What A Difference!

I just spoke with a woman in the City Clerk's office who epitomizes what a thoughtful, caring, public employee should be. I wish I'd remembered to get her name but nonetheless she is to be commended. She was pleasant, helpful, and actually seemed to care about helping me!

Imagine that!

The Concord Police Dispatcher who hung up on me early this morning should take notes from this wonderful woman as to how you deal with a citizen with a problem.
(As I said in my previous post, the officer I spoke with when I called back was a professional, took the time to hear me out and explained the situation)

In calling the City Clerk's office for the phone number of my City Councilman she also helped me with other suggestions, such as who to speak to in the General Services Dept.. She emphasized that my Councilman and the great people over at General Services would want to know about my concerns.

I always try to look at both sides of issues, and I know that people have good and bad days, but in jobs where you deal with the public (and Police Dispatch is NOT an easy job by any measure) you have to have people who maintain their professionalism at all times.

I do have to wonder though, what kind of leadership the police department has lately. In the 20 years I've lived here I can't recall so many negative incidents involving the department. I realize that they're short-staffed, and that could contribute in some ways to this behavior. I have maintain hope that the leaders in the department are working to reverse this trend of unprofessional behavior.

We want to be proud and supportive of our police force, not embarrassed or fearful. Police and Fire men and women have incredibly dangerous and critical jobs to do. Anyone who opts for those professions is to be commended and supported, but they have a responsibility to remember who they're working for, and to maintain the highest standards possible. In my experience that has been the case most of the time, but this latest experience has left me concerned.

To conclude, this woman I spoke with today in the City Clerk's office restored my faith that there are good, caring, professional people working for the city of Concord. That level of excellence is what all departments should strive for.

Welcome

Welcome to the first post of The Endicott Dispatch. The name refers to the building where I live which is a century old former hotel in downtown Concord New Hampshire.

I want to cover local topics ranging from what's happening inside and around the Endicott, to issues concerning the city of Concord and the state of New Hampshire.

I welcome comments as long as they're polite and relevant. Do to the scourge of 'comment SPAM' I have to use the challenge option to weed out automatic SPAM bots to the extent possible.

I also will be using "Jiglu" (at least initially) to help with 'tagging'. If you have any issues with it please let me know. And since I live solely on a single Social Security Disability payment each month I'm going to explore Google AdSense and possibly a PayPal [link] to help pay for things like my medications (and coffee, which currently is my substitute for the Ritalin/Concerta I can't afford because the drug company Novartis wants to pawn me off onto Medicare Part-D [which I can't afford). *See my blog post that includes more detail about the situation on this page.

I hope to produce an informative and entertaining blog that people will enjoy and support.
My thinking at this early stage is that some of the posts will be similar to a 'Letter to the Editor', and in my case that would be the local Concord Monitor newspaper.

This is my second 'real' blog. The other is called "Inside Tom's Brain" and is also hosted by Blogspot-Google. To this point it has been primarily political and media commentary with some personal issues posted every once in a great while. I, like I imagine many people, have started and basically abandoned several blogs over the years. You've seen it I'm sure, every large web portal wants you to start a blog on their site. Microsoft's "Live Spaces", the Opera browser site, your ISP offers a free web site, and the list goes on.

OK I admit it, I'm weak. It seemed like a good idea at the time, right? But especially for people like me with serious ADD, the last thing you need are more things you need to attend to. The internet is distracting enough. All I have to do is start reading the news or my daily email and I'm off on a tangent that continues to split further and further from what I'd originally intended (or needed) to do. So even for those without ADD I bet this sounds familiar. If the standards of all these sites allowed it and applications like Windows Live Writer could post to all of these disparate sites I'd be able to write the post once and if I wanted to then distribute that one post to all my blogs.

I must say though, that I haven't done an exhaustive search for applications of this type, and for all I know someone has developed just such an application. As far as the ones I've seen, some can distribute what I write to the major blog sites but not all.

So there it is, the traditional first post of a new blog, and as my mind has drifted and my attention span has been tested (I have the TV on also [with the sound off], and I stopped to write a post about Mika Brzezinski and MSNBC's "Morning Joe" for Inside Tom's Brain just now..) I think I should stop before I lose any more focus.

Thank you all for being here and please come back soon!