What a nice backhanded compliment!

You may need to settle down with a bowl of popcorn for this blog entry. Hell, I might want to grab some popcorn for this. Depending on how deep I got into the back story, this could take a while. Before we begin, I should introduce you to and/or refresh your memory about a few things.

First off, the National Good Templar (NGT). It’s a national newsletter that gets distributed to all U.S. members (and a few overseas) of IOGT, officially known as the International Organization of Good Templars. Please, please, please note that we have no relationship to the Knights Templar: we’re not religiously affiliated; our major goal is to practice and promote the non-use of drugs and alcohol; it began in Utica, NY in 1851, so no raping, burning and pillaging throughout Europe during the Crusades that I know of.

The previous editor of the NGT was charging an exorbitant amount of money for each issue last year (her own fee plus costs for another company to do the printing, mailing, etc.). For an organization that’s nationwide, we’re pretty small—we can’t support going into the hole $12,000 in one year. Borrowing money from China is not an option. Thus, I decided to throw my hat into the ring: I submitted a bit that was significantly less expensive. (The previous editor sent out a bid of her own several days later that compared the two. It turned out that the totals were really close when she priced mine at eight issues and hers at six.)

I was given the job to produce six issues this year, but I was making a few changes: I’d be using 20-pound paper instead of 80-pound (thinner and lighter) and printing it via my mother’s copier/printer (it’s not professional-grade, but it could eat your personal printer and still have room in the paper tray). I was sending them in envelopes instead of folding them over and putting little sticky tabs on the edges (another reason why we don’t need the 80-pound paper). I also included a section on Page 1 to notify people that after 72 years, they could finally receive their copy of the NGT via email (a .pdf file will look cleaner, smoother, it’ll be in color… all sorts of benefits).

This second part, which is probably a refresher for most of you, is about backhanded compliments. They sound nice, but there’s a hidden layer of insult behind it. Example: “You’re pretty cute for a fat girl.” Yes, he said you’re cute. He also said you’re fat. He might be thinking, “If your face was on a skinny girl, it’d give me nightmares and I’d wake up in a cold sweat, needing something to drink because I threw up a little in my mouth.” But since you’re fat, you’re pretty cute. Backhanded compliment.

With that out of the way, time to bust out the popcorn and see how the story unfolds.

I should start out by explaining how I got the job. Both proposals—mine and the previous editor’s—were presented to the U.S. Council of IOGT and they voted on it. Two board members were friends of the former editor, but one of them decided that, based entirely on the financial aspects, he couldn’t justify voting for the other bid. Since the board follows Robert’s Rules of Order during their meetings, a vote was taken and the majority ruled that my bid should be accepted. The other friend of the former editor, who I’ll call Jim (because that’s his name) did not like that decision. Screw Robert and his stupid rules, he didn’t want to use my proposal as approved.

I honestly have no idea how many emails floated back and forth immediately after the meeting. I’m not a member of the Board, so everything I heard was secondhand through my mother (who is on the Board) and she was getting pissed at Jim. I’m summarizing here, but he was insistent that we needed to use 80-pound paper and a professional printer to make sure the NGT wouldn’t look crappy. (He’s been the editor for various publications and newsletters; he knows these things.) If we want to promote IOGT properly, it can’t look crappy. Thus, we should forget about my bid, spend more money and make it better. I imagine he wanted his friend to have remained the editor, which might have been an ulterior motive for causing problems.

I printed out some of the emails he and I sent back and forth, so if you’ll excuse some typos, I’m retyping what we wrote. For example, he sent this message on March 14th:

I’ve sent a grant request to the Prohibition Trust Fund. We (I’m on that board, also) will have our own conference-call “meeting” in a few weeks.
We (IOGT) did not discuss how much to request, or specifically what for. I’ve asked for $1000 and have specified that it would be used to enhance the visual appeal of the NGT by allowing the use of nicer paper and offset printing — not to replace any of our own money or to allow more issues, but to improve our public face.
The Trust Fund meetings twice a year. We (IOGT) should discuss among ourselves how much to request next fall and what to use it for.

Jim

I don’t need to look through Crazy Bob’s Rules to tell you this was uncool. He didn’t contact any other members of the board to formally decide whether to request money plus he was trying to change my bid that they approved. When I found out he was officially bitching about the NGT to everyone, I felt obligated to respond:

Jim,

I understand your desire to make the NGT aesthetically appealing, but we are not using Bob Hammond’s printer nor his ink. [The editor prior to Jim’s friend used his personal printer, which kinda sucked.] I really think you should wait until you receive the first issue before making any judgments about its quality.

Shawn Bakken
Editor, National Good Templar

I thought that sounded pretty respectful and covered all of the bitching he’d been doing. (Sure, giving myself the title “Editor” might have been a dig against him, but I thought he’d earned it.) The next day, I wrote to the President of the Board and told her that she shouldn’t expect to get any more emails from him. And thus, my naivety was exposed.