I don’t know if this is true where you work but we have to justify our existence. By that I mean we always have to show how much work we are doing and making sure that management knows we are really busy, which we are. I know it is important for my leadership to know what is going on with our team and that what we are doing is the right things for the business. Every time someone decides to leave the team or go to another company I have to go through the game of, “do you really need a person?” This bugs me  because it means my boss doesn’t really know what we do or thinks we can do things better or smarter. So I sit down and explain all of what we are doing, how we are working to get smarter how I have improved the stats of the team over the last few years but the workload continues to increase and how if they really want to have my team be smaller they just need to buy and implement some really expensive software which will take us a year to get in place. This usually means I will have to create a proposal for that software, which I have already done every year at budget time, while I am posting for my open position on the team. It also means that that proposal goes nowhere. This year we actually bought the software and I am in the process of getting it started as a project but it still will take a while. Hopefully, while this is going on no one else will resign or it will start all over again.

So yesterday a criminal, well we better be politically correct, a person of interest that the police were looking for was cornered in an area of our town. So being an obvious genius this guy decides his best option for avoiding arrest was to climb a big tree. Not hide in a backyard or under a car or crawl space of a home, no climbing a big tree in the front yard in plain sight of the road and all who were chasing him. While watching the story on the news I couldn’t help but feel this was a good day for the police. Like a human pinata, this guy got a few blows from the police including rubber bullets and a water cannon from the fire department along with the high beam lights and loud music. If I were on one of these teams I would have been raffling off chances to take a shot at this guy. Think about it, how often does it present itself an opportunity to sit under a tree and figure out ways to get this winner to come down. What really is amazing is he took six hours to come down. I can’t imagine his thought process, once you are in the tree, surrounded by police, bright lights shining on you, what do you hope you can do? Unless you have wings or a friend with a helicopter there is only one outcome. I just wonder if it took the full six hours for him to come to that conclusion.