Movin’ Right Along

Yes, it does get the song by the Muppets of the same name stuck in my head.

I unsubscribed from the Engineering System Administrator’s mailing list this morning — a list I started in… well I don’t know when I started it, sometime in 2001 I think. Maybe earlier. I only have email archives that date back to 2002 when my laptop was stolen out of my office, and along with it my mail archives (yeah, don’t ask).

1165 messages, of which I sent 503 of them.

One of the things I’ve been most proud of, and the most frustrimigated by. I never really did what should have been done with the group, I didn’t show enough leadership, didn’t build enough community. I’m really not much of a community builder, all my impassioned attempts to do so notwithstanding.

But sometimes folks did talk, and even occasionally they met. And maybe amidst all the cajoling, and even a measure of whining (mine) — someone, somewhere got something out of it. At least some measure of the importance of communication. I still have the marbles Marg gave me when she brought all the door prizes for the workshop. I haven’t lost them yet.

The impetus to move on was that I’ve been gone from Engineering for a while. And there are others that need the chance to take the group and do something great — and most importantly, more consistently — with it that I didn’t quite manage to do in the time that I was in COE. And when I find that the only thing I had to offer was a snarky note about how folks come out of the woodwork when there are lab machines to give away, but when it came to meeting and helping to find discussion topics the sound of silence was the rule rather than the exception… well, it was time to go and take my negative nabob out behind the woodshed and toss it in the junk pile.

Maybe I can do it better next go ‘round.