<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"> On 3/10/2011 6:17 AM, Encore Pianos wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:001201cbdf2d$e3ddaff0$ab990fd0$@metrocast.net" type="cite"> It’s time to throw water on the discussion, not gasoline.  Speak to the issues at hand only –</blockquote> Hi, Will I'm taking a time out -- it may last for quite awhile -- so I thought it best, seeing the hurt feelings on both sides, to announce that I'm not leaving because of a sore head. It's time to give up the daily social interchange aspects of the lists to make order of the many stored posts which I've stashed here and there (in heaps) for almost fifteen years. Weed, sort, triage, print out the top 1%, get the others where I can find them. And, certainly not least, put more of the knowledge contained into practice instead of allowing it to remain mostly theoretical. That also calls for order in the shop and parts and tools. It's far too easy, coming home tired out, to sit in front of the computer instead of doing the ongoing chores which make the difference between efficient work and last-minute scrambling. When I do go to the new site, it will be to visit the archive, following up on what I've worked on, instead of sitting down with a virtual espresso and seeing what my friends are chattering about today. I've realized the necessity for this kind of work as an increasingly urgent necessity postponed far too long, and the timing of the list changes just happened to come at the exact moment when I had already decided to do something about it. As for the changeover --- well, what can I say? I left for the WESTPAC meeting on March 1 with life exactly as usual on the lists, and came home to find a whole new setup in place, out of the blue. People had to have been working on it, both the idea of it and the technical process, for months if not years. If I didn't attend the meeting about it at WESTPAC, where as always, time was at a premium, perhaps the total lack of notice might have had something to do with it? A big change in the offing, and the reasons for it, should have been announced at least six months ago, and input sought, right here on the lists. We are a community, we're all stake-holders. You don't just send in a bunch of vans and announce, "we're razing this village to the ground, put your stuff in the trucks to go to the new town we've built for you." What's done is done .... but if the people who didn't let us know about this before issuing instructions to vacate now feel unappreciated, I think they should understand that keeping us in the dark had a lot to do with the negative reaction. Perhaps thinking about it this way might help them to stop taking criticism personally. Piano technicians are independent cusses at the best of times. Susan Kline </body> </html>