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So, I guess it's "officially official" now: I came into work this morning to find an email effectively welcoming me, as well as seven other people, to the "Office Relocation Project Team." As I kind of anticipated, it's clearly more about facilitating communication between the team and my department than anything. Mark, the VP of Store Development who sent out the email, wrote, in part:
We need your help and are establishing this team to provide input, share ideas, solicit questions and concerns from your department colleagues. And, as the move approaches, we hope you will serve as ambassadors in responding to questions that arise leading up to, during and after the actual move.
Communication is among your most important responsibilities in this project. Each of you will serve as conduits taking advantage of the ideas of the office staff and sharing move details with your department colleagues.
There appears to be one person each on the team from HR; Store Development; Merchandising (that's me!); IT; Finance and Accounting; Store Operations; Marketing + Purpose; and Executive (this being the Executive Assistant to the CEO and Board).
I think I may be one of only
three people who were actually working at the Central Office when we last moved, moved in 2016. One is Sara G in HR, who was also heavily involved in the move last time. If they had an official "team" then, she was almost certainly on it. The other is Lori R in Store Development. I don't know if she was on the team last time but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.
Another part of the email read,
Please look for an invitation to an introductory meeting where I will share the work done to date as well as objectives and timelines for the project team. So presumably that's what's next.
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— पांच हजार छह सौ चौरासी —
Last night I accompanied Shobhit to
a kickoff party for a new podcast hosted by a couple of locals from the organization
More Equitable Democracy, called
The Future of Our Former Democracy.
The organization advocates for switching our voting process to ranked-choice voting, which I am all for—even though Shobhit has a valid point that it would certainly complicate states (such as Washington, where they are trying to make this change) where we do mail-in voting. With ranked-choice voting, you can't start counting until all the ballots are in. Anyway, the podcast hosts, and 35 others, recently went to Ireland to learn about how they have implemented this electoral system.
There seems to be a trend of late where you get an email to register for an event, and it won't tell you the location until you register. The Queer Housing Rights Forum Shobhit and I went to on September 19 worked this way as well. But, Shobhit forwarded me the email invite he got, directly from one of the podcast hosts (Shobhit could not remember having met him before so does not know exactly how he got on the invite list, but as a former Seattle City Countil candidate, it's still not super surprising; another candidate from a different district was at the event as well, and she knew Shobhit), and he registered us both. It turned out to be at
Stoup Brewing, in the loft space where we had already been to another event before, back when Shobhit was running for office last year.
I was a little skeptical of the event as something I should bother being at beyond someone for Shobhit to have on his arm, but I found myself becoming even more convinced by the argument for ranked choice voting than I already was. They did a very cool, scaled-down demonstration of how it works: samples of six different drinks (four beers; one cider; one hop water) were available, and we had voter cards where we could rank the drinks from 1-6 by preference.
I hate beer, so I didn't even try any of those four. It did occur to me though, as I noted to one of the few people I actually chatted with at the party, that this still served as a good analogy: there could easily be six candidates on a ballot with four I absolutely did not like, but I'd still need to rank them.
I still didn't drink any of the beer. Nor did I vote; I just let Shobhit
fill out the ballot—on which he ranked American Stout first, and the cider #3.
There were three winners in this contest, and much to my surprise, the cider actually got more votes than any of them overall. It would have been my #1, and was Shobhit's #3 anyway. As for how they counted the rest of them, there was a kind of confusing element I could stand some clarity on, because once they elimitated a candidate that had the least number of votes, there was a process by which they picked two ballots from that stack
at random for applying their second votes. Does this random selection element happen in large-scale ranked voting in actual elections? I have mixed feelings about that. I don't know if that was done for simplicity in this scaled-down demonstration or what, and I really should have just found someone at the event to ask.
They had food available. Yay free food! There were vegetarian sushi rolls and spring rolls and seasoned tofu. I filled one of the tiny paper plates three times.
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Anyway. Right before walking over to Stoup, which is just on Broadway and Union, we stopped at the Walgreens on Broadway and Pine, and I got my flu shot. It was quick and painless, but I hyperventilated for like five seconds anyway. Now I'm all set for my vaccines, for this year anyway.
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[posted 12:30 pm]
