The last time you heard from us here at the Office of the SFist Ombudsman, we noted our report was "largely uninteresting. . . . The site coughs up cool new stuff; our readers respond with wit, insight, sometimes a little love, and the occasional correction." What's become impossible to ignore over time is that this is pretty much the story every month. Which is probably as it should be, perhaps a bit to the dismay of born agitator SFist Jackson, who was always not-so-secretly hoping for the occasional shitstorm when he piloted this ship.

So when our new pilots, SFists Eve and Rita, visited the Office a couple weeks back, the first topic of conversation was of course the oddly mesmerizing stains on the Venetian blinds, but the second topic of conversation was the future of the Office itself. Its existence made sense in the site's early days, when our first stabs at contributor-reader relations went so wrong (see our first report if this ancient history interests you), and when we had an all-but-stated goal of raising some hell. Over time, though, we've learned how to be edgy and snarky without pissing people off for the sake of pissing people off. We tend towards pointing at trouble, not making it. And a monthly report that our readers sometimes question us, sometimes correct us, sometimes love us, and always hate MUNI has grown tedious. Of course that's how things are going: That's how these blog-things work, so enough with the navel-gazing, eh? Then there's our Office's e-mail inbox, which never receives mail. In retrospect, this makes so much sense we feel silly for not having predicted it. Who'd e-mail the Ombudsman when every post has a comments thread, anyway?

What we're getting around to saying is, the Office of the SFist Ombudsman is like a high school chemistry experiment that's run its course. We'd seen the big kids try this, we did it ourselves to learn a thing or two, and now, a wee bit smarter, we find ourselves washing out the beakers and the Erlenmeyer flasks and returning them to the glassware cabinet. Actually, it's a bit more like packing up a few things, closing the blinds one last time, and crossing the Bridge to dump our moldy red and yellow plaid couch on a street in Berkeley, the Bay Area's premier town for unsanctioned streetside couch recycling. But we have digressed.

The east side of the water is where we'll likely be when we make our next contribution to the site, anyway. With Ombudslike chores off our plate, we'll finally be able to turn our attention to the nooks and crannies of our beloved East Bay, which we've long thought deserve a bit more play on these pinkish pages.

Thanks to those SFist readers who always clicked for more and stuck with SFist on SFist until each bitter end. Sorry, kids, you're on your own for Ombuds now. We'll see ya around.