Mayor Forced To Relive Terrors Of High School After Brief Phone Call To Town Engineering Firm

The Mayor of Lamont was thrown back in time to that awkward, gawky stage of life where the opposite sex was a perplexing, unsolvable mystery (like that has changed!), acne outbreaks were the perpetual source of angst and worry and the looming specter of high school algebra was the ever present guillotine blade poised above his head, just waiting for some creepy dude in a black mask to give the signal to drop it and end his meaningless and wayward existence before he even had a chance to grow out of that most uncomfortable of stages. The Town, seeking a solution to a challenging question related to the water delivery system, had the Mayor call Dennis Fuller, President of Century West Engineering and good friend to the Town. "Well, I got him on the phone and explained the situation as we understand it" said the Mayor with big blobs of Clearasil dabbed in his acne prone areas. "Once he got a good picture of the situation, he began talking about flow rates and constant variables and 'if A = B and B = C then A must = C" and that sort of thing" he said with a definite 'deer in the headlights', chalky-faced look of dread and impending doom. "Dennis is the best, but when he got into the part about the pump rate being constant if the tank level is constant and that if we just calculate pump run time and factor in the pumps' average output we could arrive at the actual water delivery amount (assuming our sample time is long enough to avoid the distorting effect of outliers and natural variations in water usage based on sudden changes in the weather), I immediately felt the pimples literally sprout from my face, I began biting my nails again, my pants became about 3 inches too short (it would appear that 'high-waters' were all the rage back then amongst the more discerning 'nerd set' of which the Mayor was a founding member) and I immediately became obsessed about why none of the girls in school like me when that Buster Bodine is so popular - and he doesn't even have all of his teeth, for Pete's sake! Oh, it was horrible" whined the Mayor in a high, squeaky voice that he hasn't used since his voice changed at age 16.

"Well, we have to hand it to that whole Century West crew" said an unnamed Councilperson. "First off, we feel bad that we have to use that math laggard Mayor of ours to be the one to ask the questions on our behalf, but they are all so smart and adept at separating the "wheat from the chaff" when it comes to diagnosing problems of an obscure nature that sorting thru the Mayor's long, rambling, largely incoherent explanations and descriptions is like child's play for them. Plus, once we finally found the Mayor hiding in his closet, mumbling something about "not being a math person" and got him to tell us what Dennis said, it all made really good sense. I am not sure what we would do as a town without Dennis Fuller and Bryan Hicks and that whole Century West Engineering team. Having them on our team is proof positive that you really don't have to learn math in High School as long as you have the really smart people on your side when you are an adult" he concluded smugly.