Thought I would go ahead and post one last entry before boarding the plane to Vegas.  This way I will not take a chance on partaking in toooo much fun and end up forgetting another observation taken from the Agility Dog Show at the fairgrounds in Springfield.  I was sitting with my wife back with the dog tents (yep, my dogs are treated like true members of the family and get their own special tent to lounge in between their runs) and simply watching the other competitors take their various turns.  At one point during the day, two individuals showed up, unfolded their collapsible chairs and made themselves comfortable.   The particular spot they chose was actually right in front of us, but I really didn’t mind that much since I tend to move away from our spot when it is my dogs’ turn because they have a tendency to see me and get distracted.   What did catch my attention was the fact they chose a spot right in front the ring fencing that had a full page sign on it:

My apologies for the poor picture, but all I had at the time was my camera phone.  I added in some text so you could see one of the main purposes for the sign.   The ironic part of all of this is clearly they had to look right past the sign to see any of the dogs run.  I began to wonder just what was causing the communication breakdown and taking notice of the fact that the signmaker apparently wasted his/her time creating and hanging the request – guessing the is the classic Led Zeppelin communication breakdown.  I decided there were some possible causes:

1. They can’t read – I dismissed this pretty quickly since the individual on the left is at least giving indications they are reading another pamphlet.
2. They believe the sign was meant for everyone else and not them – a pretty elitist view of the world, but since they were not concerned about blocking my view this could be a distinct possibility
3. They are visually impaired – their heads were tracking the dogs out in the ring so I am going to dismiss this possibility and I would suggest that if this is true they would likely not have been correctly facing toward the ring 8^)
4. They are confused and think the single tick mark means inches and therefore believe they are within tolerance – This thought had me sidetracked for about 15 minutes as I tried to remember when I learned that a single tick meant feet and a double tick (quote) meant inches.  For the life of me, I couldn’t remember when this might have been…. and who was the first to do that in the first place?  obviously I have some homework to do in order to track that sidebar down – I’ll let you know what I find
5. Lastly, they have tiny little feet so when they marked off the distance they came up very short.  This has to be it.  In the goodness of their hearts they were really trying to obey the rules of the event, but a variance was introduced which prevented them from actually carrying out that mission.  I am going with this reason from a positive viewpoint – it gives them the benefit of the doubt and eliminates the evil thought in my head that they were just stupid.

I probably should have just asked them if they were aware of the 10 FOOT rule and validate their response with the options listed above.  I ultimately decided to just take a picture and use it as blog fodder when I had the chance.   Anyway, I was still basking in the display of kindness from the Caterpillar tattoo guy to let this dampen my day.

All aboard to Sin City… type ya’ (not a measurement symbol) soon!