If you’re an Oliner, and you missed out on the fun that is today’s CCO meeting, you’re in luck! Running commentary of the CCO meeting, brought to you by the utter torment of every CCO meeting I’ve been to in the past. If you’re a super masochist, feel free to read along in real time.
11:17 AM – I check the morning e-mail and get the obligatory CCO meeting reminder, with current budget overage projections. We’re about $8K over, an extraordinarily high amount, even with Olin’s fascination with spending more than its got. I scan the list of clubs asking for money. One club is asking for $5K without any descriptive information for what it will be spent for. This is a super no-no. The club president might just be dicking around with us, but if it’s an actual request, we’ve got
to hear why. $5000 for comic books might be a stretch.
11:55 AM – Couldn’t even escape the CCO meeting horrors at the breakfast table. The big clubs everyone’s looking to cut include ROC (Republicans of Olin College), Open (Olin’s GLBT group) and the aforementioned comic book club. Overall those clubs count for about a fourth of the overall spending. A few clubs are on the opposite end and ask for no money. Guess which ones we like more.
11:59 AM – The rooms slowly filling up. A few last-minute breakfast table discussions have allowed some people to opt out. CCO meetings are done on a per-club basis, so if you can convince someone to represent your club, you can skip out and watch the early games. Of course, you run the risk of not having reasons for your club to take the money, so you might lose half your budget. Hope that’s some good football.
12:00 PM – This is my fifth CCO meeting, so I’m more or less an old pro at this. A few other people in the room have been to as many as me, but I think no one’s been to more. Mark, one of my suitemates, is sitting in on his first, representing the Disc Club. The representatives for ROC and Open have arrived, but Zach, representing the Comic Book Club hasn’t shown up yet. If he doesn’t arrive, his $5000 budget will be in jeopardy
12:03 PM – Light the tires, kick the fires, this meetings been called to order! Angela hands out a voting stick for each club; we’ll use this to vote on motions on the floor. I’m anxious to get started so we can get cutting!
12:05 PM – Best lines of dialogue: “We have a deficit of a little ove….I’d like to make a motion to cut comic book club. Ok… all in favor?” Everyone raises their hands. The current deficit is about $3500. ROC also cuts their budget by about a thousand dollars, returning some money back to the pool.
12:09 PM - We start going through club by club, deciding how relevant each club’s line items are in comparison to the mission of the club.
12:12 PM – “What is a cheese outing?” If you’re wondering, it’s an outing to a local cheese farm subsidized in the spring. Current deficit is still at $3500.
12:14 PM – We’re down to the Christian Club, and there’s a little bit of confusion, but things get resolved rather quickly. Mark talks briefly about the Disc club, but his budget escapes cutting.
12:20 PM – As people get bogged down in the line items for Farmers United, I go check out some test-strategy techniques for the GRE I’m taking tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to it, to say the least. I’m fairly certain I can take the math portion without trouble, but the verbal and written might be a hassle. It’s remembering things like verisimilitude that will be the death of me.
12:23 PM – “What are 26 units of white gas?” “Actually, it’s 26 gallons.” “Oh.” A math error gives us our first real cut, about $38 dollars, or 1%. God, we’re going to be here a long, long time.
12:30 PM – We cut about a hundred dollars from FOTA since we’re unsure what the money will be used for. I hate to see new clubs and new club presidents get up, are clearly passionate about their clubs mission, and get shot down by the group. Friendly Fire’s new president is requesting just under $300, not a high amount, but the club didn’t spend much during the first semester, so the president will get some flack.
12:36 PM – Still on the Friendly Fire club. Another rookie mistake: not checking out the internet before hand. Friendly fire’s big request was for network cables at about $120. A quick web search shows that $55 would do the job just as well. Guess who wins?
12:43 PM – Ali, the SAC chair, comes and chats with us about doing more co-sponsored events. It’s a refreshing break from the hassle of budget cutting.
12:45 PM – If you’re fretting that I’ll never get out of this meeting, don’t worry. At some point, clubs will start cutting their budgets by small amounts, which will get us closer to the goal. A few straggling club presidents in clubs with reputations for responsible spending show up a little late and we go back to discuss their clubs. Due to a different math error, we’re still hovering around the high $3k mark.
12:52 PM – We’ve down to Game Club. I get ready to pull up the NFL scores. With the Bucs far out of the running for everything except the 1st pick sweepstakes, I can’t decide which team I’m going to cheer for in the playoffs. Is this the year no one wins it? Most teams, besides San Diego, looked awful last week, with the Pats and Colts getting rocked by the AFC teams from Florida. I’ll go out on a limb here and pick the Saints to face the Chargers in Glendale. (Speaking of which, this
is one of those years where people in Arizona get to see great football, with three high-profile games lined up: The Fiesta Bowl, The BCS National Chapionship Game, and the Super Bowl. Kinda makes up for the Sun Devils and Cardnials, no?)
12:59 PM – We’re painfully chugging along as clubs continue to knock of $50 and $100 from clubs. At this rate, I’ll be out of here just in time to take my GRE tomorrow.
1:00 PM – Ahh, the meat club. While people argue about whether meat is a good value, I’ll plug ecto, a really great blogging interface. The interface is similar to Outlook, so it feels similar to writing an e-mail to the world! I was pleased to find that it kept track of the word count in the status bar at the bottom. By the way, if you’re keeping track, we just went over 1100 words.
1:05 PM – It’s like pain, constant constant pain. We’re still $3700 over. But we’ve just cut some serious cash from Midnight Riders,
1:11 PM – “I can just donate some PVC adhesive. I mean, my dad’s a plumber.” This is why I love Olin meetings.
1:12 PM – Hmm, my arm’s falling asleep. This could make blogging difficult.
1:15 PM – Let the games begin. We’re on ODP, an example of one of those clubs where the estimates seem impossibly high. While I appreciate the mission of the club, it seems like such a money sink. We cut about $200. Open, the club asking for the most on the list, is about 7 away. My club is over 20. Sigh.
1:20 PM – Back to the GRE. Nebulousness? Nebularity? Nebulosity? Surprisingly, only two of those are right, even though all three pass the squiggly word test in ecto.
1:37 PM – Nitpicking discussions. We’ve made it about three more clubs on the list. I’m going to cry. I want someone to just wrap their tie around their head and yell “Follow me, follow me to freedom!”
1:41 PM – Ahh, crap. A firefox crash. I really want a new computer, as this one’s lasted me all four years. Once I graduate, I think that will be the new purchase for me. Of course, thanks to Olin’s wonderful IT department, this compy has been redone a few times in terms of software (I’m on my fourth install of windows.) My contributions to the CCO meeting have dwindled down, but after OTASA and OWW (Olin Taiwanese-American Student Association and Olin Weekend Warriors, a nerf gun club) Open
is on the board, which will be much fun.
1:45 PM – Just one club away now. I’m getting out the helmet.
1:46 PM – So, here’s the deal with Open. I respect the mission of the club, the people involved, the organization as a whole. But in general, they’re a really bitchy club to work with during the CCO meeting. They’ve almost always got the largest budget for things I’m just not sure we should be spending student money on. I realize this is the 21st century, but I just don’t think student money should pay for a drag show. I’m sometimes in the minority on this, but with the budget still over $2600,
people will look hard at the club.
1:47 PM – Open’s on the board. Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
1:50 PM – So far, it’s not so bad. Open’s willingly cut about $350 from the budget, mostly for things like prizes and the performer. The club budget is at about $1750.
1:57 PM – Nearing the two hour mark, and we still haven’t gone through the entire list yet. Sigh
2:03 PM – The group from Open is down about a third from what they asked for. We move on.
2:05 PM – Some people want a coffee break. Others want to finish the first pass. Angela decides that we’ll take a break after the first pass. So it is decided.
2:07 PM – Can I mention how much I love del.icio.us? On my main blog, links are now provided daily by the integrated extension in firefox? It’d be great if i could format the output to the XML-RPC (geek for remote posting) so that it didn’t display tags and put a little bit more into the formatting of the content. Also, I need to remember to use proper English in description.
2:10 PM – Blog gets the squiggly line of death in ecto. I’m just saying… Then again, ecto gets the squiggly line of death as well.
2:12 PM – We’re down to Rock Climbing Club, and there are about seven clubs left on the list. Since Open, we haven’t spent much time on each individual club.
2:15 PM – With the same 2+ hours in the meeting, I could have: ironed my shirt, watched a movie, or slept. Maybe I shouldn’t think about what else I could be doing with the time.
2:20 PM – 4 clubs until I’m up on the board for trivial. I don’t anticipate any real challenges. I spent all my money last semester, I’d like to go to three tournaments in the spring, but I’ll knock it down to two to appease everyone.
2:22 PM – Speaking of movies, I haven’t seen any good ones lately: I’ve been super busy with finishing up the semester. I think the three that I’ve probably missed that I would have liked to see are: Casino Royale, For Your Consideration, and Letters from Iwo Jima, the National Board of Review’s top movie of 2006
2:31 PM – Trivial is still two clubs away. I’m reading to figure out if Pulp Fiction had a title screen. I think so, but it’s not on the definitive movie title list. Maybe I’m not seeing it.
2:33 PM – Taboo, the club on the board, is requesting $75 for a “Fetish Fair”. While I don’t like the title, it’s cheap enough to fly under the radar.
2:34 PM – That was fast. Trivial and Tennis Club both quickly escape the wrath of the group. I think people really want that break, but we have to get through Yearbook first.
2:35 PM - Ahh, Yearbook. It’s a club that over time has become less annoying at CCO. At my first few CCO meetings, Yearbook needed a lot to get going. But lately, as they’ve become self-sufficient, things have been going much better.
2:36 PM -Break! You know you’re excited. Use the next ten minutes to think about things. Or eat ice cream. That’s what I did.
2:48 PM – Aaand, we’re back. We’re $1500 over right now, or about halfway to the goal. As we approach the end of the third hour, we might be done by dinner time. A more realistic goal is 3:30. Let the second round of cuts begin. We knock off antigravity club’s (yes, such a thing exists) stilts/powerisers for $350.
2:52 PM – Off-topic, I’m pretty excited to be going home next Wednesday. It’s going to be great being home, relaxing, and just not burning the candle from both ends.
2:57 PM – There’s a lot of confusion as to the different kinds of CORe money: pretty much it breaks down as CCO money and New Initiatives.
3:00 PM - It’s that time of the meeting! Everyone comes together to make the last cuts. A big thanks to SAC and the clubs who cut down at the end. Trivial and Disc Club both gave up about $150 each to keep it civil. I’m outta here. Rock out Olin!
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