Well I don’t know…I wake up in the middle of the night, like a lot of people do…to pee. Apparently it’s an old age thing….needing that middle of the night pee. Most of the time I make it back to the rack and drift off on a dream…alas it’s almost never the one I left when I got up. Sometimes though I find that the little canoe of dreamland has drifted way and left me beached and awake with a head filled with unwelcome thoughts. Not terribly unwelcome, no, but maybe annoying. Usually it starts with some unfinished thought from earlier in the day…and I could have looked it up on the web in two minutes…but now I’m wrapped in warm sheets half awake and too far away from the keyboard to consider that route. Last night was not one of those. Instead I was stuck on the phrase “centre of excellence”. I used to hear it all the time when I worked in the government and even found myself a few times in the exact location of one of those centres of excellence. M-M-M-n-n no, I looked around pretty carefully and excellence didn’t raise it’s hand. Of course I asked…and found that people had been trained…and now tried to approach “clients” with polite smiles and helpful demeanours…and to take special care with their needs and to file the appropriate papers in the appropriate places in case some other excellent public servant might be called upon to follow-up. Naturally those things are often not immediately obvious to the casual observer. I, for one, have always figured we could all use a little more excellence in our lives. Finding it seems to be a problem but I certainly want to encourage it at every opportunity. When I go to the corner coffee dealer for a treat…I’ll say…”could I have one of your excellent chocolate chip cookies please” and they hand the poisonous little thing over with a smile. They’re not deliberately poisonous, those cookies. Only to humans. I’m sure most small animals could survive a casual encounter with one or two.
Centres of excellence are bogus propaganda tricks employed by people and organizations who dare not admit that most of their operations fall far short of superlative and who want to wave a flag over the few sites that may rise to the level of mediocre in some less than obnoxious way. It struck me as I was thinking about it in the middle of the night that the scheme isn’t working too well. They’re not exactly tourist attractions…unless you count the flack catchers and senior suits who get paraded through on occasion to encourage excellence in the most official way possible…”Uhh keep up the good work guys…we’re all damn proud of you”.
So it seemed to me, last night anyway, that centres of excellence were a terrible declaration of our failure as moral beings. I mean if we’re not aspiring to excellence…what the hell are we doing? And if we were aspiring to excellence as a philosophical precept…why would we need “centres” of excellence? Does that mean that the only people who should expect good service need to find one of these centres?…What about the rest of us? You can see how dangerous it is to wake up in the middle of the night. I wanted to leap out of bed and hit the internet to search for centres of excellence…what the hell…there might even be one in my neighbourhood that I didn’t know was there. I didn’t…and I wont. I’m surrounded by excellent friends and extended family. They’re as good as it gets and nobody ever calls them a centre of excellence. I’m thinking of campaigning for “centres of deplorable”. Where people could identify places, businesses, services that were just terrible experiences. Maybe start up a guide-book. I’d start looking in those places that have “centres of excellence”. Good night.
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