Professional Gambler

I’m not much of a gambler. The handful of times I’ve been in a casino, it’s ten bucks worth of quarters in the slots and out. The few times I’ve gone to the track, it’s two-dollar bets based on the name of the horse or the color of the jockey’s silks. When I throw in with the NCAA basketball ladder at the gym, I do my pairwise picks based on whatever comes into my head: city preference, mascot. And for old time’s sake, I tend to bet on the Catholic schools. (Not such a bad strategy, given Georgetown, Villanova, and a couple of others.)

I play for the entertainment, with absolutely no expectation of winning.

The last place I figure I’ll ever end up is at a Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting.

But there is the lottery, which – despite my eyes-open understanding of the odds – I do play with semi-regularity.

As with other forms of gambling, I don’t really expect to win. (I do get the odds.) But I like the period between dollar purchase of a Power Ball quick pick, and the moment – typically a month or so later – when I bother to look up the winning number and realize that I don’t hold it. During that period, I get to play a mental game of Lady Bountiful, imagining just what I’d do with the loot if I did win. (Forget for a second that every hard luck story in the world would be standing on my doorstep, hat in hand. I was talking to the guy I usually buy my lottery tickets from, and he told me that a friend of his won a relatively modest amount – maybe a million or so – and he was overwhelmed with requests (mostly from complete strangers) for “help.” What must it be like to win the Big One?)

But like dropping those ten bucks worth of quarters on the slots, playing the lottery is entertainment.

For some folks, however, it’s apparently a way to make a living.

One such person is Clarance Jones:

Over the past decade, the 73-year-old from Lynn has redeemed more than 10,000 tickets from the state lottery - more than any other person - worth a total of more than $18 million. (Source: Boston.com)

Hmmmm. I estimate that over the same period, I’ve had a lottery take that’s closer to $18 – if that.

I must be doing something wrong.

And that something, apparently, is that I don’t approach gambling as a professional would.

The case of Clarance Jones has come to light because the state was going after him for taxes on his lottery winnings. They suspect that Jones is what is known a “10 per center” – i.e., someone who will cash in the lottery winnings of others so that they can avoid paying alimony, child support and other debts. The “10 per center” skims his portion off of the top.

By the way:

It is not illegal to cash in someone else’s winning ticket, but it is illegal to do so to help them evade taxes or other legal obligations.

I guess that this is a business like those ones I’ve seen advertised that offer to pay someone for the future proceeds of an insurance settlement that they haven’t yet received. (It’s YOUR money….)

In any case, the state was not able to prove that Jones is a tax-evading 10 per center, and, in fact, couldn’t prove that Jones was anything other than what he said he was, a professional gambler whose losses conveniently offset his wins, eliminating any tax liability on his part. The state failed, the court rules, to make the case they might have been able to make if they’d been willing to slog through the storage facility full of receipts, enumerating his losses, that Jones has kept. The state doesn’t believe those losses will add up, but hasn’t opened the cartons of losing scratch tickets etc. – some two hundred boxes - to prove their case.

Odds are that the state is right. Probabilistically speaking, Jones would have had to spend millions upon millions to end up with the $2.2 million worth of prizes he claimed last year. Baby needs a new pair of shoes, indeed.

For his part, Jones has claimed to spend between 60 to 80 hours betting each week. (Yikes!) And his lawyer suggests that Jones has a “formula”:

…including buying scratch tickets in the middle of a pack and visiting stores where patrons recently racked up wins, on the hunch that those outlets likely had other winning tickets to sell.

Formula? I’d like to see the proof behind this bit of “wisdom.” Sounds kind of lucky sock-ish to me.

Jones lives modestly, not large, in a small apartment in Lynn, which, while it does have some nice sections, is hardly the Gold Coast. Apparently, whether you’re a professional gambler, a 10 per center, or an out and out huckster, there may be better ways to make a living.

Filene’s Basement’s may be closing, but Bob Slate’s back in business

It’s been dragging on for a while, but now it’s official: that sound we’ve been hearing out of Filene’s Basement for the past however many years has been its death rattle. One more Store of My Youth, come January, will be gone, baby, gone.

Even while it was still situated where it properly belonged, in the basement of the Filene’s building, I hadn’t done much shopping there in years. And I suspect I won’t be doing any more. It’s just too depressing to participate in the store-closing death watch, which I’ve done over the past few years with Filene’s (the mother ship), Borders (yes, some of us do lament the passing of mega-chains), and Copley Flair.

And I won’t be writing an elegy to Filene’s Basement, either. Been there, done that. (Twice in fact.)

No, I won’t be missing Filene’s Basement. I’ll be missing the idea of Filene’s Basement. I’ll be missing something that, at one point in time, was distinct about the local shopping milieu. And I’ll be missing the girl who shopped The B so hopefully, for, oh, so many years.

Another local institution has bitten the retail dust as well. Last week, Daddy’s Junky Music shuttered its stores.

I never bought a darned thing at Daddy’s, but I’ll still miss something that was part of the local color for nearly 40 years. Musicians, I assume, will miss it mightily.

One thing that’s gotten them down is that so many folks come in to try out, say, a half-dozen guitars, spending time with salespeople and tapping their expertise. And then, before leaving the store, order the guitar-of-their-dreams online using their smartphone – finding it cheaper.

This practice, which plagues retailers like music stores and opticians (another one that comes to mind), strikes me as a bit unconscionable. I don’t suppose it actually bothers anyone’s conscience, as it’s the way the so much commerce is conducted these days. All that matters is me, personally, getting the best price. No matter that I’m sucking up the time of a store clerk, taking advantage of someone’s investment in bricks and mortar, and then buying elsewhere – from someone who doesn’t have to incur the costs of the clerk’s salary or the bricks and mortar. It seems to me that the shopping online trade-off is (and should be) that you might have to go back and forth a couple of times before the shoe fits. If you want to try it on for size, you should go to a real – not virtual – shoe store, metaphorically speaking, and do your trying and your buying there.  Maybe the bricks and mortar folks can figure out a way to charge those who have no interest in buying from them. We’ll help you pick out your new Gibson or your cool new specs, but we’ll charge you for it, with the charge waived if you buy from them. Good luck with this, of course, but it’s a thought…

This too shall pass, but I’m just as glad that the majority of my life’s worth of shopping is behind me.

Meanwhile, on a positive note, Bob Slate Stationer, which opened for business in the throes of The Great Depression, and which closed last spring, has re-opened. This is a wonderful, old-timey stationery store that had a couple of Harvard Square locations, as well as one in Cambridge’s Porter Square. When I worked near Harvard Square, I popped into Bob Slate’s quite often.

It was there that I purchased a beautiful plum leather Filofax, when Filofax was the ne plus ultra of personal organizers. That was back in the pre-Palm Pilot days, let alone the age of the smartphone.

You used your Filofax for your address book, to keep your calendar, and to take notes. Each year, you replaced the calendar “guts”, but you kept the swanky leather binder forever.

I loved Bob Slate in the way that I always love stationery stores – even Staples, where I’m happy as a clam wandering around picking up pens, colored Post-Its, yellow pads, and thumb drives. No matter that I already have dozens of pens, Post-Its in every color in the rainbow (pastel and bold), stacks of yellow pads (small and large) still in their cellophane wrapping, and enough thumb drives to back up the Library of Congress. I do so love me a stationery store – second only to a bookstore on my must-have retail list. I.e., the stores I’ll still be shopping ‘til I’m dropping.

The other day, I stopped in a the new Bob Slate, located on Brattle Street in what I’m pretty sure was the site of the late and much lamented Wordsworth Bookstore – another marvelous indie bookseller that’s now out of business. (Honestly, I did not start shopping at Border’s while Wordsworth was still alive. Instead, I’d troop over the Harvard Square and hit Wordsworth and Harvard Book Store, yet another great indie – and still going strong. I note that, like Bob Slate, Harvard Book Store opened its doors in 1932, demonstrating that not even the most dire of economic times can keep the life of the mind and the written word down. So here’s hoping.)

Anyway, the new Bob Slate is still in stocking-up mode and hasn’t had their official grand opening as yet. But I was able to buy a couple of calendars, some wrapping paper, and a baby card. And I was just thrilled to be there.

On the same trip, I also managed a quick look in at the Harvard Book Store.

I keep meaning to stop buying books and go to the library, but I did need to buy a couple of baby books to go with that baby card. And while I was poking around, I remembered that I wanted to read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. And then there was the Best American Short Stories for 2011 staring me right in the face.

What’s a reader to do but make a couple of purchases?

Farewell, Filene’s Basement. So long, Daddy’s Junky Music. Fight fiercely, Harvard Book Store.

And – smiley face time – welcome back Bob Slate.

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What’s not to like about a stationer named Slate? Even better than a surgeon named Klutz.

Margin Call

Given that the cast includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and Stanley Tucci, there was almost no way I wasn’t going to enjoy Margin Call. I just didn’t realize just how much I was going to enjoy it.

The movie starts out with what is a familiar scene to anyone who worked in high-tech, as well, of course, as those who’ve labored in financial services. Even when it’s extras being paid Actors Equity no-lines minimum getting tapped on the shoulder and frog-marched out of the office with their carton of personal items, it’s still gut-wrenching.  Stanley Tucci’s character, shown the door (and having his phone instantaneously turned off) after 19 years with “MBS” (More Bull Shit?), exemplifies the pain and anger that lay-offs engender.  Never more so than in times of high unemployment and major economic uncertainty; never more so than when you’re getting older; never more so than when you’ve just bought a new house; etc., etc.

But the movie isn’t really about lay-offs. It’s about the machinations of a financial services industry that helped create a bubble that would put Don Ho and Lawrence Welk to shame.

Movies about financial maneuverings can be tricky business, as you need to simplify and dramatize something that’s intricate, complex, and a bit esoteric.  CDO’s, anyone? It will be a lot easier to do the Bernie Madoff story: everyone understands a Ponzi Scheme. Except, apparently, Ruth Madoff who confessed to Morley Safer that she hadn’t known what one was. Her son Andrew had to explain it to her.

But, Margin Call, does, I think do a good job of explaining how the whole thing works, without getting in the way of a good story.

Without giving away the story, Stanley Tucci’s character was a risk manager for an investment banking firm. On his way out the door, he slips a thumb drive containing his research to a junior colleague. The junior colleague completes the model and realizes – unholy moley – that the firm is way in over its head with the junk it’s holding, and could well go under.

This precipitates an all-nighter on the part of the senior execs as they decide what to do, what to do.

I liked Too Big to Fail, the reality-based HBO film about engineering the bailout that “saved” capitalism, but I think that Margin Call does a better job of explaining to the non-insider but relatively aware viewer just how we got waist deep in the Big Muddy.  Gordon Gekko aside, greed is not necessarily good, but it sure does seem to be the way the world works.

Speaking of Gordon Gekko, I saw Wall Street when I was working at Wang. One afternoon, during that lull week between Christmas and New Year, I tromped over to the nearest theater with a bunch of colleagues to watch a movie that had the product we worked on as an extra.  For whatever reason, Wang had acquired the Shark system – near real-time stock market data – from Walsh Greenwood, and was running it on its mini-computers so that research analysts and portfolio managers could have access to information that, heretofore, was only available to brokers and traders. Shark – including the inflatable sharks that were the product giveaways, and product documentation – were pretty prominent in the background in a couple of the Wall Street trader scenes. We felt famous!

Ah, those quaint olden days, before you could turn on your TV and watch a real-time ticker run across the bottom, while some analyst or another makes us crazy about what’s happening in the market. Or just get a real-time quote on your smartphone.

I think life for us amateurs was actually easier when you had to look up where a stock closed in the financial pages of the morning paper.

But the Shark team at Wang, in our tiny and modest way, helped usher in the democratization of market data.

Naturally, Wang didn’t capitalize on the advantage we had with Shark in the portfolio management world.

The year after Wall Street came out, I was part of the vertical strategy team that was going to save Wang.

I was on the financial services team, and my tiny and modest suggestion was that we focus on the portfolio and money management markets, as we actually had a toe-hold in those communities to build on. A couple of the top portfolio management systems actually ran on the Wang minis. (Am I dating myself here, or what.)

But, alas, this market was too small to be of interest.

Why go after a $10M market you can own, when there’s a $100M market that you can’t even get a piece of?

Anyway, Wang’s not taking my brilliant suggestion had perhaps one iota over nada to do with Wang’s epic fail. Maybe those mini-computers with the 9” floppies had something to do with it. Not to mention Dr. Wang’s management style. (As I recall, he had to okay the type of paper that data sheets were printed on. An EVP had to okay your travel, and they waited until 5 p.m. the evening before to approve your trip.) Still, our vertical “strategy” spoke to at least a piece of the company’s mentality.

The next Christmas season, the Shark gang went to see Working Girl, still one of my favorite business movies. Gimme a working class hero (or heroine) any old day. Who says class warfare’s bad for the soul?

By the next holiday season, I had a foot out the door, and a lot of the folks on the Shark team had more than a foot out. They’d been tossed out on their ears in early December as part of one of the worst lay-offs I’ve ever experienced. It was, in fact, the lay-off that eerily came to mind when I saw the opening lay-off scene in Margin Call.  The tap on the shoulder, the partially sympathetic but mostly brusque meeting with HR, the pathetic march to the elevator with that carton of personal effects. (We didn’t use security guards, as they did in the movie. We had human/humane buddies to help people out the door. I was one of the buddies in the great December of ‘89 Wang blood bath.)

But the look on the faces of those getting laid off – even if they’re paid actors – is always the same.

Why me? What next? Why me?

Boy, am I ever happy to be out of that fray.

Meanwhile, I give Margin Call two thumbs up. Loved Stanley Tucci. Loved Kevin Spacey as the sad and weary head of trading. Loved Jeremy Irons as the head guy. (Named John Tuld, in a presumed nod to Lehman Brother’s Dick Fuld. James Woods played Dick Fuld in Too Big to Fail, so Fuld is getting better looking.) I even enjoyed Demi Moore in her minor role as the head of risk management. She was far less wooden than I usually find her performances.

So if you’re in the market for a good movie, you could do worse than put Margin Call on your shopping list. And the best news is: you don’t have to go to the theater. At least on Comcast, it’s on demand. (No wonder I can go years between toe steps into a movie theater…)

What’s a girl to do?

Technology is our friend. Until it becomes our unrelenting, implacable foe.

As it became last week when, in the course of 24 hours, my BlackBerry quasi-punked out on me and my e-mail was hacked. (Sorry about those ED ads, folks.)

The spammed-out e-mail will be resolved: password change, deletion or online contacts, and – if those “if it lasts more than 4 hours” messages keep going out, I’ll switch to another e-mail address.

But my BlackBerry…

I know, I know. Electronic devices tend to cough it up and die on or about their second anniversary, which I will hit with my BB in a couple weeks. Or at least mine do: my last four laptops all became nags headed for the glue factory as they approached the critical two year mark. And now it looks like my BlackBerry, trusted if not cherished companion of the past two years, is going the same route.

What is it?

Do they sense that they’ve been so technically outstripped that they become despondent and just give up?

My BlackBerry – despite being in what the Verizon tech calls “excellent condition” – doesn’t quite hold its battery life the way it used to.

Worse, the microphone no longer works, so I can only make calls using a headset or speakerphone.

Not that using the headset’s such a big deal – for calls over 30-seconds I tend to use it that way, anyway.

Still, I don’t want to have to fumble around with the earpiece every time I get a call. And I so do not want to want to walk around with a Bluetooth device clipped on my ear. No thanks. (Assuming it would work, anyway.)

I am not quite ready to make my move, but I am at the crossroads: stick with the BlackBerry herd, or follow one of the other herds to the iPhone or an Android device. The cattle are lowing… Decisions, decisions.

From all I’ve read, I’m your classic BlackBerry-er: my smartphone is my office on the go, and I use it primarily for e-mails and the phone. Yes, I text. Yes, I browse. But mostly I check my mail and make phone calls. But here’s the catch. I have a Storm, which has the touchscreen, rather than the QWERTY keyboard that the business BlackBerry pickers love. (When I went to get my first smartphone, that QWERTY keyboard reminded me of a 1940 Remington typewriter. I know, you can write the Great American Novel on either that 1940 Remington or a BlackBerry with QWERTY. But as – alas – I’m not about to do it one either, I just went with the moderne touchscreen.)

So, if I want to stick with my BlackBerry, it looks like the Torch is about to be passed my way. On the very plus side, it’s cheaper than the any of the alternatives I’ve looked at. And, since it’s a BlackBerry, it’s more or less a no-brainer, no?

But then there are my tech buddies, half of who seem to be Droid addicts, half of who seem to be Apple snobs.

Ah, the Droid… A dazzling array of brands to choose from. And 4G, so I can – what? – talk faster than I do already? And it’s not like I’m going to be downloading Gone with the Wind so I can watch it on a 3” screen. (Fiddle-dee-dee.)

Then there’s the iPhone, hallowed be Steve Jobs’ name.

I don’t really give a hoot about all those cool apps I’m missing out on. Angry Birds? Do I really need to add yet another pointless, mindless time-waster to my repertoire? I think not.

And do I wait a couple of weeks so that I can ask Siri questions when the 4S is available from Verizon?  Unlike the kid in the ad, I do not need to ask what a weasel looks like. So I don’t know if I’d be barking questions at it. But surely someone who has no problem yelling at voice recognition support systems – “Just put me through to a *@(#*&)*&!@*(*# human being” – will have no problem talking at my smartphone.

And while I’m on the subject of having Siri, are we really approaching the time when no one will have to know how to read or write? Or will this be like the 18th century, when only the elite – those few, those precious few, those 1-per centers – will be literate. For the rest of mankind, it’ll be the spoken word and the video, only.  So what happens if all this technology fails, on us, huh? Back to hieroglyphics and the Lascaux caves, I suppose. Maybe some cave dweller will recreate the alphabet.

Ah, well.

Sure was easier when the black, rotary dial phone came from Ma Bell and lasted a lifetime, wasn’t it?

Oh, what is a girl to do?

Something fishy going on here

A week or so ago, The Boston Globe did a searing exposé of the nasty little habit some local restaurants have fallen into when it comes to labeling the fish they serve. Some very big names have been embroiled in Fishgate.

Skipjack’s was caught palming off something called escolar as white tuna. Bad enough that escolar is cheaper and not as good as white tuna; eating it can actually make people sick. Not blowfish sick (as in dead), but sick enough that Japan doesn’t allow it to be served. (Escolar sometimes goes by the nickname ex-lax. Which you won’t be seeing on any menus real soon.) Chau Chow was serving up “nutritionally inferior” (and cheaper) catfish as flounder. And David Ortiz’ now closed Big Papi’s restaurant was one of many that served fake red snapper.

Even Bertucci’s – one of my stand-bys – was palming hake off as cod.

None of these restaurants stands alone:

Recent studies indicate that between 20 percent and 70 percent or more of snapper, cod, grouper, and wild salmon are mislabeled at restaurants and stores.

Some of the restaurants were innocent of any direct malfeasance. They’d been duped by their distributors. Which may have been duped by their wholesalers. Which may have been duped by the fishermen. Fish renaming can occur anywhere along the food supply chain. One place thought they were serving fresh fish because it came from the distributor thawed. Others couldn’t tell the difference between one white fish fillet and the other.

Once you fillet a fish, it can be very difficult to tell what it is, if not impossible,’’ said John Sackton, publisher of Seafoodnews.com, an online industry newsletter based in Lexington. “Even the best chefs can have difficulty.’’

The Globe used DNA testing to figure out what was what.

Of course, some of the restaurants may have been witting not-so-dupish dupes – much to the annoyance and anger of local fishermen:

“Mislabeling fish is at a ridiculous level,’’ said Eric Hesse, a Cape Cod commercial fisherman. “The dealers and restaurants have a vested interest in keeping the illusion going. Every time they can say they are selling fresh local fish and get away with selling [Pacific] frozen, they don’t have to buy from us. It kills us.’’

I haven’t had it in years, but one of my favorite fish used to be scrod. (Is it even on menus anymore? I don’t think I’ve seen it in a dog’s age. Make that a dog-fish’ age.) There is not, actually, a fish called scrod. Scrod was cod. Or haddock. Or pollock. Or whatever flaky white fish was around. But everyone pretty much knew that, when you ordered scrod, you got whatever.

Fish mislabeling, when the restaurants do it knowingly, is intended to keep costs down and prices high, and works under the apparently well-founded assumption that – wink-wink, nudge-nudge – diners won’t know the difference.

A couple of the restaurants caught in The Globe article net used the “every body’s doing it, doing it, doing it” excuse, and noted that it was the “industry standard” to mislabel fish. (Remind me to stay out of Skipjack’s.)

Some restaurants are changing their ways (or their menus or their distributors). Bertucci’s has put some new processes in place to keep it on the up and up. One restaurant has revised its menu to say “ocean perch” instead of “red snapper.” The chef-owner admitted that he started using perch when red snapper got scarce and pricey.

“The flavor is pretty good,’’ [restaurateur Nobel Garcia] said. “I have never received any complaints about it in the last couple of years.’’

Much of the problem stems from our reliance on imported fish, which, given overfishing of fishing grounds, like the ones off of the New England coast, has grown radically over the last several decades. Today, we import 86 percent of the fish we eat, with a lot of steps along the way for mistakes to be made and for fraud to occur. And, by the way, most of our fish comes frozen. So a lot of what you see on menus as “fresh day boat” fish was in reality more likely to be “fresh many weeks ago fish.”

But sometimes you do get real fresh day boat fish, mostly when you go to a fish market that’s in a town on the ocean that has or is near a harbor with honest to goodness fishing boats in it. There’s nothing like it. Delish!

One of the freshest and best fish dinners I ever had was in Ireland, at a small restaurant (located in the family B&B) in Cong, County Mayo. My husband and I were spending a couple of nights at the posh, stuffy, and pretentious Ashford Castle. After one night of posh, stuffy, and pretentious dining, we wandered into town to see how we’re fare there.  We stuck our heads into this one little restaurant, and while we were talking with the proprietor, her husband walked in with his waders on, and a brace of salmon slung over his shoulder. A few hours later, we supped on fresh salmon. Yummy yum yum. Too bad most salmon these days comes from fish farms (and gets mislabeled as “wild.”)

My favorite item in The Globe article involved Ming Tsai,

…celebrity chef and owner of Blue Ginger, said he understands the economic and environmental costs of mislabeling. But he said he used the name butterfish instead of sablefish simply because it sounds better.

“Butterfish rolls off the tongue,’’ said Tsai, who added that he thought the FDA allowed its use to describe sablefish in Massachusetts. It does not.

I admit, butterfish does sound awfully tasty. Far better than sable fish.Which sounds sort of furry, kind of rodent-y –not properties you’d want to associate with a fish.

But it sure does make Ming Tsai sound weasel-ly, doesn’t it?

Another use for a Band-Aid

God know I’ll probably change my tune about this when I’m an even older geezerette than I am now, and want to visit my doctor through the miracle of telemedicine, rather than creep over to MGH on slippery bricks after an ice storm. But for now, I am so not liking the invasion of the webcam, as chronicled in a recent Economist article.

They may not be able to do any body snatching quite yet, but online ads that can catch your eye and “read your mood” are coming,

…thanks to the power of image-processing software and the ubiquity of tiny cameras in computers and mobile devices.

That means that an ad that you’re looking at can decide just how interested you are, and start (virtually) following you around with companion ads, special offers, etc. (And I find the ads that seem to  pop up because of some search you’ve done were annoying. Can’t wait to see what’ll come from the Nazi memorabilia auction I stumbled across while looking for Graf Zeppelin ephemera. (Don’t ask. You’ll find out soon enough.) I do hope that nobody out there actually thinks I’d be interested in a Graf Zeppelin cigarette case that belonged to Herman Goring, or a swastika-engraved set of silverware that von Ribbentrop used. Seriously.)

Not all the uses of the new eyes-wide-open technology are soul-sucking advertising-related. In addition to health care, there are security, education, and other applications.

But admen are among the first to embrace the idea in earnest. That is because it helps answer, at least online, clients’ perennial carp: that they know half the money they spend on advertising is wasted, but they don’t know which half.

WWDDD?*

Today, this sort of ad-reaction emotion gauging is done in research settings, not in the natural, real-life world that’s just you, your computer, and its webcam. But it’s moving online.

Realeyes, which is in the UK, is one of the companies making this possible. Their technology is used to:

…gauge a person’s mood by plotting the position of facial features, such as eyebrows, mouth and nostrils, and employing clever algorithms to interpret changes in their alignment—as when eyebrows are raised in surprise, say. Add eye-movement tracking, hinting at which display ads were overlooked and which were studied for any period of time, and the approach offers precisely the sort of quantitative data brand managers yearn for.

Yes, and precisely the sort of information I really don’t want them to have.

I really, really, really don’t want anything to do with ads that interact with me. Let alone – and this is no doubt coming – ones that do a retinal scan, identify me, sort through data on every thing I’ve bought online from Peapod and L.L. Bean, every URL I’ve ever gone to, and decide that I’m the perfect candidate for a miniature harmonica or tax forgiveness. Let’s hope that those URLs are so diffuse and crazy that even the  most powerful data-crunching engine won’t be able to categorize someone who, in a five minute period, searched for SMEG refrigerator, Rick Perry dye job, bad Boston accents, and Graf Zeppelin ephemera. (By the way, that last one yielded an auction item listed as a “piece of Graf Zeppelin skin”. I do hope that is a piece of the Graf Zeppelin airship’s skin, and not a piece of the eponymous Graf Ferdinand Zeppelin’s skin. Ewwww.)

I find the idea of these sorts of “I know what you’re thinking” ads an incredible invasion of my privacy. Sure, we’re assured, you’ll have to give consent to Walmart and P&G using your webcam to have their way. But I say, hah, hah, to that. I’m sure when this all gets revved up it will be you’re having to opt out, with implied permission given by your having a webcam sitting idly by. When it could be put to a more productive use by spying on your reactions to ads.

All I can say is that Post-it notes have a habit of falling off, so this  presents a very good use for the common household Band-aid.

Here’s not looking at you, kid.

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*What would Don Draper do?

Job of the day: forensic entomologist

The other day, just in time for Halloween, Boston.com ran a feature on 10 Scary and Creepy Jobs.

Not all of the scary/creepy jobs were directly death related. But a few of them were.

Like road kill removal specialist, which I personally do not believe is an actual job title. I personally believe this task is actually carried out by a DPW guy with a shovel. Then again, road kill’s not all the big a deal in cities, if you factor out squashed rats, squirrels, and pigeons.

Cryonics technician is admittedly rare, but as long as there are folks like Ted Williams who just can’t seem to let go, there will no doubt be some demand for professionals who’ll turn your corpus into a popsicle so that when “the cure” is found, you can be reanimated. (Actually, Ted’s a bad example, because it’s just his head that’s frozen, I guess so that the somewhat taciturn Teddy Ballgame can come back as a Talking Head.)

Then there are forensic entomologists, folks who “look for clues in murder victims by investigating what lives inside cadavers -- maggots, flies, and other creepy crawlers that have taken hold since the person's death.”

Now here was a job I wanted to learn a tad bit more about. And fortunately, I could do so at Forensic-Entomology.com. There I learned that they don’t call them carrion beetles for nothing.

Forensic entomologists are commonly called upon to determine the postmortem interval or "time since death" in homicide investigations.  More specifically, the forensic entomologist estimates a portion of the postmortem interval based on the age of the insect present.  This entomological based estimation is most commonly called the "Time Since Colonization". 

They may also be able to unearth details about whether a body has been moved, based on whether the colonizing insects are shade lovers or sun worshipers, etc. Not to mention that they can extract human DNA from an insect that’s been supping at the human trough. The mosquito bite could turn out to more than an itchy welt – it just might place you a the quote unquote scene of the crime.

Forensic entomologists also help suss out “circumstances of abuse”. Who knew that some “parents intentionally use wasps and bees to sting their children as a form of punishment"? And, of course, abuse may mean that the victims are kept in squalor, attracting flies. While it wasn’t a case of abuse – other than self-abuse - I learned that this could occur the summer in college when I worked as an admitting clerk in the walk-in clinic at Worcester City Hospital. One day, a middle-aged woman came in with maggots infesting her head. It seems that she’d passed out drunk and whacked her head. When she finally made her way, more or less, out of her stupor, the flies had done their colonizing.

And did you know that bees and wasps are a major cause of single-occupant car crashes? You do now. (Pink Slip is such a font of eLearning, no?)

By the way, you don’t have to be board certified to be a card-carrying forensic entomologist. For $25, you can order a set of “Forensic Insect Field Identification Cards,” that can help investigators that lack specialized training pick up on crime scene clues they might otherwise miss.

By the way, those flecks of blood on the wall might not be blood spatter. They could very well be cockroach tracks.

If this has got you jones-ing for some CSI training, you’re in luck. There’s an Animal Crime Scene Workshop coming up at the University of Florida in a few weeks. For $375,

Students will get hands-on experience in the excavation of a gravesite and the exhumation of buried remains. Emphasis will be placed on the collection of associated physical evidence from the crime scene. The proper collection techniques will be demonstrated and students will be expected to implement those techniques throughout the excavation process.

Keep Calm. Carrion.

Happy Halloween!

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Since one thing inevitably leads to another, reading about forensic entomology quite naturally got me thinking about Barry and The Remains, a Boston rock band that was popular when I was in high school. What ever did we do before The Google? Sure, you could always – somewhere, somehow – “look it up.” But it’s highly unlikely that I would have been able to easily figure out that Barry of The Remains became Barry of Barry and Holly Tashian, the folk duo.

Come Thanksgiving, I’ll have to mosey around the ‘net and see if I can find out what happened to Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims…

“Students see red over T closures”? Oh, shut up, you boo-boo, baby whiners.

I picked up a copy of Metro Boston the other day. You know, the free and easy newspaper for those with limited time/limited attention span. Out of sympathy for the news vendor hunkered down at the station, I almost bought a Boston Globe for my train trip back to Boston from Salem. But then I said, nah, just pick up a free Metro, and you’ll be able to read every word in it (including the ads looking for medical research subjects), complete both the easy and hard Sudokus, plus get a catnap in during that 25 minute train ride.

The front page headline screamed, Students see red over T closures, and the inside pages further picked up the story: Closures on the Red Line: ‘Tufts’ luck for students.

It seems that the transit authority is going to be doing some weekend track repairs, November through March, which will require them to run buses between Harvard Square and Alewife Station on Saturdays and Sundays.

From the reaction of Tufts students – who live near Davis Square, one of the impacted stops -  you’d think they’d just learned that the Tran Siberian Railway was shutting down, and they were going to have to walk barefoot between Vladivostok and Lake Baikal.

“Shocked,” “frustrated”, “wicked annoying.”

Shocked? Shocked! Shocked,I’m shocked…

Up until they came to Tufts, it’s likely that 90% of these kids lived in suburbs with no public transportation whatsoever, and now they’re up in arms about having to take a shuttle bus to get from Davis Square to Harvard Square? (A distance, by the way, of all of two completely walkable miles.)

“That sucks,” said [name redacted to spare ninny further embarrassment], “I have friends [in the city], it’ll be almost impossible to get out there and see them.”

So true, [ninny with name redacted]. Getting into Boston from Medford if you have to take a shuttle bus for a couple of miles, rather than just hop on rapid transit, is nigh until impossible. Think scaling El Capitan blindfold.

Ah, yes, trapped on campus with no way out. Maybe you could just stay in Davis Square, where, last time I looked – which was in September – there was plenty to do. Maybe Mummy and Daddy can drive in every weekend and chauffer you to and fro. Maybe you can just stay home and txt your friends in faraway places.

[Ninny with name redacted] wasn’t the only Tufts Jumbo perturbed by the Red Line’s completely thoughtless and wretched decision to do this work on weekends, when it’s an inconvenience to students, vs. during the work week when it’s an inconvenience to people who work. (I was going to say ‘tax paying adults’ but that would sound just a tad too Tea Party-esque.)

There’s also a quote from [second ninny with name redacted].

While [second ninny with name redacted] will not let having to travel on a heinous shuttle bus keep him sequestered on the Tufts campus, he predicts that it will be “a huge pain.”

More ominously, he added:

“I can’t see this working out very well.”

I can see where you’re coming from, [second ninny with name redacted]. This temporary replacement of rapid transit with a shuttle bus does have all the hallmarks of a potential Hindenburg disaster, maybe even the Titanic. As I’ll find out for myself when I try to get to a play that I’m planning on seeing in Davis Square in December. Maybe I should leave now?

Anyway, I think that [ninny with name redacted] and [second ninny with name redacted] might be able to team up and have Mummy and Daddy come in every other week. It could be like the kindergarten car pool days. What fun!

At least [second ninny with name redacted] did indicate that he was willing to work through the “huge pain” and continue to make his way into Cambridge and Boston.

Unlike [third ninny with name redacted]:

“I doubt I’ll be taking public transportation anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to have to deal with crowded buses and traffic congestion. It’s too bad.”

Well, [third ninny with name redacted], I just want to point out to you that, on weekends, the subways can be very crowded, so the buses won’t be all that different. And there’s not a lot of traffic congestion between Davis and Harvard Squares on weekends, either. IMHO.

But if you want to punish public transportation by not taking it, well, knock yourself out!

To their credit, the Tufts student newspaper acknowledged that upgrading the tracks was not a bad thing, even though they decried that the announcement of the weekend T closures gave only two weeks notice. (Just how much advance notice does one need? Certainly, if you have a day or two in advance you can adjust your schedule so that you leave a few minutes early to account for the fact that the buses will go a bit slower, and take a bit more time, than the T would. Maybe Tufts kids these days are so tightly scheduled that we require this info months in advance. I see an iPhone app coming up…)

Meanwhile, assuming that they are able to come to closure with the closures, [ninny with name redacted], [second ninny with name redacted], and [third ninny with name redacted] will certainly have stories to tell their children and grandchildren. Tales of the Great Red Line Station Closures of The Winter of 2011-2112, when for five entire months they had to – get this – take a shuttle bus between Davis and Harvard Square.

Kids these days, I’m quite sure the ninnies will be telling their children and grandchildren, they have it so darned easy.

Oh, the humanity!

Awesome!

Every once in a while, I come across something that leads me to believe that humankind is going to survive the current malaise and meshugas.

That most recent something was an article I saw a couple of weeks back on The Boston Globe web site, when it was still free. (This content is no longer available unless you’re a subscriber. Sigh!)

The article was about a group of Cambridge twenty-somethings who, a couple of years ago, established the Awesome Foundation, which is committed to “forwarding the interest of Awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time.”

It’s not actually a foundation-foundation, like The Ford, or The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, or The Rockefeller. It’s not sitting on a big endowment, and passing out big checks. It doesn’t sponsor anything on NPR. What it does award is small amounts to help fund small ideas. Not so much a genius grant, as an ingenious grant.

It works like this: Ten trustees each kick in $100 a month, and together they review the submissions - the original chapter, now known as the Boston chapter, reviewed more than 130 for August - and the winner is given $1,000 for the project, with no strings attached.

As of this writing, they’re down to two awesome ideas for their latest grant, two finalists weeded out from 100+ submissions:

… a woman who wanted to buy a couple of goats to rent out as urban lawnmowers, and a sculptor who could “no longer make a case’’ for sculpture and instead wanted to buy a portable welder so he could go around and fix his city.

Goats are awesome, and all, but they do leave scat, however neat and pellet-y. So my vote goes to the guy who wants to weld his town. (And I do hope he doesn’t give up on his sculpting.)

Of course, my vote doesn’t count, because I’m not (yet) awesome.

Since the Cambridge/Boston chapter was founded in 2009, 22 other Awesome Foundation chapters have been formed throughout the US and Canada, as well as in Berlin, Hamburg, London, Zurich, Melbourne, and Sydney.

Grants are awarded ‘no strings’, and follow these rather loosey-goosey, yet awesome, guidelines:

Awesome projects are not strictly defined, but tend to challenge and expand our understanding of our individual and communal potentials. They bring communities together, casting aside social inhibitions and boundaries for a moment. They spark an instant of joy and delight and inspire a long-term hope for a more awesome future.

As I always say, some are born awesome, some achieve awesomeness, and some have awesomeness thrust upon ‘em.

Sure, I was born awesome – aren’t we all? But that was then and this is now.

What I wonder is whether it’s too late to achieve awesomeness or have it thrust upon me.

I don’t actually have any awesome ideas to offer.

But does anyone out there want to join forces, throw in a hundred bucks a month, and achieve us some awesomeness by throwing a bit of cash at some folks who do?  We could call it the getting old geezers chapter.

Awesome, no?

I HATE when that happens

Well, yesterday I managed to post not one, but two – count ‘em – two PinkSlip-pers, which is, quite honestly, one too many. This is true for my readers, I’m sure – only so much time over that morning coffee – but it’s also true for the writer. Especially when I am staring down more than a few writing projects that I’m actually being paid for. Unlike this labor of, ah, love.

Anyway, today’s post – which was really meant to be the one about cracking your teeth on nuts, which was erroneously released yesterday, right on top of the post on Dr Pepper’s hideous new marketing campaign – is going to be a pictorial celebration of the season.

Beacon Hill, where I live, is a lot of fun on Halloween.

There are quite a few people with small children in the neighborhood. The streets are dark and spookily lit with old fashioned (and just plain old-old) gas lamps. And lots of people get into the spirit by decorating their houses.

While walking down Mt. Vernon Street the other day, I passed a house that had these wonderful little sock monkeys in its windows.

Admittedly, these are a bit hard fully appreciate, but you will nonetheless get the picture, as I present to you, straight from my Blackberry to your eyeballs. I give you Sock Monkey 1, Sock Monkey 2, and Sock Monkey 3.

I so covet that Dracula…

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This post is dedicated to my sister Trish, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows her.

Some times you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t

Many years ago – if memory serves, and, mostly, it still does (kine-ahora) – the comedian Dick Gregory announced that he was a fruitarian, subsisting on fruit and nuts alone.

Now, much as I love fruit and nuts, I am not likely to go as far as fruitarianism. But it is quite easy for me to envision life as a vegetarian. Especially when I think about animal slaughter, chicken factories, and Mad Cow Disease. I am, more or less, something of a house-vegetarian, anyway. I eat meat when I go out, but seldom around that house.  There are definitely things I’d miss by going veggie: a hamburger, bacon, and chicken paprikash.

Fruit and nuts are definitely staples of my diet, however, and I always have some of both on hand. Sure those nuts are fattening – what isn’t? – but eating them feels healthy, wholesome, almost virtuous. They’re renewable. Don’t create green-house gases. And rounding them up doesn’t require the intervention of Temple Grandin. Nuts  - pistachios, walnuts, peanuts, almonds, cashews - are tasty and satisfying, and munching on them is a real treat. Especially almonds.

But now, alas, we are being warned off of them by the dental biz – or at least one dentist, Shrewsbury, Mass.’s Gerald Berenson, who has noted  “a  ‘mini epidemic’ of almond-driven problems.”

"I have been seeing and treating an unusual number of emergency patients a week due to fractured teeth, cracked teeth, very sensitive teeth as well as temporal mandibular disorders," he wrote in an email "After diagnosing each patient I have found a common denominator: ALMONDS." (Source: Boston.com.)

Well, I’m no stranger to cracked teeth, but I’ve never suffered from an almond-related incident. Make that ALMOND-related incident.

I did once crack a back tooth while chomping on a cashew. Naturally, it was the evening before the Fourth of July, when the Fourth gloriously fell on a Friday, giving everyone – including dentists – a long weekend. I spent the entire weekend on the edge of panic. I got one of those dental emergency kits, and fixed up some kind of wax tooth thing, but my tongue couldn’t resist prodding “it” all weekend. I couldn’t get to the dentist fast enough on Monday a.m.

Ah, baby’s first cap!

I was already the owner of chipped front teeth, but those chips had nothing to do with nut-eating. And everything to do with teeth-as-handy-dandy-all-purpose-tool.

While backpacking in Europe – I believe I was on a remote island in Greece – one of the wire coils that secured my backpack’s belt to the pack’s frame came uncoiled. I didn’t happen to have a pair of pliers on me, but I did have those handy-dandy front teeth available. I did manage to close the coil but, alas, not without chipping my front teeth.

Over the years, I managed to further the damage by my inability to resist using those chipped teeth to cut thread, nibble on cuticles, and unscrew bottle tops. None of which did my teeth any good.

Over the years, my dentist tried bonding, but the bonding never lasted all that long. Probably because I couldn’t resist using those teeth to cut thread, nibble on cuticles, and unscrew bottle tops. Underneath that bonding there was, apparently, a chipped tooth crying to get out.

The final straw came when, after being flooded out of our home by a burst pipe, my husband and I spent a month living in a hotel. While in the shower one morning, I couldn’t get that little bottle of shampoo opened. Fortunately, I had those teeth with me.

I got that bottle open, but not without chipping my teeth further than they’d been chipped in their whole entire little old lives. I looked like the sister of one of the Dead End Kids.

I got me to my dentist, where I confessed my foolish deed. He just laughed and told me that I was one of the few patients he had who ‘fessed up to how they’d chipped their teeth. Most of them, apparently, claimed that they didn’t know, never knew, couldn’t remember.

My chipped teeth getting chippier, I elected to bite the bullet – metaphorically, anyway – and get dental veneers. Eight thousand dollars later, my four top front teeth were just bee-yoo-ti-ful.

Although I don’t think I could chip these suckers, at $2K per I’m not taking any chances. Not only do I not – or 99.99% of the time not – use my teeth as implements, I also warn everyone I see using their teeth as such about the perils of such folly.

But I have not stopped – and don’t plan to stop – eating almonds.

I like them as a snack. I like them in a salad. I like them in green beans. And I like them whole, rather than the dental recommended slivered or sliced, although I admit that slivered or sliced almonds have their purposes. (E.g., in green beans.)

I like almonds in candy bars, and wish that Peter Paul would make an Almond Joy version of its Mounds: dark chocolate avec almond.

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. But I almost always feel like a nut. Chipped teeth, be damned!

Dr Pepper Mans Up? Talk about malpractice…

In truth, I really don’t have much of an idea what Dr Pepper tastes like, but on my mind’s tongue it’s a ghastly combination of liquid shoe polish, sicky-sweet something or other, and Moxie, New England’s own original hair-on-your-chest, disgusting tasting “soda”.  I suspect, however, that, given the popularity of Dr Pepper, the operative attribute of the three that I imagine is sicky-sweet.

But the promotion for the new Dr Pepper 10 is decidedly of the hair-on-your-chest variety. Dr Pepper 10 positioning? “It’s not for women.”

…the soda comes in a gunmetal can decorated with bullets; its advertisements include snake wrestlers and laser guns; and on its Facebook page you can visit a digital shooting gallery where you take aim at female products—lipstick, high heels, etc. (Source: The Daily Beast.)

Shooting gallery? Taking aim at female products?

I’m fine with marketing a product aimed (ahem) men, but do they really need to encourage their target (ahem) demographic, which I presume is teen-aged boys and “failure to launch” twenty-somethings who’ve never been on a date, to shoot at things associated with women?

There are plenty of male-ish things that wouldn’t involve shooting proxies for the female of the species. Think cars, trucks, motor cycles, cigarette boats, football, lumberjacks, boxing, stags, and garbage men. And that’s just for starters.

Wouldn’t it be kinder, and gentler, to take the Irish Spring approach.

You remember: “Manly, yes, but I like it, too.”

Admittedly, Dr Pepper is doing some clever marketing around Dr Pepper 10, given that this sort of campaign is quite naturally going to stir up some controversy and, thus, that most potent of marketing lures: going viral, which we used to call free publicity.

Some Moses in their advertising agency apparently went up the mountain and was handed down the tablets containing Dr Pepper’s Ten Man’Ments for using social media.

1 – THOU SHALT NOT OMG
If it’s not exploding, it’s not exciting.

2 – THOU SHALT NOT PUCKER UP
Kissy faces are never manly.

3 – THOU SHALT NOT POST PICS OF YOUR OUTFIT
Unless it’s battle armour and you have a gigantic sword and/or small bazooka.

4 – THOU SHALT NOT POST FURRY ANIMAL VIDEOS
Exceptions made for beasts fighting to the death and bears destroying idyllic picnic scenes.

5 – THOU SHALT NOT MAKE A ‘MAN-GAGEMENT’ ALBUM
That is all.

6 – THOUGH SHALT NOT SHARE YOUR HOROSCOPE
Daily.

7 – THOU SHALT NOT INSTAGRAM YOUR LUNCH
Real men eat lunch, not tweet it.

8 – THOU SHALT NOT UNTAG UNFLATTERING PICS
We know you were there.

9 – THOU SHALT NOT END A COMMENT WITH A =)
(Oops…I do that all the time!)

10 –  THOU SHALT NOT MAKE A FACEBOOK PROFILE FOR YOUR PET,
baby and/or imaginary friend.

Not the wittiest thing I’ve ever come across. And certainlyl pandering to the old stereotypes. (Am I the only one who can hear someone in the target demographic calling his buddy a ‘fag’ for sharing his horoscope.’ But a notch above Hee-Haw. I guess.

By the way, I found these on a blog called American Soda, tag line: “The Real Taste of America in Europe.” Wow! Talk about carving out a niche for your blogging self. I’m not 100% certain, but I believe that the unbolded words are American Soda’s commentary, not Dr Pepper’s.

Anyway, I had to borrow the Man’Ments from a secondary source because  access to the ur source – Dr Pepper on Facebook – required my “liking it.” LOL, as they say. I am so completely unwilling to “like” this, lest someone visiting my underused, don’t give it a second thought FB entry might think that I actually liked Dr Pepper, and had gotten sucked into their nefarious going viral marketing scheme. Which I so definitely have not!

Okay, who am I to talk? I’m blogging about it. But isn’t it amazing that 10-million plus and counting Facebook-ers have Liked Dr Pepper. And that hundreds are commenting pro and con on their wall. Citizen marketers, indeed.

You got your bread, you got your circus, and now you got your Dr Pepper Facebook wall where you can posit your own personal everlasting thumbs up or thumbs down. And the road to total immersion citizen-as-consumer continues apace.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if the good Dr sells much 10, or this ends up being another Coke Classic.

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A clink of a Moxie bottle to my sister Kath for pointing this story out to me.

Baby Boomer on Board*

Hey, I’m all for ways in which the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can extract a few coins by taxing or charging for purely discretionary things. Like taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. And - once I get past weighing the morality of duping people who can ill afford $10 scratch tickets vs. giving people some hope that they, too, can get rich quick – even the lottery.

But I’m not wild about special-interest license plates, mainly because I like each state having its own unique, instantly recognizable license plate. Not that Massachusetts has ever had anything particularly memorable or interesting. Massachusetts’ state-plate boringness aside, I like that instant recognition thing you used to get when you saw the Wyoming cowboy on the bucking bronco, or Maine’s lobster (much better, IMHO, than the nuthatch-on-pine cone or the duck).

Anyway, Massachusetts has a new license plate trick up its sleeve.

Sarah Peake, a state rep from P-town, is proposing that the state issue a special plate, “commemorating” the Baby Boom generation as a means to raise money to defray the cost of the elder services we’ll be sucking up and down once we retire.

Personally, this doesn’t exactly make me want to run out and buy myself (another) Beetle. Or a little GTO. Or a Mustang, Sally. Or a fun, fun, fun T-Bird. (Maybe an Edsel…) If nothing else, who wants to be the butt of all the anti-Boomer nastiness that will be floating around if and when The Commonwealth announces a contest soliciting ideas for what should be on the plate?

On the other hand, I just might enter that contest. After all, the possibilities are nearly as endless as the wave of squalling Boomers produced between 1946 and 1964.  (Note to classifiers: I bet there’s not a person alive born after 1960 who would characterize himself or herself as a Baby Boomer. Just sayin’…)

And speaking of Baby Boomers, it’s not just those post-1960 tail-enders who experienced a different Boom than the the rest of this vast cohort. In fact, the Baby Boomer demographic is so huge, so longitudinally and latitudinally diverse, that it’s pretty much impossible to throw us all into one bucket.

For everyone who crossed the border into Canada to evade the draft, there was someone worrying about whether he was coming back from ‘Nam in a body bag.  For every nascent feminist refusing to shave her legs, there was someone poring over Brides Magazine and planning the perfect wedding. For everyone who inhaled (or not) there was an Animal House keg-meister. For every privileged sorority girl there was someone working her way through a community college and someone else joining the steno pool right out of high school.

My sister Trish is ten years younger than I am. I didn’t go to Woodstock; she didn’t go to Studio 54.

With the caveat that no one thing will represent all of us Boomer, I will put some license plate suggestions out there. Let’s see:

Howdy Doody, Mouseketeer Ears, Davey Crockett caps, Converse High-Tops,  Bucky Beaver. Or the Crest kid: Look, Ma! No cavities!

Ed Sullivan introducing Elvis. (No, he wasn’t one of us, but we all knew who he was. That goes for Ed Sullivan and Elvis.)

A bicycle with baseball cards clipped to the wheels with clothespins. A roller-skate key. A Tiny Tears doll. A Slinky. Clue.

Plaid (or Lassie) lunch-box.

Kids doing duck-and-cover.

A family with a bunch of kids having a picnic on Dad’s old Army/Navy/Marines blanket. (Ours was a Navy blanket: cream with a navy blue stripe across the top.) Mom = Donna Reed. Dad = Ward Cleaver, or Jim Anderson (even though his kids, other than Kitten, weren’t exactly Baby Boomers. Unlike Wally and The Beave.)

A bunch of women pushing baby carriages, toddler hanging on to her skirt. All the women = Donna Reed.

Even though it’s not in Massachusetts, an overhead shot of Levittown.

Or a shot of a block full of 1950’s, VA mortgage, ticky-tacky houses – each with a colossal TV antenna tethered to the roof.

Pinky Lee in a duel with Soupy Sales. (Soupy wins. He was cool.)

A Tricker Treater going out as a beatnik or Fidel Castro.

Fast forward a few years. The license plate could feature surfer jams. Penny loafers. Madras. Circle pins. Ed Sullivan introducing the Beach Boys.

A stack of LP’s. A bunch of girls hanging around with their hair in rollers.

Keep going:

Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles. Ed Sullivan introducing the Stones.

A plastic wheel containing a month’s supply of The Pill.

‘Don’t trust anyone over 30.’ (Those were the days!)

A marijuana leaf and the motto, ‘Don’t bogart that joint, my friend.’

A Yellow Submarine.

The poster from Woodstock.

The Peace Sign. (And you kids think you invented chuck a deuce.)

A Medevac chopper saving (hopefully) some grunt.

A burning draft card. A burning bra.

I’ve got it.

Given what I anticipate will be a tremendous reluctance on the part of our cohort to pass from the stage, and journey on to the Great Be-In In the Sky, how about:

Hell, no, we won’t go!

And remember, the medium is not necessarily the message.

Source: Boston.com.

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*Honestly: I really did think of this post title before I saw the article on Boston.com.

Not exactly the teddy bears’ picnic

And it’s not exactly Born Free, either.

The other day, in Zanesville, Ohio, an exceedingly disturbed and disturbingly malevolent man, Terry Thompson,  killed himself. But not before freeing the animals that he’d kept in what has been described as “abominable” conditions – something of a concentration camp for animals. Predictably (and, frankly, understandably), folks went into panic mode at the idea that lions, and tigers, and bears (oh, my) were loosed upon the land. Schools were closed, Amber Alert-style signs went up on the highways, and the local authorities went on a big game hunt.

The result? Dozens of animals have been killed, including 18 Bengal tigers and 17 lions. Several were captured alive and two, as of this writing – a monkey and a wolf – are still at large. (My guess is that wolf is in Canada by now. I’m rooting for it. As for the monkey, it’s possibly diseased, so it might be for the best – think Outbreak – if  it met its demise.)

The carnage at the farm was just horrific, and the trigger-finger cops are coming in for quite a bit of criticism for shooting to kill, not to tranquilize. (The police claim that if they’d tranquilized, the animals could have taken off before the drug kicked in, and they wouldn’t have been able to track them down, what with the encroaching darkness.)

Whether greater effort should have gone into saving, rather than eliminating, these animals, will no doubt be the subject of quite a debate. Too late for the poor, slaughtered animals, but it sounds like, for the most part, they were being put out of their misery. What Bengal tiger would choose to spend its days in a rundown animal park that didn’t exactly replicate its natural habitat? What lion elects to leave the veldt for a filthy farm in Zanesville, Ohio?

Poor things!

The wild-animal farm in which they lived out their unnatural, truncated lives wasn’t run as a business venture, but, rather, was just maintained for the particular entertainment and delight of the owner, Terry Thompson, who:

…had a history of animal abuse, according to Larry Hostetler, an animal welfare expert who knew him…Hostetler, executive director of the Muskingum County Animal Shelter, had charged Thompson's farm with animal neglect and mistreatment. Thompson liked to show off the animals he'd collected on his 50-acre farm, with a roster that has included animals such as a camel, a giraffe and a panther.

But he never sold tickets to the event, or entertained Zanesville tourists with his mistreated attractions. His interest was deeply personal, and according to Hostetler, deeply unhealthy. Thompson had been ejected from pet fairs in the past for bringing bear cubs to events, and the people he hired were often let go after they challenged him on his care of the abused and dangerous creatures.

Source: IB Times.

In any case, there is not one reason I can think of that a private individual should be able to “own” even one wild animal – think of the poor woman whose face was ripped off by the adult chimpanzee owned by a friend of hers – let alone keep dozens of them in unregulated squalor.

One thing to be living in decent wild animal parks and zoos. Not that this is an optimal setting, but with mankind encroaching on so many habitats, zoos do serve the function of preserving some magnificent species – like the Bengal tiger. And at least if you’re a cheetah loping around the San Diego Wild Animal Park you’re in a setting that has most, if not all, of the comforts of home.

But for every San Diego Zoo, there’s probably some hideous, half-baked place like Thompson’s, run by people who don’t know what they’re doing and/or who are exploiting and maltreating their animals and/or who are nuts. There are plenty of hobbies, and plenty of ways to make a living, that don’t involve treating animals shabbily.

Whatever you think about regulation, I’d say this is an area where there ought to be plenty. But, 

Ohio has some of the nation's weakest restrictions on exotic pets and among the highest number of injuries and deaths caused by them…On Wednesday, the Humane Society of the United States criticized Gov. John Kasich for allowing a statewide ban on the buying and selling of exotic pets to expire in April. The organization urged the state to immediately issue emergency restrictions. (Boston.com,)

Sometimes there really oughta be a law!

Quitting with a grandstand play

Who among us hasn’t harbored the fantasy of quitting a job with a BIG, BOLD gesture? Who hasn’t wanted to sweep into their manager’s office, deliver an FU on a platter, and sweep out – all to the silent eye-applause of our approving co-workers? Who hasn’t felt the urge to belt out the opening lines to Take This Job and Shove It, grab their hat, and head for the door?

But what holds us back is that reluctance to burn a bridge, even if it seems like a bridge to nowhere. The niggling sense that what goes around may very well come around. The realization that it’s as much about the job being a bad fit, and about it’s being your time to go, as it is about the a-hole boss and the crappy working conditions.

None of these restraints seem to have harnessed the “I quit” energy of one Joey DeFrancesco, who left his job as a room service waiter at a Providence Hotel by delivering his notice while accompanied by a marching band. And, of course, lest any deed – good bad or indifferent – go unshared, someone recording the event for upload to YouTube.

Now, I have no doubt that the hotel job that DeFrancesco quit so colorfully after 3+ years was not a great one, and certainly not one that this Rhode Island College graduate wanted to spend the rest of his life doing. And it’s entirely possible that the person he reported to was a jerk of the highest order.

Still, showing up the boss, and recording and posting the show-up show-down, suggests that DeFrancesco himself may be harboring a bit of the high-order jerk himself.

Joey Quits

As the video shows – be patient: it’s nearly two-minutes in -  the boss is not exactly  thrilled to see Joey and his pals.

DeFrancesco, clearly relishing the moment, hands over his letter of resignation, which the boss declines to take. DeFrancesco drops it at his feet.

"I'm here to tell you that I'm quitting," DeFrancesco says with a smile.

And with that, the band kicks in, marching out of the hotel with stadium-like fanfare. DeFrancesco walks away with his hands aloft like a champion.

Ah, yes, “…aloft like a champion.”

That is until some new, potential employer becomes the 2-millionth person to view this – the count is already over 1 million – and decides not to take a chance on someone who’s this much of a grandstander. For what Joey may fail to appreciate – he is, after all, only 23 – is that, while every oppressed worker in the whole, wide, world may applaud this gesture, the people who do the hiring tend to be, well, managers. And as much of a jerk as your ex-boss may have been to you, a fellow manager might well pause and reflect on how embarrassed he’d be if some grandstanding, narcissistic jerk did this to him.

Anyway, DeFrancesco claims not to have anticipated the video going viral:

"I thought it would just embarrass the boss, but now it's all over the world and it's insane," he says. DeFrancesco says he's been contacted by various television news outlets -- and earlier this week he wound up being interviewed by a German newspaper about the state of American unions. [The hotel workers had recently unionized, in what was a rather acrimonious battle.]

Oh, come on. Does anyone put a provocative video out on YouTube and not secretly hope that it goes viral, and they end up in “various television outlets”?

Wonder what he’s looking for: Someone optioning this for a movie treatment? Publicity for his band? A book contract? A reality TV-show bid. (He’s a good looking kid. Is Jersey Shore still on?)

Okay. Maybe all he wanted was to have the last word with his putz of a boss.

In the old days, even if someone had brought in a marching band, it would have been a point-of-contact, in-the-moment incident that lived on in hotel lore for generations. I can guarantee that within 24 hours, every hotel worker in the state would have heard about this. But it would have been done without having that putz of a boss (who may be Simon Legree, or just some schnook with the less than glamorous, less than lucrative job as night manager of a hotel in Providence) made into such an object of public derision for all the world to see. (“Hey, I saw your dad on YouTube. Is he really a jerk that everybody hates?”)

Oh, Joey, Joey, Joey. I’m glad your got that new job that’s letting your use your history degree. But I can’t help but feeling that, at some point in your life, you may actually live to regret this.

You’re not Michael Moore, and this ain’t Roger and Me. Your ex-boss may have been a tyrant, but he’s not The Man. He wasn’t – until you made him one – a public figure.

This could come back to haunt you in any number of ways, including waking up some morning and feeling bad that you’d pulled this stunt.

Meanwhile, you’re 23 years old. Time to drop the “y” in Joey and start going by Joe.

Source: Huffington Post.

Age is only a number? The actress “Jane Doe” thinks not.

Jane Doe – a nom d’suit – is going after Amazon, seeking $1 million in punitive damages, because her age was revealed on IMDb, the movie database which Amazon owns. Worse than revealing the terrible truth – Lordy, Lordy, Jane Doe’s turning 40 – IMDb refused to remove the year-of-birth when asked to do so. (Info source: Boston.com.)

Being sensitive about your age is an interesting thing, and I’m not going to get up on my high horse and say that everyone should be completely open about their age. That age is only a number. It doesn’t really matter. And all that other Life Begins at 40, 60 is the new 30, etc. blather that we’re being fed.

For one thing, at my advanced age, I am just barely capable of mounting a high horse, even if it’s a non-piston, static one on a merry-go-round.

For another, age discrimination has moved beyond the realm of ‘dirty little secret’ to pretty much a way of life, especially in some professions and industries. And I would have to say that high-tech marketing is probably one of them.

That said, I’m still working regularly, and have a good number of clients I can count on to call on me when they have product marketing writing needs. So, lucky me.

But I don’t think things would be quite as cheery if I were looking for a full-time job (other than, conceivably, as a staff writer/editor, if there were any such position). I’m about 100% certain that if I were seeking a position as a VP of Marketing – a job I have held – my résumé would be laughed out of its PDF. And not just because I’ve been on my own for the past seven years.

Even though I’ve kept up with what’s current in marketing – I’ve authored an ebook on product marketing, I blog (for myself and clients), I’ve co-authored an article on social media,  I’ve consulted on social media strategy, I’ve written tweets for a couple of clients, etc. (About that tweeting: Exceptional fun to work in such a short form. I have avoiding Twitter for personal reasons because I figure I’d become an addict.)

Anyway, at a certain point, in certain careers, someone’s going to look at the “best if used by” date stamped on the lid of the can and take a pass on you.

In my own case, with my clients, I don’t advertise how old I am. Let people think whatever they want, and let me keep kidding myself that, thanks to having inherited my mother’s skin, I don’t look my age. But I don’t hide how old I am either. A couple of my clients, who are also friends, came to my 60th birthday party, which is now coming up on 2 years in the rear view mirror. I talk openly about things I did/read/watched on TV/experienced 40 or even 50 years ago or even 50+ years ago.

But when, back at my BIG 6-0 birthday time, someone at one of my clients mentioned that my friend had told her that I had a major milestone birthday coming up, it made me nervous. I didn’t mind my friend knowing, and I didn’t mind this woman knowing, either. But I just didn’t want it getting around. (“OMG. She’s 60 and still working! OMG”)

After all, I’d been to a marketing off-site there a year prior, and, by my estimate, there were two – count ‘em – two other people over the age of 40 in attendance. Both women. And both let go since the off-site. One was the CMO, the other was a marketing staff writer. (So much for my assumption that I can get work as a staff writer…)

Still, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how old someone is, plus or minus: you mention where you went to school or grew up, someone asks you if you knew so and so, there’s only so much age-veiling you can do on your résumé to begin with, etc.

Let alone if you have some type of public persona, like an actress might have.

I have true sympathy for the Jane Doe suing Amazon. If ageism is rampant in high tech marketing, I can only imagine what it’s like in the acting biz if you haven’t achieved Meryl Streep-ness by the time you’re 30. Which Jane Doe clearly hasn’t.

"If one is perceived to be `over-the-hill,' i.e., approaching 40, it is nearly impossible for an up-and-coming actress, such as the plaintiff, to get work as she is thought to have less of an `upside,' therefore, casting directors, producers, directors, agents-manager, etc. do not give her the same opportunities, regardless of her appearance or talent," the lawsuit states.

No doubt in my mind that there are some movie types who will reject her outright because of her age. But, given the Hollywood love affair with the young (especially when it comes to the female of the species), it’s hard to see that someone “approaching 40” is an “up-and-coming actress” to begin with. I’m assuming here that this actress does not have a huge list of film credits to her name, which places the probability of her “making it” really big on the low side.

I laud someone for still trying at this point, but there is some point at which “all the stars, that never were, are parking cars and pumping gas.” (As is clear from that “pumping gas”, this line was penned in pre-self serve way back. Which it was – 1968 – when it was sung by Dionne Warwick in the catchy shower tune, Do You Know the Way to San Jose?)

There are some professions where you can be up-and-coming in your 40’s – politician, for one – but acting isn’t one of them, unless you’re the character actor type. (In which case, you’ve probably been at it for years, trying to be a non-character actor type, until you finally give up and get discovered.)

Jane Doe apparently has a double-whammy going for her:

While she loses opportunities because of her age, she's also missing work because of her youthful appearance, the lawsuit says.

"Plaintiff has experience rejection in the industry for each "40-year-old" role for which she has interviewed because she does not and cannot physically portray the role of a 40-year-old woman," the lawsuit says.

Methinks that, just as I’m no doubt kidding myself that I look a lot younger than 61.10, Jane Doe may be kidding herself a bit here, too. Despite fitness and assistive surgery, she’s probably a tad too knowing-eyed and long-in-the-tooth to do ingénue. But given how ageist/sexist Hollywood is, she may look way too young for the current idea of what 40 looks like, which is probably a quasi-crone.

I read elsewhere (ABC blog) that Jane Doe thinks IMDb somehow got her date of birth from a credit card transaction she made that had something to do with upgrading to the professional version of IMDb. (I’m happy with the amateur one that lets me see who besides Kirk Douglas said “I’m Spartacus.”)

The suit alleges that IMDbPro “intercepts credit card information obtained during the subscription process for the purposes of gathering information about its subscribers” and further “both defendants are fully aware of the information-gathering, storing and usage process and have done nothing to stop the unlawful and wrong practices.”

Calling the practice “unfair, immoral and unscrupulous”, Jane Doe’s Seattle-based lawyers are asking for a jury trial and $1 million in punitive damages. Amazon.com owns IMDb and both companies are named in the lawsuit.

I have no idea how IMDb operates, but in this day and age, in probably wouldn’t take a super-sleuth to spend a few minutes twiddling around on Google to find out the age of someone who was at all a public figure. Maybe someone boasted on Facebook that they’d gone to high school with her, but hadn’t seen her at last year’s 20th reunion.

When it comes to your YOB you may want things to be MYOB, but that’s probably not going to be the case.

Meanwhile, with all the publicity around this law suit – and all the hints – Jane Doe is from Texas, Jane Doe is of Asian heritage, Jane Doe has an Americanized name (e.g., Jane Doe), Jane Doe is almost 40 – it’s only a matter of time before she gets outed.

Surely, it would have been nice of IMDb to remove Jane’s birthdate when she asked. But if this information can at all be gotten publically – and I expect that when the discovery phase sets in, Amazon discover-ers in India will be googling madly – well, what are you going to do?

Yes, we should all be careful about age-ism (which can and does, of course, go both ways), and all the other isms that hold both the ism-ers and the ism-ees back.

But, sorry, Jane Doe, we’re living in the all-information-all-the-time world.

Privacy? What’s that?

If we just stick a smiley face on that, maybe no one will notice…

There was an amusing little article in The Economist a few weeks back about South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s ordering state employees to answer the phone “It’s a great day in South Carolina. How may I help you?”

Ms. Haley says the new greeting will boost the morale of state workers and help her to sell the state. “It’s part of who I am,” she declares. “As hokey as some people may think it is, I’m selling South Carolina as this great, new, positive state that everybody needs to look at.”

Needless to say the blogosphere went bonkers. One wag suggested this alternative:

“Thank you for calling South Carolina where unemployment is high, morale is low and political leaders are very busy wasting your resources. How may I direct your call?”

First off, it never ceases to amaze me just what senior executives think will boost morale.

I worked one year over Christmas at State Mutual Insurance. My job, as I recall, was typing the letter “B” onto forms all day. I worked in a pod of “girls”, overseen by a mom-aged woman named Ginny.

A few days before the holiday, we were given the approximate time slot when the company’s president would be on our floor to issue his annual Christmas greeting. A few minutes before Mr. Big arrived, one of his lackeys stuck his head into our area and told us to be on the alert. Ginny told us all to sit up straight and look at the entrance (a space between two giant file cabinets – the ones that held all those forms I was typing the letter “B” onto).

Mr. Big came into sight, raised his hand in a quasi-wave, and, without making eye contact with anyone, called out, “Merry Christmas girls.”

And we all, quite naturally, responded, “Merry Christmas to you, too, Mr. Big.”

But we didn’t quite get the words out before he had disappeared, moving on to the next pod on our aisle.

All the “girls” started to snigger, which peeved Ginny a bit.

“He doesn’t have to do that, you know,” she told us.

Too bad we didn’t have the expression ‘like, duh” back in the day.

Now, I’m sure it wasn’t much fun for Mr. Big to have to trek around a very large office building that probably housed over a thousand workers, but wouldn’t it have been better to do something like hold floor meetings, where we could all crowd around and get a little canned speech about what a great year we’d had? With cookies. And maybe have us ask a question or two.

Hey, I was just there for a couple of weeks, and didn’t have any morale problem that wouldn’t be cured by going back to school and not having to sit on a steno chair 8 hours a day typing the letter “B” onto an insurance form. Still…

Fast forward a decade or so, and I was working at Wang Labs.

And so it was Christmas…

The tradition at Wang had been to have each department host a Christmas party – family invited – on Christmas Eve morning. And then informally dismiss everyone at noon, without forcing them to take a half-day off. It was quite a nice little tradition. I was only at Wang a couple of years, but it was fun to see everyone’s kids, and have our VP dress up like Santa and give them all some little gift.

Then the new president blew into Lowell.

A week before Christmas a “holiday greeting” memo came out that tersely informed us that Christmas Eve was a full work day, and that anyone who planned on leaving even an hour early should put in a vacation request. And, by the way, you can keep those rug rats at home where they belong.

To make up for this, we were all offered a free turkey dinner from the caf, served up by our senior execs, wearing Santa hats.

Peace on earth and morale boost toward men!

And the Wang Christmas gala was by no means the last of the bogus morale enhancing/employee thank-yous/etc. that I lived through. (I could write a book…)

How is it that, so often, those in high places can’t see that the only way to have good morale is to a) provide decent working conditions; b) communicate honestly and openly with employee – and I’m talking two-way communication here; and c) THIS IS THE REALLY IMPORTANT ONE: either succeed at what you’re doing (yay, us!) or have a reasonably clear and actionable plan for achieving success (let’s go, team!).

I suspect that “It’s a great day in South Carolina. How may I help you?” is not going to improve state worker morale, or make South Carolina a better place to work or do business. (Plus, it’s a mouthful. People in South Carolina are no doubt a lot more patient than people in Massachusetts, but who wants to hear all that jibber-jabber when they’re calling about a missing tax refund. Wouldn’t you rather hear a pleasant voice telling you you’d reached the state tax division.  As someone commented on a blog I read on this, the greeting sounds like you’ve reached a recording, not a human. Which may, actually, be Ms. Haley’s goal. Humans, after all, cost money and have morale issues.)

In terms of the hokey-hype, the truth about South Carolina is that it ranks pretty low in things that matter, like health and educational attainment. And high in things that matter in the other direction, like unemployment.

It may be a great day in South Carolina if you can afford to live in a pristine 200 year old restored home in Charleston. It may be a great day in South Carolina if you can afford to retire to Hilton Head and play golf every day. It may be a great day in South Carolina if you like barbecue. It may be a great day in South Carolina if you want to re-lo your business to a place where you can get away with paying sub-standard wages.

Other than that….

Naturally, it got me thinking about what the reaction would be if our governor ordered Massachusetts state employees to use a similar greeting. Talk about the entire population of the state playing ROTFLMAO.

The entire state infrastructure would be brought down as everyone logged onto their local “newspaper” to start flaming.

If the order did go through, they’d have to have an intermediary step, however.

Press 1, if you want to hear positive things about the state – like educational attainment, health, and unemployment rate. Press 2, if you can’t stand the fact that this is a pretty good place to live and want to hear only about real or imagined negatives. (“It’s another miserable day in Massachusetts – make that Taxachusetts – which has crappy weather and is run by a pack of socialists.”)

I would venture that the majority of people think that the place they live is pretty darned good. And certainly one would expect that Nicky Haley would love-love-love her state, as one would prefer a governor to do.

But this lame-o phone greeting? What was she thinking? (I don’t know what her background is. Maybe she never managed people.)

I read the article a few weeks back. The order has probably already been rescinded.

Meanwhile, I did find one measure in which South Carolina bested Massachusetts: lower instances of binge drinking.

Which might be in jeopardy if the order hasn’t been rescinded, and state workers have to run through that smiley-face of a greeting all day long.

Who’s wants to be the boss? Not many, apparently.

Well, today, you may be shocked and/or amused to learn, is National Boss Day.

Personally, I don’t recall ever receiving or sending a “Happy Boss Day” card, being taken out to lunch, taking anyone out to lunch, or otherwise feted on the Big Day.

In fact, if I even knew such a day existed, I had mercifully put it out of my mind. I’m sure there are other Hallmark holidays out there that are just as gacky as this one – National Prison Guard Day, National Hedge Fund Day – but being the boss is not something that, to my mind, bears celebrating. There’s no avoiding that element of sucking up, and that element of pressure if you happen to work in an environment where The Boss would expect something – and some brown-nosers would deliver.

Oh, I’m sure that there are some workplaces where the underlings want to recognize that their bosses are great. But the mental picture I have here is some petty tyrant in a white, short-sleeved shirt and too-wide tie, who has a plaque in his office that reads:

If you work for a man, in heavens name work for him!If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution he represents. I think if I worked for a man I would work for him. I would not work for him a part of the time, and the rest of the time work against him. I would give an undivided service or none. If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.  Elbert Hubbard

As a waitress, I actually worked for a man – who was known as The Boss – who had just such a plaque posted in the waitress break room. He was not a petty tyrant. He was a major tyrant: irrational, vicious, mean, and drunk. I do believe that at some point I removed said plaque from the break room wall and may, in fact, still have it in my possession.

Not that I advocate employees spending all their time badmouthing their boss and/or the place they work. If it’s that bad, and there’s no way to make it better, you need to get the hell out at some point. But if you work for a man who’s a major tyrant, there’s no way in hell you’re going to “think well of him.”

No, the Elbert Hubbard sentiments speak to a different world, in which employees and their managers had different relationships. (And when people had names like Elbert Hubbard.)

Like the 1950’s world inhabited by the woman, Patricia Haroski, who dreamed up the idea of Boss Day– quite sweetly – to honor her father, a State Farm Insurance man who was also her boss.

It certainly seems that, in this day and age, National Boss Day should have run its course. Today, the boss had better be more of a leader than a dictator. The role that needs to be played is no longer so much handing down orders as it is communicating what needs to be accomplished, helping (if needed) come up with ways to get those things accomplished, removing barriers when the pop up, acting as a sounding board and mentor when needed, etc. Oh, there’s still all that stuff like giving reviews, figuring out raises, putting names on the layoff list. But, at least if you’re in any of the places I’ve worked, being the boss is definitely not about command and control

There were actually a few things I liked about being The Boss. I liked mentoring. I liked problem solving. I liked getting out of someone’s way. I liked helping decipher the company strategy, and communicate it to “my folks.” I liked acting as the firebreak between irrational, fire drill requests from upper management. I liked it when someone told me that someone on my team did a great job. I liked providing opportunities for junior employees to get more visibility in the organization, if they wanted it.

The best managers I worked under did all of that, and more.

Interesting, the very best manager – in terms of how I was treated personally - that I ever had was someone who was incredibly controversial and widely disliked. If he took a dislike to you – and that could be for an entirely arbitrary reason (he thought one guy in our group looked like an SS officer) - well, look out.

But, for me, it worked. Especially since he was someone I could also sit down with and call-out if he treated someone miserably because, say, he thought they looked like an SS officer.

Anyway, there were other things I liked about being a manager. I liked getting invited to meetings I wouldn’t have gotten to go to if I hadn’t been The Boss. I liked knowing things early. I liked being known. I also liked getting paid and bonused to be a manager.

But managing is not all sweetness and light, and I hated dealing with problem children, with petty tensions. I hated when I had to perpetually look over someone’s shoulder, or intervene when they’d pulled some decidedly bone-headed move. hated when I had to tell someone, even if they were a poor performer, which was by no means always the case, that they no longer had a job.I hated the incessant bitching and complaining about who got paid more, who got more credit, who got better things to work on. I

I always had an open door policy, but some days I just wanted to barricade myself in a Safe Room

These days, I’m glad I’m no longer The Boss. Too much psychic energy needs to go into it…

(Funny, before I became a manager, I had a boss that I was quite fond of, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was that he did. In fact, my colleagues and I would some times scratch our heads and ask ‘what does Bill Z do all day?’ Only when I myself started managing did I figure it out…)

A lot of folks apparently feel the same way.

As I saw in an article on Boston.com that cited a survey from OfficeTeam (part of Robert Half, the staffing company) that found that:

…76 percent of employees polled said they have no interest in having their boss’s job

Astonishingly,

…65 percent said that they didn’t think that they could do a better job than their boss.

This I find completely shocking! What red-blooded American worker doesn’t feel that they could do a better job than their boss. Certainly not many that I’ve ever known.

Maybe things have changed more substantially in the workplace since I was a pup. Maybe today’s workers actually do want to celebrate National Boss Day.

Which I will celebrate in my small way by saying that a number of my projects come from people who at one point in time reported to me. I used to tell them that I wanted them to be successful so that, when I wanted out, they’d hire me to do freelance work for them. Damned if it didn’t work out that way.Thanks, Boss!