Should it stay or should it go?

Eight years ago, as I prepared for some major reno work, I went through - and got rid of - a lot of stuff.

I didn't do Craigslist. I didn't do a sidewalk sale. (We don't have yard sales where there are no yards.) I didn't bury stuff in the trash.

I gave stuff away. (Pots and pans that wouldn't work on my new induction cooktop. With the exception of my mother's Dutch over - couldn't part with it. Or my grandmother's cast iron skillet - couldn't part with it.) And I paid the Brazilian junk guys to haul stuff away. (The pullout couch in the den. An ancient and huge air conditioner that we couldn't use in any of our windows, even if we were wired to support its voltage. Which we weren't. The last giant box TV still in use in the United States of America. My husband's pride and joy: a large screen LCD TV that was so heavy and ancient that, even though the picture was still crystal-clear and great for watching sports, none of the guys doing my reno work wanted it. One of them did take the old fridge.)

Still, I hung onto an awful lot of stuff.

It took me until last fall to have the Earthworm electronic recycle guy come to disappear all my old laptops, and a desktop that had been my husband's. Plus miscellaneous routers and other gear. And a ten-ton printer. 

And I still have, for whatever reason, the manuals for every appliance, great and small, that's ever been in this place. More glassware than I could use up if I smashed a glass once a week for the rest of my life. And why did I take all those planters my sister Kath was jettisoning? I do have a basil plant going in the kitchen window, but am I ever going to repot it in that snappy blue planter? Realistically, no.

The other day, my friend K (who downsized from a 5 BR suburban home to a 2 BR urban condo a while back, and did a major winnowing then) and I made a pact to go through our stuff and drive all the stuff we don't want or need to Goodwill. Someone will be able to use those planters.

So I'll be going through all my excess stuff any day now, warbling the only words I know to The Clash's best known tune: "Should I stay or should I go?

I'm inspired by my friend Joyce, who is going through all the closets and drawers in her house. Not that she's going anywhere. She just wants to lighten the psychological load. (Bonus: she's finding all sorts of pictures from our college days. And from our great post-college European adventure.) 

Any day now...

And I'll be doing it on my own, without the services of a professional move manager. 

Still, it's good to know that there are professional move managers out there. And they're apparently in high demand, what with the young oldsters downsizing their big suburban houses. The tweener oldsters downsizing their downsized digs to move into active oldster communities. The old oldsters shuffling off to assisted living. And the post-oldsters shuffling off this mortal coil entirely, leaving their heirs to get rid of their mahogany dining room tables.

Speaking of mahogany dining room tables, I just got rid of mine.

Although I'm trying to get out of acquisition mode and into deaccession mode, in January I decided that I could no longer stand my old mahogany dining room table. Although the table was too damned big, it was the chairs I couldn't stand.

This set - which my husband and I bought about 40 years ago - was from the 1920's. 

Apparently, those chairs didn't like the fact that I hadn't been assiduously polishing them. They were dried out, fragile, and cracking every time someone leaned back in them 

So I took advantage of the January furniture sales and ordered a new dining room table and chairs, which just arrived. And which I like a whole lot better.

Fortunately, I was able to find a good and loving home for the old table and chairs. A friend has a young niece who's recently bought a vintage 1920's house. She and her husband - who, get this, like to refinish furniture - were interested in period pieces. Katie even liked the fabric on the chair seats. Have at it, kids!

Anyway, there are move managers who specialize in working with seniors. They take care of the logistics and other moving details (packing, unpacking) but, of equal importance help folks "cope with the emotional aspects of letting things go." So says Anna Novak, who owns Home Transition Pros in Arlington, VA:

“There are a host of challenges that go along with moving, including family dynamics and the guilt of getting rid of a family heirloom,” says Novak. (Source: Washington Post)

Much of the work of these senior move managers is therapeutic in nature. Jason Suderman is the owner of Lifecycle, in Carlisle, Mass.

“A move manager needs to listen, learn and establish trust with their customers,” says Suderman. “We need to learn where each person’s sensitivities are. Sorting is one aspect of the job, but the dispersal is especially important. What may look like a shabby blanket to you could have important sentimental value for someone and should be handled with care.”

One of the senior move managers' tricks of the trade is not going in there and begin by "sorting items to donate, keep, or throw out." Instead, they start by just focusing on the keepers: what's going to the next place. After that, they may ask the kids and grandkids what they want. Only then do they start having the trash, donate, sell discussions. By then the old folks at home are better prepared for the inevitable decisions about getting rid of stuff. If you've already decided you don't want/need it in your next place, if your kids don't want it, it's easier to get rid of the shabby blanket.

And get rid of it you should. Senior move managers frown on deferring the decisions by boxing up all the left over crap and renting storage for it. 

Anyway, I'm not quite ready to downsize. And fortunately, I don't have a very big place (1,240 square feet) to downsize from. 

Still, I do want to get going on unstuffing the place of the stuff I don't need. And also make some notes on the disposition of my goods, in the eventuality that I won't be there at some point in the hopefully distant future. Mostly, I hope that someone wants the more sentimental attachment items - my grandmother's cookie jar, my other grandmother's sampler, the steer horns that hung in my grandfather's saloon. But do with the rest of the stuff what you will, folks. Other than Sniffy, the worn out little stuffed dog I got for my fourth birthday. When they push my body into the flames, I want Sniffy by my side. 

So w.r.t. Sniffy, he's definitely staying for now. For a lot of my other earthly possessions, it's definitely a case of should it stay or should it go.

If brass knuckles are outlawed...

I'm very happy to live in a non-gun culture.

Never say never, but the only state where I'd be less likely to be killed in a shootout is Hawaii. 

I don't hate, hate, hate all guns. Not for me, but I can see the attraction. But I don't get the love affair with weapons of mass destruction. And open carry makes me nervous.

I see these pictures floating by on Twitter of bozos walking in to a McDonald's to order a Happy Meal, armed to the teeth: Handguns on both hips. A semi-automatic cradled in their arms. Bandoliers strapped across their chests. Something that looks like an RPG hanging across their backs. 

Chicken McNuggets please. Apple slices? You gotta be kidding me. Make it fries!

Pure, unadulterated psycho performance art on the part of the nasty one-man arsenal.

But if I ever saw someone like that in real life, I'd be out of that McD's faster than if I'd been shot from a cannon.

Not that I've seen all that much open carry. This is, after all, Massachusetts. 

But I've been in restaurants in Texas and seen yahoos sitting at the bar wearing guns as casually as I wear a scarf. In Arizona, I was once on van to the airport rent-a-car place with a fellow who was carrying. Less creepily, while hiking in a state park in AZ, I saw a guy on a horse packing. I've seen enough Westerns to know that you may have to shoot a rattlesnake or other varmint. Still, it's unsettling.

The one time I saw non-cop open carry in Boston, I was at an ATM, and there was a fellow - military hair cut, a bit steroid-buffed - with a gun on his hip. When I left the ATM, I saw a policeman on the corner and mentioned it to him. He just laughed and told me it was probably a newbie cop just showing off his newly acquired iron. 

Massachusetts is, in fact, an open carry (licensed) state. It's just that most people just don't open carry. 

We're just not a particular gun culture. Thankfully.

But even in gun culture states like Oklahoma, normal people can be alarmed when they see someone strutting around, living his best life, channeling his inner Kyle Rittenhouse. 

On June 13, a man in a tactical vest was openly carrying a semi-automatic rifle and holstered pistol in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Not surprisingly, people were pretty freaked out.

Employees at the Broken Arrow Justice Center ― a government building that houses the local court and police offices ― locked their doors, and someone called 911. More people called 911 when he approached a Target. (Source: Huffington Post)

There wasn't much the police officers could do about this walking armory. After all, open carry in OK is OK, even if the open carrier doesn't have a permit or any training. 

So the cops - and the good (alarmed!) citizens of Oklahoma - were at a loss about what to do with this idiot, who kept his little walkaround going to walk into an AT&T outlet, "prompting employees to run out the back door."

As all this was ensuing, the police figured out the the guy had a warrant out on him. 

Officers then found out that he was carrying brass knuckles ― which actually are illegal under state and city law ― and a .50 caliber semi-automatic pistol concealed in a pouch, rather than a holster, which is also illegal.

So, busted for brass kncuks.

I never want to find out, but I'm pretty sure that brass knuckles can do quite a bit of damage. I'm thinking smashed in nose, pulverized teeth, etc. But one would think that a semi-automatic rifle is more dangerous in that it can do more damage than a set of brass knucks, wouldn't one? (Side note: in my wanderings, I found that, in French, brass knuckles are called "poing américaine", or "American fist." Once again, American exceptionalism in action!)

Now that the Supremes have slapped down a NY State law "requiring people to get licenses in order to take guns outside of their homes," we're likely to see more of this nonsense. 

I'm sure that at this very moment, some folks are cooking up challenges to Massachusetts' common sense gun laws. (When their not cooking up challenges to Massachusetts' women's reproductive health laws.)

Anyway, if this stuff bothers the normal, sensible folks in a gun state like Oklahoma, you have to think that there's no getting around that it's just plain awful, and not the type of behavior that decent folks, of whatever political stripe, want to be around. 

We are just so not in a good place. Poing américaine, indeed.

Open to work? Who wouldn't want to hire David Besonen?

A couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed the great pleasure of going to a Ben Rector concert with my sister Trish and my niece Molly. They are both major Ben Rector fans - he's an amazingly talented singer-songwriter who doubles as an amazingly kind and decent person (truly, it would be shock to learn anything negative about this guy) - and, through them, I've become a fan myself. 

Other than the cluster associated with the ridonculous bag policy at the show's venue, and the fact that the evening, down by the waterfront, was a bit chillier than I'd planned for, it was an all-round wonderful night. And the most wonderful aspect to me was the story behind the band's saxophonist, David Besonen.

Last winter, Besonen put a clip of himself playing a Ben Rector tune on Instagram. As it turned out, Rector was looking for a saxophonist for his upcoming "Joy of Music" tour, so he reached back out to Besonen. 

Turns out that Besonen is "just" a kid, an early-twenty-something student at the University of Nebraska. 

But as long as he could keep up with his classes and take his exams virtually, Besonen was naturally game to join the tour.

David Besonen is a very talented sax player, and the story of his discovery was just so good...

I, of course, with my keen interest in good stories wrote one in my mind for Besonen. 

A Nebraska kid, probably hoping (along with his parents) to become the band teacher at Cornhusk H.S., gets discovered by a famous (middling famous, anyway) musician, and the rest is history. Lana Turner in Schwab Drugstore. Baby, take a bow.

I, of course, was wrong, as I learned when I found Besonen's Linkedin profile.

Having finished up his undergraduate degree in Computer Science (minors in Music and Math) in three years, Besonen's going on for his master's. Here's his statement:

I am a first year graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln pursuing a M.S. in Computer Science. During my time as an undergraduate student, I have been involved in the UNL Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experience (UCARE), the University’s Jazz Orchestra, the Jeffrey S. Raikes Design Studio Program, and the Initialize UNL Development Team, where I assist in the creation of web applications for non-profit student organizations.

Oh, is that all?  

His professional gigs include being a band member of the Ben Rector "The Joy of Music" Tour; working as a graduate research assistant in the university cyber-physical networking lab; and an internship at Blackbaud. All the while, madly volunteering and getting madly involved in all sorts of projects during his school years.

If it could get any cornier and more heartfelt, Besonen is from Apple Valley, Minnesota. It almost goes without saying that he's an Eagle Scout.

Careers come about in all sorts of different ways. Singular determination and drive. Accident of birth. Friends in high places. Drifting into something. Drifting out of something. Right place/right time. Opportunism. Dumb luck. Smart luck. 

By posting his saxophoning a Ben Rector tune on Instagram, David Besonen was making his own luck. And choosing Ben Rector - Mr. Nice Guy - to focus on was a smart move. 

I hope that, if he wants it, David Besonen has a brilliant musical career. Or, if he wants it, a great career as a computer scientist. Or, if he wants it, a great career as both.

His picture frame says #OPENTOWORK. 

Truly, who wouldn't want to hire this fellow? Soft rock on! (A star is maybe being born.)

What's there to say?

What's there to say? 

Other than that - even though I'm never going to need an abortion - I feel fortunate to live in a state where abortion is legal.

Sure, we knew it was coming. 

Still, it's shocking. It's seismic. It's stomach churning. It's gut wrenching.

To have our days and nights consumed by fear for women and girls in those benighted states where those impregnated by rapists will have to carry their pregnancies to term. Where a little girl raped by a family member will be forced to give birth. Where a woman who's had a miscarriage will be subject to invasion of her privacy, and possible prosecution. (Was that really a miscarriage? What did you do to cause it?) Where someone with an ectopic pregnancy will be refused care and bleed to death. Where someone who crosses the state border to get an abortion will be subjected to arrest and prosecution. Where the provision of reproductive rights services will be criminalized. Where those who have an abortion will be tried for murder. 

To have our days and nights consumed by fear for the already marginalized communities that will bear the brunt of this ruling. 

To have our days and nights consumed by fear of what else this SCOTUS could do.

This SCOTUS on which at least two of the "justices" - Gorsuch and Kavanaugh - lied about Roe v. Wade in order to get voted onto the Supreme Court. 

So, what is there to say? 

That I feel fortunate to live in a state where there are common sense gun laws, and a low rate of gun violence.

That I feel fortunate to live in a state where those arrested are likely to retain their Miranda rights. 

That I feel fortunate to live in a state where contraception - whatever Clarence Thomas can pull off on the radical, hyper-conservative SCOTUS he so smugly sits on - is legal. Where sex between same-sex couples - whatever Clarence Thomas can pull off in the radical, hyper-conservative SCOTUS -  is legal. Where marriage between same sex couples - whatever Clarence Thomas can pull off in the radical, hyper-conservative SCOTUS - is legal. 

That I feel fortunate to live in a state that promotes rather than suppresses voting rights. 

To live in a state where climate change is acknowledged, and where there are laws protecting the environment. 

FOR NOW.

Because despite all the "here and no further" protestations, there's no reason to believe that SCOTUS stops here. Sure, they said that abortion rights should be decided by the states. So why can't gun laws be the province of the states, too? Didn't they just overturn a NY state law (lightly) protecting gun protection?

This has been in the making for years, but this radical bunch is just out of control.

Easy to imagine that, if Trump and Co. had succeeded in getting the legitimate 2020 election outcome tossed by Congress by getting his bogus elector slates put in place in swing states, this crew would have been all "states rights, okay..." 

And here comes 2024, when a lot of these R-controlled states are implementing rules to throw out the popular electoral results in favor of whichever corrupt authoritarian and/or christofascist the R's nominate next time around. 

That will okay Texas latest plan to implement a state-level electoral college that will guarantee that a popularly elected governor - if such a person happens to be a Democrat - will have their election overruled by a set up that privileges the vote of rural, conservative voters over urban, liberal voters.

It's pretty clear by now that the forces of reaction aren't going to ease up and compromise. They're all or nothing - if they can't win legitimacy; if they can't win the hearts and minds - they'll take and keep powers by whatever means possible.  

Something's got to give, because the flaws of our system-  flaws that allow for the tyranny of the minority - are just too much to bear. At some point, the voice of the majority needs to be heard. 

I'm old. I'm probably not going anywhere. But if I were younger, I'd be looking for a way out. 

Maybe the differences between the Red States and Blue States are just insurmountable. Sorry for the folks in Red States who are stuck there, but if New England became a Canadian province, I'd be down with that. O, Canada and all that. 

This is not a matter of one law being overturned. It's a scary pattern that's been in the making for decades, with the Trump regime bringing it to the fore. And I don't believe for a Massachusetts minute that the tyrannical minority will come gunning for the states they resent. 

In the meantime, "When women's rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up. Fight back!" Donate to Planned Parenthood. Get out the vote. Support companies like Dick's Sporting Goods that are promising to pay travel expenses for employees who must travel out of state for reproductive healthcare.

The four day workweek? Yay!

Back in the good old days, when life was nasty, brutish, and short (as opposed to modern life, where it's just increasingly nasty and brutish), the American workweek was a six-day one. And, depending on the industry and the outfit, the hours per day could be anywhere from 10 to 18 (18: !?!). 

Then, in the 20th century, things started moving towards a shorter workweek. Six 8-hour days. Five 10-hour days. 

In the mid-1920's, Henry Ford, that old anti-union anti-Semite, was good enough to implement a five day, 40-hour work week in his factories. 

During the Depression, this became more of the norm, and by the end of World War II, 9 to 5 was how things rolled, workweek wise. 

And now, in a lot of countries, experimental programs are underway or in the works that play around with four-day workweeks. Some of the schemes are four-days, 40 hours (i.e., 10 hours). Others are a shorter work week, both day-wise (four) and hour-wise (32).

Some American companies are inching towards the four-day work week. I know a couple of places around here that give Friday afternoons off during the summer. But, given who and what we are, European and other G20 nations are more likely to embrace this new approach.

After all, we have to focus so much of our attention on making sure that 18-year-olds can acquire AR-15's, that rights for LBGTQ folks are diminished, that our Black citizens find it more difficult to vote. Not much energy left to champion a shorter work week for the great unwashed. Especially when there are billionaires who wannabe trillionaires. Let's go!

And, of course, there are the industries and professions (consulting, finserv, legal, frantic start-up tech) where the high flyers pride themselves on working crazy, burnout hours (18 hours a day, even).

But there is a lot going on out there. And most of it sounds pretty good to me.

Hailed as the future of employee productivity and work-life balance, advocates for the four-day workweek suggest that when implemented, worker satisfaction increases, and so does productivity. (Source: Euronews)

Belgium, which earlier this year put in place a rule for government workers allowing them to ignore after-hours emails and calls from their managers, also began offering many employees (non-shift workers) the option of getting their hours in by working longer hours four days a week, or sticking with the traditional five-day work week. Their PM, Alexander de Croo said:

"The goal is to give people and companies more freedom to arrange their work time,"

Creating a more dynamic economy and giving their workforce a break.  

In the UK, a six-month program just launched that involves 70 companies and 3,000 workers:

Employees are expected to follow the "100:80:100 model" - 100 per cent of the pay for 80 per cent of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain at least 100 per cent productivity.

Other programs are in the works in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and even the good old US of A.

(While we're generally laggards on the let's-treat-are-people-more-humanely front, there are a number of organizations, largely tech companies, with a smattering of local government entities, that have moved to a four-day work week.)

Iceland, which when it comes to social programs and general decency is a pretty darned good place to live (admittedly, it's simpler if your population is small and homogeneous), ran a pilot for a slightly shorter work week (35 to 36 hours, down from 40 hours). 2,500 people participated, which doesn't sound like much, until you take into account that Iceland's population is 366K. 

The pilot was dubbed a success by researchers and Icelandic trade unions negotiated for a reduction in working hours.

The study also led to a significant change in Iceland, with nearly 90 per cent of the working population now having reduced hours or other accommodations.

Researchers found that worker stress and burnout lessened and there was an improvement in life-work balance.

Every country hasn't enjoyed such success. Sweden tried it and didn't like it all that much, even in the instances where the workers thought it was working. One major company (Toyota), however, stuck with it, and gives its workforce reduced hours for the same pay.

Germany already has a shorter average work week than many European companies, with workers averaging 34.2 hour a week. But there are calls to reduce hours or to institute fewer working days per week.  No surprise that there's a lot of popular support for this among workers, and (more of a surprise) nearly the same level of support among employers.

To date, it's mostly German startups that are experimenting with shorter work weeks. 

Japan, "where death by overwork claims many lives," is also doing some experimenting. As is Spain. 

Overall, the four-day workweek seems to be slowly but surely gaining traction across the globe, but whether governments will definitively adopt the idea is yet to be seen.

I don't see the four-day workweek becoming widespread in the States anytime soon. Maybe in pockets here in there. 

But I'm all for it.

Power to the four-day workweek! 

I just KNEW it was all Jack Welch's fault

Because he was a local boy made good, and because he ended up in Boston for a while towards the end of his life - just up the street from where I live, in fact - because his third wife's kids were still in school, there was always a lot of stuff in the news about Jack Welch.

And because I was in business, and for decades Jack Welch-ism pretty much defined American business, his theories and modus operandi were always in the ether, there was no escaping him.

Neutron Jack. Mythic leader of GE. Icon.

Me? I never particularly liked Jack Welch.

But, as I said, if you were in business, there was no escaping his influence.

One company I worked for tried to adopt Welch's "get rid of 10% of your workforce each year" approach, in which - no matter how well your company was doing, no matter how good your employees - you ranked everyone and chopped off the bottom 10% of performers. 

In real life, of course, most companies will have poor performers, and one of a manager's responsibilities is to either improve performance or part company with those who aren't working out. But this 10% gone, across the boards, philosophy was pretty arbitrary, and my idea of corporate terrorism. 

Fortunately, at my company, it met with such resistance - managers pretty much refused to fill out the rating sheets - that it never took of.

I do know some people who worked in a company that had adopted this practice, and everyone pretty much hated it. 

When I worked at Wang, as founder Dr. An Wang was passing out and away, they brought in a Jack Welch disciple, Rick Miller, to turn the company around. Miller had come up through the GE management ranks, but wasn't earmarked for the GE C-Suite, so he was free to satisfy his ultra-executive jones elsewhere. So he blew into Wang, and with him came a briefcase chock-full of Jack Welch-y ways of going about things. 

I'll spare you the details here, but I found his reign - even though I wasn't there for much of it - obnoxious. It was also futile. Wang ended up folding.

My closest personal encounter with Jack Welch was when he was being treated for something or other at Mass General Hospital at the same time my husband was. Whatever ailment Welch suffered from, he checked in at the same waiting area where we checked in and waited. 

When you got to the desk, you were asked your name and date of birth. No one paid any attention to who was coming in. If you were there, you had something serious going on and were pretty much focused on yourself. But you got use to the rhythm of hearing people recite their name and birthdate.

I looked up when I heard the person checking in give his name, but only a partial birthdate. No year of birth. Omitting the year broke the rhythm of the recitation, which was the only reason I looked up. My assumption: too vain to give his year of birth. And there, checking in, was Jack Welch.

But the reason I found Jack Welch odious was this:

I was at a corporate learning event, a week long mini-MBA program at Babson College. In one of the sessions, there was a video of Jack Welch humiliating some young schmuck in the GE management trainee program for asking what Jack Welch considered a dumb question. 

The way Jack handled the question was so cruel, so demeaning. You could see the face of the young schmuck - I'm pretty sure his name was Kelly - crumple as he realized he was being called out by the great Jack Welch, and that he was now on the management track to nowhere other than a likely trip to that year's bottom 10%. I often wonder what became of Kelly, but I'm hoping he had a happier life and more successful career outside of GE than he ever would have on the inside. 

Anyway, I never particularly liked Jack Welch.

So I was more than gratified to see a Q&A with New York Times business writer David Gelles, in which Gelles has a lot to say about the great Jack Welch and the role he played in hurting not just GE, but a lot of other companies who adopted the Welch Way. And, in fact, the role he played in harming the overall American economy in terms of growing income inequality and worker insecurity. The title of Gelles' book on Welch is The Man Who Broke Capitalism.

Welch transformed G.E. from an industrial company with a loyal employee base into a corporation that made much of its money from its finance division and had a much more transactional relationship with its

workers.

That served him well during his run as C.E.O., and G.E. did become the most valuable company in the world for a time.

But in the long run, that approach doomed G.E. to failure. The company underinvested in research and development, got hooked on buying other companies to fuel its growth, and its finance division was badly exposed when the financial crisis hit. Things began to unravel almost as soon as Welch retired, and G.E. announced last year it would break itself up

Similar stories played out at dozens of other companies where Welch disciples tried to replicate his playbook, such as Home Depot and Albertsons. So while Welchism can increase profits in the short-term, the long-term consequences are almost always disastrous for workers, investors and the company itself. (Source: NY Times)

I. Just. Knew. It. 

Jack Welch. Icon? Schmicon! 

Think I'm gonna get me David Gelles' book.

Business as a second language

The piece - Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do? by Molly Young - is a couple years old, but it just came across my radar, errrrr, my Twitter timeline. So it's an oldie. Almost pre-pandemic. Still, let's face it, for anyone who's ever spent more than a nano-second in corporate America, making fun of business-speak never grows old. 

How well I remember when paradigm shift started creeping into our business vocabulary, borrowed from the scientific and philosophic communities. This was the early 1980's, and paradigms were shifting all over the place. And I see from a somewhat recent vintage Corporate BINGO card that paradigm shift is still around. Think of it as buzzword emeritus.

Low-hanging fruit was another one we tossed around, and it's apparently still in use. Low-hanging fruit were supposedly everywhere: the process problems that were going to be easy-peasy to resolve, the clients it was going to be easy-peasy to snag. I don't actually remember succeeding when it came to finding low-hanging fruit. Nonetheless, at any meeting, someone was apt to run the idea of going after some low-hanging fruit up the flagpole. And we'd all nod in agreement. 

Back in the day, we were also into re: reimagine, restructure, reorganize. 

I sure spent plenty of time in my corporate days trying to reimagine wherever I was working as a rational, coherent, functional, smoothly operating place of work. Never happened. Sigh. 

The world was restructuring - and the ante later upped to something a lot more dizzying and challenging than restructuring: disruption. Talk about paradigm shifts. The disruptions that ended up up ending entire industries, well, back in the 1980's we couldn't begin to imagine them or reimagine the industries that were going to be disrupted - even when we were taking the 50,000 foot view. Those disruptors - the PC, the Internet, Uber, AirBnB -  sure were game changers.

Reorganize? As one colleague snorted, "Reorganize? That presumes we were organized to begin with." True that, but when you reorganize, you do get to downsize and right size. (Ugh.)

We also spent a lot of time noodling around with quadrants. 

We analyzed our products, trying to figure out where they landed in the BCG matrix. Were they stars (high market growth, high market share)? Cash cows (low growth/high market share)? Question marks (high growth/low market share). 

Alas, when we were being really honest with ourselves, we had to admit that our products were generally Dogs, with low growth and low market share. Once in a while, we landed a Cash Cow, but never seemed to have the ability to milk it. Given our inability to execute, we left a lot of money on the table.

The other quadrant we obsessed over was the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which evaluated all the players in a tech market space. The real magic was, of course, in the Leader quadrant (your company had a complete vision for the future and the ability to execute). 

Not everyone could be a Leader. So, as a marketing professional I learned how to spin whatever quadrant my company or product fell into - even the Niche box, where Gartner put you when you didn't have either a decent vision OR the ability to execute. (Wish I had a buck for every pitch I made to a Gartner analyst trying to get into a more favorable quadrant. Guess I just never had enough leverage.)

Execute was, by the way, an ubiquitous business buzzword. Sports and battlefield metaphors abounded.

Because we were all about the multi-tasking, we were able to juggle multiple buzzwords and quadrants. 

I guess folks no longer multi-task. According to Molly Young, they're parallel-pathing. Young is my kind of gal when it comes to BS corporate speak:

No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.

The words that float in and out of corporate speech are often not at a far remove from gibberish. 

Young had this happy thought:

In theory, a person could have fun with the system by introducing random terms and insisting on their validity (“We’re gonna have to banana-boat the marketing budget”).

But, as she points out, while this may seem like fun, it's pretty much how buzzwords do just seem to emerge from nowhere and, all of a sudden, there's widespread adoption. I guess it's sort of like how items you hadn't really seen around are all of a sudden on every menu in the world. Focaccia. Caprese salad. 

A few of the terms Young catalogs: iterate moving forward, cadences, getting on the same page (an oldie but goodie).

Borrowing from Anna Wiener (author of the memoir, Uncanny Valley, about her experience working in the tech world), Young calls this way of speaking "garbage language."

It’s more descriptive than corporatespeak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don’t think about it except when we’re saying that it’s bad, as I am right now.

I'm okay with corporate speak. It may be dated, but, hey, so am I. And I'm not that finicky about jargon or buzzword, either. But the point is taken. 

Anyway, if you're up for a long read on corporate speak (by any other name), you might want to lean into Molly Young's piece.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of one of the most idiotic things I ever heard in the world o' business

It was at my company's annual sales kickoff, when the product teams assembled with the sales force to reveal to them all the delights we had in store for them for the coming year. All the wonderful products that would just metaphorically leap off the shelves and turn into big bucks for the coin-operated sales folks.

Anyway, the head of my business unit was presenting, and here's what he had to say about our enhanced product portfolio:

We will attack the market with all the momentum of an entrenched juggernaut.

I was sitting with my boss, who leaned over to me and whispered, "Just how much momentum does an entrenched anything have." Hmmm.

Anyway, I'm really sorry that entrenched juggernaut didn't make it into the biz-buzz dictionary. Guess there was just too much competition out there. Darn the luck.

Whoosh that laundry away! Or not.

First, I must begin by stating that I LOVE DOING LAUNDRY. 

I don't mind cooking. I don't mind cleaning up after. I don't mind picking up. I don't mind lick-and-a-promise wiping downing. I don't mind washing dishes. I actually kinda like ironing. I despise cleaning. But I REALLY LOVE DOING LAUNDRY. (Interestingly, both of my sisters also have laundry at the top of the list of house-y things they like to do. Maybe in a past life we were all Irish washerwomen.)

So I'm not one to feel burdened by actually having to transport clothing, bedding, towels, napkins and anything else that needs a good scrub from Point A (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen...) to Point B (laundry room). Apparently there are some folks who are so worn down - aggrieved, even - by having to lug a laundry basket a few feet, that they need to have their laundry whooshed from Point A to Point B. And for those folks, there's Laundry Jet. 

Just what is Laundry Jet? Asked and answered!

The Laundry Jet is the first vacuum powered laundry chute that transports laundry from any room with ports installed, to the laundry room. Unlike a traditional laundry chute, the Laundry Jet can be used regardless of if a home is multi-level or single story because it is not reliant solely on gravity. It can be installed

seamlessly into any custom laundry room design and existing laundry rooms. This is a must-have laundry item for any family or individual looking for a convenient and safe way to transport clothes to the laundry room from any room in the house.

This looks to me like one seriously ridiculous, tech-infused product that no one needs. And I'm guessing most don't want. Let alone could afford. 

But someone's apparently bought in, as they've been around for a few years and have actual customers raving about how it's changed their laundry-doing lives. 

Admittedly, when I was a kid, I wanted a laundry chute. But the fact was that the washing machine (and, later - much later - the dryer) were in the cellar, directly below the kitchen. So to use the laundry chute, you'd have to lug your dirty clothes, sheets, and towels to the kitchen and shove them down the laundry chute. That or shove them down the laundry chute in the bathroom and then head down to the cellar to lug them from the middle of the basement to the laundry area. 

Instead, what we did was empty the hampers and toss the dirty laundry down the cellar stairs, where they sat in a heap at the bottom until someone (my mother, me, or one of my sisters) picked them up, sorted things out, and put them in the washing machine. 

It wasn't that big a deal, and I grew up in a house with a lot of laundry doing.

There were seven people in our house, and it wasn't until I went away to college that I realized you could use a bath towel more than once. Plus seven people changed their clothing every day. (Yes, us kids wore uniforms, but that still meant fresh blouses or shirts each day. Plus play clothes. My father wore suits to work, and had his shirts "done" at a Chinese laundry, but he still changed his underwear and socks daily.) And all those towels - two per day if you were a girl with long hair! - added up. Weekly sheet changes. Cleaning rags to be laundered. So in our house, the washing machine was pretty much in a state of perpetual agitation.  

And we did it all without benefit of a laundry chute. (And, until I was away in college, without the benefit of a dryer. I still like the smell of sheets that dried outdoors.)

Our way of laundry chuting was plenty safe and convenient, other than in one instance I can remember.

One time, my then high-school aged brother Rick complained mightily that he'd thrown a wool sweater in the wash and it came back shrunken. 

I don't know which of our house-laundresses failed to notice a wool sweater in the mass of "darks" - jeans, shirts, towels - at the foot of the cellar stairs. Or whether they, in fact, did notice, but were annoyed that a) Rick had been dumb enough to throw a wool sweater in the wash and/or b) boys in our family did not have to do laundry.

Anyway, when someone pointed out to him that he shouldn't have thrown the sweater in the wash, but should have washed it in Woolite, his response was "All I know is, I throw it down the stairs and it comes back clean."

In her later years, we did worry about my mother going up and down those steep cellar stairs, even if she wasn't carrying an armful of laundry down. We kicked around the idea of moving the washer and dryer upstairs, but before that had to happen, my mother moved into congregate living. Where they washed her sheets and towels, and she just had to worry about her personal duds. 

Congregate living did not have a Laundry Jet installed.

Did I mention that I think this product is ridiculous? Let me also mention that it looks like a big fact liability machine.

For one thing, kids. With toys. And little hands. But they've got an answer for that:

Laundry Jet ports can be installed at any height to restrict access from very small children that might misuse the ports and we recommend 48 “. In addition, the system is designed so that in the case that a toy or other item is stuck into the port it must always pass through a hard 90 degree turn to enter the system. Dense items do not have enough surface area to pass through the system and will simply remain at the entrance to the port. All other items that pass through the initial port and will simply move through the system and will be delivered to the laundry room. As with any appliance, you must always follow proper instructions and procedures when operating the Laundry Jet.

Are they not aware that even a very small child determined to get at that whooshing gizmo that's four feet off the ground will figure out a way to get at it. There goes Mr. Bunny! Tickle this, Elmo! And they're doing to put their little hand and arm in there, too. Because it feels funny and tingly and good. 

I'm pretty sure a little kid's too big to get sucked in, but - and this is very grotesque to even imagine - that hole doesn't look a lot bigger than a newborn. I hope there are automatic shut offs and alarms. 

On Twitter - where I first read about the Laundry Jet - an ER physician posted that there is no doubt in his mind that, if the Laundry Jet concept take off, he'll be seeing dim bulb guys coming in who decided to see how it works when they inserted their junk into it. Wheeeeeee!

Anyway, despite my consistent grousing about technology, I'm actually a believer that it can and does make life easier. Safer and more convenient, too. But, alas, there are plenty of "just because" applications of technology that provide no true benefit, and strike me as tech looking for a problem to solve rather than the reverse. 

Maybe if Laundry Jet actually did the laundry, it'd be another story.

Not that that would make me any more interested in it. Not when I just love doing laundry. 

How (not) to spend a beautiful June afternoon

We've been having a pretty nice June - blue skies, sunny days, mildly breezy. Plus light well into the evening. What's not to like? 

Because we've had so many pretty nice June days, I didn't have anything in particular planned for that one pretty nice June day. Just walking around, enjoying the weather, sitting on a bench on The Esplanade watching sailboats on the Charles, feeling bad for my friends in Dallas who're in the midst of a Texas-size horror heat wave. (I was supposed to be visiting them, but game called on account of heat.)

Well, whatever it was I was or wasn't planning to do, the plan sure wasn't to spend all afternoon acquiring and setting up a new phone. But that's exactly what happened.

Admittedly, my old (as it is now known) phone was no longer living its best life. Phone calls kept breaking up, other than when I was wearing headphones. And sometimes even then. The battery life was starting to sap away far too quickly. I'd dropped it on its head so many times, it's amazing it was working at all. I knew that its time was nearing. And then I made the final, fatal drop that hastened its demise.

This was a face down splat, and when I picked it up, there was a thick black section at the bottom left of the screen. 

Occasionally, I'm an optimist, and this was one of those times when I was being one. I turned off the phone, fingers crossed, hoping against hope that I could jolly it back into full display.

Not exactly.

What happened is that it turned on to an entirely blacked out display that stayed entirely blacked out for five minutes, before restoring everything but that one thick black section at the bottom left of the screen. 

On my laptop, I googled. Not good news. Blacked out screen like the one I was experiencing is the phone equivalent of nag to the glue factory.

So, off to the Verizon Store, where a perfectly pleasant and helpful young woman named Jazzmine perfectly pleasantly helped me out.

No Apple for me, thankyou. So why not a Samsung Galaxy 22 to replace my ailing Samsung Galaxy S10? Bonus: 5G!

I couldn't quite understand why the cost to pay upfront is the same as paying monthly over three years. I figured there'd be some discount. Alas, there wasn't. So even though it made no economic sense to pay upfront, I went ahead - using a credit card that gets me frequent flyer miles. (My husband would be so proud.)

In the past, the Verizon Store has done the honors of transferring contacts and apps, but they no longer do so. But Jazzmine assured me that with Google everything just transfers over without a hitch. Right... (Right???)

Inevitably, there was a hitch.

I have two-factor authentication set up on my Google account, and it wanted to send that pesky old second authenticating factor to my old phone. Which was no longer working well enough to get the notice.

I was packing up and preparing to head back to Verizon to bleat out my tale of woe, when it dawned on me that, since I had set up two factor authentication, I could remove it. Which I was able to do on my laptop. Second factor, begone!

That out of the way, I went to see what exactly had transferred over to my new phone. I was most concerned about my contacts.

The contacts kinda sorta made it. But not fully and pretty weirdly, and I can't figure out the algo that did the picking and choosing. 

Neither of the Betsey's on my contact list - my sister-in-law and a neighbor - made it over. Only one of the two Toms made the cut. My brother Tom was in there; my client Tom wasn't. Same with the Ricks. Brother-in-law Rick: YES. Brother Rick: NO. Friend Mary Beth: YES; cousin Mary Beth NO. Both Kathleens: good to go! Tim, Paul, Bob: friends from the gym. Kersplat!

There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why some contact info transferred over while other info didn't.

Some of the people I text with most frequently disappeared on me. Other names appeared and I had to stop for a minute to remember exactly who they were. Madeline L? I think I was in a writers' group with her 10 years ago. Maybe. But why did I ever have her number? And who is Jessica F? Oh, yeah, she was the student writing a paper about Christmas in the City (a charity I'm involved with). 

Fortunately, although it took quite a while for the screen to unblack, I could access the contacts on my old phone and copy over the ones that were missing. And I took the opportunity to get rid of those contacts that are so ancient I can barely recall who they are. But I couldn't bring myself to delete my friend Jake's number, even though Jake's been dead now for almost two years. 

Regrettably, I lost my old message strings, so don't have the last text I got from him, shortly before the ALS that killed him really set in. 

All my photos came to me. But the apps were pretty erratic. Some bounced right on over, others I needed to reinstall. For some things, I didn't need to re-enter the password. For others, I was starting from scratch.

And let me tell you, Uber defaults to thinking that you want to be a driver. 

The final hoohah was setting up the Authenticator app, which one of my client requires. (I have an email address with them, and access to their internal systems, so they require a bit more security.) It involved getting their IT group involved, but other than a moment or two of aggravation, it worked out.

So it's all good now. I've got what I need on there. And I uninstalled some of the unwanted apps that Samsung lards their phones up with. (No, I'm never going to play Candy Crush.)

There are some improvements. The phone calls are more clear. And I like having the rotating screen backgrounds (landscapes and flowers). 

Other than that, meh: it's a (pricey) smartphone.

And I can't help but feeling a bit wistful for the less manic, info-bombarding, 24/7, instant-everything era when you never had to worry about whether your Bakelite rotary dial phone was going to punk out on you. (Two factor authentication? Hello, Central.)

PRIDE

Last Saturday, the Boston Pride Parade didn't happen..

It's been held - with a couple of years off for COVID - since 1971. 

And now it's no longer.

Which makes me pretty sad.

Back in 1969, I remember reading about the Stonewall Riots in 1969, but have no recall of the first gay pride parade in Boston. In June 1971, I was graduating from college, packing up my apartment in the Fens, moving to Worcester for the summer, preparing for grad school at Columbia in the fall, and going to weddings. Three of my friends were married in June 1971. One of them, as it turns out, was marrying a gay man. Not surprisingly, they divorced but remained good friends. Her kids considered him an uncle. Anyway, we didn't have a lot of consciousness of gay back then. At least I didn't.

I don't know when I first became aware that gay folks existed.

When I was a kid, there were sissies. Mamas' boys. People made the limp wrist gesture. I had no idea what any of it meant.

Somewhere along the line, when I was in high school, I knew that there was such a thing as a homosexual, an effeminate man referred to as a swish, a queer, a faggot (maybe). My awareness of "such things" was primarily through reading. 

I didn't know anyone gay. At least anyone who was out to anyone, including themselves. (I went to the senior prom of a Catholic boys high school, and on another date or two, with a kid from the neighborhood. Although we were both smart and oddballs, we weren't really friends, although, as a couple of smart oddballs, we probably should have been. Turns out, he was gay. He made his way to San Francisco and he died pretty young. I don't think it was from AIDS, but may well have been.)

Although I knew that there were male homosexuals, I wasn't aware that women could also be gay until one of the nuns infamously revealed that such a thing could exist.

For whatever reason, the average Math SAT score for my class (all girls high school) was higher than the average Verbal SAT score. One of the nuns told us not to be worried. "Girls, just because you did better on your math College Boards doesn't mean you're a homosexual."

Say wut?

She continued her riff for a bit: "What can you do with them, girls? You can't put them in prison. They'll be with their own kind."

We knew she was ridiculous, but the news that women could be gay was big news.

So now we knew what was up with the tough women we'd see downtown wearing dungarees and denim jackets and sporting heavily Brylcreem'd DAs (Duck's Ass hairdos).

My freshman year in college, I saw the movie The Fox, based on a novella by D.H. Lawrence. There it dawned on me that homosexual women were not all sporting heavily Brylcreem'd DAs.

There were a some women in my school - a Catholic women's college - who were rumored to be gay. A couple I was pretty friendly with, but it wasn't something discussed. I was more concerned with matters political, and with worrying about how, where, and when I was going to find a man to help me get rid of my virginity.

Also when I was in college: one of my Catholic girls high school friends transferred college to be with another of my Catholic girls high school friends. (They didn't come out until way later, when we were well into our 30's. I was out to dinner with one of them and another close friend, when K spilled the beans. She was a bit surprised when we told her that, yeah, we'd kind of figured. It was a different world. I'm happy to report that, fifty-plus years later, they're still together.)

I don't suppose I gave much thought to gay or not during my twenties. I was busy going to grad school, dropping out, traveling, working at crappy jobs, hanging with my boyfriend, taking courses, dropping back into a grad school I was better suited for, finding real work.

But during the 1980's, when my professional career began, colleagues were slowly but surely coming out at work.

Someone would confide in a trusted work friend. "You know I'm..."

You'd meet a significant other  - a "friend" - when they dropped by work. As things opened up, a picture would appear on a desk. The SO would come to a company function as the SO, not  a "friend."

And all of a sudden, I had gay friends.

I don't remember exactly when I started watching the Boston Pride Parade. I may have been a latecomer, but I'm guessing it was in 1992, the June after we moved to our condo on Beacon Street. The parade went right by our building, and we'd sit on the front steps and watch.

I always loved it.

At first, there wasn't all that much to it, but it was heartening to see the gay men and women parading. Heartening to see the PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) brigade. The groups from the Unitarian churches.

I also got a kick out of the Dykes on Bikes, a motorcycle club. And the Batacuda Belles, an all-women percussion band. 

Some of the gay bars sponsored floats, and they all had music blasting and plenty of dancing. 

There were a few parade things that brought out the inner Irish-Catholic prude in me, I guess. I wasn't a fan of seeing BDSM in action, floating by my house. And one time, I believe there was a couple actually going at in in an old fashioned claw-foot tub on wheels that some of their buddies were dragging along.

I would have rather not seen this sort of stuff, and often felt that there should be an after-parade, after-dark event in the South End (considered the hub of gay life in the hub) where anything could happen. Let it all hang out. Just not in broad daylight in front of me, and unsuspecting (but generally supportive) families with little kiddos.

Over time, the parade grew.

Eventually, it turned the corner and headed up the Hill instead of by my house. I still went.

The parade got bigger. 

More politicians walked. More church groups - not just the Unitarians. More gay families with their kids. More corporate groups. More high school and college groups. The acronym umbrella expanded. LBGTQA...

The last couple of years it was held I watched with my friend Tim From The Gym, who's roughly my age and grew up in a massive Irish-Catholic Boston family. (Thirteen kids.) 

But there were inevitable growing pains.

The group that had sponsored the parade since its inception was mostly white, middle class gays and lesbians. The kind of gay folks I know. 

There were complaints that the parade was too corporate, too privileged, not centered enough on people of color, the trans community. The old folks were sell outs. 

So the Boston Pride organization voted to disband, and with it went the parade.

Several groups have been holding smaller events. I walked by one on The Common last Saturday. But it's not the same as the old parade, which I miss. I haven't spoken with any of my friends about it, but I suspect that - even if they didn't attend the parade - they miss it, too.

What looks to the younger folks, the folks from marginalized communities like corporate selling out, like white privilege, looks to me like hard won acceptance. Sure, there's work to be done, but the gay folks I'm friends with didn't have life easy growing up, or beyond. Those corporate groups signal that it's okay to be openly gay at work. Those families pushing strollers show that it's okay to get married and have kids. Those high school kids aren't ever going to have to put up with some crackpot nun ranting about SATs. 

Maybe those complaining about the olds don't have a clue what they went through. Maybe they don't know that gay men my age watched their community, their lovers and friends, mowed down by AIDS. Maybe they don't know what it's like to watch a loved one, down to 100 pounds, covered with Kaposi's sarcoma lesions, hallucinating his last hours away. Maybe they never helped make a panel for the AIDS quilt. 

Maybe they can't imagine what it was like growing up before the Internet, when you knew you were different but thought you were the only one out there who was. 

Maybe they don't care about gay marriage. They're young. Maybe it's not their jam. Maybe it's never going to be. 

But I went to the wedding of my high school friends, held shortly after Massachusetts okayed gay marriage in 2004 - forty years after they'd first met in high school - and it was one of the most moving weddings I've been to. A lot better than the one where my college friend married a gay man.

We haven't come far enough, but things have gotten better for a lot of people. 

Here's hoping that things don't get pushed back into the closet. Here's hoping the persecution of trans folks and their families ends. Here's hoping that you can say gay in Florida. Here's hoping that white supremacist groups like the Patriot Front a-holes who were arrested before they could stir up trouble at a Pride event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, last week, cease and desist before we're living in a society where packs of armed and seething Brown Shirts show up at every event they don't like, eager for violence. 

It's a scary time.

I'm sure it wasn't perfect, but I missed the joy and exuberance of the Boston Pride Parade. 

Maybe it just ran out its string. Maybe it was time. 

Let's see what the new kids on the block can do.

It's a scary time, and for all of their sakes, and for everyone's sake, I wish them well. 

Note to self: don't look suspicious when flying American Airlines

This weekend, I had planned on flying to Dallas on American Airlines. (Game called on account of heat.)

On my way in, I wasn't going t be doing any shopping.

But on my way back to Boston, planned for the next week, I would no doubt have stopped at a Hudson Booksellers for a bottle of water, something snacky, and a People Magazine. Maybe even a book. 

I would have been a paying customer.

Nonetheless, there was apparently a non-zero chance that American Airline might have fingered me as a shoplifter and I could have ended up in the hoosegow. As happened to one traveler, who is now suing American. 

Michael Lowe boarded a flight at DFW Airport in May 2020. More than a year later, he said, he was on vacation in New Mexico when he was arrested on warrants he had never heard of for a crime he did not commit. For more than two weeks, Lowe was held in Quay County Jail at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in “grossly unsanitary conditions,” according to the lawsuit. Lowe said he didn’t even find out what he was charged with until after his release.  (Source: Star Telegram)

What Lowe endured was quite a horror show. 

What happened to him was set off when someone shoplifted something from a store inside DFW. The shop and what was lifted isn't specified, but I'm guessing it was something a bit more costly than what one might find at a Hudson's. Surely, no one could end up jailed for swiping a KIND Bar and a Michael Connelly paperback. (Not that I'm going to be swiping a KIND Bar and/or a Michael Connelly paperback.) The real light-fingered traveler must have been stealing a Tumi bag, a Mont Blanc pen, a Hugo Boss tie. Something pricey. 

Whoever was stealing whatever, "surveillance cameras caught the suspect boarding a flight headed to Reno."

The Airport Police ordered American Airlines to turn over the passenger manifest, containing info on everyone on the DFW to Reno flight. 

Instead, American Airlines “departed from its established procedures,” according to the lawsuit, and sent police a single passenger’s information — Lowe’s. Lowe had been on the flight as a layover on a trip from Flagstaff to Reno.

 At the time of the flight, Lowe had two-inch long gray hair and wore a mask. The surveillance footage — screenshots of which are shown in the lawsuit — shows a man with a military-style buzz cut wearing no mask and carrying several items. 

Oops.

Anyway, this false ID prompted arrest warrants - felony burglary and criminal mischief - made out for Lowe. 

Over a year later, Lowe was at a party in Tucumcari, NM. The party was a Fourth of July celebration, and must have gotten a bit rowdy, as the police were called in. The ruckus had nothing to do with Lowe, but the cops took down everyone's name and ran them. Lowe's two warrants came up. And he was arrested. 

Because he was innocent, Lowe figured things would be taken care of right away. 

Nope.

He ended up strip searched and thrown into a holding area with those accused of violent crimes. Plus this was at the height of the pandemic, in a jail where "corrections officers had refused to be tested for COVID-19."

For the next 17 days, Lowe was traumatized repeatedly by the conditions at the jail, according to the suit. He slept on the concrete floor, but did not get much rest due to his “constant state of fear of confrontation, physical abuse or sexual victimization.” The suit describes the violent outbursts in the packed unit that “arose over any trivial act.” 

After eight days, still without having been informed about why he was in jail, Lowe went before a judge, who smacked him back into jail to wait for Texas "authorities" to come and retrieve him.

On day 17, he was release, still not knowing why he'd been there in the first place. He made his way (another horror story) back to his home in Flagstaff, AZ.

The article I read didn't mention why Lowe hadn't gotten legal help during his time in jail. Nor did it mention why none of the friends he was partying with did anything to free him. But I guess that's neither here or there: Lowe went through hell. And continued to do so. While trying to figure out what he was charged with - and why him - he was told that, even though he'd been cleared, he was supposed to have shown up in court. Which he hadn't done, because a) he was innocent; b) he had no idea he was supposed to be in court. Anyway, there was yet another warrant out for his arrest. 

At this point, Lowe finally decided he needed a lawyer. (Duh!) The lawyer got all charges dismissed. 

But Lowe's now suffering from PTSD, and has lost income. A professional outdoorsman/tour guide, he lost a lucrative gig while he was in jail - and other work as he tried to clear himself. 

Lowe is suing American Airlines for its negligence. 

I hope he wins big. 

And I sure hope it gets American Airlines at DFW to not make any more bogus identifications. 

Note to self: Next time you fly, don't look suspicious at DFW. And remember to keep the receipt for the KIND Bar and People. 

Yeah, it's a dumb idea. So why am I so smitten?

I can't remember the last time I kicked in on a Kickstarter project. Was it the American-made, black or white, basic tee-shirts? Or was it the plastic ring that looked like something out of Dick Tracy, but was tech'd up to serve as a T pass?

I know it's been a while. Most of my impulse spending has been diverted to no-win candidates in impossibly red Congressional districts. 

But the Plufl - "the dog bed for humans" - has managed to catch my eye, if not my pocketbook.

Why a Plufl? Why, according to its Kickstarter page (where it's already raised nearly $300K - as of their June 2nd update - from 800 donor/investors):

The Plufl offers an unparalleled napping environment designed to alleviate stress and anxiety.

"Unaparalleled..." Well, that sounds pretty good. And there's plenty of verbiage that makes it sound even better:

The Plufl is a premium napping bed engineered to provide the optimal napping experience. It is created to maximize comfort and foster a sense of security, delivering relief for those who have ADHD, stress, and anxiety-related issues. A nap in the Plufl will boost your mood and have you feeling refreshed.

Premium. Optimal. Maximize comfort. Sense of security. If that don't boost your mood, nothing will. 

And yet, while I can't help but see this as a cute and catchy, I also can't help seeing it as a largely dumb idea. Or at least an unnecessary one. 

As a life-long, expert and experienced napper, there are already plenty of napping environments out there. In my little condo alone, I have a bed, a couch, a love seat, and a premium optimal ergonomic stressless recliner (purchased the Sunday after the November 2016 election). I've also been known to catch a few z's sitting up in an armchair. 

Admittedly, none of them hold the "Goodbye Stress and Anxiety" promise of the Plufl. But my napping alternatives do offer a bit of a respite. A "see you later, stress and anxiety" sort of promise that, in truth, is pretty much all the Plufl can deliver. And the Plufl will set you back $399 (early bird offer) - or $499, if you wait for it to be ready for prime time next January. Meanwhile, I already own the bed, the couch...

Another issue I have with the Plufl: it's definitely not designed with the senior set (after infant and toddlers, the prime napping demographic) in mind. Because I know precious few old geezers - self included - who'd be able to gracefully get into a Plufl, or easily extricate themselves from it. 

Once I snuggled in, I'd have a hard time napping, what with worrying about how I was going to have to crawl out of the Plufl and somehow make my way over to - say - the couch and hoist myself up. Which would just remind me that I could have just napped on the couch to begin with. 

So much for "Goodbye Stress and Anxiety."

And yet I'm pretty smitten with the Plufl.

Not smitten enough to invest in its Kickstarter drive. Yet smitten enough.

It looks so inviting. So comfy. So cozy. A nap lover's paradise. A nap lover's dream.

Maybe this is nature's way of signaling that I really do need to get a dog so I have a good reason to buy a dog bed. An actual dog bed. For an actual dog.

"Fido" can curl up in their napping space; I can zone out on the bed. All very companionable. I might even invite my mythical "Fido" to jump up and join me at some point. Beats me trying to get in and out of a Plufl.