The Property Team has a "To-do" list (link attached) which is regularly evolving and adapting to the status quo. This edition of the Property Team Tidings presents some thoughts on the list in general as well as some related thoughts ...Riding an iceberg ... A mental image ... A snapshot in time!
As I prepared to write this article for the Tidings, I was trying to think of a single image that might give the reader a sense of my current impression of things in the property sphere at Holy Trinity. All manner of images came to mind, including but not limited to Sisyphus perpetually pushing that giant rock up a hill. I eventually settled on an iceberg as a suitable image. In my mind's eye the portion of the iceberg exposed above the water represents the known, identified property tasks to be addressed at any given time. The much larger underwater portion of the iceberg represents the unseen, unknown property tasks waiting to be identified and addressed. What I find interesting about an iceberg is its typical life cycle. It is born by breaking off of a large ice source ... think glacier ... and floats around mostly harmless, out of sight and mind except for some high impact, high visibility cases ... think Titanic ... where they demand some attention. In my image a smallish cadre of individuals are riding along with the exposed portion of the iceberg, chipping away at the ice and working to diminish it. They chip where they feel it is best to chip at any given time, but there is so much to chip, it is very difficult to pick a spot or even prioritize where to chip. One piece of ice looks pretty much like every other piece of ice when there is so much of it! And for each unit of ice that can be removed, an equal unit of ice rises from the depths to replace it!
The strength and weakness of the iceberg analogy lie in the rest of its life cycle. We know that the iceberg eventually melts away, and no matter how much time and effort is expended on it, it disappears naturally with time. The strength of the analogy is that it depicts what I often think of as "time-sort". Time has a way of sorting out what is and is not important. For example, a task on the Property Team "to-do" list ... our own little iceberg ... includes replacement of rain gutters on one side of the main entry to the church. These gutters were damaged by winter ice and snow load years ago and were removed thinking they were not really needed. The gutter replacement task has remained in time-sort for these many years. Periodically, we have some water intrusion issues in the basement, most recently last week, to remind us of why the gutters were installed in the first place. If the basement water problem had not arisen, the gutter replacement task may well have died in time-sort. The down side to time-sort is the tendency to minimize or obscure the importance or significance of some items on the to-do list. Some items will, in fact, disappear with time, but others will come back to haunt us if they are not resolved in some reasonable time period.
Someone once suggested to me that to-do lists will always grow with time because there are always more folks thinking of items for the list than there are folks to do whatever is needed to get items off the list. There is certainly some truth to that observation. As I have suggested many times over the past few years, we have very limited resources to work down our to-do list, but we keep riding our iceberg to wherever it is bound. Dave Mercer, Property Team Leader (Pro Tempore)