One potato chip factory...

I am an absolute sucker for local products that make it big, especially food products. Some of my favorites - but of course! - are from Worcester: Near East Rice Pilaf. Polar Soda. Table Talk Pies.

I always have a couple of boxes of Near East rice/pilaf/couscous in my kichen cabinets. In my fridge, there'll always be some Polar Soda. (I especially like the diet orange and the diet cranberry. Mixed together, it's a wonderful combo.) I don't have any Table Talk Pies around, but when I go to a Woo Sox (Red Sox AAA team in Worcester) game - which I do a couple of times a season - I always get me a pie-let, even though they rarely if ever have my favorite, which is cherry.

A local food favorite that broke out of local availability into nationwide presence doesn't have to be from Worcester. I like Brigham's ice cream. And since I first had one, decades ago, Cape Code Potato Chips, has been my chip o' choice. 

As I write this post, there are no bags of Cape Codders in my kitchen, but there is an empty bag in my kitchen wastebasket. 

So I was sad to read the news that those chips, as of April, will not longer be made in Massachusetts. The OG plant in Hyannis is closing down, and 49 employees will be losing their jobs.

In a statement, the company said the Hyannis plant produces just 4 percent of the Cape Cod and Kettle brand chips, while newer plants in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania produce the majority. The move will end production of Cape Cod chips in Massachusetts. (Source: Boston Globe)

The company, by the way, is not Cape Cod Potato Chips. It's Campbell's, as in soups in red and white cans. They acquired Cape Cod back in 2018. I can't say I remember this acquisition, but I'm sure I was aware of it at the time. As I'm sure I would have feared that, post acquisition, chip quality would go down, and those yummy Cape Codders would no longer be so Mm! Mm! Good!

Purists may notice a difference, but I can't say that I have. Cape Cod Potato Chips remain my brand. (I favor the sea-salt originals, but also like the russets.)

Still, sorry to see the chip production leave Hyannis, even though it's unlikely that the chips in the bag I just consumed were actually made locally. I fished the bag out of the trash, but there was no indication of where the chips were produced. All I learned was that the chips were distributed by Cape Cod in Hyannis.

Probably not for long.

The Hyannis site “no longer makes economic sense for the business,” the company said. “Production will be transferred to more modern and efficient plants, enabling a more agile and flexible manufacturing network” while maintaining quality. 

Blah, blah, blah-di-blah blah.  And, for the employees who are about to be pink-slipped, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, life goes on.

Campbell’s said it will provide “impacted employees with separation benefits, job placement support and guidance on how to access state assistance programs.”

The company said it plans to connect with Cape Cod organizations that “offer culinary entrepreneur programs, workforce development, and career pathways” in the hospitality industry. It will also allow nonprofits to apply for grants from the Campbell Foundation, which targets communities where the company has operations.

Good luck to the laid-off employees. I can't quite figure out how working on a manufacturing line can translate into culinary entrepreneurship, but, then again, I am singularly lacking in careerish imagination. Good luck to them all!

And I do have to say that there was something a bit romantic about Cape Cod Potato Chips actually being made on Cape Cod as opposed to, say, Wisconsin. The sea salt from Wisconsin won't exactly be local. And while I know that Wisconsin has a titanic lake next door. And dunes. It's not the same. No one ever wrote a song about Wisconsin that holds a candle to Old Cape Cod. 

If you spend an evening, then you'll want to stay.
Watching the moonlight on Cape Cod Bay.
You're sure to fall in love with old Cape Cod.

Sentimental me. (Oh, boo-hoo.) 

Makes me want to go out and get a Party Size bag of Cape Cod Originals. (And while I'm in a pro local mood, a quart of Brigham's Mocha Almond ice cream. I'll hold off on the Table Talk Pie until I get to Worcester for a Woo Sox game.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Cape Cod Chips. 

RIP, Circle Furniture

I was a big fan of Circle Furniture, a small local chain selling interesting, well-designed, decently made, and not crazily expensive furniture and home decor.

I have pine-green painted dresser in the den that holds my sweaters. 

During the pandemic, I spent entirely too much time keeping company with my 1920's vintage mahogany dining room set and chairs. I had never polished the chairs, and if you leaned back in one of them, you were apt to break the struts. I was just plain sick of the whole thing. So I masked up and headed to Circle to get a new cherry dining room table and some cool chairs that don't fracture when you lean back in them. I love my table and chairs, which actually go pretty well with the mahogany credenza that was the only piece of my prior set I kept. (A friend of mine has a niece who lives in a 1920's home and is also a furniture refinisher. She and her husband were delighted to take my vintage furniture off my hands.)

When Trump was elected in 2016, I realized that I was going to need a comfy chair for TV watching, so I walked over to Circle the Sunday after the election and ended up spending about twice as much as I planned on for a really comfy chair. 

There may also be an arm chair in my living room that came from Circle, but I'm not entirely sure.

One thing I loved about Circle was that it was family owned and operated. When I went in to buy the table and chairs, I met with the daughter of the owners. She was great to talk to and, it turned out, we'd both gone to business school at Sloan (MIT). 

But Circle was sold a few years back to a couple who apparently didn't know what they were doing. And they managed to overexpand and run the company into the ground. 

A company-wide email sent [on December 19th] told employees that all stores were closed until further notice. Then, on Tuesday morning, employees received an email confirming they’re being laid off. (Source: Boston Globe)

The Bah Humbug layoff date? December 23rd. But, hey, good news: your health benefits would stay in place until December 31st. 

All the Circle stores are closed, all the employees are gone, but it's not clear what's happening to those who'd ordered from Circle prior to the closing. Have they been treated as callously as the employees were? Are they getting their deliveries? Their deposits back?

Thankfully, my sister Trish is not one of them. She bought a gorgeous new couch from Circle last year and has fortunately had it in her possession for a few months now. Phew!

What I found most astonishing about Circle's layoffs, its precipitous closing, was that the company's president, Jonathan Boyle, didn't know anything about it. 

“They were having some financial difficulties they were trying to resolve and work around, but that’s all I know,” he said. “It’s not a great situaion."

Bizarrely:

Despite his executive role, Boyle said he was not privy to much of the company’s finances, which were handled mostly by the accounting team and the company’s owners. The decision to shut down operations did not come from him, he said.

Boyle has been working at Circle for nearly 40 years. He came up through the ranks, and was the lead operations guy, a job he was reportedly quite good at. But a company president who doesn't have access to the financials? Huh???

The holidays are the worst time of year to lose your job, and I wish all those who got a pink slip the best of luck. Good luck to those with outstanding orders, too. 

I also feel bad for the former owners - Richard Tubman, his wife Peggy Burns, his brother Harold Tubman. Circle was their family business, and had been around for more than 70 years. They were second-gen owners and operators, but the next gen - including Jessica Tubman, the Sloanie I met during the pandemic - didn't want to keep on keeping on there. So they sold the business. 

Peggy Burns, one of the company’s previous co-owners, left Circle Furniture about two years after the sale, but has kept close relationships with employees since.

“It’s our legacy, and we’re so ashamed of it,” she said. “This was devastating. I’ve reached out to people I know and we’re trying to help in any way we can … Who wants to tell people you don’t have a job a week before Christmas?”

You're so right, Peggy. Too bad the folks you sold to got so far in over their heads, and ended up doing something that comes off as supremely heartless. 

And RIP, Circle Furniture. Not in the market for furniture at the mo, but if I were, I would have gone shopping at Circle. 

Laid Off

I've been laid off three times.

None of them were classic "here's your pink slip" layoffs, but still...

In retrospect, the first time I was laid off, I was actually fired. I was the VP of Marketing for a small company. (Did we even have 100 people?) We weren't hitting our numbers, and we were going to let ten or twelve people go. I'd been with this outfit, through many ups and downs, for about ten years, weathering many lay-offs, but this was the one I was most deeply involved with.

The company's president and I were discussing how we were going to position the lay-offs to the survivors, and got into a pretty heated argument about it. It ended with me telling him, "You say what you're going to say. I'll say what I'm going to say. We'll see who they believe." Well, one look at his face and I

realized I was a goner. Sure enough, I had made my way onto the list. But I was prepared. Within hours of our meeting - after trying to reach him by phone (he'd fled after our convo) to confirm my suspicion - I'd gotten confirmation that I'd made the list. This was a Friday. On Sunday, I came in and cleared out my desk. I walked in on Monday and just told my now former boss that I'd just come in so he could get rid of me in person.

Turns out it was actually a good thing for my career and for me personally, but at the time I was pretty much in shock.

I'd been there a long time, and invested a lot of myself in trying to help that goofy little company make it. I was hurt and bereft for a good long time, even though I had a very good package and a ton of support, including from the much larger company which had recently acquired Goofy Inc. (Within a week after I got my pink slip, they sent me down to their user group to meet their marketing team to see if there was any opportunity there. There wasn't, but it still felt good.)

For lay-off Number Two, I had volunteered for separation. It was a large company that was having quarterly layoffs on its way to bankruptcy. There were rumors that the coming layoff was the last one where the packages would be any good. I'd had it and wanted out. The problem was that I had just been one of the chosen mid-level managers who'd taken part in a ridiculous week-long offsite at Babson College, where we took skinnied down business classes and tried to figure out how to save the company. Trouble was, no one who'd participated in this event was allowed on the layoff list. Well, I went to every more senior personage I knew and asked them to help me get on this list. The night before the big layoff, my boss told me I'd succeeded. 

I came in the next day to a bloodbath, but there were so many heads rolling, my boss didn't want to bother rolling mine. I finally figured out how to surrender my laptop and Palm Pilot and grab my severance package (as promised, pretty good!), but it was sort of weird laying myself off. (Fired? I quit!) My biggest memory of the day is seeing all those (including a handful who'd been part of my group, some my direct reports) carrying their boxes out in tears, and saying my goodbyes to them. That and the fact that someone stole the Palm Pilot off my desk before I'd had the chance to turn it in.

The third time, the company I was working for was undergoing a pitched battle between the short guys in senior management and the tall guys in senior management. My boss was part of the tall guys, and they were about to lose. They were about to sail him out the door, but wanted to get rid of his pet direct reports first. The three of us knew we were going, but weren't sure of the timing. Anyway, on layoff day, the three of us were on instant messaging when I (working from home) texted the group "Incoming from Andover." I was getting the call. A few minutes after I was canned, my friend Sean texted "Ditto." Followed by John. 

I worked at HQ, but Sean and John were elsewhere. (The company was an agglommeration of multiple quasi-related small tech companies located throughout the country.)

As it turned out, both Sean and John had non-refundable flights into HQ the following week, so we decided that our last act in office would be to invite everyone we worked with to a going away party the next week. After all, they were all going to be in town for the offsite we were no longer invited to, so why not? The party was a blast, and two of the still-standing tall guy execs picked up the tab.

By this point in my career, I'd had it with corporate and had long planned to start freelancing (which soon I was doing with Sean and John, as it turned out). So I was more than happy to get the hell out of that place, even though the package was crap.

I worked with Sean and John for a few years, and then we went our separate days, but I had a pretty successful freelance business doing marketing writing for tech companies for many years. (I finally retired last December, once I hit 75.)

A few times when I was freelancing, I was let go - quasi-laid off - by a company where I'd been getting regular work for years. It was mostly due to a change in management and/or budget contraction. But oddly, I found it more wounding than when I'd really been laid off. 

Anyway, even when I was happy to lose full-time or freelance work, there is something unsettling about being without work.

There's the worry about money, of course. Will I ever work again? There's the loss companionship, the loss of purpose. Self doubt can creep in. Is it me? (Nah!) Why me? (Why not?)

My career was in high tech, and I know precious few people who weren't laid off at some point or another. It just came with the territory. 

For all of them - including myself - it all worked out for the better. Seriously, if you're working for a place where they're having layoffs, you're generally better off moving on. (Even if the next place is going to eventually have layoffs as well.) The tension of working in a place with repeated layoffs - and in my experiene, layoffs are seldom one-offs - can be agonizing. Better off gone!

Anyway, I hadn't thought about layoffs in a while, but then I saw an article about a young woman who decided to build a community of layoff-ees. 

Melanie Ehrenkranz, 35, started [her newsletter] Laid Off last August, about a year after she lost her job at a financial technology company that has since closed. After being laid off, she said, “I didn’t really feel like I had access to a community or to stories of layoffs outside of a group chat with two of my former colleagues.” By the time she introduced the newsletter, Ms. Ehrenkranz, who lives in Los Angeles, had started working for Business Class, an online entrepreneurship course created by the “#Girlboss” author Sophia Amoruso, where Ms. Ehrenkranz is still employed. (Source: NY Times)

She now has 9,000 subscribers, and provides a forum for those who've lost their jobs. 

Good for you, Melanie Ehrenkranz! 

Back in the pre- early-social media days, I guess I created my own platform and started blogging with Pink Slip, often about layoffs. But it was mostly an outlet for me to write stuff every day, and I've stuck with it now for nearly 20 years because, well, I like to write stuff every day. 

Laid Off’s Q&A interviews touch on topics people sometimes avoid when talking about unemployment. Ms. Ehrenkranz’s go-to questions for subjects include “What were the reasons given for your layoff?” and “What was the first thing you did after getting laid off?” She said the newsletter’s tone was meant to be edgy and fun; a tagline on its website reads: “The coolest place on the internet to talk about being laid off.”

Maybe I'll head over there at some point and see what they have to say. For old time(r)'s sake. 

-------------------------------------------------

Image source:  Mondo

Who's that again in the next cubicle?

I'm all in favor of work from home (WFH), with an ultra-strong preference for a hybrid model - either 3 days in, 2 days WFH, or 2 WFH, 3 days in the office. A hybrid model gives employees some breathing room: no commute, throw a load of wash in, catch up with the kiddos after school and catch up on the work after the kiddos are down for the night. And having time in the office also gives employees the opportunity to get to know their colleagues, to have impromptu meetings where problems are solved and ideas brainstormed, to read the room in a way you just plain can't on Zoom, to have genuine human contact in an increasingly isolated world. Time in the office also makes it a lot easier to onboard new employees. 

So Hybrid WFH, yay! Best of both worlds. BIG YAY!

The downside of full WFH is, of course, the opposite of the above. 

And, apparently, the empty offices that accompany WFH may be a matter of life and death.

As happened in August when a Wells Fargo employee had  "scanned into her office on a Friday morning and was found dead at her desk four days later."

According to local outlets, authorities said 60-year-old Denise Prudhomme entered her Wells Fargo office building located on the 1100 block of West Washington Street in Tempe, Arizona, at 7am on 16 August. (Source: The Guardian)

Prudhomme's body was discovered when a fellow employee who was just strolling around the building noticed something amiss in her cubicle, which was in a somewhat isolated space off the main aisle. Other employees had smelled a noxious odor, but chalked it up to bad plumbing. Oh.

Obviously, this can't all be laid at the door of WFH. 

Sure, Prudhomme was in the office on a Friday, a day on which many WFH-ers WFH. And her body wasn't found until the end of the workday on Monday, another popular WFH day. But maybe her job was one in which she didn't interact regularly with others, virtually or in person. Or maybe she died late in the workday on that Friday, after her virtual meetings were over. And who was going to discover her body over the weekend? I'm guessing that one thing that WFH has done is radically decrease the amount of time folks spend coming into the office on weekends. 

And it looks like she may have lived alone, given that no one reported her missing. Even my often-oblivious husband would have noticed if I didn't make it home from work on a Friday evening. So, if she lived at home and didn't have any plans for the weekend - which I entirely get: when I worked full time, I had plenty of weekends where I craved my "white space"; introverts be like that - no one would have noticed that she wasn't around

Still, hard not to believe that, in a full(er) office, someone would have passed by Denise Prudhomme's cubicle and noticed that something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe even saved her life. As of this writing, the cause of her death wasn't known. Foul play is not suspected. But maybe she choked on something, and someone in the next cubicle might have known the Heimlich maneuver. Maybe she had a heart attack, and could have been CPR'd back to life if someone nearby had heard her head hit the desk. 

People do die at work. When I worked at Wang Labs, we had layoffs all the time. And in the run up to one of the worst layoffs - in early Octobe one year, they'd announced that there'd be a major reduction by December 1st, and damned if they didn't wait until December 1st - a fellow who, as it turned out, was on the pink slip list, had a heart attack and died. 

But the people who worked in the cubes surrounding his knew what had happened. They just weren't able to save his life.

Anyway, hard not to read about Denise Prudhomme and think that, if there'd been more people around, she may not still be alive. But her final story wouldn't be worldwide, tsk tsk news. And fodder for bloggers. Sigh.

Patagonia - one way to force the issue

If I were asked to imagine the work culture at Patagonia, I'd say it was outdoors-y (duh!), crunchy-granola, do-goody, and young. And very conscious of and committed to their workplace culture. 

But even the most crunchy-granola, do-goody companies sometimes have to have lay-offs. And Patagonia recently had to thin the ranks and pinkslip one-third of their customer service reps. During the pandemic, when we were all stuck in doors except for the times when we were all out experiencing the great outdoors on our own or with our pods, Patagonia had hired a lot of CSR's to staff their CX (Customer Experience) department - to the tune that they were "running 200-300% overstaffed for much of the year." I don't know how "200-300% overstaffing" gets resolved by getting rid of one-third of the workers, but layoff math does tend to get a bit squirrelly.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Patagonia informed 90 of their CSR's (CXR's) that they had a choice: they could relocate to live closer to one of Patagonia's seven hub cities or accept a severance package. 

All 90 of the pinkslipped are remote. But so are the 160 or so other CSR's/CXR's who didn't get the heave-ho offer. The other guys just happen to live within 60 miles of, and in the same state as, a hub city. (The hubs are Reno, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Pittsburgh or Atlanta. None curiously, in California, where Patagonia HQ is located.)

Amazingly, for a do-goody, crunchy-granola company, Patagonia is as sucky at layoffs as almost every other company in the whole wide world, as demonstrated by the way the pinkslips were delivered.

On layoff Tuesday:

...the affected workers had their customers service calls shut down and were told to join a video conference “town hall” meeting with management.

"For the half an hour between when they turned the phones off and when they had the meeting, it was super anxious," the customer service employee said. "Nobody knew what was going to happen. They never do anything like this, an unscheduled meeting." (Source: Ventura County Star)

Oh, there are suckier ways - mass emails or texts, anyone? - but turning off systems access is right up there. (I once worked for a company that, a couple of days before a big layoff, edited the company contact list and put a "Z" before the names of everyone scheduled for the RIF. It didn't take long for someone to figure out that all you had to do was scroll to the bottom of the employee roster and see if your name had a "Z" in front of it all of a sudden.)

The reasoning behind locating closer to a hub was the importance of in-person culture. But the reps near the hub cities will still be allowed to work remotely, except for one in-person day per month.

“What we learned, with all of these employees being fully remote, is that our culture and some of the things that we really hold dear in our culture were suffering, because people weren’t together,” [spokesperson Corley Kenna] said.

The hope is that the remote reps will flock into the hub to:

..."participate in community events, film screenings, yoga, group runs, everything we offer at our locations,” Kenna said. “We’re Patagonia, so we love to encourage people to get outside together and engage with the community.” 

But, but, but...how does coming into your local hub once a month save the held-dear culture from suffering? Why couldn't a worker remoter-than 60 miles get into the hub for "in person connection" once a month and stay put in their home. (Employees at the California home office are expected to work in-person three days a week.)

I'm guessing that even though the reps will only be required to come in one day a month, they'll see the handwriting on the rock-climbing wall and realize that they better get their quarter-zip selves into the office a lot more than that for the group fun-fests.

The kicker here was that the impacted employees were given just three days to make the should I stay or should I go decision. Three days!

During the meeting, everyone listened in disbelief, according to the customer service employee who spoke with The Star. Having just three days to decide whether to move to Reno, Pittsburgh or any of the other cities was particularly upsetting, the employee said.

"It’s a huge decision to make if you're going to uproot your life and go to another city, and you're supposed to decide that in two or three days?" the employee said.

No surprise that most of the 90 CSR's/CXR's are taking the severance package. (Three days!!!) 

The package is reasonably good - a minimum of 13 weeks, 2 weeks per year for those who've been with Patagonia more than 6.5 years - and includes a year's work of medical insurance. So there's that.

And don't get me wrong. I'm a believer in workplace culture, and I think a strong, positive culture is best achieved when employees are all under one roof at least a couple of days a week. I like the hybrid model that many companies now have in place, with a couple of days working from home (eliminating commuting stress and giving employees more flex for running errands, etc.) and the rest in person.

It's just that Patagonia's way of forcing the issue strikes me as strange. Between the three-day take-it-or-leave it offer, and the only one day in person, I just don't get it. Not for a do-goody, crunchy granola company like Patagonia.

National Geo news makes me kind of sad

I grew up in a magazine-subscribing household.

At one point or another, we got the following kids' mags: Jack & Jill, Calling All Girls, Boys' Life, Seventeen. I'm sure there were a few others. (We got to read Highlights at our dentist's office.)

Non-kids magazines were also plentiful: Newsweek, Look, Readers Digest, Catholic Digest. Sports Illustrated. Sporting News, Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Family Circle. My father got the monthlies from the VFW and American Legion (even though he thought the American Legion was fascist-adjacent.) In addition to Catholic Digest, there were a couple of Catholic mags in the mix. And at some point when I was in high school, we started getting the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, thanks to my sister Kath. (We got to read the pulpy Argosy at Vic the (Blind) Barber's, where Kath and I got our bangs trim, and where my brothers - accompanied by me and/or Kath until they got big enough to go it alone - got their "basic boys" cuts.)

I read every magazine that appeared in our mailbox, even the VFW and Legion rags. 

What else came our way?

Why, National Geographic, of course. 

And for someone who'd never been been anywhere other than Worcester, Boston, Chicago, and the Cape, National Geographic was a revelation.

While I read pretty much every word in the other magazines, I don't remember actually reading National Geo. But I loved flipping through the pages and doing some far-flung armchair traveling.

With the exception of the New Yorker and the Atlantic - to which I still subscribe - I haven't read any of the above in years. Probably since my mother died in 2001, when I would have had access to the Digests, Readers and Catholic, and - of course - National Geographic. 

Despite the fact that I haven't read National Geo in ages, I still felt a bit of melancholy when I read that they'd "laid off all of their remaining staff writers."

The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine’s small audio department. (Source: Washington Post)

Even before they were clued in last April, I don't imagine this was a surprise to any/many of them. Since 21st Century Fox took control in 2015, there have been thee other layoffs, and a major reorg/deorg. (Disney stepped in in 2019.)

In the light-speed world of digital media, National Geographic has remained an almost artisanal product — a monthly magazine whose photos, graphics and articles were sometimes the result of months of research and reporting.

Forty years ago, when people still read magazines, National Geo had 12 million subscribers in the US, plus millions of international readers. Today, the "artisanal product" has fewer than 1.8 million subscribers. And as of next year, if you're not a subscriber but have a hankering to read a copy, you're out of luck. They won't be sold in newsstands. 

Still, given the collapse of the magazine market, National Geo "remains among the most widely read magazines in America."

But we've become a nation of watchers, not readers, and National Geographic's bread and butter is its cable and animal channels. 

While they produced documentaries equal in quality to the magazine’s rigorous reporting, the channels — managed by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox — also aired pseudoscientific entertainment programming about UFOs and reality series like “Sharks vs. Tunas” at odds with the society’s original high-minded vision.

That high-minded vision dates back to its first issue in 1888.

The magazine has stated that it's still committed to publishing a monthly magazine. They'll just be doing it with freelancers.

I don't know exactly why, but this makes me feel kind of sad.

And the Worst Execution of a Layoff Award goes to - ta-da - Google

Having lived (and/or died) through many layoffs during my long career in the notoriously layoff-happy tech sector, I can fully appreciate it that there's no easy/pleasant way to hand someone a pink slip. 

My full-time corporate career was largely in the physical world. While work from home was technically possible during much of the time I was working in corporate, it was a rarity. Over time, of course, as technology evolved, and employees were kitted out with laptops, as conferencing systems became a thing, and as everyone acquired a mobile phone, working from home became more common. But it was still largely special occasional.

So if you were going to be laid off, it was going to be in person. And mostly, you were going to hear the news, in person, from an actual human being. Some combination of your manager and an HR rep.

This wasn't always the case. I had a colleague who worked for a small company that took this route: on lay-off day, all the employees were handed a color-coded card. Those who'd been issued a pink card were ushered into a conference room and told they were being let go. The lucky blue card holders went back to work.

And sometimes the "in person" thang didn't work out. 

I worked with someone who was in the NICU with his newbie son - a life and death situation to see whether the little guy was going to make it - when he received a call from his boss, who laid him off. When boss got off the phone, he walked out of his office, smiled, and said 'I really enjoyed that.' (This guy was an amazingly mean-spirited and god-awful person. One of the biggest assholes I ever worked with.)

But as the workplace - along with every other aspect of our lives - has increasingly digitized and gone virtual, so did layoffs. 

Employees now learn via text or email that they no longer have a job. Sometimes, people found out when they were locked out of corporate accounts (including email). Nice!

Personally, I think that this is pretty crappy. Call me old fashioned, but whether in person, or via phone, or via zoom, there should be a live person at the other end of the message - even if that live someone isn't the person who can explain all the details (severance, next steps, picking up personal items...). 

But email is apparently becoming an "it method" to get a mass notification about a mass layoff out.

But Google (at least in NYC, which is where this story came out of) managed to screw up the email approach.

In the wee-hours of the morning, they sent an email to all those being laid off. The email had a shelf life of three hours. If you didn't catch it in time, you found that you no longer had access to your account when you tried to log in. 

But if you were and employee who came into the office in person, and the sort of odd-ball who DOESN'T check email before you head into work, here's how you found out:

You swiped your badge to get through the door. Green, you're in. Red, you're no longer a Google employee.

How crushing. How demoralizing. How humiliating. 

Seriously, I don't care how many thousands of people are getting let go. Most managers don't have that many direct reports. Anyone who's a manager can make a call. By all means, tightly script what they can say. But, if you're a manager, you need to be able to have a difficult conversation with someone in your group. If you can't, or won't, well, you're not qualified to have people reporting to you.

And no, it's not fun or easy. Unless you're the sado who enjoyed laying off the guy keeping watch in the NICU, it's really hard. Toss and turn time. (Been there, done that.)

I understand that Alphabet/Google had to cut its workforce. Or at least felt they did.

They'd been on a hiring spree and, as the company's chief exec, Sundar Pichai said in an employee email:

“We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” (Source: NY Times)

The good news is that, even if - with all the recent tech layoffs - bouncing into a new job may not be easy, the layoff package is decent. 

Alphabet said that United States employees would receive a severance package that includes 16 weeks of salary, plus two weeks of extra pay for every year they worked at Google. Laid off workers will receive six months of paid health care. Compensation for workers outside the United States will be determined by local labor laws, the company said. 

What's not decent is letting someone show up at the office and finding that their badge has been disabled.

The year is still young, but so far they get my Worst Execution of a Layoff Award.

---------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to my sister Trish, who pointed out the deactivated badge story to me.

Twitter's death spiral? I gotta say it will free up some of my time.

I'm not a big Tweeter, but I do have a Twitter account and comment pretty regularly. I joined a while back, but didn't actually suit up until the 2000 election or thereabouts. I've enjoyed being on it. Among other things, I reconnected with two former colleagues and a guy I went to grammar school with and haven't laid eyes on in over 50 years. And I've made a few Twitter friends.

I have a modest number of followers - hovering between 865 and 870 - and enjoy seeing what those who I follow (a bit over 1,000) have to say. I have some name brand followers - Nancy Sinatra, Joyce Carol Oates - and follow a lot more "big name" tweeters (e.g., historian Michael Beschloss, Barack Obama. I follow a lot of political pundits (amateur and professional), a guy who takes beautiful photographs of the outer Cape, a couple of cute dog accounts, and someone who posts  pictures of Boston

On occasion, I've racked up a goodly number of "likes" - my record being a crack I made about Bill Barr. I was also banned - sent to "Twitmo" for a couple of days when someone reported another crack I'd made about Bill Barr. (For the life of me, I can't remember which crack got the thousand+ likes and which got me kicked off.)

Mostly, I thumb through Twitter multiple times a day looking for news, for comfort from those in my echo-chamber, and for snark that gives me an occasional laugh.

I waste way too much time on Twitter. (It is addictive.) So I've been following with a slightly open eye (mostly via Tweets) what's been going on with not-so-boy, not-so-wonder Elon Musk since he took the company over a few weeks ago. Which has been going one long cra spree, that's for sure.

For all his reputation for genius, it really does appear that Musk doesn't know what he's doing, other than flushing billions down the toilet and making stupid remarks.

It was no surprise that one of his first acts was to fire the top executives and the board, giving himself free rein. His next step was to lay about half of Twitter's 7500 employees off. Fell swoop, full sweep. (Twitter, having figured out that they were essential to operations, has since called back some of those who were let go.) He followed up the massive dump of employees by going one step further, and getting rid of most of the company's contractors. 

Employees and contractors for the most part found out they were without a job when they were shut out of email and apps like Slack.

This sounds heartless, that's because it is - but there's always a danger, especially in a tech company, that if you give any notice, someone may crash and burn the place on the way out the door.

Not content with getting rid of half the labor force, Musk decided to issue a back to the office edict, and is requiring any employee who wants to stay an employee to sign a pledge to "working long hours at high intensity." If they don't sign by 5 p.m. today, they're gone. Only the "hardcore" will survive.

Musk is also showing off his puerile, a-hole-ishness in other ways.

One employee, a techie, engaged with Musk via Twitter, trying to explain to Musk that he was wrong about something technical and suggesting that they DM about it, rather than publicly go back and forth on Twitter. He was fired, although if you looked at his exchange with the Great Musk, it was a pretty typical, likely on-the-spectrum communication with lots of info and few niceties.

Then there was the group of employees who were venting spleen about execs/Musk on Slack. This sort of venting has apparently always been part of the Twitter culture. No more. Word is that twenty or so employees were fired, via email, for violating a company policy that no one knew existed. And which very well may not. Until the other day.

Ah, Twitter. Ah, Musk.

While it has had profitable years, Twitter has a colossal burn rate, so the layoffs have not been surprising (other than the magnitude), nor have the rumors of bankruptcy.

When he bought Twitter - for $44B (imagine that!) - Musk "saddled" the company with debt AND promised that he was committed to both making/keeping the platform a free speech environment, while also trying to continue to eradicate hate speech and lies. He's held up at least some of his bargain here: he hasn't invited Trump back on. But the reaction to Musk's blundering around has mostly been negative. And the ration of brutal snark and shit he's received (much of it from Tweeps) has been huge.

I'm pretty certain there was plenty of bloat at Twitter, plenty of fat to cut, but Musk got rid of most of the "content moderators" who are dedicated to keeping the platform honest. The company has also fiddled around with its "Blue Check" system, through which accounts with certain prominence can be verified. So if you see Barack Obama with a blue check, you know that the tweet you're looking at is from him.  Now it's the Wild West on there. The information is less vetted and less safe. And some of what's been happening is ludicrous, and just hilarious. (More on that for another day.)

Musk is also toying with the idea of charging users. (If so, I'm gone. I have fun on Twitter, but not $8 a month worth of it.) And there are fears that the company will try to monetize its subscribers in other ways, like selling personal info.

Meanwhile, because of the uptick in impersonations, BS, and general clownery, many advertisers are walking away, leaving Twitter in an ever-more vicarious position.

While I'm keeping a bit of an eye on the goings on, I'm not obsessing about Twitter's fate.

I feel bad for those who've been let go, whether permanent employees or contractors. Getting laid off is never fun, and getting laid off around the holidays makes things even worse, as many hiring operations pretty much shut down after Thanksgiving. Plus other tech giants are also paring down, which means the outfits where a Twitter-ex might hope to find employment are also cutting back.

Still, having Twitter on your resume can't be a bad thing. Although if content moderators are out of work, and Facebook/Meta is also getting rid of tons of employees, the most obvious place to find work may not be all that obvious.

When all is said and done, if this is Twitter's death spiral, so be it. Others on Twitter - especially those with major followings who use their presence to build their brand (not my jam!) - are exploring the other Tweet-like platforms there.

I'm not. 

If Twitter's going, going, gone, I plan on taking a break from doom scrolling, from making pithy comments, from checking my "likes."

I plan on using my new found time wisely. Reading (something longer than 280 characters) and writing (something longer than 280 characters). Maybe the novel in me will finally make its way out!

Out with the olds?

I'm not sure if I'd count in any statistics - I probably average only about 5 hours paid work each week - but the thing is that a lot more people over the age of 70 are still working than there used to be. 

Part of this is thanks to better health, part to economic need, part to just wanting to stay in the game.

With the little I make, I couldn't support myself. But it's still nice to have, plus I like having something to do beyond making a day's event out of going to the drugstore for a new toothbrush. Yes, volunteering does make up for some of the 'nice to have something to do' thang, but my work - freelance marketing writing about technology-based products and services - is interesting, I'm good at it, and it's gratifying to get paid (well enough) for doing something I majorly enjoy.

And I'm exceedingly grateful that I was able to get out of full-time corporate marketing work while the gittin' was good. I.e., when I was in my early 50's. When I left corporate - and for a long time after - I was still working at a more-or-less full-time clip. Only it was doing freelance work: flexible and more under my control. (Easier to fire a client than walk away from a good full-time job.) And it sure made it easier to wind things down as my desire to work all that hard began to wane. I was able to preserve some income and (more important) relationships and connections rather than go cold turkey. 

Nowadays, for all we hear about the labor shortage and the demand for workers at all ages, we also hear an awful lot about folks in the 50's and 60's getting pushed out of their work before they're ready, willing, or able to hang it up. And one of the sectors where this is most apparent is the tech industry, which is where I've spent my career.

What's just happened to a bunch of gray-hairs at IBM is a good example.

Remember Lotus?

If you were in the corporate world in the 1980's, you sure do.

Oh, there were spreadsheets before Lotus 1-2-3 (VisiCalc, MultiPlan). And here was even a very good one right after 1-2-3 (Javelin). But none of them took off the way Lotus did. 

By the mid-1980's, if your work had anything to do in any way, shape, or form with numbers, you were using Lotus 1-2-3.

And then, somewhere in the 1990's, once Microsoft Windows had become the de facto operating system and app suite for corporate, and graphical user interfaces displaced boring old green/black screen DOS-based apps, we weren't using Lotus anymore. We were using Excel. 

(Haven't thought about it in years, but over the course of my career, I had a lot of peripheral involvement in the spreadsheet wars. This included working for a company that had done a deal with Microsoft to acquire a kabillion licenses for their clunker of a spreadsheet - that would be MultiPlan - just before Lotus took off; and working for a company that tried to do some sort of deal with Javelin to integrate it with that product I was managing. I loved Javelin, which "understood" time series data. And I seem to remember interviewing for a job I didn't get at Trellix Software - whatever they did - with Dan Bricklin, who was the inventor of VisiCalc, the very first spreadsheet. Ah, it's all coming back to me. Can't remember why Trellix didn't hire me. Their loss. Oh, and one time I sat near Lotus founder Mitch Kapor on the Eastern Shuttle to NYC. He was a Sloan School drop out, but I don't think we overlapped there.)

So what's this got to do with IBM laying off a bunch of little old gray-haired/gray-beard workers?

In the mid-1990's, IBM acquired Lotus.

Fast forward a couple of decades and change, and:

Dozens of former Massachusetts employees, many of them Lotus veterans, are among more than 1,000 laid-off workers nationally who have charged IBM with forcing out older staffers over the past decade as part of a strategy to build a younger workforce. All of the employees were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s when they lost their jobs. IBM has been fighting the charges for over two years, saying they have no merit.

Taken together, the allegations — filed both in federal court and with hundreds of private arbitrators — amount to one of the largest age discrimination cases in US history. At a time of heightened attention to racial and gender issues, the ex-IBMers are spotlighting what they say is another pervasive, though often hidden, bias in corporate America. (Source: Boston Globe)

While this is not my "lived experience," there is not one scintilla - or is it an iota? - of doubt in my mind that there is rampant age bias out there in corporate land.  

The stories of the plaintiffs are sad. They were in their late 50's, their early 60's, when IBM lowered the boom on their long careers with the company, some dating back to the Lotus days. They liked their work. They were good at it. They felt blindsided and betrayed when they got pink slipped, often right after a glowing review. 

And now they're trying to get class action status for their complaint. This won't be all that eaasy. Thanks to a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, "employers have been able to effectively channel many age discrimination complaints to private arbitration hearings where the proceedings and outcomes are invisible to the public."

But attorneys are trying to make the invisible visible, and make public IBM internal communications about youth-ifying their workforce - while letting 20,000 employees go (most over the age of 40).

Some IBM documents already in the public realm called on managers to focus on “healthy attrition targets” in 2016 and “early professional hires” in 2020, while moving aggressively to “correct [the] seniority mix” among employees in some business areas. The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act, passed in 1967, prohibits employers from treating workers age 40 and over differently from younger staffers in hiring, promotion, and discharge.

"Correct [the] seniority mix." Hmmm. Smells like Teen Spirit to me.

The aggrieved ex-IBMers are (mostly) trying to find work. But it's hard because they are - of course! - meeting with age discrimination. 

There are plenty of things that companies could do instead of just summarily jettisoning their older employees.

Create new roles that include tasks like mentoring and internal consulting. Make some jobs for old geezers part time. Old geezers get to keep their jobs, newbies (future old geezers) get to step into better positions. Oldies who need more income than a part time job yields can spend their days off working. (Sadly, that may mean driving for Uber or bagging groceries at Trader Joe's.)

If picking up the higher health care costs associated with an aging workforce are such a turnoff, maybe the government can lower the age for Medicare eligibility to 60 and let companies opt into paying into that for their olds. 

Older workers can manage their expectations - and the expectations of potential employers - by settling for lower pay, but greater flexibility. Pitch the potential employer on the benefits of mentoring, internal consulting, etc. 

I find myself offering plenty of career advice - and suggestions for coping with the every day job crap -  to the younger folks I work with at my client companies. Sometimes I'm not even aware I'm doing it until someone thanks me for being a sounding board, helping them think things through, resolve an issue with their manager, get that promotion, find that new job. And I often end up doing plenty of free consulting, too. Sure, they're paying me for writing, but it comes with plenty of free marketing and/or organizational advice. Okay, I don't charge for this stuff, but there are companies who would find it plenty valuable and useful. And would pay for it. 

Just because you don't know how to make a Tik-Tok doesn't mean you have nothing to offer!

Anyway, I hope the ex-IBM olds prevail. 

There's just got to be a better way to manage career arcs so that they extend from 20 something to 70 something. 

If there's a labor shortage out there - for positions beyond home health care aide and Walmart shelf-stocker - let's get on creating more reasonable and just professional career paths. 

For the record, I do think there's a time for the old folks to step aside. Take politics. Pat Leahy. Chuck Grassley. Diane Feinstein. Step aside, please. Make way for the younger brigade. Especially at the top. 

Out with the olds throughout the ranks of corporate America? NEVER!

Better.com's CEO: giving real fake authenticity a bad name

Well, I just spent an hour+ writing an overlong post about what a putz Better.com's CEO Vishal Garg is. 

And then, puff, just as I was about to hit the Publish button, it disappeared on me.

Good thing I have nothing better to do with my time.

Oh, wait a minute, I actually do. So my brilliant, funny, overlong post which, as is so often the case with Pink Slip, included bits about my own brilliant career, will not be replicated in anywhere near full. 

Instead, I'll just focus on Vishal Garg and what a putz he is.

If you're scratching our head trying to figure out who Vishal Garg is, he's the founder and CEO of Better.com, a digital mortgage lender that took off during the pandemic, adding 7,000 employees.

Well, 900 of those employees have now been laid off. This despite the fact that Better.com just got a cash infusion of $750M, has $1B in cash, and was declared by Fortune to be a unicorn. 

I know, I know, business can be nasty and brutish, and careers can be short. And sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. Like laying off 900 employees a couple of weeks before Christmas.

This lay-off made the news because it was conducted, en masse, over Zoom. Everyone invited to the meeting was pink slipped (virtually, metaphorically).

When announcing the meeting, Garg mentioned that, when he'd done lay-offs in the past, he'd cried, but that this time he was going to hold it together.

I cried. Awwww.

I'm guessing this revelation of his vulnerability was either suggested by someone in HR, hoping it would give Garg some aura of authenticity - authenticity being all the rage amont today's leaders - and/or that Garg had just speed-read a two-minute article from the Harvard Business Review on authenticity (and how to fake it).

I'm all for authenticity. But when someone is being laid off, they really don't give a hoot about your feelings. What they care about are their feelings. Spare them your pain, please.

After the Zoomerama lay-off, Garg addressed the remaining employees, speaking out with a bit of a forked tongue. On the one hand, he lamented that he hadn't done the lay-offs three months earlier. On the other hand, having gotten plenty of blowback over his method and message, he apologized for not being sufficiently appreciative of the contributions and respectful of the feelings of the pink slippers.

Ah, man's quest for authenticity.

Garg might have been able to pull it off if it didn't slip out that he had been shit-posting anonymously on a networking site called Blind, complaining that at least 250 of those who'd been let go were dishonest slackers who'd only been working 2 hours a day, and, thus, stealing from customers, investors, colleagues, and - I guess - Vishal Garg. (Garg was outed for his posting, but has confirmed that it was, indeed, him.)

Truly, what in God's name is a CEO doing trashtalking about his employees - even if they are now ex-employees - on an anonymous site?

This is where the employees should be grousing, not the head guys. 

Of course, leaders have feelings that they want to express, too. Authentic ones.

Still, if more than one-quarter of the laid-off employees were only putting in two-hour days, that's a management problem, pal-ly, that Vishal Garg's managers should have been addressing. Maybe he should have been reading a five-minute take from HBR on Management 101, rather than brushing up on his personal authenticity. 

In the wake of all this, three of Better's top executives (in communications, PR, marketing) have quit over the way everything's been handled. (Garg has a pre-lay-off reputation as a bully who demeans employees, so I'm guessing his authentic self is the trash-talker.) 

Like all good unicorns, Better is planning an IPO, which was likely the main impetus for the lay-off.

Meanwhile, Vishal Garg is giving real fake authenticity a bad name.

If you can't be best, Mr. Garg, at least next time try to be better. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you to my cousin Ellen for sending this one my way. As for the cites I'm usually so meticulous about, they went 'poof' with the post, and I have better things to do than try to refind them. Just google Zoom lay-off and/or Vishal Garg and I'm quite certain you'll uncover all sorts of source material!

Shoes Blues

Perhaps it's because I Was a Teenage Shoe Factory Worker, but I've always had a warm spot in my heart for those who work in what's left of the New England shoe industry. There used to be a lot of shoes and boots made here. Converse (think Chucks). Bass (Weejuns). Timberland. LL Bean. Frye. New Balance. 

The factory I worked in that one summer, H.H. Brown, made work and combat boots. We made chartreuse leather boots with red topstitching for nuclear plants. The thinking was that no one would accidentally wear such outrageously colored boots home from work. This was in 1967. In a few years, chartreuse boots with red topstitching wouldn't have gotten a second glance.

We also made paratrooper boots for the Vietnamese Air Force. They were way tinier than the combat boots we made for the U.S. Army.

I think the old H.H. Brown factory is now condos. (I will note that any number of old factories, churches, and schools in these parts have been turned into condos. Not that I'm moving any time soon, but I've always got a partial eye on a couple of converted Catholic churches, one in the South End (way pricey) one in South Boston (more affordable).)

As for keeping my eye on the shoes I buy, I'm not obsessive about it, to say the least, but I do like to purchase goods that are made in the U.S. (preferably by union workers, but that's another story). Unfortunately, most shoe manufacture takes place overseas. Still, many brands produce a USA-made line or two.

Averaging 5+ miles a day on my walks, I go through a fair number of shoes a year. Make that sneakers, because 99% of the time, what's on my foot is a sneaker.

Given my sneaker thang, and given that I like to by American, I always have a pair or two of New Balance on hand. Sometimes they're even ones that are made locally.

I like New Balance because they're good and sturdy, providing a lot of support, and they come in narrow widths. The downside is that they're kind of boring in terms of the colors that are available, especially in narrow width. For my more colorful shoe needs, I prefer Asics. They no longer come in narrow width, but they run narrow and, given that they're a tie-shoe, narrowness is less of a big deal than it is in non-tie shoes. 

Alas, it was just announced that New Balance will be closing its factory in the Brighton section of Boston. Sixty-three folks will be losing their jobs there. Before the holidays is a really awful time to get the word, but at least they'll have work until February. 

Chief executive Joe Preston said he went to the Brighton plant, at the end of Newton Street above the Mass. Pike, to break the news to factory workers on Friday morning. The company, whose headquarters offices are less than two miles away from the plant, is also cutting fewer than 50 non-manufacturing jobs in the United States. Taken together, these job cuts represent 110 or so employees out of a global workforce of 7,700, including about 3,500 in this country. (Source: Boston Globe)

Well, first off, kudos to Joe Preston for making the announcement in person. There are altogether too many instances of the big mahoff sending a minion, even if the big mahoff is just around the corner. Worse are those who let the workers know when they see it in the news, or - even worse - on social media. So I give Joe Preston credit for stepping up here.

The good news is that New Balance is adding up to 150 manufacturing jobs at other New England locations, including a new factory in Methuen Mass, which will be opening up in mid-2021. 

The displaced Brighton workers are encouraged to apply to these new positions. Preston said shifting work to Methuen from Boston puts it closer to its manufacturing plant in Lawrence, where the company also does research and development. In total, New Balance employs about 900 manufacturing workers today among the Lawrence and Brighton plants and its three factories in Maine.

Being able to work in Methuen is great and all, but it puts the workers on unemployment for half a year, and - if they lived close to the plant in Brighton - also sticks them with a 40+ mile commute.

But a job's a job, and there aren't a ton of them if you're a shoe factory worker. A shoe factory worker in America, at any rate. 

New Balance remains unusual in the industry because of its emphasis on US manufacturing, although the majority of its shoes continue to be made in Asia.

“At the core of it, the commitment of the company to domestic manufacturing is as strong as ever,” Preston said. “That may not seem like it today, but that’s an absolute fact.”

I'll take Preston's word for it. The next pair of sneakers I buy will be from New Balance, even if they are boring black or boring white. Promise. 

Doing business on great waters

Last week, a commercial t Guard were alerted the something had gone agley, but by the time they got to the site, all that was left of the Emmy Rose was a bit of debris and an empty life raft. They believe the distress signal went off automatically, and that whatever happened to the Emmy Rose, the four fishermen on her crew likely went down with her pretty quickly. The men were all out of Portland, Maine. All experienced. The weather was foul, but the boat was considered sturdy. The last anyone heard from the crew, the men were doing some emergency welding and the boat was taking on water.

Just another reminder how dangerous things are for "the men who go down to the sea in ships, that do business on great waters." Brave men, they.

As if things weren't tough enough for fishermen this year, what with the restaurant business they rely on to buy their catch so distressed. 

I know that the commercial fishermen on the Cape have been making the best of it, selling their catch directly to consumers. My Cape relatives have been enjoying the availability of dayboat fish. It doesn't get much fresher than buying fish on the pier shortly after it arrives. 

Harder, of course, for the oystermen.

One thing to cook your own swordfish or halibut if you can't get it in a restaurant. Quite another thing to shuck your own oysters.

Not that it's impossible. 

My brother-in-law has become a master shucker. Good thing, given that their good friends and neighbors have a "civilian" oystering license and are always bringing oysters over.

But mostly oysters are a restaurant thing, and there's nothing like slurping down a salty, tasty little oyster. (Just don't let yourself think about the fact that they're likely alive when they start their fateful journey down your gullet.) 

I'm also quite partial to fried oysters, and to oyster stew, but raw oysters down the hatch are the very best.

Oysters aren't to everyone's liking, of course, but I like them just fine. And am thankful to that "brave man who first ate an oyster." I'm with Jonathan Swift. That "brave (w0)man" would probably not have been me.

So here I am, hundreds of years later, enjoying oysters. 

In restaurants. 

My favorite restaurant on the Cape is Winslow Tavern in Wellfleet. It's just not the summer until I've dined at Winslow. This year, it was takeout a couple of times. I'm hoping that by sometime next summer it will be possible to sit out under the trees on the Winslow's front lawn. And I'm hoping they still have Oyster Happy Hour, where you can sample all sorts of different preparations of local oysters. 

While Winslow stayed open this year, eat out and take out, the restaurant biz on the Cape wasn't great. 

The pandemic has hurt many businesses since March, but it has been particularly painful for the oyster industry. Unlike other seafood harvesters that have managed to sustain their businesses through the pandemic by selling to supermarkets, large institutions, and in some cases directly to consumers, nearly all oysters are sold at restaurants.

“Everybody is suffering through this,” said [Bruce] Silverbrand, who grows 450,000 oysters a year. “We’re trying our best to limp through this and come out on the other side. Some of us will make it; some of us won’t.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Overall oyster sales in Massachusetts are down 50% from last year. Not. Good. 

This isn't a huge industry. It doesn't have thousands of employees. But the oystermen harvest 48 million oysters each year in Massachusetts. And they're hurting. The larger operations have had layoffs. The smaller ones are just hoping to survive some how.

There is a glimmer of good news. 

As a reprieve for struggling growers, the Nature Conservancy and the Pew Charitable Trusts this fall began buying 5 million surplus oysters to help restore oyster reefs, about 85 percent of which have disappeared as a result of overharvesting of the shellfish, disease, and pollution. Oyster reefs are mounds of dead and living mollusks that are considered crucial for providing habitat to other species and improving water quality.

The environmental advocacy groups plan to spend about $2 million on the oysters, spreading their purchases among about 100 shellfish companies in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and Washington state. They plan to use the oysters to rebuild 27 acres of reefs at 20 restoration sites.

But it's not, of course, enough.

Oyster harvesters don't face the same dangers as fishermen going down to the sea in ships. They're not out there in the middle of the ocean trying to weld a tear in their hull shut while 20 foot high waves wash over them. Still, it's a tough way to make a living, and the pandemic is just making it tougher.

Here's hoping that for those doing business on great waters, by next summer, things will break their way. 

Sad news at Disney

Maybe it's because I didn't have kids, but I'm not the world's foremost Disney fan. 

Of course, when I was a kid things were different. 

The first movie I saw in a theater was Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in Three Ring Circus at the Park Theater in Worcester's Webster Square. My father took my sister Kath and me, and I found it HI-larious. 

Not that I went to the movies all that often, but after that, I'd say that, until I was in junior-high, three-quarters of the movies I went to see were Disney.

Cinderella. A re-release of Fantasia. Alice in Wonderland. I remember getting on the bus with my sister Kath and our friends to go "down city" to see Darby O'Gill and the Little People." Ditto for The Parent Trap. ("Let's get together, yeah, yeah, yeah.") I loved The Shaggy Dog, The Absent Minded Professor. Lady and the Tramp. Disney movie, real people or cartoon? Bring it on!

And then there was Disney on television.

Did I ever miss an episode of The Mickey Mouse Club, which ran Monday through Friday, late afternoon? Answer: not if I could help it - even if I did prefer Donald Duck to the smarmy Mickey. If someone queued up the tunes, I'm pretty sure I could perfectly sing along with the intro: "Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E". The special theme song for each day of the week ("Today is Tuesday, you know what that means, we're gonna have a special guest"). And the weepy, dirge-like farewell. ("M-I-C - see you real soon now - K-E-Y - why? because we like you!").

I had a big fat crush on Cubby O'Brien. And, although he wasn't a Mouseketeer, I had a bigger and fatter crush on Tim Considine, who played Spin on Spin and Marty, a serial about a boys ranch camp that ran on the show. (A couple of years ago, I watched one of the episodes. Yowza. The weird pedo undertones of this show were quite unnerving.)

Naturally, I admired and envied Annette Funicello, and even saw her in person once. Heavily made up and wearing a full-length leopard-skin coat, she made an appearance in the Stop & Shop parking lot. I was a bit taken a back. Sure, she was an older girl - 14 to my 7 at the time - but she was way too grown up.

Still, I lived and died by the Annette series, when dowdy poor country-girl orphan - and, let's face it, who didn't want to be an orphan at some point in their young life? - comes to live with her rich aunt (Lila) and uncle (Archie) in the big city. I can still remember how furious I was when Annette was accused by the mean-girl played by Roberta Shore of stealing a necklace. (The word "insinuating" was used in one exchange. Word power!)

I didn't have a lot of Disney gear, but one Christmas I was given a plastic Mickey Mouse Club wallet. To keep what in, I have no idea. If I had any money, it was small change, not bills.

On Sunday evenings, our family watched whatever the incarnation of the Walt Disney Show was. So I saw Davey Crockett, Johnny Tremain, Swamp Fox, and all the other serials that ran on that show. I vividly recall how I felt when Johnny Tremain's hand was burnt by molten silver. (Johnny Tremain was especially dear to me, because the author of that book, Esther Forbes, was from Worcester.)

And, of course, I lusted after Disneyland.

I finally made it when I was 22, about 14 years too late to really make me happy, but I did enjoy the experience, however weird it was. 

I went again in my mid-thirties with my sister Trish. 

And I still think the the whirling teacups, the flying Dumbo, and Mister Toad's Wild Ride are a lot of fun.

But I don't really keep up with 'what's new' from Disney, other than the background noise you can't escape. Lion King...Mulan...Little Mermaid. 

I've never been to Disneyworld in Florida, other than attending a business conference in a related hotel years ago.

Still, I'm saddened to see that the pandemic is taking its toll on the not-so-wonderful-world of Walt Disney.

A couple of days ago, Disney announced a major RIF.

Disney is laying off 28,000 US employees at its theme parks as the coronavirus pandemic hammers its theme park business.

The layoffs will hit the company's Parks, Experiences and Products, the company said on Tuesday. Disney added that 67% of the employees laid off will be part-time workers. (Source: CNN)

Part-time, full-time. Doesn't matter all that much. That many people losing their jobs is just dreadful. So much for the happiest place on earth. But, of course, inevitable, given the times.

One of my favorite Disney cartoon characters - other than Dopey of the seven dwarves - has always been Jiminy Cricket. There's just something about him (it?) that, as a kid, I found comforting. So for all those laid off Disney workers, here's Jiminy:

                    When you wish upon a star
                    Makes no difference who your are
                    Anything your hearts desire
                    Will come to you.

Do I absolutely believe this? Well, no. But, hey, anything's worth a try. Take a deep breath. Get those résumés updated. And head outside and grab a star to wish on. Can't hurt.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Happy Birthday to my sister, and fellow child Disney watcher, Kathleen!