including directing the Board to return to rubber-stamp approvals of minutes and financial, manipulating motions on agendas, and scrapping the 2025 NCS Guide.

Mac then exhorted the Board to get its act together, read the documents, and understand the duties they were elected to perform, including holding the President accountable for his actions. He then yielded the floor back to the Chair.

Path Forward

The Fourth Area Director suggested that the Board hold a special meeting to discuss Board responsibilities and how Directors, officers, and volunteers should work together going forward.

We find it odd that a special meeting is needed to discuss what should be obvious. The Board governs the Club. The President implements Board policy. The Chair serves the Board. The Secretary preserves the Board’s record. Area Directors represent the members. This should not require a retreat, a workshop, a flowchart, or interpretive dance.

But if a special meeting is what it takes, then have the meeting. Do not make it a diversion from the task of real governance. Do not let it get mired in trivially inconsequential missions. The one true mission here is taking back the Club from an imperial President.

We believe that meeting should not be conducted in secret. The members have a direct interest in whether the Board understands its own authority. Furthermore, Directors should prepare by reading the Constitution and Bylaws. For some, it may be a novel experience. We wish them well on their literary journey.

Cause for Optimism?

The important thing is that the discussion happens. The July meeting showed flickers of institutional self-awareness. Minutes were discussed. Acclamation voting was replaced by roll call voting. Presidential overreach was named. Examples were demanded and provided. A Director called on the Board to understand its duties and hold the President accountable.

That is not reform yet. But it well could be the beginning of reform.

The Board has been passive for too long. If this meeting was merely a momentary spasm of responsibility, nothing will change. If it was the beginning of Directors remembering that they are Directors, then the July meeting may eventually be remembered as more than another episode in the Club’s ongoing procedural slapstick.

It may be remembered as the night someone finally opened a window.

Please view my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. Some are nice. Some are not so nice.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 48: Delayed Fourth of July Fireworks appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

As usual, I will provide a brief personal health update after our feature article. Not much new there, other than a blood test result and some ideas about my recent weight gain.

Lifestyle Drugs, Subscription Medicine, and the Great Clinical Disappearing Act

Those of us old enough to remember the birth of Viagra also remember what came next: the online pill mills. Almost immediately, the internet discovered that male embarrassment could be monetized. No waiting room, no awkward conversation, no doctor poking around in your cardiovascular history. Just a questionnaire, a credit card, and the promise of pharmaceutical confidence.

A quarter-century later, the drug class has changed, but the business model has not. Today’s online GLP-1 sellers have updated the wardrobe. Instead of “performance,” the pitch is “wellness.” Instead of the little blue pill, it is compounded semaglutide or tirzepatide arriving in a refrigerated box. But the governing principle remains unchanged: remove as much clinical friction as possible, because friction interferes with conversion.

In the JAMA secret-shopper study, 45 of 49 online GLP-1 vendors prescribed the drug. Thirty-four mailed medication. Only a minority required a video visit. Some prescribed compounded products in five minutes or less. Many failed to ask basic questions that any competent clinician would regard as relevant to chronic metabolic therapy. Apparently, “tell me about your diet, exercise, eating disorder risk, kidney status, and current medications” has become an unacceptable burden in the sacred temple of online checkout.

The Vending-Machine Model

This is not an attack on GLP-1 therapy. I use Mounjaro, and it has been an important part of my own diabetes control. The problem is not the molecule. The problem is the vending-machine model of medicine that grows around profitable molecules.

The current GLP-1 telehealth boom reminds me of the late-1990s Viagra circus, when sildenafil escaped the confines of erectile dysfunction treatment and became a recreational lifestyle commodity almost overnight. The internet, sensing embarrassment and disposable income, did what the internet always does: it converted human vulnerability into a checkout process. Today’s GLP-1 sellers are running the same play with better graphics and colder packaging. Instead of promising bedroom confidence, they promise effortless weight loss. Instead of the little blue pill, they ship compounded semaglutide or tirzepatide. But the machinery is familiar: questionnaire medicine, minimal clinician involvement, inadequate screening, and a business model that treats actual medical judgment as a speed bump on the road to recurring revenue.

First came the little blue pill, then came the little blue business model. That model apparently still works a quarter century later. We will show you how.

One Important Difference

The ED drugs were often used episodically. A guy might get Viagra online because he wanted to avoid an awkward conversation with his doctor, feared being judged, or wanted recreational performance enhancement. That was not risk-free, especially in men with cardiovascular disease or nitrate use. But the drug event was generally discrete.

GLP-1 RAs are different. These are chronic metabolic therapies. They affect appetite, gastric emptying, glucose dynamics, body weight, nutrition, body composition, and often medication regimens. They require monitoring and clinical context. Turning that into “answer twelve questions, upload half a torso, and await your compounded appetite juice” is not merely casual prescribing. It is chronic disease management cosplay.

Viagra taught us that a powerful, culturally desirable prescription drug will immediately attract opportunists who view clinical evaluation as an obstacle. GLP-1 drugs have merely enlarged the canvas. The pitch is no longer recreational virility. It is recreational thinness, dressed up as metabolic care and shipped on auto-renewal.

My Mounjaro Update

Recall that last week, I was scratching beneath the surface itch for alternate explanations to Dr. Macallan’s reflexive diagnosis of age related xerosis. Although that is a plausible explanation, I found it a bit odd that its onset was acute. Several other areas were suspect.

For example, I was taking allopurinol for gout. This is a drug that has known skin-related side-effects, some very serious. Because my June uric acid result was much lower than that specified in standard gout treatment protocols, I made the unilateral decision to discontinue allopurinol. However, after two weeks of discontinuation, I still itched.

My focus then turned to chronic kidney disease. I am at Stage 3A, which Dr. Macallan did not believe was severe enough to be associated with itching. However, information I have found from the National Kidney Foundation discloses that a significant percentage of CKD patients at earlier stages do indeed suffer from varying intensities of chronic pruritis.

Looking for the Smoking Gun

I wanted to focus in on that and find a smoking gun. Knowing that the protein shakes I was drinking had fairly high phosphorus content led me to have my serum phosphorus levels checked. They turned out to be normal. So, no smoking gun there.

However, I still am thinking that xerosis and CKD itching are related. My scientific curiosity will continue to be unsatisfied until I can pinpoint the mechanism. Some mysteries are never solved. I hope this one doesn’t fit that description.

And Then, the Weight Gain

Back to the weight gain, I did some research, which strongly implicates three changes I made recently: deprescribing levothyroxine and metformin, plus increasing creatine to 10 mg daily. I put this all together with my medical history in Notebook LM and it spit out the following.

Peptide Purgatory is a regular feature of this blog. For an annotated catalog of all my Mounjaro, GLP-1, and Peptide Purgatory updates, please visit my Mounjaro Update Catalog page.

The post Peptide Purgatory: Of Bones and Bellies appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Our current President, Dean Davis, KL7OR, is a glaring example. His abrupt and public departure from the same position in 2015 blamed others without acknowledging any personal failure, while simultaneously creating avoidable disruption for the Club. Absurdist 43 set the stage for that earlier resignation with our analysis of the October 2015 Board meeting that many consider its trigger. In Absurdist Paper #47, we unearth Dean’s original resignation and his later attempt to recast it. Then we examine the aftermath through preserved reflector posts from members who understood, at the time, exactly what had happened.

Given that background, we will then turn to the present situation and explore the parallels. We will attempt to answer the unasked question: How did an organization with public records, living witnesses, and contemporaneous warnings manage to treat Dean’s first failed presidency as if it had no predictive value? How was he elected again in 2018? How has he remained President since then? Most importantly, can the Club survive the rest of his current term without suffering irreparable organizational damage?

Institutional amnesia is not the absence of records. It is the refusal to let records affect future behavior.

The 2015 Presidential Situation

Dean, then N7XG, was elected Vice President by a narrow margin in 2013. At that time, the Vice President’s only real responsibility was to be ready to take over if the President left office. In August 2015, then-President Russ Sawyer, W2UJ, resigned due to health issues. The bylaws made it optional for the Vice President to accept the presidency in such cases. Dean took a week to decide, but eventually accepted the succession on August 8, 2015.

Once at the helm, Dean moved quickly to consolidate power and control the narrative. His biggest move was to remove Jim Higgins, KB3PU, from all his appointed positions, including webmaster, Club Recorder, Club Information Officer, and, most importantly, Chair of the Awards Committee. At the same time, he disbanded the entire Awards Committee. He defended his actions by stating that he was the President and the bylaws gave him the right to do it.

The Board Pushed Back

However, as we mentioned in Absurdist 43, the situation was different back then. The Board was more engaged and was not willing to sit back while a President attempted to take control of the Club. Then as now, and since the Club’s founding, the President worked for the Board. Dean’s dismissal of that fundamental organizational tenet was the crux of his misconduct then, just as it remains the crux of the problem now.

The October 2015 meeting discussed in Absurdist 43 appears to have cast the die for Dean’s exit. Although Dean was able to remove Jim Higgins from appointed positions, Jim still served as Fourth Area Director. That placed him in direct conflict with Dean at a meeting where Dean tried to pull executive rank, failed in the face of a resistant Board, and later decided that if the boys were not going to play nice, he would take his ball and go home.

The Resignation

On October 20, 2015, in the immediate aftermath of that fated Board meeting, Dean posted the following resignation on the membership email reflector as message #17315. It is reproduced here verbatim.

We reproduced that historical gem verbatim to avoid any possible claim of misrepresentation. However, it deserves some interpretive comment.

First, this resignation was not offered quietly to the Board of Directors. It was broadcast to the membership. That unusual procedure suggests Dean was doing more than informing the Club that he was leaving office. He was attempting to define the story of his departure before anyone else could.

What was his intended message?

That he was the victim.

He blamed his Vice President and, especially, Fourth Area Director Jim Higgins, KB3PU, for his departure, stating that he faced “constant adversity.” He said nothing about that adversity being a reaction to his attempt at an imperial presidency.

About Jim, Dean wrote: “He constantly questions my actions, corrects me and others, and makes general and constant diatribes and other denunciation and criticism of my efforts.”

It Is Lonely at the Top

Well, Dean, that is sometimes how governance works. Directors question actions. Experienced members correct mistakes. People criticize efforts when those efforts appear to violate structure, bypass authority, or consolidate power. If a President cannot tolerate criticism and correction, he should not seek office more onerous than refreshments coordinator.

Then came the revealing sentence: “I don’t work this way.”

What way does he work? My way or the highway?

He also did not miss the opportunity to appeal to Fourth Area Members to reconsider their choice of Area Director.

The final blow was not merely the resignation. It was the immediate withdrawal of Club-adjacent infrastructure. The N7XG QSL Service was closed, effective immediately. Support for the N7XG Logger was discontinued, effective immediately. The software was “up for sale.”

Too late, everybody. Send your QSL cards to Skip. Members with money deposited in the bureau will get refunds if and when I feel like it. I’m done.

That was not an orderly transition. It was not stewardship. It was exit by detonation. Contempt duly noted.

But his story would change later on. Before we get to that, let us gauge the Club’s sentiment at the time as expressed by its membership.

The Member Reaction

To be fair, upon reading Dean’s very public resignation, many members expressed anger, chagrin, and maudlin existential concern for the future of the Club. Some were Dean’s friends. Others appeared to be looking for an opportunity to tee off on the Club and found a convenient excuse. In the middle were open-minded members who voiced thoughts about what might have influenced Dean’s decision, although much of that speculation was based on conjecture.

A large group piled on to KB3PU, at whom Dean had conveniently pointed the finger. Jim had a history of speaking his mind, enforcing rules, and rubbing people the wrong way in the process. Dean, of course, was not a member of the Jim Higgins Fan Club. He also knew that implicating Jim in his resignation would pass the plausibility test with members who had prior conflicts with him.

Skip, the Vice President, had only a brief history with the Club. During that time, he had made friends and transformed the 40-meter Late Net from a largely abandoned venture into a thriving net. So although Dean implicated his Vice President as one of the two individuals who caused his resignation, Skip’s public image remained intact. Indeed, Skip succeeded Dean as Club President.

A few less visceral and more thoughtful responses on the reflectors at the time reveal a repeating pattern with Dean and the folly of his controlling approach to the presidency. These members were not casual bystanders. They were deeply involved in the Club’s volunteer infrastructure and had seen the organization from multiple angles.

Some Member Comments

The following excerpts came from Clay Statmore, WA2JIM, Second Area Awards Manager (then and now); this writer, then serving as Fourth Area Awards Manager; Bob Young, W5UOT; and Johnny Allen, KI4WCQ.

Dean Had Quit PrevioUsly

“…I would remind everyone that this is not the first time that Dean quit when he didn’t get his way. For those of you who have been around for less than 10 years, it happened before, just not on as large a scale. I believe he was the club historian, webmaster and 7th area Director when he abruptly resigned.”
—WA2JIM

“I have been around a long time too. Jim has had a go at me a time or two. I still respect him. Yes, I was here when Dean quit before. Yes, the actions were way too aggressive for a beginning president. I wish no one ill.”
—W5UOT

Firing Jim was destructive and imprudent

“Summarily firing Jim, KB3PU from all of his various appointed positions is a good example of Dean acting like imperiously. I would point out that no one would ever suggest that Jim and I are the best of friends. I can’t begin to tell you how many e-mail screaming matches I have had with him. There is no one in the club who has frustrated me more over the years than Jim but I will be first to tell you that Jim does more for the club than almost any two or three other people I could name. Jim has been part of the glue that keeps the club running (yeah, I mixed the metaphor). He does stuff that no one even knows he does. Every time something else needed doing, he volunteered for the additional work or additional position. And, he got the job done. Please notice that since Dean fired Jim, much of what Jim used to do is not getting done.”
—WA2JIM

Dean wanted to invert the constitutional structure

“Our constitution calls for a strong board and a weak president. Dean wanted to flip those roles around.”
—AE4NT

The resignation was designed to sow discord and cause inconvenience

“Having seen several resignations in my experience, normally one contains a reason, but not an attempt to blame others and state, ‘I’m closing the buro and not supporting the logger immediately’ (pain be upon you)…while closing his missive with something to the effect of ‘you CCN members are great folks and I offer you best wishes’. How do you square those two positions?. Also, I think it should have been submitted first to the BoD as a courtesy rather than a shout out to the world. I see no good reason for a broadcast resignation unless it was to sow discord.”
—KI4WCQ

The Pattern Identified

The significance of these comments is not merely that they criticized Dean. The significance is that they identified, in real time, the same pattern now visible again: resistance to Board authority, hostility toward correction, public blame-shifting, and a tendency to treat Club functions as personal leverage.

These were not casual members complaining because the hobby had briefly stopped being fun. These were volunteers with years of service, practical responsibility, and institutional memory. They understood that volunteer work is not always fun. Sometimes it is governance, maintenance, recordkeeping, conflict resolution, and keeping the machinery from eating itself.

Their warnings were clear.

Later on, we would see that the Club simply failed to retain them.

But then Dean decided to change his story.

Read on.

Dean’s December Mitigation

On December 7, 2015, seven weeks after his original resignation, Dean posted the following update on the Hamtown reflector, and asked that it be forwarded to the “other” reflector, which he had not accessed since October. It is reproduced here verbatim.

By any interpretation, this sheds new light on Dean’s resignation, but it still raises some questions. Before addressing those questions, we should be clear: we are not treating Dean’s reported diagnosis lightly. He is still alive and kicking more than ten years later, so his medical team apparently did well, and no decent person disparages a successful medical outcome. Having lost friends and a parent to cancer, I do not treat that diagnosis lightly. It is always worthy of relief and gratitude when someone survives it.

Shifting Sands

With that December message, however, the explanation for Dean’s abrupt resignation shifted. In October, the public explanation was constant adversity from Jim and Skip. In December, the explanation became the stress of a serious medical diagnosis. That may well explain some of the abruptness. It does not explain everything else.

Dean also stated that he had suggested donating the N7XG logger software to the club members, but not to the Club. This was an interesting distinction. Isn’t the Club defined by its membership? Just asking.

More importantly, nowhere in the revised explanation did Dean walk back the externalized blame he placed on others in his original public resignation. He did not retract the accusation that Jim Higgins and Skip Guenter had made it impossible for him to accomplish anything meaningful. Nor did he apologize for broadcasting his resignation to the membership rather than first submitting it to the Board. He did not acknowledge that immediately closing the QSL bureau and discontinuing logger support created avoidable disruption. And he did not concede that Club-adjacent tools should not become personal leverage during a leadership crisis.

A personal crisis may explain an abrupt resignation. It does not explain blaming critics, bypassing the Board, closing services without transition, or treating organizational tools as levers.

And that brings us up to today’s governance dilemma, once again, the Dean Davis Complete Control Paradigm. The Club appears to have remembered the sympathetic explanation and forgotten the governance lesson.

Time Heals All Wounds, Alas

What followed was a 28-month interregnum. Skip succeeded Dean as President in November 2015, but health problems cut his presidency short. His Vice President, Dwight Greenberg, WF4H, assumed the position in June 2016 and retired from it at the end of his term in February 2018.

In contrast with Dean, both Skip and Dwight positively engaged the Board during their tenure. They did not treat the Board as adversaries; neither attempted to usurp Board authority or circumvent mandated process. Both used gentle suasion to influence the Board and elicit agreement with their initiatives. And both accepted any rare defeats with dignity and the willingness to try harder.

Taking Another Shot at the Throne

Upon learning of Dwight’s impending retirement, Dean ran for President again in 2018, defeating his runner-up, the Notorious Captain Bill, who was the subject of Absurdist 22. In all, there were seven candidates. A runoff was required because no one received a majority vote. Dean received 83 and Bill got 62. This turned out to be the last legitimate presidential election for the Club, in which nearly every candidate amassed a non-trivial vote total. The runoff between the two top candidates, Dean and Captain Bill, was decisive in Dean’s favor, 128-88.

Having run a QSL bureau, Dean had at his fingertips a ready-made member contact network that could be used to drum up votes. Although Captain Bill was wildly popular at the time, he could not compete with that kind of campaign mechanism.

But after all the turmoil of late 2015, why did the members choose Dean as President over six other candidates?

Hard to say.

Decent people have the capacity to forgive and forget. Many rank-and-file members were probably unaware of the full extent of Dean’s manipulative behavior during his brief prior tenure. Others may have remembered the general drama but not the structural issue: Dean had tried to invert the Club’s governing model by making the President dominant over the Board. Our conjecture is that poor awareness, member forgiveness, and strong behind-the-scenes campaign promotion put him over the top.

Consolidating Control

Once in office, Dean began erecting shields while increasing his control over the Club. Meanwhile, the Club had entered a period of decline. Interest in elections waned. Area Director races became single-candidate affairs. Members showed scant interest in running for leadership positions. With fewer willing candidates, it became easier to cajole friendly volunteers into Board positions.

Thus, resistance from the Board dwindled.

The President who had resigned in 2015, blaming opposition from the Board and his Vice President, who had declared “I don’t work this way,” could now finally work that way.

With the Board all but neutralized and member apathy running high, the Club was ripe for the taking. In each presidential election since 2018, Dean faced opponents who functioned more as placeholders than challengers, satisfying the bylaws’ requirement for a contested election without creating a true contest.

Protest Votes

Even then, the vote totals in those manufactured head-to-head contests were revealing. In 2020, a friend of Clay Mayrose, WA6LBU, the 2018 Eyeball host, who had just put together enough contacts on the nets to earn a single 100-Point Award, received 15% of the votes. Then, in 2022, Clay Mayrose himself, the current friendly Chair of the Board, received 29%. In 2024, Joe Bevier, KF7HNC, a new Seventh Area Awards Manager, pulled in 23%. Most recently, in 2026, Bob Young, W5UOT, Century Club Cares Chair, captured 39%, despite making clear that he did not intend to serve and was supporting Dean.

That tells us something important.

Not everyone forgot.

Dean continued to polarize members, and a growing number expressed dissatisfaction through their votes. Yet through apathy, weak candidate pools, placeholder opposition, and a docile Board of Directors, Dean survived each election. Each time, he gathered a little more power.

The Club did not merely forget the warning.

It learned to live around it.

Will the Board Continue to Roll Over?

That brings us to the present. In contrast with the Board’s current disengaged posture, the October 2015 meeting is a quaint relic of authoritative behavior by a much more engaged Board.

As recent essays have shown, Dean’s efforts to consolidate control of the Club have become more brazen. He now appears willing to presume authority over the Board’s own recordkeeping process, including how minutes are written, supplemented, or preserved. No prior Board approval, no discussion, no vote. Just another command from above.

Apparently, he wants to reduce Board meetings to a formality, minimally satisfying bylaws requirements while avoiding substantive process and healthy discourse.

Yet the Board tolerates it.

An Unwitting Symbiosis?

That is the central pathology. Dean’s conduct is one part of the problem. The Board’s passivity is the other. A President can only accumulate unauthorized power when Directors allow it, excuse it, ignore it, or decide that resisting it would be too much trouble before bedtime.

The Club’s institutional memory did not disappear because the records were unavailable. The warnings were public. The pattern was visible. Dean’s first failed presidency showed what happens when he treats opposition as persecution and Board authority as an obstacle. The problem is that the organization failed to let that history guide future conduct.

Now the Board has another chance to remember.

It must stop functioning as a courtesy panel assembled to receive packets, approve minutes, and admire whatever pet project is currently jingling in front of it. The Board governs the Club. The President implements Board policy. The Chair serves the Board. The Secretary preserves the Board’s record. Committees serve the Board’s work, not the President’s convenience.

That structure is not decorative.

It is the Club’s remaining defense against executive capture.

Again: Directors Must Act Like Directors

The first step toward recovery is not complicated. Directors must act like Directors. They must discuss reports, challenge defective minutes, demand accurate records, protect committee work, insist on proper channels, and refuse to treat presidential preference as policy. The second step is electoral: non-functional Directors must be challenged and replaced by volunteers who understand that governance requires active participation, not polite attendance.

Under a functioning Board, the Club can rebuild. A competent President who respects the structure can work with that Board to repair a decade of decline. Strategic planning can replace pet projects. Institutional memory can replace improvisation. Member service can replace cronyism. Volunteer respect can replace quiet attrition.

The Club is not doomed because Dean returned.

The Club is endangered because it forgot why his return should have mattered.

Leadership is the key.

That starts with the Board.

That is the way it was meant to be.

Please view my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. Some are nice. Some are not so nice.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 47: On the Loss of Institutional Memory Cells appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

“If Directors do not reassert that structure now, they may soon discover that while they were debating logos, platforms, and procedural fog, presidential control quietly hardened into operating reality.”

Absurdist Papers continues its critiques of executive misbehavior in our subject organization. So, what else is new?

We hear that our subject organization’s President is at it again. Yes, dear readers, Absurdist Paper #46 addresses yet another example of presidential overreach.

This time, the President appears to be attempting to assert control over the minutes of the corporation, which are governed by the bylaws as records of the Board of Directors and are clearly beyond the President’s unilateral authority.

Yet this imperial President has made it sound like a fait accompli:

“Just curious where does it say that out minutes must be written.
Starting with the June minutes the youtube video will be attached to the minutes.”

Never mind the typos and the Philadelphia lawyering. We have bigger fish to fry.

The President is obviously missing several points. We will try to fill them in for him:

• First, the Board of Directors, not the President, is responsible for the minutes.
• Second, the Board of Directors, not the President, is responsible for the Club.
• Third, the President works for the Board of Directors, not the other way around.
• Finally, the President has no authority to issue an edict about the composition, content, or structure of the minutes.

Any material change in recordkeeping practice must be discussed, debated, and voted on by the Board before implementation. The President merely has one vote, as if he were a member of the Board.

Please remember that for future reference.

This keeps cropping up.

It needs to stop, and the Board needs to take charge.

The Practical Issues of Non-Written Minutes

A video recording may supplement the minutes. It may help the Secretary prepare the minutes. It may serve as backup evidence when minutes are challenged. But it is not a substitute for written, searchable, Board-approved minutes that properly summarize material discussions, motions, votes, and actions.

Whether intended or not, treating video as an adequate substitute would relieve the Secretary of pressure to produce useful written minutes while shifting the burden of reconstruction onto future Directors, members, committee members, and historians.

That is not transparency. That is future homework.

A major problem with the lazy concept of simply referencing a YouTube video is that video recordings are not easily searchable by future Boards and Committees. A future researcher should not have to scrub through an hour-long recording to determine what motion was discussed, who objected, what correction was requested, or whether the Secretary’s summary captured the actual exchange. Coupled with cursory, incomplete, or defective written summaries, video links would exacerbate the historical preservation problem rather than solve it.

Written minutes remain the official, searchable, Board-approved record.

That must always be the case.

Videos are useful adjuncts, but they should be viewed as backup. If the video contradicts what is recorded in the written minutes, then the written minutes must be corrected.

A video is evidence. It is not minutes.

And YouTube is not a records-retention policy.

Who Gets to Decide

Only the Board can act on changes in recordkeeping practice, subject to the bylaws. If a change in bylaws is required, then a properly formatted motion must pass through the appropriate process before appearing on the agenda for a Board vote.

There is no provision in the bylaws for the President to make unilateral decisions about how the Board’s official record will be maintained.

That should be obvious. Apparently, it is not.

The Board should not allow the President or Secretary to convert an administrative convenience into a change in governance practice. Board records belong to the Board. The President does not own them. The Secretary prepares them. The Board reviews, corrects, and approves them.

That is the structure, the authority, and the line. Period.

An Intelligent Compromise

While videos are cumbersome, non-searchable, and useful mainly as corroboration or, occasionally, amusement, we have a constructive suggestion. If the Board is seeking greater accuracy rather than convenience, it should consider attaching a transcript generated by Zoom AI Companion, reviewed for accuracy, to the monthly minutes as supplemental material.

We originally proposed this in Absurdist 34, but no one was listening. So, we will propose it again here. Like our subject organization’s President, we can be persistent.

Remember the old chat transcripts that served as minutes back in the day? Absurdist 43 gave an example of their usefulness as documentation. They presented verbatim discussion that could settle future disputes and put the quietus on retrospective interpretation. A reviewed Zoom AI Companion transcript could restore some of that value without relieving the Secretary of the responsibility to prepare proper written minutes.

Such a transcript could also help the Secretary produce the real minutes. Instead of poring over an hour-long video repeatedly to capture and transcribe mumbled speech fragments, the Secretary would have ready-made editable text from which to prepare a proper summary. Because AI Companion is integrated with Zoom, individual comments are identified by Zoom user name. Of course, any such transcript would still need review. Artificial intelligence is helpful, not sacred. We already have enough false gods around here.

The Board should continue to require written minutes that summarize the meeting, record material discussion, preserve motions and votes, and provide a searchable written record consistent with the bylaws and record-retention responsibilities.

If the President and Secretary believe additional detail would help preserve the record, then the Board should discuss whether to attach a reviewed Zoom AI Companion transcript, or another reviewed transcript derived from the recording, as supplemental material to the minutes. That would provide amplification and clarification while preserving a written, searchable historical record.

Just a thought. A constructive one, even.

Please do not faint.

Once Again, the Board Must Take the Lead

We need to say this one more time, in case you missed it. This must be a Board decision. The President cannot unilaterally decide how Board records are maintained, and the Secretary must not be relieved of the responsibility to prepare useful written minutes simply because a recording exists.

A recording may support the minutes. A transcript may supplement the minutes.

But the Board-approved written minutes remain the official record.

It always reduces to the same question: will the Board act like the Board? Not like a committee of spectators. Not like a courtesy panel assembled to receive packets, approve minutes, and admire the latest cosmetic distraction. The Board governs the Club. The President implements Board policy. The Chair serves the Board. The Secretary preserves the Board’s record.

If Directors do not reassert that structure now, they may soon discover that while they were debating logos, platforms, and procedural fog, presidential control quietly hardened into operating reality.

This may not be the Board’s last chance to correct course, but it may be the last easy chance. Once a Board normalizes rubber-stamp approvals, officer-managed discussion, interpretive minutes, and unilateral presidential declarations about the record, it becomes much harder to reclaim authority later.

The entropy trend-line is advancing rapidly. A strong Board is the Club’s only hope.

The time to act like Directors is before the Board becomes purely decorative.

Further Reading

Please view my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. Some are nice. Some are not so nice.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 46: On the YouTube Doctrine appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Past updates have covered various aspects of my training, diet, and progress measurement. I am a big believer in bio-feedback, so I’m wired, monitored, and scanned at intervals. I am an even bigger believer in resistance training, a non-negotiable adjunct to GLP-1 therapy, particularly in old farts like me. I’m pushing 80, and I’m probably in better shape than I was at 35.

But of course, being old means one must endure a veritable plethora of chronic conditions. I won’t bore you with details here, but if you are interested, you can find all that drivel buried in the body of work contained in the Peptide Purgatory catalog.

All that was necessary as a re-introduction because I have not written one of these updates for a while. My writing has been distracted by a certain ailing organization I am analyzing, diagnosing, and for which I am prescribing therapy via a collection of essays. Let’s get on with Peptide Purgatory.

Today, after my feature article about how people use and misuse social media for medical information, I’ll discuss a few things that have cropped up on my own medical front. These include some shoulder issues, some itchiness, and lots of deprescribing.

When the cuff says 142/98 and the internet says “try beets”

Every so often, social media reminds me why civilization invented medical schools, blood pressure guidelines, and professional licensure. Not that the system works flawlessly, mind you. We have all encountered physicians who communicate like encrypted firmware and healthcare systems that appear to have been designed by raccoons trapped in a copier room. Still, there is a substantial difference between “the medical system is flawed” and “let us crowdsource cardiovascular risk from Facebook comments.”

The latest specimen comes from a Facebook group devoted to “reversing high BP without drugs.” That title alone should cause a mild rise in systolic pressure, but onward we go. A 38-year-old man posted a photo of his Omron blood pressure monitor showing 142/98 and asked a simple question: “Is this really bad?”

This was, in its own innocent way, a reasonable question. Blood pressure numbers are not self-explanatory to most people. A home monitor will give you the reading, but it will not lean forward and say, “Friend, perhaps this should not be interpreted by a retired forklift operator with strong opinions about garlic.”

Fortunately, Facebook was there.

The comment section enters medical practice

The answers arrived with the usual mixture of casual reassurance, folk medicine, half-remembered advice, and confident nonsense.

One commenter said that if he were 40, it would be okay. This is fascinating, because apparently human arteries observe age-based zoning exemptions. At 38, you are in trouble. At 40, the same pressure gets grandfathered in under the municipal vascular code.

Several people said “No,” meaning no, it is not bad. Others said it was “not great but not terrible,” which is the Chernobyl approach to primary care. One person said it was “fine” and warned that stress would only raise it further. That is true in the same sense that worrying about termites will not repair your joists. Emotional management is nice. Structural decay remains inconsiderate.

Some advice was not wrong, merely incomplete. Exercise. Reduce salt. Sleep better. Avoid stress. Drink water. See a doctor. These are reasonable components of the usual lifestyle discussion, although they were delivered with the diagnostic precision of refrigerator magnets.

Then came the herbal supplement wing of the proceedings: magnesium, garlic, vitamin D, beets, hibiscus, and amla. I have nothing against plants. Plants have been kind enough to provide us with fiber, micronutrients, shade, and, in some cases, drugs that actually became drugs after science stopped by and ruined the vibes. But a Facebook comment recommending beets for stage 2 hypertension is not a treatment plan. It is produce marketing.

And then, because no social media health discussion is complete without ideological graffiti, someone declared that the medical industry is a business that profits from sickness. This is not exactly false as a critique of American healthcare, but it is not especially useful when a 38-year-old man is asking whether his diastolic pressure should be auditioning for a horror film. A structural indictment of capitalism does not lower afterload.

What a clinician would probably say

A blood pressure reading of 142/98, if taken properly at rest, is not normal. Under current American blood pressure categories, a systolic pressure of 140 or higher or a diastolic pressure of 90 or higher falls into stage 2 hypertension.

That does not mean the man should sprint to the emergency room clutching his Omron like a sacred relic. One reading does not diagnose hypertension. Blood pressure is fussy. It changes with activity, stress, bladder fullness, caffeine, nicotine, cuff size, arm position, talking, posture, pain, and the universal human tendency to do measurements badly and then argue with the machine.

A sensible medical response would be boring, which is how you know it has a chance of being correct. Sit quietly for five minutes. Feet on the floor. Back supported. Arm at heart level. Correct cuff size. No talking. Take two readings one minute apart. Repeat this over several days. Average the readings. Then bring the log to a clinician.

If the average remains around 142/98, a clinician would not say, “Relax, king, drink water.” He would likely call it confirmed hypertension and discuss lifestyle measures, medication, and risk factors. At age 38, persistent hypertension would also invite questions about secondary causes: kidney disease, sleep apnea, endocrine issues, medications, stimulants, family history, alcohol, sodium intake, and other unglamorous contributors. Medicine is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is an inventory of boring suspects, which is exactly why Facebook hates it.

JAMA ruins the fun by measuring the problem

Just when I was enjoying this little carnival of cardiovascular commentary, along came a JAMA research letter that put numbers to the madness.

The authors analyzed data from the 2024 Health Information National Trends Survey, a nationally representative survey of 7,278 US adults, representing about 262 million adults. Social media use was reported by 87.8% of adults, or roughly 228 million people. Among social media users, 84.8% reported sharing personal or general health information, and 70.2% participated in online communities. More importantly, 21.6% reported making health-related decisions based on social media content. Meanwhile, 77.7% believed health information encountered on social media was false or misleading.

Pause there, because that is the finding that should make your eyebrows crawl up your forehead.

Nearly four out of five social media users think the health information they see is false or misleading, yet more than one in five still make health decisions based on it. That is the modern health-information environment in one sentence: “I know this swamp is contaminated, but I am thirsty.”

This is not merely a problem of gullibility. It is a problem of exposure. Humans are pattern-seeking animals. We absorb repeated messages even when we distrust them. If enough people tell you hibiscus tea cures hypertension, statins are poison, GLP-1 drugs melt your pancreas, or blood sugar spikes are caused by moon phase and seed oils, some of it lodges in the mind like shrapnel. Later, when the doctor suggests medication, the patient is not starting from zero. He is starting from a sedimentary layer of memes, anecdotes, tribal suspicion, and YouTube thumbnails.

The distrust paradox

The JAMA authors point out that social media platforms are “engagement-driven” environments. That is the polite academic way of saying that the machinery does not care whether a post is true. It cares whether the post makes you click, argue, share, rage, fear, hope, or purchase a tub of powdered miracle roots from a man wearing a headset microphone.

Accuracy is optional. Engagement is the product.

That explains the Facebook blood pressure thread perfectly. The calmest and most medically useful answer would be something like this:

“Your reading is high. Retake it correctly over several days, record the results, and discuss them with a clinician. If your readings remain elevated, you may need treatment.”

That is accurate. It is also dull. It will never outperform “The medical industry profits from sickness,” “God will heal you,” “try beets,” or “this is close to stroke-level.” The algorithm does not reward calibration. It rewards combustion.

The most dangerous advice is not always the wildest advice. Sometimes it is the soothing nonsense. “It’s fine.” “Don’t worry.” “No.” “At 40 it’s okay.” These responses lower anxiety at the exact moment when the person needs a small but useful dose of concern. Not panic. Concern. The kind that leads to measurement, follow-up, and action.

Chronic disease does not immunize anyone

The JAMA study also examined adults with chronic conditions. Among 4,590 adults with chronic conditions, representing 69.1% of respondents, social media use was still high at 85.5%. Adults with chronic conditions were less likely than those without chronic conditions to share health information or participate in online communities, but making health decisions based on social media did not differ by chronic disease status.

That matters. It means social media health decision-making is not confined to newly diagnosed patients, hypochondriacs, or people with obscure supplement cabinets. It is part of the general health-information atmosphere. We are all breathing it, even those of us who think we have decent filters.

This is especially relevant in the GLP-1 era. People taking Mounjaro, Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, or any of the other peptide celebrities are living in a hailstorm of online medical claims. One group says the drugs are miracles. Another says they are poison. One influencer says muscle loss does not matter because weight loss is the point. Another says you can prevent all lean mass loss by waving a resistance band near your refrigerator. Somewhere in the middle, actual medicine is trying to have a conversation, but it keeps getting drowned out by affiliate links.

For those of us managing chronic metabolic conditions, social media can be useful. Patient experience matters. Practical tips matter. Seeing how other people handle side effects, appetite changes, protein intake, exercise, constipation, hypoglycemia fears, or insurance absurdities can be valuable. But experience is not evidence. Anecdote is not physiology. And “this worked for me” is not the same as “this is appropriate for you.”

The comment section is not a care team

The old model of medical authority had its own problems. Doctors often behaved as if patients were appliances brought in for repair. Information flowed one way. Questions were tolerated up to the point where the physician’s hand reached the doorknob. Many patients went looking elsewhere because the formal system failed to explain things clearly, respectfully, and in human language.

Social media filled that gap.

Unfortunately, it filled the gap the way kudzu fills a roadside ditch: energetically, aggressively, and with limited concern for infrastructure.

The solution is not to sneer at patients who seek health information online. People do this because they are confused, worried, curious, underserved, overbilled, rushed, ignored, or simply trying to understand their own bodies. That impulse is good. The problem is where the impulse lands.

A Facebook group can provide camaraderie. It can provide examples. It can alert you to questions you might not have known to ask. But it cannot examine you, review your medications, check your kidney function, assess your cardiovascular risk, evaluate your home measurement technique, or distinguish between “this is annoying” and “this is dangerous.” The comment section is not a care team. It is a crowd in a parking lot, some of whom may be helpful, some of whom may be deranged, and one of whom is definitely selling something.

A practical bullshit filter

When using social media for medical information, I suggest a simple filter. Rejection is particularly valid when comments are prefaced with “Honestly,…” or the social media acronym “TBH”. Same advice goes with “I’m sure…” or “I’m pretty sure…” Here are some other things to watch for.

First, beware of anyone who gives absolute advice based on one number, one symptom, or one screenshot. “You’re fine” and “you’re dying” can both be garbage.

Second, beware of miracle specificity. If one herb, supplement, food, detox, breathing trick, or YouTube protocol claims to solve a complex chronic disease, assume the usual ratio: one teaspoon plausibility, one gallon marketing.

Third, beware of ideological substitution. “Big Pharma is corrupt” may sometimes be a legitimate discussion. It is not a blood pressure management plan. “Doctors don’t know nutrition” may occasionally contain truth. It still does not validate a stranger’s beet protocol.

Fourth, distinguish between support and decision-making. It is one thing to ask, “Has anyone else had this side effect?” It is another to ask, “Should I stop my medication?” One is community. The other is a low-budget malpractice simulator.

Finally, look for boring answers. Boring answers are underrated. Repeat the measurement. Confirm the trend. Check the lab. Ask the clinician. Review the guideline. Change one variable at a time. Boring answers do not sparkle, but neither do uncontrolled blood pressure, diabetic retinopathy, kidney failure, or a stroke. Biology is rude about drama.

The Peptide Purgatory verdict

The JAMA findings do not tell us that social media is useless for health information. That would be too easy, and reality rarely has the decency to be simple. Social media can connect patients, spread useful information, and expose failures in the formal medical system. It can also distribute misinformation at industrial scale while making people feel informed, empowered, and vaguely superior to their doctors.

The Facebook blood pressure thread is a perfect little case study. A 38-year-old man posted a reading that deserved attention but not panic. In return, he got reassurance, alarm, produce, prayer, salt lectures, anti-medical cynicism, and a few reasonable suggestions buried under the rubble.

That is the whole problem in miniature.

We now live in a world where millions of people distrust social media health advice and still act on it. The machine does not need our trust. It only needs our attention. And in the sacred economy of clicks, your blood pressure is just another engagement opportunity.

So keep your cuff calibrated, your doctor involved, your salt reasonable, your resistance training intact, and your bullshit detector set to “continuous monitoring.” The internet may yet prove useful, but only if we remember that a comment thread is not a clinic, hibiscus is not a cardiologist, and Facebook should not be allowed within ten feet of your medication list.

My Mounjaro Update

As I mentioned way up there in the introduction, I remain at the 7.5 mg weekly dose of Mounjaro, which I have been injecting weekly since June 2024. Coupled with diet and a rigorous strength training program, I have experienced a body renaissance, losing 70 lbs and reducing blood sugar to normie level. Although I have experienced an upward weight bump of five pounds in the past couple of months, I have been stable otherwise for over a year. I might have an explanation for the weight gain. Jenny has one, too. More on that later.

A February DEXAscan confirmed great progress with body composition. Body fat is now under 20% for the first time since infancy, probably. Bone density is excellent, always an area of concern for very senior citizens. And muscle mass is increasing, akin to body magic for a near 80-year-old. The marketing arm of DEXAfit of Orlando calculates my effective biological age at 64. So, I’ll celebrate my 65th birthday instead of my 80th in November, if I make it that far.

At this rate, I’ll be a teenager before long. Who knew?

My June labs were terrific. Looks like we have the iron problem solved for now. Blood lipids are perfect. Gout seems to be under control, with uric acid actually below the normal range. The kidneys are so-so, with eGFR at 53, but hey, that’s still not too bad for an 80 year-old. I’ll talk more about kidneys and an additional test that might benefit me later in this post.

Shouldering the Burden

I’m an orthopedic disaster area. Doing heavy weight training at 80 is certainly beneficial overall, but it comes with side-effects. Something is always hurting. For a few months, the main pain focus has been on my left shoulder and biceps.

Two possibilities came to mind. One of them was my cervical spine pathology. For those unfamiliar with every gruesome detail of my orthopedic nightmare, I have had C3-6 fusion, complicated by a broken stainless steel screw embedded in my vertebra at the bottom of the internal brace. I also have thoracic spine scoliosis. Great stuff!

On Facebook, they’d recommend ashwagandha therapy.

Cervical spine radiculopathy would have been a sucky diagnosis. I am not interested in additional surgery. The original fusion was done in 2007, when I was lots younger. The performing neurosurgeon is now pushing daisies in that great operating theater in the sky.

I saw Dr. Macallan (not his real name). After a physical exam, he concluded that the problem was likely a combination of rotator cuff issues and biceps tendinitis. He recommended physical therapy.

As regular readers know, I have engaged Advent Health’ physical therapy division for my rehab needs over the past twenty years or so. However, at this juncture, I felt it was time for a change. Advent had been disappointing me by overbooking their therapists and giving me watered-down generic exercises in an unsupervised setting. I’d either be sent off on my own to do the exercises or have occasional visits by the therapist or an overworked assistant. Their detailed insurance billing bordered on creative fiction. So, I was happy that Dr. Macallan recommended Orlando Sports Medicine, an outfit I had previously vetted when I sought a potential alternative to Advent.

I was not disappointed. From top to bottom, Orlando Sports Medicine is a class operation. My therapist, Nate, gave me a detailed examination and concluded the same thing as Dr. Macallan: rotator cuff and biceps tendon pathology. He developed a program which includes home exercises, and he gave me advice about weightlifting, which he fortunately recommends continuing with caution.

My concern going into this rehab venture was that my training would suffer a serious setback. Nate says I should keep up the good work. His key marker is pain above level 4 on a scale of one-to-ten means stop whatever the hell I’m doing and either lighten the load, reduce the reps, or modify the exercise. Great all-around advice.

After five days of simple exercises for ten minutes per day, I can tell you that my shoulder feels much better. The nagging pain while lying in bed trying to get to sleep is gone. And my range of motion has greatly improved. I’m optimistic that Nate has found the key.

Meanwhile, upon polling social media, Facebook’s consensus recommendation was a prefrontal lobotomy.

That Itchy, Bitchy Feeling

I have been dealing with itchiness for the past couple of months. Random body areas suddenly start itching, and it is hard to resist the urge to scratch, which only intensifies the itching cycle. It was driving me nuts, so I mentioned it to Dr. Macallan.

After reviewing some normal blood results for SED rate and CREP, he seems to think it is a generic geriatric dry skin problem. He says he works with a pre-eminent dermatologist who is an expert in the treatment of geriatric xerosis. Their brilliant solution? Use emollients.

Now, I don’t have an issue slathering my skin with CeraVe or LaRoche-Posay, but it doesn’t seem to do anything for the itching. Furthermore, since the itching is random, not localized, what am I supposed to do, bathe in the stuff?

My intuition tells me something else is going on. Although I am usually happy with the Occam’s Razor approach to problem solving, I felt this one deserved further study to perhaps unearth a more complex etiology. It should come as no surprise that I eschewed social media as a source for that front-line research. Instead, I turned to another much maligned cyberspace phenomenon: AI.

A combination of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Notebook LM narrowed the potential causes down to three areas including the one proposed by Dr. Macallan and his mystery dermatological guru. The other two were the allopurinol I was taking for gout, and my chronic kidney disease.

Dr. Macallan had posited that itchiness—technically called pruritis—affects people with later stages of chronic kidney disease, but typically not at Stage 3A, where I have been for the past seven years. He also said my urea nitrogen was not high enough to be implicated as a cause. So, I should use emollients.

LaRoche-Posay, take me away!

Nah, I wasn’t about to give up on my quest.

Rogue patient that I am, I quietly stopped the allopurinol, already at a very low dose, to see if that would fix it. After a couple of weeks, I still itched.

Then, I came across an informative article from the National Kidney Foundation that confirmed that pruritis affects a fairly large percentage of people with Stage 2 and 3 chronic kidney disease—the earliest stages consisting of people with impaired kidney function but not yet on hemodialysis. It outlined treatment possibilities, starting with topicals like corticosteroid creams and yes, emollients. Resistant itching is then treated with antihistamines, and if they are not helpful, gabapentin or pregabalin are used. UV-B phototherapy is a possibility, but comes with a cancer warning.

I have been trying antihistamines and topical corticosteroids with mildly positive results. Before taking on another prescription drug like gabapentin, I want to explore one more area. I have been drinking pre-packaged protein shakes to keep my dietary protein levels up. I recently read the label on one of those protein bombs. It revealed 550 milligrams of phosphorus. For CKD Stage 3 patients, the recommended daily dietary phosphorus intake is generally 800-1000 mg. So, that might be something to look into.

Guidelines state that blood phosphorus levels should be between 3.0 to 5.5 mg/dL. I have no idea whether mine falls into that range because it has not been tested. Not recently, and perhaps, not ever. Phosphorus is not a standard component of the “complete metabolic panel” (CMP) blood test suite. So, my homework project will be to get that done. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, Facebook tells me I should take oatmeal baths, avoid chlorinated swimming pools, and use a DEET-based insect repellent with built-in emollients. Those were the helpful posts. I didn’t summarize those that said, “Your a idiot”.

Deprescribing for Fun and Big Pharma Profit (not)

Aside from working on my musculature, I am on a mission to ditch some prescription drugs. As I mentioned, I made the executive decision to dump allopurinol in connection with the itchiness. I am also working with Dr. Macallan to officially deprescribe some others.

First on the list was levothyroxine, which I have been taking for a long, long time at the minimum dose of 25 mcg. I had read a recent medical paper that reported favorable results deprescribing synthetic thyroid hormones for older adults with TSH and T4 in range, especially those on minimum dosage. That would be me. Macallan agreed, and we dropped the synthroid/levothyroxine a month ago.

Next, was Metformin. My blood sugar was doing well on Mounjaro and Farxiga, an SGLT-2 drug for my kidneys whose side-effect is peeing out your donuts. So, no need for a third diabetes drug.

On the horizon will be Lipitor (atorvastatin). My cholesterol and triglyceride numbers were so wonderful that we’ll potentially dump the statin. My decision there in collaboration with Dr. Macallan was to wait for September so the multiple discontinuations don’t combine to produce some confounding variables. By displacing that additional deprescribing, we can better isolate cause and effect if any untoward issues arise.

One potential causal factor for my five pound baseline weight gain over the past couple of months could be the withdrawal from levothyroxine and Metformin. Both are known to be mild weight loss producers. However, Jenny believes I’m gaining muscle mass. I’m skeptical at my advanced age, but I’m willing to admit the possibility, given the intensity of my workouts and my well developed six-pack still buried under a subcutaneous fat layer.

Meanwhile, social media recommended discontinuing all drugs and replacing them with medical marijuana.

Going forward (as opposed to going backward), I scheduled labs for phosphorus and uric acid. I will share results and what I glean from them.

Peptide Purgatory is a regular feature of this blog. For an annotated catalog of all my Mounjaro, GLP-1, and Peptide Purgatory updates, please visit my Mounjaro Update Catalog page.

The post Peptide Purgatory: Shouldering, DePrescribing, and Itching appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Alas, the best laid plans of mice, men, and Vox Incommoda oft times run amok.

The July Board meeting is nigh, and with it came the July Board packet, along with revised June draft minutes. The good news is that the revised minutes show signs that objections are being noticed. The less good news is that the packet and minutes still contain errors, confused document handling, defensive Secretary notes, stale roster information, and the lingering belief that minutes are a suitable venue for clerical self-defense.

So here we are. Absurdist Paper #45 performs a quick analysis of the documents leading into the July meeting.

The Pressure Is Working, But the Machinery Is Still Broken

The revised June minutes show that scrutiny can force corrections. That is encouraging. But the packet also shows why continuing scrutiny remains necessary: stale rosters, confused page references, wrong UTC dates, defensive Secretary notes, incomplete report restoration, and no clear agenda space for Directors to discuss the Board’s own authority.

Let us begin with the positive.

The revised June minutes improve several things. They name W6PNY as the Director raising the May-minutes objection, explain that he objected to the Secretary’s “out of order” comment because the Secretary lacked standing, and state that the May minutes would be adjusted and presented at the July meeting. They also correct Craig’s call to VE3CMB and add the important substance that both Craig and Gary did not think a discussion with Rich alone was necessary, that Gary said Rich should work with the Awards Committee, and that Craig wanted to return to the previous Awards Committee Report content.

That is progress. Small, belated, pressure-induced progress, but progress nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the revised minutes remain contaminated by the same fog that required correction in the first place.

The June Record Still Has Problems

Date confusion still taints the June record. The document identifies the meeting as “Local Saturday, June 14, 2026,” while also giving the UTC time as June 15, 2026, 0100 UTC. June 14, 2026 was not Saturday. The meeting was held at the normal Saturday evening local time corresponding to 0100 UTC, so the local date was Saturday, June 13, and the UTC date was June 14.

Given all the attention Doug devoted to revised document dating, he left the most glaring date problem intact.

The revised document also opens with a footer that looks as if two file names collided in a fog bank: revised timestamps jammed together, document names mashed into one another, and enough formatting debris to suggest that document control remains aspirational.

A Ghost in the Roster

Virgil Warren is still listed as Ninth Area Assistant Director despite his resignation. If Directors know of that resignation, how can they be expected to approve minutes or packets that continue listing him as though nothing changed? If official records cannot keep current with prominent resignations, perhaps “rubber-stamp” approval is not the cure. Perhaps careful review is.

Extraneous Pronouncements

The gratuitous interpretation of the five-day rule also remains embedded in the minutes discussion as if it were a pronouncement from on high. The minutes report the Chair’s explanation that there is no problem inserting reports after the final agenda is produced, and that the five-day lead-time restriction applies only to agenda discussion items. That may be Clay’s view. It may even be correct. But the minutes do not show that the Board adopted that interpretation as a ruling or resolution.

Minutes should not launder an officer’s interpretation into institutional fact unless the Board actually made it institutional fact.

And the NCS Guide language remains damning. The minutes say the workgroup was given “the most recently adopted NCS Guide from the club website” to review. That language keeps alive the fiction that the completed 2025 Guide is some inconvenient ghost document rather than completed volunteer work that should have been the starting point.

Also, yes, committee reports are part of the minutes packet. They are part of the historical record. Attempts to narrow “minutes” into only the skeletal meeting narrative are a clerical convenience, not good institutional memory.

The July Packet

Date confusion is becoming a tradition among The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. We have come to expect meeting date approximations as entertaining, continuing calendar creativity.

The July agenda says the meeting is 11-July-2026, then gives the UTC date as June 12, 2026, 0100 UTC. That is not a typo one wants in a Board packet one month after people complained about date confusion.

Time remains hard. Calendars remain undefeated.

Numerical Approximation

Then we have the equally traditional page-numbering confusion. The agenda says the June meeting minutes are attached on pages 5-9, but pages 4-8 of the packet contain the revised May minutes, while the revised June minutes begin on page 9 and continue through page 12. The table of contents lists both May minutes and June minutes, but the agenda item refers only to June.

So what exactly is being approved: May, June, both, or whatever Doug’s document blender produced before breakfast?

This is the product of twenty hours of clerical labor by the Secretary? We suppose the adjusted time budget precluded a cursory proofreading.

Acclamation Apathy?

The agenda also still preloads the approval ritual: “Accepted by Acclamation. Yes No ?” for minutes and financials. That little template is not conclusive by itself, but it fits the culture of procedural convenience too well to ignore.

More interestingly, the Financials section asks, “Are there any corrections or questions?” before the acclamation line. The Minutes section asks only, “Are there any corrections?”

No questions?

Why the inconsistency between two similar sections?

How tidy.

How revealing.

Minutes approval should not be treated as a narrow proofreading chore, which remains the primary responsibility of the author. Directors are not merely checking commas and call signs. If all those typos and date errors are inserted as deliberate diversions from substantive discussion, very clever! But typos notwithstanding, Directors are approving the official record of what happened, what was discussed, what was decided, and what future readers will understand about the Board’s work. If substantive issues remain, Directors should ask questions. They should discuss. They should correct. But they should not be nudged toward quiet acclamation by a preformatted ritual line.

May Minutes Revision

The revised May minutes included in the July packet now contain a SECRETARY NOTE, set off in red boldface, saying that at the June meeting N3VEJ’s statement was declared out of order because “it was thought” the Secretary had no standing for VOICE, that “the board agreed with this premise,” and that N3VEJ agreed to provide an update showing the Director’s objection while keeping the history of the discussion.

That is rich.

Doug is still writing interpretive notes about Doug’s own conduct. The revised language is better than the prior unqualified scolding of Mac, but it remains self-referential and defensive. Minutes should record the Board’s action and the Director’s objection. They should not become Doug’s personal appellate brief with minutes formatting.

Doug can express his clerical grievances to his Area Director for presentation to the Board. Waging his unilateral battle through the Club’s formal meeting record is indeed “out of order”.

This is the central problem. The Secretary should record what happened. He should not frame the dispute, defend his own role, explain his intent, or insert interpretive gloss designed to preserve his preferred version of events.

The Board does not need minutes that argue. It needs minutes that record.

Awards Committee Report Improvements

Now for an honest atta boy.

The July packet’s Awards Report now includes Payments by Type, showing checks, free awards, PayPal receipts, total payment sum, and counts. That is a partial restoration of financial-management value after the prior effort to strip Awards Reports down to activity statistics.

That matters.

It means pressure from Craig, Gary, Mac, Johnny, and whoever else has been asking questions is having an effect. They did not fully restore the old report format, but they put money back into the report. The Board should notice that this is exactly the kind of management data it was told did not belong there.

Funny how reality keeps barging in without an invitation.

The report also adds information about what the Awards Committee is working on. No narrative, just the exclamation that the Committee is working on two awards, followed by the names of those awards. Baby steps, I suppose. It certainly would be appropriate to flesh out that section for the historical record. Aside from creating a more useful committee report, it would set an example for the minutes.

While the Awards Committee Report has not been restored to its former glory, we see improvement, and we applaud it.

Keep going. Restore the useful management content. Explain what the Committee is doing. Show the Board what it needs to know.

Give future readers a record that tells them something more than “awards happened.”

Partial Correction Is Not Completion

The revised minutes and July packet demonstrate two things at once.

First, scrutiny works. Corrections were made. Missing substance was added. Craig’s call sign was fixed. Mac’s objection was named. The Awards Report began to recover some of its lost management value.

Good. That deserves recognition.

Second, the machinery remains unreliable. The documents still contain stale roster information, wrong dates, confused page references, defensive Secretary notes, loose procedural interpretation, and approval templates that seem designed to move the Board toward acclamation rather than active review.

That deserves continued scrutiny.

Integrity of the Historical Record

This is not just nitpicking. These documents are the Club’s memory. They tell future Boards what happened, what was questioned, what was corrected, and whether Directors acted like Directors or merely approved whatever appeared in the packet. If the record is sloppy, the institutional memory becomes sloppy. If the minutes are argumentative, the record becomes argumentative. And if Directors approve by acclamation without careful review, the Board becomes an accessory to its own fog.

So let us say the positive part plainly: To those who objected, pushed, questioned, corrected, and improved the record: atta boy!

The pressure worked. The Awards Report improved. The revised minutes moved in the right direction.

Now comes the admonition: Do not stop.

Partial correction is not completion. A slightly better packet is not a functioning governance culture. A few restored data points do not repair the Awards Committee report. A revised note does not cure the Secretary’s habit of inserting interpretive prose. A corrected call sign does not fix document control. Acknowledging Mac’s objection does not settle the Board’s responsibility to govern itself.

Continued Progress

The July meeting is the next test.

Directors should read the packet. Read the minutes. Compare them to memory. Ask questions. Reject acclamation when accuracy remains in doubt. Insist that the Chair serve the Board, that the Secretary preserve the record, and that the President remember his proper role.

The machinery moved because someone pushed.

Keep pushing. We are just getting started.

Happy 250th Birthday, USA!

Further Reading

Please view my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. Some are nice. Some are not so nice.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 45: Partial Correction, Persistent Fog appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

An encouraging sign is that our readership is expanding due to strong promotion by established readers and by the Club itself. We welcome new readers, with the hope that we can strike some resonant notes.

Our subject organization’s leadership attempted to warn members away from outside criticism. Instead, that warning may have reminded thoughtful members of something more important: they are entitled to ask questions, request records, challenge defective minutes, and expect Area Directors to represent them.

That is one purpose of these essays.

What We Are About

We do not write merely to complain, although the material supplied by current leadership often makes complaint feel less like a choice than a civic obligation. We write because members should speak up when they see imbalance, procedural shortcuts, information control, squandered volunteer labor, or leadership priorities drifting away from the general membership. The Club exists for members and is operated by members. When leadership abandons duly adopted bylaws, wastes resources, shortcuts due process, pursues cosmetic distractions, or places its own convenience ahead of the Club’s long-term health, we intend to say so plainly.

If these words resonate, members should contact their Area Directors and ask specific questions. Not angry questions merely for sport, although sport has its place. Useful questions. Documented questions. Questions about minutes, reports, committee work, website accuracy, award procedures, Board authority, and whether the Club is being governed as its organizing documents require.

Our Intent: Provide Discussion Points

A major goal of the Absurdist Papers is to inspire Club members, officers, and Directors to think: inside the box, outside the box, and occasionally about why the box is wet, smoking, and labeled “governance.” Just think.

Think about what is written here and whether it makes sense. Think about the future of the Club. Think about whether the current pattern is sustainable. Think about how the organization can correct its course before entropy becomes not merely a theme of these essays, but the Club’s operating condition.

We understand that many members have no interest in Club politics. They want to participate in nets, earn awards, see friends at the Eyeball, and enjoy the hobby without becoming amateur parliamentarians in a procedural swamp. That is entirely reasonable. Most members of most volunteer organizations are not activists. They are participants. A smaller group volunteers in service roles, keeps the machinery running, and absorbs the aggravation that comes with responsibility.

That division is normal.

But governance still affects everyone.

The member who only wants to check into nets is affected by NCS rules, NCS training, and document control. The member who only wants awards is affected by award fees, application accuracy, committee reporting, and revenue oversight. The member who only wants to attend the Eyeball is affected by Board decisions, budgets, communications, and volunteer energy. Even the member who wants nothing more than a peaceful radio hobby depends on a functioning organization behind the curtain.

Directors Reclaiming Their Role

Recapping what we have published in other Absurdist Papers, we present this list of seven major principles we have been commenting on and pursuing. While collateral issues exist, this list captures the essence of our wishes for the Club.

1. Directors have the right and duty to discuss minutes, reports, and agenda items at meetings.
2. Minutes must preserve the record accurately, not manage controversy.
3. Committee work must be credited, preserved, and reviewed by the Board.
4. The President implements Board policy; he does not manage the Board.
5. Board officers serve the Board, not the President.
6. Area Directors represent members and should not be bypassed by presidential favoritism.
7. Major volunteer departures deserve recognition and inquiry, not silence.

These non-negotiable principles are established in the governing documents. It is our hope that the Club can return to good foundational management by complying with them.

The Bottom Line: Hope and Progress

Vox Incommoda may be one small voice from the membership, but it is a knowledgeable voice, backed by a decade of committed service and a substantial store of institutional memory. We know how the Club has worked. We know how it can work. We also know what happens when leadership substitutes control for governance, silence for accountability, and procedural fog for honest discussion.

And most of all, we care about the future of the Club and its continued service to its members.

To those members who remain firmly loyal to the current President, we make a modest request: read before rejecting. You need not agree with these essays. You need not like the tone, the author, the conclusions, or the fact that Vox Incommoda keeps showing up with a flashlight in rooms some would prefer left dark. But do not dismiss documented criticism merely because someone in authority labels it disruptive, disloyal, or subversive. The Club does not belong to any President, faction, committee chair, or favored inner circle. It belongs to its members. Loyalty to the Club should require enough intellectual independence to examine criticism on its merits, separate fact from opinion, and decide for yourself whether the questions being raised deserve answers.

Thanks to Our Readers

We have received favorable feedback from members with current and former service roles, as well as from members who had grown quiet, weary, or detached. We are encouraged by that response. More importantly, we are encouraged by signs that members are beginning to ask their own questions in their own voices.

That matters.

The goal is not to create a Vox Incommoda fan club. Heaven spare us all from merchandise. The goal is to encourage members to re-engage, Directors to remember their duties, and volunteers to understand that the Club’s future does not belong exclusively to the small circle currently managing the narrative.

If the Absurdist Papers help even a few members ask better questions, insist on better records, demand better governance, or consider renewed service, then they are gaining traction.

And traction is exactly what a sliding organization needs.

Further Reading

Please view my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. Some are nice. Some are not so nice.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 44: Gaining Traction appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

“Back then, we produced minutes that faithfully recorded discussions in vivid Technicolor instead of an artist’s impression in diluted watercolors.”

Following our comedic review of the July Centurion, a nominal attempt at a Club newsletter, the Absurdist Papers return to the serious business of the dysfunctional Board of Directors. Our subject organization’s governing documents specify that eleven Directors run the Club, with the President charged to implement Board policy. Current practice suggests something different: a Board that too often waits for the President to define the problem, frame the discussion, shape the process, and tell everyone where the rubber stamp should land.

But it was not always this way.

In Absurdist Paper #43, we time travel to 2015, when the Board still knew how to say no. The President attempted to control Board action beyond his authority, and Directors pushed back in real time. They challenged him, corrected procedure, and they forced votes. They acted like a Board.

Not coincidentally, the President in that 2015 skirmish, who resigned shortly thereafter, is our current President, having risen from the ashes to be elected again in 2018.

What changed was not the personality at the center of the dispute. What changed was the Board around him. In 2015, Directors resisted presidential overreach. In 2026, too many Directors accommodate it, excuse it, or sit silently while it is converted into agenda fog, meeting fog, and minutes fog.

That is the organizational decline this essay examines.

The Way We Were

Our focus on the October 2015 Board meeting would not be possible without an excellent discussion summary in the minutes, recorded in detail by then Secretary Jim Foster, WA9DIY. This was facilitated by holding Board meetings in internet chat rooms at the time, which automatically created a verbatim transcript.

Back then, we produced minutes that faithfully recorded discussions in vivid Technicolor instead of an artist’s impression in diluted watercolors. Those October 2015 minutes reveal an interesting exchange between President Dean Davis, N7XG (now KL7OR), and Fourth Area Director Jim Higgins, KB3PU.

Indeed, the October 2015 Board meeting offers a vivid snapshot of a Board that still understood itself to be the governing authority of the Club. The major dispute arose during consideration of a proposed expenditure for the 2016 Orlando Hamcation. After the motion was introduced and seconded, President Dean Davis attempted to stop the matter by declaring, in substance, that he was going to table it until a plan was developed and presented to the Board. That immediately drew objections. Director Higgins stated the obvious point that apparently needed stating: the President had no unilateral authority to table a motion already before the Board.

The Triumph of the Bylaws

What followed was a procedural tangle, faithfully preserved in the chat transcript minutes in all its awkward glory. The Chair tried to convert Dean’s declaration into a proper motion to table. Dean first tried to make such a motion, then questioned whether he could do so under the bylaws. Directors discussed whether Robert’s Rules applied, with KB3PU noting that the Club had explicitly voted years earlier not to operate under them. The essential point, however, was not parliamentary trivia. It was authority. Dean wanted to delay Board action. Directors pushed back because the Board already had the matter before it.

KB3PU then cut through the fog. Dean’s argument was that the matter should wait until the Board could approve participation in Hamcation, but the motion already on the table was the Board’s opportunity to do exactly that. In other words, the President was attempting to block the very process he claimed was necessary. KB3PU’s blunt response, “LET’S VOTE ON IT!!!” captured the moment perfectly. The Board did vote. The effort to table or delay failed, and the original Hamcation motion ultimately passed over Dean’s opposition.

More of the Same

The same basic pattern repeated immediately afterward with the 2016 Eyeball proposal. Dean sought to withdraw or delay the proposal, saying information was missing. Directors asked the natural question: what information? No clear answer appears in the minutes. Rather than allow the matter to disappear into presidential fog, Higgins moved to accept the Eyeball proposal, the motion was seconded, and the Board approved it with one abstention.

Contemporary recollection within the Club has associated that meeting with the unraveling of Dean’s first presidency, but the minutes alone are enough for our purposes. They show the behavior. They show the attempted control. They show the resistance. And they show a Board that still understood it had authority independent of the President.

Thus, the significance of the October 2015 meeting is not merely that two motions passed. The significance is that the Board acted like a Board. The President attempted to control, delay, or derail Board action. Directors challenged him in real time. They did not dissolve into polite paralysis. Neither did they wait for someone else to define their authority. They exercised it.

Back to the Present

“This is yet another attempt to move discussion away from meetings and into the cybervoid, where objections can be atomized, softened, or ignored before the Board is asked to approve whatever version of reality survives the filtering process.“

We will not speculate on how the current Board would have acted if transported back to that October 2015 meeting. Hypotheticals are cheap, and the Club already has enough low-value inventory. What we can say is that the present Board too often remains silent while bylaw breaches, procedural distortions, and presidential overreach become routine.

Examples abound. The most recent pattern takes the form of ongoing attempts to move discussion of reports, minutes, agenda items, and substantive corrections away from Board meetings and into side channels. Yes, you read that correctly. With the assistance of his loyal Secretary and compliant Board Chair, the President has attempted to narrow or preempt discussion by duly elected Area Directors. Once again, current practice distorts the reality established by the organization’s governing documents.

The Constitution states in plain language that executive authority for the Club is vested in a Board of Directors composed of eleven Directors. The Board may delegate portions of its authority, but the authority remains the Board’s. The buck starts and stops with the Board of Directors.

As If…

The President and Vice President are given the privilege of voting as if they were Directors. That phrase matters. “As if” gives them voting parity. It does not give them governing supremacy. They are elected by the membership, but administratively they operate within a structure in which the eleven-member Board governs and officers carry out assigned duties.

Given that structure, a recent directive by the President, published on the Board reflector, is revealing:

The phrase “rubber stamp” does most of the work for us. One should appreciate such candor. Critics labor for weeks to describe a governance pathology, and then the President strolls in and names it himself.

Advance review of draft minutes is not inherently improper. Directors should indeed read the minutes before the meeting. They should identify errors and request corrections. They should be prepared. But advance review does not replace Board deliberation. It certainly does not convert approval of minutes into a ceremonial rubber stamp.

Throttle the Discussion, Control the Board

The problem is not pre-meeting review. The problem is pre-meeting containment.

Dean’s message attempts to relocate substantive discussion away from the Board meeting, where it would be visible, recorded, and subject to participation by the full Board under the transparent view of attending members-at-large. Instead, he wishes to move it into the low-energy, sparsely read environment of the private Board reflector. That reflector is not a meeting. It is not a substitute for deliberation. It is a fragmented side channel where participation is uneven, objections can be diluted, and silence can later be misrepresented as consensus.

The June draft minutes, as discussed in Absurdist 36, contained serious defects. They omitted material exchanges, softened controversy, misstated details, and preserved a sanitized version of a meeting that deserved a more accurate historical record. If Directors raise concerns on the reflector and those concerns are not resolved to their satisfaction, what then? Are they expected to appear at the July meeting and rubber-stamp minutes they still believe are defective?

That is not governance. That is laundering the record before approval.

Contact the Person Submitting Them

The third paragraph of Dean’s post is also revealing, although cryptic and grammatically unfortunate: “Also when the agenda gets posted please feel free to contact the person submitting them with comments and corrections.”

Who exactly is “the person submitting them”? The Secretary who prepares the packet? The Chair who is responsible for the agenda? The Webmaster who posts it? The President, who too often behaves as though all channels eventually route through him? The ambiguity is useful only if the goal is to keep process fuzzy.

Let us settle on the Chair, because the bylaws make the Chair responsible for the agenda. So Directors should “feel free” to contact their own Chair? Their peer who they elected to manage the agenda and run meetings? How generous and empowering! How good of the President to grant Directors permission to communicate with the officer who serves the Board, not the President.

A Meeting without Discussion Is Like a Day without Sunshine

The deeper issue remains the same. This is yet another attempt to move discussion away from meetings and into the cybervoid, where objections can be atomized, softened, or ignored before the Board is asked to approve whatever version of reality survives the filtering process.

All of this appears aimed at neutralizing inconvenient Board discussion, especially from the rare Director willing to speak up in public. Lord help us if Directors discuss the minutes before approving them, if Directors insist that reports may be questioned, and if Directors remember that the Board, not the President, runs the Club.

Do they think they govern this organization, or what?

Do not answer too quickly.

No need. The governing documents already did.

The Difference Eleven Years Makes

“In 2015, the Board used process to protect its authority.
In 2026, process is too often used to protect the President from the Board.“

The October 2015 minutes are not important because they preserve a quaint procedural squabble from a bygone era. They are important because they show what Board authority looked like when Directors still remembered they possessed it.

A President attempted to control the flow of Board business. Directors objected. The Chair was forced back toward process. Questions were asked. Motions were made. Votes were taken. The Board did not treat presidential preference as command. It did not confuse reluctance with veto power. It did not allow a matter already before it to vanish into procedural mist merely because the President wanted it delayed.

That was 2015.

2015 vs. 2026

In 2026, the same organization now watches the President attempt to route discussion away from meetings, soften reports, manage minutes, shape committee work, and openly yearn for the return of rubber-stamp approval. The problem is not that the governing documents changed. They still place executive authority in the Board. The problem is that too many Directors behave as though authority is something the President lends them once a month, provided they return it promptly and do not dent the finish.

The contrast is brutal.

In 2015, the Board used process to protect its authority.

In 2026, process is too often used to protect the President from the Board.

That is organizational entropy in its purest form. The structure remains on paper while the habits that once made it functional decay. The titles remain, meetings continue, minutes are drafted, and votes are recorded. The shell survives while the muscle atrophies.

The lesson from October 2015 is simple: presidential overreach can be stopped when Directors act like Directors. Not rebels, troublemakers, or malcontents. Directors.

They need only read the governing documents, understand their office, speak when procedure is distorted, insist that discussion occur where it belongs, and refuse to approve records that do not accurately preserve what happened.

The Board used to say no.

It still can.

But first, it must remember that it is allowed to.

Further Reading

We welcome our newest subscribers referred to us by the 3905 Century Club Centurion newsletter.

Please view my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. Some are nice. Some are not so nice.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 43: The Board Used to Say No appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Vox Incommoda, on behalf of the vast and imaginary Absurdist Papers media empire, wishes to express deep gratitude to the 3905 Century Club Centurion newsletter for its kind reference in the July issue. The broad circulation of that house organ will surely produce a welcome surge in site traffic, if only from members curious to discover what a “non-active” member is and whether the condition is contagious.

Along with our thanks, Absurdist Paper #42 takes a humorous look at the latest approximation of a Club newsletter, where unnamed critics are warned about, inactive members are selectively appreciated, and valid criticism is acknowledged just long enough to be waved vaguely toward an Area Director.

Aside from its entertaining levity, perhaps this offering will serve the collateral purpose of averting eye strain by obviating the need to read that visual nightmare. We’ll see.

Not Much Going On?

As usual, the monthly extravaganza kicks off with an inspiring note from the President, who reports that there is not much going on with the Club this month. This is useful information, especially to those of us who foolishly thought Board dysfunction, committee confusion, newsletter warnings, logo fog, NCS Guide resurrection efforts, and minutes controversy might qualify as “something.”

But apparently not.

He then tells us that he has been working with several committees, including Bylaws and the NCS Guide, to help them get started.

We can only imagine.

Other than that, we are treated to a chatty narrative about Alaska estate matters, Field Day preparations, and the enviable SWR performance of a new end-fed half-wave antenna. This is certainly important news. Some members might wonder about governance, committee authority, minutes accuracy, website accuracy, awards reporting, or why completed work products keep falling into administrative sinkholes, but those people clearly do not appreciate the soothing majesty of a sub-1.2 SWR.

There’s no business like show business.

Blank Stares

Then we have messages from the Vice President and the Awards Secretary.

Or not.

The Vice President, who when last I checked was still among the living, appears in a heavy black frame suggestive of an obituary. However, that picture seems to be the extent of his message. Perhaps this is symbolic. Or maybe it is avant-garde newsletter design. Possibly it is editorial voodoo. I decline to speculate further without protective eyewear and a gas mask.

Meanwhile, the Awards Secretary’s message consists of a borderless picture of himself looking like the neighborhood kids were playing on his lawn again. For some reason, the picture is underlined, perhaps to emphasize the friendly smile on his mug shot. The only textual assistance comes from the editor, who directs readers to the stats section near the end of the issue.

In an active organization, albeit one with “not much going on,” why can’t the Vice President and Awards Secretary find time to write a few lines for the members? Important committee work getting in the way?

Perhaps a committee should be formed to investigate.

The June Meeting

Although the draft minutes of the June meeting have not yet settled comfortably on the meeting’s exact date, the newsletter editor made the executive decision to call it the June 14, 2026 meeting. Bold. Decisive. We appreciate chronological confidence wherever it may be found.

We have already beaten that notoriously eventful meeting to death up, down, sideways, diagonally, and possibly in Morse code across several Absurdist Papers. It is therefore interesting that our intrepid editor led with an earth-shattering fact we neglected.

The Third Call Area was not represented by either its Area Director or Assistant Area Director.

He named names. Or rather, call signs.

Naughty boys. This goes on their permanent records.

The next paragraph tells us there was no new business but there was yet another discussion about the famous logo. It also emphasizes that the Board has approved no action whatsoever regarding the logo. This sounds suspiciously like damage control after the design-cart wandered down the hill without a horse, driver, or Board-approved destination.

And Then, Out of the Blue…

Then, floating serenely inside the Board meeting summary like a dead fish in a punch bowl, we encounter a paragraph about the Absurdist Papers.

Or at least, apparently about the Absurdist Papers.

I’m flattered. I think.

The editor warns readers that a “non-active” member has been posting criticisms on a non-Club website, some of them valid and some apparently not. The unnamed critic is accused of criticizing the Club, the Board, the President, the Chairman, the Secretary, the membership, officers, and specific members.

That “non-active” member would apparently be me, unless another former Club volunteer has also been writing lengthy essays about governance collapse, which would be suitably prescient but unlikely.

The placement is odd. This was supposed to be a Board meeting summary. Instead, the newsletter suddenly swerves into a vague public-service advisory about an unnamed critic on an unnamed website. Perhaps the editor wrote this while he was ostensibly observing the June meeting, which would explain why his summary of the meeting itself was so brief.

For Further Information

I could only wish that the Absurdist Papers would become a regular topic at our well-attended Board meetings. It would make my star shine even brighter. But I digress.

Members seeking “further information” are instructed to contact their Area representative on the Board. The editor could have merely printed my URL to avoid overworking our Area Directors. A live link would have been even better. But no one thought of that.

However, this raises logistical questions.

Do I need to provide my URL and biographical materials to all Area Directors so they can factually represent my interests? Should I prepare an official media kit? Does a “non-active” member submit promotional materials through his former Area Director, his current Area Director, or the Area Director most emotionally prepared to receive them?

Maybe we should designate an Area Director for the Non-Active Member Area.

I am certainly interested in promoting the brand, but please allow a little preparation time. Our Area Directors will need some time to allow the newsletter editor to get them up to speed on their newfound Absurdist Papers promotional duties, and furthermore, I am not yet ready for the anticipated rush of adulation.

Valid Criticisms, Eh?

I appreciate the Centurion’s acknowledgment that at least some of my criticisms are valid.

That was kind. Unexpected, but kind.

I would have preferred a point-by-point rebuttal, but one must not expect miracles from a newsletter that has discovered the avant-garde practice of publishing unnamed opposition notices.

No, seriously, I do appreciate it. I could not buy this sort of publicity and validation but here it is in official print, for free, yet. Somewhere in the machinery of the Club’s house organ, a sentence now exists conceding that some of these criticisms have merit.

That sound you hear is the narrative coughing into a napkin.

Oh, No!

But wait. That implies that some of my criticisms are apparently not valid. That is truly unfortunate. I will try to recover emotionally. Perhaps someday, after a period of reflection, meditation, and possibly re-reading my own footnotes, I will come to terms with the editor’s disappointment.

Until then, available evidence remains available evidence.

Pesky stuff.

New Membership Classes

Our editor also conducted a highly scientific poll asking 40-meter SSB net participants to describe their equipment configurations. He received 43 responses, which became a disorganized, uncorrelated listing presented in no apparent analytical order. He then tells us that analysis may follow next month. Waiting a month for the data to be organized into a rearranged melange with no statistical significance has us all starry-eyed with bated anticipation.

Wow, this great idea has staying power! Two months of it. Appropriately vacuous filler because it appears that external inputs have dried up.

Thus, the poll has already achieved a rare distinction: one month of filler now, one month of filler later.

Efficient.

Did You Respond? I Did.

Your favorite essayist actually responded to the editor’s poll request. Out of curiosity when looking at the results, I scanned the listing but failed to see the items I had submitted for mobile and fixed station equipment. Hmmmm. Curious. Then, I suppressed my gag reflex long enough to read the fine print.

Apparently, my entry was deactivated. Defused by the bomb squad.

Yes, the text associated with poll reveals something more interesting than antenna choices. It introduces a fascinating membership concept: the “inactive” member. Three such members responded to the survey, submitting a total of four configurations. Their participation was noted and appreciated, but their equipment configurations were excluded from the published list.

Interesting. I wonder who the other two are?

One must also wonder what criteria the newsletter editor employs to determine inactive status. A Geiger counter, perhaps? It could check for radio activity. Get it? Huh?

Oh, well.

Deactivated from Elections?

Are inactive members are excluded from an equipment poll also excluded from voting in presidential elections?

If not, why not?

If so, where exactly is that rule written?

And if “inactive” is not a formal voting category, why is the newsletter using it to decide whose participation counts?

Does this mean that all those votes the President routinely solicits from long dormant members won’t count in the future? Prohibited by Centurion editorial fiat? Oy.

Furthermore, how does an inactive member differ from a “non-active” member such as I? Is “inactive” a clinical condition, an administrative status, a voting classification, a newsletter adjective, or simply a convenient way to reduce the visibility of people who do not fit the desired story? I am accorded the double-whammy: both inactive and non-active. Who knew?

The Club now appears to have three membership states: active, inactive, and inconvenient.

Active members may be celebrated. Inactive members may be noted and appreciated, unless their data is inconvenient. Inconvenient members may be dismissed as non-active, even when their criticisms are partly admitted to be valid.

This is not membership policy. It is adjective management.

Three Special Members

The Club Statistics section then refers to tables displayed at the request of “three special members.”

Who dey?

Three blind mice?

Three little pigs?

Three tenors?

The Three Musketeers, except with spreadsheets?

Another new category of membership? Special members? Anointed by whom?

No one knows. But whoever these three special members may be, they apparently persuaded the newsletter to publish award payment data that the Awards Committee had otherwise stopped presenting in useful form.

Can a non-active member or an inactive member also be a special member? If so, I’d like to be the first to wear the triple crown.

Those barely readable tables, referred to in the text as “charts”, are ugly enough to frighten a printer, but they do indeed contain numbers. Paper awards. PDF awards. Counts. Payment sums. The sort of basic management information that should never have disappeared from the monthly Awards Committee report in the first place, although column totals would have been nice. Baby steps.

So perhaps this is progress. Maybe someday, a report of committee activity will reappear. The Centurion has the power to make it happen. The three special members should insist on it.

Perhaps the three special active, inactive, or non-active members deserve thanks from the rest of us. They’re very special, indeed.

Observing standard Club protocol, we should form a committee to identify them, recognize them, and then quietly ignore their work product next month.

Normal Stats

After the special-member statistics, the editor announces that the normal stats continue below.

This naturally raises another question: what differentiates special stats from normal stats?

Are normal stats the statistics that existed before three special members disturbed the peace?

Are special stats the ones that reveal inconvenient management information?

Oh wait. Hang on. Are normal stats the ones that go on and on until the reader forgets why he opened the newsletter and now regrets having done so?

The normal stats include check-ins by call area, net activity, no-net counts, award counts, awards by call sign, and member counts by area. Some of this information is useful, and some of it may be interesting. Some of it appears to have been formatted by a spreadsheet trying to escape captivity.

We also learn that one unidentified call area, apparently represented by a blank entry, had one check-in.

Congratulations to the blank call area. Always nice to see participation from the void.

A Closing Word of Thanks

This issue left me breathless.

I had been wondering what I would write about next, and then the Club handed me this masterpiece on a silver platter at the stroke of midnight, replete with oblique references, partial validation, membership-status fog, special-member statistics, empty officer messages, and enough formatting choices to qualify as a cry for help.

I cannot begin to thank them enough.

Brilliance

The most important point, however, is this: the newsletter did not rebut the Absurdist Papers. It warned about them. It did not disprove the criticisms. It admitted some were valid. It did not engage the issues. It directed readers to Area representatives, which may be the first time in months that anyone remembered Area Directors are supposed to exist.

So here we are.

A non-active member has been noticed.

Some criticism has been deemed valid.

The Club’s house organ has unintentionally promoted the opposition, albeit awkwardly. A clickable link would have been more efficient. Perhaps, in future issues, it could be a prominent feature, perhaps accompanying an underlined photo of old Vox Incommoda himself. I might reward the editor with a bouquet of daisies for that.

I welcome new readers vectored here by the generous publicity blurb in the Centurion. I promise to redouble my efforts to provide you with a humorously cogent alternative to the Party line. Especially now that the Centurion has ginned up additional interest, I promise to create content with even greater frequency than I have been.

And so it goes. The Absurdist Papers media empire continues its unpaid public service mission with gratitude, humility, and only modest concern that “non-active” may soon require treatment.

Now, I return this frequency to normal amateur use.

Further Reading

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. Some are nice. Some are not so nice.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 42: Valid Criticism, Now in Newsletter Form appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Volunteer-run organizations survive on volunteer labor. That labor is not merely free work. It is institutional capital: experience, continuity, judgment, memory, skill, trust, and the willingness of people to keep doing thankless tasks long after the novelty has worn off. That capital rarely appears in the Treasurer’s report, but it is often worth far more than the cash balance. If the volunteer pool dries up, the Club dries up with it.

Recognizing volunteer contributions costs almost nothing. A few sincere words at a meeting. A paragraph in the minutes. A note in the newsletter. A public thank-you that acknowledges completed service instead of pretending the departing volunteer simply evaporated into the ether. For an organization so dependent on unpaid labor, gratitude should be one of its cheapest and most reliable maintenance tools.

Why is That So Hard to Understand?

So why does our subject organization find it so difficult to praise significant contributions? Why, when crucial volunteers complete years of service, does the Club so often choose silence, minimization, or quiet erasure? Why are departures swept under the rug instead of recognized as moments to thank people who gave the Club time, effort, and competence it did not have to buy?

Absurdist Paper #41 examines this late-stage organizational behavior through the lens of entropy. An organization that fails to recognize volunteer service is not merely being rude. It is consuming its own operating capital while wondering why fewer people are willing to help.

Thus, we ask the question: How does the Club expect to attract new volunteers when significant past contributors are ignored, minimized, or castigated by its leadership?

The Economics of Free Labor

Volunteer time is free in the narrowest accounting sense, which is why badly managed organizations treat it as worthless. But volunteer labor is actually the Club’s operating capital. Money buys postage, award certificate paper, envelopes, plaques, software, and the occasional mystery expense nobody can quite identify without a committee. Volunteers supply memory, competence, continuity, judgment, and the willingness to answer the same question 400 times without committing a felony.

Members who volunteer give time they could spend on personal projects, family, radio, travel, sleep, or staring peacefully at a wall without being asked to fix anything. They offer that time without compensation. But “without compensation” does not mean “without value,” and it certainly does not mean “without the ordinary expectation of respect.”

In most volunteer organizations, much of the work is carried by a small group whose combined experience and output, if priced honestly, would dwarf the balance in the Club treasury. These are the people who know where the records are, how the forms work, which old decisions matter, what broke last time, and why the simple solution is usually not quite as simple as it looks to someone wandering in with a bright idea and no context.

They contribute from the heart and sometimes from the wallet. They are worth their weight in rhodium.

Their cost to the Club? Zero.

Their replacement cost? Much higher than the Club seems willing to understand.

Kindness: The Cheapest Management Tool Ever Invented

A thank-you costs nothing. A paragraph in the minutes costs nothing. A public acknowledgment costs nothing. Even our subject organization, with its lightweight treasury, can afford “nothing”, although it might need a committee to study procurement. And then a three-month debate over whether Board approval is required. But I digress.

The Club need not throw testimonial banquets honoring every volunteer who serves with distinction. In fact, short-term service is often as valuable as long-term service when a specific task needs to be completed. A volunteer brought aboard for a defined project may spend weeks or months doing focused, difficult work that saves the Club time, money, and embarrassment. Completion of that work is worthy of recognition, both informal and formal. Whether the service lasted ten years or ten months, the maxim still holds: it costs nothing to be nice.

A brief phone call from the President costs nothing. A resolution drafted by the volunteer’s Area Director and presented to the Board costs nothing. A note in the minutes costs nothing. A sincere public thank-you costs nothing. None of these gestures requires anyone to deviate dangerously from the Club’s usual activities, unimportant as many of them may be, in order to spend five minutes acknowledging useful work.

What Changed?

The organization used to understand this. It honored past presidents and long-serving Board members, but it also recognized individuals whose contributions were smaller, quieter, or tied to specific projects. Little drops of water and little grains of sand still matter when the beach is maintained by volunteers.

The Club still acknowledges some contemporaneous work by active volunteers, especially when doing so is convenient at the annual Eyeball meeting. That is fine as far as it goes. The problem is what happens when a volunteer’s usefulness ends, or worse, when a volunteer leaves under circumstances inconvenient to the prevailing narrative. At that point, recognition too often becomes optional, silence becomes easier, and completed service is treated as something best allowed to fade from view.

That is not volunteer management. That is political accounting.

Recognition should not depend on whether the President still expects future usefulness from the volunteer. Gratitude should not be reserved for those who remain safely inside the tent, smiling for the group photo and producing more unpaid labor on demand. A healthy organization thanks people for what they contributed, not merely for what leadership still hopes to extract from them.

When appreciation becomes conditional on continuing compliance, the message to future volunteers is unmistakable: serve long enough to be useful, leave quietly when you are done, and do not expect the organization to remember your work once you are no longer politically convenient.

That is a foolish way to manage free labor.

It is also a remarkably efficient way to make sure there is less of it.

The Goodwill Battery

Every volunteer carries a goodwill battery. Each unnecessary slight, erasure, private scolding, public silence, or failure to acknowledge completed service drains it. A sincere thank-you charges it. Late-stage organizations keep wondering why the battery is dead after leaving the headlights on for ten years.

But why charge batteries when they are finished with their service, right? Why spend a few minutes thanking departing volunteers when those precious Board cycles could be used debating unnecessary new logos, gamer chat servers, or the latest procedural diversion wearing a committee name tag?

That is sarcasm, but what follows is not.

Volunteers have eyes. They have ears. Most of all, they have brains. If a prospective volunteer sees how contributors are discarded after significant service, why should that person expect different treatment? Why should anyone step forward, invest serious time, accept responsibility, and produce useful work if the visible reward for completed service is silence, minimization, or quiet erasure?

An uncharged goodwill battery with buckled plates, left on public display, is a strong disincentive to future volunteers. The load test reveals irreparable damage. The meter reads “Stay Away.”

That is the part leadership misses. Neglecting gratitude does not merely affect the departed volunteer. It sends a signal to everyone still watching. Every ignored contribution becomes a warning label. Every unacknowledged departure becomes a recruitment message written in reverse.

A volunteer organization cannot keep draining the goodwill battery and then act surprised when the engine will not turn over.

The Departing Volunteer Test

How an organization treats departing volunteers tells future volunteers what to expect. If years of service end with silence, minimization, or embarrassment avoidance, everyone watching learns the lesson: give your time, do the work, absorb the aggravation, and then vanish politely when leadership no longer finds your existence convenient.

Within the past year, this pattern has repeated often enough to suggest that it has become unofficial policy to sweep distinguished service under the rug. Four key individuals departed largely because of grievances involving the President. Their combined contributions across multiple volunteer roles were considerable: committee chairs; Area Director; long-serving Awards Secretary; technical contributors; newsletter editor; committee members whose work was accepted, praised, and then ignored; registered agent; prolific Net Control Station; Assistant Director; and Election Monitor.

That is not a minor leakage of talent. It is a major volunteer systems failure.

Business As Usual?

Those departures should have sent a signal to the Board that something was seriously wrong. Instead, Directors appeared content to treat the matter as the President’s problem. They let him take the lead. Having done so, they should not be surprised when the President chose silence, minimization, or narrative control over gratitude. A straightforward thank-you would have required acknowledging the scale of the loss. Better, apparently, to pretend these people simply faded into the QRM.

When major contributors depart, the Board should ask, “Why?” That question may be uncomfortable, especially in an organization where “why” questions are increasingly met with deflection by the President and his confidantes. Ask anyway. Directors are not ornamental. Their job is not to sit quietly while institutional capital walks out the door carrying its own box of records.

And if the President is incapable of expressing gratitude to departed volunteers, the Board should pick up his slack.

After all, it costs nothing to be nice.

World Peace, Marijuana, and Other Dangerous Ideas

Did that section header grab your attention? Has Vox Incommoda finally flipped his wig? Drifted to the Dark Side? Started wearing beads and preaching universal love from the back of a Volkswagen bus?

No. Settle down.

We are talking about something much more dangerous to a late-stage volunteer organization: being nice.

Too often in these Absurdist Papers, we write scathing excoriations, because scathing excoriations are what the material demands. Here, because the subject is kindness, we are attempting to remain lighthearted. This is a dangerous experiment. Keep children and sensitive directors away from the keyboard.

We are not suggesting that the Club must achieve universal harmony, legalize marijuana at Board meetings, although it often appears as if some of them have been smoking something funny, or join hands and sing folk songs until the bylaws heal themselves. We are suggesting something far more radical.

Say thank you when people do useful work.

A Practical Project for the Board

Here is a practice exercise for the Board: recognize Virgil Warren.

Virgil’s departure is still fresh enough that Board recognition would remain meaningful. Why not be nice? Recognize an NCS who repeatedly covered the Club’s backside, served as an unfailing relay station, worked by the NCS Guide, and did the job without making himself the center of the universe. He believed in good net operation. He did not merely practice it; he modeled it.

That kind of service deserves acknowledgment.

Shucking the editorial “we” to avoid ambiguity, I hereby present my offer to any Director brave enough to be nice: I will write the thank-you motion for you. Having written several such motions during my volunteer service, I am uniquely qualified as a ghostwriter.

But do not wait too long.

At my age, you might soon be dealing with an actual ghost.

The Bottom LinE: A Simple Courtesy Protocol

Recognizing service, whether large or small, should be standard practice for the Board regardless of who serves as President or what tone that officer chooses to set. It is unfortunate that the current President appears to find this practice beyond his emotional pay grade, but if that is the case, the Board must pick up the slack.

We are not suggesting anything exotic. No grand ceremony, testimonial banquet, or carved monument in the parking lot. Just ordinary organizational decency: common sense, a working moral compass, and some recognition that volunteer labor has value.

Five Minutes Invested for Outsized Gains

Every resignation of a Director, officer, committee chair, or major volunteer should be formally acknowledged at the first Board meeting following the conclusion of service. The President or Chair should publicly recognize the volunteer’s work, and a brief thank-you for completed service should appear in the formal minutes of that meeting. The departing volunteer should be invited to attend and receive that recognition personally, if he or she chooses.

Completed committee work should be credited. When that work is later used, revised, incorporated, or superseded, the prior contributors should be credited again. If a future committee builds on an earlier document, the members of the prior committee whose efforts formed the foundation should not be erased merely because leadership finds the lineage inconvenient.

Departures should not be hidden, minimized, or airbrushed merely because they embarrass leadership. Mature leaders want to know why people resign. They ask questions and look for patterns. They consider whether correctable causes exist. And they do not treat resignations as public relations irritants to be smoothed over until everyone forgets.

Gratitude should not depend on whether the volunteer remained politically convenient. Volunteer contributions do not disappear because someone in leadership feels threatened by what those contributions, or the circumstances of departure, might reveal.

These are simple suggestions. They cost nothing. They require no bylaw amendment, no workgroup, no budget line, no software subscription, and no month-long exercise in parliamentary fog. The Board can simply decide that useful service will be acknowledged as a matter of routine practice.

Volunteer labor is like any other scarce resource. Ignore it long enough and it will go away. In an organization already struggling to attract capable volunteers, that is a reckless risk.

And that could get expensive.

But it costs nothing to be nice.

Further Reading

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. Some are nice. Some are not so nice.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 41: It Costs Nothing to Be Kind appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Deferred Maintenance

While the Board fiddles with zero-value projects like an unnecessary new logo or a gamer chat utility likely to confound members and annoy committees, day-to-day management continues to decay. When committees responsible for maintaining crucial documents and systems are distracted by internal wheel-spinning or nullified by presidential circumvention, necessary work goes undone. When the Club Secretary spends his energy trying to influence the Board with his personal interpretation of the bylaws and maneuvering toward the functional equivalent of a Board seat, required duties such as keeping accurate minutes fall by the wayside. And when an NCS Guide Workgroup is handed an outdated document to revise while a completed, restructured, and more current guide is treated as inconvenient history, the Club wastes irreplaceable volunteer labor that could be used more effectively elsewhere.

This is exactly how a late-stage organization in the throes of entropy creation coupled with compensatory entropy masking pretends to function while coming apart at the seams.

The President, charged with implementing the policies of the Board, is responsible for ensuring that day-to-day operational things happen. Mundane things, yes, but important ones: keeping the website current, maintaining accurate documents, ensuring internal compliance with the bylaws, and preserving external compliance with governmental reporting requirements. These are not glamorous jobs. Nobody gets a plaque for updating an award application or filing a corporate report correctly. But these details create the Club’s forward-facing image. If they are shabby, the Club looks shabby. If they are neglected, the Club looks neglected.

In this essay, we will focus on several areas where responsible functionaries have dropped the ball, then apparently wandered off to admire the new wallpaper.

The Website

To an outsider, the website reflects the Club. I could argue that the format evokes memories of local government websites of the mid-2000s, but I am not here to decry the aesthetics and usability of the site. What I address here is content and implementation lag.

The information presented by the website should be kept up-to-date. I suppose the assumption is that we all know what is going on, so the information will be updated when we can get around to it. No biggie. The webmaster is on an extended RV trip, and everything can wait.

The webmaster is certainly entitled to a vacation, but is there no backup plan? Can no one perform simple updates in his absence? Are we not then creating yet another single point of failure as we described in Absurdist 1, the seminal paper of this series?

Close is good enough. Set your sights low, so you won’t be disappointed.

Club Leadership

On the website’s Leadership page, Virgil Warren, W9WWG, who resigned in May, is still listed as an Election Monitor. Yet his role as Ninth Area Assistant director was deleted elsewhere on the page. I suppose whoever last updated the page must have read the announcement of Virgil’s resignation but missed the part about the Election Monitor.

Oh wait, there was no formal announcement of Virgil’s resignation. Too embarrassing, one would guess. Thus, I suppose the webmaster needed to wing it based on hearsay. He tried. You cannot expect him to be a mindreader.

Then, we come to Committees. Specifically, the Bylaws Committee. The webmaster must not have received that message, either, as Johnny Allen, KI4WCQ, is still listed as the only member. He is the only remaining member of the former Bylaws Committee, which suffered severe depletion due to two resignations and an untimely death in December. The new committee was announced by the Board via its April minutes, under New Business. Yet it is now the end of June and they are nowhere to be found on the website.

Award Information

In a well-known, high-profile move, the Club adopted a new fee schedule for awards on March 1, 2026. The motion describing this fee increase passed in November 2025. Thus, most of us have been aware of the new fees for seven months now.

Yet the Awards Program information on the website was only cursorily updated. Endorsement fees are still shown as effective September 1, 2016, although the fees themselves are correct. The same inattention to detail resulted in the PayPal awards fee payment page leading off with the sentences, “The Awards Applications and On-Line Award Entry System have been updated as of 2016-Sep-09 to accommodate the fee reduction approved by the BoD. Please submit your award applications on the latest Award application documents.”

Wow. Now, we change the effective date of the ten-year-old, obsoleted fee decrease eight days forward, which is bad enough, but then it reflexively references the Awards Program information page to determine the correct fees, so as to thoroughly confuse the new member with its conflicting disinformation.

But the worst is yet to come.

Award Applications

Then, the confused website visitor might wish to actually look at an award application. The first award one can earn is the 100-Point Award, or its equivalent for SWLs, the Shortwave Listener Award. The prospective member downloads one or the other from the website. Both contain a comprehensive set of instructions for submitting awards, as well as the fee schedule.

Oops.

Both applications list the 2016 fees as if they were current. Both applications were last updated under my watch on March 1, 2025, a year before this year’s fee increase.

Being fair-minded and helpful, I sent the Awards Secretary/Awards Committee Chair a heads-up email on May 25, 2026 apprising him of the errors. I never heard back from him. A month later, the outdated applications remain untouched.

One must wonder how this confusing fee situation plays out. In my mind, the front-line soldiers, the Area Awards Managers, wind up doing mop-up duty for the wayward officers.

As usual.

The NCS Guide, Again

No post about fanciful departures from sound management principles would be complete without mention of the illustrious NCS Guide, a botched ongoing project akin to hiring a consultant to write a document and then throwing it out the window along with the $10,000 consulting fee.

Recall that the President assigned a new task group to update the 2023 version of the NCS Guide although a 2025 update had been completed at considerable expense.

You don’t just get free volunteer cycles. Those hours come at a price. The cost of serving the whims of a capricious President is exacted in the form of deferred maintenance elsewhere in the Club. Damn the website, full speed ahead on the latest NCS Guide update, which might or might not ever be adopted.

The update’s volunteer authors have every right to be concerned about the possibility that their work will be in vain, given the fate of the 2025 Guide. Shelving it squandered hundreds of man-hours of volunteer capital. However, I am pleased to learn that at least some members of the current NCS Guide Workgroup have access to the completed 2025 Guide and may be using it as a foundation. That is exactly what should have happened in the first place.

The Bylaws Committee

Henceforth, until they prove worthy of another nickname, I will refer to the Bylaws Committee as the “Ours Is Not to Reason Why Committee” (OINTRW). As you might recall, that characterization emanates from an utterance by its chair as a deflection to a “Why?” question by a Board member at the famous June meeting. We discussed that nonsense in Absurdist 28.

The OINTRWC seems to have devolved into an informal sounding board serving at the whim of the President. Formerly, with a high-functioning Bylaws Committee, the President merely chose to applaud the committee’s work but subsequently ignore or manipulate its output. In the current paradigm, it appears that the President wishes to interact directly with the Committee to influence the Board. This is obviously contrary to the stated formal procedure in the bylaws.

A committee tied up with busywork, which still needs to proceed through appropriate channels, is again wasting valuable volunteer capital.

Meanwhile, they task themselves as guinea pigs in the low value Discord project, imposed on them without Board approval. Thus, they waste cycles playing with gamer chat protocols while they could be doing useful work.

While the OINTRWC is serving as informal presidential legal counsel and Discord tester, it cannot be focusing on real maintenance work: clarifying defects, cleaning up outdated provisions, improving document control, and protecting the formal processes it was created to support.

Deferred Maintenance Is Still Maintenance

None of these issues is individually catastrophic. A stale committee listing will not sink the Club. An outdated fee reference will not, by itself, bring the organization crashing down. A neglected award application will not cause the bands to go silent. A website stuck in a prior decade will not prevent a member from checking into a net. And a Bylaws Committee relegated to busywork and presidential counsel will go unnoticed by most members.

That is exactly why these problems persist.

Each one is small enough to excuse. Each one can be waved away as a minor oversight, a volunteer limitation, a timing issue, or something that can be fixed later. But when small neglected items accumulate across the website, award materials, committee listings, operating documents, and official records, they stop being isolated mistakes. They become evidence of a maintenance culture in decline.

This is the unglamorous side of organizational entropy. It does not always arrive as a dramatic failure. Sometimes it arrives as old fees on current forms, missing committee members, outdated guides, abandoned work product, confused document ownership, and the recurring assumption that somebody else will eventually clean up the mess.

Studying Color Charts for Months Does Not Paint the House

Meanwhile, the Board entertains cosmetic projects and procedural distractions while the ordinary machinery of the Club grows shabby. The Club does not need a new logo before it needs accurate award applications. It does not need a gamer chat utility before it needs current information for members. It does not need another workgroup before it needs to stop losing, ignoring, or duplicating completed volunteer work.

Maintenance is governance.

Keeping the website current is governance. Keeping forms accurate is governance. Preserving completed work is governance. Making sure committees are listed correctly is governance. Maintaining clear, consistent, reliable information for members is governance.

These things may not be glamorous, but they are the visible evidence that someone is paying attention.

Right now, the house has fresh wallpaper proposals, a discussion about rearranging the furniture, and several people admiring the curtains. And for months, a committee has been working on color selection before painting the house has even been approved.

Meanwhile, the foundation still needs work, the pipes are still leaking, and the electrical panel is making a noise no homeowner should ignore.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 40: Shabby Housekeeping appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

My Offer

I retain archived source files and historical materials from my decade of Club service, including time as Area Director, Awards Secretary, Awards Committee Chair, Bylaws Committee member, and general unpaid Club consigliere. My archive includes Awards Committee reporting materials, historical logo files, and governance-related documents such as the completed 2025 NCS Guide. Any Director or Committee Chair seeking these materials for legitimate Club work may request them. I will provide them in due course.

Note: I am limiting this offer to Directors and Committee Chairs simply to keep the file transfers manageable and tied to legitimate Club work. Members who are curious about any of these materials should contact their Area Director and ask that the information be requested through the proper representative channel. That is how the system is supposed to work.

Lots of Files

When I resigned from my leadership roles, I provided my files to the Awards Secretary and the President on thumb drives. The collection was large enough that I had to buy a couple of 64 GB drives. Those drives included the awards files I maintained, including every award I generated as Awards Secretary, along with many documents of historical significance.

So, to be clear, this material was not left behind in a shoebox under a folding table at an Eyeball. Copies were provided.

I am not proposing to repeat that entire bulk transfer, although I would consider doing so if justified. Instead, I am offering specific files upon request to engaged Directors and Committee Chairs who are willing to dive deeply enough into issues to require the relevant historical material. If the Board wants to solve problems rather than admire them, some of the source material already exists.

Awards Committee Reports

The Awards Committee Report has been the subject of recent Board discussion. At the last meeting, one Director suggested that returning to the former report format would be the simplest solution. The President responded with the noncommittal observation, “We’ll see if we can figure that out, then.”

There is not much to figure out.

I have Awards Committee Reports going back as far as 2016. They were published as part of minutes or Board packets, but I also retain them together in source format. Any Director who wants the collection for legitimate Club work may request it.

That should make it easier to “figure out.”

The former Awards Committee Report format was not a mystery. It worked for many years, provided useful management information, and supported oversight. If the Board wants to restore meaningful Awards Committee reporting, the materials are available.

Logos

I also have Club logo files in multiple formats, including EPS, Adobe Illustrator, PNG, and JPEG. The vector files are especially useful because they allow the image to be scaled cleanly to arbitrary dimensions. These were the kinds of files used to create logo images for coffee cups, Eyeball banners, and other Club-related materials.

Included in the collection are logos redrawn by the graphic designer daughter of former Third Area Director N3WD for the 2017 Eyeball in Upperco, Maryland. She recreated them in vector formats, which should address many of the resolution and scalability concerns that tend to arise when organizations keep recycling low-resolution images until the logo looks like it was transmitted by spark gap.

I also have the 40th Anniversary logo designed by Beth Greenberg, wife of our late and beloved colleague Dwight, WF4H.

If the Club wants to discuss logo history, logo quality, source files, or future logo use, those files exist. There is no need to pretend the Club must begin with guesswork, screenshots, or whatever image happens to be floating around the website.

Other Documents

Incidental to my tenure on the Bylaws Committee, I also have the completed 2025 NCS Guide. That Guide was intended for implementation on July 1, 2025, but somehow missed the boat, fell off the dock, and was later replaced by a new effort to update the older 2023 version still sitting on the website.

No one has satisfactorily explained why the completed 2025 Guide was shelved.

Any Director or Committee Chair curious about this is welcome to request a copy of the remarkably well organized and useful document produced after roughly ten months of volunteer work by the Bylaws Committee. If the Board wants to understand what was already completed before assigning new work, the file exists.

Other documents may also be available. If I have not mentioned something here, Directors and Committee Chairs may ask.

My Object

History is valuable to an organization approaching its fiftieth year. The Club needs to preserve its past, understand its decisions, and learn from its mistakes. That requires transparency, continuity, cooperation, and access to records. It also requires resisting the organizational habit of forgetting useful work and then assigning someone else to rediscover it.

Historical Preservation

I recognize that I am sitting on a substantial archive of Club history. I also recognize, being human and approaching eighty, that I will not be around forever. Like everyone else, I will eventually become unavailable for consultation, complaint, provocation, or memory retrieval. My hope is that the information I preserved will continue to serve the Club after I am no longer available to explain where the bodies, files, and old report formats are buried.

Clarity on Current Issues

I also wish to help with current issues, because some of these files hold the keys to problems the Board is still treating as mysteries. There is no sense reinventing the wheel when it has already been invented, preserved, transferred, and in some cases apparently misplaced in plain sight.

Reiterating My Offer

So here is the offer to any Director or Committee chair:

• If you want the former Awards Committee Report materials, ask.
• If you want historical logo files, ask.
• If you want the completed 2025 NCS Guide, ask.
• If you want to compare what existed before the current fog rolled in, ask.

I will happily oblige.

Enough Said

I am not seeking appointment, reinstatement, committee membership, or operational control. I am offering records. The Club does not need another workgroup to discover whether source files exist.

The files exist.

The only remaining question is whether anyone wants to use them.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 39: The Files Exist, Free for the Asking appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

In Absurdist Paper #38, we examine how this happened: how representative governance gave way to a shadow operating system built on access, loyalty, appointment control, committee labels, sanitized minutes, and the Board’s enduring talent for mistaking acquiescence for leadership.

Preferred Pathways

Back in Absurdist 21, we described the problem created when a member favored by the President triggered presidential intervention in a net operations dispute. That member had violated the members’ rules of conduct not only by disrupting a net, but also by calling on the President to intervene on his behalf. The bylaws specify that members agree to lodge complaints only with their Area Director.

That safeguard exists for a reason.

Area Directors are supposed to be the members’ first point of governance contact. They are supposed to administer their areas, handle member concerns, and serve as the representative path into Board-level attention. The purpose is to prevent members from shopping complaints directly to whatever officer they believe will give them the most favorable answer.

In that dispute, two Area Directors eventually became involved, but only after the matter had already become a Club-wide issue. Even then, their token attempt at resolution was met by a token effort from the favored member, who had every reason to believe he enjoyed presidential protection.

Direct pathways to the President compromise the policy that empowers Area Directors to administer their areas. They also teach members the wrong lesson. The real path is not representative government. The real path is not process. The real path is access.

It is not what you know. It is who you know.

That is how shadow governance begins.

Committee Capture

Our subject organization has turned increasingly inward to a tight circle of familiar names to implement shadow management by committee. Three consequential bodies, the Bylaws Review Committee, the Awards Committee, and the NCS Guide Workgroup, include thirteen positions staffed by ten people. The Vice President appears in all three and chairs two of them, namely Bylaws and the NCS Guide Workgroup.

Overlap is not automatically sinister. In a shrinking volunteer organization, some overlap is inevitable. The problem is not merely that the same people keep appearing. The problem is that committee structure increasingly appears to be shaped around presidential trust, presidential convenience, and presidential control.

Awards Committee

The Chair of the Awards Committee was chosen for that role by the President, who presumably understood that this compliant appointment would help keep the committee within the desired lane. In Absurdist 29, we chronicled the evolution of the Clint Wise motion, which was presented “on behalf of the Awards Committee” even though the motion appears to have been concocted by the President and the Awards Committee Chair rather than reviewed and approved by the Committee itself. Meanwhile, the President and the Awards Committee Chair worked together to remove useful management information from the monthly Awards Committee report.

If the Board allows that behavior to continue, it has essentially nullified the Awards Committee. The Committee becomes a label. The Chair becomes the channel. The President becomes the source. The Board gets the result.

Very efficient, if one’s goal is to eliminate independent review while preserving the appearance of committee process.

Bylaws Committee

The Bylaws Committee now seems to be considering casually introduced subjects at the behest of the President. One example is the “suggestion” to change Board meeting timing from the second Saturday of the month to the third. When the Board asked why, the Committee Chair could only offer the deflection, “Ours is not to reason why…”

Excuse me, but the Board is entitled to ask questions of its standing committees. Committees answer to the Board, not the President. A committee should not function as a suggestion box for presidential convenience, nor should its Chair behave as though the Board has no right to understand the purpose of work being requested.

NCS Guide Workgroup

The NCS Guide Workgroup presents another problem. The President is charged with overseeing the nets, which is one of his few defined areas of limited authority. But his assignment of the 2023 NCS Guide to a new workgroup for updating begs for serious Board examination.

The NCS Guide project had already been assigned to the Bylaws Committee in 2024. The Committee completed the project in May 2025 after a significant expenditure of volunteer labor. In the June 2025 minutes, the President stated that the new Guide would take effect on July 1. That never happened. The completed 2025 Guide was never implemented. Now the President has directed a new workgroup to update the website version, apparently starting again from the old 2023 document.

That is not process. That is organizational amnesia with a workgroup.

Why did the President drop the expensively produced 2025 Guide? Does the Board care?

In a volunteer organization, squandering completed volunteer work is the functional equivalent of depleting the treasury on a personal whim. Time is capital. Trust is capital. Competence is capital. When leadership burns those assets because it finds an earlier result inconvenient, it damages the willingness of future volunteers to do serious work.

Managing Committees

The Board must recognize that committee work is its responsibility. Directors must demand accurate reporting. They must read committee reports critically. They must ensure that committees are functioning as working bodies, not window dressing or facilitators of presidential decisions.

A committee that merely validates what the President already wants is not a committee. It is window dressing.

Board Machinery Captured

The Board also permits the President to dominate the machinery through which Board business is managed.

The Board lets the President choose its Chair and Secretary. Those positions should protect Board process and preserve the record. Instead, they have become instruments of agenda control, report suppression, minutes interpretation, and meeting-flow management.

I imagine the Board breathing a sigh of relief whenever the President’s favored Chair candidate regularly offers his services at the annual chair selection meeting. If he had not volunteered, one of them might have needed to step forward. Whew! Nothing says Board apathy like a collection of statues sitting around a table with “Hell, yes — I approve” signs hanging around their necks!

These appointments matter because the Chair and Secretary are not decorative functionaries. The Chair runs the meetings. The Secretary prepares the packet and creates the official record. When those positions become aligned with presidential preference rather than Board independence, the entire governance system tilts.

Impeding Review of Committee Work

In the previous section, we asserted the importance of Board review of committee work. That review becomes especially necessary when hand-picked committee chairs appear to be doing the President’s bidding. Yet the Board’s own meeting machinery has drifted into the same pattern. The Chair, who runs Board meetings, and the Secretary, who documents them and sometimes oversteps into managing them, appear to operate within the President’s preferred frame.

Recently, either the President directly wanted committee reports minimized, or others divined his wishes and acted accordingly. In either case, the Board allowed officers to narrow discussion of committee activities. Reports were labeled as being included for “information purposes only.” Questions were pushed toward the reflector. Minutes became a place for procedural editorializing. Discussion became something to contain.

After the meeting, the Secretary sanitizes the record of pesky controversy that might negatively affect the President’s image or weaken control of the narrative. He also uses the minutes to admonish the Board, offering helpful hints on how Directors should govern.

Geez.

I should not need to mention this, but I will.

These positions answer to the Board. The Chair serves the Board. The Secretary serves the Board. Both can be replaced by the Board.

Yet the Board chooses not to act. The easier and friendlier path is to let the arrangement continue. That path allows a dysfunctional President to consolidate influence through personnel, process, packet control, and record control.

That is shadow governance in operational form.

The Board Ratifies Rather Than Governs

The Board has devolved into a collection of individuals who mostly just show up to vote on the second Saturday of each month, assuming they decide the meeting is worth the inconvenience. They spend little time collectively discussing strategic or tactical issues between meetings. Then, when the meetings themselves are sanitized of real content, voting on perfunctory approvals and trivial projects consumes most of the Board’s available energy.

If the President needs to ram something through, he cajoles a collection of friendly Directors through private, one-on-one phone calls far away from the meeting record. In many cases, he has his votes lined up before opening the Zoom app.

That is not Board governance. That is pre-cleared ratification.

The Board offers little resistance to this progressive decay of organizational discipline and hierarchical integrity. Most Directors appear content to go with the flow, following the path of least resistance. Keep the meeting short. Avoid unpleasant conflict. Approve the minutes. Accept the reports. Let the Chair smooth the edges. Let the Secretary tidy the record. Let the President handle whatever is unpleasant. Then sign off in time for the 75-meter Early Net.

In this environment, the Board does not need to be conquered. It merely needs to keep surrendering by habit.

What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate

Shadow governance occurs when the organization’s formal decision paths remain on paper, while real decisions move through access, loyalty, appointment control, agenda control, and record control.

That is the disease.

The Club cannot cure it by changing one committee chair or revising one rule. It must restore the Board as the actual governing body.

Committees must be independent enough to review matters honestly. They must choose their own chairs, or at least not have chairs imposed as presidential control points. Directors must be the member access path. The Chair must serve the Board, not the President. The Secretary must preserve the record, not manage the narrative. The President must execute Board policy, not become the hidden routing switch for everything that matters.

The official system still exists on paper. The unofficial system now does much of the actual work.

That is why the Club feels increasingly incoherent. It has a Constitution and Bylaws describing one organization, while daily practice reveals another.

• The formal structure says Board governance; the shadow structure says presidential routing.
• The formal structure says committee review; the shadow structure says committee labels.
• The formal structure says minutes preserve the record; the shadow structure says minutes manage the narrative.
• The formal structure says Directors represent members; the shadow structure says access beats representation.

In our golden years, we seem to be running for the shadows.

David Bowie just rolled over.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 38: On the Issue of Shadow Governance appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

This essay examines the Club’s existing membership paradigm, explains why “free lifetime membership for all” has become a broken model, and offers practical suggestions for separating historical membership mythology from the active membership reality the Club actually needs to manage.

Our subject organization loves large numbers when large numbers are useful.

A Club of Over 4,000 Members?

“Over 4,000 members” sounds impressive. It suggests size, vitality, tradition, reach, and organizational legitimacy. It conjures an image of a sprawling national amateur radio club with a deep bench of engaged members, eager voters, willing volunteers, and meaningful democratic participation.

Then one looks at actual voting totals, Board participation, committee activity, net activity, award applications, and volunteer availability, and the 4,000-member Club begins to look suspiciously like a barn painted on the side of a cliff.

The problem is not merely rhetorical exaggeration. The problem is structural. The Club does not appear to maintain a meaningful active membership roll. It confers lifetime membership automatically through award achievement, then carries that membership indefinitely, whether the member remains active, inactive, unreachable, uninterested, Silent Key, or lost somewhere in the glorious swamp of historical data.

That means the Club cannot reliably answer the most basic membership question:

How many members does it actually have?

Not how many people have ever earned a first 100-Point Award, how many names exist in an award database, and not how many call signs appear in legacy records. Not how many people can be invoked when the President wants the Club to sound large.

How many living, reachable, interested, participating, voting, dues-supporting or award-supporting members does the Club have now?

That number matters. And right now, the answer seems to be: nobody really knows.

How Membership Happens

Under the Club’s current model, membership is not obtained through an application, dues payment, annual renewal, Board approval, or even a conscious act of joining in the ordinary sense. For a licensed amateur operator, full voting membership is conferred upon earning a first 100-Point Award. For a shortwave listener, associate non-voting membership follows earning the SWL Award. For a club station, associate non-voting membership follows earning a first 100-Point Award.

This is charming in its original spirit, although it is interesting to note that the the original Articles of Incorporation refer to an application for membership in Article 10 c.

The Club was born around nets and awards. The idea was simple: participate, make contacts, earn the first award, and become part of the Club. Membership was not a paywall. It was a recognition of participation. In that sense, the model reflects the best part of the Club’s history. You earned your way in by getting on the air and doing the thing.

But a model that was charming in 1977 can become dysfunctional fifty years later.

The first 100-Point Award is free. Therefore, a person can become a lifetime voting member without paying a membership fee, without submitting a membership application, and without providing meaningful demographic or organizational information beyond what is needed to issue the award. In practical terms, the Club may associate a membership record with a name, address, call sign, and award history, but not with the kind of information a normal membership organization would collect and maintain.

That might include email address verification, ARRL membership status, military service, communication preferences, emergency contact limitations, volunteer interests, willingness to serve on committees, current activity status, or consent to receive election communications.

Instead, the Club has something closer to a historical award-recipient database that it sometimes treats as a membership roll.

There is a difference: One is an archive while the other is an electorate.

The Lifetime Membership Problem

Lifetime membership sounds generous until one tries to govern through it.

If membership never expires, is never renewed, and is not periodically confirmed, attrition cannot be measured. Members leave the hobby, stop checking into nets, and stop chasing awards. Some members lose interest and some become physically unable to participate. Members change call signs and email addresses. They move, they die. Members remain in the database anyway.

That produces a comforting fiction for publication in the Centurion and in braggadocio by the President.

The Club can claim thousands of members because the database contains decades of accumulated award earners. But that number does not distinguish active members from inactive members, reachable members from unreachable members, voters from nonvoters, living members from Silent Keys, or current participants from historical artifacts.

This is not merely an accounting problem. It is a governance problem.

A club that cannot identify its active membership cannot accurately measure participation, cannot meaningfully report attrition, cannot calculate turnout, and cannot know whether elections are representative. Furthermore, it can neither evaluate whether Area Directors represent living constituencies, nor can it determine whether programs are serving current members or merely honoring a vanished population through sentimental arithmetic.

And it cannot be honest with itself.

The President can invoke “over 4,000 members” because no one can point to a clean, maintained, independently understood active membership count and say, “No, that is not the real number.”

The number cannot be challenged because the number has not been defined.

That is convenient. A little too convenient.

Ghosts in the Electorate

A lifetime membership roll creates another problem: stale names and old email addresses can be politically useful.

This is not an accusation that any particular election was decided by ghosts, zombies, or retired operators rising from their recliners in ectoplasmic protest. Let us not get carried away, at least not before lunch. The point is more basic and more serious.

When a Club preserves email directories of long-dormant members without a transparent system for active status, such lists are open to exploitation. A President, official, editor, campaigner, or anyone with access to past member data might try to activate these names for electoral advantages. While some contact info remains valid, other entries are outdated. Certain messages may reach people who haven’t participated for years yet still hold voting rights. These individuals might be unaware of present-day issues or candidates, allowing them to be influenced by whoever controls the narrative.

That is not healthy membership democracy. It is database politics.

If the Club wants lifetime voting membership, then it needs clean rules for voter eligibility, current contact confirmation, election notice, opt-in or confirmed email status, and inactive-member handling. Otherwise, the Club has created a strange situation in which active members carry the Club, inactive members inflate the Club, and old addresses can be rediscovered when convenient.

A clean membership roll protects elections. A mythical membership roll protects whoever controls the myth.

The Free First Award Problem

Then there is the matter of money, investment, and assimilation into the Club’s culture.

The free first 100-Point Award has obvious historical appeal. It lowers the barrier to entry. It welcomes newcomers. It encourages participation. It gives a new operator a tangible accomplishment without immediately asking for payment. In a net-centered awards club, that is not a foolish idea.

But “no barriers to entry” can become “no investment in belonging.”

A person can become a lifetime voting member without paying a membership fee, without submitting a membership application, without affirmatively joining in the ordinary sense, and without contributing anything to the Club beyond the time needed to earn the first 100 points. In the old culture, that time commitment probably meant something. A new station had to get on the nets, learn the rhythm, make contacts, understand the Club’s customs, and gradually become part of the operating community.

That assumption no longer holds as strongly.

A Slam-Dunk

Today, depending on circumstances, a first 100-Point Award can be earned very quickly. A newcomer attending an Eyeball could gather the necessary contacts through the friendly miracle of QRP nets, where the award path can be compressed into a weekend of handouts, smiles, signal reports, and organizational self-congratulation. That may be good hospitality. It may even be good recruiting. But it is not the same thing as assimilation into the Club’s culture.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The phrase may be old, but the principle still works. When a person invests nothing, that person has little to protect. A free first award attached automatically to free lifetime voting membership may generate a new member number, but it does not necessarily create commitment, loyalty, understanding, or responsibility. It may not create a future volunteer, a serious award chaser, a net regular, a voter, or someone who cares whether the bylaws are followed, the finances are sound, the records are preserved, or the awards system remains credible.

That is the hidden cost of free lifetime membership.

Nominal Membership

The Club may gain a nominal member without gaining an engaged member. It may expand the historical roster without strengthening the active community. It may create the appearance of growth while adding another name to the database that will later be counted, invoked, emailed, and perhaps mistaken for a living constituency.

This is not an argument for slamming the door on newcomers. The Club should remain welcoming. The first award should still feel like an invitation, not a toll booth. But there is a difference between welcoming someone and conferring permanent voting membership with no application, no contribution, no confirmation, no orientation, and no continuing connection.

A free first award may be good outreach. Free lifetime voting membership attached to that award may no longer be sound governance.

Stakeholders, Not Just Names

A healthy club does not merely collect members. It creates stakeholders.

Stakeholders care because they have something at risk. They have time invested. They have effort invested. They have money invested. They have friendships, awards, traditions, operating habits, volunteer work, and institutional pride invested. They care because the Club’s decay would cost them something.

That is why active members become protective. They want accurate records because their awards depend on them. They want sound finances because the Club’s infrastructure depends on them. They want competent officers because volunteers depend on them. They want clear bylaws because fair process depends on them. They want a credible awards system because their own work inside that system has value.

A zero-investment membership model weakens that natural protective instinct.

If membership is conferred automatically and permanently after a free introductory award, the Club may have no practical way to distinguish between a member who is deeply invested and a member who merely passed through. Both remain members. Both may remain on the rolls. Both can be counted in the great mythical membership total. But only one is carrying the Club.

This is where the free first award becomes part of the larger membership-roll problem. It is not just a revenue issue. It is a culture issue. It is a governance issue. It is an accountability issue.

A member who has invested nothing may have no reason to care what happens next.

A Club built on members who no longer care will eventually be governed by the few who still do, or by the few who find the inactive names useful.

What the Club Does Not Know

Because there is no real membership application, the Club does not collect basic information that could be useful for planning, governance, outreach, and affiliation.

For example, many amateur radio organizations track military service or veteran status because such information often matters culturally, historically, and socially within the amateur community. The same is true for first responder status. It can support recognition, outreach, event programming, and member connection.

The Club also does not track ARRL membership status. That matters because ARRL affiliation and related programs can offer practical benefits to clubs, including resources, listings, communications tools, and insurance-related opportunities. I researched ARRL affiliation years ago and ran into the same brick wall that keeps appearing in this organization: the Club could not identify what percentage of its members were ARRL members because the Club did not collect or maintain that information.

Imagine that.

A club claiming thousands of members could not answer a basic eligibility question because it did not know enough about its own membership.

This is not a small administrative inconvenience. It is another example of organizational entropy: information that should exist does not exist, so options narrow, planning weakens, and leadership substitutes mythology for data.

Define Active Membership

The first fix for the vexing quandary over membership numbers is simple in concept, though probably complicated in execution because human volunteers will be involved. In this entropic organization, that typically means the same five people who do everything else, with tight coupling to the whims of the President. But I digress.

The Club should distinguish among several membership statuses:

Historical Member: Anyone who earned membership under the traditional rules and remains in the permanent historical record.

Active Member: A member who has confirmed contact information and has participated in a defined way during a recent period, such as checking into nets, applying for an award, voting, volunteering, donating, or confirming membership status.

Inactive Member: A historical member who has not participated or confirmed contact information within a defined period.

Silent Key: A deceased member, preserved respectfully in the historical record but not counted as active or voting.

Associate Member: SWL and club station members, recorded according to the bylaws but distinguished from full voting members.

This would allow the Club to preserve its history without pretending history is current membership. The Club could still say, proudly and accurately, that more than 4,000 people have earned membership over its lifetime. But it should not say or imply that it currently has 4,000 active members unless it can prove that absurdity without needing a fog machine.

Annual Confirmation Without Dues

One option is an annual membership confirmation.

This would not require dues. It would not revoke historical membership. It would not punish inactive members. It would simply allow the Club to know who is still reachable and interested.

Each year, members could receive a simple electronic or paper confirmation request:

• Are you still active or interested in the 3905 Century Club?
• Is your call sign current?
• Is your email address current?
• Is your mailing address current?
• Do you wish to receive election materials?
• Are you an ARRL member?
• Are you interested in volunteering?
• Do you consent to receive official Club communications electronically?

Members who respond remain active. Members who do not respond after a reasonable period become inactive for administrative purposes. They remain historical members. They can reactivate at any time by confirming their information.

This is not draconian. It is basic housekeeping.

Every organization that wants to know who its members are eventually discovers the radical administrative practice of asking them.

Couple Voting Rights with Current Membership Status

The next question is harder: should voting rights require active status?

I think the Club should at least consider it.

A person who earned a first 100-Point Award in 1989, has not checked into a net in twenty years, has not applied for an award in decades, has not confirmed contact information, and has no current involvement in Club affairs should not carry the same voting weight as a member who is participating now.

This is not disrespect for long-standing members. Quite the opposite. Historical members should be preserved and honored. But voting should reflect current connection to the organization.

One possible rule would be:

A full voting member remains eligible to vote if, within the previous three years, the member has confirmed contact information, voted in a Club election, checked into a Club net, applied for an award, served as a volunteer, made a donation, or otherwise confirmed continued interest.

That gives plenty of ways to remain active. It does not require award chasing. It does not require constant net participation. It merely requires some living connection to the Club.

The Club should not be governed by ghosts, stale email addresses, or database archaeology.

A Modest First-Award Reform

The Club does not need to abandon the free first award tradition. It should not punish newcomers for wanting to try the Club. It should not turn the first contact with the awards system into a shakedown at the clubhouse door.

But it should separate the free introductory award from permanent governance status.

Several options are available.

Option 1: Keep the first award free, but require a membership application.
The applicant receives the free first award, but voting membership requires a simple membership form with current contact information, communication consent, ARRL status, volunteer interests, and acknowledgment that the member wants to be part of the Club, not merely receive a certificate.

Option 2: Keep the award free, but make membership activation affirmative.
The first award would confer eligibility for membership, but the new award recipient would need to activate membership by confirming contact information, opting into official communications, and acknowledging voting rights and responsibilities.

Option 3: Keep membership free, but require periodic active confirmation for voting.
This preserves the traditional no-dues model while preventing inactive historical members from bloating the voting roll forever. A member who remains interested can confirm status easily. A member who disappears becomes inactive for voting purposes until reactivated.

Option 4: Create an introductory member status.
The first 100-Point Award creates introductory membership. Full voting membership begins after the member confirms information and demonstrates continuing connection, such as earning a subsequent award, checking into Club nets over time, volunteering, donating, or otherwise affirming active interest.

Option 5: Solicit a voluntary first-award contribution.
The first award can remain free, but the application should clearly explain that the Club incurs costs and invite a voluntary contribution to support awards, technology, records, and operations. Some people will contribute if asked directly and respectfully. Astonishingly, adults sometimes respond well when treated like adults.

Option 6: Pair the first award with orientation.
A new member should receive more than a certificate. The Club should provide a clear, well written welcome packet explaining the awards system, nets, bylaws, elections, volunteer opportunities, current officers, communication channels, and expectations for participation. If the Club wants members to become part of the culture, it must introduce the culture instead of assuming osmosis through signal reports. When I was last involved, promptly sending such a welcome package to new members was the responsibility of the “Communication Team”. This should be a mandatory policy.

None of these options destroys the Club’s tradition. They refine it.

The goal is not to create financial barriers. The goal is to create intentional membership. The Club should still welcome newcomers generously, but it should stop pretending that a free certificate, a database entry, and lifetime voting rights automatically produce engaged members.

A first award should open the door. It should not be the entire membership process.

Protect the Awards Culture While Fixing the Membership Model

The Club must be careful not to damage what actually works.

The awards system is the Club’s core identity. Membership tied to award achievement makes cultural sense. The first award should remain welcoming. New members should feel encouraged, not taxed at the door like they wandered into a county fair with a parking fee.

But the Club can preserve the awards culture while fixing the membership problem.

It can still welcome newcomers through the first 100-Point Award, it can still honor every historical member, it can still preserve lifetime recognition, and it can still avoid annual dues if the membership hates dues as much as one suspects.

But it must stop confusing historical recognition with current governance. That distinction is the whole point.

An award record says: this person accomplished something. A membership roll says: this person is part of the current organization. A voter roll says: this person may help choose Club leadership. Those are related concepts.

But they are not the same concept.

The Club’s current paradigm blurs them together, and the result is inflated membership mythology, unmeasurable attrition, weak planning, election uncertainty, and a governing structure that cannot tell the difference between active members and sediment.

The Real Number

The Club should publish three numbers annually:

• Total historical members.
• Current active members.
• Voting-eligible members.

That alone would change the conversation.

No more hiding behind “over 4,000 members” when fewer than 100 people vote. No more pretending database accumulation equals organizational health. No more invoking a giant membership body when actual participation suggests a small active core surrounded by decades of names.

The Club might not like the real number. That is usually why organizations avoid measuring things.

But honest numbers are better than comforting fiction. If the active membership is fewer than 200, say so. If the voting-eligible membership is fewer than 150, say so. If only 89 people vote in a presidential election, say so and ask why. If whole areas produce one, two, or four votes, say so and confront what that means for representation.

A shrinking Club can still be a good Club. A shrinking Club that lies to itself cannot.

Conclusion: Stop Counting Ghosts

Free lifetime membership for all may have served the Club well when the nets were younger, when the paper flowed more slowly, and when the active membership was easier to see. But fifty years later, that model is producing bad information, inflated claims, unmeasurable attrition, and a voting universe that may not reflect the members who actually sustain the Club.

The answer is not to erase history. The answer is to separate history from current governance.

Preserve every member record. Honor every award earner. Maintain the historical roll. Remember the Silent Keys. Keep the first award welcoming. But create an active membership status. Confirm contact information. Track current participation. Collect useful voluntary data. Identify voting eligibility. Ask about ARRL membership. Build a membership roll that can support planning, elections, outreach, affiliation, insurance, and honest reporting.

The Club does not need another myth. It needs a roster. A real one.

Because a Club that cannot identify its members cannot honestly claim to represent them. It can only count ghosts, inflate numbers, and hope no one asks how many living, active, interested members remain.

And in this Club, hope has already been assigned too much committee work.

The Absurdist Papers series of essays, written by a former officer and director of this organization, is intended to create discussion fodder for Club members and policy makers alike. My departure from volunteer service frees up my time to explore the Club from the unique viewpoint of an outsider with inside knowledge and institutional memory accumulated through a decade of service. I write this drivel hoping that it will inspire the few remaining committed volunteers to stem the tide of organizational entropy in a Club I have long cared about.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 37: Free, Lifetime Membership: A Broken Paradigm? appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Absurdist Paper #36 dissects the draft minutes for the June Board meeting, at least the first iteration. They present another fine example of our subject organization’s growing problem with official memory.

These draft minutes do not chronicle the meeting in a meaningful way. They are minimal, whitewashed, and in some sections, flat-out misrepresentations, replete with personal opinions and rule articulations. They are a mess. The issue is not that the draft minutes are imperfect. Draft minutes are drafts. Corrections happen. Names get misspelled. Page references drift. Human beings, against all evidence and better judgment, continue to prepare documents.

The issue is that these draft minutes do not merely contain errors. They shape the meeting into a softened, sanitized, and sometimes self-serving version of what happened. Key exchanges are omitted. Revealing comments vanish. Uncomfortable details are compressed into fog. The Secretary inserts his own procedural interpretation into the record. Once again, the minutes become less a neutral record of governance and more a post-meeting attempt to control what future readers will think occurred.

This is minutes laundering, not recordkeeping.

About That Workload, Doug

Before we proceed, let us pause over the Secretary’s workload complaint, because it has now become part of the Club’s official atmosphere. At the June meeting, the Board was told that preparing packets and minutes can consume something like twenty hours per week. The implication was clear enough: this is burdensome work, Directors should be more restrained, and anyone unhappy with the minutes is welcome to grab a shovel and help dig the trench.

Fair enough. Let us test that.

This analysis was assembled in a few hours using contemporaneous meeting notes, the draft minutes, and the meeting recording. It identifies date errors, stale roll-call information, omitted exchanges, mischaracterized discussions, softened controversies, and inserted procedural interpretations. With access to the Zoom AI Companion transcript discussed in Absurdist 34, a competent Secretary could have prepared far better minutes in significantly less time than the workload figure being floated from the head table.

That matters. If a former Director pushing 80 can reconstruct the substantive meeting record in a few hours from the outside, then the Board should not simply accept “twenty hours” as a magic shield against scrutiny. Directors should return the challenge. What exactly consumes that time? Is the workflow broken? Are reports arriving late? Are templates poor? Is the Secretary transcribing when he should be summarizing? Is he manually doing work the software can already do? Or is the complaint being used to justify thinner minutes, fewer questions, and less accountability?

No one should want the Secretary buried under unnecessary work. But the solution is not to reduce the historical record, discourage Directors from asking questions, or insert defensive interpretations into the minutes. The solution is to modernize the workflow, use the tools already available, and produce accurate minutes without treating every substantive Board discussion as an attack on the person holding the pen.

Surely a comparatively young whippersnapper like Doug, properly equipped with AI transcription and a disciplined template, can outperform this old fart with a notebook, a recording, and a grudge against institutional fog.

Now, on to my analysis.

The Date Still Does Not Work

Let us begin with the easiest problem, because apparently the Club now struggles with the calendar.

The draft minutes identify the meeting as “Minutes – Unapproved 14-June-2026.” They then state “Local Saturday, June 14, 2026,” followed by “June 15, 2026, 01:00 UTC.” Later, the minutes say the meeting was called to order at 0100Z.

Those statements cannot all be true.

If the meeting was called to order at 0100Z on June 14, then it was the evening of June 13 in the United States. If the local meeting date was June 14 at 9 PM Eastern, then the UTC date would have been June 15. The draft minutes preserve the same date confusion that infected the agenda packets, as though time itself has now joined the Club’s document-control problem.

This is not a cosmic mystery. It is a recurring monthly Board meeting. The organization should be able to state when it happened.

A Board that cannot correctly record the date of its own meeting should perhaps be cautious before interpreting the bylaws, restructuring committees, changing meeting dates, or lecturing Directors about what is and is not “out of order.”

The Roll Call That Time Forgot

The roll call still lists Virgil Warren, W9WWG, as 9th Area Assistant Director.

Virgil resigned in May.

One might think that a resignation from a Board-related position would have some effect on the roster used in the next month’s minutes. Apparently not. The Club’s official record continues to move names forward by inertia, like a ghost ship crewed by copy-and-paste.

This matters because roll call is not decorative. It establishes who held office, who was present, who had authority, and who participated in the governance of the corporation. If the roster is stale, the record is stale. If the record is stale, future readers inherit fiction with line numbers.

The Secretary could possibly bank on a weak excuse. The President kept Virgil’s embarrassing resignation low-profile, failing to announce it while quietly sweeping it under the rug to save face. Meanwhile, the Secretary might have been too busy assembling Board packets to have heard the news through the back-channel grapevine.

Again, this is not a complicated correction. Remove the resigned Assistant Director from the roll call. Leaving him in there does not assuage the sting and embarrassment of his departure.

There. Governance.

Doug’s Procedural Pronouncement

The most revealing problem appears in the discussion of the May minutes. The Secretary is at it again.

Mac objected to the May minutes because they contained the Secretary’s editorial statement that a prior discussion was “out of order.” Mac’s point, correctly stated, was that the Secretary does not rule Directors out of order. The Chair does that during the meeting. The Secretary records what happens. He does not get to become Parliamentarian Emeritus in the minutes after everyone has gone to bed.

So how do the June draft minutes handle this?

By giving Doug another platform.

The Gospel According to Doug

The draft minutes state that the Chair explained the packet publication process. Then, gratuitously, the minutes add that there is “no problem” inserting reports after the final agenda is produced on Monday because the five-day lead-time restriction applies only to agenda discussion items.

Say what?

That is not minutes drafting.

That is Doug’s bylaws interpretation, inserted into the historical record out of left field under the guise of summarizing a minutes discussion. That, coming from the author of a patronizing comment added to each agenda: Did we actually record the events and discussions of the meeting correctly?

Answer: No, but we added our passive-aggressive “no problem” nonsense.

This is precisely the type of transgression Mac objected to in the first place. The Secretary is using the minutes to editorialize, interpret, defend, and normalize his preferred procedural theory. His earlier “out of order” remark generated an objection. The cure was apparently to insert a new procedural ruling into the next set of minutes.

That is not improvement. Seems more like escalation.

If Doug believes the bylaws allow reports to be inserted after the final agenda is produced, he should say so in a proper discussion, where Directors can challenge him. If the Chair believes that interpretation is correct, the Chair can rule accordingly. If the Board wants to clarify the issue, it can refer the matter to the Bylaws Committee through proper channels.

What Doug should not do is launder his own interpretation into the minutes as though it were settled fact.

Minutes are not the Secretary’s private commentary channel. They are the Club’s historical record.

The recording secretary records the meeting. Articulating rules and misquoting the bylaws is not part of the deal.

The Missing “Why”

The Bylaws Committee discussion is another example of selective memory.

My notes from the meeting show that Kirk reported the committee was considering moving the regular Board meeting from the second Saturday to the third Saturday of each month. Gary then asked the obvious question: why?

Kirk’s answer was the revealing part.

“Ours is not to reason why…”

That response matters. It was not merely a joke. It signaled that the Bylaws Committee was being asked to consider a governance change without openly stating the underlying reason. Since then, I have heard enough to confirm what the exchange suggested: this was not some independent committee initiative bubbling up from neutral review. It was another example of back-channel tasking.

Back-Channel Machinations

Dean wanted something explored. Kirk brought it to the Bylaws Committee. The committee was placed in the position of examining a structural change without the normal discipline of a formal motion routed through the Chair.

That is ass-backward.

The Bylaws Committee should not be used as an informal sounding board for presidential preferences, secretarial workload complaints, or anyone else’s procedural wish list. If someone wants the Board meeting date changed, a Director or voting officer should prepare a motion and submit it to the Chair. The Chair should route it through the Bylaws Committee for review. The committee should analyze the governing documents, report what changes would be required, and return the matter through the formal process. Moreover, transparent records must reflect the entire process.

That is governance.

What we appear to have instead is casual, back-channel machinations: private presidential nudges converted into committee activity, then sanitized in the minutes as bland procedural housekeeping.

The draft minutes omit Gary’s question. They omit Kirk’s deflection. They omit the part that revealed why the discussion mattered. They record the shell and bury the signal.

That is how dezinformatsiya works in small organizations. Not by dramatic lie, but by omission, compression, and boredom.

The NCS Guide Memory Hole Gets Formalized

The draft minutes also report that the NCS Guide review committee has been provided “the most recently adopted NCS Guide from the club website.”

That sentence should set off alarms.

The website contains the older, 2023 guide. It does not contain the 2025 NCS Guide produced after months of Bylaws Committee work and publicly announced in 2025 as going into effect. The draft minutes now help launder that erasure by referring to the website version as the “most recently adopted” guide.

Adopted by whom?

When?

By what action?

And what happened to the 2025 guide?

The 2025 NCS Guide did not crawl into a ditch on its own. As we thoroughly discussed in Absurdist 31, it was completed, praised, announced, and then left unimplemented. Now a new workgroup is being sent back to the website version as though the completed update never existed.

That is not document control. That is institutional amnesia wearing a committee badge.

The Awards Report Discussion Gets Flattened

The Awards Committee report discussion is one of the most important parts of the meeting, and the draft minutes manage to flatten it into procedural pablum. Ho hum.

The draft minutes say Craig raised concern that the report “does not show all the information that might be desired.” After “lengthy discussion,” the President asked whether Craig would work with Rich on the content of the awards reports.

That is not an adequate account. A review of the YouTube video confirms that my meeting notes accurately reflect what happened. Doug’s minutes do not.

Craig’s Points

Craig made two distinct points. First, financial information belongs in the Awards Committee report because the Audit Committee needs a way to compare expected award income against actual receipts. If the awards report contains only award-count exhaust, the Audit Committee loses a key management tool. This is especially important because the Club already has a history of reconciling award revenue against receipts, and eliminating that information from the report weakens oversight at exactly the wrong time.

Second, Craig said, speaking as a Club member and Director, that the current Awards Committee report does nothing for him. It does not show what the Awards Committee is doing. It does not report ongoing projects. It does not identify substantive work. It does not help Directors understand whether the committee is functioning, drifting, or merely producing statistics.

That is not a committee accountability issue, not just formatting.

The missing discussion matters even more because of what followed. Gary eschewed involvement and said whatever Rich wanted to put in the report was fine. This was the Treasurer discussing a report whose financial information should help reconcile award activity and revenue. The Treasurer’s response was essentially: leave me out of it, whatever Rich wants.

That should be in the minutes.

A Simple Solution, a Presidential Parry

Craig then stated the obvious, uncomplicated solution. The Awards Committee report should revert to the previous format, the one used before the President and Awards Secretary stripped its financial information and converted the report into a statistical placemat.

Dean’s response was not decisive leadership. It was managerial fog. Craig had “some great ideas.” Forward them along. Dean would forward them to Rich. Craig stated the simple solution of reverting to the prior format. Dean deflected, “We’ll try to figure that out then.”

Try to figure what out?

The old format existed. It worked. It contained the needed information. It existed through November 2025. It later changed because the President declared the revenue numbers “meaningless,” and now one of the very people who needs the information for audit work is strongly criticizing that omission.

This is not difficult. Go back to the former format.

But the draft minutes do not preserve the actual issue. They turn a concrete oversight problem into a vague content preference and an action item for Craig to work with Rich. That framing protects the people who caused the problem, obscures the Treasurer’s disinterest, ignores the President’s deflection, and hides the simplicity of the solution.

What we have here is data laundering, not historical record.

Sanitizing the Logo Contest

The logo contest discussion receives similar treatment.

The draft minutes make it sound routine. The contest will run June 15 through October 15. Gene will contact Peter. A judging committee exists. They are publishing format and DPI resolution specifications. Several Directors asked whether there was interest in updating the logo. We will need a motion at some point to implement a change.

That is the sanitized version.

The meeting itself was messier and more revealing.

Gene had already sent an email to the membership before the meeting announcing the logo contest, including contest dates, submission instructions, judges, and prizes. Peter said Gene had not contacted him as promised. Gene admitted he had not contacted anyone. Dean asked whether anyone had submitted a motion to approve the need for a new logo, because the Board needed to approve that before going to the membership. Doug said he had reviewed the April minutes and could not find recorded approval. Craig remembered Dean telling Gene to go ahead. Gene was flabbergasted because he thought he had a “go.” Clay told Gene to explain to the members that the logo requires Board approval and to slide the contest one month.

That was the story.

The issue was not whether Gene published DPI guidance. Sheesh! The issue was that a Club-wide logo contest had left the station before anyone could identify clear Board approval for the train.

The draft minutes reduce that governance train wreck to a harmless project update. Worse, it exacerbates what is already a foggy record of bobbing and weaving.

Again, the pattern repeats. Remove the embarrassment. Preserve the bland action. Bury the accountability.

The Watered-down Report-Discussion Gag Rule Deflection

The draft minutes also soften Mac’s Q&A challenge to the agenda’s passive-aggressive language regarding reports.

The draft minutes say only that someone raised a question about the wording for discussion of reports and that the membership has the right to observe the discussion. Clay indicated the wording was “not great” and he would modify it.

That is not wrong, but it is thin.

Mac made a specific point. Reports are Board business. Directors should discuss them openly at Board meetings where members can observe. This was a direct challenge to the agenda language attempting to push questions about reports into the CCNBoard reflector and away from open meeting discussion.

Clay’s response also matters. He said he would change the wording, but added that he did not want discussions to become “War and Peace.”

That quip belongs in the record because it explains the tension: the Chair wants efficiency, but the Board still has a duty to discuss matters of governance. Meetings should not become endless novels. Fine. But neither should they become staged readings of preapproved paperwork.

The draft minutes again preserve the outcome while softening the conflict.

The Adobe Question Loses the Important Part

The description of the financials discussion presents itself in a way that protects the fog.

The draft minutes say a question was raised about the Adobe software expense of $49 and whether it was paid once or monthly. Gary answered that it is a monthly charge.

That is only part of the exchange.

Peter’s question went further. He wanted to know what software the Club was paying for. Was it InDesign? Something else? Gary said he did not know. He just pays the bill. Dean chimed in to further obfuscate the matter and deflect questions. He and Rich would deal with it.

The Treasurer not knowing what monthly software charge he is paying is a more important fact than the mere recurrence of the charge. A financial report should not become a guessing game. If the Club is paying monthly for software, the Treasurer should know what it is, who uses it, what is its need, and whether it remains justified.

And in our subject organization, the Treasurer is also the Fourth Area Director. Fiduciary, policy maker, involved on multiple levels. No need to defer to the President and Awards Secretary.

The minutes must record the President’s deflection, too. A Director asked him for specifics; he responded with a parry. The President answers to the Board.

The draft minutes record the harmless answer and omit the uncomfortable ones.

How convenient.

The Larger Pattern

Taken individually, some of these omissions and errors might seem small.

Together, they show the method.

The draft minutes repeatedly preserve the least embarrassing version of events. They record outcomes but omit revealing exchanges. They summarize conflict into fog. They remove names, soften accountability, and convert governance failures into harmless updates. At the same time, they allow the Secretary to insert his own bylaws interpretation when that interpretation protects his packet process.

This is not what minutes are for.

Minutes are not a public-relations product. They are not a comfort blanket for officers. They are not a procedural sermon from the Secretary. They are not an opportunity to protect the President, the Chair, or the packet from scrutiny.

Minutes are the official memory of the Club.

And this Club already has a memory problem:

• It forgets completed work product.
• It forgets why reports mattered.
• It forgets what committees actually did.
• It forgets who resigned.
• It forgets which guide was completed.
• It forgets whether Board approval was granted.
• It forgets that agenda language designed to suppress discussion was challenged.
• It forgets that a Treasurer said whatever Rich wanted was fine.
• It forgets that simple solutions were offered and buried under “we’ll try to figure that out.”

That is not accidental entropy.

That is entropy assisted by editing.

The Dean-Clay-Doug Axis

At this point, the pattern is too obvious to ignore.

Dean controls too much of the operating environment. Clay presides over meetings in which uncomfortable governance issues are softened, deferred, or converted into manageable fog. Doug controls the written record and repeatedly inserts interpretive gloss while omitting key facts that future readers would need to understand what actually happened.

This Dean-Clay-Doug Axis does not need to issue dramatic decrees. It merely needs to shape what reaches the Board, shape what happens in the meeting, and shape what the minutes preserve afterward.

• Agenda fog.
• Meeting fog.
• Minutes fog.

By the time the Board approves the record by acclamation, the controversy is already processed, pasteurized, and rendered safe for historical consumption.

Dean may be secure for the next eighteen months, but Doug and Clay are not sovereign institutions. They serve at the Board’s discretion. That point should not be whispered. The Board, not the President, is responsible for managing the Club. The Constitution and bylaws establish that structure, even if current practice sometimes looks like the President manages the Board through a compliant Chair and Secretary while everyone else waits for the packet to tell them what reality is this month. Doug and Clay require direction from the Board. They should not be allowed to convert administrative convenience into procedural control, nor should the Board permit them to narrow discussion, shape the record, or manage meeting flow in ways that serve the President’s preferences rather than the Board’s responsibilities.

Directors: Please Read the Minutes!

That is why Directors must read the minutes.

Not skim them. Not trust them. Not approve them because everyone wants to move on to the next item. Read them. Compare them to memory. Compare them to recordings. Compare them to reports. Compare them to what people actually said.

• If the minutes are wrong, say so.
• If the minutes omit material exchanges, say so.
• If the Secretary editorializes, say so.
• If the minutes launder the meeting into a more convenient story, say so.

Approval by acclamation is not a substitute for Board review. It is not a magic wand. It is not absolution. When Directors approve minutes without reading them carefully, they become accomplices in the corruption of the record, even if their sin is merely laziness.

Mac objected.

Good.

Mac has been doing what Directors must do: read the documents, remember what happened, challenge bad recordkeeping, and refuse to let procedural fog become institutional fact. That effort deserves recognition, and it deserves support. One Director cannot carry the record alone. But one Director can force the rest of the Board to decide whether it wants minutes or mythology.

Correct the Record

The Board should not approve the June draft minutes as written. It should demand corrections.

1. The meeting date and UTC/local-time problem should be fixed.
2. Virgil Warren should not be listed in a current roll-call capacity if he had already resigned.
3. Doug’s interpretation of the five-day agenda rule should be removed unless it is clearly attributed as a statement made during the meeting and subject to correction. It should not be presented as settled procedural truth merely because the Secretary typed it with confidence.
4. The Bylaws Committee discussion should include Gary’s question and Kirk’s “ours is not to reason why” deflection.
5. The Awards Committee report discussion should reflect Craig’s two distinct points: financial data is needed for oversight, and the report should show what the Awards Committee is actually doing.
6. Craig’s call sign in the Awards Committee discussion should be corrected. He is VE3CMB, not VE3CMT.
7. Gary’s statement that he did not need to be involved, and that whatever Rich wanted in the Awards Committee report was fine, should be recorded.
8. Craig’s recommendation to return to the former Awards Committee report format should be recorded. Dean’s vague “we’ll try to figure that out” response should be recorded as well.
9. The logo contest discussion should be corrected to reflect the actual governance issue: the contest had already been announced to members before clear Board approval was identified; Gene believed he had a “go”; Craig remembered Dean telling Gene to proceed; Doug could not find recorded approval; and Clay told Gene to slide the contest because Board approval was needed.
10. The Q&A discussion should identify Mac’s objection to the report-discussion language and Clay’s promise to revise it.
11. The financials discussion should record that Gary did not know what Adobe software was being paid for, not merely that the charge was monthly.
12. The NCS Guide entry should not be allowed to obscure the completed 2025 Guide. If the committee is reviewing the website version, the record should say so plainly, and the Board should ask why the completed 2025 version is being ignored.

None of this is hard.

It only requires the Club to value accuracy over convenience.

I have given Directors a ready-made list of discrepancies and corrections to the June minutes in the hope that one of them might happen across this essay and demand that the official record accurately reflect what happened at the meeting, and nothing else. No editorializing. No laundering. No selective omissions. No private procedural doctrine inserted as fact. No passive-aggressive attempts to narrow the record after inconvenient discussion has already occurred.

Will anyone take the initiative to do what is right? Or are they all too worried about hurting Doug’s feelings, crossing Dean, or provoking another literary reference from Clay or Kirk?

Stop Pretending

The Board has a choice: It can continue approving sanitized minutes by acclamation, congratulating itself on efficient meetings while the historical record is slowly converted into paste. Or it can act like a viable Board of Directors.

• A viable Board reads the minutes.
• A viable Board corrects the record.
• A viable Board does not allow the Secretary to editorialize by stealth.
• A viable Board does not allow the President’s preferences to move through back channels and emerge wearing the costume of committee activity.
• A viable Board does not let the Chair smooth over uncomfortable facts for the sake of meeting flow.
• A viable Board does not let the official record become a soft-focus version of governance.

The Club does not need prettier minutes. It needs truer minutes. The Directors should demand them.

Disinformation must cease. Transparency must be restored. And if the Board cannot bring itself to correct a set of minutes that misstates the date, lists a resigned officer, launders conversations, omits material exchanges, misidentifies a Director’s call sign, obscures a completed NCS Guide, and inserts the Secretary’s private procedural doctrine into the record, then it should stop pretending it is exercising oversight.

Because if the Board cannot protect the record of what happened last week, it has no business claiming it can protect the future of the Club.

The record is the test. Correct it.

The Absurdist Papers series of essays, written by a former officer and director of this organization, is intended to create discussion fodder for Club members and policy makers alike. My departure from volunteer service frees up my time to explore the Club from the unique viewpoint of an outsider with inside knowledge and institutional memory accumulated through a decade of service. I write this drivel hoping that it will inspire the few remaining committed volunteers to stem the tide of organizational entropy in a Club I have long cared about.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 36: Minutes Laundering appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Absurdist 35 is intended as a head start.

Instead of spending institutional energy on short-term distractions like Discord, logo contests, and other shiny objects rolling across the governance floor, the Club’s leadership should be confronting the longer-term problems threatening the organization’s future: weak representation, eroding trust, procedural decay, financial opacity, volunteer flight, document-control failure, and the declining integrity of the awards system. That work would require something more than hobbyist caretaking. It would require the President and Board to act like responsible corporate stewards.

So here are twenty questions. Ten are questions a functioning Board should ask the President. The other ten are questions a legitimate President, one interested in strengthening rather than managing the Board, would ask the Directors. Whether anyone in authority has the interest, discipline, or stomach to ask them is, regrettably, one of the questions not yet on the list.

Questions the Board Should Ask the President

In a functional organization, the Board would hold the President accountable for discharging his duties in accordance with the bylaws. Each month, the President would give the Board a clear account of significant events under his watch: what happened, what failed, what remains unresolved, what committees are doing, what decisions require Board attention, and what risks are developing. Then the Board would question him. That should not be controversial. That should be the job.

Instead, the President’s Report has become a watered-down administrative postcard. The Board gets a pleasant little note that “May has been a quiet month,” as though the Club’s governance problems politely paused so everyone could prepare for summer trips and Field Day. A President who controls information controls the Board’s field of vision. A Board that does not ask questions consents to being managed. So the following questions are the kind a functioning Board would ask if it intended to govern rather than merely receive reports.

Ten Questions to Ask the President

1. Do you believe 54 votes in a Club presidential election gives you a mandate to control the direction of the Club, or does it impose a duty to govern cautiously because participation is so thin?
2. Why does the Club continue invoking thousands of members when fewer than 100 active voters decide on actual governance?
3. Do you understand that the bylaws are not obstacles to presidential action, but limits on it?
4. Why are motions, reports, guides, and agenda items increasingly appearing through informal channels rather than through the committees and procedures the bylaws require?
5. When a motion is submitted “on behalf of” a committee, what proof should the Board require that the committee actually reviewed, approved, and authorized it?
6. Why did the 2025 NCS Guide, completed after months of Bylaws Committee work and publicly announced as effective, disappear into the fog while a new workgroup was assigned to update the older version?
7. Why was award revenue reporting stripped from the Awards Committee Report at the same time the Club needs better financial controls, not fewer?
8. What is the Board supposed to conclude when long-serving volunteers resign, withdraw, or stop trusting the machinery of the Club?
9. Why are Discord pilots, logo contests, and procedural distractions receiving energy while the Club struggles with bylaws compliance, financial transparency, awards integrity, recordkeeping, and volunteer retention?
10. What will the Club look like after your presidency, and are you building that future or merely preserving your own control until the machinery stops moving?

Questions the President Should Ask the Board

The next ten questions are not questions I expect the President to ask. Let us not insult reality before breakfast. They are the questions a real organizational leader would ask of his Board if he believed the Board existed to govern rather than to ratify decisions made elsewhere. In other words, they are questions from the alternate universe in which presidential leadership means strengthening the Board instead of shrinking it into a rubber stamp.

Ten Questions to Ask the Board

1. Do you want to govern, or do you merely want to attend meetings and approve whatever appears in the packet?
2. Are you reading the bylaws, minutes, financials, reports, and motions before meetings, or are you approving them by habit because that is easier?
3. Do you understand that a Director’s job is not to keep meetings short, but to protect the Club’s interests?
4. Are you willing to question the President when he bypasses process, or have you accepted that presidential convenience is the Club’s operating system?
5. When committee names are attached to motions or reports, are you willing to ask whether the committee actually acted, or are you content with labels pasted onto decisions made elsewhere?
6. Do you believe fewer records, fewer numbers, fewer discussions, and less visibility better serve the members or are you ready to insist on transparency?
7. Are you representing active members in your areas, or are you occupying constitutional seats after your constituencies have mostly gone silent?
8. What are you doing to protect the members who still care, still check in, still chase awards, still volunteer, still attend Eyeballs, and still believe the Club is worth saving?
9. Are you willing to abandon distractions and focus on the work that matters: bylaws compliance, financial safeguards, awards integrity, record preservation, volunteer respect, and operational clarity?
10. If the Club continues to decline under your watch, what will you be able to say you did to slow the entropy rather than merely preside over it?

The Questions Are the Point

These are twenty questions that come readily to mind. There are many more. No single essayist, even one with a former insider’s view and a regrettably durable memory, can exhaust the list of questions the Club’s leadership should be asking itself.

The thirteen elected Directors and officers sitting on the Board should be more than capable of identifying the rest. Collectively, they have more institutional authority, more direct access to current information, and more responsibility than any observer on the outside. They sit where the decisions are made, they receive the reports, they approve the motions, they accept the minutes, and they control the agenda, or at least they should. If they choose to think seriously, they can ask better questions than these, sharper questions than these, and questions more immediately connected to the Club’s present condition than anything I can write from outside the room.

But that outside view also has value.

I am no longer caught in the meeting flow, the personalities, the procedural fog, the desire to keep peace, or the volunteer instinct to make the next immediate task succeed even while the larger structure decays. From the outside, patterns become easier to see. The packet problems, the committee drift, the missing implementation, the thinning elections, the financial opacity, the awards-system risks, the volunteer departures, and the document-control failures are not separate irritants. They are symptoms of the same underlying disease: an organization confusing motion with direction.

That is why the Board must shift its focus.

Thwarting Entropy, Not Masking It

Short-term task management is not enough. Discord pilots, logo contests, meeting-packet mechanics, and procedural patches may create the appearance of activity, but they do not answer the strategic question facing the Club: how does a declining organization preserve its integrity, serve its remaining members, protect its awards system, retain volunteers, and remain viable in a shrinking segment of amateur radio?

That is the Board’s real job:

• Not merely to approve what appears in the packet.
• Not merely to shorten meetings.
• Not merely to avoid conflict.
• Not merely to keep the Club limping from one month to the next.

The Board must think beyond the next agenda. It must think strategically about survivability in a declining segment of the amateur radio hobby. Furthermore, it must protect the members who still care, still check in, still chase awards, still volunteer, still attend Eyeballs, and still believe the Club is worth preserving. And finally, it must insist on bylaws compliance, financial safeguards, searchable records, committee accountability, award integrity, and honest reporting from the President and every officer who serves under Board authority.

Cohesive Leadership is the Key

The President should not fear a serious Board. A serious President would welcome one.

And the Board should not fear asking hard questions. Hard questions are not acts of disloyalty. They are acts of stewardship. They are how a governing body proves that it exists for something larger than approving reports, endorsing decisions already made elsewhere, and pretending the machinery is fine because the wheels still turn.

If the Club is to survive as anything more than a shrinking awards engine wrapped in nostalgia, the Board must stop admiring activity and start demanding direction.

Twenty questions are only a beginning.

The real test is whether anyone in leadership has the nerve to ask them out loud.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 35: Twenty Questions appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Today, Absurdist 34 turns to the Club’s latest information crisis: the Secretary’s workload, the minutes, and the dangerous little idea that reducing work should mean reducing the historical record.

Vox Incommoda has heard the Secretary’s grievances, and we are here to help. The Secretary appears to want relief from the time-consuming burden of preparing Board packets and meeting minutes. Fair enough. Volunteer work can become exhausting, especially when the volunteers around you insist on asking questions, discussing reports, and otherwise behaving as though a Board meeting is meant for Board business.

But reducing workload does not require reducing institutional memory.

In fact, the Club should be doing the opposite. It should preserve more historical information, organize it better, make it more searchable, and stop treating the written record as an inconvenience created by troublesome Directors. The problem is not that the Club records too much. The problem is that it already forgets too easily.

We think there is a painless solution.

The Secretary’s Complaint

At the June Board meeting, the Secretary complained about the amount of time he spends preparing Board packages and minutes. The Chair appeared sympathetic, suggesting that the job can require something like twenty hours per week.

That is a substantial burden. No one should dismiss it. The Secretary performs a real function, and the job has clearly become too large, too cumbersome, or too inefficiently supported.

But the immediate context matters.

This subject did not arise in a vacuum. It followed two meetings in which at least one Director had the audacity to ask questions about reports, records, awards, finances, and minutes. Questions, as we have learned, are very dangerous things in our subject organization. They create discussion. Discussion creates work. Work creates minutes. Minutes create accountability. Accountability creates indigestion.

Attempted “Solutions”

So the Secretary first attempted, verbally and then through passive-aggressive prose in the agenda, to narrow what Directors could discuss. Reports were described as included for “information purposes only.” Questions were nudged toward the CCNBoard reflector rather than open meeting discussion. The minutes approval section warned Directors to confine themselves to whether the minutes recorded the meeting correctly, which is true as far as it goes, but became suspiciously convenient after prior questions about attached reports became uncomfortable.

Then came the editorializing.

In the May minutes, the Secretary characterized a lengthy discussion about awards and financial reports as “out of order.” That was not neutral recordkeeping. That was commentary. Whether a discussion is out of order is for the Chair to rule in the meeting, not for the Secretary to stamp onto the historical record afterward like a procedural parking ticket.

The Director who had dared to ask questions called him out on it.

Good.

Board minutes should record what happened. They should not become a venue for post-meeting discipline, editorial scolding, or after-the-fact protection of fragile officers from inconvenient oversight.

The Soliloquy

The Secretary next suggested that he wanted the new Bylaws Committee to address some things for him, including greater freedom to participate during meetings. He also questioned the bylaw requirement that minutes include detailed summaries of discussions, complaining about the time required to transcribe and prepare them. Then he offered to fall on his sword if anyone else on the Board wanted to step in and do all that writing for him.

Who knew volunteer work would be time-consuming?

And for what? Merely preserving the decisions, discussions, context, corrections, objections, and institutional breadcrumbs needed by future Boards, officers, committees, historians, auditors, and members? Surely the better system is to record votes, wave vaguely at a YouTube link, and let posterity go spelunking through video files like abandoned mine shafts.

That, apparently, is the temptation.

An earlier work-avoidance scheme involved including a blanket reference to the YouTube recording of the meeting for anyone interested in details. After a couple of meetings, that notation disappeared. I do not know why. Perhaps someone noticed that the bylaws require the minutes themselves to contain the necessary elements, including detailed summaries of discussions. Perhaps someone realized that “go watch the video” is not a substitute for minutes. Or perhaps the idea simply wandered off, as ideas often do in this Club when implementation requires follow-through.

Whatever the reason, the principle remains simple.

The minutes are not supposed to be a transcript, but they are also not supposed to be a voting stub.

They are the written institutional record.

Why We Record Discussions in Writing

As a member of the former Bylaws Committee, I know exactly why detailed written minutes matter.

The Committee spent a great deal of time researching prior Board decisions, motions, reversals, interpretations, and procedural history. We went back through roughly twenty-five years of PDF minutes to understand what had been done, what had been undone, what had been forgotten, and what had been quietly buried under years of organizational sediment.

That work would have been nearly impossible if the historical record consisted mainly of YouTube videos.

Videos are fine as secondary evidence. They can show tone, sequence, and context, they can help resolve uncertainty, and they can supplement the record.

They cannot replace the record.

A video is not easily searchable. In the future, a Bylaws Committee cannot quickly search a video archive for a motion number, award name, policy phrase, call sign, officer title, or recurring issue. A future Audit Committee cannot efficiently reconstruct financial decisions by listening to hundreds of hours of meetings. A future Board cannot determine precedent by scrubbing through recordings while hoping someone said the magic word clearly enough for a transcript tool to notice.

Written minutes are essential because they make institutional memory usable.

Searchability is not a luxury. It is a governance requirement.

A Case in Point

When I researched the “go or no-go” logo issue in Absurdist 30, I found the minutes did not document the President’s April direction to provide a proposal for a Board vote. Nor did the minutes document the nebulously tacit go-ahead without a Board vote in May. I needed to laboriously endure many minutes of YouTube recordings to find the discussions. At one point in the June meeting, the Secretary even looked back through the April minutes to find any evidence of such a vote or directive. He couldn’t.

Discussions of consequence must be documented. That is non-negotiable.

The Club has already suffered from too much memory loss: undocumented decisions, missing implementation, obsolete documents, uncertain authority, reports stripped of useful information, and policies that exist in rumor form. Reducing the written minutes would not cure the Secretary’s workload problem. It would deepen the Club’s information disease.

Who Reads The Minutes, Anyway?

A collateral problem enables this casual downgrading of the minutes: too few Directors appear to take seriously their duty to read, review, and correct the minutes of the prior meeting. Approval by acclamation has become so routine that the process now feels less like review and more like a rubber stamp with a nap schedule. The Board moves past the minutes, the Secretary gets his approval, and the historical record survives only if no one inconveniently notices what has been omitted, distorted, editorialized, or buried.

I do not know when “approval by acclamation” became the default practice, or who first decided that minutes review needed to be streamlined into near invisibility. Perhaps it began as an innocent effort to shorten meetings. But when combined with the Secretary’s desire to narrow discussion, exclude substantive review of attached reports, and discourage Directors from asking questions, the effect is obvious. The Board is not preserving the record. It is hurrying past it.

Reading and correcting minutes is not optional Board housekeeping. It is part of a Director’s job. The Board creates policy, directs volunteers, approves motions, accepts reports, and leaves behind the written record by which future Boards understand what happened. Directors must not allow that function to be trivialized by procedural convenience, meeting-speed obsession, or bureaucratic impatience. If the minutes are wrong, incomplete, misleading, or casually approved without review, the failure does not belong only to the Secretary. It belongs to the Board that approved them without doing its work.

Reducing Information Is Not the Answer

The Secretary’s apparent plan to involve “the new Bylaws Committee” in relieving his workload is something that should happen only through proper channels. The Secretary does not get to bypass the Board’s motion process simply because the proposed change affects his desk. If a bylaw amendment is needed, then an elected Director or officer should bring the matter properly to the Chair, and the Chair should route it through the Bylaws Committee as required.

That is the process. We still have one, theoretically.

Of course, in our subject organization, one might understand why an appointed officer could be tempted to seek a shortcut. He may have observed the Awards Secretary’s apparent direct channel to the President, through which the abortive Clint Wise motion somehow arrived on the agenda “on behalf of the Awards Committee” even though the Committee apparently did not review or approve it. Once informal channels start producing agenda items, everybody wants a pipe into the machinery.

But the Bylaws Committee should resist any proposal that reduces the quality of the historical record merely to accommodate one officer’s workload.

A healthy Bylaws Committee, especially one fresh from a major rewrite, should not recommend weakening the minutes because the Secretary finds them inconvenient. The duty to preserve institutional history is larger than the comfort of the person currently holding the pen. If the job is too burdensome, fix the workflow. Add tools. Add assistance. Improve templates. Use technology. Split the work.

Do not gut the record.

A Club that cannot remember what it did will soon stop understanding what it is.

A Simple, but Effective, Solution

The irony is that the Secretary’s workload complaint has an obvious modern solution.

Use AI transcription.

No bylaw amendment is required. No passive-aggressive agenda language is required. In fact, no motion is required to reduce the historical record. No new procedural workaround is required to turn minutes into skeletal vote summaries.

The software already exists.

The former Bylaws Committee tested Zoom’s built-in AI transcription tool. It captured everything, including our late colleague Dwight’s discussion of his zero-turn lawn mower. That alone should qualify it for honorary membership. The raw transcript was not perfect, because no transcript is perfect and no meeting participant speaks like a court reporter. But it was more than good enough to create a working draft.

Board meetings are conducted via Zoom. Zoom AI Companion transcribes meetings. When enabled, it converts spoken words into text in real-time and after the session, noting exactly who is speaking. Just what the doctor ordered and it doesn’t even require a trip to CVS.

The Secretary does not need to laboriously transcribe an entire YouTube recording from scratch. He can generate the transcript, review the meeting sequence, remove extraneous chatter, identify the substantive discussions, summarize them clearly, and produce minutes that satisfy the bylaws without requiring a twenty-hour weekly martyrdom ritual.

This is not difficult.

It requires adopting the tool, establishing a simple workflow, and treating minutes preparation as an information-management task rather than a punishment from the governance gods.

The Secretary’s job should be made easier. The Club should support him. But the result should be better minutes, not thinner minutes.

Searchable Documents, Please

As a gratuitous aside, the Club should also require that all official documents preserved in PDF format be searchable.

That should include Board packets, minutes, financial reports, committee reports, bylaws, constitutions, award documents, guides, and operating references. A PDF that cannot be searched is not an archive. It is a photograph of an archive. It may look official, but it frustrates retrieval, analysis, auditing, and future governance review.

This should not be controversial.

If the Club is going to preserve documents, it should preserve them in a way that future humans can actually use. Otherwise, it is not preserving history. It is embalming paper.

The Real Problem

The Secretary’s frustration is understandable. The proposed direction is not.

The Club does not need less historical information. It needs better information management. And it needs searchable records, consistent formatting, complete and timely packets, reliable minutes, documented decisions, and committee reports that contain actual substance. Finally, it needs a written record that helps future leaders understand what happened without forcing them to reconstruct institutional history from rumor, memory, and video archaeology.

The answer to workload issues is better tools, not institutionalized amnesia.

If preparing minutes takes twenty hours per week, then the Club should ask why. Is the packet process inefficient? Are reports arriving late? Are templates poor? Is the Secretary trying to transcribe too much verbatim instead of summarizing discussions? Are meeting discussions too sprawling? Is the job too large for one volunteer? Are modern tools being ignored? Those are operational problems. They can be solved.

But stripping down the minutes is not a solution. It is institutional self-harm.

The Club has already lost too much information through obsolete documents, undocumented procedures, disappearing work product, inconsistent records, and decisions that live only in the memories of aging volunteers. That is organizational entropy in its purest form: useful information converted into noise, then into absence.

Reducing the minutes would accelerate that process.

Conclusion: Do Not Cure Overwork with Amnesia

The Secretary deserves help. He does not deserve to be buried under unnecessary volunteer labor simply because the Club has failed to modernize its workflow. If the minutes process is too onerous, then the Board should fix the process. Use AI transcription. Use better templates. Require timely reports. Divide the work. Create a review step. Standardize the packet. Make the documents searchable. Do the boring, useful things that make governance easier without damaging the record.

But do not compromise historical information because the Secretary feels overworked.

The written record belongs to the Club, not to the Secretary.

• It belongs to future Boards trying to understand past decisions.
• It belongs to committees researching precedent.
• It belongs to auditors reviewing financial history.
• It belongs to members trying to understand how the organization is governed.
• It belongs to the institutional memory of a Club that already forgets too much.

Minutes are not busywork. They are the Club’s memory.

And when an organization is already sliding into entropy, memory is not the thing to cut. It is the thing to protect.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 34: The Minutes Are Not The Problem appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

This Absurdist Paper turns from bylaws to elections, but the theme is the same: legitimacy without discipline is fragile. The Club’s election process has increasingly become a confirmation engine, producing officers and Directors from a shrinking, unevenly distributed, and often disinterested electorate. When uncontested seats are filled by one, two, four, or five votes, the formal structure of representation remains, but the substance of representation grows thin. A Board chosen under those conditions should be humble, careful, and relentlessly attentive to the interests of the members who remain.

Instead, too much of the current leadership behaves as though weak participation gives it more freedom, not less. That is exactly backward. The Board’s duty is to represent the membership, not its own preferences, friendships, habits, or pet projects. That means observing sound governance principles, eliminating cronyism, respecting the volunteer workforce, preserving the integrity of the awards system, protecting the Club’s finances, and placing members’ needs ahead of internal wheel-spinning. Low turnout is not a mandate for convenience. It is a warning that the remaining safeguards matter more than ever.

Elections Tell the Story

If you swallow the hype, the Club is a large, thriving organization. But does anyone really believe that?

Our leaders continue to invoke a mythical 3,000, sometimes 4,000-member Club whenever bulk sounds useful. It is a comforting number, large enough to suggest vitality, legitimacy, and broad democratic participation. Unfortunately, the election results tell a different story. The 4,000-member Club elected its President with 54 votes.

The problem is not merely low turnout. Low turnout happens. Volunteers drift. Members age out, lose interest, stop checking in, stop voting, or remain on the rolls long after their active connection to the Club has evaporated. The problem is that the Club still governs as though its formal structure reflects a living electorate, while actual decisions are being made by a tiny remnant of active participants clustered unevenly across the call areas.

Fragile Governance

As we saw in Absurdist 32, this matters because a Board with thin democratic grounding has even less excuse to treat the bylaws casually. When active participation shrinks, procedure becomes more important, not less. Bylaws are the remaining guardrails when broad member engagement has already failed. A Board elected by a handful of voters should be more careful about legitimacy, more respectful of process, and more reluctant to behave as though convenience has become a governing principle.

This Absurdist Paper asks an uncomfortable question: when Area Directors are elected with one, two, four, or five votes, are they meaningfully representing an area, or merely occupying a constitutional chair that the active membership has mostly abandoned? It also asks a related question about the presidency: if the incumbent President, effectively running against a bylaw-satisfying nominal opponent, received only about 60% of the vote from a tiny and largely disengaged electorate, why does he act as though he received a mandate to impose his will on the Club?

The numbers do not prove illegitimacy.

They do prove fragility.

And fragile governance should not swagger.

Government of the Few, by Even Fewer

The election results do not show a thriving democratic organization. They show a shrinking active core, unevenly distributed, weakly engaged, and increasingly governed by inertia. In that environment, a President should not mistake survival for endorsement, and Area Directors should not mistake a handful of votes for broad representative authority. The smaller the active electorate becomes, the less room the Board has for arrogance.

Consider the most glaring example. In the past two election cycles, the Sixth Area Director ran unopposed and received one vote. One. The Sixth Area includes California and Hawaii, home to a very large amateur radio population and, one would think, at least a few possible 3905 Century Club voters not hiding under the sofa. Yet the area produced a single ballot.

Perhaps that vote came from the Director himself. Perhaps it came from one loyal supporter. Either way, the result is not meaningfully different. A Director elected by one vote may hold office under the Constitution, but he cannot plausibly claim to represent an active area constituency. This is not a personal attack on his character, leadership, or willingness to endure the hazardous duty of Board participation. It is evidence of a structural problem: some Area Directors now appear to occupy constitutional seats after the active electorate in their areas has largely disappeared. They may be legally elected, but they are not democratically anchored.

When an Area Director can be elected with one vote, the Board has not solved representation. It has preserved the form of representation after the substance has wandered off.

Apathy, Ennui, and Disinterest

Let us get real. The President’s recurring invocation of “4,000 members” is not evidence of a thriving electorate. It is mythology with a spreadsheet somewhere in the background. That figure is overblown by 1,000 more than what was the May Centurion gloriously reported 2,927 “current members” and 357 Silent Keys. Even that accurate-looking number is itself mostly historical residue. In Club terms, “member” means someone who earned a first 100-Point Award at some point over the past half-century. That is not the same thing as an active participant, an engaged voter, or a living constituency.

But let us not split hairs. Either 3,000 or 4,000 is fantasy. The vast preponderance of that cohort has moved on, whether to other hobbies, other clubs, silent inactivity, or their greater reward. A more realistic estimate of currently active members is probably fewer than 200. That figure is not pulled from the ether. In what I have characterized as the last legitimately contested Club presidential election, back in 2018, voter turnout was roughly in that neighborhood. Since then, attrition, inertia, and simple disinterest have reduced the voting pool to a puddle. In the 2026 presidential election, only 89 votes were cast.

I will not opine on how many of those 89 were ginned up by emails cajoling inactive members to vote for the President, but nothing conveys club warmth better than a “long time no see” letter from the President to a long absent member, right?

The Sadly Contracting Core

In any case, fewer than 100 members now appear to constitute the voting core of a Club that still talks about itself as though thousands of members are leaning forward in civic engagement. They are not. Most are casual net participants, occasional award applicants, inactive names in the database, or historical ghosts kept alive by arithmetic. The living electorate is small, unevenly distributed, and increasingly disengaged.

Membership Concentration

The Area Director results make the problem impossible to ignore. In the 2025 and 2026 elections, only the 1st, 4th, and 10th Areas reached double-digit vote totals. The others produced electorates so small that “area representation” begins to sound less like democratic governance and more like constitutional taxidermy. Yet those Directors still carry full Board authority, equal in vote to Directors from areas with demonstrably more active participation. The result is a Board nominally structured around geographic representation, but increasingly decided by areas where the active membership has either vanished, stopped caring, or never existed in meaningful Club numbers.

That is the central problem. A President elected with 54 votes, receiving only about 60% against a nominal opponent who vowed not to serve if elected, should not mistake survival for a mandate. Protest votes totaling 40% demonstrate far more than mere statistical significance. Moreover, Area Directors elected by one, two, four, or five voters should not mistake occupancy for democratic depth. The Club may still have the formal structure of representative government, but the election results show a much thinner reality: a small active core, surrounded by disengagement, governed through constitutional machinery that no longer reflects where participation actually lives.

Rotten Boroughs with Call Signs

“…it has allowed disengagement to hollow out representation while preserving the outward form of democracy. The seats remain. The ballots are counted. The Directors take office. But in too many areas, the constituency has effectively vanished.”

A “rotten borough” was a British parliamentary constituency that retained its ancient right to elect Members of Parliament despite having a tiny, declining, or nearly nonexistent population. Some of these boroughs became notorious because their seats could be controlled through patronage, family influence, bribery, or other forms of political manipulation. The form of representation survived long after the substance had rotted away.

On a much smaller and less powdered-wig scale, the Club now shows a similar structural problem. The Constitution still treats each call area as a living constituency, entitled to equal representation on the Board. The election results suggest something else. In several areas, member interest has declined to the point where Director elections are uncontested, barely noticed, and decided by electorates small enough to fit in the QRP net broom closet at the 2014 DePere Eyeball.

This does not mean every Director elected from a low-turnout area is corrupt, unqualified, or acting in bad faith. That is not the point. The point is that when an area produces one, two, four, or five votes, the Director may be legally elected but is not meaningfully anchored to an active constituency. There is little electoral pressure, little public accountability, and little reason to believe the Director is carrying the informed will of area members into Board deliberations.

Insider Governance

That vacuum invites insider governance. If members do not recruit challengers, do not vote, do not ask questions, and do not appear to care who represents them, the initiative shifts to the people already controlling the machinery. Candidates can be encouraged, recruited, blessed, or left unopposed by those already in power. The result is not representative government in any robust sense. It is governance by placeholders: constitutional seats occupied by individuals who may owe more to inertia, presidential preference, or the absence of opposition than to an active area electorate.

The Club has not created rotten boroughs through ancient land titles, aristocratic privilege, or sacks of coin passed under a tavern table. It has done something more prosaic and modern: it has allowed disengagement to hollow out representation while preserving the outward form of democracy. The seats remain. The ballots are counted. The Directors take office. But in too many areas, the constituency has effectively vanished.

Where Is This Going?

The election results reveal that the current representative model no longer reflects the active Club, but fixing that model would require serious corporate restructuring. That is precisely why the Board should be more careful with the governance tools it already has, not more casual.

The obvious temptation is to ask whether the Constitution should be revised to reflect active participation rather than dead geographic symmetry. But that is not a simple housekeeping change. Serious restructuring would likely require amendments not only to the Constitution, but also to the Articles of Incorporation. Done properly, that means legal review, careful drafting, formal filings, and money. Done internally, it means the usual squadron of septuagenarian would-be Philadelphia lawyers confidently performing nonprofit surgery with a 1977 Weller soldering gun. Neither path seems especially likely. So the point is not that proportional representation is around the corner. The point is that the existing representative structure has lost much of its democratic substance, making faithful compliance with the current bylaws even more important.

When representation is thin, procedure becomes thicker. If Directors are being elected by electorates of one, two, four, or five members, the Board cannot also treat bylaws as optional scenery. Low participation is not permission to govern loosely. It is a warning that the remaining restraints on insider control must be honored with even greater care.

Once Again: The Board Must Run the Club

The existing leadership may be the product of a flawed representative structure, weak participation, and broad member disinterest, but it is still the leadership the Club has. That matters. The Directors and officers cannot use low turnout, uncontested seats, or member apathy as excuses to govern casually. If anything, the opposite is true. When fewer members remain actively engaged, the duty owed to those members becomes sharper. The people still participating in the nets, applying for awards, attending Eyeballs, volunteering, paying fees, and preserving the Club’s institutional memory deserve more, not less, protection from procedural decay.

Those remaining members have invested something real in the Club. They have invested time on the nets, invested effort in awards, and invested trust in records, rules, traditions, and operating expectations. Fairness and equity demand that the Board protect that investment by observing the bylaws, implementing basic financial safeguards, maintaining credible records, and preserving the integrity of the awards system. That is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is stewardship. Directors are not merely hobbyists with vote buttons. They are fiduciaries, practical if not always philosophical, carrying the Club’s remaining institutional weight on their shoulders.

Spinning Wheels

That is why the current drift is so frustrating to this vox incommoda. While membership participation declines, the Board’s attention is too often diverted into heat-generating distractions: Discord experiments, logo contests, packet fog, report suppression, procedural improvisation, and other shiny objects that do little to protect the members who still care. A declining Club does not need all that entropy masking. It needs discipline, financial clarity, and award integrity. Furthermore, it needs records that can be trusted. And it needs Directors who understand that their job is not to preserve the appearance of activity, but to safeguard the substance of the Club.

The Board may not have been chosen by a robust electorate, but it still has an obligation to represent the members who remain. Those members deserve governance that is careful, fair, transparent, and rooted in the governing documents. They deserve leaders who stop mistaking motion for progress and distraction for renewal. They deserve a Board that gets back to the unglamorous work of protecting the Club rather than spinning its wheels while the active membership continues to shrink.

Fragile governance should not swagger. It should serve.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 33: Representative of Whom? appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

As you may or may not know, I am perched hard on the cusp of 80 years old. That does not make me “80 years young,” a phrase that causes my gag reflex to perform emergency maneuvers. Eighty is not young. Eighty is old. I am an old geezer, and I have earned every creak, pop, scar, replacement part, and pharmacological assist that came with the title.

It takes no effort to be young. Young just happens to you while your hormones are running the circus and your joints still believe in democracy. Getting old, however, is a long, arduous road paved with orthopedic referrals, Medicare statements, pharmacy alerts, and the dawning realization that “sleeping wrong” is now a medically plausible injury.

So, don’t call me young.

In fact, hypocrite that I am, and being somewhat notorious at the gym for my tee-shirt collection, I just returned from the workoutatorium proudly wearing one that says:

IT’S WEIRD THAT
I’M THE SAME AGE
AS OLD PEOPLE!

The kids at the gym think it’s funny. The oldsters, not so much. There is no harsher critic than another old fart who has not yet accepted the paperwork.

Anyway, I recently came across a new paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that heartened me, quite literally. The paper concluded that long-term resistance training appears to be independently associated with lower mortality, especially when paired with aerobic activity. As if I needed corroboration that my gym time was not merely an elaborate ritual of self-abuse conducted under fluorescent lights.

But corroboration is nice. At my age, vindication counts as cardio.

The Obesity Medication Culture

We now live in the age of injectable metabolic leverage. The scale moves. The appetite quiets. The influencer smiles. The pharmaceutical shareholder glows softly in the distance.

GLP-1 and GIP drugs such as semaglutide and tirzepatide are powerful tools. I am not here to pretend otherwise. I use one. My blood glucose improved dramatically, my weight dropped, and my metabolic markers moved in the right direction. This is not some cranky sermon about how real men control diabetes with tree bark and moral superiority.

But the current obesity-medication culture has developed a familiar American defect: it wants the benefit without the invoice. Not the financial invoice. That one arrives promptly, usually with enough zeros to suggest clerical misconduct. I mean the physiological invoice.

The influencer crowd would like people to believe that these magic elixirs can shed unwanted rolls of blubber without consequence elsewhere. Appetite disappears, pounds vanish, selfies improve, and everyone rides off into the sunset wearing smaller pants.

Lovely story. Needs editing.

The problem is that weight loss is not automatically health restoration. Along with fat loss, patients can lose lean body mass. That matters. It especially matters for older patients, who are already fighting sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength. In older people, muscle is not cosmetic upholstery. Muscle is metabolic infrastructure. Muscle is glucose disposal capacity. Muscle is balance, mobility, fall prevention, independence, and the ability to get off the damn toilet without filing a work order.

The miracle drug may help people lose weight, but it does not repeal physiology. If anything, it raises the stakes. When appetite suppression makes weight loss easier, resistance training becomes more important, not less, because the goal is not merely to become lighter.

The goal is to remain functional, metabolically competent, and harder to kill.

The BMJ Sports Medicine Paper

The paper looked at long-term resistance training, aerobic activity, and mortality. This was not a six-week “blast your belly fat” nonsense study conducted on twelve undergraduates and one confused Labrador. It analyzed data from three large prospective cohorts: the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, the Nurses’ Health Study, and the Nurses’ Health Study II.

The investigators followed 147,374 participants for as long as 30 years and documented 35,798 deaths. Resistance training and aerobic activity were assessed repeatedly over time, which is a major strength because human beings, despite our best efforts to remain ridiculous, do occasionally change behavior.

The headline finding was that compared with no resistance training, 90 to 119 minutes per week of resistance training was associated with:

• 13% lower all-cause mortality
• 19% lower cardiovascular mortality
• 27% lower neurological disease mortality

Those estimates were adjusted for aerobic activity, which means the lifting signal was not simply riding in on the treadmill’s coattails.

No Added Benefit Over 120 Minutes

There was also a practical ceiling. The authors found no additional mortality benefit above 120 minutes per week. So, apparently, one does not need to move into the gym, declare residency near the squat rack, and start receiving mail addressed to “The Old Guy by the Cable Machine.”

This is important. The study does not say you must become a bodybuilder. It does not say you need CrossFit cosplay, chalk dust, theatrical grunting, or a pre-workout supplement named after a minor felony. It says that consistent long-term resistance training, roughly an hour and a half to two hours per week, was associated with lower mortality.

That is not an impossible target. That is two or three reasonable sessions per week. Even an old fart can do that, provided he does not waste too much time talking to other old farts between sets, which is admittedly a known failure mode.

Cardio Still Gets Its Due

Now, before the barbell cult starts dancing shirtless around the deadlift platform, the study did not say lifting replaces aerobic activity.

It said both matter.

Resistance training alone was associated with a modest 7% to 11% lower mortality risk among people with inadequate aerobic activity. Aerobic activity alone showed a stronger association, with 26% to 43% lower mortality risk once people exceeded 7.5 MET-hours per week. The lowest risk appeared among people doing both, especially those combining 30 to less than 45 MET-hours per week of aerobic activity with 60 to 119 minutes per week of resistance training.

Very high aerobic activity, greater than 45 MET-hours per week, seemed to dominate regardless of lifting level. That is interesting, but it also describes people who are doing a lot of aerobic work. Not “I walked from the recliner to the refrigerator during halftime” work. Real work.

So, the paper gives each camp something to brag about and something to shut up about.

Cardio people can continue reminding us that the heart and vascular system matter, which is annoyingly true.

Weight-training people can remind the cardio crowd that muscle is not optional equipment, which is also annoyingly true.

Cardio zealots sometimes regard weight lifters as overfed statues who grunt a lot while remaining suspiciously stationary. Weight lifters sometimes mock cardio types with cute phrases like “walking is weakness,” usually while gasping after eight stairs because leg day was “mostly machines.”

The study redeems both, individually and especially in combination. It is not either/or. It is both/and. Nature, in its usual inconsiderate fashion, refuses to validate anyone’s simplistic tribal identity.

The Observational Cockroach

Now, let us not overstate the evidence, because that is how we wind up with headlines like “Lifting Weights Cures Death,” followed by an influencer selling resistance bands and powdered yak collagen.

This was an observational study, not a randomized trial. The authors adjusted for many confounders, used repeated measures, and added lag periods to reduce reverse causation. That is good epidemiology. But healthy-user bias remains the cockroach of lifestyle research. It survives everything.

People who lift weights are often different from people who do not. They may eat better, smoke less, sleep better, see doctors more often, take medications more reliably, or have fewer health limitations in the first place. The authors tried to adjust for those factors, but no statistical model fully disinfects human behavior.

The sample also was mostly white, middle-aged to older health professionals. That does not make the findings useless, but it limits generalizability. Also, resistance training was self-reported. The questionnaires captured time spent, not load, intensity, progression, sets, reps, proximity to failure, or whether someone was actually training versus wandering among machines like a confused tourist looking for Gate 17.

So, no, this paper does not prove that lifting weights directly causes a specific reduction in mortality for every human being with a gym membership and a compression sleeve.

But it does add weight, so to speak, to the larger body of evidence that resistance training belongs in the healthspan discussion, especially for older adults and especially for people losing weight pharmacologically.

Weight Loss Alone Is Not Health Restoration

This is the part that matters most for Peptide Purgatory.

GLP-1 drugs can lower appetite. They can help reduce weight. They can improve glucose control. They can improve cardiometabolic risk factors. For many people, they are a godsend wrapped in a prior authorization form.

But they do not lift for you.

They do not preserve muscle by magic. They do not train balance. (And as Dr. Mimi knows, balance training benefits everyone—inside joke.) They do not improve grip strength. They do not increase bone loading. They do not teach your nervous system how to recruit muscle fibers. They do not make your legs stronger for getting out of a chair, climbing stairs, carrying groceries, or avoiding the humiliating spectacle of being defeated by a low sofa.

Weight loss changes the load. Resistance training improves the chassis.

That distinction is not trivial. A smaller weak person is still weak. A lighter frail person is still frail. A diabetic with beautiful lab numbers but declining muscle and physical capacity has traded one problem for another, and Medicare will eventually send flowers.

For older diabetics using incretin therapy, the issue is not merely glucose normalization. It is preserving enough muscle and physical capacity to remain metabolically resilient. We do not want to become smaller, weaker diabetics with better A1c values and the functional reserve of wet cardboard.

The Type 2 Diabetes Connection

For those of us with Type 2 diabetes, muscle is not just there to fill out a tee shirt or impress teenagers who think anyone over 50 remembers the Civil War. Muscle is one of the largest sites of glucose disposal in the body. Training it matters.

Resistance training improves strength, function, insulin sensitivity, and body composition. Aerobic training improves cardiovascular fitness, vascular function, and endurance. Together, they form a metabolic one-two punch, assuming one actually does them instead of merely nodding solemnly while reading about them.

In my own case, the proof has been in the pudding, although pudding is now mostly theoretical. Since I increased my resistance training while maintaining ample cardio, my insulin resistance markers improved tremendously. My HOMA-IR moved in the right direction, which means my body has become more efficient at handling glucose and insulin.

That did not happen because I wished upon a Stelo CGM. It happened because the drug helped, the diet helped, the weight loss helped, and the training helped. All of it matters. The human body, being an overcomplicated committee with no bylaws, rarely responds to a single intervention in isolation. The 3905 Century Club should be so lucky.

Cheese for Gym Rats

So, what is the takeaway for my fellow geezers, diabetics, peptide pilgrims, and reluctant gym rats?

Not that everyone needs to become a powerlifter, nor is cardio useless, nor are GLP-1 drugs bad.

And certainly not that one BMJ paper should be tattooed on your deltoid.

The takeaway is simpler and more irritating: if you are using pharmacology to lose weight and improve glucose control, you still need to give your body a reason to keep muscle around. Muscle is metabolically expensive tissue. If you starve it, ignore it, and never challenge it, your body may conclude that keeping it is poor resource management.

Your body is not sentimental. It will sell off unused equipment.

Resistance training tells the system: keep this. We need it.

That message becomes more important with age. It becomes more important with diabetes. It becomes more important with GLP-1-induced weight loss. And it becomes especially important if your long-term goal is not merely to weigh less, but to live better, move better, think better, and avoid becoming a frailty statistic wearing nicer pants.

I will continue going to the gym, wearing obnoxious tee shirts, lifting things younger people assume I should not lift, and doing enough cardio to keep the pump from filing a grievance.

I am not 80 years young.

I am almost 80 years old.

And old, done properly, takes work.

Peptide Purgatory is a regular feature of this blog. For an annotated catalog of all my Mounjaro, GLP-1, and Peptide Purgatory updates, please visit my Mounjaro Update Catalog page.

The post Peptide Purgatory: Cheese for Gym Rats appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

The June Board packet did not merely contain a defective motion. It became a procedural specimen: wrong dates, missing reports, a placeholder motion, a later inserted awards motion, a withdrawal, and enough bylaw shrapnel to keep a former Bylaws Committee member muttering into the darkness. Absurdist 32 goes to the scoreboard.

A Former Bylaws Committeeman’s Lament

The 2025 Bylaws Committee was thanked for “a well done job.” The June Board packet suggests the bylaws themselves were less fortunate.

There comes a point when a former Bylaws Committee member must stop asking whether the bylaws are being misunderstood and start asking whether they are being treated as decorative wallpaper.

I spent three years on the Bylaws Committee. Along with my distinguished colleagues, I worked through language, structure, cross-references, policy intent, procedural safeguards, and the endless little details that keep a volunteer organization from governing itself by whim, memory, and whatever someone thought somebody said during a Zoom meeting. The point of bylaws is not ornamental. They are supposed to restrain impulse, channel authority, protect the Board from ambush, and preserve enough orderly process that members can trust what the organization says it is doing.

That assumes, of course, that the people running the organization intend to follow them.

The June Board packet suggests a more flexible philosophy.

We Don’t Need No Steenking Bylaws!

Why have bylaws if we are going to ignore them? Better yet, why have bylaws if the officers charged with observing them seem prepared not merely to ignore them, but to sneer at the safeguards they contain?

• If a motion is inconvenient, publish a placeholder.
• If a committee review requirement gets in the way, slap “on behalf of the Awards Committee” onto a motion the Committee apparently never saw.
• If the agenda is supposed to contain the full text of motions, release a skeletal packet and add the actual text later.
• If the date is confusing, make it more confusing.
• If the motion collapses under public scrutiny, withdraw it and pretend the process worked.

This is not compliance. This is compliance theater.

The June packet did not merely contain a defective motion. The packet itself became evidence of organizational decay. It appeared in versions, each one revealing another layer of procedural improvisation. First came the rushed, skeletal package, with missing reports, scrambled references, and a “motion expected” placeholder where actual motion text should have been. Then, after the deadline, came a later version containing the full Clint Wise Award motion, a rushed, poorly drafted, awards-related proposal submitted by the President “on behalf of the Awards Committee.” Then came the final version, where the motion was gone, marked withdrawn, having completed its lifecycle from vapor, to defect, to corpse.

That is quite a journey for something that never reached a vote.

Julian, Gregorian, or Kevorkian?

And then there is the calendar.

The agenda managed to identify the meeting as “14-June-2026,” then describe it as “Local Saturday, June 14, 2026,” and then place the UTC time on June 15. In reality, the meeting was scheduled for 0100 UTC on June 14, which was the evening of June 13 in the North American time zones where most participants live. This matters because the bylaws require meeting notices and agendas to use time and date correctly. It also matters because, if The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight cannot read a calendar, we should perhaps temper our expectations about their ability to read a bylaw.

The calendar problem is funny. The motion problem is not.

None the Wiser

The Clint Wise motion was not an ordinary housekeeping motion. It was an awards-related motion, and the bylaws treat awards-related motions with special care. They must be submitted in writing for study no later than seven days before the meeting at which they are to be presented. They must be routed properly through the appropriate committee. The Chair has a gatekeeping duty to ensure that happens. The agenda must contain the full text of motions to be presented. A motion must not be changed after publication of the agenda except through proper floor amendment.

Those safeguards exist for a reason.

They are designed to prevent exactly what happened here: a defective awards motion, apparently drafted through an informal President-and-Committee-Chair channel, appearing under the name of a committee that did not officially review or approve it.

The placeholder did not preserve compliance. It advertised noncompliance.

A placeholder motion is not a motion. It is a promise that a motion may someday appear wearing the clothes the bylaws required it to have already worn. A Board cannot study a placeholder. A committee cannot review a placeholder. Directors cannot evaluate text that does not exist. Members cannot meaningfully observe a process that substitutes ellipses for substance.

Yet there it was, sitting in the packet like a cardboard cutout of governance.

Then the real text appeared. It was worse.

Bylaws Not Impacted? Baloney!

The motion attempted to modify the Clint Wise Award requirements by adding language about physical presence and remote portable operation. It contained repeated language, awkward drafting, questionable terminology, and the remarkable assertion that the bylaws were “Not Impacted,” even though the very controversy involved bylaw definitions of portable and remote operation. It was dated June 7 and submitted by KL7OR, Dean Davis, President, “on behalf of the Awards Committee.”

That phrase now deserves a small memorial plaque.

The June 7 date looks less like proof of compliance than an attempted paper shield. Perhaps that is unfair. Maybe the completed motion truly existed on June 7, was properly submitted to the Chair, was properly studied, was properly routed for committee review, and somehow still failed to appear in the first packet, which instead contained only a placeholder. Perhaps the Awards Committee reviewed it so thoroughly that one of its own members later said the Committee never saw it before it appeared on the agenda. Perhaps the dog really did eat the homework, then typed a placeholder, then withdrew the motion three days later.

Serial Abuses

The abuses are obvious:

• A committee chair is not a committee.
• The President is not the Awards Committee.
• A placeholder is not a motion.
• A late insertion is not timely study.
• A withdrawn motion is not proof that the process worked.
• And a Board packet that cannot decide what day the meeting occurs is not exactly a monument to procedural discipline.

This is why bylaws matter. Not because former Bylaws Committee members need a hobby, though admittedly I have found one. Bylaws matter because they are supposed to prevent governance from turning into a memory contest between whoever controls the agenda, whoever controls the website, whoever controls the packet, and whoever can get away with saying “that is how we have always done it.”

The June packet shows what happens when safeguards are treated as annoyances. The agenda becomes a moving target. The motion becomes a shape-shifter. Committee review becomes a label. The Chair’s gatekeeping duty becomes optional scenery. The Board becomes an audience. The members receive a packet that has molted so many times it should have been issued with a shed skin warning.

So this essay goes to the scoreboard.

How many bylaw safeguards were ignored, bypassed, mocked, or reduced to paperwork theater in the life and death of one withdrawn motion?

Let us count.

Start Acting Like a Responsible Board

The Board should not be an audience for decisions made elsewhere. It should not accept committee labels without committee action. Neither should it accept placeholders as motions. Nor should it accept late text as timely study. Nor should it accept “on behalf of” as proof of review. And for crying out loud, it should not accept a packet that changes shape every time someone notices another defect!

The bylaws are not suggestions. They are not optional scenery or a decorative moat around presidential convenience. They are the rules of governance for the corporation.

If the Club does not intend to follow them, it should say so plainly.

• Cancel the Bylaws Committee.
• Stop pretending motions have deadlines.
• Stop pretending committees review anything.
• Stop pretending agendas provide notice.
• Stop pretending the Chair is a gatekeeper.
• Stop pretending the Board governs.

This would be a giant leap toward the organizational entropy finish line. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But if the Club does intend to follow its bylaws, then this packet should be remembered as a warning flare.

The June packet was not merely sloppy.

• It was a procedural specimen.
• It showed how safeguards fail when the people responsible for enforcing them treat them as obstacles.
• It showed how a motion can be born as a placeholder, appear as a defect, wear a committee’s name without the committee’s approval, and then disappear before a vote while leaving its procedural fingerprints all over the room.

Placeholder governance. Easy to see—and even easier to smell.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Helluva way to run a railroad.

Governance Is Not Meant to be Fun

“A Club that sneers at its bylaws is not freeing itself from bureaucracy. It is freeing its leaders from accountability.”

Most members do not care about bylaws, and that is understandable up to a point. They joined a radio club, not a parliamentary monastery. They want nets, awards, friendships, Eyeballs, and a little fun before propagation collapses and the geriatric back pain returns. But bylaws are not the enemy of fun. Bylaws are what keep the fun from being governed by impulse, favoritism, private understandings, and whatever someone remembers the President saying last month. When the rules are ignored, the damage does not stay trapped in the boring paperwork section. It eventually reaches the nets, the awards, the money, the records, the volunteers, and the members who thought none of this mattered.

The Board does not have the luxury of thinking like rank-and-file members who only want the Club to be enjoyable. Directors are not elected to be casual participants with vote buttons. They are elected to govern. They are elected to be fiduciaries. This means reading the bylaws, respecting the safeguards, enforcing procedure, and protecting the organization even when doing so is inconvenient, dull, or unpopular with the people who would rather skip directly to milk and cookies. If the Board treats the bylaws as obstacles to fun, then it has misunderstood both fun and governance. The bylaws do not get in the way of a healthy Club. They get in the way of a careless one.

A Call to Action

If this Absurdist Paper strikes you as disturbing, good. It was meant to. The disturbing part is not that someone noticed the breaches. The disturbing part is that they happened in the first place, in plain sight, inside the very documents meant to guide the Board’s work. Unless and until the Board takes seriously its obligation to uphold the bylaws, organizational entropy will continue to metastasize through the Club’s weakest points. Directors, wake up and smell the coffee! You were not elected to nod along while process collapses around you. You were elected to lead. Now, lead!

A Club that sneers at its bylaws is not freeing itself from bureaucracy. It is freeing its leaders from accountability.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 32: Placeholder Governance appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

For those of you who are new to my blog, Peptide Purgatory is a series of articles relating to GLP-1 RA drugs: their benefits, their perils, and my experience on one of them during the past two years. During the past several years, prescriptions for GLP-1s and combination drugs have skyrocketed due to the obesity plague and the quest for solutions. Big Pharma has, of course, played a major “pusher” role in the process.

In Peptide Purgatory, we realize that miracles come at a cost, and while benefits may outweigh the negatives, the latter must not be swept under the rug. We emphasize that people should not blindly dive into the latest fad without first gaining knowledge about all aspects of what they are doing.

I started GLP-1 therapy with Mounjaro (tirzepatide) in June 2024, with the expectation that it would be an effective agent to control my Type 2 diabetes. Weight loss was not my primary object. However, a year later, I had shed 75 pounds of blubber. I worked with real doctors, not mail-order boutique clinics, and redoubled my commitment to physical fitness–an intense, six-day-per-week workout program emphasizing resistance training. I cleaned up my diet as well, including a serious effort to get adequate protein. I’ll update you on my progress later, after today’s feature article.

Drugs, Lifestyle, and OMG, Now I Don’t Need to Exercise

Two recent articles caught my attention, and together they tell a story that is both predictable and depressing.

The first concerns new American College of Physicians guidance on pharmacologic treatment for overweight and obesity. The headline version is that semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) now sit at the front of the line for adults with obesity, and also for overweight adults with weight-related comorbidities. Behind them come the lesser pharmaceutical contestants: phentermine-topiramate, liraglutide, and naltrexone-bupropion, depending on the patient category.

In fairness, the ACP guideline does not say “forget lifestyle.” It says these drugs should be used with lifestyle modification, meaning improved nutrition and physical activity. That phrase is dutifully included, as it always is, rather like the safety card in an airline seatback pocket. Everyone knows it is there. Almost nobody reads it. Fewer still plan their behavior around it.

The practical effect is harder to ignore. When the first four treatment options are drugs, lifestyle management has not exactly been banished, but it has been moved to the servant’s entrance. It becomes the tasteful side salad next to the pharmaceutical prime rib. Clinicians may say “nutrition and physical activity remain essential,” but the system’s megaphone says, “Here is the prescription.”

This is not entirely irrational. Semaglutide and tirzepatide work. Tirzepatide, in particular, is a metabolic sledgehammer, and I say that as someone taking Mounjaro for Type 2 diabetes. These drugs reduce appetite, improve glycemic control, produce major weight loss, and for many patients accomplish what decades of scolding failed to achieve. Reality is allowed into the room occasionally.

But the issue is not whether the drugs work. The issue is what happens when the drug becomes the plan instead of part of the plan.

Eat Less, Move Less

That brings us to the second article, which reported wearable-measured activity data in patients with obesity after starting GLP-1 therapy. The unsurprising revelation: they moved less.

Not the same. Less.

Daily steps declined. Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity declined. The decline was worse among men and among people with musculoskeletal pain. In other words, the people who especially need structured movement, resistance training, and maybe physical therapy were not spontaneously transformed into lean, motivated gazelles by the magic of appetite suppression.

Duh.

It Ain’t Automatic

There is a popular fantasy in GLP-1 land that once patients lose weight, they will naturally become more active. Their knees will rejoice, their sneakers will leap from the closet, and they will suddenly decide that squats are better than streaming video. That might happen for some people. But as a general public-health strategy, it has all the reliability of waiting for Congress to discover fiscal restraint.

People who seek a quick fix are not usually looking to “bust they asses.” They are looking for the fix to be quick. That is the point. If the treatment is marketed, discussed, and socially absorbed as the “easy button,” then we should not be shocked when patients press the easy button and sit quietly waiting for physics to improve.

The problem is especially acute because GLP-1-induced weight loss is not made entirely of fat. Lean mass can be lost along with fat mass. That does not mean these drugs are bad. It means that unstructured weight loss in older adults, sedentary adults, and people with pain can become a bargain with a hidden surcharge. The scale goes down, but strength, function, and bone density may be standing in the alley with empty pockets.

This is where the conversation needs to get less stupid.

Get Thee to the Gym

Exercise is not merely a way to burn calories. That model is primitive calorie-accounting nonsense, the metabolic equivalent of balancing a checkbook with a crayon. Exercise improves insulin sensitivity, preserves muscle, supports bone, improves cardiovascular capacity, helps maintain weight loss, and keeps older people from becoming decorative furniture. Resistance training, in particular, should be treated as core therapy during medically induced weight loss, not as a lifestyle hobby for people who enjoy mirrors and chalk dust.

The ACP guideline at least acknowledges the risk: nutritional deficiencies, loss of lean mass, and bone-density loss, especially in older adults. That is good. But acknowledgment is not implementation. “Counsel patients” is medical-speak for “we mentioned it, your honor.” The patient still needs a plan.

For obesity treatment in the GLP-1 era, “lifestyle modification” should not mean vague exhortations about eating better and walking more. It should mean a structured prescription:

• adequate protein intake,
• progressive resistance training,
• some form of aerobic work,
• attention to mobility and pain limitations,
• body-composition monitoring where feasible,
• and enough follow-up to keep the whole enterprise from collapsing into the usual American ritual of intention followed by entropy.

This is where the modern obesity discussion gets squishy. The pharmaceutical side has product, branding, sales force, insurance coding, clinical trials, celebrity testimonials, and glossy before-and-after photos. Lifestyle has broccoli, dumbbells, a physical therapist, and the unpleasant requirement that the patient participate. Guess which side wins the marketing war.

Still, the answer is not to retreat into puritanical anti-drug sermonizing. That is just the old failure wearing a hair shirt. These drugs can be profoundly useful. For Type 2 diabetes, they can be game-changing. For obesity, they may reduce risk, improve mobility, and give patients a metabolic opening they could not create on their own.

But the opening must be used.

The Holistic Approach

If the drug lowers appetite and weight, that is the window. That is when the patient should be taught to eat enough protein, lift something heavier than a grievance, and rebuild the machinery that will carry him, her, they, or it through the next decade. Otherwise, we are not treating obesity so much as chemically assisting weight loss while leaving the patient’s behavior, muscle, and long-term resilience to fend for themselves.

So, yes, ACP has moved the incretin drugs to the front of pharmacologic obesity management. The evidence supports their potency. But the ENDO data provide the badly needed slap upside the head: patients do not automatically become more active because the scale moves.

The needle can reduce body weight. It cannot confer discipline, muscle, or a functioning posterior chain.

For that, alas, the patient still has to participate. Nature remains stubbornly unimpressed by prior authorization.

My Life on Mounjaro

This old guy is pretty stable—perhaps not mentally, but physically, anyway. My body weight has remained at roughly 175 pounds for over a year. HbA1c has stabilized at 5.5%, which is 0.2% below the pre-diabetic threshold. Blood pressure averages 122/65. My body fat percentage, measured by a DEXAscan, is 19% and visceral fat, the bad stuff, is less than two pounds.

The appetite suppression effect of Mounjaro has long since departed. My appetite is normal. Sometimes, after an intense workout, it can be described as voracious. However, my eating habits are now healthier, and with insulin resistance in check, I can now consume carbs without them instantly becoming blubber. Used to be, I’d look at an apple and gain 10 pounds. OK, not literally.

Bio-feedback has turned into a hobby of sorts. Lab tests, wearables, measurements, and scans have provided information to guide my progress. I’m not just guessing about increased insulin sensitivity; I have the HOMA-IR to prove it. I keep track of blood sugar in real time with the Dexcom Stelo CGM. My Garmin fitness watch tracks a plethora of body variables. Overkill? Perhaps, but not only is tracking all these things fun, but also it keeps me on course.

I remain at a relatively small dose of Mounjaro, 7.5 mg. I have no desire to increase it. It is keeping my blood sugar right where I want it to be, although I wouldn’t mind that A1c getting down to 5.2%.

Dumping Prescriptions

My metabolic improvements inspired me to work with my new doctor, the Highlands Hero, Dr. Macallan, to deprescribe some of my medications. As you know, we old farts tend to accumulate prescriptions as we go from doctor to doctor. As I recall, the average 70 year-old is taking five prescription drugs. At that level, interactions, both subtle and frank, undoubtedly are piling up.

My secret? I have none. Controlling diabetes through a combination of drugs, weight loss, exercise, attention to nutrition, self-monitoring, and common sense will be the theme for the remainder of my time on the planet. I have no desire to return to the old gluttonous, sedentary lifestyle I somehow slipped into for decades. I’m about to turn 80, and I feel I’m on bonus time.

Peptide Purgatory is a regular feature of this blog. For an annotated catalog of all my Mounjaro, GLP-1, and Peptide Purgatory updates, please visit my Mounjaro Update Catalog page.

The post Peptide Purgatory: Needle First, Pushups Later appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

We previously discussed the dormant 2025 NCS Guide in Absurdist 15, questioning why operators still appeared to be relying on the 2023 Guide. Although the President publicly announced adoption of the 2025 Guide as of July 1, 2025, it never happened. Now we discover that he has assigned a new task group to update the 2023 Guide, as if the more recent comprehensive update had never occurred.

The NCS Guide did not need to be rediscovered. It had already been rewritten.

The real problem is not that the 2023 Guide needs updating. The real problem is that the 2025 update, produced after ten months of Bylaws Committee work and publicly announced as effective, was never posted, never implemented, and is now being ignored by a new workgroup tasked with reinventing the wheel from the prior flat tire.

Why would the President commission two projects to accomplish the same goal, scrapping the first after announcing a firm implementation date?

We will leave the conjectures to the reader. What follows are the facts of the matter.

The Guide That Was Updated, Except Not Officially, Except Maybe It Was

Read the June 2025 Board meeting minutes. In the Question & Answer section, you will observe the following:

“Dean KL7OR announced the new NCS guide to go in to effect July 1. Thanks given to the Bylaws committee. Since no bylaw policies changed, no need for the board to vote on it.”

Set aside the tortured “go in to effect,” which appears to have staggered into the minutes without adult supervision. The meaning is clear enough:

• Dean announced a new NCS Guide.
• Dean said it would become effective July 1.
• Dean thanked the Bylaws Committee.
• Dean said no Board vote was required because no bylaw policies changed.

That is neither ambiguous nor is it idle chatter. That is an implementation announcement.

So what happened?

We cannot say for sure. What we can say is that the 2025 Guide was not posted on the website. The 2023 Guide appears to have remained there all along as the designated reference document for NCSs.

Selective Promulgation

However, as we noted in Absurdist 15, one prominent NCS, Virgil, W9WWG, was given a Microsoft Word copy of the 2025 Guide by the President. So the document existed. It was circulated selectively. It was apparently treated by someone as useful enough to hand to an operator, but not official enough to post, publish, or explain.

Why have one official operating guide when you can have a website version, a mystery Word version, a promised future version, and now a new workgroup revising the old version?

This is a damn scavenger hunt, not document control.

Virgil later resigned, which we covered in Absurdist 21. His resignation was not directly because of the mysterious promulgation of the 2025 Guide, but because of shifting rules designed to accommodate favored individuals. One of those rules had been added to the 2025 Guide at Dean’s request. That detail matters because it shows the 2025 Guide was not some abandoned draft in a forgotten folder. It was actively shaped, discussed, revised, and then selectively used.

Now, that same 2025 NCS Guide appears to be headed to the scrap heap, while the President has handed the 2023 edition to a new workgroup for the next update.

I am tempted to give the new workgroup my copy of the completed 2025 Guide so they can finish their assignment by simply changing its date. No need for another prolonged revision effort when the Bylaws Committee already spent ten months doing the job.

But where would the fun be in that? Volunteer labor must be squandered properly, preferably in layers.

The 2023 Guide: The Thing Still on the Website

The 2023 Guide contains useful content. Let us be fair, because apparently someone has to try it.

Still a useful document, it contains core operating policies, NCS procedures, operating tips, and relay guidance. It reflects years of accumulated experience and operational adjustment.

But it is poorly organized and structurally inferior to the 2025 effort. It mixes policy, procedures, operating tips, definitions, and legacy update history into the same operational soup. It is a linear collection of numbered points, arranged in a way that forces the reader to hunt through preceding material to find the relevant item.

That is not how a primary operating manual should function.

An NCS Guide should be easy to use under practical operating conditions. A Net Control operator does not need a treasure map. He needs a clear distinction between what the bylaws require, what the Board has approved as net policy, what procedures must be followed, and what practical advice may help the net run smoothly.

The 2023 Guide had much of the content. It lacked the architecture. That is why it needed a serious update.

And, inconveniently for the current plot, it got one.

The 2025 Guide: The Thing That Actually Solved Much of the Problem

“The 2025 NCS Guide did not fail because it was defective. It failed because implementation required follow-through, and follow-through is where useful committee work goes to die.“

The aim of the Bylaws Committee was to completely reorganize the NCS Guide and rewrite applicable sections. The Committee first separated policies from required procedures and operating tips. Section II mirrored the bylaws as they applied to the nets. The remainder of the Guide was organized so an NCS reading it could understand the flow of a net.

That distinction was critical. Policies are not tips. Procedures are not folklore. Bylaws are not suggestions wearing a tie.

The 2025 Guide made those distinctions clearer. It separated approved net policies from required procedures. It then organized operating guidance in a way that followed how nets actually function. Because procedures differ between SSB nets and CW or digital nets, the Committee wrote separate sections for those modes. Operating Tips and Tricks were arranged logically, with a clearly written table of contents.

Finally, the Committee meticulously corrected the poor grammar, awkward constructs, typos, redundancies, and structural clutter that riddled the 2023 Guide.

The 2025 NCS Guide was a huge improvement, a polished presentation that coupled facts with usability. The 2023 Guide had most of the facts, but far less usability.

So, again we ask:

Why was the 2025 Guide not implemented?

The Memory Hole

Did the President forget about the 2025 update he commissioned?

Doubtful.

The update dated May 14, 2025, which certainly exists here on my screen as I am writing this, was publicly announced by Dean as taking effect on July 1, 2025.

It did not.

No one knows why.

Now we must ask the obvious question: at a time in the Club’s history when it is losing crucial volunteers who have carried significant portions of the workload, why would the President stretch the available talent even thinner by assigning a new workgroup to duplicate a completed document?

Only Dean knows the answer to that, and he ain’t talking.

This is the institutional memory hole in action. A committee is assigned a task. The committee does the work. The work is praised. Implementation is announced. The document is not posted. Time passes. The old document remains in place. Then a new group is assigned to update the old document as if the newer document never existed.

This is not governance. This is organizational amnesia with a meeting agenda.

The Insult to Committee Work

I was a member of the Bylaws Committee that produced the 2025 update. The President assigned the project to the Committee as a collateral task. Although we had our hands full working through a complete Bylaws update cycle, our Chair, Eric, AA0HF, along with Dwight, WF4H (SK), Johnny, KI4WCQ, and I approached the project with the same energy and attention to detail we applied to the bylaws.

Ten months of work went into the NCS Guide.

Ten months of reading, reorganizing, rewriting, checking bylaws, aligning procedures, cleaning up language, and trying to produce a document that NCSs could actually use.

Now, the President appears ready to blow it up and start again.

That is an outrageous insult to the Committee. It is also a cautionary tale for anyone considering volunteer work under current management.

You never know when the rug will be pulled out from under you.

Ten months of Bylaws Committee labor has been treated as disposable because the President, who controls the nets, the website, and the workflow, failed or declined to complete the final implementation step. Then new people get assigned to redo the same work, likely with less context and more confusion.

That is not volunteer management. That is volunteer composting.

The Club constantly needs skilled volunteers, yet it burns their work product, forgets their contributions, and then wonders why the capable people walk away or stop raising their hands.

One need not be a management guru to understand the lesson. If volunteers spend ten months producing a document, and leadership praises it, announces it, fails to implement it, and later assigns someone else to redo it from an older version, the message to future volunteers is clear:

Your work matters until it becomes inconvenient, forgotten, or politically unusable.

That is a helluva recruitment poster.

Not That Update

The most absurd part is that the new workgroup may very well produce a document resembling the 2025 Guide, because the 2025 Guide already solved the structural problem.

The 2023 Guide needed a clearer organization. The 2025 Guide provided it.

The 2023 Guide mixed policy, procedure, tips, and legacy material. The 2025 Guide separated them.

The 2023 Guide buried operational flow inside numbered clutter. The 2025 Guide organized procedures around how nets are actually run.

The 2023 Guide needed cleanup. The 2025 Guide cleaned it up.

So what exactly is the new workgroup being asked to accomplish?

If the answer is “update the 2023 Guide,” then the first question should be: why are we starting with 2023 when a 2025 update already exists?

If the answer is “review the 2025 Guide and recommend changes,” that would at least make sense. It would respect prior work while allowing current operators to refine it.

But pretending the 2025 Guide does not exist is not review.

It is erasure.

The Larger Entropy Lesson

The Club cannot retain institutional work product.

It creates committees, assigns projects, receives work, praises the work, fails to implement it, forgets it exists, and then appoints another group to solve the same problem. That is organizational entropy with a file cabinet.

The 2025 NCS Guide did not fail because it was defective. It failed because implementation required follow-through, and follow-through is where useful committee work goes to die.

This is how decline happens in volunteer organizations. Not always through explosive conflict, although there has been plenty of that too. Decline also occurs through lost documents, duplicated assignments, shifting explanations, memory holes, and leaders who treat other people’s work as disposable.

The Club does not lack documents. It lacks document control.

The Club does not lack volunteers. It lacks respect for volunteer work.

The Club does not lack ideas. It lacks follow-through.

If churning out paper for the sake of keeping printers busy is now the object, then I will gladly award someone the contract to print 75 copies of my forthcoming book, The Absurdist Papers Collection: A Case Study in Volunteer Organization Entropy.

Please have them ready by August 10.

I intend to do a book signing at the Grand Forks, North Dakota Eyeball.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 31: The NCS Guide That Found the Memory Hole appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Absurdist Paper 30 dives further into the June Board meeting, focusing on the Great 3905 Century Club Logo Contest, which suffered a false start shortly before the meeting. Will our subject organization get a new logo? Does it need one? If so, why now? And, most important, did anyone ever actually approve the project before it was announced to the membership?

Silly questions, I know. Around here, procedure is often discovered only after the email has already gone out.

The Most Important Thing, Obviously

Let’s put this in perspective.

In a well-staffed, well-run organization, refreshing its corporate image and branding with a new logo is a normal, cyclical event. A graphic artist friend of mine makes a comfortable living researching and designing new logos for client companies.

However, in volunteer nonprofit organizations, especially in one with a contracting volunteer pool, the picture is quite different. New branding does not automatically equate to enhanced organizational performance. A project of any magnitude taxes already stretched volunteers and diverts time and energy away from more pressing issues.

The Club is hemorrhaging volunteers, committee reporting has become useless, motions are being laundered through committees that never approved them, the NCS Guide has wandered into the institutional memory hole, and the Board is struggling to understand its own rules.

So, naturally, the June meeting spent serious time on the logo—as had the April and May meetings. I did not have the stomach to review meetings prior to April.

Although the Board has better things to do, it is their prerogative to spend disproportionate time discussing this relatively inconsequential matter. With that in mind, the logo controversy perfectly illustrates how the Club now handles authority: someone talks, someone thinks he heard approval, someone else acts, and only later does the Board ask whether it ever voted.

Much Ado about Logos

When the logo project came up for discussion at the June meeting, one Director asked why we need a new logo after 49 years. The President corrected him, saying the current logo was developed through a significant project around 1985. For those who do not believe math should be part of reading these essays, that is 41 years.

Then the President dropped the bombshell.

The project had not yet been approved by the Board, and it needed Board approval to proceed.

Gene, the sponsoring Director, protested. He believed the President had given him a verbal go-ahead.

That is where the real fun begins.

April: Bring Back a Proposal

The logo mess is not a simple case of one Director going off half-cocked, although there was certainly enough half-cockedness and hair-triggers in evidence.

After reviewing the April and May Board meeting recordings, the situation is more interesting and more absurd. Gene did not simply invent a Club logo contest out of thin air. Rather, the Board, the President, the Secretary, and the Chair collectively produced a cloud of procedural ambiguity so dense that Gene apparently believed he had authority to proceed, while the official record still contained no motion, no vote, and no clear Board approval.

In other words, this was not rogue action.

It was non-action action.

In April, Dean told Gene that if he wanted to pursue the logo idea, he should make a proposal and bring it to the next Board meeting so the Board could approve it. Dean said:

“I think that if you’re going to do it, Gene, I think you make a proposal and bring it to the next Board meeting of what this is going to look like and then identify the pieces and get the Board approval so that we can approve it.”

That part was reasonably clear.

Prepare a proposal. Bring it back. Get Board approval. Check.

Dean went on to discuss collateral issues involving “running with the logo project,” then added that he had no problem figuring out whether it was something Gene wanted to do and getting it to the Board for a yes-or-no decision.

Gene agreed to “propose something way before the next Board meeting, so we can run with it.”

Again, reasonably clear.

Or at least clear enough for ordinary humans, which may be asking a lot.

May: The Fog Machine Starts

Then came May, where clarity wandered off to find better leadership.

Gene did submit a modest one-page proposal in the Board package. But there was no motion. There was no vote. There was no formal Board approval.

When the Chair asked about the proposal, Gene said he did not believe it needed to be voted on. In his view, Dean simply needed to say yes or no.

That was the first wrong turn.

The logo of the Club is not Gene’s personal project, nor is it the President’s personal decision. A permanent Club logo is a Board matter. If the Board is going to replace the long-standing logo, solicit member submissions, appoint judges, offer prizes, and potentially alter the Club’s public identity from 2027 forward, the Board should approve the process before the train leaves the station.

Out of left field, Secretary Doug then wandered into the fog by suggesting that the matter was the President’s decision. That was a fascinating view of Board governance, assuming one enjoys watching authority melt in public. Talk about being “out of order”!

The Chair asked Gene whether he had his ad hoc group. Gene said that was up to the President. Gene then floated names for judges and asked Dean for his thoughts.

Dean’s response was not exactly a model of parliamentary precision:

“Not my choice. Go for it. I would like to see your plans for getting the membership involved.”

Then the Chair added:

“So you’ve got it. Run with it. Keep us up to date.”

And there it is.

The procedural fog machine at full power:

• Was the Board approving the project?
• Was Dean approving the project?
• Was the Chair merely telling Gene to continue developing a plan?
• Was the ad hoc group approved?
• Was the membership contest approved?
• Was the Board authorizing a permanent logo replacement process, or merely allowing Gene to keep exploring the idea?

No one seems to know.

That is the problem.

Board Evanescence is Quite “Distrubing”

A Board cannot govern by conversational vapor. If the April instruction was “bring back a proposal for Board approval,” then the May meeting should have produced a motion, discussion, and vote. Then if the Board was not ready to approve the project, the Chair should have said so. If Gene misunderstood “go for it” as authorization to launch a Club-wide contest, that misunderstanding was foreseeable because the meeting produced a pile of approving noises without an actual approval.

So Gene left May believing he had a “go.”

The record says otherwise.

The Contest Leaves the Station

On June 13, before the June meeting, Gene announced a “Century Club Logo Contest” to the membership.

The announcement included contest dates, judges, submission instructions, format requirements, a prize, and the statement that the winner could become the Club’s new logo from 2027 and beyond.

That was not a brainstorming invitation.

Nor was it “I am preparing a proposal for Board consideration.”

And it was not “This is an unofficial idea-gathering exercise.”

It was a contest announcement. A contest with dates, judges, image specifications, and prizes. It described a contest with an intended result.

The train had left the station. The only problem was that no one had laid the track.

Clay Statmore Throws the Flag

Clay Statmore, WA2JIM, not Board Chair Clay Mayrose, WA6LBU, threw the flag on the reflector.

That distinction matters.

Statmore’s objection came from outside the meeting machinery and correctly identified the core problem: a message from an Area Director announcing a “Century Club Logo Contest” strongly implied Club sanction where no Board action appeared to exist. He noted that the Board had taken no action indicating dissatisfaction with the current logo and no action suggesting this was a Club contest.

He was right.

Gene replied that it “WAS sanctioned by the president.”

That may have been his honest understanding. Unfortunately, presidential atmosphere is not Board approval.

This is where the entire mess becomes useful as a governance case study. Gene believed the President had sanctioned the project. Statmore pointed out that the Board had not acted. Both could be operating in good faith, and the process could still be defective.

That is what procedural ambiguity does. It creates multiple plausible memories, none of which equal a vote.

June: The “Go” Becomes a Stop

At the June meeting, Board Chair Clay Mayrose, WA6LBU, was left to manage the resulting procedural wreckage.

Gene believed he had been given a “go.” Dean questioned whether the Board had ever approved the need for a new logo. Doug looked to the minutes and found no recorded approval. Craig remembered Dean telling Gene to proceed. The contest announcement had already gone out.

Then Dean asked whether anyone had submitted a motion approving the need for a new logo.

In other words, the President who had said “go for it” in May was now asking whether the Board had ever approved the underlying need to proceed.

Dean was not entirely wrong, which is an uncomfortable sentence to type and may require a shower.

The Board had not voted. The record did not show formal approval. Gene’s contest had launched into the membership before the Board had approved the need for a new permanent Club logo.

Gene was flabbergasted. Understandably so.

The Chair, confronted with the smoking crater, told Gene to explain to the members that Board approval was needed and slide the contest one month.

So we have Gene announcing the contest before the June Board meeting, the Board stumbling over the absence of formal approval during the meeting, and Board Chair Clay Mayrose telling Gene to slide the contest until the Board could act. Then, on Sunday, Clay Statmore threw the flag on the reflector, correctly warning that the announcement looked like a Club-sanctioned contest without Board action. Gene replied that it had been sanctioned by the President. Two Clays, one fog bank, now drifting across two days.

Are you following all this?

Presidential Atmosphere Is Not Board Approval

The logo contest did not merely launch without a “go.”

It launched after a series of ambiguous “go-like” noises that never became a Board decision.

That is the real absurdity.

The President encouraged it. The Secretary treated it as presidential turf. The Chair told Gene to run with it. Gene announced it. Dean then asked where the Board approval was. Statmore challenged it. Everyone then discovered, once again, that the Club’s actual operating procedure is apparently:

• Talk first.
• Act second.
• Check authority third.

The logo is not the problem.

The problem is that the Club cannot distinguish among discussion, encouragement, presidential permission, chair acquiescence, committee exploration, and Board approval. Those are different things. In a functioning organization, people know the difference. In our subject organization, the difference is discovered later, usually after someone has already sent an email.

This is how governance goes to hell in a handbasket: not always through malice, but through mush. Mushy authority, mushy records, mushy motions, mushy committee work, mushy recollections, and mushy “go for it” statements that later become “where is the motion?”

The contest may yet be properly approved in July. Fine. Let the Board vote. Let the Board decide whether the Club needs a new permanent logo, a 50th anniversary logo, both, neither, or a small commemorative plaque reading, “We Finally Found the Motion.”

But do not pretend this was clean.

It was not.

It was a logo project launched through procedural fog, corrected only after the train had already left the station and someone noticed the Board had never laid the track.

The Logo Is Not the Problem

This essay is not about whether the logo should be updated.

A modernized logo may be a good idea. A 50th anniversary mark may be a good idea. A member contest may be a good idea. Even a new design process may be worthwhile if the Club wants something crisp, flexible, and usable across certificates, web pages, publications, and apparel.

But good ideas still need authority, scope, process, and approval.

The problem is not art. The problem is authority.

The Club does not need a new logo nearly as much as it needs people to understand who is allowed to launch things in the Club’s name.

And then, of course, there is the logo.

I invite my newly expanded audience to review my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. I hope it will provide some useful counterpoint to the Party line!

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 30: Go or No-Go, We Have a Logo appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

I would like to thank the President for bringing my modest literary efforts to the attention of the Board.

In a message titled “Distrubing Comments,” which I assume is either a typo or a bold new dialect of procedural panic, he advised the Directors that AE4NT has created “a disturbing comments” about himself and other Club members. I appreciate the concern, the grammar, and most of all, the free advertising.

For months, I have been hoping that Directors would wander into my blog to read the Absurdist Papers. Now the President has helpfully provided them with a direct link. This is the kind of communications support I could only dream of when I was still trying to make the Club’s reports useful.

Naturally, no action is currently being requested. That is wise. Reading is enough of a burden for some Boards.

Welcome, Directors and Officers!

In any case, I welcome the new audience. Any Director or officer following the link will find not random invective, but a documented series of essays about governance failure, committee dysfunction, missing records, defective reports, disappearing revenue information, procedural clampdowns, and the general tendency of our subject organization to convert solvable problems into fossilized absurdity.

I write them with humor and irony—sometimes with biting sarcasm—always relying on the applicability of Sayre’s Law: In the 3905 Century Club, the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small.

If these essays are disturbing, perhaps the problem is not that they were written. Perhaps the problem is that they keep being illustrated by events.

Dean may control the official Club channels, and Discord may soon provide a shiny new corral for approved discussion. But over here in The Absurdist Papers, readers get something different: a refreshing break from sanitized propaganda, brought to them by a knowledgeable former insider with too much time on his hands, a weakness for documentation, and a proven talent for creating “distrubing comments.”

So thank you, Mr. President, for the promotion. I could not and would not have placed the link more efficiently myself. In fact, I had heretofore carefully avoided promoting The Absurdist Papers through official or unofficial Club channels. Now, you have effectively doubled my readership. Good work!

Alas, my blog is not ad supported. Otherwise, I’d consider sending you a few cents per hundred clicks for the visitor bump.

But I certainly promise to keep creating a disturbing comments for as long as the Club keeps creating disturbing material.

I invite my newly expanded audience to review my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda. I hope it will provide some useful counterpoint to the Party line!

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist EXTRA: Thanks for the Bump, Dean! appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

In Absurdist Paper 29 we direct our attention toward the travails of the Awards Committee.

In 2026, the Committee came under new leadership, and that leadership appears to rely heavily on direction from the President. All indications now suggest that the Committee itself is serving largely as a stage prop. The symbiosis between its dependent, hand-picked chair and the President has effectively nullified the Committee as an independent deliberative body.

The Committee still exists. It still has a name, it still appears in Board packets, and it still produces something called a report.

But does it deliberate? Recommend? Decide? Explain what it is doing?

Increasingly, the answer appears to be no.

The Motion That Wasn’t

A case in point is the poorly worded, unsupported, defective, typo-laden Clint Wise Award motion that appeared on the June 14 meeting agenda after the deadline. The motion purported to be submitted by Dean, KL7OR, the President, “on behalf of the Awards Committee.”

It was withdrawn within hours after several Club members expressed severe reservations about it.

In Absurdist 26, we asked several questions. Why was the motion so late? What was it trying to accomplish? Why was it attempting to solve a bylaw-level defect through an award rule? Why was it so poorly drafted? And, particularly, why was it submitted by the President when two members of the Awards Committee have standing on the Board and could have submitted it themselves?

The answer, it turns out, was exactly what one would expect in the current environment.

The Symbiosis

The motion was cooked up between Rich, the Awards Committee Chair, and Dean, the President. The Committee was present in the motion in name only.

According to one Awards Committee member, the Committee did not enter the motion, did not see it before it appeared on the agenda, and had actually advised against part of the terminology used. The problematic “remote/portable” terminology was apparently hatched by Rich, despite Committee members telling him that it was not a bylaw definition. The Committee reportedly suggested clarifying existing language to mean that the applicant was physically in the state claimed.

That suggestion was ignored.

So the motion was not really an Awards Committee motion. It was a Dean/Rich product placed on the agenda wearing an Awards Committee costume.

That distinction matters.

Standing committees exist to bring specialized review, deliberation, and recommendations to the Board. They are not supposed to be decorative labels pasted onto private drafting projects. If the President and a committee chair can generate a motion, bypass the committee, and then submit the motion “on behalf of” that committee, the committee has ceased to function as a committee.

It has become institutional camouflage.

On Behalf of Nobody

This also explains a curious omission in the May Awards Committee Report.

The report said nothing about the ill-fated Clint Wise motion.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Nary a mention. Neither a discussion nor a recommendation nor a vote. No summary of competing views or explanation of why the motion was needed. Not even a note that the Committee had considered the remote/portable problem. No mention that a Board motion was coming or that the Committee had approved anything.

That omission looked suspicious at the time. Now it looks explanatory. The report did not mention Committee action on the motion because, apparently, there was no Committee action on the motion. The President submitted a motion “on behalf of the Awards Committee” that the Awards Committee had not seen before it appeared on the agenda.

The Rich/Dean Committee, with the apparent cooperation or acquiescence of the Secretary and Board Chair, circumvented an established governance safeguard against improper Board motions. Under bylaw I.E.2.a.ii, motions related to awards must be submitted no later than seven days before the Board meeting for study. That requirement is not decorative. It gives the Board time to understand the motion and, under bylaw I.B.3.e., gives the Chair the opportunity to route award-related matters to the Awards Committee before Board action is taken. Clearly, that process did not occur in any meaningful way if the Awards Committee did not officially approve, review, or even see the motion before it appeared on the agenda. Instead, the motion existed only as a placeholder until three days before the meeting, when rushed and flawed text was posted under the Committee’s name. So the safeguard was not merely missed. It was converted into paperwork theater.

This is what we call governance?

The Report That Reports Nothing

Along the same lines, the President’s influence over the Awards Committee is also reflected in the appalling state of the Committee’s monthly report, which has devolved into a ball of fluff best characterized as database exhaust. It has done so at the direction of the President.

In Absurdist 7, we decried the President’s direction to eliminate useful award revenue numbers from the report. He spoke, and the Committee Chair listened. Accordingly, the report presented to the Board for the June 14 meeting was completely useless as a management document.

A Deeply Involved Member’s Concerns

On the Fourth Area reflector, Johnny, a member of the Audit Committee as well as the Awards Committee and the Bylaws Committee, voiced the obvious objection:

“This report in its current format in the board packet provides no useful information from a management perspective. Numbers, types of awards, and counts of awards are meaningless for monitoring how our new fee structure is working. Also, there is no ability to compare expected and received income over the FY years without cost points.”

That is not a casual complaint from an uninvolved observer. Johnny sits on both sides of the problem. As a member of the Audit Committee, he knows what information is needed to compare expected award income with received award income. As a member of the Awards Committee, he knows what the report used to contain and what it should still contain if the Board is serious about oversight. His objection therefore exposes a deeper failure: an Awards Committee member understands the defect, can identify the missing control information, and still cannot get his own Committee Chair to produce a useful report.

If the Awards Committee were functioning as a committee, this problem would be resolved inside the Committee before the report ever reached the Board packet. Instead, the useful information disappeared after the President objected to it, and a Committee member had to complain publicly that the resulting report was useless. What remains is not committee governance. Instead, it is a castrated committee wearing a name tag.

Back to the Future?

Despite the President’s and the Treasurer’s objections, the prior Awards Committee Report format allowed the Board to see award activity and associated expected revenue. That did not replace the Treasurer’s financial report, but it served a different and important purpose. It gave management and the Audit Committee a way to compare what should have been received with what was actually received.

That is sure as hell not “meaningless,” a term used by the President to support removal of the data. Indeed, it represents reasonable, albeit minimal, internal control.

If the numbers did not tie perfectly month to month, that was not a reason to remove them. It was a reason to understand timing differences, reporting cutoffs, payment methods, and reconciliation procedures. In a functioning organization, imperfect information is improved. In a declining organization, inconvenient information is deleted.

The Club chose deletion.

Whatever Rich Wants

At the June 14 meeting, Mac, the Tenth Area Director, once again raised the same concern. Without dollar amounts on the Awards Committee Reports, the Audit Committee would have no means of comparison between expected and received award income.

Craig, the DX Area Director and a member of the Audit Committee, agreed. Further, he said he would also like to see what the Awards Committee is working on. No such narrative exists in the report as it stands today. He went on to say that the current report format does nothing for him. The statistics included in the report are not the kind of information he needs.

Craig has a point. Those statistics are useless ornamentation, transforming a formal report into something resembling the output of two eight year-olds conducting a rainy-day afternoon tic tac toe session. Its value might be somewhat less. At least the game kept the kids quiet.

A functional Board wants to know what its standing committees are doing. The bylaws require the Awards Committee to write a monthly status report for the BoD on ongoing projects, completed projects, and any changes made to existing award documents. As well, a functional Audit Committee wants information that helps it test whether money that should have been received was actually received. A functional Treasurer wants reporting that helps identify discrepancies, timing issues, and control weaknesses.

Mr. Fix-It Responds

Then came the Mr. Fix-It response.

The Chair suggested that Craig and Johnny from the Audit Committee get together with Rich, the Awards Committee Chair, and Gary, the Treasurer, to sort out what the reports should contain.

Gary chimed in that he did not need to be involved. Whatever Rich wanted to put in the report was fine with him.

There it is.

Whatever Rich wants.

Wearing both his Treasurer hat and his Fourth Area Director hat, Gary fails to see the use for a well structured, robust Awards Committee Report. The same Director who sponsored the awards fee increase motion that took effect on March 1, 2026 defers to “whatever Rich wants.”

Incredibly, the officer responsible for the Club’s money, declined involvement in shaping a report that bears directly on award income, the Club’s primary revenue source. The Awards Committee Chair can put whatever he wants in the report. The Treasurer apparently has no stake in whether the report supports reconciliation, oversight, audit comparison, or management review.

Ho hum. Put the Communication Team hat on and play with the Discord Project, that distracting, thinly veiled narrative control project launched by the President. Much more important, right?

One might think a Treasurer would care whether the Club has a reasonable way to compare expected award revenue with received award revenue or would want to know whether the new fee structure is working. One might think a Treasurer would want award reporting to support audit review rather than frustrate it.

But why burden oneself with such archaic notions? The bill arrives, the bill gets paid, the report appears, the report gets accepted, and everyone moves along before someone ruins the evening with arithmetic.

Digging Out

Craig reiterated that the current report format does nothing for him.

The typically irascible President, seeking to preempt the conversation in a less abrasive-than-usual manner, replied, “You have some great ideas. We should look into how the report can be improved.”

Well, that is a firm commitment, isn’t it? A little nebulous. Par for the course.

The old bureaucratic lullaby: you have great ideas, we should look into them, someone should get together with someone else, and perhaps someday a report may once again contain information useful to the people who need reports.

Craig then stated the obvious solution: It is not difficult. Just go back to the former format.

Thank you, Craig. An actual thinking adult has entered the building.

Another Ignored Bylaw

According to bylaw II.C.1.d.iv, among the duties of the Awards Committee is the requirement to generate monthly status reports for the BoD, including ongoing projects, completed projects, and any changes made to existing award documents. Apparently, when Dean summarily chose completely inexperienced Rich to chair the committee over the four seasoned, long-time members, he forgot to hand him a copy of the bylaws.

To compound the problem, perhaps Rich lost the bylaws copy he should have studied when he was Area Director for two years and should still be reading as Assistant Director.

Loyalty to the throne buys one lots of leeway.

In any case, for whatever reason, the Awards Committee, or perhaps the Dean/Rich Committee, chose to dump the transparent reporting approach I developed and used when I was Awards Secretary and Committee Chair. I produced consistent, detailed reports of committee activity every month. This required no more than one hour per month. Rich could easily do the same. But I suppose when you have something to hide, transparency is not your friend.

The former format I developed also provided useful management information. The current format provides counts, categories, areas, and statistical wallpaper. It tells the Board how many awards were processed, but not what the Board actually needs to know. There is no mention of Committee business. It does not disclose pending issues, does not describe recommendations, does not support revenue comparison, and it does not tell the Audit Committee what it needs to know.

This useless piece of trash is simply a data dump, not a committee report.

Craig’s solution is simple. The Board should demand it.

Rich Was Not There

There is another detail worth noting.

Rich, the Awards Committee Chair and Awards Secretary, was not present for the third straight Board meeting.

This matters because the Board was discussing the usefulness of the Awards Committee Report. And furthermore, it matters

• because the Board was discussing what the report should contain,
• because a defective Awards-related motion had appeared on the agenda supposedly “on behalf of the Awards Committee” and was then withdrawn before the meeting,
• and because the Awards Committee is now central to questions of award policy, revenue reporting, audit comparison, and committee governance.

So the Board was left discussing what the Awards Committee should report, while the Treasurer said he did not need to be involved and the Committee Chair was absent.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Helluva way to run a railroad.

Entropy in Motion

This is how organizations deteriorate. Not usually with one dramatic collapse. They decline by converting functions into appearances. Reports still exist, but do not report. Committees still exist, but do not deliberate. Motions still carry committee labels, but not committee action. Financial oversight still exists, but the relevant numbers disappear. The Board still meets, but the serious work happens elsewhere, informally, invisibly, and without accountability. If it occurs at all.

That is organizational entropy in motion.

The machinery still makes noise, the lights still blink, the packets still get assembled, and the reports still have headings. But the gears are no longer connected.

Restore Order and reporting sanity

As Craig so astutely postulated, none of this is complicated.

The Awards Committee needs to become functional and relevant again. It should meet, deliberate, document its work, and report meaningful activity to the Board. A comprehensive monthly report not only benefits current management initiatives and ongoing operation of the awards system, but also preserves the record for future historical reference.

That is what a committee does.

It does not serve as a decorative label for decisions worked out privately between the President and a dependent chair. Neither does it allow motions to appear on the agenda under its name when its own members have not reviewed or approved them nor does it hide behind statistical filler while actual policy work happens offstage. That is puppet theater with call signs, not committee governance.

Respect the Bylaws

The bylaws also need to mean something again. The seven-day motion deadline is not a clerical nuisance. It is a safeguard. The routing of award-related matters to the Awards Committee is not optional scenery. It is part of the governance structure. If officers and committee chairs can evade that structure with placeholders, late text, and “on behalf of” language unsupported by actual committee action, then the bylaws are no longer rules. They are props.

And, yes, the Awards Committee Report should go back to the former format. Restore the wonderful format I developed, thank you very much, because apparently my reward for building a transparent reporting structure was watching it get gutted by people allergic to useful information.

The former format gave the Board meaningful management data. It showed award activity and expected revenue. Plus, it helped compare what should have been collected with what was actually received and supported audit review. It allowed Directors to ask intelligent questions, which, of course, may have been its fatal flaw.

Get It Right!

One more time, in bold, just in case it did not come through 5×9:

Restore the former format. Return to actual committee reporting. Respect the bylaws. Restore transparency. And, damn it, go back to treating the Board like a governing body instead of an audience for decisions made elsewhere.

None of this requires genius. It requires only ordinary governance, ordinary honesty, and ordinary respect for the rules the Club claims to operate under.

But apparently, for now, the governing principle is simpler.

Whatever Rich wants.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 29: Whatever Rich Wants appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Apparently, literary allusion now provides cryptic comic relief from organizational hypocrisy, procedural bumbling, and misplaced priorities.

Here, we focus on institutional double-dealing as well as a brief recap of other aspects of the June 14 meeting. We will cover some of those topics more thoroughly in later Absurdist Papers.

As you may recall, Absurdist 27 discussed a series of agenda warnings apparently designed to gag a Director who asked inconvenient questions. The most revealing of those warnings attempted to banish discussion of standing committee reports to the ccnboard reflector, away from the Board meeting itself. Reports were included, we were told, “for information purposes only.”

Since this appeared to be a puerile attempt to silence a single upstart Director who dared to ask legitimate questions about a defective report, the result was predictable.

This rule applies to thee, not to me.

Of Mice and Men

The Board seems composed mostly of mice these days. However, a couple of men stood out during the meeting.

One of them was Mac, W6PNY, the targeted Tenth Area Director, who spoke up about the inappropriate editorial reference published in the draft minutes of the May meeting. The Secretary had characterized Mac’s prior objection to the deficient and defective Awards Committee Report as “out of order” and complained that it provoked a 29-minute discussion. This is what prompted the three-pronged, sophomoric, reactionary reprisal featured in Absurdist 27.

Mac stood up to say that it was not the Secretary’s place to declare him out of order. Furthermore, including that spurious editorial judgment in the recorded minutes was offensive to elected Directors.

He was right.

The Secretary is appointed by the Board to record meeting details, not to chastise Directors or express personal opinions about their participation.

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

Secretary Doug then spoke up, saying he would ask the Bylaws Committee about a motion that would allow him to participate more directly in Board meetings. Good luck with that. Even the President commented negatively, saying the notion did not comport with the bylaws. When even the President notices a bylaw problem, one should probably check the smoke detector.

Doug had claimed that reports were not part of the minutes, so Mac had no business bringing them up during approval of the minutes. Inconveniently, the bylaws say otherwise. Section I.G.1.c. states that minutes must contain committee reports.

Meanwhile, Mac’s major point was not difficult to understand, assuming one was trying. He acknowledged that his comments may have arisen at the wrong point in the prior meeting. If so, it was the Chair’s job to tell him so, not the Secretary’s. A Director with a comment should be heard, even if the comment must be deferred to the appropriate procedural opportunity.

The May minutes were tabled until the July meeting, pending revision to excise the offending editorial.

A small victory for adult supervision.

Institutional Hypocrisy

No sooner had the financial reports been accepted than the Vice President, who happens to chair two committees, presented those committee reports verbally. Both reports produced discussion.

No one batted an eye.

Apparently, the boldface agenda language discouraging report discussion had a shorter shelf life than a gas station sandwich. More likely, most Directors had not read it, had not understood it, or did not realize it was supposed to apply to anyone other than Mac.

This confirms what was obvious from the beginning: the admonition against discussing reports during the meeting was a bumbling attempt by the President, the Secretary, the Chair, or some combination of those officers, to stifle comments from one inconvenient source.

The rule was not a rule.

It was a muzzle with a target painted on it.

The Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

When the verbalized Bylaws Committee report mentioned consideration of a strange proposal to permanently move the monthly Board meeting from the second Saturday to the third Saturday, a Director asked the obvious question:

“Why?”

“Ours is not to reason why,” came the response from the committee chair, a paraphrased reference to Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Let me finish the quote:

“Ours but to do and die.”

One would hope this specious proposal dies in committee, because changing meeting timing is much more complex than simply modifying a calendar entry. A constitutional implementation timeframe needs consideration. Meeting schedules affect attendance, notice, planning, officer availability, committee workflow, and member observation.

But above all, why the deflection?

Who created this “do or die” proposition? For what reason must the Club turn itself on its ear to satisfy a singular, unexplained preference?

My guess is that the President is behind it. All Directors must appoint assistants who can attend meetings in their stead. If the Vice President were the culprit, he probably would not have been so cryptic. That leaves the Master of the Bully Pulpit.

If the reason is innocent, say it. Or if the reason is personal convenience, say that too. If the reason cannot be explained, perhaps the proposal is not ready for grown-up handling.

The Omnipresent Logo

A large portion of the meeting was devoted to the ongoing logo debate, because apparently nothing says organizational recovery like arguing about graphics while the governance plumbing backs up into the kitchen.

Prior to the meeting, the Director pushing the logo revision had published details of his contest for Club members. The contest was to run from June 15 through October 15.

Then, during the meeting, someone asked whether the Board had ever authorized the need to replace the logo.

Turns out it had not.

Oops.

Another Absurdist Paper will address this absurdity in due course, because the logo fiasco deserves its own little display case in the museum of procedural rubble.

A Tale of Two Reports

The prohibition on report discussion silently evaporated.

Directors wanted to discuss reports, so they discussed reports. The Audit Committee Report provided a springboard for discussion of the vacuous Awards Committee Report, the very deficiency Mac had identified the prior month.

This time, no one attempted to gag him. The Secretary refrained from comment. No one was sent to the “Out of Order” corner. The meeting did not explode. Civilization survived.

The Awards Committee Report was criticized for doing essentially nothing useful. Its current data dump does not help Directors understand what the Committee is doing. Neither does it support meaningful management review, nor does it provide the Audit Committee with the information needed to compare expected award income with received award income.

The obvious remedy was stated plainly: go back to the former format.

Imagine that. The old format, which contained useful management information, was more useful than the new format designed to avoid uncomfortable questions about useful management information.

Another forthcoming Absurdist Paper will discuss the current state of the Awards Committee, its reporting, and who appears to be running the show.

Spoiler alert: it does not look like the Committee.

Tolstoy or Lenin?

Then, during Q&A, Mac brought up the actual gag order on report discussion. He correctly stated that reports are indeed Board business and should be discussed openly in Board meetings, where members can observe.

The Chair quickly responded that he thought the admonishment wording was incorrect and that he was going to modify it.

“I just didn’t want discussions to turn into War and Peace,” he noted.

I hope he’s not aiming for Dick and Jane instead.

Thus ended the gag rule’s first field test: ignored in practice, challenged in Q&A, and scheduled for revision by the Chair.

So, was this Tolstoy or Lenin?

Tolstoy gave us War and Peace. Lenin gave us democratic centralism, which, in practice, meant plenty of discussion until the leadership decided what the discussion had been allowed to mean.

Our subject organization appears to be auditioning for both.

The Board discussed reports after being warned not to discuss reports. The Director previously branded “out of order” successfully challenged the editorial stain in the minutes. The Chair agreed to change the agenda language. The Awards Committee Report was criticized for being useless. The logo contest stumbled into the obvious question of whether anyone had actually approved the need for a new logo. And the meeting mercifully adjourned after 49 minutes of bliss.

Leo Tolstoy reached out from the grave, found the plug, and pulled it.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 28: Of Mice, Men, and Minutes appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Absolutely absurd!

Our subject organization is now incorporating institutional infantilization into its already impressive record of Soviet-style dezinformatsiya. Will the Board, charged with making organizational policy, ever stand up and say, “Enough!” when procedural rules are imposed on it by appointed functionaries and presidential loyalists?

This Absurdist Paper focuses on one Director who dared to speak up. Because his questions displeased the President and his cronies, the appointed Club Secretary not only declared the Director “out of order,” but recorded that assessment in the official minutes. That was followed by sophomoric agenda language apparently designed to preempt similar discussions in the future.

I am suitably outraged. This, Absurdist aficionados, is not order. It is managed silence.

And Justice for All

“A Board that cannot tolerate questions about its own reports is not maintaining order. It is mistaking silence for order.”

The newly elected Tenth Area Director, Mac, W6PNY, spoke up at the last Board meeting. He correctly assessed the attached Awards Committee reports as deficient, mathematically suspect, late, and generally unhelpful as management information.

The Club Secretary declared him “out of order” because the discussion arose during the portion of the meeting where prior minutes were being approved.

Mac had a reasonable point. It may have come at the wrong point in the meeting. If so, the Chair should have stepped in and said something like:

“Mac, discussion during approval of minutes should be limited to whether the minutes accurately record the prior meeting. If your issue concerns errors in attached reports, we will take it up under Reports, Financials, Old Business, New Business, or Q&A.”

That would have been normal. Too normal. It would have been orderly. It would have treated a Director as a Director rather than as a child asking too many questions before cookies and milk.

Instead, the Secretary, President, and Chairman appear to have treated the moment as a problem to be suppressed rather than managed.

Welcome to the 3905 Century Club Board of Directors, Mac, where obeisance is expected and silence is golden!

You’re Out of Order, For 29 Minutes, Already!

First, the Secretary gratuitously and testily documented Mac’s discussion in the minutes as “out of order,” stating:

“[The Secretary] pointed out that None of this discussion has anything to do with the approval of the April Minutes, since those minutes made no reference to awards reports. So the entire last 20 minute (it was actually nearly 29 minutes) discussion is out of order. [The President] is going to ask the Awards Secretary to reissue the March and April reports to exclude financial reports. The most important report about the fees is the financial report.”

Pause there.

The Secretary did not merely record that the Chair ruled the discussion out of order. He inserted his own procedural assessment into the minutes. That is sure as hell not neutral recordkeeping. It is most assuredly editorializing with a minutes template.

Ensuring that It Cannot Ever Happen Again

Then came the agenda double-whammy.

This month’s agenda contains two paternalistic admonitions, both seemingly designed to keep Directors inside the little playpen. Talk only about what the grownups permit. Stay inside the lines. Raise your hand. Do not disturb the nap mats.

The first admonition appears in the “Minutes” section:

“Please reference any discussions to this included document only. The actual minutes of the meeting as represented in this board agenda packet is all that is up for review. Did we actually record the events and discussions of the meeting correctly?”

In the narrow sense, this is not wrong. Approval of minutes should focus on whether the minutes accurately record the actions taken and material discussion at the prior meeting.

But that is precisely the point.

The Minutes As Club Secretary’s Editorial Outlet

Absurdist 21 disclosed how the Club’s newsletter editor uses the platform to combat the Board on behalf of the President. Now, the appointed Club Secretary is at it.

When the minutes contain an editorial characterization of a 29-minute Board discussion as “out of order,” Directors have every right to challenge whether that characterization belongs in the minutes. This is not debating the attached reports. It is questioning whether the minutes accurately record what happened without improper commentary.

A better agenda note would read:

“Approval of the minutes should be limited to whether the minutes accurately reflect the actions taken and material discussion at the prior meeting. Questions about attached reports may be raised under the Reports section or another appropriate agenda item.”

That would preserve order without gagging oversight.

Naturally, they chose the low road. The one with the ditch.

The Committee Reports Gag Rule

The second passive-aggressive admonition appears at the beginning of the Committee Reports section:

“Reports are included here for information purposes only. Any questions may be directed to the authors of the documents via the CCNBoard email reflector forum.”

This is the coup de grâce.

Are reports to the Board by standing committees not Board business? Are the Commissars now telling the Board not to discuss Board business at Board meetings? Must Directors take their questions to an offline reflector where members cannot observe and where the minutes will not preserve the discussion?

I would be willing to bet that both of these reactionary clamp-down rules were aimed at silencing the lone Director who stood up for accurate reporting.

How dare he speak up! And for 29 minutes we can never get back, damn it! Someone missed the first scene of Gilligan’s Island.

Targeted Enforcement and Puerile Hypocrisy

The path forward is easy to predict. These rules will be enforced when convenient to shut down Directors who reveal systemic flaws, but ignored when favored Directors bring up safe topics like logo redesigns or spurious, Presidentially directed topics like chat-server centralization. If they manage to drive off the Director who dared to be different, which I hope to hell they do not, they will conveniently forget the whole thing.

That is how informal suppression works. It is never called suppression. It is called order, efficiency, focus, or keeping the meeting moving.

I’m Out of Order? You’re Out of Order!

The Secretary’s “out of order” label works only if the Board accepts the premise that asking substantive questions about attached reports, committee activity, or meeting records is a procedural nuisance rather than a Director’s duty.

Mac may have been procedurally inconvenient. But inconvenience is not disorder.

A Board that cannot tolerate questions about its own reports is not maintaining order. It is mistaking silence for order.

If Mac finally objects, the real question will not be whether he is out of order. The real question will be whether the Board has allowed “order” to be redefined as whatever keeps uncomfortable discussion out of the record.

The real problem is that the President and Secretary appear to have treated “out of order” not as a timing ruling, but as a content suppression tool. They did not merely say, “not now.” They effectively said, “not here, not later, not in the minutes, please take your inconvenient adult questions to the reflector swamp.”

That is where they become the procedural problem.

Even the Board Chair plays along. It is too inconvenient to interrupt the flow of procedural drivel with pertinent discussion. So, he allows discussion to be stifled. That way, the Secretary won’t need to get writer’s cramp, and can just perfunctorily check boxes with his crayon.

Blurring the Objective Field

The attached-report issue is especially messy because the Club keeps blurring categories. The May minutes packet included collateral reports. The agenda then says minutes approval concerns only whether the actual minutes accurately record the meeting, not whether attached reports are correct. Fine. But then they attach reports to the minutes packet, include them in the official record bundle, silently change them, and later act as though questions about those changes are not germane.

We’re not seeing intelligent procedure implementation here. We’re seeing discussion suppression and information laundering. Those PDFs will be squeaky clean and, by God, free of inconvenient controversy.

Is It Board Business or Monkey Business?

A Board cannot approve a “minutes packet” containing attached materials and then forbid Directors from asking whether those materials are the same materials previously circulated, whether they contain errors, or whether their inclusion implies acceptance. If the reports are not part of the minutes, stop bundling them into the minutes packet like procedural barnacles. If they are part of the record, Directors may question the record.

The latest agenda still says the Board should reference discussion only to the included minutes document and ask whether events and discussions were recorded correctly. Again, that is not inherently wrong. It becomes wrong when used to preempt legitimate questions about altered attachments, missing reports, or whether a prior discussion was accurately characterized as “out of order.”

What Adults Would Do

A reasonable organization would handle this intelligently:

1. Approve minutes separately from attached reports.
2. Clearly identify attachments as informational, not approved as part of the minutes.
3. Preserve version history if reports are revised.
4. Allow Directors to question reports under the Reports item or another proper agenda section.
5. Let the Chair, not the Secretary, rule on order.
6. Record the ruling and any objection.

Instead, our subject organization seems to be inventing a new category: official enough to attach, unofficial enough to avoid responsibility, mutable enough to change silently, and sacred enough that questions are discouraged.

Weak leadership protects its own interests first, above all else. We have seen where that leads: an ineffectual Board, crucial resignations, shrinking volunteer capacity, and an ever-narrowing idea pool. Minor functionaries like newsletter editors and secretaries attempt to nullify the Board on behalf of the President. Now, a new Director disrupts the numbed stasis of a weakened and docile Board by asking inconvenient questions. The immediate response is to remove the information he questioned. The longer-term response is to pair that permanent loss of troublesome information with a passive-aggressive clampdown on discussion itself. Helluva way to run a railroad!

I am saddened that a Club I put so much of myself into has now morphed into Lord of the Flies, with Jack and Roger taking over.

Jack, by the way, will miss the meeting.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 27: You’re Out of Order! appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

No sooner had we published Absurdist 23, 24, and 25, commenting on the June 14 Board packet, than the packet was silently updated. This is what happens when one tries to analyze an organization in real time. The patient keeps coughing up new symptoms while the doctor is still writing the chart.

The original, deficient packet was rushed to publication on the website in an obvious effort to meet the deadline mandated by the bylaws, which allows five days for members to review and comment on the content. So, the initial attempt was all for show. A packet replete with skeletal placeholder motions and missing reports gives them little to comment on, anyway.

The updated packet now includes some of the missing material we previously noted: the Awards Committee report, the May financials, and the previously placeholder motion. So, credit where due. Someone noticed the gaps and filled them.

Unfortunately, they filled them in a way that proves the thesis.

This is not a correction that restores confidence. It is a correction that walks into the room with its shirt buttoned wrong, carrying more evidence.

The Missing Awards Report Appears

The original packet contained no Awards Committee report. The updated packet now has one.

Sort of.

What appeared is not really an Awards Committee report in the meaningful sense. It is a statistical dump: counts by award, counts by call area, one progressive award entry, and a breakdown by state or province. No committee actions, no pending issues, no recommendations, no future work. No explanation of anything requiring Board attention.

A standing committee report should report what the standing committee did.

This one reports what we refer to here as database exhaust.

The problem becomes clearer when we look at the newly added motion. The updated agenda now includes Motion 2026-06-01 concerning the Clint Wise Memorial Award. The motion would clarify that applicants for the mobile and portable versions of the award must be physically present in each state and that remote portable operation does not apply.

That is not trivial housekeeping. It is a substantive award-policy clarification. It directly concerns award requirements, remote operation, and the meaning of portable or mobile presence.

Yet the Awards Committee report says nothing about it.

If the Awards Committee discussed the issue, reviewed the award application, debated remote operation, and recommended a motion to the Board, why is none of that reported? If the Committee did not do those things, why is the President submitting the motion “on behalf of the Awards Committee”?

One cannot have it both ways. Either the Awards Committee acted, in which case its report failed to report the action, or the President acted and then draped the Committee’s name over the motion like a borrowed sport coat.

Neither option inspires confidence.

The President as Awards Committee Messenger

The motion is listed as originating from KL7OR, Dean Davis, President, “on behalf of the Awards Committee.”

Why?

The Awards Committee has members who can submit motions. The Second Area Director sits on the Committee. The Vice President sits on the Committee. Either of them could have entered a motion if the Committee wanted action by the Board.

So why is the President the one carrying the motion?

This is not merely a procedural curiosity. It goes directly to the continuing problem of centralized presidential control. If standing committees are functioning, let them function. If they are making recommendations, let them report those recommendations. And if they need Board action, let their members bring the motion.

A President submitting a motion on behalf of a standing committee while that committee’s own report says nothing about the underlying business is exactly the kind of structural fog that allows responsibility to disappear.

• Who owns the recommendation?
• Who drafted it?
• Who approved it?
• Did the Committee vote?
• Was there discussion?
• Was there dissent?
• Was the motion edited by the President?

Will anyone ask?

Probably not. The motion is now in the packet, wearing the Awards Committee’s name tag, and that may be enough for a Board trained to nod at paperwork as it passes by.

The Motion That Needs a Motion

The Clint Wise motion itself appears sensible in concept. If the award is intended to recognize mobile or portable operation from states, then requiring the operator to be physically present in those states seems obvious. Remote operation would defeat the point of the challenge.

Fine. Good. Sensible.

But then we get to the drafting.

The proposed revised requirement for the portable award contains duplicated language. It says, in effect, that the applicant must have been physically present while operating portable, remote portable is not applicable for this award, and then repeats “operating portable, remote portable is not applicable for this award.”

So the Board is being asked to approve language meant to clarify an award requirement, and the proposed clarifying language needs clarification.

This is how entropy reproduces: by correction.

A cleaner version would have been easy:

“The basic ‘Clint Wise Memorial Award – Portable’ is a certificate earned for confirmed contacts with five different call signs made from each of 20 U.S. states in which the applicant was physically present while operating portable. Remote operation is not applicable for this award.”

There. Done. No duplication, no verbal pothole. No need to send the reader back through the sentence with a flashlight and a tow rope.

A Critical Comment by a Former Area Director and Awards Committee Chair

While I understand how the motion was an attempt to provide a quick fix to a perceived problem, it is a naïve approach because it fails to provide not only implementation details but also an explanation of its necessity and impact. Its authors likely perceive that it will produce a relatively innocuous effect limited to a single, fairly rare award. A broader view reveals the fly in that ointment.

The deeper problem is that this motion attempts to solve, through an award rule, a defect created at the bylaw level. The Club previously muddied the definition of portable operation by allowing remote operation to be treated as portable operation. That may have been convenient for modern operating practices, but it created exactly this kind of ambiguity. Now, rather than fix the definition in the bylaws, the Board is being asked to carve out a Clint Wise exception by saying that an applicant must be physically present and that remote portable operation does not count for this award. That may produce the desired result for Clint Wise, but it does so by making the award application compensate for defective governing language. In other words, the Club is not fixing the foundation. It is hanging a sign on one cracked wall saying, “This crack does not apply here.”

Not Portable Enough?

If the bylaws define or permit remote operation as portable, then the clean solution is to revisit the bylaws, restore meaningful distinctions, and create whatever confirmation requirements are necessary to enforce them. Otherwise, the Club is left with the absurdity of the same contact being “portable” for one purpose but not portable enough for another. Worse, without bylaw-level data requirements requiring members to identify remote operation on confirmations, NetLogger entries, or award submissions, enforcement becomes guesswork. This is not governance. It is workaround engineering, the kind humans invent when they would rather patch the symptom than admit they broke the system.

Financials Added, Page Numbers Reassigned by Dice Roll

The updated packet also adds the May financials. That is progress.

However, the agenda’s internal page references now say that the May financials are attached on pages 10 through 12. They are not. Pages 10 through 12 are the Awards Report.

The agenda then says the Awards Committee report is attached on pages 13 through 15. It is not. Pages 13 through 15 are the May financials.

The table of contents gets the page numbers right. The agenda text gets them wrong.

This is the kind of thing that seems minor until one remembers that a Board packet is supposed to help Directors find information and prepare for a meeting. It is not supposed to become a document-navigation practical exam.

The May financial notes add their own little flourish. The notes summarize May 2026 activity but carry an “April 2026” heading and refer to “Awards revenue for April” when the surrounding financials are for May. The Treasurer also signs as “Treasure.”

To be fair, maybe that last one is aspirational.

Still, in a packet already struggling with missing reports, swapped page references, and a motion that repeats itself, this is not just a typo. It is another sign that the official record is being assembled with the level of precision normally reserved for labeling leftovers in a refrigerator.

The Admonition Survives

“If a report is included in a Board packet, it is Board business. If the report raises questions, those questions should be raised where the Board is meeting, where Directors can hear one another, where members can observe, and where the minutes can preserve at least the existence of the discussion.“

Most important, the update did not remove the agenda’s instruction that reports are included “for information purposes only” and that questions may be directed to the authors through the Board reflector.

That language remains.

So the packet was updated. The missing documents appeared. The placeholder motion became a real motion. Page references were shuffled into fresh confusion. But the narrative-control feature survived untouched.

Reports go into the packet. Questions go to the reflector. Discussion avoids the meeting. The permanent record captures less. The members see less. Directors can avoid saying inconvenient things in a public meeting, which is handy if the goal is to preserve institutional quiet rather than institutional accountability.

This is not how a Board should handle reports from officers and standing committees.

If a report is included in a Board packet, it is Board business. If the report raises questions, those questions should be raised where the Board is meeting, where Directors can hear one another, where members can observe, and where the minutes can preserve at least the existence of the discussion.

Moving report discussion to the reflector is not efficiency. It is evaporation.

The Correction Proves the Point

This is why the silent update deserves its own Absurdist Paper.

The original packet showed missing information. The updated packet shows mishandled information.

The Awards Committee report appeared, but did not report committee activity. The Clint Wise motion appeared, but was submitted by the President on behalf of a Committee whose report did not mention it. The May financials appeared, but were mislabeled in the agenda page references. The motion appeared, but contained duplicated language. The admonition against discussing reports in the meeting remained intact.

That is not recovery.

That is entropy with revision history.

Mistakes, I Know I’ve Made a Few

A functioning organization can make mistakes in a packet. Everyone does. Human beings created the semicolon and still cannot reliably attach the correct file to an email. We must be realistic.

But the pattern matters. Missing reports, silent updates, incorrect page references, hollow committee reports, presidential proxy action, and Board-discussion avoidance all point in the same direction: information is not being managed as a governance asset. It is being shuffled, trimmed, routed, sanitized, and sometimes stapled to the wrong page.

And then, after all that, the Board is expected to act.

Perhaps it will. Maybe the Clint Wise clarification will pass. Maybe the Discord pilot will proceed. Perhaps the reports will be accepted by acclamation. Perhaps everyone will nod politely while the organization continues mistaking packet assembly for governance.

But at least now the members have the mid-week comedy update.

The packet changed. The thesis did not.

And, oh, by the way, Virgil is still listed as Ninth Area Assistant Director.

Update #1: Thursday of Meeting Week

Well, that escalated into usefulness.

On Thursday morning, I sent my comments regarding the Clint Wise motion and the reports gag rule to Gary, my Area Director. I also copied the Fourth Area reflector, which Gary should be using, but generally does not use, to discuss Board business with the members he represents.

Imagine that: an Area reflector being used to discuss Area business with Area members. Civilization may yet recover, though not before the next packet revision.

I’m Not a Lone Voice — The Motion Made No sense

After my comments were posted, Debbie Yarbrough, K9DBB, essentially confirmed the central objection to the Clint Wise motion. The motion conflicts with current definitions, lacks a verification mechanism, fails to address QSL and NetLogger implementation issues, and had not been fully vetted. Gary then announced that the motion had been pulled from the June agenda, agreeing that the wording needed cleanup and that an implementation plan was required.

So the motion submitted by the President “on behalf of the Awards Committee” disappeared after one public exchange on the Fourth Area reflector.

Apparently, discussion still works, which may explain why the agenda tried to move so much of it elsewhere.

Whodunnit?

Gary did not say, “I will ask Dean whether it should be pulled,” or “I will recommend that the Board table it.” He announced that it had already been pulled. Since the motion was Dean’s, submitted by Dean “on behalf of the Awards Committee,” Gary’s statement reveals either direct coordination with Dean or a governance process so informal that motions can appear and disappear through private understandings before the Board ever meets.

Either way, the Board is again reduced to a receiving dock for decisions made elsewhere.

Let us recap the life cycle of this motion, because it deserves a tiny procedural headstone.

First, the incomplete agenda was posted with a placeholder motion, which ostensibly satisfied the agenda deadline. Then the “real” motion appeared later, a poorly worded, poorly thought-out attempt to fix a bylaw problem through an award rule. The motion should never have been approved for the agenda in that form. It lacked an implementation plan, ignored verification mechanics, and tried to declare a distinction that the bylaws themselves have already blurred.

Transparent, Efficient Governance at Its Finest

Did they think no one would notice? Did they think no one would read it? Or did they think the phrase “on behalf of the Awards Committee” would act as a magic spell?

Now the motion has been pulled, and we still do not know precisely by whom, under what authority, or after what consultation with the Awards Committee whose name was used to sponsor it.

The latest updated agenda now reads:

NEW Business – NONE
A) Motion Request: Motion ID 2026-06-01 – Withdrawn 6/10/2026
Topic: Requirements for the Clint Wise award.

So there we have it: a motion that began as a placeholder, appeared after initial publication, arrived defective, prompted public objection, and vanished before the meeting.

Entropy with a paper trail.

But About Board Discussions, They Still Don’t Get It

The report-discussion issue remains. Gary responded that he does not think the phrase “may be directed to the authors” prevents discussion during a Board meeting. That is comforting, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it does not go far enough. If the intent is merely to encourage pre-meeting preparation, then the agenda should say so clearly. Reports included in a Board packet are Board business. Directors should be free to question and discuss them during the meeting, where members can observe and where the minutes can preserve at least the existence of the discussion.

Otherwise, “may be directed” becomes one more petite, polite, passive phrase doing impolite institutional work.

The latest packet also contains a new proxy wrinkle. The President, who owned the Clint Wise motion before it became procedural vapor, has decided to stay home from the meeting and has appointed the Vice President, Kirk, AA1NA, as his proxy. Today is Kirk’s birthday, so perhaps this was Dean’s idea of a birthday present. Happy Birthday, Kirk. Here, have an extra vote and a meeting packet with skid marks.

And, miracle of miracles, the Thursday updated version of the Board packet finally associates the correct page numbers with the component documents.

It only required three tries.

Progress.

Update #2: The Report That Reports Nothing

And now, from the Fourth Area reflector, we have confirmation from inside the tent.

Johnny Allen, KI4WCQ, a member of the Audit Committee, commented that the current Awards Report format provides “no useful information from a management perspective.” He further observed that numbers, award types, and award counts are meaningless for monitoring whether the new fee structure is working, and that without price points there is no ability to compare expected income against received income over fiscal years.

Precisely.

The President directed that cost data be removed from the Awards Report after the May Board discussion raised uncomfortable questions. Johnny believes that action was intended to tamp down discussion. I agree. The new report does not answer the questions that matter. It tells us how many certificates were issued, what types they were, and where they were associated geographically. It does not tell us what the Club needed to know: what revenue should have been generated, what revenue was received, and whether the new fee structure is producing the intended financial effect.

In other words, the report was not improved. It was declawed.

This is especially rich because the Audit Report in the same Board packet discusses the comparison between award income received and award amounts shown in Awards Reports. The Audit Committee relied on that relationship to explain the “amazingly close” $2 difference for FY25. Now, having used that information for audit comfort, the Club is eliminating the very data needed to perform the same comparison going forward.

That is not progress. That is burning the ladder after climbing one rung.

Use it or Lose It

Johnny’s conclusion is exactly right: if a report does not answer necessary questions, it either needs to be revamped or dropped as a requirement. The correct answer is to revamp it for managerial purposes, not redesign it to suppress discussion.

So now the public record shows this: the Clint Wise motion was pulled after public criticism, and the stripped-down Awards Report has been criticized by an Audit Committee member as useless for management and future comparison.

Another Twist

There is another wrinkle. Johnny Allen, KI4WCQ, is not only on the Audit Committee; he is also, to the best of my knowledge, a member of the Awards Committee. Yet I was told that Johnny was not aware the Clint Wise motion would be placed on the June agenda. If accurate, that raises an obvious question: how does a motion appear on the Board agenda “on behalf of the Awards Committee” when at least one member of that Committee apparently did not know it was coming?

That is not a functioning committee process. That is a label being used after the fact.

Withdrawn or not, the Board should ask who actually drafted the motion, whether the Awards Committee met or otherwise acted, which members participated, whether the Committee voted or reached consensus, and who authorized the President to submit the motion in the Committee’s name. If the Committee did not formally act, then the motion was not truly “on behalf of the Awards Committee.” It was a presidential motion wearing the Committee’s jacket.

Does the Awards Committee Even Exist?

And, because it came from the Awards Committee, shouldn’t the discussion have been summarized—or at least mentioned—in the Awards Committee report? Unless those pages describing past, current, and future activities of the committee were eaten by someone’s dog on the way to the Board packet, one can only assume that the Awards Committee has done absolutely nothing during the past five months. And its Chair, who is also Assistant Second Area Director, failed to attend both the April and May Board meetings. Maybe he was too busy removing useful numbers from reports.

Apparently, the Fourth Area reflector is more useful for governance than the Board packet.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 26: Mid-Week Catch-Up Comedy appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Because the Discord proposal is included in the Board packet as a report, under current rules it apparently cannot be discussed at the Board meeting. We covered that new narrative-control feature in Absurdist 23. Thus, like the Audit Report analyzed in Absurdist 24, this essay might be the only place where a member of our subject organization can obtain any meaningful analysis of the project before it is blessed, ignored, imposed, or quietly allowed to metastasize.

Reflectors and AIM Are Not Good Enough

Way back in Absurdist Paper 1, our seminal essay, we discussed the President’s grand plan to eliminate a troublesome email reflector owned and moderated by someone outside his camp. Unfortunately for him, that reflector has roughly three times the number of subscribers as the reflector he would prefer to make official. After unsuccessfully attempting to wrest the more popular reflector away from its owner, the frustration became obvious.

The President first made a pronouncement without asking for Board concurrence: “All Club communication channels must have two administrators.”

The implication, of course, is that one or both administrators must be among his favored members. How else can a poor, beleaguered President control the narrative?

Of course, when it comes to the Centurion, only one administrator is apparently needed, provided that administrator is a strong ally. As you saw in Absurdist 21, we now have a Centurion editor who will do the President’s bidding without even needing to be asked. Such a deal.

The next bright idea was to replace reflectors, and possibly NetLogger’s AIM messenger tool, with either Discord or Slack. Researching this project became a task for Gary, K9GWS, our Fourth Area Director, Treasurer, and Captain of the Communications Team, under whose auspices the project apparently landed.

The preliminary results are presented to the Board, but apparently not for discussion at the Board meeting, in the form of a bulleted list of advantages and concerns.

That alone tells us something. The report describes a major potential change in Club communications, involving Board members, net controllers, award managers, and standing committees, yet it is treated as a report to be absorbed quietly rather than a governance issue requiring open Board discussion.

Because why discuss communication governance in a Board meeting? That would be dangerously adjacent to governing.

The Seductiveness of Centralization

The first claimed advantage is “centralized communication through a single platform instead of multiple reflectors for board members, net controllers, award managers, and other groups.”

On its face, that sounds reasonable. Multiple reflectors can be messy. Messages get misplaced. Threads wander. Members reply to the wrong list. Someone inevitably forwards something, someone else claims not to have seen it, and before long we are back in the usual swamp, but with better timestamps.

However, centralization is not inherently improvement. It merely moves the failure point.

Stretching the Volunteer Workforce

Someone would need to set up the Discord server, presumably as a Community. A volunteer would need to create private, role-gated channels for committees, Board members, net controllers, award managers, and whatever other groups the Club wants to corral. Someone would need to assign permissions, maintain roles, manage opt-in groups, select moderators, document rules, remove inappropriate content, and handle access disputes.

In other words, the Club would stretch its already thin volunteer workforce even thinner.

That brings us to what I believe is the real crux of the proposal: “greater control, since Discord would be managed by the Club rather than through CCN chat.”

There it is.

Control.

Neither clarity, nor recordkeeping, nor continuity, nor documented governance. Control.

I presume “CCN chat” refers to the existing email reflectors, but in any case the phrase reveals the underlying impulse. Control the platform, control the access, control the channels, and ultimately, one controls the narrative. Interdict subversive commentary before it spreads among the unwashed members, who might otherwise commit the sin of comparing notes.

The other advantages are fluffier: expanded customization options, the ability to share pictures and attachments, and the potential to replace AIM for net chat with real-time communication instead of 20-second delays.

AIM does, after all, stand for Almost Instant Messenger. The delay is practically disclosed in the name. Truth in advertising, for once.

The Concerns Are Not Footnotes

The report appropriately lists the learning curve first. Members would need to create accounts, understand new terminology, and learn the interface.

This concern cannot be overstated in a group consisting largely of sixty-to-ninety-year-olds. Many members do not want another app, another password, another notification system, another interface, another set of obscure icons, and another opportunity to wonder why their phone is chirping at them like a smoke detector with unresolved childhood trauma.

Email works because nearly everyone already has it. NetLogger AIM works because it is attached to the tool most operators already use during nets. Discord would require a separate account, a separate interface, and a separate learning curve.

If the Club proceeds, it would likely need skilled “Discord Ambassadors,” volunteers who would act as a cooperative help desk to assist members in ramping up. These volunteers would need patience, technical competence, and enough emotional stability to explain channels, roles, permissions, notifications, threads, mentions, and direct messages to operators who still think “the cloud” is weather.

That is not impossible. But it is work.

And work requires people.

Where are they? Who are they? Will this fall on the same five people who do most of the work of the club? Let’s not kid ourselves about the availability of fresh, new talent.

Better have redundancy, too, lest the Club in its Discordant zeal unwittingly create additional single points of failure.

Some members will simply want to stay with the current system. What happens to them? Are they excluded from Club communication? Left out of fast-moving discussions? Told, in effect, that participation now requires adoption of the chosen platform?

If so, Discord is not a service improvement. It is a gate.

Security, Moderation, and the Usual Unanswered Questions

Among the concerns are security risks, including greater exposure to spam bots and malicious links. The current moderated email reflectors are comparatively resistant to those exploits. They are not perfect, but they are familiar, slow, and boring. In security terms, boring is often underrated.

Then there is the question of moderation. How will content be moderated? How will inappropriate posts be removed? Who decides what is inappropriate? Who hears appeals? What happens when a moderator removes criticism of the President under the label of disruption, negativity, or some other flexible governance perfume?

This matters because communications platforms do not merely transmit information. They shape power.

A Club-managed Discord server could be useful if governed by clear rules. Without clear rules, it becomes another arena for selective enforcement. One person’s “inappropriate post” becomes another person’s inconvenient question. One person’s “moderation” becomes another person’s narrative control.

The report also notes unresolved questions about managing member access and preventing unauthorized users from joining.

Again, not minor. Access control is not a decorative issue. If private channels are used for Board, Bylaws, Awards, or NCS discussions, the Club must know who is admitted, who is removed, who maintains roles, and what happens when someone changes office, resigns, is removed, or no longer needs access.

The Club has trouble keeping reports attached to the right packet pages. Now it wants to manage role-based access in Discord. What could possibly go wrong, apart from the obvious?

The Pilot That Already Knows Its Problems

After listing concerns, the report says that, as part of a pilot effort, several Club groups, including the Bylaws Committee, Communications Team, and Awards Committee, will begin using Discord on a trial basis.

Here are the unresolved problems. Therefore, we proceed.

That is the modern Club planning model in miniature.

What I want to know is whether these groups voluntarily agreed to participate, or whether the pilot was imposed by Presidential edict. I suppose if each group has a President-friendly chair, it makes little practical difference. Consent becomes wonderfully easy when the chairs already know from which direction the wind is being manufactured.

But why would these committees need real-time communication if they are not even reliably producing monthly reports?

Giving Discord to silent committees is like handing a megaphone to a ghost.

Before standing committees begin using Discord for official work, the Board should answer basic questions:

• Is Discord an official Club communication channel?
• Who, other than committee members, will have access to the committee channels?
• Will committee decisions made or discussed there be valid?
• Will Discord discussions become part of the committee record?
• How will records be retained?
• Who owns and administers the server?
• Who assigns and removes permissions?
• Who moderates content?
• What are the moderation standards?
• Are committee members required to use Discord?
• What accommodation exists for members who cannot or will not use it?

Those are not technical details. They are governance details. A platform is not a policy.

AIM Replacement: A Solution Looking for a Delay

As for replacing AIM, that one is a stretch.

To make Discord work as a net-chat replacement, the Club would need to convince operators using NetLogger that they should also run a second app alongside it. Many members already run Dean’s CCLogger alongside NetLogger. So now their screen would be cluttered with three applications.

For what?

Solving AIM’s latency problem that throttles messages down to about the right speed for septuagenarians?

AIM is neither elegant, nor modern, nor flashy. But it is integrated into the operating environment and already understood by the regular users. That matters.

The Club should not confuse “newer” with “better.” The cemetery of failed technology projects is filled with bright ideas that ignored user behavior. Somewhere in that cemetery is a headstone reading, “But It Had More Features.”

Discord Is Not the Problem

To be clear, Discord itself is not the villain. Discord can be useful. Slack can be useful. Email can be useful. A bulletin board nailed to a tree can be useful if the problem is properly defined and the users actually read it.

The problem is the Club’s habit of changing tools without fixing governance.

• If the current communication system is fragmented, define the fragmentation.
• If members are not receiving official information, define the distribution failure.
• If reflectors are poorly moderated, define the moderation standard.
• If AIM delay is a net operations problem, define the operational impact.
• If committees are not reporting, Discord will not make them report.
• If the Board does not discuss reports, Discord will not make the Board govern.
• If the President wants more control, Discord may provide that. But control is not the same as communication.

Right now, this project looks like a wet tarp thrown over a burning compost pile. It changes the shape of the problem while trapping the smell.

The Bottom Line: Misplaced Priorities and Increasing Entropy

We raised all the relevant questions in Absurdist 6, when Discord was a mere gleam in the President’s jaundiced eye, a potential deliverance from the reflectors which existed in free cyberspace, just beyond his grasp. The theme of that essay was the Club’s misplaced priorities and their impact on ever-increasing entropy.

Instead of securing the primary revenue stream with transaction-level internal controls, repairing relations with crucial front-line operators, restoring meaningful committee reporting and discussion, or clarifying Board authority over standing committee communications, the Club intelligentsia is sitting in the dark, blowing into a toy whistle, and declaring it “the future of member services.”

And then, of course, there is the logo.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 25: Discordant Governance appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Given the agenda’s instruction that reports are included “for information purposes only” and that questions should be directed to the authors through the reflector, this might be your only source of analytical discourse concerning reports of standing committees to the Board. By moving discussions to reflectors in such a heavy-handed manner, those discussions are essentially nullified with respect to the membership and the permanent record. They will no longer be part of Board meetings. They will no longer be captured in minutes. Few Directors will chime in on the reflectors.

Soviet-style suppression at its finest, except with worse formatting.

The Audit Report: Which Fiscal Year?

First, a minor point I have tried to make with our Treasurer and the Audit Committee: fiscal years are typically identified by the calendar year in which the fiscal period ends, not the year in which it begins. So, whereas this report identifies itself as the “FY25 Audit Report,” it covers the period from March 1, 2025 through February 28, 2026. Under the usual convention, that would be Fiscal Year 2026.

This is not the primary defect. The report at least states the actual dates, so the ambiguity does not kill anyone. Still, fiscal-year nomenclature exists so people do not need a decoder ring. Governance documents should clarify, not make readers perform archaeological sorting.

Following a standard statement about how the Treasurer cooperated with the Audit Committee, giving them monthly financial statements, bills, checks, expense reports, and related notes, the Committee presented its findings. They found no errors in the financial records. They also noted a small bank reconciliation issue involving approximately six cents per month in interest, corrected on the year-end financial report.

Fine and dandy.

Then we get to award income, the Club’s primary source of revenue. Here, the audit becomes much more interesting, though not necessarily in the way the Audit Committee intended.

Award Income: No Reconciliation Required, Apparently

Once again, as we saw in Absurdist 7, there is much waffling about reconciliation of award revenue versus receipts. The Audit Committee seems to support the stance of the Board and the President: the only thing that matters is the cash in the drawer at the end of the day.

Thus, they handwave away any semblance of internal control.

The report declares awards income received by the Club during the fiscal year to be $1,171. I take this to mean actual cash receipts recorded by the Treasurer. On the other side of the coin, it states that the Awards Reports during the year show $1,173, “which is amazingly close.”

The report then explains that the Treasurer records actual funds received, while Awards Managers record award fees after processing awards. Payments can lag because checks or money orders may be mailed after an award is entered. Therefore, the two reports are not expected to be in sync because they serve different purposes. One is for accounting, and the other is for management of the award fee structure. The report calls them “complementary.”

Complementary is a lovely word. It sounds cooperative and mature, like two systems holding hands while skipping through a meadow.

It is not a reconciliation.

Cash Box Accounting

Where do I begin?

Let us start with the Awards Reports. They show $1,173. Having been directly involved in the production of those reports for much of the fiscal year, I can attest to the accuracy of the March through November numbers. Beyond that, however, we saw at the May Board meeting that later reporting has been replete with factual and mathematical errors. Those reports need an audit of their own.

However, now that the Board, in its Presidential-led wisdom, has concluded that revenue numbers are no longer necessary on Awards Reports and will henceforth be banished to obscurity, where, pray tell, will next year’s auditors find them?

This is the organizational trick. If a report raises questions, do not improve the report. Remove the troublesome information. Then next year, when the information is no longer available, shrug and say it was not required.

That is not internal control. That is institutional amnesia with a spreadsheet.

Amazingly Close?

Now, the famous $2 difference.

Any of us who have taken on the simple task of balancing a checkbook have encountered a situation in which we are off by a few dollars. Further investigation might show that we made a single small error. Or it might reveal multiple errors that happen to net out to a small difference. Two omitted or erroneous transactions could each be hundreds of dollars, but because they partially offset each other, the final difference looks trivial.

We are “amazingly close,” so we fudge the number and save ourselves the time of dealing with it. The ball is on the green, “amazingly close” to the hole. No need to bother putting.

That is exactly why “amazingly close” is not internal control.

A proper reconciliation does not merely compare annual totals and consider it a “gimme” because the numbers are near each other. A proper reconciliation asks whether each award fee expected from the awards processed was actually received, properly categorized, and deposited. That requires transaction-level review, not annual aggregate comfort.

The Audit Committee explains away the $2 with a wistful conjecture. Perhaps someone entered a $2 PDF certificate near the end of the previous fiscal year, while the Treasurer received the funds in the current year. Case closed. Laughable in its simplicity. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.

At the May Board meeting, the Treasurer spoke of receiving a check six months after the award it covered was entered. Are there others? We do not know. We cannot know if the Club abrogates its responsibility to safeguard its primary revenue source by refusing to implement proper controls.

This is not rocket science. It is simple bookkeeping.

Esoterica? Methinks Not.

Why does this seem like such an esoteric concept?

One conjecture is laziness. No one wants to take the time to perform a reconciliation. But the task itself is not complex. Most of us perform an analogous task when we balance a checkbook, review a credit card statement, or compare receipts against a bank account.

The necessary control is straightforward:

• Awards processed should create an expected-fee record.
• Payments received should create a cash-receipt record.
• The two should be reconciled monthly.
• Timing differences should be identified and carried forward until resolved.
• Unresolved differences should be investigated.

That is not bureaucracy. That is adult supervision.

Yet the entire concept seems beyond the grasp of the 3905 Century Club Board of Directors and its Treasurer. It should be done monthly, not annually, and certainly not by squinting at two year-end totals and admiring their proximity.

As we saw in Absurdist 18, the Financial Committee was established back in 2010. One of its stated functions was to perform this reconciliation. That committee disappeared, and along with it went the internal control it was designated to implement.

There is your entropy thesis with a dollar sign attached.

Treasury Trajectory and Key-Person Risk

The Audit Committee also notes the continuing decline in the treasury and recommends that the Board monitor the Club’s financial trajectory to determine whether the March awards fee increase is adequate. That is a reasonable concern.

The report’s attachment shows a steady decline in assets over recent years. The Club’s assets declined by about $2,073 during the fiscal year under audit, continuing a trend previously reported by the Audit Committee. Award fees account for the bulk of the Club’s income, while IT support expenses are now greater than in prior years and inflation has increased recurring expenses.

That part is useful. It is the sort of thing an audit report should say.

The Committee also notes that the Club lacks a designated contingency fund to cover unexpected expenses, such as the recent expenses from the transfer of Awards Secretary duties, unless that is the intended purpose of the “reserve fund” in the budget.

Thanks for the mention.

Also, thanks for recognizing that multiple single points of failure exist. The Club apparently needs a designated reserve for future high-profile resignations. Prescient. Prudent. Slightly hilarious, if one enjoys institutional autopsy reports before the patient has stopped twitching.

But again, the broader point is simple: if award fees are the Club’s primary revenue source, and if the treasury is declining, and if volunteer transitions create unexpected costs, then the Club needs better controls, not fewer reports.

The Comfort of Coincidence

The Audit Committee found no financial-record errors, and that is good. No one is alleging that money vanished into a secret cigar fund or a Cayman Islands repeater project.

The issue is more basic and more boring, which means it is more likely to be ignored.

Annual award revenue and Awards Report totals being “amazingly close” does not prove that the process works. It proves that two annual numbers happened to be close. That is neither reconciliation, nor control, nor assurance.

It is coincidence wearing a tuxedo.

If the Board truly wants to safeguard the Club’s finances, it should require monthly reconciliation between expected award fees and actual receipts. It should retain the data necessary to perform that reconciliation. Furthermore, it should not remove financial information from Awards Reports merely because questions were asked. Finally, it should not rely on annual aggregate comparisons to validate a process that requires transaction-level accountability.

But that would require the Board to act like a Board.

Next up: Discord, where unresolved access, moderation, security, retention, and participation problems are apparently not obstacles to implementation, but decorative scenery on the road to “progress.”

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 24: Amazingly Close Is Not Internal Control appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

The June 14 Board packet does not merely contain governance problems. It demonstrates them. Missing reports, unavailable financials, insulated discussion, irrelevant presidential filler, and quiet data removal all point to an organization learning to reduce embarrassment by reducing information.

The two subsequent Absurdist Papers, 24 and 25, will critique the Audit Report and the Discord Project, respectively. Here, we take a broad, interpretive view of the Board packet itself, a masterpiece of malformed, malodorous, or missing information. It rather graphically validates my entropy thesis by showing how the Club is failing in real time.

The Disappearing Awards Committee Report

Awards Committee reports have been a hit-or-miss proposition. When they make it to the Board table, they have often been replete with mathematical errors and devoid of content relating to the actual activities of the Awards Committee. That, ironically, is what an Awards Committee report reports on. Shocking, I know. Standards are hard.

Recall that at the May 9 meeting, the Tenth Area Director questioned the veracity of attached reports, which were catch-up reports. The President, the Treasurer, and a couple of Area Directors stonewalled his questions. The Secretary, bless his little obviously irritated heart, intoned that the reports were “not part of the meeting.”

An Elegant Solution!

The June meeting packet reveals two apparent solutions to the problem of inaccurate and malformed reports, brilliant in their deviousness. The first is obvious: omit the report altogether. The second is more subtle: insert a note in the agenda stating that reports are “included here for information purposes only” and that questions should be directed to the authors through the reflector.

This latter admonishment reflects the Secretary’s declaration that reports are not part of the meeting.

A report from a standing committee to the Board of Directors is not part of a Board meeting? This is music to an entropy writer’s ears. Stifling Board discussion is another perfidious plunge into the steaming, stifling, stinking cauldron of organizational heat death.

If the President and Secretary can get away with that kind of nonsense, why have meetings at all? Just let the President do whatever he wants, which seems to be the operating model toward which the Club is drifting, if “drifting” is not too active a word for institutional surrender.

When the Awards report raised questions, the remedy was not to improve the report. It was to remove the troublesome information. By June, even the report itself had apparently achieved stealth mode. Now, we want to stifle discussion of the non-existent report.

This is not governance. This is data evaporation.

Update As of Wednesday, June 10

The Board packet was silently updated after initial publication. The update added the missing Awards Committee report, added the May financials, and replaced the placeholder motion with an actual motion by President KL7OR on behalf of the Awards Committee. But in the process, the agenda mislabeled the Awards Report as the financials and the financials as the Awards Report, while leaving intact the instruction that reports are for information purposes only. Thus, even the correction validates the thesis: information is not managed; it is shuffled.

About that Updated Awards Committee Report and the Motion

The updated packet did add an Awards Committee report, but calling it a committee report is generous. It is a statistical dump: counts by award, counts by area, a progressive award listing, and a state/province breakdown. What it does not contain is any report of Awards Committee activity. No pending issues. No recommendations. No decisions. No future work. Most notably, it says nothing about the Clint Wise Award motion that appears later in the agenda, even though that motion is submitted by the President “on behalf of the Awards Committee.”

That raises the obvious question: if the Awards Committee conducted business significant enough to generate a Board motion, why did the Awards Committee not report that business? And why is the President submitting the motion on the committee’s behalf when the Second Area Director and the Vice President both sit on the Awards Committee and are available to do their own jobs?

Is the Awards Committee now a private collaboration between the Awards Secretary and the President?

No one will study that sorry collection of statistical confetti. It tells the Board how many certificates were issued, but not what the committee did. A report from a standing committee should report committee activity. This one reports what we characterize here as database exhaust.

The President’s Report from Left Field

The President’s report says May was quiet, speculates about summer trips, mentions Field Day, says he has three non-radio trips and will not fly with radio equipment, identifies an NCS Guide workgroup, gives a vague year-to-date count of 16 new members and approximately 394 awards, and ends with Alaska family travel plans. Ho-hum.

Stifled yawn aside, the President’s report is not supposed to be a travel blog with a callsign attached.

Clearly, this was a cut-and-paste job from the President’s June Centurion column, suggesting that he did not want to invest any time in a separate report for the Board. The perfunctory approach works only because the Board allows it. As we asked in Absurdist 11, who the hell is in charge here?

So, “May was a quiet month…”

I’ll Give You a Quiet Month, Already!

Right, Mr. President. Aside from a significant resignation, namely Virgil Warren, W9WWG, the leading NCS and Assistant Ninth Area Director. You must have forgotten about that already. Selective amnesia? Or dancing around inconvenient truths?

Sarcasm aside, was that not a significant enough event to report during the allegedly quiet month of May? Was that not important enough to discuss with the Board?

Oh, wait. Reports included in the Board packet apparently must be discussed on the reflectors, not in the meeting. So, there is your excuse, defective though it is.

And why, pray tell, does the agenda still list Virgil as Assistant Ninth Area Director?

Perhaps the President, in his haste to sweep the whole affair under the rug of ignominy, failed to apprise the Secretary. Or better yet, perhaps he failed to apprise the Chairman of the Board, who is actually in charge of the agenda. Wouldn’t want all that bad news getting out unfiltered, would we?

The President had room to report his vacation plans, but not the resignation of another high-profile Club volunteer. And to this Board, that’s just fine and dandy.

Unavailable Financials and Available Confusion

The agenda states that the May financials are attached on pages 10-12, while also stating that they are “not yet available.” Page 10 is actually the President’s report. Pages 11 and 12 are the Audit Report.

That is not merely a clerical hiccup. It is a compact demonstration of how careless packet assembly degrades Board oversight. Directors cannot responsibly review what is missing, mislabeled, or displaced. Members cannot follow what the packet pretends to provide but does not actually include.

This is how official records become scavenger hunts. But does this matter, if the Ministers of Disinformation enjoin the Board from discussing reports, anyway?

Oh, What About the Golden Logo?

The logo project is in there. That is all I can say. There is no information about it. But it gets a mention.

I do not understand why it is even included. Under the new rules, the Board may not discuss such things if they constitute a report.

Wait, though! This is a different category, entitled a “discussion item.” (What is the difference between a report and a discussion item?)

What I gather this means is that the President or the Secretary deemed it discussable during the meeting because it was suitably uncontroversial and would not expose flaws in the upper echelons of Club management.

A safe topic? Verily. Nothing says benign institutional renewal like redesigning the logo while reports vanish, financials lag, and committees drift toward Discord without a governance map.

And Finally, the No-Motion Motion

We have New Business: “One Motion Expected,” followed by a placeholder motion.

Governance at its finest. Clarity at its nadir. Entropy with bullet points.

A Board agenda should tell Directors and members what will they will be discussing and what actions might follow. A placeholder motion tells them almost nothing. It preserves the appearance of process while withholding the substance necessary for meaningful review. Just when that motion will appear, no one knows.

It appears that the malformed, incomplete, and quasi-authoritative Board package suffered from “deadlineitis”, albeit with a couple of crucial reports and the only real business item missing.

The June packet is not just incomplete. It is instructional. It shows a Club learning that the safest way to avoid hard questions is to stop producing the information that invites them.

Next up: the Audit Report, where “amazingly close” is treated as reassurance, as though coincidence had recently been promoted to internal control.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 23: Information for Information Purposes Only appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

This Absurdist Paper takes a break from hammering at the loose nails in The 3905 Century Club’s organizational and operational structure to present an entertaining foray into its past. Please fasten your seatbelts, then sit back and enjoy the flight! It might get a little bumpy ahead.

A System Built on Trust

In a club built around amateur radio awards, geography matters. If a station claims to be operating from a state line, a tri-point, a high point, a national park, or some other award-generating location, the validity of that claim depends on the operator actually being there. The Club did not maintain a mobile forensic division, a GPS subpoena unit, or a squad of retired surveyors standing by with handcuffs and calipers. We relied on the honor system.

The honor system is a wonderful thing when honorable people use it. When someone treats it as an engineering tolerance to be exploited, the system becomes less an operating framework than an unlocked cash drawer in a lobby full of magicians.

Enter Captain Bill

Bill arrived in the Club around 2015 or 2016 and quickly became one of those members who could not merely participate. He had to dominate. He was a retired airline captain, and he had that cockpit-announcement confidence some pilots acquire after spending years telling hundreds of passengers that everything is under control while the aircraft is being pelted by hail over Omaha. Barf bags are conveniently located in the seat pocket in front of you.

At first, Bill was entertaining. He ran nets, generated contacts, chased awards and helped members complete difficult certificates. He was energetic, persistent, and, in a club full of aging operators, that kind of energy can look like leadership if you squint hard enough and ignore the smoke coming out of the breaker panel.

Eventually, he was elected Vice President.

That turned out to be unfortunate, because the Vice President’s actual role was modest. Under the Club’s governing documents, the VP existed primarily to act in place of the President if the President could not serve. Bill, however, appeared to regard the office as an aviation-grade command platform with a leather chair, a throttle quadrant, and authority over whatever crossed his mental radar. The Club had elected a spare tire, and the spare tire thought it was the drivetrain.

The Trust Problem

The Club’s awards structure had always depended on good faith. If a mobile station checked in from a remote location, the Net Control Station logged the claimed location. The Area Awards Managers later checked QSLs and award applications. No one expected every member to produce a sworn travel affidavit, fuel receipts, trailhead photos, and a laminated witness statement from a park ranger.

That system worked because most mobile operators had no reason to lie. They were proud of their operations. Some took pictures. Others wrote travel notes. They posted stories and told other members where they had been and how they had gotten there. The mobile operation was part of the fun.

Bill was different. His claimed operations began raising questions not because one claim seemed slightly odd, but because many claims formed a pattern of physical, logistical, and occasionally geological creativity. He typically traveled alone, therefore no witnesses ever corroborated his fantastical stories.

At some point, the issue stopped being “Was Bill at this one location?” and became “How many laws of nature must be suspended before this story works?”

The Great Alaska Speed Run

The masterpiece was Bill’s September 2017 Alaska operation. This was the culmination of a series of escalating lesser episodes involving increasingly extravagant claims.

According to his account and archived net information, Bill performed a road trip that would have made a long-haul trucker, a rally driver, and a sleep-deprived moose all say, “Nope.”

The Awards Committee reconstructed the route using Bill’s own representations, archived net listings, and Google Earth routing. The reconstructed trip covered roughly 2,721 miles. Google estimated about 51 hours of driving. Bill claimed about 40 hours total driving time, while also spending several hours operating from stationary locations on nets during the same overall period.

A new, non-deterministic branch of mathematics has entered the building. This was neither a minor discrepancy nor was it a rounding error. This was not the difference between stopping at Buc-ee’s for brisket and soldiering on with beef jerky from the glove box.

On the contrary, this was a claim that required sustained high average speeds over long distances through remote country, including rural highways, secondary roads, unimproved roads, fuel stops, food stops, border crossings, restroom stops, and whatever other biological maintenance even heroic retired airline captains occasionally require.

Plausible Deniability

Bill’s explanation was, in essence, that he did it.

When the Committee questioned the logistics, he did what he often did: he revised one portion of the story in a way that improved one problem while creating another. At one point, he claimed that the archived net listing had placed him at the wrong state line. Instead of operating from the Idaho/Wyoming line, he said he had been near the Idaho/Montana line around Sula, Montana, conveniently several hours closer to Alaska.

That helped the Alaska arrival problem. Unfortunately, it made the prior leg more ridiculous. Now he had to get to the Sula area in time for the next net, over secondary roads at night, while maintaining an average speed that belonged less to amateur radio and more to a county sheriff’s dashcam. Even that would have gotten him to his destination a minute before the Late Net closed!

Although his cover story blamed the NCS for listing him at “the wrong line”, we later discovered that he sent QSL cards to stations he worked from that line. They bore his inscription stating he was at the Idaho/Wyoming line.

This is the thing about tall tales: pushing the bulge down in one place makes it pop out somewhere else.

And then there was the mysterious “alternate driver” who appeared somewhere on the road, casually tossed into the story by Captain Bill.

“Lucky I had an alternate driver which allowed me to sightsee and sleep during day.”

This had all the “oh, by the way” finesse of a nine-year-old inventing alibis for missing homework.

Lovely Hyder, Alaska

The Hyder, Alaska angle was equally revealing. Hyder is a tiny Alaska community accessible by road through British Columbia. It was the least impossible Alaska target if one were trying to make Bill’s timeline work. Yet Bill, who seemed otherwise willing to claim state lines, tri-points, high points, and award-generating geography with the appetite of a goat in a paper mill, did not claim the Alaska/British Columbia line while presumably operating from the one Alaska location where that claim would have been sitting practically in his lap.

The Committee did not have to prove beyond all possible doubt that Bill was not there. This was not a criminal trial, although the drama sometimes aspired to one. The issue was reasonability. His proof consisted largely of restating the claim. The Committee’s response was more or less: repeating “I did it” is not documentation. It is karaoke.

Closed Parks and Magic Identification

The New Jersey High Point episode was another gem.

In July 2017, during the New Jersey government shutdown, state parks were closed. High Point State Park was among them. Bill nevertheless claimed portable operation from the New Jersey High Point.

When questioned, one version of the story involved showing a Department of Defense identification card to a state policeman and being allowed in. Later, the account shifted toward a maintenance worker servicing a transmitter site and some Appalachian Trail access logic that wandered through the landscape like a raccoon in a campground.

The problem was not merely whether some human being somewhere might have let him through a gate. The problem was whether his claimed operation met the Club’s high point rules. If he had obtained access to the park, he could have operated from the actual high point area. If he had not obtained access, then the story had to explain how he safely and legally operated within the required distance while the park was closed.

Bill’s accounts did not clarify the matter. They created additional fog. This was a recurring feature. Ask Bill for a flashlight and he gave you a smoke machine.

Shrinking Nebraska

Then there was the Nebraska high point and the Colorado-Nebraska-Wyoming tri-point.

“On my map, they are less than a mile apart!”

Club rules required an operator claiming a point to be as close as safely possible and, in no case, more than one-half mile away. Bill claimed to operate from both the Nebraska high point and the CO-NE-WY tri-point simultaneously.

The problem: they were more than a mile apart. As the crow flies and as Google Earth measures, the tri-state marker is 1.91 miles from Panorama Point, the highest point in Nebraska.

The Committee presented this finding, which should have ended the discussion. One cannot be within one-half mile of two points that are more than a mile apart unless space itself has been subcontracted to a committee with poor minutes.

Bill’s answer was that on his map, they were within range.

This is where his pilot background becomes comic rather than impressive. Pilots are supposed to understand maps. They are supposed to understand scale. They are supposed to understand distance. Apparently, Bill had found the one map on which western Nebraska contracted under pressure, perhaps due to barometric conditions or wishful thinking.

His larger defense was that the Club did not explicitly say one could not claim a high point and a tri-point at the same time. But the rules did say he had to satisfy the proximity requirement for each point. This is not a loophole. It is arithmetic, that cruel little discipline that ruins so many excellent stories.

The Prairie Riders

The most cinematic explanation involved South Dakota.

Bill needed to explain another aggressive travel timeline, this one involving movement from North Dakota toward Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. His explanation featured a group of motorcyclists, reportedly the “Prairie Riders,” who recognized his truck, antenna, and flag, then escorted him at very high speed across the prairie.

Some of them, he said, were hitting 100 mph.

This was the moment the story left amateur radio and entered late-night basic cable.

In Bill’s telling, this was a glorious open-road scene: Harleys running fast, lights visible for miles, trucks and cars pulling over, the mobile ham radio hero pressing onward toward destiny and the next net. One half expected someone to cue up patriotic music while an eagle flew through the moon.

The Committee, being cruelly attached to clocks and roads, noticed that even accepting large portions of the story, the timing still did not work. The hike down from the North Dakota high point, the drive, the claimed contacts, and the Late Net timing still refused to align. The motorcycle escort did not solve the problem. It merely added leather jackets.

International Bill

Bill’s operating claims were not limited to domestic geography.

He was accused of operating in contradiction to FCC rules and communication laws in other countries. The Cayman Islands issue became one of the charges in the eventual revocation process. The question put to him was direct: Did he knowingly check into a net with an illegal call sign from the Cayman Islands?

A normal person might answer yes, no, or “I misunderstood the requirement.” Bill’s preferred method was to avoid the clean answer, attack the premise, and turn the issue back on the accuser.

This became his standard defensive geometry: deny, deflect, accuse, demand proof, and, when necessary, produce another story.

The Legal Eagle and the Case of Deformation

Bill also enjoyed legal posturing.

He claimed to have graduated from law school but chose not to become a lawyer because, as he reportedly explained, he “didn’t like the judges.” This is a magnificent sentence. It has the same energy as saying one did not become a surgeon because one disliked organs.

During the earlier dispute over his operations, the Club received a threat letter from a Texas attorney claiming to represent Captain Bill. The letter alleged, among other things, “deformation of character.”

I assume the intended word was “defamation,” but with Bill, one hesitates. In this saga, perhaps character really had been deformed. So had time, distance, geography, board patience, and the English language.

The letter demanded corrective action and threatened legal remedies. It also complained that various allegations had not been proven true, as though the Awards Committee bore the burden of disproving every unsupported claim Bill could produce from the cockpit of imagination.

That was always the trick. Bill wanted the Club to operate as an honor system when accepting his claims, but as a criminal court when questioning them. Believe me when I claim it. Prove me wrong when I am challenged.

That asymmetry is poison in a volunteer organization.

The Pattern Becomes the Point

By early 2019, the issue was no longer one Alaska trip, one closed park, one elastic Nebraska map, or one motorcycle caravan with a generous throttle hand. What you’ve seen here is only a representative sampling of some of Bill’s more “interesting” representations.

The issue here was a pattern.

Over roughly two years, Bill had been accused of misrepresented operating locations, faulty ballots, improper foreign operations, disregard for mandatory net procedures, disruptive behavior, legal threats, unauthorized investigations, and repeated attacks on the Board and the President. He had also pushed nuisance motions, including motions involving D&O insurance, dissolution, revocation of other members, and other matters that consumed Board time like a shredder eats junk mail.

Bill’s supporters saw persecution. Bill called it a witch hunt.

That phrase is almost mandatory in such situations. Every organizational malcontent eventually reaches for “witch hunt” the way a drowning man reaches for a floating cooler. It converts inquiry into martyrdom and lets the accused climb onto a soapbox made from his own paperwork.

But this was not a witch hunt. It was an immune response.

The Club had tolerated, negotiated, reasoned, tabled, delayed, softened, and re-explained. It had asked for documentation, endured shifting stories, and had tried lesser measures. It had even explored settlement.

Bill’s response was to keep flying the airplane toward the mountain while arguing about cockpit procedure.

The Settlement That Wasn’t

The February 2019 Board minutes preserve the procedural absurdity beautifully.

On February 5, the Board met in special session to consider Dean’s motion to revoke Bill’s membership. A settlement agreement had been discussed. Several versions had apparently circulated. Bill had a notarized version. More modifications were being discussed. Bill said he had been on the road with only a cell phone and had not gotten emails.

Naturally, the Board began debating whether to vote, table, revote, table again, or continue participating in what had become amateur radio’s answer to a hostage negotiation conducted through a screen door.

A motion to table passed 7-6. Then one Director said he had made a mistake in his vote, so the Board retook the vote. On the second try, the motion to table failed 6-7. Then another motion to table until the next regular Board meeting passed 7-6.

This was not governance. This was a carburetor coughing.

The Agreement that Could Have Been

Four days later, on February 9, a special Board meeting was called to approve a settlement agreement, provided Bill had signed the revised version before the deadline. I personally presented the proposal to him for his signature at Orlando Hamcation. He read it and told me he wouldn’t sign it. Dean withdrew the motion.

The proposed settlement was not trivial. Bill would have immediately resigned as Vice President and Fifth Area Director-elect. In addition:

• He would not seek or hold an officer or VIP position for five years.
• He would not serve as Net Control Station for six months.
• He would promise to observe the Constitution, Bylaws, NCS procedures, Board decisions, FCC rules, and applicable foreign communications laws.
• He would publicly apologize.
• He would stop making direct or oblique legal threats.
• He would work to convince NCS operators he had cajoled into quitting to return.

That was the off-ramp.

He did not take it.

The Board Finally Finds the Switch

At the regular February 9 Board meeting, the revocation motion came back off the table.

The minutes note that “all the discussions, talks, meetings and more meetings, offers, re offers and counter offers” had failed to produce a resolution. That line deserves preservation in amber. It is the written record of volunteers realizing they had been trapped in a maze built by a man with unlimited time and no visible shame.

The Board voted to bring the motion off the table. Then the motion to revoke Bill’s membership proceeded.

The vote was 9 in favor, 3 opposed, and 1 no response.

There was then confusion about the effective date. The Board was polled: March 1 or immediate. The result was 9 for immediate, 2 for March 1, and 2 no responses. President Dean then declared the effective date and time to be February 10, 2019, at approximately 0245Z.

For once, the Board chose institutional reality over theatrical possibility.

Bill’s Club membership was revoked. His officer status was terminated, his awards were voided, and his function as Net Control Station ended. Contacts made by other members with Bill before the revocation date were preserved for those members’ award use, which was the right thing to do. The Club punished the source of the problem without punishing members who had acted in good faith.

There, buried in a tedious meeting record, was something almost elegant: accountability with collateral damage control.

Why This Still Matters

It would be easy to treat Captain Bill as a one-off clown show, a strange interlude from the past, best remembered for padlocked parks, 100 mph motorcycle escorts, and maps that apparently used elastic as a projection method.

That would miss the organizational lesson.

Bill was not merely a colorful character. He was a stress test. He exposed a core weakness in a trust-based awards culture: the system worked only as long as the participants shared the same assumptions about truth, restraint, and shame.

Most members did. Bill did not.

Once such a person appears, an organization has two choices. It can enforce its standards, or it can slowly rewrite reality around the offender because confrontation is unpleasant. The latter path is organizational entropy in its purest form. Rules become suggestions. Suggestions become memories. Memories become arguments. Arguments become folklore. Eventually, the people still trying to preserve standards are accused of being the problem.

The Entropic Path

That is exactly how institutions rot. Not always through corruption. Often through exhaustion.

Volunteers get tired. Boards get tired. Committees get tired. Decent people start accepting nonsense because rejecting it requires another meeting, another motion, another argument, another threat, another three-page email, another private phone call, another round of “prove it.”

Captain Bill weaponized that fatigue.

The Board’s eventual action in 2019 was therefore significant. It was not just about Bill. It was about whether the Club still had enough institutional immune function to say no to chronic bad faith.

At that moment, it did.

The suspension of disbelief finally ended at approximately 0245Z on February 10, 2019. After two years of improbable trips, mutable explanations, legal vapor, and operational theater, the Board stopped negotiating with fog.

For a brief shining moment, the Club remembered that trust is not the absence of enforcement. Trust survives only when enforcement remains possible.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 22: Captain Bill and the Suspension of Disbelief appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Under the current President, Dean Davis, KL7OR, accelerating entropy is observable not only in high profile resignations, but also in blatant manipulation of the narrative through Club communication channels. This Absurdist Paper examines both, exploring the thermodynamics of failure at the Club’s highest echelons. Can the Club survive as the transgressions accumulate?

Previous essays have avoided personalization, but here we name public officers and editors where their public actions are directly relevant.

Introduction to Chaos

Organizations in advanced stages of structural entropy do not usually collapse all at once. They first lose the people who understand how the machinery works.

That is the danger now facing our subject organization. The Club is not merely experiencing volunteer fatigue or routine turnover. It is shedding load-bearing volunteers: the people who administer awards, maintain records, review bylaws, support information systems, conduct elections, control nets, publish communications, and quietly prevent procedural slop from becoming governing custom.

In December 2025, that process became impossible to ignore. In a single month, the Club lost its Awards Secretary, Awards Committee Chair, Bylaws Committee Chair, IT Committee participation, newsletter editor, and Florida Registered Agent. This was not ordinary rotation. It was a self-inflicted administrative stroke, not coincidentally at a time when the President was engaged in his mission to further consolidate his power.

Warning Signal Not Heard

A healthy organization would have treated that cluster of resignations as a warning signal requiring immediate self-examination. A captive organization treats each resignation as an isolated personality problem, then publishes cheerful routine business as though nothing structural has happened.

That dezinformatsiya, Soviet-style information laundering, is what I refer to as The Pravda Effect.

The June 2026 issue of The Centurion provides a useful case study. Its table of contents promises messages from the Vice President and Awards Secretary, yet the interior supplies little more than headings and a redirection to the statistics section. The President describes May as a quiet month while also announcing a newly formed NCS Guide workgroup consisting of three named members and “still looking for another person.” Thus, a missing contributor becomes an empty slot, and a governance wound is translated into staffing language.

This is how narrative management works in a volunteer club. It does not need to fabricate an alternate universe. It merely needs to omit the inconvenient parts of this one.

The Board Chooses Silence

An example of institutional apathy is instructive. When I resigned as Awards Secretary in December 2025, my resignation letter to the Board and the President clearly stated why I was leaving. The immediate issue with the President was the trigger, not the whole cause. It was merely the latest in a long series of double-dealing episodes, which I covered in Absurdist Paper 10. The letter went to every Board member, as well as to the President and Vice President.

How did the Board react?

To be fair, I will express gratitude to the only two Board members who ultimately contacted me: Vice President Kirk Frazier, AA1NA, and the DX Area Director, Craig McLoughlin, VE3CMB. That was it. Nine Area Directors, including my own, silently accepted the high-profile departure of the Awards Secretary, Awards Committee Chair, Bylaws Committee member, IT Committee member, and Florida Registered Agent. I was a colleague, a former Board member who served alongside them for five years. Ten years’ tenure as Awards Secretary. Yet, no one else thought to ask the obvious institutional question: “What is going wrong here?”

Although not surprising, that silence was not merely discourteous. It was diagnostic.

A functioning Board would treat the sudden resignation of a load-bearing volunteer as a warning signal. Even if individual directors disagreed with my conclusions, they had an organizational obligation to understand the failure mode. Instead, their silence conveyed the familiar posture of executive dependency: this is Dean’s problem, so Dean can handle it. Nothing to see here. Please return your tray tables to their fully upright and locked positions while governance exits through the rear hatch. Do I hear a motion to adjourn?

Not Unexpected

I could take the silence personally, but I do not. By now, the Board’s behavior is too consistent to surprise me. Its members continue to validate my work on organizational entropy by demonstrating, month after month, how a nominal governing body becomes a passive validation layer. Absurdist Paper 11 addressed that abdication directly. The Board does not lead the President. It waits for him. The Board does not investigate executive failure. It accommodates it.

As expected, I heard nothing at all from the President. His solution was simple: accept the resignation, find the first interested volunteer, hand him the job, and declare the problem solved. In that model, the purpose of succession is not continuity, accountability, or repair. It is vacancy suppression.

A Familiar Pattern

I will not speak for the other two high-profile December resignations, one of whom was a Board member and Chair of the Bylaws Committee, and the other, the newsletter editor. Both were highly productive and committed to the Club. Both had their own grievances with the President. I do not know whether any Board members attempted to intervene with them. I rather doubt it.

Under this President, high-profile resignations appear to follow a familiar sequence. A disgruntled volunteer resigns. The President establishes a gaslighting narrative that deflects any possible executive responsibility. The Board remains silent. A replacement is found. The vacancy disappears from the roster, and the underlying damage is left untouched.

That is how an organization hollows itself out while pretending to remain functional. The Club survives on paper. The offices are filled, reports resume, and the machinery keeps making noise. But with each departure of a competent, experienced volunteer, the organization loses memory, judgment, discipline, and resistance. Eventually, what remains is not continuity. It is managed depletion.

With that background scenery, we will set the stage for the most recent high-profile departure.

The Protected Insider Problem

Buddy Spiegel, W3BS, is a long-time, accomplished member with a checkered history in the Club. His record includes high-value achievements, controversial departures from volunteer roles, and a long-running habit of inserting himself into procedural disputes whenever he believes the Club is not doing things his way. He is not merely a noisy member. He is a recurring institutional actor.

That distinction matters because President Dean Davis recently appointed this long-time ally as editor of the Club newsletter, The Centurion. A member already inclined to challenge Board decisions and operational authority now occupies a position from which he can shape the Club’s official narrative. This is not an improvement in communications. It is a migration of factional behavior into official publication.

Enter the 3905 Century Club Minister of Propaganda.

The same protected-insider problem appears on the nets. Dean’s ad hoc presidential endorsement of Buddy’s net behavior appears to be a primary cause of the latest reported high-profile resignation. This was not the first such issue involving the same Net Control Station. A similar conflict occurred a couple of years earlier, when Buddy objected to the NCS’s handling of a net and insisted on having his way. Although Club policy treats the NCS as the captain of the on-air ship during a net, Buddy escalated the matter beyond the net itself and eventually involved the President.

The first incident ultimately rose to the Board level. If you have been following my treatises on Board behavior, the result will not surprise you. Two Area Directors, one from the NCS’s area and one from Buddy’s, handled the matter with all the urgency of two men discussing the current standings in the NFC North over ginseng tea. The net result was a directive to Buddy requiring him to apologize to whomever checked in to the disrupted net. Whether he complied is debatable. One member mentioned receiving something that was more a parry than an apology.

Meanwhile, Dean directed the Bylaws Committee to incorporate a new rule into the 2025 NCS Guide rewrite to accommodate his pal Buddy’s preferred interpretation.

Cloudy Documentation Leads to Cloudy Behavior

As we discussed in Absurdist Paper 15, that revised 2025 NCS Guide was never officially published. Yet, in a perfect little specimen of procedural absurdity, an unofficial copy later found its way to the very NCS who has now resigned. Governance by unpublished document is one of those innovations only a declining volunteer organization could admire without blushing.

Then came the second episode. A nuance not covered by Dean’s earlier ad hoc presidential fix inspired Buddy to involve Dean in doing his bidding yet again. Dean hastily supported Buddy. This time, he used the NCS reflector to establish an emergency rule, claiming, “In the past we have had several masters request check-in at the bottom of the check-in list and according to the NCS guide it implies that they must be put at the top.” [Emphasis mine. –Ed.] Perhaps several did. But from the outside, the chorus sounded suspiciously like Buddy, Buddy, Buddy, and Buddy in quadraphonic sound, straight from the 1970s.

Playing Favorites

That was the fatal rebuke. President Dean did not merely resolve a procedural ambiguity. He signaled once again that when a favored insider challenges an NCS, the NCS should not expect presidential backing. The person responsible for maintaining order on the net was thrown under the bus so the protected insider could continue enjoying executive cover.

This is how procedural discipline dies. First, exceptions are made for a preferred member. Then those exceptions are rationalized as clarifications. Then the people responsible for enforcing order discover that their authority exists only until it inconveniences the President’s allies.

When independent oversight and procedural discipline are treated as executive inconveniences, the administrative apparatus stops functioning as an awards society and starts functioning as a protection racket for preferred insiders.

The Pravda Effect

The June 2026 issue of The Centurion provides the cleanest demonstration yet that the Club newsletter has drifted from communication into narrative management. Yes, we are talking about that same newsletter I mentioned in Absurdist Paper 1 as an example of a Club sanctioned single point of failure.

The current issue reports that, other than routine housekeeping, the May Board agenda contained only discussion of a new Club logo. It then notes that a non-emergency, non-agenda item was brought to the floor: a proposed $400 contribution to NetLogger. The Board approved the contribution overwhelmingly. According to the meeting record, the vote was 12 to 1, with the President standing alone in opposition.

This was a remarkable occurrence. The Board passed a desirable motion over the President’s lone objection. For once, the Board acted like a Board.

That should have been the end of the story. The Board acted. The President lost. Corporate governance, miraculous though it may seem, briefly functioned.

Editorial Prerogative?

But the official newsletter did not report the event neutrally. Instead, Buddy used the Board-action section to question the legitimacy and prudence of the Board’s decision. He complained that no Board member asked what contributions had been made in the past, what requests the Club had made of NetLogger, what work NetLogger had performed specifically for the Club, or what other clubs and nets had contributed. He then wondered aloud how and why non-emergency, non-agenda items are brought to the floor for a Board vote.

Those may be fair questions in the abstract. They are not fair questions when deployed selectively in the official Club newsletter immediately after the Board overruled the President by a 12-to-1 vote.

That is the Pravda Effect—Soviet state-run “journalism” at its finest.

Newsletter Neutrality is the Issue

The issue is not whether a NetLogger donation was wise, wasteful, overdue, or insufficiently studied. The issue is that the editor used an official publication to re-litigate a Board decision after the President lost. A newsletter that reports Board action serves the organization. A newsletter that scolds the Board for voting against the President serves the executive faction.

The distinction matters. In a functioning corporation, the President is not the corporation. The Board is not a nuisance. A 12-to-1 vote is not an editorial inconvenience to be massaged afterward by a friendly publication. It is the governing body speaking.

When the Club’s official newsletter becomes the place where the President’s defeated position receives sympathetic postmortem treatment, the publication has ceased to be a neutral communications vehicle. It has become an executive pressure dressing applied over the wound of Board independence, a vehicle for narrative control by Dean and Buddy.

Buddy Discovers NetLogger Again

Buddy’s June 2026 editorial performance over the NetLogger contribution was not an isolated event. It was an encore.

A decade earlier, in 2016, in response to a Board mandate, Buddy publicly challenged the Club’s movement away from the unsupported N7XG Logger, now CCLogger, and toward NetLogger. That detail matters because N7XG Logger/CCLogger was and is Dean’s software. Dean was not a neutral bystander in the logging-software ecosystem; he was the developer and owner of the competing tool. The long, tangled history of that conflict of interest deserves its own essay. One day, I may write it. For present purposes, it is enough to note that Buddy’s 2016 procedural barrage opposed a Board-supported move away from Dean’s logger, while his 2026 newsletter editorial again questioned a Board-supported NetLogger decision after Dean stood alone in opposition.

Some of those 2016 questions were fair in isolation. Collectively, however, they formed a familiar pattern: procedural interrogation deployed after the organization had already decided. George Huett, W6LJK (SK), then 6th Area Director and Board Chair, responded point by point and concluded that, with only a couple of exceptions, Buddy’s questions had already been answered earlier that winter. George saw no reason to reopen the live-logging issue.

Ten years later, the same pattern returned in the official Club newsletter. Buddy is a master at bringing up the same point repeatedly, ad nauseam.

The issue is not whether his questions are intrinsically illegitimate. The issue is their function. In 2016, Buddy used questions to resist a Board-supported logging transition. In 2026, he used the official newsletter to second-guess a Board decision that crossed the President. The recurring tactic is procedural suspicion, not governance discipline.

The Front Line Break

The most recent warning sign is no longer merely reported. Virgil Warren, W9WWG, has confirmed that he has relinquished his Club responsibilities. This is not the departure of a casual participant. Virgil for several years was one of the Club’s most active Net Control Stations, as well as Ninth Area Assistant Director, Election Monitor, and a member of the NCS Guide workgroup. In other words, he was not occupying a decorative chair. He was part of the operating machinery.

Virgil’s explanation is precise. His resignation stems from his refusal to continue acting as an NCS while the President subverts established net procedure to accommodate a favored member. In his explanation to his Area Director, Virgil wrote that the issue “stems from me holding all check-ins to club rules.” He feared that if he continued as NCS, the same pattern could erupt again on AIM, involving Buddy, as it had a couple of years earlier. He added, “I have more respect for the club than to let that happen.”

The immediate issue was Dean’s reflector directive concerning Master’s Degree holders and their placement on the check-in list. Dean wrote that the NCS Guide “implies” Masters must be placed at the top, then announced that, until the NCS workgroup could address the issue, he was authorizing all NCS stations to honor any Master’s request to be placed at the bottom of the list during prelist or normal check-in.

That was not a clarification. It was an executive override.

The Published Word Means Nothing

Virgil pointed to the actual NCS Guide language, which says: “Take Pre-net check-ins (order) – Masters at the top, followed by OCS/OCM, then DX, then all other stations in any order.” As Virgil correctly observed, that is not implication. That is instruction. The President converted a written procedure into a mere suggestion because a favored insider disliked the rule.

Virgil’s position was not that he personally cared where a Master appeared on the list. His point was more important: Club rules should be respected, and the NCS volunteers who conduct the nets should not be undermined for enforcing them. That is the operational core of the problem. The President’s directive did not simply adjust check-in order. It told NCS operators that their rule-based authority could be displaced whenever a protected member made enough noise.

Virgil described himself as a principled man, and that word matters. This was not a tantrum. It was not a bruised ego. It was a principled refusal to continue serving in a system where written procedures can be rewritten on the fly to pacify one disruptive member.

Recall that in the June Centurion, Dean sidestepped Virgil’s departure when he announced the NCS Guide workgroup as three named members and added that the Club was “still looking for another person for the group.” That language has all the institutional warmth of a missing chair at a committee table. It does not acknowledge loss. It converts departure into vacancy.

That is the front-line break. A high-capacity volunteer, one of the primary people keeping the nets orderly and productive, walked away because executive protection of a favored insider made principled net control untenable. A healthy organization would ask why. A declining organization changes the roster, updates the euphemism, and hopes nobody notices the blood on the carpet.

The Dean and Buddy End-State

The danger is not merely that high-profile volunteers have resigned. The deeper danger is what remains after they leave.

When competent volunteers depart because they no longer trust the President’s judgment, candor, or procedural integrity, the organization does not automatically collapse. It becomes simpler. The people who knew the history, who understood the systems, and who were willing to object in specific, documented terms are gone. What remains is easier to manage because it is less capable of resistance.

That is how an elected Board becomes stage dressing.

The President’s facilitation of Buddy Spiegel is central to this decay. Buddy is not just a noisy member with a long history of challenging Board decisions when it suits him. He has now been placed in a communications role from which he can shape the official narrative, second-guess the Board in print, and support the President’s factional posture while presenting the whole exercise as Club news. Meanwhile, the same President’s protection of Buddy’s over-the-air behavior alienates the very people expected to keep the nets orderly.

Thus, the Club is being squeezed from both ends. On the communication side, the official newsletter becomes a vehicle for executive-friendly editorial pressure. On the operational side, front-line volunteers are left to absorb disruption without meaningful presidential backing. The competent eventually conclude that their labor is being used to prop up a regime that will not defend them.

If this continues, the Club’s future is not difficult to imagine. It will be run in practice by Dean and Buddy, with a dozen compliant placeholders sitting around the Board table, too timid to call a spade a spade and too comfortable with procedural theater to notice that governance has become compliance.

That is not leadership. It is managed depletion.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 21: High-Profile Resignations and the Pravda Effect appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

When the Volunteers Run Out, So Does the Net

Back in 2009, a member of our subject organization, disgruntled by Club politics, formed a new, competitive awards net called the North American Traffic & Awards Net (NATA). Its nets ran for sixteen years, but now NATA appears to have gone silent. Its website declares, “As of Sunday, August 24, 2025, the NATA Net has closed. The advisory board has disbanded. If the net should resume in the future, a search will be opened for prospective board members at that time.”

Nine months later, as of June 2026, is an obituary premature?

Founding Principle: Escape from Politics

NATA appears to have been born as an escape from 3905 Century Club politics. However, escape is not the same as institutional design. A new net can avoid an old club’s personalities, but it cannot avoid the thermodynamics of volunteer labor.

Publicly available evidence suggests NATA closed after the operational burden of maintaining an awards net exceeded available volunteer capacity. Governance and awards administration increasingly fell back onto a small core group.

NATA’s founder, director, and chairman of the Board, Jim Duncan, KU0G, had once been a webmaster and NCS with our subject organization. I have confirmed that he served as 3905 webmaster from March 25, 2008, to October 29, 2008. Old correspondence suggests that his performance as webmaster was not well regarded. His departure from that position became part of the later grievance narrative. As well, during his existence in the Club, he appears to have been a polarizing influence.

Interestingly, there is no record of his tenure as webmaster in the current Club website’s officer history section. That same listing contains entries for both his predecessor and successor. His name and callsign are conspicuous by their absence. Whether this omission was intentional, accidental, or the result of later reconstruction from incomplete records, it illustrates the Club’s chronic vulnerability to institutional memory loss. In a volunteer organization, the official record is often less a ledger than a weathered oral tradition with HTML tags.*

*Note: After publishing this, I received additional information. It turns out that Duncan, angry over his dismissal, pointedly requested removal of his information from the website. A hidden entry in an archived version of the website's officer history listed him as Webmaster as well as 20M PSK and RTTY Net Coordinator in 2008.

The Rise and Fall of NATA

At the outset, NATA’s founder emailed a flyer to Club members announcing the competing venture. Excerpts from the flyer follow:

Why are we doing this? Simple. We believe that we can
create a net that serves ALL members, not just a few
elite elected officials. In fact, our net has NO officers.
Our leadership team is purely volunteer-based and each
person focuses on one area. As a participant
in NATA YOUR voice counts! All participants are
equal shareholders and we don’t make decisions
that affect you behind closed doors or without a vote
of everyone.
WHY A NEW NET? We feel that after many years of absence
and after listening to many disenchanted participants
in other nets that it was time to get back to the basics
of an awards net.

A contemporaneous Hamtown reflector post attributed KU0G’s break with 3905 to his removal as webmaster and quoted his NATA flyer as openly criticizing 3905’s leadership culture. The post was not neutral, but neutrality is not usually the native language of reflector traffic. It was, however, contemporaneous, specific, and consistent with NATA’s own founding rhetoric.

The flyer’s promise of “NO officers” is the most revealing line. It is the standard fantasy of the disgruntled reformer: abolish structure, and fairness will naturally bloom. But structure does not disappear. It either becomes explicit and accountable, or it becomes informal and personal. NATA appears to have chosen the latter path first, then later formalized enough governance to survive for a while, pretending it was ungoverned. Ultimately, volunteer scarcity and organizational gravity finished the job.

The Officerless Net Acquires a Board

One can easily see that the officerless promise also collided with the practical need for somebody to keep the lights on. Successful volunteer organizations are not run from the bottom up in any literal sense. Members may guide priorities, supply labor, and hold leadership accountable, but somebody must still make decisions, resolve disputes, maintain continuity, and accept responsibility when things go sideways.

NATA’s own website eventually took pains to explain that its Board of Directors existed only on an as-needed basis, although “in general… the board meets every two months.” It then described what the Board does and does not do, how it resolves disputes, and how it communicates. The kicker was the final sentence: “The board wishes to emphasize that the net was founded on the principle of being absent of club politics and the ultimate goal of the board is to ensure that the net remains true to [its] founding [principles] and goals.”

So the goal of the Board was to act like a Board while reassuring everyone that it was not really acting like a Board. This is the predictable endpoint of anti-politics politics: denounce structure, then quietly rebuild under gentler names.

Then, It All Evaporated

The website lists ten “Past Directors,” two of whom it labels “Founding Member.” If the organization remains on life support, it no longer has a Board. It has a Director, Chair, and Net Founder standing beside the empty machinery, waiting to see whether enough volunteers ever return to restart the engine.

NATA began as a revolt against perceived 3905 elitism and closed-door decision-making, promising an officerless, participant-driven awards net. Its later history suggests the usual volunteer-organization paradox: the fewer formal structures an organization admits it needs, the more dependent it becomes on personalities, informal authority, and the stamina of a shrinking worker core.

Eventually, the entropy bill comes due.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 20: The Breakaway Net That Couldn’t Outrun Entropy appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

“…[where] peers feigning comprehensive knowledge engage in urination competitions while answering nuanced questions
quasi-authoritatively.”

Members in our subject organization are constantly pursuing information about the Club, but are frustrated with a largely stagnant website on which specific information is hard to find. Being human, they seek information where it is more readily available, namely, the reflectors and NetLogger’s AIM tool. In those channels, misinformation abounds, even as peers feigning comprehensive knowledge engage in urination competitions while answering nuanced questions quasi-authoritatively. This leads to further information rot as the bogus interpretation is passed on from member to member.

If the Club functioned the way it was intended by its founders, Area Directors would be the first stop on a member’s information quest. However, the Club founders’ vision of actively engaged Area Directors is a pipe dream in today’s organization. Many directors are now legacy placeholders who run unopposed, succeed themselves, and gradually become decorative governance furniture. The bylaws still pretend someone is answering the phone. Reality, inconsiderately, has wandered off. Few Area Directors engage in day-to-day communication with their members. Some do not communicate at all.

Even when directors attempt to help, many are not equipped to answer complex governance, awards, or operating questions accurately. Years of passive service, thin participation, narrow focus, and minimal document engagement produce predictable consequences. Some know less than they think they know. Others know what used to be true. Both conditions are hazardous when delivered with confidence and presumed titular authority.

Alternate Pathways

Members, recognizing the uncertainty and, possibly, the futility of firing off an email into a vacuum, route around these predictably dead channels. AIM and the reflectors provide quicker answers. Questioners depart feeling more knowledgeable, even if their newfound knowledge is incorrect. They know no better, after all. AIM did not create the misinformation economy. It merely filled the vacuum left by inactive representatives, stale documents, and leadership unwilling to build a working information path.

The Club has no defined intake mechanism, other than trying to figure out one’s area director or other officials via the website, or using the “contact the webmaster” link. The latter at least reaches a responsive human being who can refer the question to an appropriate Club authority. However, once again, that means members must first figure out that link is there, try it, and wait for a response, with no guarantees. No instantaneous acknowledgment that the request has been received. A shot in the dark.

Once again, the frustrated member will cling to the path of least resistance: AIM and the reflectors.

The President has long recognized this problem and complained about it. Recognition, however, is not remediation. Complaining that members receive bad information on AIM while failing to provide a better official channel is not leadership. It is weather reporting.

Some Ruminations on Discord and Slack

This is why the current talk about replacing the reflectors with Discord or Slack is so perfectly beside the point. The Club keeps mistaking the container for the contents. If bad information is being circulated by disengaged officers, inactive directors, stale documents, and self-appointed experts, moving the discussion to Discord will not cure the disease. It will merely give the disease a dark mode and make it inaccessible to those not wishing to install a new app. Then, back to AIM they go.

A new platform may improve convenience, but convenience without authority accelerates misinformation. That is not modernization. That is giving the rumor mill a turbocharger.

A Proposed Solution

In 2021, during the then-pending website makeover, I floated an informal proposal to the Board reflector for a support-ticket system. The concept was simple: a prominent Support link on the Club website would open a web form through which members and prospective members, could submit questions. A drop-down menu would categorize the subject area: membership, awards, net operations, elections, finance, website, general Club information, and so forth. Upon submission, the user would receive an immediate acknowledgment with a ticket number and a statement that someone would respond within a specified time. Simultaneously, the ticket would be routed to the appropriate responsibility head.

That proposal went nowhere, as practical ideas often do when they interfere with the ceremonial preservation of dysfunction.

Five Years Later, the Club Could Do Even Better

Were I writing the same proposal today, I would go further. A modern Club support system would not merely forward questions to human volunteers. It would first use AI to answer routine questions directly from approved Club sources: the Constitution, Bylaws, NCS Guide, award applications, election procedures, and current Board policies. At the same time, AI would generate and update an FAQ.

The AI-generated answer should cite its source. If the AI could not answer confidently, or if the question involved judgment, dispute resolution, money, discipline, or policy interpretation, the system would route the question to the responsible Club functionary.

That would give members the immediacy they now seek on AIM while preserving an authoritative path. It would also avoid the usual scolding ritual in which members are effectively told to wander through the bylaws like monks copying illuminated manuscripts. Members should not have to know where the answer lives. They should only need to ask the question.

An AI-assisted support system could expand on my original concept and become a point of pride for the Club. To my knowledge, no comparable awards-net organization provides such a facility. More importantly, it would curtail much of the AIM misinformation cycle by making the authoritative answer easier to obtain than the wrong one.

The Entropy Lesson

The entropy lesson is simple: when official channels are slow, obscure, or unresponsive, unofficial channels become the real institution. AIM did not displace Club leadership. Club leadership vacated the space, and AIM moved in. An AI-assisted support system would restore some order by making accurate information immediate, traceable, and reusable.

That is precisely why it will probably never happen.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 19: The Misinformation Economy appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

A Financial Committee Is Born

In August 2010, the Board unanimously approved creation of a standing Financial Committee chaired by the Treasurer. By 2015, that requirement had made it into the bylaws. The committee was to consist of three to five members selected by the Treasurer and approved by the President. Yet by the current bylaws, the committee does not exist, leaving only an Audit Committee that performs annual or vacancy-triggered reviews. That is a downgrade from ongoing oversight to retrospective archaeology.

The disappearing Financial Committee and the later elimination of award-revenue detail are not separate bookkeeping trivia. They are the same failure at different levels. In 2010, the Board created a standing body that could have owned internal controls. As of 2015, that committee still existed in the bylaws, but I can recall no active Financial Committee at the time. By 2023, I had noted that the need for such a body was obvious, because nobody was reconciling cash receipts against awards issued. Then, rather than strengthening control data, in 2026, the organization moved in the opposite direction by stripping revenue detail from the Awards Committee report. At that point, I was no longer around to object. The Club did not merely fail to build a control system. It discarded the pieces that could have made one work.

Internal Control: Why?

Did the organization ever have a Financial Committee? If so, what did it do? Why did the requirement later vanish? The available record answers none of those questions, which is itself part of the problem. The Board typically ignored the budget after the annual ritual of Board approval. Financial planning was nonexistent. Financial reporting devolved into counting the marbles in the bag at the end of the month. So, they let it be. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Besides, it would require disciplined effort by diligent volunteers, possibly producing unpleasant revelations.

The Financial Committee was not some ornamental committee conceived so another volunteer could enjoy a title. Its natural role would have been ongoing financial control: reviewing procedures, reconciling revenue streams, checking whether awards revenue matched awards issued, and ensuring that the Treasurer’s reports were not the only financial lens available to the Board.

One-Sided Accounting: Good Enough at the End of the Day?

That distinction matters. A Treasurer’s report in our subject organization records what money reached the treasury. It does not, by itself, prove that all expected money reached the treasury. For that, someone must compare collections against an independent source of expected revenue.

In the Club’s case, the obvious independent source was the awards data. Award applications, PayPal receipts, checks forwarded by Area Awards Managers, and certificates issued should produce a rough expected-revenue trail. That trail need not be perfect down to the penny every month, but it should be good enough to detect missing payments, duplicate entries, suspicious receipt numbers, or process failures.

In 2023, when I raised this issue with the Audit Committee, the answer confirmed the weakness. There was no real reconciliation. The Treasurer saw PayPal transaction records, but the award-side detail resided elsewhere. A fake PayPal receipt number entered into the awards system could theoretically pass unless someone compared it against actual PayPal activity. That “someone” was not clearly defined. In other words, the control was trust.

Trust is fine for friendships, bad for accounting, and catastrophic as a substitute for procedure.

Financial Oversight? Not in This Entropic Organization!

This is why the issue discussed in Absurdist 7 mattered. The award-revenue figures in the Awards Committee report were never meant to be audited financial statements. They were operational control figures, providing an independent expectation against which Treasurer receipts could be compared. Furthermore, they provided detailed breakdowns of revenue sources not provided in the Treasurer’s report. They existed for years without anyone outside the Awards Committee expressing interest in properly reconciling them or using them constructively. Eliminating them did not simplify financial oversight. It removed one of the few cross-checks that made oversight possible.

An Archaeological Smoking Gun

The most interesting artifact is not the 2010 motion or the 2015 bylaw language. It is the draft Operations Manual itself. Contrary to any assumption that the 2010 Operations Manual project existed only as a Board fantasy, a controlled draft did exist. It was under the control of an Operations Manual committee and contained office-by-office procedures, including a detailed Treasurer section.

That Treasurer section did not treat financial control as optional decoration. It stated that the procedures were intended to explain how Club funds were accounted for, identify controls against misappropriation, establish audit trails, preserve continuity for future Treasurers, and inform the Board of tax and recordkeeping requirements. It also treated the Financial Committee as a working control body, distinct from the Audit Committee, and specifically identified “cross checking income to award sales” as a Financial Committee task.

In other words, the control problem I raised years later had already been anticipated. The Club did not lack a solution. It wrote one down, buried it, forgot it, and later deleted the committee that would have used it.

A Bylaws Committee Confession

I should not pretend to be an innocent bystander in this particular piece of entropy. I served on the Bylaws Committee during the 2023-2025 rewrite period, and the current bylaws bear fingerprints from that work, including mine.

As I recall, the committee’s logic was straightforward enough at the time. The standing Financial Committee had not been known to function in recent memory, the bylaws already contained enough committees to staff a small principality, and the Audit Committee needed to be formally documented. The revision notes stated that the old Article V.F Financial Committee language and related reserve-account language were removed because those matters had been addressed in the Article II rewrite.

That explanation may have made procedural sense, but it did not solve the internal-control problem. The Audit Committee is not the same thing as a Financial Committee. An Audit Committee looks backward. A Financial Committee, properly used, would provide ongoing oversight, procedure review, and control design and implementation. Substituting one for the other may have cleaned up the bylaws, but it also helped erase the only standing body naturally suited to revenue reconciliation.

So, yes, I was there. If this was a mistake, I own my share of it. The more useful question is not whether the Bylaws Committee can be blamed for rationalizing a dormant provision out of existence. The useful question is why the Club allowed a financial-control mechanism to remain dormant for so long that deleting it seemed like housekeeping.

Entropy, Any Way You Slice It

Organizational entropy reaches criticality when a nonprofit begins functioning like a sole proprietorship run by proxy. The President controls the practical agenda, the Board ratifies, the Treasurer reports what cash arrived, and no standing financial body asks what cash should have arrived. Since the money belongs to no one individually, everyone treats it as if basic controls are optional. That is exactly backward. Because it is not anyone’s personal money, the control structure should be stronger, not weaker.

The Club first abandoned or erased the standing Financial Committee that could have owned internal controls. It later stripped away the revenue detail that could have fed those controls. That is organizational entropy in its purest form: reduce the structure, discard the data, then pretend the remaining ritual is governance. The result is not financial oversight. It is the illusion of oversight, maintained by reports no one reconciles and committees no one misses until the controls fail.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 18: We Don’t Need No Steenking Financial Committee appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Sixteen Years of Progress, Give or Take a Lost Decade

The Operations Manual is another artifact of deferred governance. Back in August 2010, the Board approved creation and maintenance of an Operations Manual detailing operational necessities, including business operations, banking, accounting and bookkeeping procedures, audit procedures, federal and state filing procedures, financial policies, officer responsibilities, and the ever-elastic “etc.”

That was not a trivial housekeeping document. It was intended to be the Club’s operating memory.

The 2010 motion stated that the Manual would be held and maintained by the Club Recorder. A draft Operations Manual did exist. The problem is that it apparently never matured into an actively maintained, Board-owned operational control document.

The Watered-Down Update

In June 2024, the Board adopted a Bylaws Committee update that reduced the required components of the manual to job duties and procedures for Club Officers, volunteer positions, and standing committees, plus a list of responsible positions and corresponding Club website content they manage. The update shifted stewardship of the manual from the Club Recorder to the Vice President.

The motion itself expressly stated that the Club Operations Manual was “Not Impacted.” Thus, the Board changed the bylaw scaffolding around the manual without creating, revising, attaching, or confirming the existence of the manual itself. That is governance as stage scenery.

I cannot even confirm the existence of the rudimentary Operations Manual now supposedly under the stewardship of the Vice President. The bylaws say the manual must exist and that the Vice President is responsible for maintaining it, but a mandate to maintain a document is not evidence that the document was ever created.

At this point, the Operations Manual exists conclusively only as a bylaw requirement. Whether it exists as an actual document remains unproven, which is rather a defect in a manual whose supposed purpose is to preserve operational continuity. One might call it an invisible manual, but that would insult invisible things, some of which perform useful work, such as gravity.

Pipe Dreams and Failures

The Club has a long-standing pattern of approving governance infrastructure, then failing to implement it, under-implementing it, or replacing it with narrower documents that no longer serve the original purpose. Boards consider themselves visionary when they concoct great ideas, although they rarely consider how those ideas translate into task assignments. Consequently, projects are left flapping in the breeze, accompanied by “not my job” denials and shoulder-shrugging.

Tasks like this typically fall upon a few already overcommitted volunteers who produce most of the useful organizational work. Because they are overloaded with emergent day-to-day needs, long-term projects are pushed down the list. Absent leadership, no one drives completion. Volunteers leave, new volunteers arrive, and the project is passed along, losing both impetus and definition. Then, predictably, it dies on the vine.

The Operations Manual began as a serious 2010 attempt to preserve institutional memory and impose financial-administrative discipline. It later reappeared in the bylaws as a much narrower procedural manual, with the Vice President responsible for maintaining it. The problem, naturally, is that maintaining an unwritten manual is like polishing an imaginary fire extinguisher. It looks like preparedness only if nobody checks for pressure.

The Operations Manual appears to have completed the full entropic cycle: approved as a governance safeguard, ignored for years, reduced in scope, assigned to a custodian whose enthusiasm was not preserved in the official record, and possibly never created at all.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 17: Whither the Ops Manual? appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

This Absurdist Paper examines whether the Board, in its altruistic haste, stumbled into a policy of replacing searchable written minutes with video-recording archaeology.

Lose the Record, Save Some Work—Well, Maybe

I cannot resist calling the February 14 Board meeting minutes The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, because an informal decision might have lined the Bylaws up against the wall and peppered them with Tommy gun bullets. I say, “might have” because in a reflexive demonstration of organizational ineptitude, the minutes poorly document what the Board presumably wants to do with the minutes. So, whether those .45s ever hit the mark remains conveniently unknowable.

The February 14 minutes started with a more with a fizzle than a bang. Immediately following Item 1–Roll Call came the approval of the December minutes, labeled Item 4. What might have happened to Items 2 and 3 no one knows, but I digress. About Item 4, the approved February minutes reflect that the Chair asked the question whether there are any corrections to the December minutes, prompting the fateful discussion.

One director noted that the minutes included “the entire transcript”, asking whether there was “anything we can do to make it easier for [the Secretary].” The President opportunistically chimed in with his agreement, stating, “We have the YouTube. Between now and March, we should decide how we want to document the meetings, and leave the YouTube as the official record.”

The Tail Wagging the Dog

Wow! Here, once again, we see the President, employing the royal “we”, attempting to dictate policy to the Board, proposing that “we” consider a serious and fatally flawed deviation from the Bylaws via a casual decision that avoids due process. Between now and March, “we” are going to decide.

Another director offered relevant information that Zoom has AI Companion, which would create a transcript of the meeting, including attribution for each comment. That potential solution failed to gain traction with the Board, probably because no one felt like thinking. The President had done their thinking for them, and they were fine with that.

Case closed.

The record shows no further discussion, just the notation: “Accepted by Acclamation. Yes“.

I can almost hear the cheers and applause. But what, precisely, did the Board accept by acclamation? Typically, that line would refer to the adoption of the December minutes as the official record. However, its juxtaposition following the narrative where the President proclaimed YouTube as the governing record might suggest that the Board cheered and adopted his idea, too. And, there we have it—once again, as we saw in Absurdist 11, the tail is wagging the dog. Ambiguously, perhaps.

Maybe.

Whether any discussion of the matter occurred between that February non-discussion and March is unclear, but the March minutes supplied the first clue.

The Discussion that Didn’t Happen

Let us pause before the paperwork catches fire. Can we talk here?

The issue is not whether the Secretary should be required to transcribe every word of Board discussion. He should not. Verbatim transcripts are burdensome, tedious, and unnecessary. The issue is whether the Club’s permanent record should remain a written, searchable governance record or be reduced to a pointer toward a video recording.

The Bylaws require detailed summaries of motion discussions and detailed summaries of Board discussions of Club issues. They also state that Board minutes are the permanent record of Board actions and must be preserved forever for continuity and historical documentation. A YouTube recording may be useful as a supplemental reference, but it is not a substitute for minutes. It is not readily searchable, not reliably permanent, and not practical for future officers, directors, or Bylaws Committees trying to reconstruct why a decision was made.

Not Just Theoretical Nitpicking

This is not merely a theoretical issue. The Board, which cannot see beyond the end of its nose, apparently treats minutes as a necessary evil: a procedural nuisance to be handled with cursory expedients and then entombed in the Club catacombs once “accepted by acclamation,” where no one is expected to view the corpse again. Yet over the past couple of years, my Bylaws Committee colleagues and I researched all the meeting minutes back to 2000, to trace the history of actions by an often capricious Board. Inconsistency and shoddy recording techniques complicated our task, inspiring our refined and tightened Bylaws requirements for minutes.

Imagine doing that same research through incomplete minutes with the prospect of viewing 25 years of monthly one-hour YouTube videos with abysmal signal-to-noise ratio. Watch one of them. Tell me you want to see more lame jokes and procedural BS. Distilling useful information from any one of those videos requires the patience of Job.

And they’re not searchable. So good luck finding the information you want if you don’t even know whether it is in there!

The Bed They Forgot They Made (Again)

The Board unanimously accepted the Bylaws update in which the Bylaws Committee succinctly stated the stringent documentation requirements. They now appear willing to ignore this “inconvenient” provision, a repeating pattern we first observed in Absurdist 2.

If the burden on the Secretary is the problem, the solution is not to abandon written minutes. The solution is to use Zoom AI or other tools to prepare a draft summary, then require that the Secretary edit it into a concise written record. That preserves institutional memory without requiring anyone to hand-transcribe the Chairman’s insouciant, long-form procedural molasses or every stray joke that wandered into the meeting and died there.

The Board should establish a clear position that audio-video recordings are archival supplements only. The approved written minutes remain the official record.

What Happened Next?

As we mentioned above, the following month’s minutes reveal that the Board’s short-term memory was working. The President’s royal “we” apparently had become operative policy, at least for one month. To reiterate, the last line in the March minutes read: FOR FURTHER DETAILS OF THIS MEETING, SEE THE ZOOM MEETING RECORDING STORED ON YOUTUBE.

On the subject of document rot, the website, archive guardian of the Club, lists only the unapproved minutes for March 14. There is no approved version, although April minutes reflect acceptance by acclamation in Item 2. That month’s minutes had no disappearing items. But again, I digress. There’s just so much fertile ground for digression here.

But wait, there’s more!

That bold red disclaimer directing members to YouTube for an hour of audio-visual torture for further details is missing from the approved April and unapproved May minutes.

So, apparently, the Secretary figured one such notification was enough. Maybe that was the President’s decision. Who knows? Organization chart aside, the Secretary seems to receive his direction from the President, not from the Board. And that’s just fine with most of the directors.

Will we see the bold red caption in future minutes? No one knows. But does anyone care?

A Documentation Entropy Spiral

This is not an isolated lapse. It belongs to a developing pattern in which inconvenient information is removed from the written record in the name of simplification. We saw the same instinct in Absurdist 7 when the President called for removing financial details from Awards Committee reports because the Treasurer did not want to reconcile sales revenue against cash collections. Rather than define the numbers, explain the timing differences, or improve the format, the apparent solution was to remove the troublesome data.

That is the same failure mode at work here. Detailed minutes are burdensome, so the proposed cure is to thin the written record and point anyone interested in details toward a video. Award revenue detail causes confusion, so the proposed cure is to remove revenue detail from the Awards Committee report. In both cases, the organization treats information as the problem rather than recognizing that poor structure, poor explanation, and poor review are the real problems.

Data loss is permanent. A messy report can be improved. A lengthy discussion can be summarized. A confusing comparison can be explained. But once revenue detail disappears from committee reports, and once Board discussions disappear into an hour-long video black hole, the institutional record is weaker forever. The Board has not simplified governance. It has reduced its own memory.

In Conclusion

The common denominator is not efficiency. It is erasure. When numbers confuse the Board, remove the numbers. When discussion summaries burden the Secretary, remove the summaries. By that logic, the cleanest possible governance record would be a blank page, approved by acclamation and preserved forever.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 16: Document Entropy appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

A glance at the Club website’s Net Control Information page exposes the fermented chaos.

The website’s NCS training material is a May 2022 Study Guide. It refers candidates to the official Procedures for Net Control Stations. The website appears to present the September 2023 NCS Guide as that official document. Yet in May 2025, after a yearlong assignment from the President, the Bylaws Committee delivered a revised NCS Guide aligned with the current Bylaws. The President replied that it looked great except for the missing cover page and suggested an NCS meeting. After that, official disposition becomes foggy.

Then an unofficial Word version of the May 2025 Guide surfaced in the hands of an NCS operator, while the website still appeared to rely on the 2023 Guide. To complete the tableau, at least two prominent NCSs stood up during the 2025 Eyeball Q&A and announced that, regardless of what the NCS Guide says, they will check people in from AIM on their nets without RF confirmation.

No officer or director objected. In fact, the President stated that he had been thinking about it for a few months, and felt that we have too many rules. He thought the AIM rule could be moved to the “Guidelines” section.

Who’s Running the Show?

The President’s response was more revealing than the NCS complaints. Rather than reaffirming that Club nets are governed by Club procedure, he agreed that experienced NCSs should run their nets as they see fit and suggested that some rules get in the way. He continued by stating that he had even tried running a net himself while ignoring the rule and liked the results.

That is how mandatory procedure becomes optional culture. First, a rule is inconvenient. Then, a respected operator ignores it. Then, leadership rationalizes the exception. Finally, the document is revised to make the noncompliance look intentional.

Of course, the President’s proposal to weaken the rule into a mere suggestion assumes that a single, specific set of governing documents exists. In reality, the net operations people do not know which end is up. Is it the 2023 Guide, the 2022 Study Guide, the Bylaws, or the unadopted but nevertheless circulating 2025 Guide? No one knows.

When no clear document chain exists, authority migrates from policy to personality. The written rule loses force, and the practical rule becomes whatever the most confident operator, most useful volunteer, or least confrontational President allows.

No wonder they all do it their own way. The nets run, contacts are made, nobody wants to offend the productive volunteers, and “that’s how we do it” gradually replaces “that’s what the rule says.”

The Rules are Too Mean

In other Absurdist Papers, we have seen how directors selectively enforce the Bylaws. Is it any wonder, then, that contempt for documented rules pervades the lower echelons of our subject organization?

And, by the way, because the President is charged with net oversight and has assumed practical control over the website where the governing documents are published, this whole mess falls directly on his shoulders.

As we used to say in The Bahamas, “The fish stinks from the head on down.”

Entropy Prevails

What we have here is not a document-control problem. We have a governance collapse wearing a headset.

The issue is not whether any one NCS is helpful, popular, or well-intentioned. The issue is whether the Club is governed by adopted rules or by accumulated exceptions. A rule ignored by favored operators, contradicted by obsolete training materials, displaced by unpublished drafts, and left unenforced by silent officers is not a rule. It is decoration.

The Club does not need another NCS Guide. It needs to decide whether an NCS Guide means anything.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 15: The NCS Guide That Was, Wasn’t, and Might Be appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Our subject organization conducts local low-power nets, called Eyeball QRP Nets, at its annual gathering. They are available only to people physically present at the event. Their practical purpose is simple: they allow attendees to pad their contact logs with minimal effort.

QRP is an old radio Q-code meaning “low power.” Legitimate low-power contacts can be a source of pride among amateur radio operators because they require restraint, skill, patience, favorable conditions, and sometimes enough stubbornness to qualify as a personality disorder. Eyeball QRP contacts are different. There, the radio serves mainly to legitimize slam-dunk contacts among participants who are already within shouting distance. Typically, stations are placed in adjacent rooms, while mobile stations are strategically positioned in the parking lot, bravely operating from somewhere near the designated smoking area.

This raises an obvious question: why are grown men and women simulating radio contacts instead of hobnobbing with friends they have not seen for a year? The contacts are foregone conclusions. The only real uncertainty is whether the operator being called has wandered off to lunch, the restroom, or some other dangerous frontier beyond the confines of NetLogger.

The logical conclusion is obvious, which means the organization will avoid it with heroic determination. If two people in adjacent rooms are making performative radio contacts that could be accomplished more efficiently by ordinary speech, why cling to the equipment? Eliminate the radios. Eliminate the charade. Grant each participant free award credit for the certificate of his choice and send him to lunch with the other boys and girls. The result would be no less artificial, but it would at least be honest.

Award Credit, by Any Other Name…

Eyeball QRP nets are not troubling because they produce too many contacts. They are troubling because they normalize the conversion of proximity, choreography, and attendance into award credit, while pretending the result is equivalent to ordinary operating achievement.

This Absurdist Paper explores their evolution and justification, as well as their negative impact on the organization, and we will see how the Board failed to act on a reasonable proposal to throttle back these activities.

An Innocuous Beginning

The original purpose of QRP nets—specifically those on 40m and 75m SSB—was to reduce congestion on regular evening nets by allowing Eyeball attendees to make local contacts earlier in the day. This served a practical and equitable function, benefiting both attendees and non-attendees. I have no beef with preserving this function.

On the other hand, the subsequent expansion into digital and CW modes has no such justification. These additional QRP nets offer a shortcut to award credit without serving the broader membership. I have heard that the seminal incident involved a benevolent gesture to a member who needed a 100-point RTTY award as the remaining impediment to his Master’s Degree. In our subject organization, if it happens once, you can count on seeing it again.

Those familiar with the arguments I have presented in these Absurdist Papers will see that Eyeball QRP net proliferation fits the broader pattern of entropy masking through rule liberalization. A single precedent, unnoticed by a distracted Board, becomes de facto operating policy. Attempts to dial it back are met with fierce resistance.

An Eyeball Attendance Incentive?

Proponents defend Eyeball QRP nets as an attendance booster for the annual event. That may be true, but it proves very little. Any giveaway can attract people by appealing to greed. Easy awards, easy money—same mechanism.

The real question is whether the incentive supports the Club’s purpose or corrupts one of its core institutions. In this case, the incentive is not a door prize. It is award credit.

That matters.

By promoting Eyeball QRP nets in rare bands and modes as an attendance lure, Club leadership is whoring out the awards system, one of the Club’s predominate features. Protecting the integrity of that system was a central component of my decade-long service. I am therefore opposed to dangling award credit as bait for attendance at a volunteer-run event. If prospective Eyeball hosts need help breaking even, the Club should find honest ways to help them. It should not convert the awards program into promotional currency.

The Club offers awards with a broad range of difficulty. They were designed around normal operation, not room-to-room communication. Ordinarily, qualifying contacts require time, effort, persistence, propagation, knowledge of modes that require skills beyond talking into a microphone, and enough patience to endure whatever fresh procedural indignity the net coughs up that evening. The closed-loop Eyeball environment removes most of that uncertainty. It hands out contacts with almost no effort beyond remembering to repeatedly say or type, “5-9.”

That is the core fraud of the exercise. It preserves the outward form of radio achievement while stripping away much of the substance that made the achievement meaningful. The contact may satisfy the letter of the rules. It does not satisfy the spirit of amateur radio, nor the spirit of an awards program supposedly based on earned accomplishment.

Who Needs the Radios?

So why bother with the radios? The entire exercise operates with a sly wink: “We are doing real radio here. This is a Club-sanctioned net.” Fine. If the organization wants to stage award-credit theater, let us at least stop pretending the props are sacred. Ditch the radios and hand out the credits.

Actually, why even do that? Money would be the cleaner inducement. Hand out hundred-dollar bills at the door and free attendees for socializing, tours, programs, real radio games, lectures, and, of course, the sacred rites of donuts and pizza.

The difference is that cash would at least be honest. It would deplete the treasury, while preserving the awards system. It would not pretend to be operating achievement. Eyeball QRP award credit is more insidious because it borrows the prestige of the awards program to subsidize attendance at a social event.

Let’s Be Honest

Award credit is not a trinket. It is the accounting unit of the Club’s central mythology (although as we saw in Absurdist 7, the Board disdains accurate revenue accounting because it is too hard). When award credit becomes an attendance premium, the awards program stops measuring achievement and starts functioning as promotional currency.

If the real objective is attendance, say so and fund the inducement honestly. Do not launder event promotion through the awards system and then congratulate the organization for preserving tradition. That is couponing with QSLs, not tradition.

Worse, as we will see next, these seemingly harmless contrivances do more than cheapen awards. Another, subtler side-effect of rewarding a small subset of members who can attend the Eyeball causes significant damage to the regular nets the Club supposedly exists to sustain.

No Harm Done?

Eyeball QRP nets are often defended as harmless fun. That defense depends on defining harm so narrowly that only a flaming transmitter and three FCC citations would qualify.

The damage is more subtle. These nets create a closed loop of manufactured activity. They deliver short-term satisfaction to those inside the room while distorting the broader award ecosystem outside it. Their danger lies not in any single contact, but in the cumulative effect of normalizing artificial scarcity removal, preferential access, and award inflation.

Looking beyond the award system, Eyeball QRP nets subtly degrade the Club’s regularly scheduled nets.

Here’s how this “inducement” undermines the organization.

Degradation of Award Meaning: Achievement by Seating Chart

Eyeball QRP nets approach the thermodynamic ideal of a no-effort award system. Uncertainty is eliminated, scarcity disappears, and outcomes are largely pre-coordinated via a sign-up sheet before anyone even warms up the coax. Participants use conveniently nearby radios to communicate across a hallway, parking lot, or even between two corners of the same meeting room while pretending atmospheric propagation deserves the credit.

Under those conditions, RF becomes little more than ceremonial decoration. Social proximity replaces operating skill as the true transmission medium. The resulting awards no longer recognize persistence, technique, or success under difficult conditions. They merely certify that the holder showed up on time and remembered to say “5-9” before the pizza arrived.

Achievement has not been abolished. It has simply been replaced with attendance verification.

Cannibalization of Open Nets: Feeding on the Host

Eyeball QRP nets do not create operating energy so much as redirect it from healthier systems. They offer a rapid, low-friction pathway to award credit, allowing participants to accumulate contacts in concentrated bursts rather than through sustained participation on ordinary nets.

The result is predictable. Time and motivation are siphoned away from regularly scheduled operations, especially fragile low-density nets such as CW and digital modes, which already survive on volunteer persistence, habit, and the stubborn refusal of a few operators to admit the patient expired years ago.

In effect, the closed-loop Eyeball system preserves itself by hollowing out the open system beneath it. It behaves less like fellowship and more like a parasite politely wearing a convention badge.

Failure of the Anchoring Effect: Instant Gratification, Amateur Radio Edition

Historically, earning early award milestones required weeks or months of participation. That gradual accumulation of contacts served an important psychological function: it built operating habits. Members became regular participants because progress required regular presence.

Eyeball QRP nets short-circuit that process. Instead of developing operating habits organically, attendees can harvest large amounts of early credit in a single weekend through choreographed, near-zero-difficulty contacts. The Club effectively replaces gradual engagement with an awards power run.

Many participants obtain certificates and then quietly disappear from ordinary nets, having extracted the dopamine without acquiring the habit. The remaining regular operators are left to populate increasingly sparse airwaves while the organization congratulates itself for “growing participation” through accounting tricks worthy of a struggling streaming service inflating subscriber metrics.

Displacement of the Gathering’s Original Purpose: Fellowship by Schedule Compression

The original purpose of an Eyeball gathering was obvious and healthy: social interaction, shared experiences, storytelling, informal learning, technical discussion, seeing local sights, and the rare opportunity for geographically scattered operators to behave like actual human beings for a weekend.

As structured QRP operations expand, those activities are increasingly shoved to the margins. Tours, lectures, spontaneous conversation, and relaxed camaraderie must compete with tightly scheduled award-production sessions whose practical purpose is maximizing certificate throughput before checkout time Sunday morning. Furthermore, after making copious simulated contacts, attendees must sit around writing out QSL cards chronicling their dubious achievements.

The gathering gradually transforms from a social event with incidental radio activity into a closed-loop contact factory interrupted occasionally by donuts.

Ironically, the organization defends this transformation in the name of “fellowship,” even while participants spend increasing portions of the gathering isolated behind radios making simulated long-distance contacts with people standing forty feet away near the ice machine.

A Failed Solution

I believe the only viable path to curtailing further mission creep is to tighten the language in the bylaws. At a minimum, the bylaws should state that the President must approve all nets, including those operated at the Eyeball or other special events, if the contacts are to count toward awards.

This would restore clear operational oversight without requiring a sweeping overhaul of award definitions or imposing burdensome enforcement mechanisms.

Beyond that, restricting the types of nets eligible for Eyeball QRP operation would help return those nets to their original purpose: relieving pressure on nighttime regular nets, not manufacturing “handout” awards.

Such a proposal was made by the Bylaws Committee but was rejected by the Board at its December 2025 meeting by an 11–1 vote, with one abstention. The discussion recorded in the minutes reflected a broad misunderstanding of both the content and intent of the amendment. It was painfully clear that most of the Board had not read the proposal closely—or at all—although one director was honest enough to admit it and properly abstained from voting.

Yet the discussion labored on, with mostly cursory comments oblique to the purpose of the amendment. Reading the minutes of that December 13 meeting provides graduate-level instruction in how to prolong a conversation about something no one has read or understood. The Board never actually debated the motion. It debated process anxiety, host sovereignty, personal grievance, tradition, and hurt feelings, then accidentally voted on award integrity.

Why It Failed

Ostensibly, the motion failed because it tried to solve a real structural problem with a proposal that was too detailed, too late-changing, too emotionally loaded, and too easily reframed as an attack on Eyeball tradition and prior award legitimacy.

The Board chose social comfort over award-system discipline. Not shocking. Mature volunteer organizations usually protect the ritual first and the principle second, then publish minutes proving no one knew which was which.

Politics Enter the Picture

There was also a political layer. The President was entering another reelection cycle, and the balloting period began only weeks later. Around that time, many of his actions appeared directed at sanitizing his image, preserving support, and avoiding conflict with potential rivals. That context helps explain his public reversal on Eyeball QRP nets, even though he had privately expressed support for the underlying amendment well before the meeting.

The Vice President was the most obvious potential alternative candidate and also the leading champion of Eyeball QRP nets. Whether the President’s concern was justified is almost beside the point. If he believed that threatening the Vice President’s pet project might provoke opposition, his conduct at the meeting becomes easier to understand. Once he saw where the discussion was headed, he aligned himself with the majority and made a performative display of injured dignity, recasting the amendment as an insult to prior award recipients rather than a prospective safeguard for award integrity.

In retrospect, had the Bylaws Committee proposed the amendment in February instead of December, after the election was a done deal, it might have fared better. This is not an indictment on an extremely productive committee on which I served with pride. It is merely an admission that we could have been more politically intuitive. Reform introduced during an incumbent’s image-polishing season is unlikely to receive a fair hearing, especially when it threatens a popular ritual and a powerful ally’s favorite toy.

So, according to the bylaws, the subject is dead for six months. Now that the Bylaws Committee has been reconstituted, reconsideration is unlikely.

Conclusion: Fellowship by Dummy Load

Eyeball QRP nets did not emerge from malice. They emerged the way most institutional distortions emerge: incrementally, emotionally, and under the protective camouflage of “fun,” “fellowship,” and “tradition.” A small accommodation became a precedent. A precedent became a ritual. A ritual became untouchable.

That progression matters because mature organizations rarely collapse from dramatic corruption. More often, they slowly liberalize standards, redefine achievement downward, and confuse participation incentives with organizational health. The outward forms remain intact long after the underlying meaning has leaked away.

The radios are still there. The awards are still there. The nets are still there. Yet increasingly, the activity resembles theater more than accomplishment: operators sitting in adjacent meeting rooms exchanging ceremonial signal reports while the organization solemnly records the resulting “achievement” in its permanent records.

At some point, honesty becomes preferable to ritual.

If the real purpose of Eyeball QRP nets is attendance promotion, fellowship, and accelerated award accumulation, then the organization should admit it openly. Hand out attendance coupons redeemable for award credit, skip the close-proximity RF pantomime, and release everyone to lunch before another hour disappears into the sacred rite of saying “5-9” through a dummy load near the ice machine.

At least that system would be honest.

Net Charades Will Doubtless Continue

Instead, the organization preserves the illusion of difficulty while quietly replacing accomplishment with choreography. The awards survive. Their meaning slowly evaporates. And because the process occurs gradually, socially, and under the banner of “having fun,” many members cannot even perceive the entropy unfolding around them.

That, perhaps, is the most impressive achievement of all.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 14: Free Awards for the Price of Admission appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

“Speeding up the nets” has become one of those managerial slogans that survives because it sounds better than the thinking behind it. Everyone agrees that faster nets would be better. Newcomers would be less likely to wander off in search of a hobby that does not require listening to prolonged uncertainty on 40 meters. Net control stations would spend less time herding RF cats. Regular participants would get through their contacts without the evening turning into a hostage situation.

Unfortunately, the usual remedies attack the part of the problem that is easiest to see and least responsible for the delay. We time preambles, shorten scripts, and cut explanatory language. We congratulate ourselves for shaving seconds from fixed overhead while preserving, and sometimes expanding, the variable delays that actually make nets drag.

This is how entropic organizations pretend to solve operational problems. They optimize the visible nuisance while protecting the sacred cows. In this case, the sacred cows include marginal contacts, relays, retries, combo accommodations, extra calls for new stations, asynchronous check-ins, club and special event drag-alongs, and geographic-credit contrivances such as on-the-line and on-the-point operations. Apparently, the path to efficiency is to remove instructions while multiplying exceptions. Somewhere, a process engineer just put his head through drywall.

This Absurdist Paper examines how well-intended changes in our subject organization’s nets cumulatively missed the mark.

Aiming at the Wrong Target

Script length is a fixed cost. It can be measured in seconds and predicted before the net begins. It does not compound. A thirty-second announcement remains a thirty-second announcement whether ten stations check in or forty.

The real delay lives elsewhere. It lives in contacts that almost complete, then fail, and in stations that cannot hear each other but continue trying because the potential award value is too attractive to abandon. It lives in relays, partial reports, repeated calls, correction loops, and the strange confidence with which operators infer signal reports from audio they did not actually copy.

Propagation makes this worse, but propagation is not the whole explanation. Poor conditions merely expose the weakness of the operating model. When the net structure rewards rare entities, special categories, implicit multipliers, and familiar high-value participants, operators will spend time pursuing them even when contact probability is poor. That behavior may be rational for the individual award hunter, but it is costly to the net as a shared system.

The organization then mistakes the resulting drag for a script problem. That is like blaming a traffic jam on the wording of the road signs while continuing to allow livestock, parade floats, and amateur fireworks in the left lane.

Discouraging Newcomers: Unintended Consequences

The collateral damage falls on newcomers. A newcomer does not yet understand which contacts matter, why certain stations attract attention, why one operator produces multiple credits, why a marginal contact is pursued beyond the point of dignity, or why the same familiar voices seem to dominate the useful exchanges. The net becomes a game whose rules are partly written, partly customary, and partly known only to those who have been marinating in the culture for years.

Cutting explanatory material makes that worse. The insider does not need the explanation. The newcomer does. A mature organization that removes explanation in the name of speed is not making the process more efficient. It is making the process less readable.

That is how entropy presents itself in volunteer organizations. The system becomes increasingly optimized for those who already know how to exploit it. The Club expects new participants to infer the rules by observation, boredom, and osmosis. This may work for sourdough starter. It is less impressive as an onboarding strategy.

What Really Slows Down Nets

Rule liberalization has been a recurring theme in The Absurdist Papers, as it was in my broader paper, “Closed Systems, Internal Incentives, and Entropy in Amateur Radio Award Nets.” Accommodations ostensibly adopted to increase inclusion can have the opposite effect when they increase complexity, slow the net, and make the process less intelligible to newcomers. They favor established members by increasing demand for internal contacts while crowding out external inputs. The result is a net that claims to welcome new participation while preserving operating customs that mostly benefit those already fluent in the machinery.

The following examples show how well-intended, but misguided, rules and customs slow the nets while masquerading as member-friendly refinements.

Combos: A Family Affair

When two related operators use the same equipment from the same location, the Club calls them a “combo”. The original rule for combos states that calling stations contacting one of the two operators receive a “free” call to the other at the same time. Of course, this means that if a desirable combo checks into a net, most stations will opt to call them, increasing the average time cost per check-in.

As if that wasn’t enough, somewhere along the way, the Club decided that working both members of the combo on a single turn not only applied to calling stations, but also to the combo when making their own calls. The mathematics are mind-boggling when two combos check in, especially when other “entitled” stations, such as new check-ins and stations calling new check-ins, exist on the list. Later, we will see an example of how this impacted a net.

Because net scripts do not explain the rules, combos present challenges to newcomers. Some are familiar with an alternate definition from another awards net, in which a combo is an operator bringing along a club call sign. In our subject organization, that has another name: “business as usual.” Thus, net controllers must give newcomers frequent procedural briefings.

Expansion in the works?

Per the bylaws, two parties operating as a combo must be members of the same immediate family, either two married people, parent and child, grandparent and grandchild, or two siblings. One director is now pushing an expansion of the already liberal combo rules to permit “tandem check-ins”, which would not require any family ties. This would make net life particularly interesting at events where many unrelated operators cluster, although the sponsoring director has proposed some size limitations.

The need to contact both members of a combo individually wastes time. If both are using the same station and a contact was successful with one, why not just grant the other automatically, cutting the time for each station calling a combo? Purists argue that to be legal, one needs to complete a valid call with each call sign worked. Yet the same purists gladly accept 12 QSLs for a single contact using club, special event, and location multipliers described below.

Drag-Along Clubs and Special Events

The Club allows each net check-in to bring one club and one special event call sign. These “clubs” typically exist only for award credit, with minimum membership the FCC requires. They typically have “interesting” prefixes or suffixes with value for obtaining particular awards. Meanwhile, special events stations are short-term call signs commemorating activities, locations, or historical events. Our organization uses them for another purpose—specifically, multiplying award credit. Being single-letter suffixes, they also have tie-ins for increased value with certain awards.

Contacting a station with this excess baggage doesn’t typically burden insiders, because they know the shortcuts. They can call “KL9XYZ and the gaggle…” But newbies require an explanation of this unusual practice, another speed bump for the net. Furthermore, check-in delays result when net controllers must do the bookkeeping to properly list all the ancillary stations’ call signs.

Location Multiplier

In Absurdist 9, we discussed yet another check-in list confounder, the location boondoggle. This gives the caller credit for as many locations as the called station declares itself to exist in at the time of the call, subject to the prevailing rules. Being “on the line” or “on the point” means claiming to be in either two or three locations, except for Four Corners, where the station can pretend to be in four states at once. Again, net controller bookkeeping and new station confusion are complications of this contrivance.

Marginal Contact Guesswork and Assistance

Now, we get down to radio propagation, poor operating conditions, and making contacts at all cost. Some stations in desirable locations possess a weak signal or are completely unintelligible. But the impetus on the net is to make contacts. Some old hands feel that checking in and making the attempt is good enough, even if they can’t hear the other end or vice-versa. So, they spend valuable net minutes, requesting relays and making multiple guesses at signal reports. Benevolent net controllers prolong the misery for other stations awaiting their turn by encouraging more of the same until the signal reports randomly match. Meanwhile, five minutes might have transpired, the others on the net have fallen asleep, and stations toward the end of the list become impatient and decide that even having a conversation with the wife about the running toilet would be preferable to the droning boredom. So they leave.

New Station Accommodations

A few years back, in an honest attempt to encourage increased external participation, the net operations made some changes. The new station rule not only entitled newcomers to make two calls per turn, but also gave any non-new check-in the option to make a second “free” call if their first call contacted a newbie. What appeared to be a growth tool slows down nets in both obvious and insidious ways.

In practice, frequently newcomers check in, then ultimately tire of all the insider machinations and the slow pace, and bail out before their turn arrives. They do not announce their departure, so they remain on the list. Because they still appear on the list as “new” stations, they are appealing targets, representing unmined potential contacts, so established stations continue to call them. Each such call requires several tries, and usually there are several such absent newbies for a calling station to cycle through. While some savvy NCSs preempt stations flogging such dead horses, saying, “He hasn’t been answering,” others will play along in the hope that the newbie’s temporary absence was due to taking care of nature or because net boredom induced only a temporary nod-off.

Yet more net delays.

One Net Said It All

The problem is not theoretical. Occasionally, one net becomes a complete field demonstration of the entire failure mode. One such specimen occurred on April 8, 2023, when a 40-Meter Late Net managed to collect nearly every delay mechanism discussed above into a single evening of procedural archaeology.

That Late Net had 43 total check-ins, of which there were:

• Two combos (four stations), one of which had one “new” operator
• Four “new” stations in all
• Five stations dragged along clubs
• One mobile in Alaska, highly desirable, but difficult copy
• One regular check-in from Canada that few can hear but who is persistent in his quest for contacts

Aside from the “usual” slow-down factors involving propagation and list bookkeeping, the dual combos ramped up list logistics to new heights. One of the combo operators was “new”. So, when their turn came, that combo member optionally could make two calls. If they called a “new” station, they would get another free call. And each station they called could call the “other half” of the combo. An advanced degree in combinatorics would have helped.

The NCS survived, with battle scars. He deserves a Purple Heart for that duty assignment.

A Proposed COMBO Remedy

After participating in that classic net, an interminable affair that lasted more than two hours, I floated a simple proposal to the President, Vice President, and my Area Director:

If stations calling someone dragging along a club call sign can receive bundled credit, why require stations calling a combo to work both members individually?

The practical rationale was obvious. All the “do you want the other half of the combo?” ritual and the additional calling slowed the net. If the two operators were using the same station from the same location, the two contacts could be bundled for net purposes, just as club and special-event call signs already were.

My proposed rule was simple: if you call one side of a combo, you automatically receive both.

Naturally, the proposal went nowhere. The objections were familiar: both members of the combo should receive equal operating time; new rules confuse people; purists would object. As I previously mentioned, this last objection was especially precious, given the same system’s willingness to multiply credit through clubs, special-event calls, and geographic location gimmicks from a single exchange.

I’ll give you “purists”.

So instead of addressing a recurring variable delay, the organization returned to timing scripts and trimming seconds from fixed overhead.

This is the essence of the problem.

Losing Clarity Along with the Fat

In another context, I have written about weight loss that removes muscle along with fat. The same mistake appears here. The organization trims script language as if all reduction were improvement. But some of what gets cut is not fat. It is connective tissue.

Explanatory language helps newcomers understand what they are hearing. It gives structure to a process that otherwise sounds like ritualized static interrupted by familiar call signs. Removing that language may make the script leaner, but it also makes the net weaker.

This is the organizational equivalent of losing muscle along with the fat.

Existing players in an increasingly closed system overvalue the weight loss and minimize the muscle loss. By the time muscle atrophy becomes crippling, it will be too late.

Are Faster Nets Possible?

The issue is not that faster nets are undesirable. Faster nets would be useful. They would reduce fatigue, improve newcomer retention, make NCS work less miserable, and restore some sense that the evening has not been donated to a procedural sinkhole. The issue is that the organization keeps aiming at the part of the process least responsible for the delay.

Script trimming is attractive because it is safe. Nobody’s favorite award shortcut is threatened. Nobody’s pet accommodation is questioned. Nobody has to tell an operator that a barely audible contact should be abandoned after a reasonable attempt. Nobody has to examine whether rule liberalization has converted the net from a welcoming entry point into an insider harvesting machine. Instead, the organization cuts explanations and congratulates itself for becoming more efficient.

But efficiency is not produced by removing clarity. It is produced by reducing friction. The friction in these nets does not come primarily from preambles, announcements, or inter-round explanations. It comes from accumulated exceptions, marginal-contact persistence, award-driven incentives, and the reluctance to say no when a contact has already consumed more time than it is worth.

Life Inside the Box

This is how a mature organization slides into operational entropy. It does not usually collapse from one spectacularly bad decision. It becomes slower, stranger, and less readable through a hundred small indulgences, each defensible in isolation and corrosive in combination. The insiders adapt. The newcomers drift away. The remaining participants then mistake the absence of newcomers for lack of interest rather than evidence of process failure.

Thus, the net hurries up and waits. It rushes through the material that explains the process, then bogs down in the customs and accommodations that obscure it. It saves seconds where clarity lives and spends minutes where indulgence lives.

The nets are not slow because too much is being explained. They are slow because too much is being indulged.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

If you want some further reading about organizational entropy, I have written a paper that relates ham radio award nets to thermodynamic systems. Sounds boring, I know, but if you wish to dive into it, you can download it here.

The post Absurdist 13: Hurry Up and Wait appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

What began as our subject organization’s highest honor, guarded by demanding requirements and broad institutional ratification, has been softened over time by substitutions, enabling practices, reduced approval thresholds, and increasingly elastic operating rules. The familiar excuse is participation. The predictable result is dilution. Thus, with no insult intended toward those who earned it, we arrive at the uncomfortable question: when does a pinnacle award begin to resemble a participation trophy?

From Sharp Pinnacle to Broad Plateau

At its inception in 1986, the Master’s Degree rules bore the caption “HIGHEST HONOR AFFORDED A CENTURY CLUB MEMBER.” The award conferred permanent VIP status, a role as a permanent advisory member of the Board of Directors, and significant special treatment on the nets, including immediate check-in and QSL manager service. Beyond the specified award résumé, an applicant required unanimous approval by the Board of Directors and two-thirds approval by members voting in the next presidential election.

That was not casual approval. That was institutional ratification.

It is therefore unsurprising that the first Master’s Degree was not conferred until 1993, seven years after the award was conceived. One more followed in 1995, then one each in 1996, 1997, and 1999. This was a rare and highly desirable distinction. It made members feel good because it was difficult, selective, and symbolically important. But with such stringent requirements, only a handful would ever earn it unless the rules were softened.

Predictably, rules liberalization followed. By the end of 2004, only fifteen members had achieved the pinnacle award. Then, from 2005 through 2010, forty-three more Masters were confirmed, a rate of roughly seven per year. During my decade-long tenure as Awards Secretary, I processed seventeen Master’s applications, ten of them from 2023 through 2025.

Award Deflation?

By 2023, the application no longer described the Master’s Degree as the Club’s highest honor. It called it “one of the highest awards offered by The 3905 Century Club.” One of the highest. Somewhere along the way, even the language developed a limp. The same 2023 application required the applicant to hold the listed awards, demonstrate participation, dedication, service, and courtesy, and receive approval by a simple majority of the Board of Directors.

That is a profound change. The original standard required unanimous Board approval followed by ratification of the voting membership. The modern standard requires only a simple majority vote by the same Board whose defects I examined in Absurdist 11. In practice, the approval process has become largely perfunctory. The President has even spoken of eliminating it altogether, because apparently the final gatekeeper is still too much gate.

The award’s benefits were also reduced along the way. I imagine someone eventually realized that Board meetings would become even more unmanageable with dozens of permanent advisors sitting around the virtual table. So that status evaporated, along with the QSL manager service. Yet the current application still says the award “confers a number of honors and privileges as outlined in the Club Bylaws.” Unfortunately, the current bylaws contain no corresponding explanation of those honors and privileges. The promise remains; the substance has vanished. A perfect little museum piece of organizational entropy.

[Mea culpa alert: I served on the Bylaws Committee and chaired the Awards Committee during the last bylaws update, yet failed to notice this disconnect. I would flog myself, but the Board might appoint a committee to study whether they should gift me the whip. –AE4NT]

Progress is Our Most Important Product

Changes to the Master’s Degree requirements themselves were scorned as an affront to history, and therefore are rare. The more subtle liberalization was indirect. The Board did not need to weaken the Master’s Degree directly if it weakened the prerequisite environment underneath it. Drag-along club call signs and special event call signs multiplied the value of contacts. “On the line” and “on the point” rules mentioned in Absurdist 9 loosened geographical presence limitations and created contact proliferation. In the extreme case, one station claiming operation from the Four Corners monument while dragging along a club call and a special event call could generate twelve QSLs: three for each state. That is not operating achievement so much as geographically fictitious award arithmetic with RF attached.

As if the floodgates were not gaping open enough, the remote portable rule described in Absurdist 9 removed much of the remaining resistance. Geographic location became increasingly abstract. A station no longer had to be physically difficult, modest, inconvenient, or even local in any meaningful historical sense. With remote operation, a member could exploit powerful stations, favorable geography, large antennas, and tall towers while the award system continued pretending that the old definitions carried the same weight.

Furthermore, to vault the DX hurdle, an operator arranging a contact with a local friend who could check in to a net remotely from some far-off land eliminated the guesswork and happenstance associated with DX contacts. This practice resembles meeting scheduling and performance art more than ham radio.

Eyeball QRP Nets: the Final Softening

Then came the expansion of Eyeball QRP nets into CW and digital modes, which transformed some of the Master’s Degree’s more stubborn prerequisites into weekend errands. Under normal operating conditions, earning 100-Point awards on relatively inactive CW and digital nets could take years of patience, propagation, and persistence. At the annual gathering, however, the same requirements could be dispatched through travel, proximity, and a weekend of slam-dunk, close-range, simulated radio, replete with drag-along clubs and special events for all. The award requirement survived; the difficulty did not.

None of these expedients existed in 1986, when the Master’s Degree was conceived. Each accommodation could be defended individually as harmless, practical, inclusive, or modern. But awards are ecosystems. Change the rules for contacts, stations, locations, and prerequisite awards, and the effects propagate upward. The Master’s Degree may still require work, but the nature of the work has changed. Years of patient and arduous labor are no longer the same barrier they once were. The pinnacle was not abolished. It was bulldozed into a strip mine.

A Case Study in Invisible Standards Reduction

The 75M DX Award has become the practical choke point for many Master’s Degree aspirants. That ought to mean something. A bottleneck preserves value because it requires patience, operating skill, propagation, persistence, and the cooperation of reality, which remains stubbornly indifferent to award fever.

But even there, the Club has found ways to reduce friction. Remote operation has made powerful stations available to members who could never reasonably build, buy, or site such systems themselves. Strategically located stations with towering antennas and European propagation advantages are now within reach, as are remote stations in desirable DX entities. Meanwhile, the expansion of “on the line” thinking into country credit supplies yet another accommodation. Each of these changes can be defended individually as harmless, modern, inclusive, or merely convenient. The trouble is cumulative. Each accommodation changes the operating environment. Each workaround makes the next workaround easier to justify. The hurdle remains printed on the application, but the ground beneath it is gradually raised.

No member with a secure place in the Eyeball pizza line would be expected to decry such enabling rule softening, whether insidious or blatant. After one notable recent DX BOGO, which occurred around the same time another member was participating in nets from remote sites scattered around the planet, some members began lionizing the pair as “Master’s Makers.” In a practical sense, they were not wrong. Their efforts supplied a needed boost for aspirants stalled at the 75M DX bottleneck. But that is precisely the point. The requirement still exists, but it has been converted from a test of sustained operating achievement into a logistics problem with RF attached.

Damn the Rules: Let Bygones Be Bygones

If courtesy and service are stated requirements, what does Board approval mean when a candidate’s record raises obvious concerns on both fronts?

The subjective requirement is where the process becomes most vulnerable. The application does not merely ask whether the candidate possesses the required certificate numbers. It also requires demonstrated participation, dedication, service, and courtesy. Those words are not ornamental. If they mean anything, the Board must be willing to ask whether a candidate’s conduct supports the honor being conferred.

Yet the modern approval process makes that unlikely. A “quick, procedural simple majority vote” by a compliant Board is a weak safeguard, especially when dissent can be expressed by absence rather than by vote. In such a case, a 9-0 approval may look unanimous on paper while concealing the more relevant fact that some Directors simply declined to appear and be counted, leaving four areas completely unrepresented in the decision. That is not moral courage. It is procedural laundering.

In recent years, Board motions proposing Masters for approval include certification that the candidate has met the award requirement, then list volunteer roles served, but never mention whether those roles were performed with diligence and courtesy. Thus, any essence of past improprieties are swept under the rug in the interest of expedient inclusion, if not intellectual dishonesty.

Predictable Results

The result is predictable. A controversial candidate can pass through the gate not because the doubts were answered, but because the Board lacked the will to act on them. Then the organization celebrates “our newest Master,” and the public ritual of approval overwrites the private reality of reluctance.

The problem is not that an imperfect person or two received the Master’s Degree. Every organization must decide how much imperfection it can tolerate, and none of us is applying for sainthood, thank God. The problem is that the Board’s modern process lacks the courage and structure to evaluate the subjective requirements honestly. If courtesy and service are real criteria, the Board must sometimes say no. If it never says no, then those criteria are decorative.

The Pinnacle, Paved Over

And there it is: after forty years, the Master’s Degree still exists, still carries its name, still adorns the list of Club distinctions, and still requires work. But it no longer means what it meant when conceived. The name survived, the certificate survived, and the aura survived, at least in the minds of those who still need the aura. What did not survive intact was the resistance.

That is how institutional dilution works. No one stands up and declares, “Let us cheapen the highest honor.” That would be too honest, and therefore immediately disqualifying in a mature, albeit entropic, bureaucracy. Instead, each change arrives as a kindness, a convenience, a modernization, an accommodation, or a practical necessity. One rule softens, one prerequisite becomes easier, one difficult operating condition is bypassed, and one geographic fiction is tolerated. One Board vote becomes perfunctory and one subjective standard is ignored because enforcing it would be unpleasant. Then everyone looks around years later and pretends the same mountain still stands, even though half of it has been strip-mined for participation gravel.

Institutional Softening

The recipients earned what the Club offered. That point bears repeating because some will pretend not to understand it. All of them deserve congratulations and admiration for their motivation and drive. I strongly believe that they all would have ultimately earned the Masters even if the rules had not softened. This is not an attack on the Masters. It is an indictment of the institution that kept sanding down the edges of its own pinnacle while congratulating itself for preserving tradition. Tradition is not preserved by keeping the label and hollowing out the contents. That is taxidermy, not stewardship.

The most damning part is not that the Master’s Degree became more attainable. Accessibility is not inherently dishonorable. The damning part is that attainability was pursued without a serious accounting of what was being traded away. Difficulty was treated as a defect. Bottlenecks were treated as embarrassments. Standards were treated as obstacles. Judgment was treated as inconvenience. And whenever the Board had an opportunity to say, “This far, and no farther,” it mostly discovered urgent business elsewhere, perhaps alphabetizing the rubber stamps.

A pinnacle award requires gatekeepers who believe in gates. It requires a Board willing to preserve difficulty, enforce subjective standards, and endure the social discomfort of saying no. Our subject organization instead evolved toward the easier answer: loosen the rules, raise the ground under the hurdles, preserve the ceremony, and call the result progress.

A Question of Value

So yes, the Master’s Degree remains one of the Club’s highest awards. After all, the application says so, with all the confidence of a faded sign on an abandoned storefront. But the question is not where the award sits in the hierarchy. The better question is what the hierarchy itself is now worth.

The Master’s Degree was not destroyed in one reckless act. It was damped, diluted, softened, bypassed, and rationalized over decades. The process was gradual enough to be deniable and cumulative enough to be decisive. That is the genius of organizational entropy: no single change has to look fatal. The system merely has to keep choosing the easier path until the hard path disappears.

The Club did not abolish its pinnacle. It paved a road to the top, installed guardrails, added shuttle service, and now wonders why the summit feels crowded.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 12: When the Master’s Degree Became a Participation Trophy appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

This Absurdist Paper essay posits that entropy will continue to accelerate while the leadership inversion and Board dysfunction persist. Our lament: Is a cultural renaissance even possible at this late stage?

The Closed Loop of Governance Decline

Given the short-term orientation of the active members of the Board, the inertia of the inactive members, and the general membership’s visible lack of enthusiasm for running for directorships, my concern for the Club’s future is not pessimism for sport. It is pattern recognition.

Every rock I turn over exposes another signal of decline. Indeed, the organization has become increasingly self-referential. The Board meets, receives reports, approves minutes, processes motions, and congratulates itself for completing the rituals of governance. But ritual is not renewal. Motion is not progress. Administrative continuity is not relevance.

The leadership pipeline is the clearest warning sign. A healthy organization has more qualified candidates than offices. A declining one struggles to find one candidate, then treats an uncontested election as evidence of stability rather than evidence of exhaustion.

No Easy Fix for A Defective Board

Procedural remedies would fail. For example, one might propose requiring at least two candidates for every Director position, but that reform would collapse immediately in practice. In some cases, the Club has difficulty finding even one candidate. If a two-candidate rule were imposed, the predictable workaround would be the same artificial competition already seen elsewhere: a shill candidate, entered not to provide choice but to satisfy procedure.

That is the larger disease. The Club increasingly solves structural problems by creating procedural appearances. It does not restore vitality; it simulates it.

Who the Hell Is In Charge Here?

“The Board has become less a governing body

than a validation layer.“

—Vox Incommoda

The leadership vacuum also explains the Board’s inverted relationship with the President. Under the bylaws, the Board is the governing authority of the corporation. Corporate powers are exercised by or under the authority of the Board, and the affairs of the corporation are managed under the Board’s direction. The President’s job is not to govern the Board, but to communicate and administer Board policy. In practice, that relationship has been reversed. The Board has become less a governing body than a validation layer.

This inversion did not happen by accident. It is the predictable consequence of apathy, weak succession, and a culture that rewards compliance over independent judgment. When few members want to serve, the President can help populate the Board with agreeable Directors, cultivate a reliable rubber-stamp contingent, and reduce dissent to an occasional inconvenience. Elections continue, but too often they function as managed continuity exercises rather than genuine contests. Committees are staffed from the same familiar circle. Communication channels remain in trusted hands. The narrative is controlled, the machinery is preserved, and the appearance of representative governance survives even as meaningful independence withers.

The effect is not merely political. It is operational. Directors who should be setting direction instead wait to be led. Some are content to follow. Others may see the problem but lack the appetite to oppose the prevailing current. A few occasionally offer independent ideas, but those moments are rare and often treated as disruptions rather than contributions. The result is a Board that spends most of its time approving minutes, confirming candidates, processing routine reports, endlessly debating trivial issues, and performing the monthly liturgy of governance while strategic questions go largely untouched.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

Even important work, such as bylaws reform, is weakened by this culture. The bylaws may be improved on paper, but rules matter only if the institution is willing to enforce them when enforcement becomes uncomfortable. The current bylaws contain mechanisms for dealing with non-representation, yet when those mechanisms become inconvenient, the Board seeks a softer landing. This is organizational entropy in miniature: rules are adopted, softened, bypassed, normalized, and eventually reduced to historical decoration.

The same impulse appears in financial reporting. When useful information produces discomfort, the Board’s instinct is not to improve the process, reconcile the numbers, assign responsibility, or create a repeatable control procedure. The instinct is to remove the information. That is an even more advanced form of institutional avoidance. Ignoring a bylaw leaves the rule on paper while nullifying it in practice. Eliminating a troublesome reporting element goes one step farther: it erases the instrument that exposed the problem in the first place.

Occasionally, a Director remembers that the Board exists for oversight rather than applause. When inaccurate revenue information appears in a permanent record, the proper response is not to declare the information unnecessary. The proper response is to correct the numbers, identify the source of truth, and establish a repeatable reconciliation procedure. Awards revenue is not decorative trivia. It is the Club’s cash register. The Treasurer’s report is the cash drawer. If the two do not match, serious people find out why.

Yet the Board’s instinct was not to improve the process. It was to remove the discomfort. That is the more revealing failure. In one case, inconvenient bylaws are ignored. In another, inconvenient reporting is erased. Both responses protect the organization from the labor of accountability.

Is a Renaissance Possible at this Late Stage?

I would dearly love to see a renaissance. I would like to believe that the Club can rediscover its purpose, rebuild its leadership pipeline, restore meaningful governance, and make itself relevant to members who are not already trapped inside the machinery. But I cannot honestly identify a strategic move that would fix the defective Board, revive member engagement, and reverse the cultural drift without first confronting the leadership structure that sustains it.

Now that I am outside the machinery, the Board increasingly resembles a middle school class performing diligence for a teacher who has seen the act before. The pupils know the routine: shuffle papers, nod at the right moments, copy the expected answer, and hope visible compliance passes for completed work. It might reassure the class. It does not fool the teacher.

The rare breath of fresh air on the Board is not someone who grandstands, but someone willing to ask why inaccurate information is being approved into the permanent record. That should not be courageous. It should be routine. The fact that it now looks courageous tells us how far the Board has fallen.

No magic wand will right the S.S. 3905CC. There is only hard work: contested leadership, independent Directors, transparent elections, enforceable rules, serious financial and operational oversight, meaningful communication with members, and a willingness to stop mistaking procedural survival for organizational health. Unfortunately, the people most able to begin that work appear least inclined to do it, and many of the people who might replace them have long since concluded that the game is rigged, pointless, or both.

That is why the future looks dire. Not because decline is inevitable in some cosmic sense, but because the organization has become highly skilled at avoiding the very discomfort required to arrest it.

A Sinking Ship?

The Club does not lack procedures. It lacks institutional will. The Club does not lack offices. It lacks candidates. The Club does not lack meetings. It lacks purpose. Most importantly, it lacks independent governance. A Board content to be led by the President cannot govern the President, cannot hold itself accountable, and cannot lead the membership toward renewal. Until that inversion is corrected, every reform will be filtered through the same closed loop that created the problem.

The S.S. 3905CC is not sinking because no one can see the water. It is sinking because the pumps are controlled by the same people who keep insisting the bilge is dry.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 11: The Board That Forgot It Was in Charge appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Until now, I have said little publicly about what precipitated my resignation as Awards Secretary and my other positions of responsibility in the Club. My intent was to avoid exacerbating the disruption caused by my departure. But now, I believe that the organization has recovered nicely and is back to producing award output regularly, so a clinical post mortem is in order.

You might ask, “Who cares? He’s gone now, and it doesn’t matter who he was or why he left.” That’s a valid point. I wouldn’t be offended if you felt that way.

I Care about the Club and My Legacy

I’m certainly not here to rub salt in old wounds. I’m here to set the record straight for two reasons. First, with a decade of service behind me, I remain as concerned about the welfare of the Club as ever. I hope my hard work moved the Club forward, so I would hope to dispel any doubts that I left with the intent of creating harm. Second, as often happens in organizations dealing with the unknown, false narratives emerge. I have encountered a few versions alluding to things that are way off base. Perhaps the intent is not malicious, but they certainly can be interpreted that way.

As always, I’ll shoot straight with you here. For the first time, I will explain openly what occurred and why it needed to happen. Some revelations might resonate; others might be rejected. Those of you who are already committed to a negative view about me won’t be swayed. So be it. I’m reaching out to the open-minded members who never did get any answers around the time of my departure, not seeking vindication, just accuracy.

The Old Curmudgeon Retires

I previously wrote about the matter of my retirement as Awards Secretary lightly. That tone was intentional. The work had been rewarding and I had no desire to turn a decade of service into a grievance parade. I was and am truly grateful for having had that opportunity to serve the Club and its members.

But I decided to give up all my roles when I was pushed out of broader service by governance rot, narrative manipulation, and avoidable conflict. The decision was mine, but it was forced by events I’ll describe below.

I recognize that my style can be forceful, procedural, and occasionally exhausting to colleagues who prefer a less formal operating culture. Procedural rigor and blunt communication are not universally appreciated in volunteer organizations. My view has always been that popularity does not necessarily equate to effectiveness. And I know I can rub people the wrong way. But I am what I am.

All that having been said, here’s my story, for better or worse.

In the Beginning…

I happened across the Club in 2013. Checking into my first net, I quickly grasped the purpose and appeal of the organization. Its structured awards system and many available nets with long lists of diverse check-ins appealed to me, so I became increasingly engaged.

In Summer of 2014, I attended my first “Eyeball”, the annual gathering where members from around the country and the world converge. That social communion and the friendships I created there were my inspiration to do more for the organization.

First Volunteer Job: Area Awards Manager

In mid-January 2015, the Fourth Area Awards Manager quit, leaving the job up for grabs. I volunteered. So, in February, the Fourth Area Director appointed me as Area Awards Manager for his area.

Soon, I was Awards Secretary and Chairman of the Awards Committee

In November of 2015, the president appointed me as Awards Secretary. A couple of months later, he would select me as chair of the Awards Committee. I held both these positions until my late 2025/early 2026 resignation.

Meanwhile, a new Fourth Area Director, who just happened to be the person I replaced as both Fourth Area Awards Manager and Awards Secretary, was elected to serve starting March 2016. He decided he would be his own Area Awards Manager, so that ended my tenure in that position.

If this sounds convoluted, welcome to volunteer-organization history: circular, ironic, and occasionally allergic to memory.

Fourth Area Director: 2017-2022

In January 2017, our Fourth Area Director and Fourth Area Awards Manager resigned in a huff over a Board policy, leaving both positions open. I was content to avoid throwing my hat in the ring until the leading candidate annoyed me by publicly making sardonic comments about an area member. Irritated enough to act, I entered the race and won.

I quickly appointed an Area Awards Manager and an Assistant Director. Ultimately, I would serve my area for five years as its leader and liaison, stepping down in 2022 to allow some fresh blood to replace me.

Collateral Projects, Committees, and NCS Work

Along the way, I was involved in both ad hoc and formal projects in the administrations of three different presidents. I worked with many members and directors on the IT Committee and the Bylaws Committee, on projects including two separate update cycles to the bylaws and constitution, and two iterations of the NCS Guide.

I also served as Tuesday night 40-meter Late Net NCS for a year, to round out my experience on the operations side of the organization.

Finally, in 2025, when the need arose for a Registered Agent (who must reside in Florida), I stepped forward to assume that role.

No Slowing Down!

During the past few years, wanting to give someone else a shot at running the Awards Committee, I sought volunteers. My colleagues on the committee demurred. I continued to serve in that role until December 2025.

Recently, I publicly stated my intention to serve as Awards Secretary until 2031 to become the longest serving Awards Secretary in Club history, if I remained healthy and the President and the Board would have me. The current record is 15 years. I had served 10. None of us is immortal, and at 79, I knew there was some chance I would not be able to fulfill my volunteer service longevity aspirations. But I did not expect it to end the way it did. Although somewhat unlikely due to my abrasive personality, I would have preferred to have retired as a revered figure whose tenure was viewed favorably by future members.

All my Club positions were rewarding. All had their moments. If forced to choose one that mattered most to me, I would choose Awards Secretary and Chair of the Awards Committee. That work far transcended printing and mailing certificates. At its best, it involved systems design, policy development, records integrity, graphic design, workflow management, member service, committee leadership, software development, and long-range planning. The visible output was paper. The real work was infrastructure.

So, why was I willing to give it all up? Will time heal all wounds? Read on.

Was It a Policy Disagreement?

I would not have resigned over a simple policy disagreement. Yet some of the feedback I have received simplistically paints that as the causal factor. Nope.

If you have been reading The Absurdist Papers, you know I have strong ideas about how the Club should be run, and I have voiced some harsh criticism about its operational errors. But we all have opinions. In my case differences of opinions are grounds for intelligent discussion, not for quitting.

I had my share of policy arguments through the years. I won some; I lost some. When I lost, I walked away with the determination to reshape my argument and revisit it later. Collaboration was my preferred path. Sometimes we would reach an eventual impasse. We moved on.

Those Board members and members-at-large who believe I summarily quit over a specific issue are wrong. And those who believe I had malicious intent toward the Club are dead wrong. I continue to care deeply about the Club and the direction it is heading.

So, what is it, then?

If I wasn’t tired of the volunteer jobs and I wasn’t angry over losing an argument, what could cause me to leave?

Betrayal.

The Bylaws Committee had worked hard and produced substantial output. We took pains to ensure the Board would have adequate preparation before voting on bylaws updates. We created briefing documents, worked with Board members, and believed the President was committed to working with us.

Behind the scenes, he wasn’t.

A crucial update was planned. The President had assured me in writing that he unequivocally supported it. His only qualification was that the committee wait until late Fall to bring it to the Board. With that assurance, we believed the amendment had a reasonable path to approval in December 2025.

A Pirouette

At the December meeting, however, despite his prior reassurance and without so much as an advance hint that he would do so, the President made a U-turn and summarily withdrew his support, effectively burying the update. This insidious reversal was not the first time he had engaged in duplicity, but it was the most consequential. For me, it broke the remaining trust necessary to continue in leadership.

The Chair of the Bylaws Committee resigned at the same time. I won’t impute his reasons.

As for me, I had had enough. I felt I needed to act. My tentative plan was to relinquish my leadership positions immediately, but the Awards Secretary position was another matter. The Club depended on that function. My issue was primarily with the President and with the Board culture that enabled his capricious actions, not with the general membership. I therefore decided that I would propose to remain as Awards Secretary through the end of the fiscal year, providing approximately 11 weeks’ notice, enough time for an orderly transition.

The Resignation

“The real issue was the gradual realization that the leadership culture surrounding me had diverged fundamentally from the principles under which I was willing to continue serving.“

Resignation after a long tenure is a difficult decision, and I was reluctant to make it despite strong indications that my future with the Club had become untenable. I spent a sleepless night examining the possibilities, but none of the decision trees bore contrary fruit. Every branch pointed to cutting the ties.

The morning after the December meeting, I told my wife I would be resigning from all my positions except Awards Secretary, a set of duties I would perform until February 28. Knowing how much the Club had meant to me, she took a moment to absorb it. When she recovered, she completely supported my decision. She normally enjoys playing devil’s advocate, but in this case, she readily agreed with my logic.

A Sad Event and Its Aftermath

Compounding my emotional distress during that period was the death of my good friend and trusted colleague Dwight, a former Club President whom I had appointed as my Assistant Fourth Area Director. He and I had also reorganized and run the Club’s Mobile Shootout, a mobile radio competition, beginning in 2019. Dwight was also a fellow member of the Bylaws Committee and was keenly interested in the fate of the update we had proposed, but he sadly passed three days before the meeting at which it was ultimately shot down.

I was rocked emotionally when Dwight’s wife Beth called me on December 10 to tell me he had passed that morning. While I could find no words to comfort her, she had the presence of mind to ask me to ensure that the Club would be informed and would honor its fallen member, as was its tradition. I assured her that I would apprise the President and would follow-up with Club issues.

Few people loved the Club more sincerely than Dwight did. I continue to miss his boisterous presence, and I can’t imagine the grief his widow, Beth, is enduring.

All did not go as I had expected. What further unsettled me was the cursory institutional acknowledgment that followed Dwight’s passing. Organizations reveal their true character in moments of loss. In this case, the contrast between Dwight’s years of devotion and the brevity of the response deepened my alienation from the leadership culture that had emerged.

It ultimately fell on my shoulders to announce Dwight’s passing and memorialize him, a role I easily accepted, but I felt that these actions should have emanated from the upper echelons of the organization.

Bitterness over that slight galvanized my decision, clearing the path for my resignation letter to the Board of Directors.

Control At All Costs

My resignation letter offered the Board the following: “To avoid disruption to members who are not parties to this disagreement, I will continue to serve as Awards Secretary in a clerical capacity through the end of the current fiscal year, February 28, 2026, and no longer. I will also continue to serve as Florida Registered Corporate Agent until a replacement is appointed, but not beyond that date.”

The President decided to preempt my stated notice period, choosing a different “transition” path. He called an emergency Board meeting on January 6, 2026, to appoint my successor, and the Board confirmed the appointment. Whether the motivation was urgency, control, distrust, or some combination, the effect was the same: my proposed transition was preempted. At midnight that night, my 3905 Century Club leadership career ended.

I should mention that two members of the Board contacted me in advance of that meeting to dig deeper and, perhaps, sway me. Although I was resolute and determined to follow through with my resignation, I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the Vice President and the DX Director. On the other hand, neither the President, my own Area Director, nor any of the other Area Directors, some of whom I had known and worked with for many years, bothered to call me or even so much as send me an email. To say I am disappointed in this pusillanimous collection of “leaders” would be a gross understatement.

Also, I have heard it mentioned that under pressure, the President’s motion was amended at the meeting. No one called me to tell me about that. Thus, I proceeded with the midnight cutoff as planned. Enough was enough!

The Negative Spin

The President removed any remaining doubts from my mind at that January 6 Board meeting, which I chose not to attend. It being the special meeting whose purpose was to appoint and confirm my successor as Awards Secretary, I felt that my presence there would be disruptive, and I didn’t want to rain on the new appointee’s moment in the sun. In my absence, the President seized the opportunity to level a series of accusations at me.

Referring to an ordinary business matter, namely the logistics of shipping the Club printer after the Club settled an unpaid reimbursement owed to me, he told the Board I was trying to, “…hold the Club hostage in terms of returning the Club printer until we reimburse him…”

The Printer Non-Issue

Convoluted as it was, that statement was specious, inflammatory, and revealing. I never refused to return Club property I was still using for Club business. Indeed, I stated that once the Club settled my final expense reimbursement, I would arrange shipment of the printer. Far from holding the Club hostage, I was printing awards with the printer while I remained Awards Secretary, so I could not ship it until my tenure ended anyway. One additional complicating factor was that I underwent hernia surgery on December 9, and was restricted to lifting no more than 10 pounds. Thus, I noted that if the Club wanted the printer quickly, they would need to schedule a service to package and ship it from my house. That was not ransom. It was sequencing. Apparently, in the heat of organizational theater, even ordinary logistics can be converted into felony-adjacent melodrama.

The “Files” Hyperbole

But the theatrics did not end there. The President further accused me of withholding the award files from him. Once again, I was using them at the time. The document I wrote up regarding transition promised that I would send all files to the President and my successor. Transferring an incomplete set of files prematurely would entail sending ongoing incremental updates of the live files, which would have been confusing and unnecessary. Despite that easily comprehensible operational issue, the President portrayed it as willful intransigence. In reality, I sent them all the files I had accumulated through the years, several gigabytes of them, via Priority Mail without hesitation when my tenure ended, as I had committed.

The President took other pot-shots at me during that fateful meeting, which can be viewed on the Club’s YouTube channel. I won’t bore you with further forays into institutional character assassination here.

Forcing My Hand

The irony is that the urgency of the abrupt transition was not my creation. Had I been present at that meeting to comment, I would have made that point. By rejecting my offered 11-week notice period, which would have provided overlap and continuity, the President and the Board created the fire drill. Their actions forced mine. Leadership appeared to believe an instant transition was practical. My experience told me otherwise.

But with the manufactured urgency, no one would have been in the mood to listen to my protestations, anyway. So, they unanimously agreed to the President’s plan.

Having been not only pre-empted but also subjected to hyperbolic accusations in absentia, I had no desire to waste my energy when Club leadership thought they knew better than I what a transition would involve. My successor would need to start from scratch, much as I did when I first became Awards Secretary. But at least he would have “the files”.

And that was why I enacted a sharp cutoff.

But What about the Software?

My transition document clearly stated that I would be retiring the award manager data entry software when my tenure ended. Hence, it was well known to the Board, as I had sent the document to each Board member. No one commented at the time, and it should have come as no surprise that I would follow through. Perhaps they thought it was an idle threat or, more likely, they did not bother reading and comprehending it. Nevertheless, when I acted on it as I stated, it resulted in more accusations that I was seeking to deliberately harm the Club.

To understand my position, I’ll give you the history of that particular software application. I had inherited a skeletal data entry system from a prior webmaster, which I rewrote completely, a non-trivial, time consuming programming project. I hosted the system on a shared web host under my control, and used my own QRZ.com XML membership credentials to obtain live, real-time information from their database to populate name and address fields in the entry forms.

We Had An Alternative

Contemporaneously with my rewrite, the current webmaster had written a similar data entry system. However, I decided to defer its implementation indefinitely. Several issues influenced my decision. First, I am a data junkie. I write SQL queries to analyze award data for various reasons, and I do so frequently. The webmaster would not give me the access I needed to perform generalized queries. If we could have gotten past that hurdle, then there would have been a significant training effort to get the area award managers, my user base, up to speed. I did not believe the training burden was justified unless the data access issue could first be solved. Thus, that alternate system remained in existence, but was in limbo.

I knew it was there for fallback when I decided to resign. It gave me comfort knowing that my successor probably would not care about the data access as much as having a simplified system. Furthermore, as we saw at the May 9 Board meeting, the Board no longer cares about “meaningless numbers” generated by the awards organization, obviating the need for detailed data analysis. My plan was to transition out of my system and into the webmaster’s during my 11-week notice period, which would give us sufficient time to work out the kinks.

Pulling the Plug

My proposed notice period was essentially cancelled by action of the President and the Board, so that software evolution plan went out the window. Accordingly, I shut down my server at midnight January 6, at the time my successor assumed the Awards Secretary position.

And I was roundly criticized for it. However, I had no desire to provide ongoing support for software I knew was destined to be replaced anyway. To do so past the end of my tenure would leave dangling strings that were undesirable for both the Club and me. Better that the Club should get a fresh start and I should not need to deal with midnight phone calls.

For many years, I maintained a system that worked seamlessly for Area Awards Managers and for me. It provided robust and useful statistics that the club in its current increasingly entropic state, has declared “meaningless.” Had my transition plan been accepted, that venerable system could have been retired in an orderly fashion, with the successor system easily brought online and debugged during the notice period. Instead, the transition was compressed into an artificial emergency, and a predictable systems problem was later recast as personal sabotage.

In Retrospect…

Looking back, I do not regret the years I devoted to the Club. I made friendships that mattered to me, worked with many capable and dedicated people, and participated in projects that improved the organization in tangible ways. For a long time, I genuinely believed I would remain involved for many more years.

But volunteer organizations are fragile ecosystems. They run on trust, continuity, institutional memory, and the willingness of people to contribute far more effort than anyone sees publicly. Once trust erodes, even highly functional systems begin to destabilize. Informal narratives replace direct communication. Procedural shortcuts replace careful governance. Long-term thinking yields to immediate expediency.

In the end, my departure was not provoked by a single disagreement, a printer, or a software application. Those were collateral issues, not causes.

The real issue was the gradual realization that the leadership culture surrounding me had diverged fundamentally from the principles under which I was willing to continue serving.

Just the Facts

Perhaps others will view the events differently. That is their right. I am not asking for universal agreement, vindication, or apologies. What I want is to ensure that the factual and emotional record exist somewhere outside the rumor mill and organizational folklore.

I still care deeply about the Club. I hope it succeeds and I hope future leaders preserve what makes it unique while avoiding the kinds of institutional failures that slowly alienate the very people most invested in keeping it healthy.

Entropy is relentless. Organizations survive only when enough people are willing to resist it.

For ten years, I tried to do just that.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 10: Straight Talk about My Resignation appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Ellsworth Statler’s famous real estate maxim, “Location, location, location,” rests on the stubborn premise that physical placement matters. That premise should be uncontroversial in amateur radio, where transmitter location determines both operating authority and geographic credit. Yet our subject organization has managed, through the usual mixture of convenience, enthusiasm, and procedural mush, to convert location from a fact into an award-generating fiction.

Liberalizing the Rules for Fun and Profit

As external inputs diminish and a mature organization seeks new ways to reward a contracting membership, rules tend to liberalize. What once required effort becomes attainable by interpretation. That which once required presence becomes available by proximity. And that which once required precision becomes a committee-approved shrug.

Our subject organization started down this path innocently enough by recognizing operation from two U.S. states simultaneously when a station was positioned on or very near a state line.

The next step was more ambitious: operation from three states at once, even when the operator was not actually at the intersection point. Under the Tri-Point Award, an operator could claim tri-point operation if he was as close as safely possible and no more than one-half mile from the actual point. The Tri-Point rules also recommend that QSLs identify the specific tri-point. Typically, a station working from a Tri-Point will issue three QSLs, one for each state, and expect the same in return from those stations he or she contacts.

The Tri-Point Award also expanded the concept beyond domestic state lines to include certain Canadian provincial and U.S. state borders, allowing a station to claim credit from multiple provinces or states and, in some cases, two sovereign countries.

Thus, what began as a special-purpose award convention became something larger. The award did not merely define eligibility for a certificate. It created an operating fiction, encouraged that fiction to be recorded on QSLs, and rewarded both the activating station and the stations contacting it. Once both sides benefited, the fiction became politically protected. A bad precedent with beneficiaries is not a mistake. It is an interest group.

Creepy Mission Creep

Predictably, the concept escaped its original enclosure. Members began to rationalize that if being near a boundary could produce multiple credits for one award, then similar claims should be acceptable elsewhere. Not wishing to daunt anyone’s fun, the Board tolerated the expansion. The toothpaste was out of the tube, and the tube had apparently been placed on the Awards Committee’s agenda for ceremonial approval.

The next liberalizing step made the operator’s physical presence even less relevant. The bylaws were modified to treat remotely controlled stations the same as physically portable stations, so long as the receiving, transmitting, and antenna equipment share the same location and the licensing authority governing the transmitter location permits the control method. The bylaws further provide that each operation type uses the same call sign modifier whether controlled locally or remotely. On paper, this preserves a narrow legal distinction. In practice, it allows “portable” to describe a station location without necessarily describing the operator’s location. The operator may be in a recliner several states away while the QSL carries the represented location of the remote station.

Does It Matter?

The reader might ask, “Who cares? It is their game, so they can create the rules.” That argument would be stronger if Club award credit remained hermetically sealed inside the Club’s own sandbox. It does not. QSLs are confirmations of actual two-way communications, and the Club’s bylaws require them to state the operator’s named location by state, province, or DXCC entity. Mobile and portable QSLs must also include the type and location of operation. Once those confirmations leave the Club’s internal machinery, location fiction becomes portable. Other organizations, other awards, and future reviewers may treat those representations as factual.

There is also the jurisdictional absurdity. One cannot operate under the laws of two sovereign countries simultaneously merely because a Club award finds the ambiguity entertaining. Ironically, the Club’s own bylaws require that the licensing authority governing operations at the transmitter location permit the means of control, and its line-or-point rule requires compliance with all governing entities’ laws and regulations. That language gestures toward legal rigor while the operating culture rewards geographic elasticity. The result is classic organizational entropy: a subordinate award rule created an exception, the exception became habit, habit became expectation, and expectation became de facto governance.

The Mexico Paradox

Institutional hypocrisy is a hallmark of late-stage organizations.

An “innovative” operator was condemned by the Board when he claimed operation from Mexico at a time when amateur radio licensing was suspended due to vast changes in the telecommunications bureaucracy. Apparently, the operator never read about the widely publicized ban which denied reciprocity to U.S. stations operating portable or mobile in Mexico.

In contrast, as we mentioned above, the Board, by either rule or apathy, supports operation in two sovereign countries, under two sets of sometimes conflicting laws, simultaneously.

The Mexico incident revealed the Board’s selective reverence for sovereign communications law. Management properly treated the rogue member’s Mexico claim as a serious violation. Yet the same culture had little difficulty treating operation from adjacent sovereign entities as simultaneously valid when it produced attractive award credit. Thus, the governing principle was not legal precision, but whether the fiction served or embarrassed the institution.

The Board did not object to geographic fiction. It objected to geographic fiction that lacked its own institutional sponsorship.

How Award Rules Became de facto Governance

The damage was not that the Tri-Point Award had generous rules. The damage was that those rules escaped the award application and became the practical premise for broader net conduct.

The Tri-Point Award institutionalized three concepts:

1. Claiming operation from three distinct locations simultaneously.
2. Treating any point within a roughly 500-acre circle as equivalent to the single geographic point at its center.
3. Claiming operation in two sovereign countries simultaneously, with the accompanying implication that both countries’ legal requirements had somehow been satisfied.

A special award rule should not create a condition precedent for Club-wide operating policy. Award rules are subordinate instruments. They may determine whether a contact qualifies for a particular certificate, but they should not redefine station location, legal jurisdiction, QSL validity, or general net procedure. When an award rule is allowed to do so, it becomes de facto governance without having passed through the discipline required of actual governance.

Casting a Blind Eye

In recent years, members have leveraged the de facto governance slop to claim simultaneous operation in Alaska and Canada, and on both countries of the Caribbean island of St. Martin. In the latter case, one country requires an operating permit, which was never obtained. These questionable operations were outside the scope of the Tri-Point Award and, at minimum, stretched the “on the line” concept beyond any disciplined interpretation. Furthermore, they blithely ignore the bylaws requirement that the local laws must be observed, which should not require amplification. Again, nary a peep from the Board. Why ruin everyone’s fun?

The Club did not consciously decide to abandon geographic precision. It let an award exception create beneficiaries, let the beneficiaries create custom, and then let custom harden into policy. That is how de facto governance emerges in declining organizations: not by deliberate design, but by failure to stop convenient nonsense while it is still small.

Thus, by tacit club fiat, international borders are no longer meaningful except for multiplying credit for its awards.

Are We Remotely Portable Or Portably Remote?

The tri-point precedent taught the Club that proximity could become presence. The line-and-point rule taught it that one contact could become several. The remote-operation liberalization then taught it that operator presence itself was optional. Each step had its own excuse. Together, they produced a location doctrine under which the QSL says less about where the operator was than about what the Club is willing to count.

Remote operation is not distinguished from portable operation in the current bylaws. This provision was the outgrowth of a single member’s desire to operate his home station from a remote summer home location. Mission creep by an opportunistic, fun-loving Board generalized it into a loose rule that allows anyone to operate a remote, time-shared station anywhere and generate two-way credit for the remote location. The remote operator and the station contacted both receive credit for the transmitter’s location.

Greetings from Zagreb!

Ultimately, the remote operation rule liberalization triggered a flurry of armchair road warriors. I must admit some complicity in heightening awareness among the membership. As a semi-facetious exercise, I checked into one of the Club’s nets one night via a remote station in Croatia. After the NCS spent several minutes trying to figure out how to list my station, I promptly became a popular target on that net, making a dozen or so contacts. I dutifully issued QSL cards with a 9A/ prefix to my call sign, making lots of people seeking the DX Award happy.

Although others were operating remotely here and there, my Croatia expedition immediately preceded a wider proliferation of geographically dislocated operation on the nets.

Then, the remote boondoggle progressed even further with no one batting an eye. An individual could check in from two disparate locations during the same net, re-checking after the first round. So, the feat of contacting the same operator in Massachusetts and Colorado on the same day became a regular occurrence through the magic of internet/ham radio hybridization.

Entropy Accelerates

The remote-operation liberalization completed the conceptual collapse. The bylaws now permit portable operation to be treated the same whether controlled locally or remotely, so long as the receiving, transmitting, and antenna equipment share the same location and the transmitter-location licensing authority permits the control method. On paper, this preserves a kind of legalistic rigor. In practice, it allows the operator’s physical presence to disappear from the meaning of “portable.” The station may be portable; the operator may be in a recliner several states—or oceans—away. Yet the resulting QSL can carry the same location representation that once implied actual operation from the represented place.

Thus, “portable” no longer reliably means that the operator went anywhere. It means that some equipment, somewhere, can be described in a way that satisfies the award machinery.

The intent of our organization’s policy liberalization movement, either formally stated or implied, is to increase award output by loosening requirements. The upshot is that awards are devalued, which is what the Board believes newer members want. In reality, this destroys not only the meaning of awards they earn, but also the meaning of the organization.

The Club did not modernize location rules. It monetized ambiguity in the currency of award credit.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 9: Location, Location, Location appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Aesthetics are even scarcer. The editor concedes that “I cannot do pretty,” thus accepting mediocrity as a design principle.

I picture an editorial committee of one watering his lawn while awaiting content that never arrives, then hastily pasting together scant contributions and copious filler as the deadline approaches. Directors do not provide news from their areas. A new Awards Secretary does not describe how he is reshaping the awards program. Occasionally, a member takes a trip or builds an antenna, providing the only real content, if the reader can find it amid the wreckage.

Meaningless Statistics As Salvation

With only a modicum of useful material, the current issue turned to statistics for salvation. Some were mildly interesting. Most were filler, misleading at best. A better characterization borrows the Board’s own dismissive terminology: meaningless.

And as if one issue of filler were insufficient punishment, our intrepid editor threatened readers with “Part 97 Statistics” in the future. This may be educational, but it already smells like another statistic in search of a question.

Vox Incommoda appreciates the irony of the Board declaring meaningful revenue numbers meaningless while tolerating a publication loaded with meaningless database exhaust presented as useful information. But perhaps that gives the Board too much credit. Active support would require reading the newsletter. Instead, as with so many opportunities to improve the operation, they ignore it. Maybe it will go away.

Alas, things do not go away merely because leaders ignore them. They decay, harden, and become somebody else’s mess.

Read on if you have the stomach for a closer look at how organizational decay disguises itself as useful drivel.

The Comfort of Big Numbers

The May Centurion reports 2,927 current members and 357 silent keys. At first glance, this looks like a useful organizational metric. It is not. It is a number wearing a necktie. Because Club membership is conferred for life upon completion of the first 100-point award, and because there is no annual dues cycle, renewal process, or periodic validation of member activity, the total cannot reasonably be treated as a count of active members. It is more likely an accumulated historical count of first 100-point award holders, reduced by known silent keys. That may be useful to a historian, but it is nearly useless as a measure of present vitality.

The Ghost Roll Problem

Having been involved in refining membership statistics in the past, I understand that precision is limited by available data. Research efforts frequently encounter dead ends—no pun intended.

Thus, the silent key count is almost certainly a known-death count, not a true mortality-adjusted membership count. That distinction matters. A death only enters the Club’s records if someone reports it, someone recognizes the call, and someone updates the database. Otherwise, the member continues in administrative immortality, one more ghost in the roll. For a club founded in 1977, with a heavily older amateur-radio demographic, the notion that the roll cleanly reflects living members should be treated with the same skepticism one applies to miracle antennas and committee promises.

The Dubious “Active Member” Count

If roughly 2,500 “active members” exist in the roll, why have election turnouts been fewer than 100 in each election since 2018? Even in that hotly contested election, the most recent competitive Club election, turnout was barely greater than 200. Election turnout is not a perfect proxy for active participation, but it is a useful reality check. It strongly suggests that the practical active membership is only a small fraction of the published roll.

The Check-In Machine

The prolific check-in statistics suffer from a different problem. Instead of counting inactive ghosts, they multiply active operators. Under Club policy, one person may check in with a personal call sign, a club call sign, and a special event call sign. If operating from a line or point, that same person may claim multiple geographic entities, with each call sign receiving a separate check-in line for each entity. At Four Corners, one operator using three call signs across four states can occupy twelve lines in the net listing. Each line appears to count as a check-in. That is not participation analysis. That is spreadsheet mitosis.

On second thought, the check-in statistics do sometimes count inactive ghosts quite literally. The Club’s tribute practice of checking in departed members one final time may be touching, but it further illustrates why gross check-ins should not be treated as participation data.

Why Gross Check-Ins Are Not Participation

A gross check-in count may be arithmetically accurate while analytically useless. It does not tell us how many unique operators participated and how many Club members were active. It does not distinguish a casual participant from a regular operator. Neither does it separate ordinary check-ins from club call signs, special event call signs, line operations, point operations, mobile-to-portable rechecks, or repeat appearances by the same person across multiple nets. Nor does it separately identify non-participating tribute check-ins. It is a count of list entries, not a measure of organizational health.

The Revenue-Column Contrast

The irony is rich enough to require cholesterol medication. At the May 9 Board meeting, the word “meaningless” was repeatedly applied to the revenue columns in the Awards Committee Report by the Treasurer, the President, and a few members of the Board who were still awake. Yet award revenue, if accurately stated, is one of the few statistics that is plainly meaningful. It connects awards issued to money received, and it helps detect fee errors, transition failures, accounting gaps, and operational slippage. Far from being merely decorative, it is a control point. Removing it would reduce transparency precisely where the Club needs more of it.

Meanwhile, the Centurion publishes membership totals and gross check-in counts without qualification, even though both are severely confounded. One overstates the living body of the Club by counting historical members who may be dead, unreachable, or inactive. The other overstates activity by allowing one operator to become multiple check-in lines. The Board is prepared to discard meaningful financial data while leaving misleading activity data standing in public view. That is not governance. That is data laundering with a newsletter masthead.

What Meaningful Numbers Would Look Like

“The Club does not need bigger numbers. It needs honest ones.”

If the Club wanted meaningful statistics, it would publish separate categories:

Membership reality: historical members, known silent keys, contactable members, and unique active members in the past twelve months.

Net activity: gross check-in lines, unique monthly operators, club-call and special-event entries, line and point-operation entries, repeat operators by frequency band, and mobile/portable rechecks.

Awards and finances: awards issued by type, awards revenue by category, and month-over-month trends.

Those figures would not merely decorate a newsletter. They would describe the organization’s living metabolism. The downside for our Board and our newsletter editor is that they might require real work.

In Closing: Ever Increasing Entropy

Organizations in decline often cling to accumulated mass because current motion is harder to prove. In our specific context, they point to total membership rather than active members, publish gross check-ins rather than unique operators, and remove revenue visibility while preserving activity inflation. The result is not transparency but comfort reporting: numbers selected because they look reassuring, not because they explain anything.

The Club does not need bigger numbers. It needs honest ones. Until then, the published statistics are less a dashboard than a painted speedometer on a stalled vehicle.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 8: Meaningless Numbers and the Illusion of Vitality appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

The first seven essays in this series examine organizational failures that, taken together, reveal a system losing energy, feedback, accountability, and purpose. Across the series, we see evaporating feedback loops, a contracting talent pool, financial opacity, and increasingly disengaged membership. Leadership focuses on trivial issues while major structural defects are ignored.

Here, we recap Absurdist Papers 1 through 7.

Introduction: The Silent Decay of the “Successful” Organization

On the surface, a decaying organization can look oddly successful. It still holds meetings, it still issues awards, and it still has officers, reports, elections, and minutes. The machinery turns. The question is whether it produces useful work or merely noise. However, as an institutional pathologist, one must look past the veneer of activity to diagnose the underlying entropy. In the context of the Absurdist Papers, entropy is not a sudden, violent collapse; it is a “steady state of inactivity” or a state of “permanence without relevance.”

By examining the specific failures of this volunteer-led entity, we can identify the universal markers of institutionalized laziness and bureaucratic rot. The Absurdist Papers are a study of a system that has ceased to serve its mission and has instead begun to optimize itself for its own comfortably slow dissolution.

Takeaway 1: The Trap of Solving “Solvable” Problems Over Meaningful Ones

A hallmark of organizational entropy is the fixation on trivial, low-stakes issues while high-consequence “single points of failure” are tolerated. As detailed in Absurdist 1, management devoted significant energy to seizing control of “Group A,” an independent discussion group that had operated successfully for twenty-five years. Despite Group A having three times the number of subscribers as the official “Group B,” the board demanded administrative redundancy, viewing the group’s independence as a threat.

While the board obsessed over this non-problem, they ignored a critical structural flaw: the “duality of roles” where directors appoint themselves as their own area award managers. This creates a system where accountability is nonexistent because the manager reports only to themselves. Management chooses the “solvable” problem of a discussion group—masking a personality conflict as a technical redundancy issue—because the meaningful problems involving the board’s own structure require “uncomfortable” political maneuvering.

The board chose the solvable but low-value problem because the meaningful problem required self-examination. Controlling a discussion group is easy. Correcting a board structure that permits directors to supervise themselves requires discomfort, political capital, and an adult attention span.

Takeaway 2: Rules are Signals, Not Constraints (The Illusion of Governance)

“A rule unanimously adopted becomes meaningless when the same body refuses to enforce it at first contact with reality.”

Governance is illusory when a system’s bylaws are treated as “advisory” suggestions rather than binding constraints. Via Absurdist 2, we observe the “Abandonment Rule” incident. In February, the board unanimously passed (13-0) a bylaw stating that a director’s position must be declared vacant if they fail to represent their area for a specific duration. In a fit of supreme irony, the director who would eventually violate this rule was one of the individuals who cast an affirmative vote to approve it.

By November, when the rule faced its first contact with reality, the board balked. Rather than enforcing the clear-cut violation, the discussion pivoted from compliance to sentiment. Compassion became the vocabulary by which accountability was avoided. The final vote to enforce the rule failed, with only three of eleven directors voting for accountability. The organization demonstrated that its highest operational priority was minimizing discomfort in the room, even at the expense of its own integrity.

Takeaway 3: When Participation Becomes Performative Ritual

“Participation becomes performative when outcomes are predictable… The election will not select a leader. It will confirm the only available option.”

As an organization turns inward, participation shifts from “selection” to “ratification.” Absurdist 4 and 5 describe how as the talent pool contracts, existing insiders accumulate roles. Meanwhile, because outsiders defer to incumbents, elections cease to select leadership. Instead, they become affirmation ceremonies.

Multiple roles abound. For instance, the Treasurer simultaneously serves as an Area Director, Membership Coordinator, Club Information Officer, and Net Coordinator. The Vice President is similarly burdened across five distinct committees and roles.

Elections are performative. The outcomes are rarely in doubt.

This stagnation creates a “Deference Trap.” Qualified outsiders decline to run out of respect for incumbents, and elections become single-candidate ceremonies. When the outcome is invariant, voting is no longer a choice of leadership; it is merely a measure of “residual engagement.”

The system is no longer selecting leaders; it is soliciting victims to maintain the status quo.

Takeaway 4: The “Ostrich Effect” in Financial Oversight

“The correct response to bad numbers is not fewer numbers—it is better numbers.”

When systems fail to produce accurate data, the entropic instinct is to eliminate the data rather than fix the system. Absurdist 6 and 7 highlight the board’s decision to remove revenue figures from award reports because they were inaccurate. This is the organizational equivalent of “removing the low-oil-pressure light” to fix an engine.

By eliminating the “expected revenue” side of the ledger, the board engaged in “cashbox faith healing.” They chose to rely solely on the Treasurer’s record of what was received, ignoring the operational record of what should have been received. This institutionalized blindness removes the ordinary deterrents against clerical error, informal fee waivers, favoritism, and missing cash. It is a surrender to “cigar-box bookkeeping” where whatever is in the box is assumed to be correct because no one has the acuity to check it.

Expected revenue is not merely another number. It is an independent check against received revenue. Eliminate that comparison, and the organization has not simplified reporting. It has disabled reconciliation.

Takeaway 5: Symbolic Control vs. Operational Competence

A late-stage symptom of the pathology is the obsession with symbolic control while operational competence evaporates. As noted in Absurdist 6, the board spent its energy debating the aesthetics of a “crisper” logo for 2027 and “controlling the reflector” (communication channels) to manage the narrative.

This focus on branding occurred simultaneously with a total collapse in basic operational rigor. The same board that obsessed over “crispness” ignored “quantum arithmetic” in its own reports, where the Awards Committee claimed that 55 times 4 equals 120. Meanwhile, no committee activity was reported for two months. This is the “Pathology of Volunteer Heroism”—where the board praises a committee for “trying hard” as a way to whitewash a systemic design failure. Control expands as the ability to perform simple arithmetic contracts.

“Control expands as competence contracts… The hubcaps are not just being polished. They are being polished by people who no longer know how to mount the wheel.”

Conclusion: The Choice Between Tradition and Vitality

Longevity is no shield against irrelevance. As noted in Absurdist 5 with Eastman Kodak, organizations die when they refuse to abandon the structures of their past to meet the needs of the future. The subject organization has reached a state of “permanence without relevance,” where it preserves the outward forms of a club while its internal energy has dissipated into “institutionalized laziness.”

Organizational vitality requires friction: contested ideas, accurate records, enforced rules, and the cold light of external observation. Without a corrective force to break the closed-loop of self-referential management, the organization will continue to polish its hubcaps until the wheels finally fall off.

Why the Absurdist Papers? A Note from the Author

As I mentioned above, the closed-loop organization faces stagnation and ultimate heat death unless external energy is applied to the system. This can be through recruiting new blood in management, reorganizing to eliminate outmoded systems, or simply by observing its own bylaws. As a former insider who is now on the outside looking in, I continue to hold some hope for an organizational renaissance, or at least for a temporary jailbreak from fifty years of normalized mediocrity.

My purpose is not to manage the organization from the outside. I no longer have that duty, and I do not miss the committee-room anesthesia. My purpose is to apply external observation to a closed system that badly needs it. If my inconvenient voice produces reform, excellent. If it produces only discomfort, that too is diagnostic.

—Vox Incommoda

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist Papers 1-7: A Review appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Entropy Progresses: The Board discovers the cure for bad numbers

At the latest Board meeting, our subject organization discovered a bold new method for improving financial accuracy: stop reporting the numbers that might be wrong.

The Awards Committee reports for March and April contained obvious revenue errors. One director made the serious point that the reports were incorrect. The Board’s apparent solution was not to correct the fee schedule, improve the report, or reconcile award activity against collections. Instead, the consensus drifted toward eliminating revenue information from the Awards Committee report altogether.

This is an elegant solution, in the same sense that removing the low-oil-pressure light is an elegant solution to engine maintenance.

The Treasurer’s argument was that he records revenue when money is received, and therefore his financial records are the authoritative source. That is true as far as it goes, but it misses the internal control issue completely. The Treasurer’s records show what came in. The Awards Committee’s operational records show what should have come in. Comparing those two figures is not redundant bookkeeping. It is the control.

Without knowing expected revenue, received revenue floats in space. A payment received six months late is no longer a warning sign; it is merely a pleasant surprise. A missing payment is not missing, because no one knows it was expected. A wrong fee is not wrong, because no independent report preserves the correct fee category. A waived fee, a late payment, a cash payment, or a clerical error all disappear into the same fog.

Whatever is in the cigar box at the end of the month is income. Period.

Institutionalized, Rationalized Laziness

And so, the Board summarily endorsed laziness as a valid reason to eliminate yet another useful feedback loop, this one being a safeguard of the organization’s primary source of income. They rationalized that it was “impossible” to reconcile income with receipts.

Most of the board are non-accountants. What’s the Treasurer’s excuse for this ignorance?

Underlying that foolish rationalization is an apparent disdain for good internal control systems and safeguards. They don’t have the time or inclination—and now, demonstrably, the knowledge and acuity—to implement and maintain them.

Honest systems are not designed on the assumption that everyone will always be honest, competent, alert, and immune from arithmetic. Internal control exists because humans are fallible, volunteers are busy, and money has a long history of developing legs.

But controls mean someone must be vigilant. Someone must be diligent. And furthermore, someone must care enough. By dismissing the revenue report as “meaningless,” our organization’s Board collectively negates all of those qualities.

Awards Revenue: receipts are not expected revenue

I continue to assert that the Treasurer’s records show what money arrived, whereas the Awards Committee’s operational records show what money should have arrived.

These are different data streams. Their comparison, known in basic 8th grade bookkeeping as reconciliation, is the control. Eliminate one, and there is nothing to reconcile.

In this organization’s fragile system, the point of sale is an award application accompanied by either a PayPal receipt, a check or money order, or cash, received and dutifully entered by an area award manager. The funds are deposited remotely by the Treasurer. PayPal transfers are electronically credited to a PayPal account, while checks, money orders, and cash are mailed to the Treasurer to be deposited to a bank account.

Obvious single points of failure exist in this process. They can be minimized if the system were used as intended. But if the awards manager’s entries are dismissed as meaningless, and then are completely eliminated because no one wants to reconcile receipts versus sales, there are no safeguards against errors, abuses, and outright theft.

A receipt total without an expected revenue total is not a control. It is a cash drawer with a prayer taped to it.

Abuse Scenarios: not accusations, but risk models

I am not accusing anyone of stealing award fees or issuing favors. I am describing why internal controls exist: again, honest systems are designed not to depend entirely on everyone remaining honest, competent, and awake. Even a half-assed accountant banks on such controls, as the foundation of his trade.

“The organization has found a way to comply with its bylaws while defeating their purpose.”

Here are some examples that would be caught if the organization tightened its internal controls instead of declaring them “meaningless”:

• Award Manager receives payment, records it as received, but forgets to send the check to the Treasurer
• Award Manager makes a deal with an area member to pay for several awards in advance, but they are not recorded until earned
• Award Manager does a friend a favor, waiving the fee for one or more awards
• Awards Manager receives cash for an award, records it as paid, and pockets the cash

In each of these cases, the amount collected differs from the amount recorded as revenue at the point of sale. By blithely ignoring what is recorded as a sale and counting only cash received, the probability of errors and abuses increases, especially as marginal players start to realize that no one is looking.

If I were to argue this point before the Board, I would anticipate strong opposition via rationale such as, “We don’t really have a theft problem.” Or, “If there is breakage, it’s quite negligible.” A crystal ball would be an excellent adjunct to each board meeting, a good substitute for intelligence and basic common sense. Don’t look for problems and you won’t have any.

No One Cared

As the officer who implemented revenue reporting via the Awards Committee report, I regularly harped on the Treasurer and the Audit Committee to ensure that revenue expectations agreed with the reality of cash collections. Although my internal control preaching fell on deaf ears and never inspired any serious attempt at revenue accounting integrity, at least the psychological control was there.

I suppose I should feel some satisfaction that through ill-advised decisions like this one, the organization is proceeding headlong into the heat death I predicted, but I mostly lament the demise of the modest controls I tried to put in place. I wish the organization would simply wake up.

During my decade in Club management, a collateral area I harped on with the Treasurer and the Bylaws Committee was the annual budget. That document was also on the agenda at last night’s meeting, representing yet another financial accounting charade by The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

Budget Kabuki: required, approved, ignored

So, let’s talk budgets. Yet more performative dysfunction occurs in the Club’s annual budgeting ritual.

The bylaws require an annual budget, proposed by the Treasurer and approved by the Board. On paper, that sounds like ordinary nonprofit governance. In practice, the Board receives a proposed budget, pokes at a few line items of personal interest, bickers briefly, and then approves it because approval is inevitable. The ritual is complete. The spreadsheet has been blessed.

What follows is—nothing.

There is no meaningful monthly budget-to-actual comparison, no routine variance analysis, and no year-end report explaining where the budget was accurate, where it failed, and what the Club learned from the difference. During the year, the President may occasionally invoke “not in the budget” to curtail discussion, but otherwise the budget functions mainly as a bureaucratic artifact.

Thus, the Board approves a budget not to manage against it, but to satisfy the bylaws and provide occasional ammunition for shutting down inconvenient spending discussions.

Budget vs. Actual: the missing mechanism

A budget without budget-to-actual reporting is not a management tool. It is a decorative spreadsheet. It satisfies the bylaws, creates the appearance of fiscal planning, and gives leadership a prop to wave when convenient. What it does not do is control spending, validate assumptions, expose revenue weakness, or educate the Board before the next budget cycle.

Without that:

• The Board cannot know whether assumptions were valid.
• Treasurer cannot identify systematic overruns or under-collections.
• President can invoke the budget selectively.
• Directors approve future budgets without learning from prior ones.
• The process becomes ritual compliance.

While we’re at it, since reconciliation seems to be precluded by institutional laziness, why not just mandate elimination of the “meaningless” budget along with the “meaningless” revenue figures?

Combining Both Failures: the control collapse

Awards revenue reporting would tell the Club what should have been received. Treasurer’s reports tell the Club what was received. Budget-to-actual reporting would tell the Club whether its financial plan had any relationship to reality. The Board is now moving in the opposite direction: fewer comparisons, fewer reconciliations, fewer explanations, and therefore fewer opportunities to notice that something has gone wrong.

This is not simplification. It is institutionalized blindness dressed as administrative tidiness. The organization has found a way to comply with its bylaws while defeating their purpose.

This is how organizational entropy becomes financial entropy: first the controls become inconvenient, then the reports become optional, and finally, everyone agrees that ignorance is more efficient.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 7: Better Numbers? No, Fewer Numbers! appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

The forthcoming Board meeting will confirm a replacement director who ran unopposed and received four whole votes. Certifying that non-election and adopting an annual budget are the only real business items on the agenda. The rest is “discussion.”

What important issues are up for grabs?

Of Logos and Reflectors

One is a new “golden” logo, a “crisper” graphical representation of the organization for 2027 and beyond. Ordinarily, this would be a harmless collateral project for a small committee, but it has now become a Board-level undertaking. It received a dose of reality at last month’s meeting when the President pointed out some real-world implementation impediments.

Another is communication forum ownership, a non-issue for the past fifteen years. It has suddenly surfaced under the banner of organizational sanity, although the practical effect would be to consolidate member communication under presidentially approved channels.

We’ll return to these major, low-value distractions later. First, let’s examine the content of the information package, because while the Board appears preoccupied with logos and communication control, more significant problems are hiding in plain sight.

A Report That Is Not a Report

The token Awards Committee reports for March and April present statistics, but no meaningful report of committee activity, either completed or forthcoming. Whether the statistics reflect reality is highly suspect, especially because they fail to incorporate the mandated March 1 fee increase. Worse, the awards organization has invented a new form of quantum arithmetic, a mathematical universe in which 55 times 4 equals 120.

I questioned this with my Area Director, who is also the organization’s Treasurer. He is aware that the report is incorrect. He was unclear about what, if anything, will be done about it. Awareness is something, but correction is another story.

They’re Trying

Meanwhile, in his report, the President praises the Awards Committee, stating that they are in their fourth month of operation with “completely new software and tools.” He thanks them for their hard work during the transition. Whether intended or not, this functions as advance whitewash: a reminder that the committee is trying hard, a notion conveniently positioned before anyone asks why the reports are numerically defective and substantively empty.

And yes, they probably are trying hard. They are good people. But trying hard does not make bad totals and flawed reporting correct. Operational pathology is being praised as volunteer heroism instead of being treated as a system design failure.

When I departed as Awards Secretary and Awards Committee Chair, I became a convenient explanation for future failure: “He took his software with him and left the Club in a lurch.” A more accurate diagnosis would be that the Club had allowed a critical production process to depend on one volunteer’s tools, skills, templates, and workflow discipline. The software could have been replaced. The missing competence was the more expensive vacancy.

I was quietly competent for a decade, but no one took notice. Logo change? No issues. Certainly nothing that would need Board-level engagement. Alas, no one asked what would happen if I was no longer there. In an organization seemingly obsessed with single points of failure, this one went unnoticed until it was too late.

The Golden Logo and the Dead Goose

Let’s get back to the logo, since it will be generating large quantities of heat in board discussions. The mechanics of who will design the logo and how the winning design will be selected are necessary points to be clarified. A sponsoring director plans to bring a proposal to the table. Meanwhile, the President brought up a potential game-changer, a signal that peaked above all the noisy blabbering about colors and crispness: We don’t have the software to create and install it.

Right. That’s some of the software I took with me, software that was fully capable of creating a professional quality graphic design and propagating it through a large collection of brand-identified documents—like award certificates. I left behind all the masters. But the software license was mine. I had negotiated a deal with the club in 2015 to subsidize a small portion of the license, a bargain for the club. When I left, they chose not to purchase the full subscription. That probably made sense at the time, because they had no one with the skills to use the full suite of graphic design applications.

Solving the Immediate Problem, with Blinders On

They weren’t thinking of logos at the time. This is typical of volunteer organizations, which don’t deal with long-term, strategic projects because they want to devote only enough time to solve immediate problems. When someone proposes a long-term project, they approach it as a collection of short-term tasks. Nobody puts together the bigger picture.

In this case, the President gave them a cold shower: “We don’t have the software, but we have the budget for it.”

Aside from the fact that I didn’t see a corresponding provision in the current budget that is up for approval at the meeting, spending the money would be one thing, while finding someone skilled enough to use the expensive software would be quite another. In an organization that typically chooses volunteers based on availability instead of capability, the “who?” question must be top priority. But they might not like the answer.

Who knows what patchwork solutions they’ll arrive at to solve “the software problem”? Of course, an analytical mind would conclude that the problem is more than lack of software, as we mentioned above. Thus, I won’t speculate on potential workarounds here.

Reflections on the Reflector

“Control expands as competence contracts.”

Moving on to the other non-problem, let’s cut to the real issue driving the Board’s other distraction: reflector ownership. The Board is not trying to solve a reflector problem. It is trying to solve a personality problem, a free-discussion problem, and a searchable-history problem, while pretending the issue is whether Discord has channels.

The stated reason, suddenly, is that organizational integrity demands multiple administrators for communication channels. Eliminating single points of failure is a convenient and defensible organizational imperative. However, beneath that rhetorical veneer lies the real issue: control. Control of the channel means control of the narrative, and control of the archive means control over what history remains easy to find.

The President appears to believe that all Club discussions should take place on channels controlled by the organization. To illustrate the mindset, he mentioned that he installed a “friendly” administrator on the Facebook page.

What is at stake in this discussion is a “neutral” club oriented discussion group, which has long been “owned” and moderated by a third party. Although his moderation has been stringent at times, mainly concerned with eliminating name-calling or personal insults, discussions proceed without intervention by club officials. To an administration that prefers managed messaging, this is a dangerous communication vehicle.

This is the equivalent of “neutral turf”, where organizational discussion participants can speak freely among themselves without fear of reprisals or censorship. Repressive societies fear such forums, while open organizations welcome them.

A neutral but abrasive moderator is not everyone’s idea of paradise, but compared with presidentially sanitized communication, it has one virtue: people believe it is not being stage-managed. In a club full of hams, curmudgeons, ex-officers, procedural obsessives, and people who can remember grudges from the Nixon administration, credibility matters.

The 399 Subscribers Tell the Tale

The channel in question is the choice of the membership. At last glance, it had 399 subscribers, over triple the number of subscribers to the “official” channel, which had 113. Beyond the inertia of fifteen years of operation, members can speak freely there about controversial subjects without fear of organizational censorship. The only stricture is that they “play nice”. The paternalistic moderator sometimes comes under fire for admonishing the more unruly commenters, but the forum has withstood the test of time.

So, all the Board banter about moving to more sophisticated platforms such as Discord or Slack, where more control could be exerted, is sublimation of a non-issue to vapid delusions of grandeur. The issue is not what is best suited for an audience of 70 year-old retirees, but what is best for organizational control. The cover story is that people could pick and choose discussion categories to suit them. But will they want to bother with the learning curve and the complexity? One retired engineer already declared, “I don’t want to install a new app.”

If We Build It, They Will Come

So, member adoption, which cannot be forced, is in doubt. This is not Field of Dreams—if you build it, they might not come.

We haven’t even touched on the administrative complexity or cost of moving to one of these new systems. In an organization that lacks the talent to handle what it already must deal with, a new layer of complexity is not what the doctor ordered.

Discord might be technically superior in some ways, but this is an elderly amateur radio club, not a gaming guild coordinating a dungeon raid. Slack is cleaner for business users, but free-tier retention and account-management constraints matter. Groups.io has costs, but it is closer to what this demographic actually understands: email that can also behave like a forum. The existing reflector works. The risk is governance and succession, not “we need channels because modernity.”

So Long, History!

And, where would the original, neutral forum go? Would its rich history be lost? This, perhaps, is the biggest argument for keeping it—institutional history. Some of that history might be inconvenient for the current administration, reminding them of the sometimes turbulent past. However, it is the history of the organization, and to lose it would be yet another confirmation of its ever-increasing entropy.

The Bottom Line: Entropy Increases

The hubcaps are being polished to the point where the chrome plating has eroded. Meanwhile, the financials differ from the award report, the awards committee does not report its activity, unopposed director candidates garner four votes, and the Board treats it all as business as usual.

Many directors feel that just showing up for meetings is sufficient—if they choose to show up.

Erosion of institutional values is all too obvious. Healthy organizations preserve useful institutional memory while improving weak structures. Entropic organizations do the opposite: they lose operational competence while trying to centralize symbolic control.

So the Club cannot maintain an award production workflow robust enough to absorb a logo change, cannot produce awards reports with correct arithmetic, and cannot distinguish committee reporting from decorative statistics. But it can still find energy to debate logos and communication-platform control.

That is not governance. That is entropy with a microphone.

Control expands as competence contracts.

The hubcaps are not just being polished. They are being polished by people who no longer know how to mount the wheel.

Epilogue: Making the Numbers Go Away

After observing tonight’s meeting, I feel compelled to comment further.

One director made the serious and correct point that the Awards Committee reports contained erroneous revenue information. Unfortunately, the Board’s apparent solution was not to improve the reporting, correct the fee schedule, or reconcile the awards activity with collections. Instead, the emerging consensus was that the Awards Committee report should simply stop including revenue information.

That’s the ticket, boys. Make the numbers disappear, and no one will have to worry about whether they are wrong.

The President, Chairman, and Treasurer all agreed that award revenue information should be eliminated from the Awards Committee report, characterizing it as “meaningless”. The rationale advanced by the Treasurer was that he books revenue when money is actually received, making the Treasurer’s records the only valid source of revenue information. That may be valid for financial reporting, but it misses the internal control issue completely.

The Treasurer can report what was received. The Awards Committee should be able to report what should have been received. Those are not competing facts. They are two sides of a basic reconciliation process. If the organization eliminates one side of the equation, it also eliminates any practical way to detect errors, omissions, delays, or abuse.

A Half-Assed System Ripe for Abuse

Potential abuses are not difficult to imagine.

Suppose a rogue awards manager wants to do favors for friends and quietly issues awards without charging them the required fee. He dutifully records the fee as having been charged, but it is never collected. How would anyone know?

Suppose someone pays cash for an award and the payment never reaches the Treasurer. How would anyone know?

Suppose an application is processed using the old fee schedule after a price increase. How would anyone know?

Under the Board’s newly endorsed preferred approach, the Treasurer knows only what money arrived. He does not know what money should have arrived. You call that accounting control? It is more like cashbox faith healing.

In a properly controlled process, award activity and expected revenue should be independently calculable from the number and type of awards issued. Collections should then be compared against that expected amount. Differences may have innocent explanations: late payments, waived fees, corrections, bundled payments, timing differences, or clerical errors. But without the comparison, there is no meaningful way to identify the differences in the first place.

Even if the reconciliation is imperfect, maintaining two information sources creates at least a minimal deterrent against mistakes and dishonesty. Eliminating the expected-revenue side does the opposite. It tells everyone in the chain that no one is checking.

That is surrender, not simplification.

Shooting Ourselves in the Foot

The meeting discussion wandered into sophomoric examples intended to support removing the revenue columns. One example involved the Treasurer receiving a check for awards six months after the fact. This was presented as evidence that Awards Committee revenue reporting is unreliable.

In reality, it proves the opposite.

A payment arriving six months late is precisely why expected revenue should be tracked separately from received revenue. If no one records what should have been paid at the time awards were issued, how would anyone know six months later that the payment was missing? The Treasurer did not realize it, but he was arguing for better internal control, not less.

Nevertheless, his anesthetized audience nodded in adamant agreement while the director who brought up the discrepancy was seen beating his head against the wall.

Further into the Abyss

The Awards Committee report never was, nor does it ever need to become, the official financial statement. That remains the Treasurer’s job. But the awards function should report enough operational detail to show what was issued, under what fee categories, what revenue was expected, and what exceptions existed. The Treasurer can then reconcile receipts against that operational record, just like he reconciles the bank account at the end of the month.

The fundamental bookkeeping process of reconciliation is intended to detect errors—and perhaps, mysterious disappearances—timely, so they can be corrected quickly and measures can be implemented to prevent their recurrence.

Without that, the Club is back to cigar-box bookkeeping: count whatever cash is in the box, assume it belongs there, and hope no one has been making change from it.

For a Board that claims to care about organizational integrity, deliberately removing a useful cross-check because it exposed errors and, besides, would take time to reconcile, is ass-backward.

The correct response to bad numbers is not fewer numbers—it is better numbers.

But I suppose if we merely declare numbers we don’t want to take the time to understand as “meaningless,” our tacit acceptance of the leaky bucket is just another symptom of organizational entropy.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 6: Rome Burns, but the Logo Will Be Crisper appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

The Straight Scoop: Man to Man

I recently watched a GLP-1 “influencer” specifically addressing men about weight loss induced by his favored pharmaceutical method. His aim was apparently to give the boys the straight locker-room scoop on GLP-1 weight loss, a subject he treated as if it were heretofore somehow too emotionally delicate for the masculine constitution.

His instincts were valid, since most of the social media noise about GLP-1 weight loss is oriented toward women. And judging by his video’s comment thread, the “straight talk” resonated with many attention starved guys who felt left out by the prevailing emphasis on how good we’ll all look in our bikinis next summer.

First, our manly man hero addressed the stigma issue: the notion that using GLP-1 drugs is “cheating,” “taking a shortcut,” or using an unmanly crutch. His point was that men should not concern themselves with social disapproval. Yeah, right. Come on, man! Do you really care what anybody thinks, fellas?

Then, to dispose of any lingering unmanly shame, he rolled out a sophomoric power-tool metaphor. After all, nothing spells manhood better than a pulsating hammer drill in a sweaty hand! Our influencer posited that no one would criticize you for using a chainsaw instead of a hand saw to fell a tree. And, oh, by the way, it would take forever to build a house using only hand tools, wouldn’t it? So there we have it. GLP-1s are the power tools for conquering the “disease of obesity.” Nothing feminine about that!

Fine. I’ll buy the metaphor. GLP-1s are indeed power tools. But tools do not decide what gets built. They are just tools. Without skill, judgment, and some awareness of their limitations, tools can be ineffective or dangerous. So why read the safety instructions when we can just crank up the chainsaw and admire the noise, the smoke, and the flying chips? Go for it, man!

Burp!

Weight Loss First, All Else Later

The problem is not that GLP-1s work. The problem is that the culture forming around them increasingly treats weight loss as the only scoreboard. That is how people end up lighter but weaker, thinner but less capable, and pleased with the scale while quietly surrendering muscle, strength, and resilience.

The testosteronically enabled GLP-1 evangelism was amusing until Peptide Man touched a nerve by prioritizing weight loss above all else. His message was essentially: lose the weight first, then maybe start thinking about exercise later. Like his referral commissions depended on it (duh!), he did not want to scare people away from pharmaceutical weight loss by declaring that consistent strength training should be part of the process from the beginning. Instead, he minimized training and emphasized enjoyable activities like pickleball or golf—eventually. When you’re ready. Let’s not rush.

Now, I am not here to denigrate pickleball, golf, walking, cycling, or any other decent recreational exercise. They are good ways to get our asses in gear, and many provide meaningful aerobic benefits. But they are not serious strength builders. Especially for those of us in our so-called golden years, a commitment to resistance training is essential to combat sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle. Rapid weight loss from GLP-1 therapy can accelerate muscle loss along with fat loss, combining with sarcopenia for a double-barreled threat.

“If the end result is frailty, we have not achieved health. We have merely reduced mass.”

The threat is not just a little loss of strength. It is a seriously compromised lifestyle.

In short, GLP-1s change how much you weigh. Resistance training determines what that weight is made of. Ignore that, and you are solving the wrong problem.

Strength Training is an Optional Extra

Our influencer further trivialized serious training by mentioning that some people starting weight-loss programs cannot even bend down to put on their socks. This was intended to justify putting weight loss first and treating strength training as an afterthought. But that argument cuts both ways. If someone is already functionally impaired, the goal should not be merely to make that person lighter. The goal should be to make that person more capable.

A morbidly obese individual certainly faces many weight-related complications. But “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” is not a comprehensive medical strategy. Blindly pursuing scale weight reduction while ignoring muscle loss can trade one problem for another. If the end result is frailty, we have not achieved health. We have merely reduced mass.

If you lose 30 pounds and 10 of those pounds are muscle, you did not just get lighter. You got weaker.

Metabolic Implications

Your metabolism does not care about your scale weight nearly as much as influencers would have you believe. It cares about lean mass. Muscle is metabolically active tissue. The more muscle you lose, the more you compromise strength, function, glucose disposal, and long-term weight maintenance. That is not a trivial side effect. That is structural damage masquerading as success.

And let us not forget that many people who start GLP-1 drugs discontinue them within a year, for reasons ranging from side effects to cost, insurance barriers, supply issues, or simple dissatisfaction. Those who believe the drug alone produced “magical” weight loss often regain much of what they lost. Unfortunately, the weight lost included muscle, while the weight regained tends to return mostly as fat.

So the real risk is not merely losing weight. The real risk is what you are made of when the drug stops.

This is no longer merely a concern raised by exercise cranks, geriatricians, or those of us old enough to view muscle as something more valuable than Instagram-friendly thinness. Even the financial press has noticed. A recent Wall Street Journal article asked whether the GLP-1 revolution is causing a frailty epidemic, citing patients who lost impressive amounts of weight but then reported weakness, fatigue, feeling cold, and difficulty with ordinary tasks. One researcher quoted in the article put it bluntly: “We are curing obesity by encouraging frailty.” Another point was even more damning: people worship body weight as an outcome measure because it is simple, quick, and cheap. Exactly. The scale is easy. Body composition is harder. Functional strength is harder still. Naturally, the hard stuff gets ignored by people selling the easy button.

The Holistic Approach

Returning to the power-tool metaphor, GLP-1 evangelists often treat muscle preservation like the boring safety manual in the box. Toss it aside, fire up the chainsaw, and admire the flying chips. But when the job is done, someone still has to inspect the structure.

Resistance training is essential, and that does not apply only to people on GLP-1s. Any form of meaningful weight loss can involve loss of lean mass. Faster weight loss generally increases that risk. And even without weight loss, aging steadily erodes muscle unless we give the body a reason to keep it.

I am not trying to turn everyone into a gym rat. I am trying to convince people to take strength seriously.

You do not need to train like a bodybuilder. You do need to give your body a reason to maintain muscle. Two or three resistance-training sessions per week is a reasonable starting point. The program should include basic compound movements involving large muscle groups, with loads increased progressively as tolerated. The keys are consistency and commitment. “I’ll get to it if I have time” is not a training plan. It is a prewritten excuse.

A few hours per week is an ounce of prevention against what could later require a ton of cure. Lose enough muscle and your strength, balance, mobility, glucose control, and independence go with it. Sarcopenia is not cosmetic. It is functional decline.

Those few hours might seem hard at first. But you will find that you start feeling better almost immediately. And the long-term payoff far outweighs any perceived inconvenience.

GLP-1 evangelizing “influencers” love to proselytize the joy of uncomplicated weight loss. Their YouTube channel generates more revenue for them if they sweep the hard truths under the rug. As well, their commissions from compounders would suffer if people weren’t sold such a bill of goods about shucking excess pork with little or no personal responsibility beyond sticking a weekly needle in their spare tire. Don’t buy that line of crap!

To sum it up: if you are using a GLP-1 and you are not doing resistance training, you are leaving part of your health behind.

My Progress on Mounjaro

I am somewhat delinquent in updating you on my personal situation. As you might recall, I have been on Mounjaro since June 2024. I’ve lost over 70 pounds and reduced my HbA1c to 5.5% from 7.6%. What I want to focus on today is my improvement in insulin sensitivity, which I attribute more to my resistance training than to the drug-induced weight loss.

Last week, I had blood tests for fasting insulin and glucose. The results were 6.3 uIU/mL and 92 mg/dL, respectively. A commonly used calculation that uses these two numbers to depict insulin resistance, called HOMA-IR (Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance), gives me a number 1.43, which is comfortably in the “insulin-sensitive human” range instead of the “modern metabolic train wreck.”

In November 2024, my HOMA-IR was 4.4, which is a horrible number indicating severe insulin resistance. I had begun my resistance training in earnest in August 2024, so it hadn’t yet had its impact on my crappy numbers. By February 2025, my HOMA-IR was 2.9—still in the metabolic train wreck range, but trending down.

My current result of 1.43 is right on the top end of where a normally insulin sensitive human being should be. HOMA-IR, though, is a model that assumes liver output is stable, and there is no hormonal interference, including GLP-1s bending reality. However, I’m on Mounjaro, which suppresses glucagon, slows gastric emptying, and alters insulin dynamics. So my true insulin sensitivity is probably even better than what the HOMA-IR suggests. The model wasn’t designed for pharmacologically enhanced humans.

I cut fasting insulin by two-thirds without sacrificing glucose control. How? Pharmaceuticals aside, my resistance training played a huge part in it. All the more reason why influencers should be emphasizing, not minimizing muscle maintenance.

Peptide Purgatory is a regular feature of this blog. For an annotated catalog of all my Mounjaro, GLP-1, and Peptide Purgatory updates, please visit my Mounjaro Update Catalog page.

The post Peptide Purgatory: GLP-1 Weight Loss with Minimal Activity? appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

I came across one such comment as I was looking for reactions to the FDA moves for a story I wanted to write here. However, this comment and the response by the “influencer guru” incensed me, so I’ll write about it instead.

Here’s the comment:

“My current provider for [tirzepatide] compound is refusing to prescribe me any more of the medicine since my BMI is 21.9 and I’m 71 years old. When I told her I thought we were treating the disease of obesity all she said was ‘but you are not obese.’ Clearly she doesn’t get it at all! She told me all kinds of scary possible side effects and told me no ethical health provider would prescribe me the medicine. She told me ‘maintenance dose’ was a made-up term not honored by the FDA. That she would not risk my health or her license by pretending such a term exists. What am I to do?”

The highly intelligent influencer’s response was to “please find a obesity certified doctor.”

Oy, vey!

So let me get this straight. Someone who is not obese yet who is suffering from the “disease of obesity” needs “a obesity certified doctor” to feed their addiction?

What is “A Obesity Certified Doctor”, exactly?

Short answer: not a recognized medical specialty in the same sense as cardiology or endocrinology. It is a certification from the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which means:

• A licensed physician (any specialty)
• Completed CME hours in obesity medicine
• Passed an exam

That’s all. No residency, no fellowship requirement, and no standardized clinical training pathway like, say, endocrinology.

Is it useless? No.

Is it the holy grail these YouTube evangelists imply? Hell, no.

It is basically a continuing education credential with branding.

Now, Let’s Look at Our Commenter’s “Obesity Disease”

A BMI around 21 at age 71 is normal, possibly bordering on “don’t lose any more weight unless you enjoy sarcopenia.”

So, this person tells the clinician they want to continue a potent GLP-1/GIP agonist indefinitely?

The intelligent response: “No ethical provider would prescribe this.”

She amplified this by expressing concern for her patient’s health and her own medical license.

Of course, this incensed the desperate patient, who believes all the bullshit fed to her by YouTube influencers. In this case, she was brainwashed into believing the mythical “maintenance dose” for her “disease of obesity.”

The “Disease of Obesity”

You’ve read my thoughts in prior columns regarding “the chronic, relapsing disease of obesity, which requires lifelong treatment.” Indeed, this has been one of my more popular Bullshit Corner topics. I regard it as more of a marketing opportunity in an expanding world of human porkers than a pathological classification.

But let’s pretend for a minute that current vogue classifying obesity as a disease is valid.

Treatment would be indicated if there were evidence of disease. This case, influenced by influential influencers, lacks such evidence. The only evidence I see here is evidence of addiction abetted by evidence of marketeering.

Think of it this way. You don’t treat

• “hypertension” at 90/60
• “hypoglycemia” at 110 mg/dL
• “obesity” at BMI 21

Unless your treatment paradigm is, “keep the injections coming because of good vibes.”

Maintenance Dosing — real or imaginary?

The provider is technically correct, which to an engineer is always the most satisfying, if not people-pleasing, kind of correct.

The FDA does not define a formal “maintenance dose” concept for GLP-1s in the sense these self-educated influencers use it.

On the other hand, clinical trials maintain patients on doses to sustain outcomes, but that’s not the same as, “You must stay on this forever regardless of clinical context.”

Yep, there’s a big difference between continuation of therapy based on indication and lifetime subscription model for a drug.

Guess which one telehealth businesses, compounding pharmacies, and their willing, commission-earning dupes in the “influencer” business prefer?

The Crux: Indication Drift

What we have here is social media abetting classic scope creep. It goes something like this:

1. Drug approved for obesity and diabetes
2. Works well
3. People like how they look and feel
4. Community forms
5. Identity attaches to drug
6. Now, stopping the drug feels like malpractice

At that point, you’re no longer treating disease. You’re maintaining a pharmacologic lifestyle.

To paraphrase songwriter Paul Simon, “Mama, don’t take my tirzepatide away!”

The Adult in the Room

The physician is clearly the adult in the room. She evaluated risk versus benefit, saw no current indication, and refused to prescribe a drug that can produce serious side-effects. In other words, she’s practicing medicine instead of running a subscription service.

Good for her.

The Uncomfortable Physiology Piece

At BMI 21 in a 71-year-old, further weight loss risks lean mass loss, something you know I’ve been harping on here continually. Additionally, GLP-1s can reduce appetite enough to compromise protein intake. The combination of the two lead to sarcopenia, frailty, and falls. At 71, those are all at issue, even before adding GLP-1s to the picture. The doctor recognized this and acted responsibly.

Not so, our friendly influencers. They’ll push “obesity certified” docs who prescribe, prescribe, and prescribe. Nothing rare or new. Not impressive. Ho hum.

Conclusion, I Hope

“Obesity certified” is a credential, not a specialty, but even so, an ethical doctor who holds that credential would likely not see BMI 21 as a legitimate indication for tirzepatide therapy in most cases.

“Maintenance dosing” is partly real, but mostly abused in this context.

The provider who rejected the prescription request was doing her job correctly.

The whole exchange reads like a support group where the shared condition is not wanting to give up the drug.

The feedback loop is not only unstable, it is oscillating wildly.

Peptide Purgatory is a regular feature of this blog. For an annotated catalog of all my Mounjaro, GLP-1, and Peptide Purgatory updates, please visit my Mounjaro Update Catalog page.

The post Peptide Purgatory: YouTube GLP-1 Fanboys BS Advice appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

“Organizations that do not react timely to changing circumstances set themselves up to fail.”

Tradition Killed Eastman Kodak

A couple of decades after photography pivoted from film to digital, the corporate founder and leader of the modern photography industry, Eastman Kodak, failed. Kodak did not fail because it misunderstood the future. It failed because it could not abandon the structures that defined its past. Thus, tradition killed Eastman Kodak.

Organizations that do not react timely to changing circumstances set themselves up to fail. As our subject organization enters its second half-century, some serious creative thinking could avert failure.

First, the organization must engage in honest introspection. This requires disciplined thinking, a quality that is quite rare among part-time volunteer policy makers.

Declining Participation and Volunteer Labor

In the Absurdist Papers thus far, a recurring theme is the “overloaded operator”. As participation declines and the organization’s volunteer talent pool contracts, individuals accumulate responsibilities. This leads to overload, dilution of effort, absence of new, external inputs, and ultimately, stagnation. Worse, it can imperil accountability and cloud communication.

Some examples of “operator overloading” follow.

• The Vice President is also an Area Awards Manager, member of the Awards Committee, Net Coordinator, and member of the Bylaws Review Committee. Furthermore, he functions as a regularly scheduled net control operator.
• The Treasurer is also an Area Director, Membership Coordinator, Club Information Officer, Net Coordinator, and a regularly scheduled net control operator.
• Finally, in three geographic call areas, Area Directors have appointed themselves as Area Award Managers.

These are not isolated cases. They are the predictable outcome of a system that assigns responsibilities based on availability rather than suitability. And while the organizations dilettantish leadership decries single points of failure for its more trivial systems, it allows these crucial positions to be concentrated. Draw your own conclusion about priorities.

Although all such cases represent severe compromise, I view the third example of operator overloading as the most potentially damaging to the organization. It muddies accountability and oversight while dubiously “solving” the staffing problem.

What Can We Do about It?

Eliminating the policy loophole that allows a director to serve as award manager is just one component of what I will propose here. It makes no sense and will not be possible in the restructured award organization. The awards organization must be examined and rebuilt, eliminating bad practices while shucking old biases.

The remainder of this Absurdist Paper is a proposal for restructuring the awards suborganization, aiming at creating an accountable, communicative, and efficient subsystem that reduces the demand on a limited talent pool.

Two key concepts are introduced below. Due to wide variability in the existing division of responsibilities by amateur radio call areas, we propose consolidating call areas into regions to even the load and better leverage available talent. To do so will obviously require changes in reporting responsibilities for Area Awards Managers. Under the revamped plan, the Area Directors will be unburdened with the responsibility for managing them, and a more natural, organizationally sound structure will be implemented.

The Case for Decoupling Area Director and AwardS Manager

Let’s address that issue of the amalgamation of Area Directors and Area Awards Managers, which currently exists in three call areas.

In our subject organization, elected Area Directors are largely autonomous, responsible to the membership that elected them and reporting only to the remainder of the Board of Directors. Their primary responsibility is communication with area members and serving as their representatives on the board. Bylaws require that each Area Director appoints an Assistant Area Director to represent the area members in their absence, and an Area Awards Manager to process award applications for the area.

Nothing in the current bylaws precludes an Area Director from appointing themselves to perform the duties of award manager. As I have regularly mentioned here and in earlier Absurdist Papers, this is a major organizational flaw.

Although this dual role arrangement has only manifested as a chronic problem in limited cases, its success or failure is entirely dependent on the individual involved. All elected directors are not equally capable, particularly when declining interest results in candidates running unopposed. which now happens in more elections than not.

If we do not care who we elect, handing them two crucial roles is even stupider than allowing flawed candidates to run without opposition. We compound the felony by allowing irresponsible sinecures, then allowing them to add critical functions to their non-performing portfolio of malfeasance. When failure predictably occurs, we sweep it under the rug.

Accountability Suffers

When the Area Awards Manager is his own boss, accountability becomes a matter of personal integrity rather than organizational design. Systems that rely on individual virtue instead of structural accountability eventually fail. The organization feels “lucky” when volunteers step forward to run for area director, breathing a collective sigh of relief that they have dodged another bullet. We take what we can get.

Once elected, the existing system allows deficient directors to further propagate their inadequacies by appointing themselves to a position where actual work is required. But they were never much interested in real work, so the result is predictable.

Furthermore, many directors are uncomfortable with personnel management. My aim is to unburden them with personnel management by moving Awards Managers’ reporting responsibilities away from Area Directors to the Awards Secretary.

The De Facto Truth

During my decade-long tenure as Awards Secretary, I encountered several situations with awards managers who committed serious offenses or negligence that created a clear, urgent case for their dismissal. Organizational structure precluded me from firing those managers myself. Instead, I needed to make firm recommendations to the area directors responsible. Beating an already dead horse, if the Awards Manager and Area Director are the same person, such recommendations understandably, but frustratingly, fall on deaf ears—and they did.

In the organizational overhaul I describe below, we consolidate areas into regions and redraw lines of authority and responsibility to create a more responsive and accountable revamped award system while eliminating the abominable dual-role Area Director/Award Managers.

Area Award Managers vs. Regional Award Managers

Instead of attempting to find eleven qualified award managers among the organization’s scarce available human resources, I propose consolidating the current areas into “regions”, based on projected workload.

When the FCC laid out amateur radio call areas eighty years ago, population densities significantly differed from those today. For example, the fourth call area was largely rural in 1946, but it is now the most active of all the U.S. call areas. Dramatic population shifts have occurred, yet they are not reflected in the static call area map.

While the FCC has changed its administrative structure to be less dependent on call area boundaries, our organization has neglected to follow suit. As you can see in the chart below, three-year award counts are widely inconsistent among call areas, from an astonishingly low 23 in the 6^th Area to 856 in the 4^th Area. Yet each call area’s awards are administered by a single Area Awards Manager. The large variation demonstrates the current structure’s workload inequity. For this organization, geographic boundaries define responsibility, but do not reflect demand.

Inequities in the Existing Geographic System

A Sixth Area Awards Manager might process six award applications per year, while the Fourth Area Awards Manager can process that many in a single day, day in and day out. The real-life workload will have peaks and valleys, but the the point is still clear. Clinging to the current geographic structure not only wastes scarce talent, but also embeds inequity.

Analysis of Awards Issued between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2025

Combining areas intelligently could result in a regional structure resembling the following, shown with three-year aggregate award totals:

Northeast (Areas 1, 2, 3) – 739 awards
Southeast (Area 4) – 856 awards
West/DX (Areas 5, 6, 7, DX) – 596 awards
Central (Areas 8, 9, 10) – 722 awards

The exact regional boundaries are less important than the principle: aligning responsibility with workload rather than geography. Arguments can be made for other arrangements, but the net result will be:

• fewer award managers,
• reduced training demands,
• improved consistency,
• increased responsiveness, and
• enhanced communication in a tighter, purpose focused awards organization.

DX Area Alternative Structure

Although use of traditional mail services is declining, it is expected to persist as a delivery mechanism for award applications and certificates. U.S. postage to foreign countries is an increasing burden to the organization. This leads us to consider a synergistic possibility while pursuing the proposed restructuring.

Instead of combining the DX area with a non-homogeneous region, we could create a separate DX Region, which would be structured differently than other regions. In this modified scheme, the DX Regional Awards Manager’s function will not only include processing and approving award applications, but also printing and mailing award certificates to DX area residents, thus saving postage costs.

This alternate structure couples smaller award volume with a broader mix of tasks. The DX area would be somewhat more autonomous and self-contained.

Differentiating the DX Regional Awards Manager from the domestic managers suggests the need for a modified, elevated title reflecting the additional responsibilities, such as Assistant Awards Secretary and DX Coordinator.

This is just one idea that emerged while discussing this piece with one of our more engaged members. Intelligent discourse by the Board as they plan the reorganization will surely yield other synergies.

The Board needs to be open-minded and adaptable as they take on major policy updates. Thinking about related subjects like DX awards should be part of the discussion. Let’s continue with the framework for them to consider.

Concentrating Talent

Fielding four energetic and qualified Regional Awards Managers is a much less onerous process than attempting to fill eleven slots with whoever the Area Director can either conveniently plug in or, failing to do so, take on the responsibility themselves. The case for consolidation makes itself.

The current collection of awards managers displays a wide variance in experience and acuity, which complicates management. Area Directors exert little effort training them, so the burden falls on the Awards Secretary.

When the organization implements a regional award structure, it must abandon the current system in which awards managers report to Area Directors. In the next section, I’ll describe the redrawn lines of authority and responsibility necessary to support the awards system of the future.

A Novel Awards Subsystem

To reiterate, if Regional Awards Managers are responsible for multiple call areas, they must no longer report to Area Directors. A one-to-many relationship between operative function and the supervisor would cloud lines of authority and responsibility to the point of unmanageability.

Area Directors are policy makers, not operational functionaries. Furthermore, many Board members lack the necessary depth to directly supervise the awards system. Operational responsibilities should reside with those directly engaged in the function, under a clear and singular line of authority. Here, I propose a revamped organization chart to serve the needs of the organization in its second half-century.

Reporting Responsibilities

The Awards Secretary will be responsibility for hiring, firing, and day-to-day management of the newly created Regional Award Managers. This will greatly improve organizational consistency and communication efficiency. And, once again flagellating that necrotic equine, under no circumstances should area directors serve as award managers. Not now, not ever.

The existing system pays lip service to Area Awards Managers “working for” Area Directors. In practice, the system has evolved such that once “hired”, the Area Awards Manager has little contact with their Area Director.

Meanwhile, the Awards Secretary has daily contact with award managers, effectively acting as their supervisor. Yet when issues arise that require personnel changes or attitude adjustments, the Awards Secretary can only recommend appropriate action to the award manager’s Area Director, adding a layer of communication complexity and bureaucratic lag. In the new scheme, communication and day-to-day management are significantly streamlined.

As I mentioned previously, as Awards Secretary, I took responsibility for selection and vetting Area Award Managers—either when the area directors asked for help or when they failed to act and let a bad situation fester. I also regularly communicated with award managers and engaged in their day-to-day supervision. I resolved disputes between Area Awards Managers in different areas. This arrangement proved both natural and effective. Furthermore, many directors were happy to offload the work to me.

I am proposing that the organization formalize what has evolved into a responsive, albeit de facto, structure, further refining it by consolidating areas as described above. Supervising four, instead of eleven, awards managers, the Awards Secretary can optimize time and quality of supervision while enhancing system-wide communication.

“Charismatic leadership is one key to making beneficial changes in the system. Without it, external inputs are minimal, while internal churning consumes most available energy. The system produces more noise than signal and considers low-value output better than no output at all, especially when the required investment is correspondingly low.”

Reworking the Bylaws

The authority and responsibility of the Awards Secretary prescribed by the bylaws will require a major update. The position description will pivot from clerical toward managerial, aligning it with the unacknowledged current tacit responsibilities. The Awards Secretary is elected by the Board of Directors and serves at the pleasure of the President. Those organizational relationships and their inherent accountability will be preserved.

In the new structure, disputes over awards, formerly resolved by the Area Director, would first be brought to the Awards Committee, which would either settle the matter or refer it to the full Board of Directors if they could not.

These changes will create a responsive, efficient organization with a well distributed workload. Marginal “placeholder” volunteers will be boiled out of the system, while earnest, well qualified awards managers will remain. Thus, the awards system will be streamlined and competent.

Implementation Considerations

Such changes require sustained attention and coordination—qualities that volunteer boards often struggle to maintain. Updates to operating documents demand large infusions of energy for thoughtful consideration and decisive action. Late-stage organizations tend to mire themselves in minutiae, to the detriment of large-scale projects such as this one.

Charismatic leadership is one key to making beneficial changes in the system. Without it, external inputs are minimal, while internal churning consumes most available energy. The system produces more noise than signal and considers low-value output as better than no output at all, especially when the required investment is correspondingly low.

There is a chance that our entropic organization would view the project described here as an overly ambitious non-starter. Furthermore, a few Area Directors might dismiss it if they feel they are losing territory.

While this change alters the traditional role of Area Directors, it will also relieve them of the ongoing burden of recruiting and supervising Area Awards Managers—an obligation that has proven increasingly difficult to fulfill. Some might welcome the change.

The project described here is not a “one-and-done” motion. It will require enabling changes in documents, transitional accommodations, and careful implementation over a span of time much longer than a volunteer Board of Directors’ typical attention span.

Yes, it is ambitious, but it is certainly not unrealistic—especially if the Board can lay aside the minutiae to roll up its sleeves and collaborate on a major project.

What are the chances? History suggests they are not high—but neither is the probability of long-term success without change.

You can’t hit a home run if you never step up to the plate.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 5: On Breaking from Tradition appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

The Illusion of Process

“The question is not whether elections are held,
but whether they function.”

Elections continue to occur. Candidates are presented. Votes may even be cast. From the outside, the machinery appears intact.

The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they function.

My earlier opus, “When Participation Becomes Performative,” stated:

In healthy organizations, elections are noisy. Multiple candidates emerge organically. Outcomes are uncertain. Participation is visible and losing candidates still confer legitimacy by their presence alone.

In the subject organization, multiple-candidate elections are the outliers; single-candidate elections, including elections where placeholder candidates are chosen to comply with rules, are now the norm.

That earlier essay went on to state that at some point, the organization becomes self-referential, drawing only from those already inside the governance loop. Thus, elections cease to be aspirational. Participation becomes performative when outcomes are predictable.

Here, we examine what happens next.

The Single-Candidate Election

The bylaws prescribe a special election process to fill the crucial policy-making position. The current call for nominations yielded a single candidate in a mandated one-week period.

The candidate who emerged is a capable and concerned individual who currently serves as award manager in his area.

One candidate. No contest. No uncertainty. Given the predetermined outcome the election serves only to measure the level of residual engagement among the electorate.

The election will not select a leader. It will confirm the only available option.

From Selection to Ratification

In competitive elections, contrasting ideas are presented by a diverse collection of candidates. This leads to a selection process that advances the individual who best reflects the views of the electorate.

A single candidate offers no such choice. Thus, the election is not a selection process. It is a ratification mechanism.

When no alternative exists, voting becomes ceremonial.

Participation declines not from apathy, but from recognition that outcomes are invariant. Potential voters ask, “Why bother?”

The Shrinking Talent Pool

“As the pool contracts, roles do not remain vacant. They accumulate.”

I mentioned that the director candidate also holds the area award manager job. Whether he retains the dual role once he is established as a director will be clinically interesting.

If he does, he will be the third sitting area director who has appointed himself as award manager. We pointed out the perils of this duality in Absurdist 1.

It is no surprise that the one person who stepped forward was already in the system. With declining participation and a limited volunteer base, leadership will likely be drawn from the same internal cohort.

The issue is not lack of capable individuals, but lack of available and willing ones. The system increasingly selects from those already embedded within it.

When candidates are reluctant to commit themselves, participation must be actively encouraged among trusted individuals, frequently accompanied by a quiet minimization of the expectations attached to the role. Selection becomes solicitation.

We see the same familiar faces, serving in multiple roles.

The Deference Trap

“Respect for experience becomes a liability
when it suppresses participation.”

In some cases, multiple qualified individuals exist who could serve in leadership roles. Yet these individuals decline to run, not due to lack of capability, but out of deference to incumbent leadership.

The reasoning is straightforward: experienced leaders are respected and challenging them is seen as unnecessary or even inappropriate.

This reasoning assumes that stability in leadership is inherently beneficial and that continuity outweighs the value of competition. In system terms, this replaces a selection mechanism with a preservation mechanism.

The consequence of such deferential behavior is that qualified candidates select themselves out, incumbents remain unchallenged, elections become uncontested, and the leadership pool stagnates. When capable individuals decline to run, the absence of competition is not evidence of consensus. It is evidence of constraint.

A closed system does not need to exclude new participants; it only needs to provide no reason for them to enter.

Renewal vs. Continuity

Leadership roles benefit from renewal. Committee roles benefit from continuity.

The system functions best when new participants are introduced at the leadership level, while institutional memory is preserved in advisory and committee roles.

When the candidate pool narrows and incumbents are not challenged, roles begin to accumulate among the same individuals, further reducing opportunities for new participants to enter the system.

Respect for experience is essential. However, when deference suppresses participation, it ceases to be a virtue and becomes a constraint on renewal.

A system that protects incumbency more than it encourages participation will eventually have neither.

Role Convergence

“Redundancy is discussed, but consolidation is practiced.”

As the volunteer talent pool contracts, we can observe an increase in the number of individuals wearing multiple hats. I have already mentioned the possibility that after this election the organization will have three area directors who also serve as their area’s award manager. The associated confounding of lines of authority and responsibility was covered in Absurdist 1.

One current director is also the treasurer and the club’s membership coordinator. Other trusted, inner-circle directors and officers serve on multiple standing or ad hoc committees.

While the President and Board of Directors pay lip service to addressing single points of failure, there is little redundancy in staffing critical club functions. Lose one of these overloaded operators and the system is imperiled.

Thus, with the contraction of the pool, roles do not remain vacant. Instead, they accumulate. Single points of failure, previously identified, are not eliminated but reassigned.

The Closed-System Feedback Loop

Now, we can see that with declining participation and shrinking candidate pools leading to uncontested elections, leadership merely recycles internally while roles consolidate. Barriers to entry increase as the system turns inward, and participation declines even further. It is now a self-referential system selecting from and reinforcing itself.

The Consequence: Stability Without Renewal

The danger is not collapse. It is permanence without relevance.

The system indeed continues operating, giving the outward appearance of normalcy: running nets, issuing awards, holding meetings, and conducting events. But internally, adaptability is decreasing while entropy is steadily increasing.

The organizational body is ailing. The diagnostic interpretation is clear; the pattern is increasingly evident. Absent external intervention, the decline will continue.

In the meantime, hope for increased accountability and improved functionality rests in the general membership’s willingness to question organizational leadership. In self-referential systems lacking any significant internal feedback, external observation becomes the only corrective force.

The Question That Matters

If an election produces the same outcome regardless of participation, is it still an election? Or is it merely confirmation of the status quo?

The answer may depend on whether anyone is still watching.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 4: On the Closed-Loop Election appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Eleven days after the April 11 board meeting, the minutes had not been posted. The bylaws require that minutes be prepared and published for Board and membership review within ten days. At 9:14 AM, I posted a simple inquiry to the club-wide discussion group asking whether the minutes were available. At 1:15 PM, the Secretary responded with an apology and posted them.

The sequence is instructive.

A time-bound, bylaws-mandated function went unfulfilled. Neither the President, the Vice President, nor any of eleven Area Directors took any action. Only after a member-at-large raised the issue did the process complete—within hours.

The Failure of Oversight

This was not a failure of capability. It was a failure of oversight.

The organization has recently shown a keen interest in imposing redundancy and administrative control over selected communication systems—most notably a long-standing discussion group that has operated without incident for decades (see Absurdist 1). Meanwhile, previously identified crucial single points of failure (see Absurdist 2) remain unresolved, perhaps even unnoticed. Most critically, a legally mandated corporate function—the preparation and publication of official minutes—remains dependent on a single individual, with no evident monitoring, escalation, or shared responsibility.

The contrast is difficult to ignore. Redundancy is demanded where it is unnecessary, and absent where it is essential.

Human Error and Institutional Responsibility

It would be easy to dismiss this as simple human error. People forget. Tasks slip. That is precisely why institutions establish process, accountability, and checks. In this case, those mechanisms were either absent or inactive. When the failure surfaced, it was corrected immediately, suggesting that the underlying system is fully capable of functioning when attention is applied.

A similar pattern appears outside the organization. In a recent warranty return with a major manufacturer, a replacement request remained in a static “processing” state for ten weeks. Only after direct inquiry did the case advance, with the explanation that escalation had not occurred because no prior contact had been made. Once prompted, the replacement shipped the same day.

In both cases, the system worked—once someone noticed.

Selective Fidelity in the Record

Even when processes execute and records are produced, they do not necessarily capture the substance of events. In the April meeting minutes, the IT Task Force provided a detailed report of activities and planned work. In contrast, the Awards Committee ‘report’ consisted of a routine listing of awards issued, offering no insight into committee activity.

More notably, a discussion concerning control of a long-standing communication system was summarized generically, omitting a directive introduced during the meeting that would impose new administrative requirements. That directive does not appear in the official record, nor is there evidence of Board affirmation.

The result is a record that is formally complete but substantively selective. Decisions and proposals that shape operational behavior may exist only in transient channels, while the permanent record reflects a narrower, sanitized version of events.

Awareness, or Lack Thereof

This pattern extends beyond delayed execution to the prioritization of communication itself. In a prior instance, a Board-approved change to member fees, designated for immediate publication, did not appear on the primary website channel for several weeks. During that period, other content was given prominence. The information was eventually published two months later, well outside the required timeframe.

The implication is not that decisions are not made, but that their communication is subject to discretionary prioritization, even when timing requirements are explicit. The limiting factor is not capability, but awareness. In the absence of external prompting, processes enter a steady state of inactivity while preserving the outward appearance of operation. In some circles, this is described less charitably. Here, we call it entropy.

This is governance by interruption. Not continuous oversight, not enforced procedure, but sporadic activation triggered by visibility. When no one looks, nothing happens.

In this system, a report need not describe activity; it need only resemble one.

The bylaws are not forgotten. They are simply inert until observed.

The next Absurdist Paper may return to performative elections—unless, of course, something more immediate presents itself.

See my catalog of the entire Absurdist Papers Series by Vox Incommoda.

The post Absurdist 3: On the Absence of Oversight appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Levothyroxine is consistently in the top 10 most prescribed medications in the United States. We’re talking 100-120+ million prescriptions annually. For a thyroid hormone, already!—as it turns out, a thyroid hormone most people don’t actually need replaced.

Recently, a study in the Netherlands found that many low-dose, long-term, borderline indication patients like me who had been taking levothyroxine for years could safely withdraw from the drug. Especially those older adults who were at very low doses were successful with deprescribing the synthetic hormone.

This raises the question: Why the hell am I still taking this crap and why have I been taking it for so damn many years?

With the collaboration of Dr. Macallan, I am suspending my daily 25 microgram dose of levothyroxine. We’ll do labs in six to eight weeks to assess whether I have any real thyroid issues. But I must wonder whether I ever did! Here, I will explore the sordid history of mainstream medicine and “thyroid pills”, followed by my expectations about life after levothyroxine.

First, though, I must state that I am not condemning levothyroxine, which is used to treat thyroid issues such as Hashimoto’s Disease, an autoimmune disorder affecting many women including my wife. Conditions such as this causing hypothyroidism do require lifelong treatment with carefully titrated and monitored dosage. The overprescription I refer to here is in connection with what came to be known as subclinical hypothyroidism—in other words, “You’re too fat, so you gotta take thyroid medicine.”

Back in the Day…

My family doctor prescribed Synthroid 25 mcg back in 1965, when I was a chunky teenager. I presented to him with a back issue, the earliest instance of a lifelong struggle with back pain. After a thorough examination, Dr. Citronella pronounced me overweight with high blood pressure, prescribing a “water pill” along with the levothyroxine.

That’s when the levothyroxine started. Yep, 60 years ago.

But I was a kid and by 1968, my priorities didn’t include refilling prescriptions every month. Early in my teen years, my Dear Old Dad had issued the edict: “When you’re 18, out of the house!” I took that literally; I got the hell out at 17. Thus on my own, managing my own health care with no nagging parents around, I did what kids do—assume immortality and ditch the pills. After all, they didn’t seem to do anything one way or the other.

I was living in Queens and working in Manhattan. In New York, you do lots of walking. I was still overweight, but I was in pretty decent shape, felt good, and had plenty of energy. So what the hell good were these little pills? I quickly forgot I ever took them, and I didn’t see a doctor again until I was in my late thirties.

Thyroid Hormone Fixes What Ails You

In the 1950s through 1970s, it was standard procedure to push thyroid hormones at patients describing various suspicious symptoms including fatigue, weight gain, dry skin, or having a pulse. Hell, everyone at the Moose lodge was “on thyroid”, so why not? That was the era of the vogue hypothyroidism diagnosis. Little testing was available to assess underlying issues, so the shotgun treatment was seen as good science. Burp!

Until levothyroxine was invented, desiccated thyroid extract, usually from pig thyroid, was the drug of choice.

Yes, patients would lose some weight initially due to an increase in metabolic rate. This would reinforce both patient and physician perceptions that the treatment was working. Now, empowered by their success, physicians skipped the testing and prescribed, prescribed, and prescribed.

Levothyroxine Worked, Didn’t It?

Sure it worked. Increasing thyroid hormone increases basal metabolic rate, increases lipolysis (“burning” fat), and increases sympathetic tone. People lost weight and felt more energetic—or maybe jittery, if they got too big a dose.

But while the weight loss was happening, they were also losing muscle, something I’ve dwelt on here in connection with GLP-1s or any other weight loss inducing drug. Bone loss, as well. And thyroid hormone can cause cardiac arrhythmia to boot.

Finally, dicking around with Mother Nature caused long-term metabolic disruption in many, many lifelong thyroid patients. For a lifetime.

There just ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

What the medical geniuses of the time were doing was purposefully inducing mild hyperthyroidism and calling it treatment. Medieval medical elegance!

Habits Linger: The 1970s-1990s

Starting with the 1970s, we entered a new era of medical enlightenment where thyroid treatments became more scientific. Better testing, such as TSH assays, became available, along with better understanding of thyroid physiology. This should have fixed things—in theory.

However, in practice, doctors were still running on the old paradigm. Whereas medical research may advance quickly, clinical practice evolves at a snail’s pace. Protocol medicine has staying power even when guidelines change. In other words, old habits die hard. Doctors still had decades of “this seems to help” baked into their habits.

The hardening of thyroid science led to a new category: subclinical hypothyroidism. This assessment translates to, “Looking at your labs, I see your TSH is a slightly off-kilter, and you’re kind of thick around the middle, so let’s nudge your metabolism with some Synthroid.”

Back on Levothyroxine

And that is how I managed to get back on the stuff in the 1990s.

I started seeing the doc regularly again around 1984, after a gallbladder attack reminded me that I was no longer immortal. I was hospitalized for a week, during which I donated my infected component and its many gallstones to medical science—or the pathological trash bin, as it were.

As my weight crept up in the 1990s, it was inevitable that I would be diagnosed with subclinical hypothyroidism and be dosed with the magical substance, again at the minimum dose. And I’ve been taking it ever since.

From Myth to Dogma: the 1990s-2010s

I stopped thinking about it. I just took it. The little orange pill was just a part of my everyday routine. No questions asked.

Once in a while, a doctor who noticed I was taking levothyroxine tested my TSH and maybe T4, then glanced at the results, grunted, and moved on. Nothing to see there, so lets just preserve the status quo.

Was levothyroxine working? Who da hell knows?

Whether doctors feared rebound effects or just resisted deprescribing so-called lifelong prescriptions, no one ever gave it a second thought. Like many others, I was on low-dose levothyroxine for life. I guess they thought it was like metabolic chicken soup—it might not fix anything, but it couldn’t hurt!

Levothyroxine in 2026

The Netherlands study I mentioned at the outset revealed that treating mild or subclinical hypothyroidism often does not improve symptoms, does not reduce weight, and does not improve quality of life. Furthermore, in older adults, overtreatment risks atrial fibrillation, bone loss, and mortality signals in some cohorts.

The disturbing conclusion: A non-trivial number of people have been on levothyroxine for years—for no compelling reason.

They might have been “fat and tired” at one point. Seeing the doctor led to the great “must be your thyroid” boondoggle. And so it went.

Some Encouraging Observations

Metabolic ironies abound.

Thyroid hormone supplementation increases gluconeogenesis. In plain English, it can raise blood sugar, which isn’t a good thing for a diabetic like this Turkey. If you remove it, the glucose decreases.

My HbA1c has been in the 5.3-5.5% range for over a year now, with fasting glucose in the high 90s or low 100s. My insulin levels are reasonable. So, I’m not a metabolic disaster awaiting rescue. Plus, my aversion to polypharmacy impells me to discontinue drugs if they’re not doing me any good or worse, doing me harm.

Since discontinuing the levothyroxine, I have noticed a small, but perceptible, downward shift in my baseline blood glucose, along with muted peaks. While this is non-scientific, preliminary, anecdotal bullshit, it hints at an unexpected benefit of deprescribing levothyroxine.

Approaching 80, actionable epiphanies are rare. This one hit me squarely between the eyes, and I jumped on it.

Da Bottom Line

Thyroid hormone earned a long, slightly disreputable career as a weight nudge, a fatigue placebo, and a “something must be wrong” prescription. For many patients, including me, it might have been initiated on shaky grounds, continued by inertia, and now only questioned because I finally had the audacity to read the literature instead of just stupidly swallowing the pill.

Medicine loves a good habit. Breaking one requires data and a somewhat stubborn patient.

While it is unfortunate that many doctors just reflexively prescribe drugs, patients can help themselves out of “one-size-fits-all” treatment. Do not be reticent about questioning protocol-driven medicine. Knowledge is power.

Peptide Purgatory is a regular feature of this blog. For an annotated catalog of all my Mounjaro, GLP-1, and Peptide Purgatory updates, please visit my Mounjaro Update Catalog page.

The post Peptide Purgatory: Thyroid Myths and Modern Medicine appeared first on The Nittany Turkey.

Organizations create rules to constrain behavior. Adoption by the governing body is accompanied by a tacit commitment to enforcement, for without enforcement, rules are signaling, not governance.

Absurdist Paper Number 2 presents a particularly flagrant example of non-governance in which the organization’s board of directors unanimously passed a bylaws update in February of 2024 but refused to act on it in November of the same year.

My intent here is not to assassinate the character of individual officers and directors, but to hold the organization collectively responsible for its failure. I’ll name no names. All are complicit.

The Rule

The subject rule was part of a sweeping bylaws update passed by a 13-0 vote of the full board in February 2024. The Bylaws Committee had rewritten Articles I (Board of Directors) and II (Officers, Volunteers Positions, and Standing Committees) in their entirety, providing the full text to the board well in advance of the meeting.

This Absurdist Paper focuses on one provision concerning abandonment of a director’s position:

Abandonment. In the event an Area Director fails to have his or her area
represented for three of the five prior consecutive months at the regularly scheduled
BoD meetings, the President must notify the Chair, who must present a motion at the
next scheduled BoD meeting to declare the Area Director position vacant. To pass,
the motion requires a majority vote of the eleven Area Directors then in office.

Here, it is interesting to note that the director who would ultimately be the subject of the first enforcement test of this rule cast an affirmative vote to approve the measure.

The Trigger Event

In November of the same year, owing to habitual absences that left a particular director’s area completely unrepresented, the organization’s president found himself in the uncomfortable position of needing to comply with the abandonment rule. He wrote a motion for removal of the affected director, which he routed through the chair to the board of directors for approval.

The case for abandonment was unambiguous. The director had not only completely left his area unrepresented for the requisite three out of five meetings, but also had been a habitual offender. In fact, over the previous two years, in seven five-month periods, he was absent from three of five. To further compound the malfeasance, in four of those periods he was actually absent for four out of five meetings.

Up to this point, the system, designed as a safeguard against abandoning representation for area members, was working properly. However, as you will see, that changed dramatically when the question was called at the board meeting.

The Pivot: From Rules to Feelings

The waffling started almost immediately when the chair read the motion and called for a discussion before the vote.

The general sentiment among the board was that the director was a friend, a nice guy who travels frequently, and maybe his life outside the organization was getting in the way. They felt they should be more compassionate and understanding.

The director charged with abandonment gave them assurances that he would do better in the future, and wanted “another chance.”

The discussion did not center on whether the director violated the bylaws. It centered on whether the bylaws should matter in this instance.

Meanwhile, other directors were talking about “grace,” despite the bylaws structure.

One director attempted to ground the discussion in reality when he noted that the bylaws update had only recently passed. It was designed to ensure board members attend meetings.

That was met with a “yes, but…” response from another director who opined that the bylaws are a “living document” that should be adjusted as times change.

Another director said that nothing in the bylaws prevented calling the director to give him a friendly reminder that he needed to show up for meetings.

And so it went.

The discussion did not center on whether the director violated the bylaws. It centered on whether the bylaws should matter in this instance.

The Smoking Gun: They Knew Better

After this robust discussion, one director felt the motion should be tabled for further consideration. The motion to table overwhelmingly failed.

The directors present thus expressed the desire to vote on the motion then and there.

First, the Bylaws Committee chair, also a director, noted that laws in the state of incorporation require that this vote be restricted to directors (which means the president and vice president do not vote).

Then, the board chairman called the question.

Only three out of eleven directors approved the motion to declare the position abandoned. Of the remaining eight, five disapproved and three abstained.

Abstentions? In a situation that boils down to “guilty” or “not guilty,” there are no maybes. Why, then, would a responsible director abstain?

Abstentions in a binary enforcement decision vote represent a refusal to decide. For a director voting on an important organizational issue, this amounts to shirking one’s obligation to the members.

I previously touched on one director’s assertion that the bylaws were plainly stated and this case was a clear-cut violation of them. The path forward was spelled out. Indeed, that director was part of the minuscule minority who voted in favor of removal.

The Bylaws Committee chair, also a director, was present to answer questions. He also was a minority “yes” vote.

One other director chose the responsible path.

The majority, whether through “no” votes or abstentions, chose not to act.

The Structural Failure

Failure to act on an obvious breach of rules because the consequences as provided in the rules appear to be too harsh does not signify compassion, flexibility, or nuance. It reduces to selective enforcement of formal rules.

As we mentioned in Absurdist 1, where handwringing over management of a simple discussion group took center stage, the organization wants to impose rigid controls over trivial systems while optionally enforcing rules for critical systems.

The Real System

This inability to tackle difficult issues — avoiding friction — is characteristic of late-stage organizational entropy. The focus is on having fun while existential problems go unresolved.

The system is not optimized for compliance, governance, or accountability. Instead, the system is all about:

• avoidance of interpersonal conflict,
• preservation of relationships, and
• minimizing discomfort in the room.

The priority becomes concluding the meeting, not resolving the issue.

Rules exist until they become inconvenient. At that point, they are subjected to interpretation, mitigation, deferral, and finally, they might be completely ignored.

The Consequence

The bylaws are rendered advisory rather than binding. Governance is illusory.

This organization has demonstrated repeatedly that its rules are there to be broken. The bylaws are not binding. Only advisory.

Only nine months were required to test the abandonment rule. That test produced hesitation, reinterpretation, and ultimately, non-enforcement.

Although this is one example of what has become a habitual occurrence in this organization, you need but one such event to establish precedent.

In Closing