| | As TOC's Summer Intern, I have the sweetest summer job a college student could find. You see, thanks to TOC's lack of productivity and generally poor work ethic, no one notices when I cruise into the office, stare at my computer screen and drink coffee for eight hours, and clock out only to return and repeat the same process the next day. It's easy for a quiet half-assed employee like myself to go unnoticed when the bosses are holding 14 meetings a day, trading stocks on company time and taking 90-minute lunches on a regular basis.
I hope by this point my sarcasm has become clear, although it may certainly have been lost on some of my fellow SOLOists who have heard nothing but the "TOC staffers don't actually produce anything" line for the past couple of days. During the runup to the Summer Seminar, I observed TOC staff miraculously completing the following tasks simply by lounging around the office all day:
-Planning and scheduling a week and a half's worth of seminar events in a foreign country, including an Advanced Seminar for scholars, a Sponsor's Dinner, and a Gala Banquet at the Hyatt Vancouver,
-Managing the logistics of said events,
-Ensuring that Seminar Faculty had well-prepared speeches and had submitted adequate outlines,
-Writing and polishing their own presentations and speeches, which taken together constitute well over 12 hours of material,
-Exporting thousands of dollars of merchandise, through intransigent Canadian customs, to be sold on-site at UBC,
-Creating graphic designs for t-shirts, clocks, brochures, schedules, and other Seminar-related goods,
-Reviewing applications for Seminar scholarships and Conference Assistant positions,
-Raising funds to cover Seminar costs, including faculty plane tickets,
-Mailing out pre-Seminar materials, including maps, tourism guides, conference introductions, etc.,
-Posting almost all the Seminar-related information to the TOC website for easy access.
TOC's staff accomplished all this alongside their usual month-to-month duties, which included:
-Editing and layouts for Navigator and Logbook,
-General fundraising and member services,
-Interviewing applicants and hiring a new full-time webmaster,
-Filling orders and producing new material for The Objectivism Store,
-Writing and posting new op-eds,
-Scholarly work for publication in JARS and other sources,
-A public discussion forum and a trustee's meeting in Washington, DC,
-Training me and editing my own writings for the website.
These lists are by no means exhaustive. I have omitted many items for lack of recall or knowledge, especially regarding The Center's operational and financial workings, with which I have only a minimal involvement and interaction.
SOLO has long had its disagreements with TOC over issues of tactics and tone. These are valid criticisms for SOLOists to level, but when it comes to TOC's productivity, it's time to lay off. I just can't abide the injustice of accusing TOC of apathetic shiftlessness.
(Edited by Andrew Bissell on 7/13, 9:20pm)
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