Worst team-building ever

Offsites were one thing. A day away from the usual office whatever. So what if all anyone came away with was a slew of rolled up flipchart pages full of items that everyone was going to "execute" to turn the company around? It was still a day out. 

But the teambuilding events? Oh, no. 

Mostly, anyway. 

I didn't so much hate the ones where we took personality tests and walked away with tips on how to get along with our psycho-dynamic opposites. (INTJ, by the way.) But even these could gang a bit agley. At one company, we took a poor man's version of Myers-Briggs where we fell into Blue-Green-Red-Orange color groups. I was a Blue: corporate analytic nerds. All the sales guys were Reds, mostly Flaming Reds. At one point, the Flamers, who were hooting, screaming, and chanting in some weird impromptu bonding excercise, turned on us Blues and started hollering and gesturing about what pussies we were, and how they were thrilled they weren't Blue. (Fast forward, and I could understand how members of the press felt at MAGA rallies.)

There was another one where we all painted our own versions of a Van Gogh sunflower picture. That one was okay. It was actually very interesting to see who did what in terms of trying for exact replication vs. vague use of the same color palette.) 

But I didn't like the team building exercises where we had to write and perform a cheer, make a heliocopter out of Tinker Toys, sit back to back with a colleague and tell them something deeply personal about yourself. And the absolute worst: learn to build trust - hah -  by falling back into a colleague's arms. Ugh on ugh. That one I really despised. 

Team building has increasingly taken a philanthropic turn, with groups signing up to do something charitable or other. 

Like hike up a mountain to raise money for the entirely admirable José Andrés' World Central Kitchen, the outfit that shows up whenever and wherever there's a natural or manmade disaster.

Over the summer, a team from Beazley, an insurance firm, climbed Colorado's 14,230 foot Mt. Shavano. 

This was obviously a voluntary event, as 14,230 feet, while doable in a day, is a pretty strenuous hike. (The only mountain I've ever made it to the top of is Mt. Monadnock in NH, which is only a bit over 3,000 feet high. It only took a couple of hours, and that was plenty enough for me. I've climbed Mt. Washington, but only made it as far as Tuckerman's Ravine. And I've also climbed Mt. Katahdin in Maine, the most strenuous hike I've ever been on, but I don't remember whether we got to the top. We're talking over 50 years ago for all of these treks.)

Anyway, underwriter Steve Stephanides, age 46, was on his second Beazley charity hike, which the company has been holding for more than a decade.

As the team of 15 Beazley-ites neared the summit, Steve decided to take a breather. While he was breathing, his colleagues made it to the peak and started heading down. The 14 all made it to the bottom safely.  Steve forged on and got to the top after his colleagues had exited. On the way down, he realized that something was off.

[He] used his cellphone to pin-drop his location to his co-workers, who informed him that he was on the wrong route and instructed him to hike back up to the summit to get to the correct trail down, rescue officials said in a statement. "In his initial attempts to descend, he found himself in the steep boulder and scree field on the northeast slopes toward Shavano Lake," according to officials. 

Just before 4 p.m. local time on Friday, Stephanides sent another location pin-drop to his colleagues that he was near the correct trail. Shortly after that message, a strong storm passed through the area with freezing rain and high winds, rescue officials said in a statement. (Source: ABC News)

Nothing went right for Steve. He lost cellphone reception and took multiple spills - at least twenty falls. After the last one, he couldn't get up. 

Meanwhile, his safe and sound colleagues didn't report that Steve was missing until 9 p.m. "some eight-and-a-half hours after he started his descent, officials said." Eight-and-a-half hours, as it turns out, is roughly waht it takes most hikers to complete the round trip.

Rescue teams sprung into action and after Steve spent a chilly, wet, and solo night in a gully was found near a drainage ditch. He was carried down and taken to a hospital. 

Rescuers said Stephanides was "phenomenally lucky" that the weather cleared on Saturday and he regained enough cellphone service to call 911.

At least Steve was smart enough to finally call 911 and not those colleagues.  

We don't know the full story. Was Steve Stephanides a hiking pro, who waved off his colleagues when they offered to wait up for him? Was he a jerk that they wanted nothing to do with? Were they all from different locations, so weren't a team to begin with, just a bunch of individuals who had Beazley in common, but didn't really work together?  (Steve works in Florida...) 

Were they jerks to abandon their colleague? Shouldn't a cuople of them have stayed at the top to wait for him to arrive? Shouldn't someone have alerted the rescue squads when that storm passed through? And - in a pretty perplexing move - the colleagues, on their way down, had collected the trail markers they had set on the way up. Guess they didn't trust Steve to pick up after himself, and I'm sure one of the rules of the road is to not leave your trail markers behind. Still...

I suspect there'll be plenty of awkward moments if and when these colleagues run into each other. HR might want to intervene. These guys should use some team-building!

Oh, let's just privatize everything

The hospital closings, bankruptcy filing, and reeking greed and venality of its private-jet-flying/yacht-sailing/Fifth-Amendment-taking CEO - oh, and I forgot to mention the patient deaths attributed to repossessed life-saving equipment for failure to pay bills while the CEO was swanning around on his jets and yachts - of the private, profit-driven (no surprise!) Steward Health Care have been much in the news these days, thanks to a brilliant Boston Globe Spotlight series. 

But Steward is not, of course, alone. There are plenty of other examples of privatized hospitals providing a shoddy version of what should be a public good. Because profits.

And one of those is Acadia Healthcare, a chain of private psychiatric hospitals. Given the lack of and demand for mental health services, Acadia has been just humming along churning out the profits.

But a New York Times investigation found that some of that success was built on a disturbing practice: Acadia has lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will, even when detaining them was not medically necessary. (Source: NY Times)

What's been happening is that folks in need of routine care show up in the ER, or are brought in by a police officer, or come in on their own based on a recommendation "only to find themselves sent to Acadia facilities and locked in."

A social worker spent six days inside an Acadia hospital in Florida after she tried to get her bipolar medications adjusted. A woman who works at a children’s hospital was held for seven days after she showed up at an Acadia facility in Indiana looking for therapy. And after police officers raided an Acadia hospital in Georgia, 16 patients told investigators that they had been kept there “with no excuses or valid reason,” according to a police report.

Acadia held all of them under laws meant for people who pose an imminent threat to themselves or others. But none of the patients appeared to have met that legal standard, according to records and interviews.

You'll get no argument from me that there are times when a person experiencing a mental health crisis should be held whether they like it or not. A fellow in Boston was recently sent to a state psychiatric facility after he was arrested for chasing folks around downtown streets, flailing around with a machete. When the name of the fellow sent to Bridgewater was published, I wasn't surprised. I knew him from the homeless shelter where I'm a long time volunteer, and where this guy radiated mental health issues, including hostility and disconnection, that were apparent even to us lay people. I'm glad he's off the streets and hope he gets straightened out. And I hope that Bridgewater State holds him long enough to get him straightened out. Or at least stable enough that he won't be chasing folks around with a machete.

But at Acadia, they're holding patients longer than they need to be held, and in many cases the reasoning behind the hold is financial rather than medical. 

Acadia, which charges $2,200 a day for some patients, at times deploys an array of strategies to persuade insurers to cover longer stays, employees said. Acadia has exaggerated patients’ symptoms. It has tweaked medication dosages, then claimed patients needed to stay longer because of the adjustment. And it has argued that patients are not well enough to leave because they did not finish a meal.

Without a legal intervention, patients are kept under lock and key in an Acadia hospital "until their insurance runs out."

Doctors, nurses, hospital management, patients, their families - all have reported bad behavior on the part of Acadia. 

There's no doubt that plenty of the old time state-run or other public psychiatric facilities were snakepits, where nobody got much by way of care. I remember driving by Worcester State Hospital - idealized view above - and thinking about what a scary fortress it was. And there's no doubt that there are more and more people in need of mental health care. Still, as we've seen time and again when public services and non-profit entities are replaced with privatized, profit-making concerns, the focus quickly veers from the supposed market efficiencies the private sector brings to a laser focus on profit making at the cost of providing services. 

Insurance companies are not, of course, in the business of reimbursing providers for services the insurance cos. don't deem necessary. So Acadia had to make sure they were making a compelling case for keeping patients. 

To do that, Acadia needs to show that patients are unstable and require ongoing intensive care. Former Acadia executives and staff in 10 states said employees were coached to use certain buzzwords, like “combative,” in patients’ charts to make that case.

In 2022, for example, state inspectors criticized an Acadia hospital in Reading, Pa., for having instructed workers to avoid adjectives like “calm” and “compliant” in a patient’s chart. That same year, employees at Acadia hospitals in Ohio and Michigan complained to their state regulators that doctors had written false statements in patients’ medical charts to justify continuing their stays.

At an Acadia hospital in Missouri, three former nurses said, executives pressured them to label patients whose insurance was about to run out as uncooperative. Acadia employees then would argue to insurance companies that the patients weren’t ready to leave. Sometimes, the nurses said, they wrote patients up for not finishing a meal or skipping group therapy.

Once Acadia won more insurance days for patients, it often would not release them before their insurance ran out, according to dozens of former Acadia executives, psychiatrists and other staff members.

Capitalism has much to commend it - the potential for prosperity, opportunity, creativity, high quality products - but, man, does it come with a downside. And one of those downsides shows up big time when it comes to healthcare (and education and prisons and, and, and). God help you if you're in need of mental health care and end up in an Acadia profit-making hospital. Not finishing a lousy hospital meal - no doubt prepared using the cheapest means possible; gotta squeeze costs out, don't you know - can be enough to keep you in the stir? 

Sure, let's just privatize everything.

I couldn't have done this

When I was in college, I spent my summers waitressing. After college, but before "real life" clicked in, I waitressed for a couple of years to finance travel. Over the years, when frustrated by my "real life" career, I'd often joke that I could always go back to waitressing. But in "real life," I couldn't have. There was much I enjoyed about waiting on tables, but I don't think it would have aged very well. I wouldn't have wanted to be on my feet running around for ten hours. I wouldn't have wanted to come home every night with the smell of roast meat and fried fish in my hair. Sure, everyone has to put up with demanding customers, nasty bosses, and idiotic colleagues, but for me it was probably easier to deal with an idiotic, nasty VP of sales than it would have been to deal with an idiotic, nasty line cook. 

So although I sometimes still joke about waiting tables, I know that I couldn't have. The closest I come is working a lunch or breakfast shift dishing out food at "my" homeless shelter, which is more like being a lunch lady than it is like being a waitress. 

But not Elaine Gingras, a Worcester woman my age who's been working at the IHOP on Route 9 in Shrewsbury for 50 years. 

Over the course of her career, Gingras spent a number of years as the head waitress, but stepped down after a decade or so to leave the thankless managerial stuff, like scheduling, and back to what she loved doing: waiting on tables and mentoring newbies. 

Interacting with customers is what gives Gingras the most joy. For years, she has served individuals and families who are regulars at the IHOP, asking them about their day, where they are from, if they are traveling someplace and even helping them if they were working on a puzzle.

“Some of them have passed on,” Gingras said. “I see families come in with their kids in infancy, and now I see their kids with their kids. I’ve seen generations.” (Source: MassLive)

Mostly, Elaine waited on regular folks, but she did wait on Neil Diamond, who came in with a bodyguard. 

“He had bacon and eggs, toast and coffee,” she said. “Then he told me to be quiet about it.”

My only celebrity serve - other than local pols - was waiting on the members of Blood, Sweat and Tears while I was working at Durgin Park. I don't remember what they ate, but part of the tip was two tickets to their performance at Paul's Mall (the Boston club at the time). The seats were great - front row; the performance was okay.  

I don't know Elaine Gingras, but I bet within two minutes we'd figure out that there's only one or two degrees of separation between us. She trained as a teacher - early on, she waitressed while teaching - and I'm betting she went to Worcester State or Anna Maria. Which means I would have known plenty of girls in her class. In any case, she sounds like a very nice person, and I would have been delighted if I had learned that, at some point early on, our waitressing paths had crossed. Maybe they did. Maybe we worked together at Ted's Big Boy in Webster Square. Or maybe I waited on her. She had waitressing jobs prior to IHOP, so maybe between those gigs and her long tenure at IHOP, she waited on me way back in the day.

So congratulations, Elaine, on your Golden IHOP Anniversary. Fifty years a waitress? Much as I like to kid about it, I never could have done it. Good on ye, Elaine. What a Worcester girl!

Great Expectations

I'm old. 

Back in the way back, olden times, when we went to college - that would be the late 1960's, early 19770's - we had less-than-great, one might say exceedingly modest, expectations about what our dorm rooms would be like. We expected clean, we expected small. And that's we got at the clean, small Catholic college I went to.

Freshman year, my roommate Joyce and I were in Room 333 in St. Joseph's Hall at Emmanuel College in Boston's Fenway area. St. Joe's was the newest and largest of Emma's four dorms - it had the "nicest" main lounge (which we never used) - but that didn't have much of an impact on room size or cleanliness, which were uniform across campus. The paint on the cement block walls was a very pale orange, pretty actually, and the drapes were in a darker, still pretty, orange shade.

After moving in, we hiked over to George's Folly in Brookline, which was a wondrous emporium that sold Zig-Zag papers, incense, generally ill-fitting but colorful hippie clothing from India and Latin America, decor items, ornaments, vases, bowls, and a fabulous assortment of Indian-print and Madras bedspreads. 

For our room, we bought matching Indian print spreads: cream, brown, and orange, patterned with small elephants. Sounds awful, but they were plenty cute. I think they cost $3 each. We also got a folky ceramic pitcher/vase and a bunch of straw flowers to plunk in it. I don't remember what we had on the walls, but I think it was the Bob Dylan poster with the psychedelic hairdo. Later in the year, I found a still-wrapped poster of Paul Newman (the one where he's in the white tee-shirt) in a snowbank on Boylston Street, and that went up, too. Our room looked great. 

Sophomore year, we were still in St. Joe's, now in Room 510. The view wasn't as good (other dorms, rather than city life), but we had lucked into one of the coveted rooms with the pale grey walls and the yellow drapes. We went out and got plain yellow bedspreads - I can't remember where, probably some cheap place downtown, but they were too plain for George's Folly - and put our old vase with new straw flowers on the window sill. Then the unbelievable happened. Someone who wanted those yellow drapes broke into our room and swiped them, toppling our vase to smithereens. They actually didn't break in, as no one locked their rooms. (No one had anything worth stealing except, apparently, the yellow drapes.) We got the drapes back. I don't remember who the thieves were, or whether they paid us for the vase.

Junior year, we lotteried into Loreto Hall - a room on the fourth floor, number forgotten. Loreto was older, and the rooms were in need of a good coat of paint. We had no desire to spend the next nine months in a room with dingy paint, so we took the T to Lechmere Sales and bought a couple of paintbrushes and a gallon of pale green (with a slight bluish tinge) paint. Curiously, while we were there, we ran into Sister Ann Rachel, the Dean of Students. At any rate, we saw her heading into the paint department, of all things. We bee-lined out before she could see what we were buying. Our painting our room set off a flurry of room painting on Loreto's fourth floor. Good little Emmas that Joyce and I were, we used a color that would actually have been on the walls officially. Other girls went off the rails: purple, black. In any case, the next thing we knew, all the rooms in Loreto were getting a new coat of paint. (Why they didn't do this over the summer remains a mystery.) The painters on our floor were two Irish guys, Dominic and Vincent. I don't remember if they bothered to redo our room, as we'd done a good job and chosen a color from the dorm-approved palette. 

Our bedspreads were from George's Folly: blue and green Madras. Our room innovation: for a while, we put one of the beds (the usual campus fare: metal frame, skimpy mattress) on top of the dressers, and slid the other one between the dressers for a bunk-type arrangement. It looked great - Joyce always had a super eye (her career was in fashion, and her last position was as the lead designer ready-to-wear buyer at Neiman Marcus) - but it was too much trouble to get into the upper, so we dismantled the cool-looking but user unfriendly bunk set up. 

Senior year, we moved just off campus, paying $150 a month for a two bedroom apartment on Queensberry Street. We furnished it with family castoffs - my parents' studio couch, a table from her mother, two scratchy arm chairs from her schoolteacher aunts. My room had pale blue walls; my quilted bedspread was a cream, royal blue, and navy paisley pattern. The bed and dresser were hand-me-downs from my sister Kath, who'd upgraded to actual purchased furniture. The bed had a nifty bookcase headboard, and two side cabinet "wings". (The original setup must have had nightstand that slid under the wings.) The bed and dresser came blue, but I painted it cream. Or vice versa. 

In the living room, we splurged on a braided rug. I can still picture our turquoise and chartreuse shower curtain. Tommy - Joyce's then BF, now husband - put down fresh linoleum in the bathroom and miniature kitchen. The landlord replaced the 1920's Detroit Jewel stove and oven with a modern appliance. Before we moved in, the landlord had painted all the rooms but hadn't cleaned the bathroom or kitchen. They were filthy. Under the claw-foot bathtub, we found a couple of empty whisky bottles and a ton of dust kitties. 

I'm old.

Old enough to remember that this is how college students lived when I was a college student.

No longer.

At least in some precincts. 

Today, a wave of undergraduates — especially in the southern states — are hiring interior designers to completely makeover their dorm rooms at a cost of thousands of dollars per room.

...This year, according to the National Retail Federation, college students spent about $87 billion, a drop from the high of $94 billion last year, but significantly more than the $48 billion they spent in 2014. This equates to an average of $1,365 per student, the group reports. (Source: NY Times)

Hmmm. I know I'm old, but I'm guessing that I never spent more than twenty bucks outfitting my dorm room, which equates to about $150 to $180 in today's terms.

But students - "especially in the southern states" - have greater expectations than Joyce and I ever did. 

There are design firms dedicated to dorm room living, and the students have budgets running into the thousdands upon thousands, and can cover items like:

...custom fabrics for the curtains, monogrammed pillows, linens, a couch and coffee table, headboard and dust ruffles; handmade murals or removable wallpaper; luxury light fixtures to replace fluorescent lights; and real wood hutches, shelves and cabinets custom-made to fit the room.

One Ole Miss student took one look at her dorm room and decided that it was "'completely not doable to live-in.'" Post design, she keeps her door open with "pride and confidence."

I'm just guessing here, but I'm guessing the students (read: their parents) forking over $10K - more than Ole Miss tuition, by the way - to gussy up a dorm room will be moving into a sorority sophomore year. Naturally, sorority houses at the big state schools in the south are also getting pricey makeovers. Girls gotta Tik-Tok, girls gotta Insta...

Me, I was happy to be away from home, living the life in my cement block-walled room, with my $3 bedspread from George's Folly. 

I'm old.

.

What would Joe Friday do?

I haven't watched it in years, but the "reality" show COPS, which follows real-life police officers while they make their rounds, has one major thing to recommend it. "Bad Boys" is its theme song. (Bad boys, bad boys. Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? Bad boys, bad boys.)

I hadn't thought of that show or song in years, but it sure came to mind when I read about Antioch (California) ex-cop Morteza Amiri who's no longer wondering what he's going to do when they come for him. They've come, and he's now facing serious prison time.

In reading about Amiri, I also found myself asking what Joe Friday would do. Joe Friday was the fictional LA cop, played by Jack Webb, on the TV show Dragnet which ran in the 1950's, and then again in the lates 1960's. Joe Friday was a deadpan, stick-up-the-ass, rightwing, by-the-books police officer who liked nothing more (in the 1960's version of the show) than busting some long-haired, peace and love, pot smoking hippies.

But I do know that Joe Friday never would have done what Morteza Amiri did, and would have gladly busted this bad boy.

Amiri was recently convicted, by a federal jury, of trying to scam his way into a hefty pay raise by fraudulently getting his college degree. 

During the trial, evidence showed that Amiri hired someone to complete entire courses on his behalf at an online university so he could qualify for higher pay.

Here are some of the text messages Amiri sent to his would-be stand-in, according to the press release:“Can i hire you [ ] to do my … classes? ill pay you per class”

“Don’t tell a soul about me hiring you for this. we can’t afford it getting leaked and me losing my job”

“If I submit my request for the degree on time by the end of the month I can coordinate my raise in a timely manner”

“I’m gonna rush order my degree to get my pay raise jump-started” (Source: Daily Muck)

Maybe I'm just spitballin' here, by I'm guessing that the curriculum for a degree in criminology is not the most rigorous one in the history of higher ed. I mean, it's not exactly like getting a degree in neurobiology or physics. I don't know what school Amiri was trying to scam a degree from, nor do I know his course of study - just guessing it was something crime-y -  but I looked on the website of a small local college that's well known for awarding degrees to cops and firefighters, who pursue these degrees - like Morteza Amiri was doing/not doing - to earn more money. Here are a couple of the required courses for Anna Maria's degree in Criminal Justice: 

Policing in America: a survey of the history, development, environment, organization, and sociology of law enforcement in America.

Corrections: an examination of the evolution of prisoner management from Pennsylvania's Walnut Street Jail to the present day correctional system. 

Now, I'm all for police officers pursuing further education. May they all take a bunch of psychology courses, for one thing. And far be it from me - with my undergraduate degree in sociology, and my master's in business - to shame anyone for taking gut courses. But Morteza - I keep wanting to type Morticia - Amiri couldn't even see his way clear to take a bunch of gut courses so he could earn more money?

Amiri wasn't alone. Five other police officers have been "convicted in the conspiracy to commit wire fraud related to cops cheating on university degrees to qualify for higher pay" at the Antioch and Pittsburg (also in California) PDs.  They could end up serving more than 20 years. 

He'll have plenty of time to study while he's behind bars, that's for sure. 

But wait, there's more. 

Amiri had already been suspended for instructing his police dog - his "K9 partner" - to take a bite out of 28 suspects, and he's been indicted for these acts, as well. 

Amiri took photos of the encounters to “keep them as a souvenir,” according to the indictment for that case. That trial date is set for Feb. 18, 2025.

Quite a guy! (Whatever happened to protect and serve?)

Joe Friday wouldn't have done this in a million years. But I would have loved to have heard what Joe Friday had to say about this case. "It was Thursday, October 8th, a warm day in Los Angeles. My partner and I were working the day watch out of Central. We got a line on a rogue cop who was faking his way into a college degree..."

Joe would have called Amiri "College Boy," and would have been delighted to snap the cuffs on him.

On second thought, I'd rather have watched Joe Friday bust Amiri for siccing his police pooch on suspects. And if Morteza Amiri ends up with a good, stiff sentence, I'd just as soon see it be for torturing suspects. 

When Dragnet was on the air (and beyond) the LAPD had quite the reputation for having violent and corrupt cops, but Joe Friday never would have had a dog-bites-man thing going. Never. 

Too bad (not) for Morteza Amiri, but it looks like his bad behavior is now jumping up and biting him in the ass.

Bad boy, bad boy.

I hope someone from Steward ends up paying for their sins

I've been consumed of late with trying to keep up with all the ups and downs of Steward Health Care System, which owns and ran (into the ground) a number of hospitals in Massachusetts. Steward is a classic example of why there are certain things - like healthcare - that would be better off not being privatized. Steward is a classic tale of corporate profligacy, executive perfidy, private equity greed. The result: bankruptcy, hospital closures, lost job, lost lives. 

So we've gotten to read about a woman who died after childbirth in a Steward hospital in Boston because the equipment that would have saved her life had been repossessed for lack of payment, and we've gotten to read about CEO Ralph de la Torre's vacationing in Versailles to watch the Olympics dressage competition (but of course!). I'm not sure how he and his fam got to France. It could have been one of his kabillion dollar yachts, or a private plane. Nothing but first class for good old Dr. Ralph while Sungida Rashid gets to bleed to death. 

Everything you read about Ralph de la Torre suggests he's little more than a greedy self-dealer, but he's still swanning around ritzing it up while the little people who were patients or staff in "his" hospitals suffered.

Some of the Massachusetts hospitals he put his reverse Midas touch on - reverse other than when it comes to himself - have been pulled into our existing not-for-profit systems. So most personnel will have jobs. But in the hospitals that have closed outright it's not all that clear what happens to the folks who worked there or otherwise supported the hospitals.

Sure, they can probably find work, but they'll lose seniority, benefits, pensions, severance protection, and everything else that comes with the job (including your community of colleagues), but doesn't survive a bankruptcy closure. 

It almost goes without saying that the two Steward hospitals that didn't get snapped up by the big healthcare systems are those that serve poor communities, including Carney Hospital in the Dorchester section of Boston.

Among the folks impacted by Carney's closing is Junhwa Lee whose family - Lee works alongside her husband and daughter - owned the pharmacy located within the walls of Carney. The news that Carney was going to close (which it did a month ago) came suddenly, giving the Lee family little time to respond. This is from an article that appeared in the Boston Globe a few days before Carney was shuttered. 

The short notice left Lee little time and few options for relocating and continuing to serve her patients, let alone recouping financial losses. She’s worried about what will happen not just for her family’s sake, but for

her patients’, many of whom are elderly, non-English speakers, and otherwise vulnerable.

“They trust us, they always tell us, ‘I will follow you wherever you go,’ so we’re very thankful about that, but we don’t know where to go,” Lee said last week, as the days until closure ticked by. ”There’s not enough time.”

Lee was able to find a less-than-ideal place to relocate, and the state regulators is helping the family accelerate the regulatory process involved with pharmacy relocation. But, still:

...she’s one of many small business owners and workers whose livelihoods have been threatened by the Steward collapse, watching helplessly as executives, investors, state officials, and a bankruptcy judge negotiate over the wreckage.

The article doesn't say, but what do you want to bet that Lee and her family are immigrants? And that this is a classic American immigrant story: come to the States, work hard, buy a business - Lee bought the pharmacy, where she'd worked for nearly a decade, just before things started to go south with Steward - only to end up on the receiving end of some All American unbridled capitalism shite. 

Junhwa Lee's is hardly the worst story to come out of Steward. (That would be Sungida Rashid. So far.)  And there are a lot of Carney workers who are a lot worse off. Lee is a pharmacist and business owner. She and her family will take a hit - a big one - but will likely be fine. 

Suppose you were a health care aide in your late 50's who's worked at Carney for decades, standing on your feet for long, tension-filled days, but working an easy commute from home. And looking forward to retiring in a few years on a modest Social Security check and a modest pension. Nothing flashy, nothing great. But enough to get modestly by. Will that meager pension survive bankruptcy? I believe the technical answer is 'hah!'

Then there are the poor people in the surrounding community who went to Carney for their healthcare? Sucks to be the old little-English-speaking grandpa in a wheelchair who'll now have to take three buses to get to his new healthcare spot.

Yeah, life is hard, but bums like Ralph de la Torre make it a lot harder for those who are already struggling. 

Chances are most of what he's done to suck the life (and money) out of Steward is perfectly legal. Just immoral. But maybe his self-dealing, his using Steward's coffers to fund his lifestyle-of-the-rich-and-famous, will catch up with him. 

I hope someone from Steward ends up paying for their sins, and my favorite candidate is Ralph de la Torre. 

Would you pay to attend a wedding? (Me: No!)

I'd read a bit about it. Having clicked on one wedding horror show story on AITA (a Reddit forum: Am I The Asshole, in which folks write in about a sitch they're involved with, and ask forum members to weigh in on whether they're a-holes or not), such stories appear with considerable frequency. And with considerable frequency, I get baited and click. I never weigh in, other than in my mind because, basically, I don't care if your cousin failed to go along with your dress-like-a-Star-Trek-character request. Etc. 

But because of AITA, I knew that there were couples out there who are charging people to attend their weddings. Sometimes they ask for cash wedding gifts to help defray their dream wedding costs. Sometimes the fees are associated with part of the wedding, important now that a lot of weddings have become multi-day, drag-on affairs. Sometimes they solicit a donation on the RSVP card, so you're more of less purchasing a ticket. 

Remember when, back in the day, the only cost (beyond a gift) associated with a wedding was paying for your drinks if there was a cash vs. open bar? Ah, the good old days.

So coming across an article in the New York Times that talked of charges of $333, of $450, to attend a wedding shouldn't have come as a shock. And yet it did.

What to make of the young guy in Houston who's planning ahead for his 2025 wedding? 

Hassan Ahmed, 23, is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston, where he lives. Mr. Ahmed said he hadn’t heard back from many of his 125 wedding guests. But he has already spent over $100,000 on the wedding, including deposits for the venue, the D.J. and the photographer. In a video on TikTok, he said he was confused by the response, noting that many of his guests had spent more money on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets. (Source: NY Times)

I'm going out on a limb here in stating that young Mr. Ahmed is a 14 karat gold dope. 

He's wondering why he isn't hearing back from his guests? Huh?

And he has this to say about the frivolous ways his nearest and dearest are frittering away their cash: 

"What I don't understand is that y'all spend more money on stupid stuff, but you can't come out to support your family and your friends at a wedding," the groom said. (Source: MSN)

Stupid stuff, you say?

How about this? The overall cost for this wedding is said to be $200K, which translates into $1,600 per guest. That's swell, I guess, if you can afford it. But if you need to have your guests defray the costs, then you can't afford it. And your guests are not your guests, they're paying customers. And if they want to spend their money on "stupid stuff" like Beyoncé tickets, then that's their right as customers. Because I'd sure rather spend $450 to see Bey than pay that much to go to anyone's "stupid stuff" of a wedding.

And how shortsighted to spend $200K - even if your customers help underwrite $56,250 worth of it - on a one shot experience, as opposed to using that kind of money to say, put a downpayment on a house. And the $450 your customers are forking over could have gone toward purchasing tangible stuff - like the "stupid stuff" that no doubt litters your bridal registry, but will at least last and help you settle in to married life. (Hassan Ahmed is only 23, so presumably he's setting up a household for the first time, as opposed to older couples who've lived together and already have the Cuisinart, airfryer, and monogrammed sheets.)

Again, one thing if you have the money to spend on a splosh wedding. (Can you just imagine what the nuptials will cost when and if Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce tie the not.) But if you have to charge your guests, then you really do need to lower your sights. Backyard weddings, a DJ'd reception at the K of C Hall, can actually be a lot of fun!

And by the way, it's already not cheap to go to a wedding:

The cost of being a guest is also becoming more expensive. The average cost of attending a wedding is $580, according to a 2023 study by the Knot, which surveyed 1,000 people who had attended a wedding in the previous year. That was an increase of $120 compared with 2021. (Back to the NY Times)

Well, 2021 was pandemic, so the weddings were likely smaller scale, but that's still quite an increase over a few years. But when you think of it: gift, outfit, transpo. You can run through $580 pretty darned quick. And this even if you're not talking a destination wedding...

Yikes! 

Some folks actually do seem to be able to carry off the ticketed wedding. 

Last year, Nova and Reemo Styles were married at St. Patrick's Cathedral in NYC. They sold tickets to their wedding for $333 a head. 

The couple, who live on the Upper East Side, said they had not charged guests to cover the cost of their wedding, which was upward of $70,000; rather, they had needed to winnow their guest list down significantly.

The couple hired a double-decker bus that took guests to New York landmarks that were significant in their love story. The first stop was the legal ceremony at the cathedral. Other stops included Hudson Yards, where Mr. Styles, 31, proposed, and the 42nd Street AMC theater, where they played a video of their journey together. The final stop was the reception, which was held at a private event space on the 102nd floor at the One World Observatory.

The couple originally had a 350-person guest list, but the bus had space for only 60 people. “It was stressful,” Mr. Styles said. “We had to figure out a way for them to choose us, because we can’t choose them.”

Ms. Styles added, “We wanted people who really wanted to be there.” They felt that the ticket system was the best way to do it.

I just can't. (And, Ms. Styles, I have some news for you: I'll bet that lots of the 350 people on your original guest list likely found the invite, even if it were for free, to be a big pain in the arse. When they opened the envelope, the majority likely rolled their eyes, checked their calendar, and hoped they had something else to do that day - like have a colonoscopy or have their wisdom teeth yanked out or wallpaper the guest room.)

Anyway, the Styles had 350 folks on your guest list, but they wanted them to self-select by paying for the privilege of attending their wedding? Wouldn't the normal response be to winnow the list down to the number of people who were most essential in your life, and host a wedding you could pay for?

Under the pay for the privilege scenario, what happens if dear old Auntie Gladys is on a tiny fixed income and doesn't have $333 to spare, but a former colleague whose wedding you went to (for free) thinks, WTF, sounds like a hoot, and buys a ticket? 

The one Styles attendee interviewed was glad she went. At first, she didn't quite get it, but the couple explained their reasoning (which I personally found a tad bit absurd), so Lola Marie decided to go for it. 

“It was worth more than $333,” Ms. Marie said, adding that she knew the couple’s intention was not to make money from their guests. She said she had a lot of fun celebrating and would have paid much more for the steak and lobster dinner at the top of One World Trade Center, with stunning views of the city and a surprise performance by the rapper Fabolous.

Fortunately, the Styles had 60 folks willing to pay for surf and turf with a view. While I will say that if someone I cared for asked for cash gifts only, that would be fine by me, even if the money was going for the wedding party and not real life. But if I'd been on the invite list for this shindig, I'm pretty sure the answer would have been a bit fat NO! Let alone if Hassan Ahmed had sent me a save the date with a save $450 to pay for it attached to it. NFW!