Concerned citizens, your time has expired

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/05/2025 (331 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The owner’s manual for the Greenworks 1500-psi 1.2-GPM cold water electric pressure washer is 31 pages long.

The safety instructions and details alone are 10 pages of instructions, clocking in at 2,626 words, with valuable information like, “The operation of any power tool can result in foreign objects being thrown into your eyes…”

Just reading those safety instructions out loud at an average rate of speed would take 20 minutes and 12 seconds.

On a completely different but tangentially related topic, a basic description of line dance terms, assembled by Tony and Lana Wilson of Desert Dancers LLC, in the World of Dance Newsletter is 1,690 words long.

It includes descriptions like this one for the sugarfoot: “Touch toe of first foot beside instep of second foot, touch heel of first foot beside instep of second foot, step first foot forward or across second foot.”

You can take that as line dance gospel.

Between them, Tony and Lana have choreographed line dances for at least 145 songs, so they’re definitely on top of the terminology.

Reading their 1,690 word package of dance terms out loud at an average reading speed?

Thirteen minutes.

Using the same calculation, if you want to write a five-minute long oral presentation, you have about 650 words to make your point.

And that 650 is an important number — because that’s the number of words you may soon have to limit yourself to if, as a citizen, you want to make a presentation on an issue you’re concerned about to Winnipeg city council.

The council is moving to reduce citizen speaking times on an issue from 10 minutes to just five, citing the need to shorten long public meetings that sometimes stretch out into the evening.

Can you make a cogent argument in 650 words?

Well, this editorial is 629 words in total, but it only has to point out what a five-minute presentation would look like. Other issues, especially complex ones involving things like the need for green spaces or opposition to detailed council spending plans, clearly would take more than the allotted five minutes.

Are meetings overlong? Perhaps they are.

But maybe that’s also part of the price you pay for having engaged, involved citizens.

City council passed the motion that would limit citizens’ presentations to five minutes on March 27, but the final effort needs council to pass a bylaw bringing the new limit into effect.

Interestingly enough, the same city council members voted on a measure that would have restricted city councillors themselves from going on at length, capping their comments at 10 minutes when they move a motion, and five minutes for other comments.

The measure was defeated, firmly ensconcing council in the land of “Do as I say, not as I do” when it comes to talking overlong and lengthening municipal meetings.

But back to safety, pressure washers and timing.

The Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service aims to respond to the most serious of emergency calls in under nine minutes. (If you’re following along here, that nine minutes is equivalent to roughly the amount of time the city now wants to allow not one, but two citizens to present their detailed concerns on an issue to a council committee.)

That’s important, say, if you’ve skipped reading all the pages of your pressure washer instructions and have failed to “wear safety glasses with side shields,” with every painful result that can entail from that uninformed decision.

By the way, you don’t reach the safety glasses portion of the Greenworks 1500-psi 1.2-GPM cold water electric pressure washer operating manual until word 654.

To recap: a lot of important detail can get left out when you decide it’s best to cut things short.