Editorial
Front Page - Friday, June 18, 2010
I Swear...
What’s in a name (badge)?
Vic Fleming
There was some incentive to register for the Arkansas Bar Association’s annual meeting online (a small discount, as I recall), so I did so.
Enclosed with the Association’s annual meeting material was the invitation to the Arkansas Bar Foundation’s annual awards banquet (always held on Wednesday night), inclusive of the request for money to reserve a seat.
Recently, at the time (mid-May), I had also received notice that it was time to renew my membership in the Association – a transaction I prefer to handle by check.
Envelopes were scarce that day – or, possibly, I wanted to use only one stamp.
Since the Association and the Foundation share a building, I remitted my Association membership dues and my check for the Foundation’s banquet in the same envelope (forming the mental impression that someone would open the mail and route the contents to two different desks).
Assuming (a mental impression is an assumption, right?) can be a dangerous activity.
What can go wrong will go wrong (see Murphy’s Law), and when one doesn’t know that anything has gone wrong, even more then seems to go wrong (see next week’s column).
I got to the annual meeting after the registration desk had closed on Wednesday and, thus, wasn’t able to pick up
my Association name badge
or even be certain at that moment that that my online registration had cleared.
Naturally, I assumed (there’s
that word again) that my Foundation name badge might have been put on a table outside the banquet hall, as the banquet was my only activity for that evening, but I was wrong – many badges were on the table, but not mine was not among them.
Eventually it occurred to me to look in my checkbook, where I saw that, as of two days earlier, neither the check for the banquet nor the membership dues check had cleared the bank.
Little did I know that around this time of the year, anything that looks like membership renewal is routed by the Bar Association to a stack that is not dealt with until the annual meeting is over.
Aha, I thought, that explains why they had so strongly encouraged online registration.
Notwithstanding, all the reassurances from staff that everything would be okay and that I should just go ahead and enjoy myself at the banquet that evening, I felt naked without a name badge.
David Menz, by the way, at the President’s reception before the banquet, thanked me for causing the new placement of the crossword, and someone standing with him expressed envy that he had gotten his name in this column (flattery usually works and did so again, as revealed hereinabove).
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.
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