Mess Up With The Directory

 So when Wifey and I moved here in 2001, we were given a booklet, which was our neighborhood directory. It was nice -- set out the history of our beloved Devonwood, and listed all the residents and the names and ages of their kids. It also had a map as a centerfold, which made things easy if you had to visit someone either socially or to drop off errant mail or packages.

Each year there was an updated one, always put together and paid for by the matriarch of our 'hood, Bobbe Dooley. I really dug her -- Texas charming, but with a very quick wit, and flirtatious even into her 90s. She ran a real estate company she and her late husband Jim founded, and it was located next to Stir Crazy, a strip club that existed long before Pinecrest incorporated. At HOA meetings people would ask why upscale Pinecrest couldn't run them out of town, and Bobbe said they owned the land and were perfectly legal. She said once she knew they were there to stay, "I walked inside one day and asked if I could dance the afternoon shift." I really miss her -- she died about 5 years ago.

Since her death, for some reason updating the Directory has proven a daunting chore. It was suggested it go totally online, but most objected -- it really is nice to have the handy booklet to check out what's what and who's who in the hood. The Plague shut it down for a few years, but last year the HOA Board decided to get 'er done -- which was truly a tough task, given that we had record turnover -- probably a full 25% of the residents had moved, taking advantage of the absurd prices. A house that was worth about $1.5M sold for $3M -- in a single day! And the new folks were all refugees not from Latin America, which was the recent Miami trend, but from LA, and Chicago, and NYC. Still, the Board kept up, and at a meeting Denie, an exec with a local Mercedes dealership, announced her company had volunteered to pay for the printing costs, in exchange for having their logo on the cover -- the way Dooley Realty used to do. Actually, it was a smart move for advertising to an 82 house 'hood where the cheapest house is now close to $2M -- classic Mercedes demographics.

Well, the project dragged on. Since I'm Welcome and Hospitality Chair, I delivered the packets with all the neighborhood info without the Directories. And then finally, it was announced that we had them back! Our President Allison asked Denie and I to each deliver 1/3 of them, and on Saturday night, after a great dinner in Lauderdale with visiting friend Kenny, picked up my stack of the documents.

Early yesterday,  I acquitted my duties, fantasizing I was a mail carrier from days of old, letting neither heat, nor humidity, nor mosquitoes, nor iguanas, not peafowl keep me from my appointed rounds. Allison and Denie did theirs, too -- and there was some controversy. A longtime resident and Board member, Ellyn, said we ought to hand deliver each directory, as leaving them in mailboxes might "allow them into the wrong hands." I responded that wasn't gonna happen -- these days, any of the info in the Directories is a mouse click away, anyway, and I know from experience that people often are away -- hand delivering these things would take months, and I wasn't going to assume THAT task.

So it got done. Or DID IT??? In the evening came yet another HOA email blast -- a full page of information had been left out! I guess 15 or so of the residents were excluded from the Directory!

Poor Gloria, who had undertaken the job, and is extremely competent and accurate -- Wifey and I always joke that she was the girl we'd have sat next to in school to get all the right answers -- had missed the omission. So now she has to get the updated page from the printer -- hopefully for free since it was the printer's fault, apparently, and I shall again assume my fantastical duties as local mail carrier.

Now the scuttlebutt is whether there isn't a better system to get this done. I asked whether some neighborhood tech savvy kid might be deputized for the task -- all of us are too damn old to deal with things like this anymore.

It'll get done. And, as Wifey and I agreed, these tempests in teapots are the best kind of neighborhood problems to have. Now if we can just start getting rid of the endemic peafowl...