SOP

I followed the story of the guy put off a train in The Middle Of Nowhere Arizona with great interest.

The story was, a man appeared drunk to train conductors. So they put him off the train at a unmanned stop without running water five miles from the nearest town in the middle of a forest, without his luggage, and therefore without his medication, which he was going to need as he wandered aimlessly in his drunken state toward civilization, because it so happens he was not drunk, he was in diabetic shock.

Since the story first appeared the man was found. In four days he'd gone two miles and was down to his underwear. As the story has been retold it's got muddier. His doctor had not prescribed medication, so there was no medication in that luggage left behind on the train. We don't really know he was in diabetic shock, that's what the family believes, and they weren't there.

The conductors have been reported saying that they and the train waited for the police to arrive and that the man slipped away into the forest just when the police got there. So it's not like they just abandoned him, exactly.


But never mind that. Here's what makes the story interesting. The train officials accept no blame for the fact that a dazed man ended up lost without food or water in an northern Arizona forest for four days, on the grounds that "standard procedures were followed." I mean, what can you do? You follow standard procedures and the drunk, or diabetic, or whatever he says he is, isn't cooperative, or the sun gets in your eye, or you slip on something a wild dingo left, and the drunk, or diabetic, or whatever he says he is, wriggles away. Well, it's his own fault, isn't it? Standard procedures were followed.

Then there's this bit. As I said, the story now is that the local police arrived at the train stop to pick our man up. They were going to take him into custody, but he slipped away, we're told. We're told they then looked for him but couldn't find him. So they stopped looking. And continued to not bother looking for our man until relatives in St. Louis inquired as to his whereabouts. That was, again, OK, because standard procedures had been followed.

So let's summarize. If you are ever drunk and disorderly on an Amtrak train, or just appear so, standard procedure is to put you off into the hands of local police as far from civilization as possible, preferably at a train stop a hundred miles north of the Sea of Tranquility, without food, water, air, Cheetos, or love. If you then leap away in a cloud of dust as the men in the space suits with the billy clubs show up, it is standard procedure for them to look for you for a minute and then when they don't find you shrug and say, "Lets wait and see if he has relatives, and if not he can just die in this wasteland -- that'll teach him."

Meanwhile vendors regularly tell me of campsites raided and all belongings trashed, often including medicine. So, yes, it's standard procedure all right.

Speaking of standard procedure. If a review board arrives at an unfavorable conclusion regarding our beloved police chief, it is of course standard procedure here in Seattle for an entirely new review board to be appointed so that better results might be obtained. And naturally, standard procedure calls for the new board to if possible include big names like Gary Locke and Ron Sims on it, to give it legitimacy.

Now let's see if Greg Nickels follows standard procedure all the way and farms this new board's review work out as a project for Leadership Tomorrow.

Standard procedure is that standard procedures stay in place, no matter how many people get hurt or how badly.