In Bridge for sale I wrote about the $3 million dollars that city council will spend for four televisions. They are calling it a digital wall.
Copenhagen has one.
Well, it appears that our city staff feels the need to visit the one in Copenhagen.
Word on the street is that five of our city staff (engineers and IT people) will make a personal sacrifice and travel to Copenhagen to learn about this technological marvel.
“Boondoggle” is defined in the online Oxford dictionary as “work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value”.
This does not even reach the low standard for the term boondoggle.
It appears that what we have here is a “junket”, defined in the same dictionary as “an extravagant trip or celebration, in particular one enjoyed by a government official at public expense”.
Questions are not necessary. We all know what is going on.
Maybe someone can stop it.
Who could have known that Shakespeare would be an expert on El Paso city government?
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
One would think that an organization that is advocating a video wall would understand and embrace videoconferencing, but then of course there’s not personal benefit (vacation) to doing so. Send one person. That’s reasonable. Two people. Okay, okay, fine. Five? You must be kidding.
What makes this especially insane is the fact that this technical marvel is already a fait accompli. So why send an entire expedition team under the guise of evaluating this thing? Something tells me the people involved in this saw how many people made the ballpark trip to Oklahoma City, and they now think site visits are simply an entitlement and perk of the job.
So much for prudent management. The bills just keep on coming. Will someone please check into canceling this group’s return flights?
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I guess my thoughts were only half right. FedUP has a good idea, send them over and leave them there.
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Here’s how to fix this. Require them to pay the expenses themselves.
No one would go.
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