Tis the Season To Install

Here we are back in November and a month of Installation Ceremonies stretches out before me. With 183 Installations in twenty-nine days (no one installs on Thanksgiving so far as I know), there is obviously no way to attend even a fraction of them, especially not when your teleporter is on the fritz and no one seems to carry parts for it. Even if you don't work and could travel every day and go to two installations every weekend day, that would only be thirty-eight you could get to as a possible maximum, and even if you went to different ones each of your four years as a Grand Line officer, another impossible task, but if we're going to dream, let's dream BIG, you still couldn't get to them all. And of course the problem was even more impossible back when there were over 200 Chapters or more. So this year, an interesting philosophical question has been posed - If you can't get to all of them, should you go to any but your own Chapter? And if you do go to more, how do you decide which ones? One side says that the is the only way to be fair is to go to none but your own, because that way, everyone is treated equally. Other people say that you should accept invitations in the order in which you receive them, because that is what you do with all other social activities in life. Still other people say that you should go to all the ones in your Association or general area, because those are the people who support you in your service as a Grand Officer, but not travel outside of your area because of the fairness issue. And then others say that you should go to all the Chapters in your district and also the ones where someone you know or served with is going in as either the head of the Chapter or as one of your own subordinate officers.

Before this question arose, I started doing what I have done every year, which is to accept invitations in the order received if I could reasonably get to the Installation. So far, I've accepted about eleven, but more invitiations are coming in all the time. I've also found out that I am not acting quite normal because I send an RSVP to every invitation, either yes or no, but other people evidently only send a yes and ignore the invite if it is a no because I've had several people surprised to hear from me with a no. Go figure? And my pet peeve for the season are the invitations that don't give any RSVP information at all, nothing, nada, zip, zilch, zero! I know that people are really bad sometimes about the RSVPs, but please don't make us work at it. :-)

I am going to have to think about the idea of how many installations to do as I go into the next two years. But for now, next weekend, I am heading south on Saturday for installing down there and then coming back Sunday morning for my own Chapter. WHEW!