The Easy One

He assured me that the item would fly through the committee meeting without any opposition and that it would barely take any time from the other work.

Alarm bells rang in the back of my mind.

The more he argued that the issue was minor, the louder the bells became. I seemed to recall an observation by Parkinson that boards will speedily approve a multi-million dollar project and then bog down on a discussion of parking spaces.

No one will be opposed to this, he said. That's optimistic, I replied, and you've been around long enough to know that. He chuckled and agreed to delay the matter.

I guess he thought it was worth a try.