Below, by special request, are pictures of AUFA members unshaven near the end of week 2.

And this is just the morning crew.

On Wednesday night I received a call from HQ, asking me to participate in another guerilla picket. This time, we were going to send a small strike force to the Irving Building. I didn’t know why we were going there at 7 am, but I immediately confirmed that I would be there. And now, almost 12 hours later, I can only assume that nobody else could make it. Oh yeah, and that the person who contacted me forgot to call and tell me that nobody else could make it.
        Yes, I was the lone picketer in front of the Irving Building in the darkness at 7 am (And I was without a sign–which sort of defeats the purpose of picketing–because someone else was supposed to bring mine.). Yes, I dropped my wife off at work 30 minutes early so that I could make it there on time. And yes, Mike and Leo, you do owe Gisele a nice bottle of wine. She likes Merlot. And fortunately, she’s very good about sharing it with me.
        When I got to HQ at 7:30 am, only Robert Seale was there getting ready to make signs for Friday’s Family Day on the line. Not surprisingly, the first question out of his mouth, after I explained why I was there so early, was “Have you heard anything?” I had checked my email first thing in the morning, so I knew that I hadn’t received any messages from the exec or the negotiating team. “No news is good news,” I said. At least I hoped so. And that probably explains why I wasn’t in the least bit pissed about my lone picket duty experience (I’m still not. But I can’t speak for Gisele. So Mike and Leo, you know the drill.).
        The cone of silence that descends when negotiations begin in earnest is hard to take for information junkies like me. But the consolation in this case seemed to be that negotiations had really begun in earnest. Given that the BOG team hadn’t budged in any meaningful way on financial issues since making their “conciliation offer” in June, and given how quickly things had gone pear-shaped on the Sunday before the strike began, the absence of news was promising. So when news did arrive via walkie-talkie on the line, no one was terribly surprised that it was “good.”
        Okay, “good” might seem an overstatement here. All “good” means in this case is that the two sides are still talking: they talked until 11:30 Wednesday night, and they agreed to meet to talk some more beginning at 1 pm Thursday. But given how bad things have been, we’ve had to recalibrate our expectations for the word “good.”
        I’m not willing to recalibrate my expectations for negotiations, however. I want to reclaim the word “good” and make it meaningful so that I don’t have to put quotation marks around it to indicate irony every time I use it. And the only way to do that is to get the deal we need that addresses our issues and that prevents a strike three years from now. That’s what good (without the quotation marks) really means. That’s what it has to mean by the time we’re done.

In the meantime, Acadia’s President has returned from China. That’s “good,” isn’t it?