Source: Rhino Times Greensboro

Yost%20Column
Sherlock Yost Cracks The Wine Glass Case

by Scott D. Yost

July 26, 2012

This is the story of the Mystery of the Mysterious White Wine Glass.

To begin this story, I should point out that Guilford County has 11 county commissioners, and those commissioners have very nice offices that take up almost half a floor of prime office space on the first floor of the Old Guilford County Court House in downtown Greensboro.

Now, you and I and all the taxpayers are the ones who pay for those offices, and, every once in a while, we here at The Rhinoceros Times will write an article about how the commissioners never use their offices, and we point out what a tremendous waste of space it is.

The commissioners’ offices are well stocked and they look very nice, and there’s a receptionist’s desk right inside the glass door entrance.

Now, several years ago, the board decided that it didn’t reflect well on Guilford County government to have its commissioners offices just sitting there empty and locked, so the board voted to move a receptionist down there and made her sit there day after day.

However, since the commissioners were never there, and no one ever came by, the receptionist got very bored, and, after a few months of that, everyone realized it was inhumane to sentence her to solitary confinement when she hadn’t even committed a crime.

So they let her move back upstairs to her old office, and now there’s just a permanently locked suite of 11 offices, protected by a key code.

Now, while the commissioners never use their offices, sometimes I do.

If I’m, say, between meetings that I have to attend at the Old Court House, or if there are too many cats and dogs running around The Rhinoceros Times’ office, which is just across the street, then I’ll take my MacBook over there and use the nice tranquil offices to write. I know the key code, and several commissioners have told me to please feel free to use their office any time I want.

So, I do use them from time to time – however, other than that, here’s an example of how often the offices get used.

One day earlier this year, I was sitting in there enjoying my private personal suite of 11 offices, writing peacefully. This time I happened to be using Commissioner Bruce Davis’ office, and I noticed that the daily calendar on his desk was open to Dec. 1 with a little writing on it.

I thought that was strange since it was spring, and I wondered if Davis had actually been in and used his office in December and then I saw that it was a 2006 calendar. That’s not a joke or anything; that’s the honest truth.

So that’s just one indication of what I am talking about.

I later told Commissioner Mike Winstead about the 2006 calendar, and he said that that reminded him of something.

“I still have a picture of my ex-wife on my desk from when I was sworn in,” Winstead said.

Winstead became a commissioner in 2004. If you do the math, that’s eight years ago. He remarried last year.

Anyway, my point is that the offices get very little use.

OK, so, now back to my story. In April, about three months ago, I was in the commissioners’ offices, happily writing away, and I noticed that, sitting on the receptionist’s desk, was a wine glass with a little something in it that looked like white wine.

I was fascinated by it. How did it get there? Was there a commissioners’ party in the office suite? Were two county workers using the commissioners’ offices and desks for romantic encounters if you know what I mean?

I found that last theory particularly intriguing.

What in the world was the backstory I was wondering. I had no idea. But I took a picture of it for posterity’s sake.

I thought about it, and I figured that there had been some sort of festive event like a retirement party or something in the “Blue Room” meeting room across the hall; and, I surmised, some party guests who knew the code had simply wandered in and left their wine glass on the receptionist’s desk.

The handful of people who know that the county makes the Blue Room available to the public will, once in a great while, use it for things like business presentations or press conferences, but I didn’t know they allowed alcohol in the Old Court House.

If they do actually allow alcohol, when you think about it, the Old Guilford County Court House would be a great place to have, like, a bachelor party – though one problem would be that, when the strippers arrived at the building, they would think they couldn’t possibly be at the right address.

Now, a few days later, I was back in the commissioners’ offices, and I passed by the desk and the wine glass was still sitting there. I was surprised because – while we joke about how the staff never uses the offices, and a cleaning crew doesn’t come by because there’s nothing to clean – I figured that once in a while someone goes in to use the restroom or something. I would think that a secretary or someone might walk by and pick up the glass.

I mean, it wasn’t like the glass was hidden or anything. It was an obvious white wine glass with a little bit of wine in it and a party napkin sitting there at the entrance to the commissioners offices. It was visible from the outside, so anyone passing by – say, a security person – could have taken the glass and put it on a shelf or something. I don’t know – maybe a commissioner would wander in one day by mistake and see it.

If you think about it, it isn’t the best first impression for a resident or a visiting official from another county to show up and there are no commissioners, no staff, just a locked glass door – and an empty wine glass and a party napkin on the main desk.

So anyway, the next time I used the office – probably about a week after I had seen the glass – I came in and the wine glass was still sitting there.

And guess what: I came back several weeks later, and there it was – still sitting on the receptionist’s desk at the front entrance of the nerve center of Guilford County government.

April became May and May became June.

The wine glass remained.

June became July.

The mysterious white wine glass continued to sit there. Every now and then I would take a picture of it so I would have dated pictures to prove I wasn’t making this story up. I thought about doing something about the glass myself or notifying county staff; however, at this point I was curious to see how long it would sit there. Years? Decades? Centuries? Who knew?

To me, it’s somewhat remarkable that the front desk of the headquarters of a county of over 480,000 people could just sit there month after month, apparently completely unnoticed.

You know, if it were Pamlico County or Hyde County, you might expect that, because, there, the entire county government is made up of three commissioners, a manager and a secretary, and they probably drink on the job all day long there, so they wouldn’t think anything about a stray wine glass sitting on a desk.

Anyway, then, last week, I was in the Old Court House and I stopped by to see the wine glass and …

Gone.

Suddenly, after three months, out of nowhere the mysterious wine glass had vanished.

The mystery deepened. What had happened to it? Where had it gone? And why now of all times?

So I called a county staff person I know who works in the building, and I said, “Hey, there was a white wine glass in the commissioners offices, but now it’s gone.”

“I took it,” she said.

It wasn’t her job to clean the commissioners’ offices, but she said she had seen the glass and removed it. She theorized that other staff may have passed by it but not known what to do with a wine glass – because it’s not like you can put it back in the county’s wine glass cabinet with the other wine glasses in the set.

She said it was apparently from some sort of reception in the Blue Room. She told me that, other than that, she didn’t know where it came from.

Then she jumped into her natural response mode of trying to protect the county’s image.

I said that there was wine in it, but I added that I didn’t think you could have wine in the Old Court House.

“I think it was tea,” she said.

“I don’t think it was tea,” I said. “It was in a white wine glass, and it looked exactly like white wine to me. It was too clear to be tea, and I’ve studied the liquid carefully over several months.”

I said it didn’t appear to be tea to me by a long shot.

She said she had taken the glass back to her office recently, and it was her understanding that the caterer had come and picked it up.

I said it didn’t really seem to me like a caterer would make that trip just to retrieve one glass – especially after not missing it for months, and she said she would look into the matter.

A little later that day, my phone rang.

“Mystery solved,” she said.

She told me she had found someone who knew about the origin of the glass, and it turns out that the wine glass had quite a storied past indeed.

“It’s Newt Gingrich’s wine glass,” she said.

“Excuse me,” I said, ”But for a moment there it sounded like you said it was Newt Gingrich’s wine glass.”

She said I had heard her right. The county’s conservatives had held an anti-tax rally in the plaza in mid-April, and Newt spoke at it, and apparently he had used the commissioners’ offices at some point.

I was astonished, so it wasn’t just anyone’s wine glass – it was the wine glass of a very famous and powerful man who came this close to being the next president of the United States of America, one nation under God.

(I asked a security person if the county allowed alcohol at events and he said he didn’t think there was a rule one way or another about that. I asked what had happened that day and he said he was working, but he didn’t know exactly what had happened. He said others were in charge that day. “Well, the Secret Service just takes over,” he said. Apparently, the Secret Service has no rule against people drinking wine while they are being protected. That makes sense when you think about the recent story of the Secret Service agents and the Colombian prostitutes.)

Anyway, now it all fell into place.

I wondered about the fate of the glass.

“What did you do with it?” I asked the woman.

“We still have it,” she said. “We’re keeping it in a glass case.”

I figured that was a joke – but maybe not. This was, after all, Newt Gingrich’s wine glass.

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

Whenever a commissioner leaves the board, county staff always has a present for him or her as a token of how happy staff is that that commissioner will no longer be in their hair (though staff tells the commissioners the gift is for their hard work and dedication, some wild story like that).

“I guess we will mount it and give it as a parting gift to an outgoing Republican commissioner,” she said.

I said that would be nice because then they would have a wine glass that Newt Gingrich drank wine from.

She corrected me: “… that Newt Gingrich drank tea from.”

I said, well, “Maybe that makes sense after all, since it was from a Tea Party rally.”

“Exactly,” she said.

And so ends the tale of the Mystery of the Mysterious White Wine Glass.