SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
MISSION — With 366.34 acres of Cimarron improvements theoretically ready to begin, the city announced this week that not one ditch, curb, or drainage pipe will be touched until it finishes renumbering the chairs. Council voted unanimously to pause everything after concluding that the neighborhood’s problems — whatever they were — can only be solved by a seating chart executed down to the sticker.
“People keep asking about drainage,” said Ruben Faz, Mission’s newly created Assistant Director of Sequence Compliance, peeling a “3” off a folding chair stored where the country club’s cart barn used to be. “I keep telling them: you cannot regrade 366.34 acres while Place 4 is sitting where Place 2 used to be. That’s how you get flooding.”
The Behavior Cannot Be Described; The Chairs Can
The incident at the center of the pause remains officially undescribable. What is describable, at exhausting length, is the seating. Places 1 through 3 now belong to the neighborhood. Place 4 belongs to the golf course’s new owners. Place 5 belongs to the mayor, the city manager, or — per the resolution — “any officer or employee of the city of Mission who can locate the room.”
“We are not about politics,” said a spokesperson for the course’s new ownership group, moments after handing each council member a laminated, notarized request to remove one specific person whose behavior also could not be described. “We’re about chairs.”
Place 5 Rotates Through Every Employee Mission Has
Because no one can be permanently named to Place 5, the city has begun rotating municipal staff through the seat in four-hour shifts, like a lighthouse. So far the chair has been occupied by a librarian, a mosquito-control technician, and a meter reader who asked what a fairway was and had to be excused.
“He admitted under oath he’d never seen one,” Faz said. “That course spent years declining specifically so this moment could happen.”
“I’ve sat on a lot of boards,” said longtime resident Dora Salinas, watching a facilities intern count the chairs for the third time. “I’ve never seen behavior so serious the cure was arithmetic. But Place 3 is a different person now, and honestly, the neighborhood feels 60 percent repaired already.”
Renumbering is expected to wrap up by spring, at which point the city will move to phase two: scheduling a meeting about the actual work, which cannot occur until the chairs are in the room, which is the chairs.
