Reading the fine print, or, include me out

I grew up in a house of subscribers.

From the time we could read, the Rogers kids subscribed to magazines. Jack ‘n Jill. Boys Life. Calling All Girls. As we moved on up, the girls “took” Seventeen. As we became more sophisticated – thanks, Kath, for leading the way – The New Yorker. Not to be undone, I started subscribing to The Atlantic Monthly. We also were members of book clubs: one that sent a book about American history to our doorstep each month, another that sent a Catholic “Vision” book – lives of the saints, lives of prominent Catholics. We also got books from a series called “Children’s Classics.”

My parents had their own subscriptions: Newsweek (when, of course, everyone else got Time); Look (everyone else, of course, got Life). Catholic Digest, Reader’s Digest. Ellery Queen. A bunch of “women’s magazines.” On the dad side, we got the freebies from the American Legion (a group my father despised) and the VFW. Sports Illustrated. Sporting News.

We also got monthly books, at one time or another, from the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild, Quality Paperbacks, Yale Shakespeare, and a series that did grownup classics (nicely bound editions of books like Pride and Prejudice). A series on art. I’m sure I’m missing something here.

Bottom line: we were a house of readers, and all these subscriptions were required to augment our weekly takeaways from the library, the books the kids bought out of our allowance (literary works like Nancy Drew and Tom Swift), and gifts.

We also subscribed to record albums from Columbia House: a catalogue showed up every month or so, and my parents made their picks. (Mostly Broadway musicals and Sing Along with Mitch.)

Finally, for a while, my mother was part of some “foreign decorative item of the month” club. In my home office, I have a little Greek plate that came through our doors.

I’m still a subscriber: magazines only. (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, Glimmer Train.) For a while, I subscribed to an excellent book service from Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway, but that was a long while back.

For magazines, subscribing is pretty much straightforward: you sign up for a certain number of months/years. You pay for it. When time’s running out, they send you a whole bunch of reminders to re-up.

I’ve mostly avoided those sucker jobs where you get an issue for free, and if you don’t explicitly opt-out, you owe big.

But other than that tchotchke club my mother belonged to, I’m not all that familiar with retail subscriptions. I do know that my mother was never duped into anything – now there was a woman who read the fine print – and she would have known exactly what she was signing up for: how many tchotchkes she was obligated to buy. (And now that I’m thinking of it, maybe this wasn’t a subscription. It may well have been something like an Avon Calling enterprise, where some woman she knew sold this stuff at home parties. Oh, well. Forget I mentioned it. Think subscription.)

Anyway, what got me thinking about subscriptions was a recent article on Bloomberg that talked about the increasing popularity of retail subscription services, the “future of online shopping, a business model that has in recent years attracted a billion-dollar bet from venture capital investors.” (Source: Bloomberg)

The article began with a bit about a woman who’d made a purchase on Adore Me, a lingerie site:

…without noticing that she had joined the retailer’s subscription service. After spotting the credit card charges in early 2014, [Hailee] Taylor called and says she learned she was paying $39.95 like clockwork each month to maintain her status as an Adore Me VIP Member.

You can buy bras and undies on Adore Me without signing up, but buyers are drawn in to the VIP service because it offers a fabulous discount on that first purchase. Adore Me’s not alone.

Adore Me is among a group of buzzy Internet retailers accused of sometimes placing customers into unwanted and hard-to-cancel retail subscriptions. Several of these companies have been hit with lawsuits alleging unfair business practices, including JustFab (apparel), Blue Apron (food delivery), and Birchbox (beauty samples). Adore Me is currently facing a lawsuit from a disgruntled subscriber. JustFab, which also owns ShoeDazzle and Kate Hudson’s athletic wear shop Fabletics, last year paid a $1.88 million fine as part of a settlement over allegations of deceptive marketing. Stamps.com likewise paid $2.5 million to settle a similar suit. (Blue Apron, Birchbox, and Stamps.com did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Buzzy” Internet retailers? No wonder I’m not in the know on these services, being part of that distinctly non-buzzy demographic: Medicare Boomers.

These retailers aren’t doing anything illegal. Which is not to say it’s all on the up and up, that these practices aren’t manipulative and borderline deceitful. Adore Me gets an F from the Better Business Bureau.

[Adore Me Founder and CEO] Hermand-Waiche insists his company’s subscription model is nothing like other services cashing in on murky recurring fees. “If you’re one of those players that try to scam people and put them into not-flexible systems where they get charged for things they didn’t order, these companies are born to fail,” he says. “They should. That’s not the way you build a business.” Adore Me, he emphasizes, doesn’t trick shoppers with its opt-out membership model: “It’s really people’s decision to go for one or the other.”

The beef against Adore Me is how difficult it’s been to cancel a subscription,which originally required a business-hours phone call. They’ve implemented a rather cumbersome new process, one that involves an email, a wait of several hours, and a link to instructions. “Four screens and one online quiz later, membership is deactivated.”

An online quiz? What could they possibly be asking? I’m almost tempted to join Adore Me, just so I can deactivate my subscription. But, of course, I won’t. I like being a subscriber. I like getting that New Yorker every Wednesday, and The Economist every Saturday. I like that there are no trick plays going on. And I know that, if I ever want to unsubscribe, I can just toss the reneal notice in the recycle bin. No fine print to read. But, believe me, I’m my mother’s daughter: if there were any fine print, I’d be reading it.

Too much ice in the coffee? Talk about a first world problem…

I’m not a coffee drinker. But I am an occasional iced coffee drinker. When I do go for an iced coffee, it’s a Dunk’s, not Starbucks. So I guess I can’t be part of the big class action suit that Stacy Pincus is spearheading, Not that I would have signed up, anyway. When I order an iced coffee, I expect there will be, well, ice in it. And that the ice will take up some of the room that, in the absence of ice, would be taken up by liquid. But if there were no ice, wouldn’t that mean that the coffee would be hot coffee (or tepid coffee, or chilled but not ice-cold coffee)? Isn’t ice actually an ingredient of iced coffee?

Ah, but it’s not the ice in the iced coffee. It’s the ounces advertised on the cup. The cup size for the iced coffee (the venti cold) is 24 ounces. Which apparently has led some folks, Stacey Pincus among them, to believe they’re entitled to 24 ounces of coffee. Ice be damned!

“Starbucks is misleading customers who expect to receive the advertised amount of fluid ounces,” states the class-action lawsuit, which was filed last week in federal court. “For example, if a gallon of gas is advertised as costing three dollars, and a customer pays three dollars and pumps gas, that customer is expecting to receive a gallon of gas — not approximately half a gallon.” (Source: Washington Post)

Well, I’m not sure I’d have used a gas analogy here. But there are some that claim that Starbucks coffee leaves a nasty taste.Anyway, I’m sure that Starbucks would counter-argue that the 24-ounce is the size of the cup, not the promise of the liquid.

The plaintiff who filed the suit, Stacy Pincus, alleges that those who purchase cold beverages at Starbucks receive far less coffee than advertised. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, notes that the claims also apply to iced tea and other cold beverages prepared by Starbucks employees.

I know that those who spearhead class action suits aren’t necessarily people who actually felt they were wronged. Instead, some folks get their gripe on and find someone willing to raise their hand and say “use my name.” So that might be what’s going on here.

But if you’re lending your name to a lawsuit, presumably you’re feeling a bit aggrieved about something. Why else would you set yourself up for ridicule, as Stacey Pincus is doing. This isn’t exactly Erin Brockovich or Norma Rae we’re talking about.

Assuming that Stacey Pincus is truly aggrieved, one question for me is when did Stacey Pincus start getting aggrieved? Had she been sipping iced coffees for years, only to wake up one morning and smell the coffee and realize she’d been screwed? Or did she realize all along that she was being sucker-punched by Starbucks, and it just took her a while for her to have her kismet moment with a law firm eager to push this suit forward?

Is it just me, or does this one sound more frivolous than the suit against Subway that claimed that its sandwiches weren’t really foot long, but might have been one little piggy toe short? That actually seems like a righteous case.

As one can imagine, Starbucks doesn’t see things quite Stacey Pincus’ way:

“We are aware of the plaintiff’s claims, which we fully believe to be without merit,” Starbucks spokeswoman Jaime Riley said in a statement emailed to The Washington Post on Monday. “Our customers understand and expect that ice is an essential component of any ‘iced’ beverage. If a customer is not satisfied with their beverage preparation, we will gladly remake it.”

Or maybe they should just take the 24 ounce markings off of their cups. Baristas can just hold them up to show a customer what the size is – yep, that’s big; yep, that’s small. Then the customer can say ‘easy on the ice’ if they really don’t care if their iced coffee is actually iced.

And why does it have to be a suit to begin with? Why not just mount a campaign on social media bitching and moaning about Starbucks? Why not picket the stores? Why not organize a boycott? Why not ask for less ice? Why not – get this – go somewhere else for your iced coffee?

This is a $5 million dollar law suit. Think of how many iced coffees Starbucks has poured over the last 10 years.Think of how many folks there are out there who are “entitled” to a piece of any settlement. What might each of them realize? A quarter? A nickel? A dime?  Don’t spend it all in one place.

What is the point of this one? Is it worthwhile tying up our courts so that one law firm can win big and a bunch of consumers get a coupon or two?

Too much ice in the iced coffee…

When I think of all the crappy things that are going on out there, this does seem like one hell of a grade-A first world problem doesn’t it?

Blink of an eye

I was on the T on Saturday and decided to look at the headlines in The Boston Globe. A bad accident on the corner of Beacon and Charles. Really bad accident. A young woman – 29 years old – on a motorbike, crushed under the wheels of a duck boat. The accident had occurred at 11:30 a.m., an hour or so after I’d left for a walk and lunch with a friend, so I wasn’t around to witness it. Otherwise I might have been. Beacon and Charles is right outside my front door, and I’m standing on the corner where the accident happened once or twice a day. Whether you’re on foot, on a bike, in a car, or in a duck boat, it’s a really bad place. Not as bad as some of the other Charles-Beacon turning “opportunities”. But overall Charles-Beacon is a complex set of intersections, not easily explained. You have to see it to believe it but, as with so many spots in Boston, it was not designed with safety in mind. There may, in fact, be no way short of banning all vehicular traffic, to make it safe.

When I got back home around 2 p.m., the intersection was closed off with yellow and black crime scene tape, the duck boat was sitting there abandoned, and cops were all over the place. I didn’t stop to gawk, but you couldn’t miss it. And it was all over the news.

Anyway, worrying about our terrible intersections was likely not on my young neighbor Allison Warmuth’s mind on a bright and gorgeous spring day when she went out with a friend for a spin on a Vespa. I didn’t know Allison, but I’ve no doubt passed her on the street, seen her in a store, or stood next to her on the corner waiting for the light to changed. I didn’t know Allison, but I may have seen her tootling around on her moped, as I’ve noticed a few young women doing so of late, and I’ve envied them their youth, their beauty, their charming Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday” insouciance.

I didn’t know Allison, so the grief at her loss isn’t mine. She could have been the daughter of a friend. But she wasn’t. The grieving belongs to her parents, her family, her friends, her colleagues, to those who knew and loved a woman who was, by all accounts, as bright and gorgeous as the day she lost her life. And the grieving also belongs to the duck boat driver and the passengers who were touring Boston on a bright and gorgeous spring day.

Taking a duck boat tour is one of the most fun tourist things to do here. I’ve taken folks on it a half-dozen times, mostly recently last summer when I took some family members – including 5 and 8 year old boys – on it. It’s tremendously enjoyable. The narration is hokey, but it’s fun to be riding high above the fray in an restored WWII amphibious landing craft. And the kids, if they want to – the 8 year old did, the 5 year old didn’t – can take a turn at “driving” the boat when it’s in the water. But if you think about it, as vehicles go, with our narrow, crowded streets, their not really fit for land. And with their bulk and canopy coverings, they’re probably not all that fit for the Charles River, either.

But they’re a big business around here, and when a Boston sports team wins The Big One, as they do with pretty heartening regularity, the teams load up on duck boats for a tour through our narrow, crowded streets while a million fans line those narrow, crowded streets screaming.

I’m sure there will be calls for the duck boats to be banned in Boston. This may not be necessary, but maybe it’s time to equip them with better safety features and signage warning other vehicles to stay out of their way as they lumber around.

But whether the boats stay or go the real story, of course, is that somebody’s daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece, cousin, friend, colleague is gone in the blink of an eye.

Plenty of people I’ve loved have died, but none were gone in the blink of my eye. The only close friend or family member I can think of was a much younger cousin in Chicago who was killed in a car accident when she was in high school. I’d met her a couple of times, but by the time she came along, my family had outgrown the semi-annual Chicago pilgrimages. I knew my close-in-age cousins very well; the others, not so much. (My youngest aunt and uncle were young enough to be my mother’s kids.) While Janet’s death saddened me, I wasn’t bereft. I do know that my Aunt Kay, her mother, never recovered. How could you?

But me? I haven’t experienced much by way of sudden death.

Oh, one grandmother died suddenly. But, while it was unexpected, just how unexpected can death be when it occurs a few weeks before your 97th birthday? And my wonderful Aunt Margaret also died without giving us any notice. But Margaret was 85. It was most certainly a gut punch. But there’s unexpected and then there’s unexpected.

Most of “my” deaths have taken a while, which means you get to rehearse things in your mind, and work through at least part (admittedly a small part) of your grief in anticipation. Coping with a blink-of-an-eye death is unfathomable to me (especially when multiplied by the unimaginable of losing a child). If it’s someone who’s 97 or 85, you tell yourself that’s the way you want to go. (Absolutely!) But if the person dying is only 29 years old… Sometimes life and death are just plain lousy.

We’ll have plenty of nice bright spring days around here. I’m sure the duck boats will be back in full tourist-packed swing. I’m sure I’ll end up on one again at some point.

But it’ll be a while before I see on quacking by, or stand on that particular corner of Beacon and Charles, without thinking of Allison Warmuth.

RIP to a young neighbor I didn’t know, gone in the blink of an eye on a bright and gorgeous spring day.

"Worcester is for working.”

When I was a kid, growing up in the biggest city in the United States that no one had ever heard of, we hungered for any time Worcester’s existence was acknowledged in the outside world.

Cornball 1940’s b&w bio-pic of the obscure football coach and WW I hero Frank Cavanaugh showing on Boston Movietime? Cavanaugh was BORN in Worcester and coached for a bit at Holy Cross. They actually said Worcester in the movie. We’ll watch it!

Space program AOK-ing it’s way into our consciousness in the early 1960’s? Forget Wernher Von Braun, that old Nazi. Space meant a mention of Dr. Robert Goddard. Dr. Robert Goddard, liquid fuel rocket pioneer. The Wright Brother of the space program. Our Dr. Robert Goddard. Be sure to note that, like Frank Cavanaugh, he was born in Worcester, and shot that first liquid fuel rocket off on Packachoag Hill, right up the way from Holy Cross, where Cav coached. Forget that a popular expression in the 1920’s was “crazy as Dr. Goddard.” He was a ours.

So was Bob Cousy. The Cooz wasn’t born in Worcester. He actually chose to live there. Right next to my high school, in fact. Chose to live there. Wow. Just wow.

Who cared if the description of Worcester in Truman Capotte’s In Cold Blood was kind of a downer:

"One wet afternoon the following November, a Greyhound bus deposited Perry in Worcester, a Massachusetts factory town of steep up-and streets that even in the best of weathers seem cheerless and hostile."

Who cared that he called our city “cheerless and hostile”? (You want cheerless and hostile, Mr. Capote? I’ll show you cheerless and hostile.) This was a best seller. And WE were in it.

Well, you can take the girl out of Worcester, but you just can’t take the Worcester out of the girl. So, although I haven’t lived in Worcester since the late 1960’s, and have lodged more years in my Beacon Hill condo than I did in the Heart of the Commonwealth, I was delighted to see that Worcester has made this week’s NY Times Sunday Magazine, in the form of an article “What Happened to Worcester?” by Adam Davidson.

Davidson’s great-grandparents had built their life in Worcester, and he traced their history as a parallel to the rise of the American middle class, a rise enabled by “factory towns” like Worcester, or, as Davidson would have it, by Worcester itself. Davidson writes:

But in learning about my family’s economic history, I’ve also come to understand how deeply their story is embedded in the history of a place, of one particular city created by and for the middle class. When I mention Worcester to people from New England, they often give a knowing nod or laugh — this unlovely, down-on-its-luck
city of dead industry and collapsing buildings. But
Worcester was an engine for betterment until the middle of the 20th century, a magical place that transformed lost and impoverished lives.

My great-grandparents’ economic journey was one that’s harder to make today, in part because there are fewer “middle” cities now. Even during the middleclass
heyday of the 20th century, they couldn’t have done it without Worcester.

The article is quite interesting, detailing the ups and downs of generations of his father’s family, and how Worcester supported them through those ups in ways that are less attainable today, economic forces being what they are. Things are just more complicated these days, all-round.

Yet the article underscores Worcester’s resilience, the tough old hearts that still beat in those three-deckers and modest single family homes that still survive in neighborhoods like the one I grew up in. (Main South, Webster Square, OLA.) And Worcester is still a city of immigrants.

When I was a kid, we were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Irish, Italian, French Canadian, Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian, Greek, Armenian immigrants. Today, it’s  Latinos, Middle Easterners, and Ghanians. Yes, Ghanians. A few months ago, I had a cab driver in Boston: a Ghanian who lived in Worcester.

In his travels through Worceser, Davidson spoke with Ahmed Yusef, who’d fled Mosul, Iraq and somehow ended up in Worcester (as did my Irish immigrant great-grands in the 1870’s. Seriously, how did they end up in Worcester County instead of Boston?). In Worcester, Yusef owns a tailor shop. He also works a couple of days a week in Brooks Brothers (I’m guessing in Boston: no BB in Worcester.)

When Yusef was considering where to land, he had the opportunity to settle in Arizona, but called the only person he knew in America, who happened to live in Worcester, for advice:

Don’t go to Arizona, he was told. It’s too hot there, and there are no jobs. Move to Worcester, where housing is cheap, and opportunities are plenty…[Married, and with one child] he envisions that, one day, he’ll have many children, that some of them will even work with him in the tailor shop.

He told me that he has been to New York and Miami. They were beautiful: “Like a dream,” he said. But he was always happy to get back to Worcester. Those other cities are too expensive, too busy. “Too much,” he said. I said, “You like Worcester.” He said: “No, not like. Love. I love it. I have a future.New York is for dreams. Worcester is for working.”

Screw cheerless. Screw hostile. Screw unlovely. Nothing dream-like about Worcester. “Worcester is for working.” That’s about right.

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Dual shout out today to my cousin MB, a fellow Worcester girl, and to my brother-in-law Rick, who married in, for pointing this article out to me.

Uber’s tortured logic

The first time I used Uber, I sat in the back seat, googling to see whether you were supposed to tip your Uber driver. What I came away from the google with was that, while there was no formal mechanism for tipping – and, in fact, Uber makes it clear that tipping isn’t necessary – everything out there written by Uber drivers said that tips are most welcome.

Since that first trip last fall, I’ve used Uber maybe 10 or 12 times. It’s been generally reliable, in some cases easier to get than a cab. (But not always. For some reason, cab drivers, with their primitive old-timey know-how, know how to find my address, which is on a major thoroughfare, downtown in a large city, and in the same block as a famous tourist spot, the Cheers block. Those relying on GPS or some sort of online map function, often find themselves in other parts of the city. I had one crazy back and forth with Uber. I could see on the app, that all the cars that were actually close to me were being waved off, while someone tootling around Jamaica Plain, which is maybe five miles away, was listed as one minute away and the one coming to get me.)

And, not that at least some cab drivers aren’t, but Uber drivers have been fun to talk with. Oh, yes, and they’ve all been quite appreciative of the tips I’ve given them. Ain’t nobody getting rich as an Uber driver. The tips help.

As a result of a class action suit against it, Uber has “agreed to clarify that tips are not included in its fares — an important concession that drivers hope will prompt more passengers to add a gratuity.” (The way the info on tipping is framed on the Uber app, one might be lead to believe that everything’s all inclusive. Which it is. It’s just that there’s not any concept of a tip factored into the prices that Uber charges.)

What Uber drivers would like the company to do is to add a tip function, so that their often cash-free clientele can add a bit extra.

For some reason, Uber doesn’t want to do this. Maybe they think it will at least psychologically translate into a fare increase, which will undermine their low, low price image. Maybe they figure ‘why bother?’ given that all the human drivers will go away once Uber gets their hands on the self-driving cars they’re so keen on.

But Uber is framing their reasons in grandiose, academic, moral high-horse terms:

Tipping is inherently unfair because of customers’ unconscious racial biases.

The transportation network company’s stance is based in part on an academic study that found white restaurant servers earned larger tips, on average, than black servers who provided equally good service...

The Uber spokesman, who declined to make a company official available for an interview, said introducing widespread tipping would make drivers’ overall compensation dependent on those same racial biases…(Source: Boston Globe)

Okay. So drivers can’t be provided with a better, easier way to get their tips – and the only way to get a tip from one of the rising generation for whom carrying cash is the ‘what’s in your wallet?’ equivalent of wearing a bustle, driving a flivver, and using a rotary phone – because a study of the restaurant biz showed that blacks get lower tips? Sounds like BS to me.

But while I may call BS, there is a counterpoint of sorts offered:

Michael Sturman, a coauthor of the 2008 Cornell study, acknowledged drivers’ frustrations. But he said multiple studies have found tips are more strongly correlated with gender, race, and attractiveness than performance.

“Companies often use tips as a way of passing compensation costs on to the consumer,” he said. “The problem is that you don’t have any control over whether violations of [antidiscrimination laws] are occurring. So there’s a lot of discomfort for companies to say they’re going to use a pay system that we know depends on race and gender, which is illegal.”

Which sounds as if he believes that any service that involves tipping should do away with tipping, as it may be allowing their customers to explicitly or implicitly discriminate. Once again, I call BS. Uber’s grabbing on to this as part of their reasoning seems like tortured logic at best.

I’d be fine with doing away with tipping if everyone just upped their prices by 20% and FULLY PASSED THE EXTRA 20% ON TO THE SERVER. Having been a waitress, I would say that just raising the hourly pay to the minimum wage wouldn’t have made me happy. I was fine getting the sub-minimum pittance, as long as I could make tips. Some days were good days, some were awful. But mostly it balanced out on the side of making more than minimum wage. I expect my experience was not unique, regardless of the color of the server. I don’t know many folks who would opt for the guaranteed minimum wage if they could make more with tips.

I haven’t been a cab driver. Do they even get paid hourly? Uber drivers sure don’t. But I imagine that most of them – Uberista or cabbie -  like getting tips.

Sure, it’s not great to hear that black servers may get worse tips than white servers. But that’s a problem that’s pretty deeply rooted in our society, and it won’t be uprooted by getting rid of tipping.

Anyway, I will continue to tip Uber drivers, just as I do cabbies, and I’d say that my tipping habits are pretty colorblind. But just to make sure, I’ll try to make note of what my impulse tip is for white drivers vs. black drivers. What I do suspect I’ll find is that I’d tip a woman Uber driver more than a man Uber driver, therefore being guilty of gender discrimination.

Since they won’t allow a tip function on their app, for Uber drivers, those tips will be in cash, since I am fuddy-duddy and bustle-wearing enough to still carry.

But I may not be using Uber for much longer.

Lyft has a tip function.

Think I’ll download their app next time I’m out and about.

Churner by marriage

There are many, many things that I miss about my husband. But coming home and finding yet another filled in credit card application, ready for me to sign, is not one of them.

Was my husband someone who racked up credit card debt, and needed to get new cards going so he could rob – or borrow – from Peter to pay off Paul?

Hardly.

I don’t think Jim ever borrowed a dime in his life, and he fully paid off every bill that came in the door the minute it came in the door.

But what Jim was was a frequent flyer miles junky who used points accumulated via credit cards to make sure he never paid for a flight anywhere.

There’s a name for what Jim did, I have learned, and it’s credit card churning.

How it works is pretty simple: You get an offer for a new credit card, promising 50,000 miles if you sign up – as long as you spend, say, $1K a month on the card for three months. Once you hold up your end of the bargain by spending that $1K a month, and you take possession of the miles, you cut the card up. And apply for the next one that comes along.

Compared to the folks who are serious churners, Jim was something of an amateur. While Jim might have a half dozen or so active cards at any given time, the real churners may be juggling dozens of them. One couple profiled in a recent Bloomberg article had “43 cards, not counting more than 20 they’ve opened and closed in the past few years.”

Juggling so many credit cards and rewards programs can be a huge undertaking. You need to meet each card’s spending requirements, track changes to the fine print of all your programs, make sure you’ve got the money to cover bills with due dates spread across each month, and keep up with new card offers. Leppar and Miller both say they spend an hour or more a day on their hobby. [Shawn] Coomer, 34 and now a full-time travel blogger, keeps all his cards—about 25, for now—in a binder and uses a complex spreadsheet to track their due dates, spending requirements, and annual fees. He logs in to each card issuer’s website regularly and constantly looks for fresh offers, opening an average of 15 cards a year. (Source: Bloomberg)

Jim didn’t keep binders or complex spreadsheets, and, as frequently as I felt he was asking me to sign up for yet another card I didn’t want I don’t think we averaged any 15 cards per year. But Jim was a detail-oriented guy, and he kept good records, including info on the dates when he could apply for a new card from a bank that he’d already dumped. And we did accumulate a ton of miles.

Jim also liked Capital One points – I do, too; Capital One is one of the few credit cards I hold – and one of his final points coups happened a couple of months before he died, when we charged a new $15K HVAC system and got showered with points. (I think there was a two-for-one promo on or something. I’ll say this for Jim, he didn’t let a brain tumor stop his brain from churning.)

The trick, of course, is to not get in over your head, and not to incur all sorts of debt that you can’t afford to pay off – all so that you can make oodles of reward miles or points.

A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston showed that when borrowing limits go up, consumers generally can’t help themselves from using every last cent of their extra credit. As churners try to put everything they possibly can on their credit cards, down to rent and utilities if possible, they can also be tempted to buy things they don’t need.

For the record, we did need that new HVAC system.

Alas – for churners, anyway – there are rumors in churner-ville that the big banks are going be cracking down and cutting off the credit card flow to anyone who’s “applied for five other cards in the past 24 months.” That would be my husband. And, under his wing, me when I came home and found one of those filled in applications waiting my signature, or later, awaiting my email confirmation.

As I said, there are plenty of things I miss about my husband, but being a churner-by-marriage isn’t one of them.

Nonetheless, sigh…

Non-cash and carry

For years now, I’ve been making silent fun whenever I see one of the young folk paying for something that cost, say, $1.49 with a debit or credit card. I really just don’t understand why someone would not just use cash for small purchases. I’m all for prepaid Dunkin cards and my T pass. I’m all for credit cards. I’m all for the ATM. I’m all for ordering online. I’m all for paying for my groceries with my debit card. So it’s not as if I don’t go in for electronic transactions. And I’m not advocating for a return of the gold standard. It’s just that I can’t stand the idea of trusting all things financial to the miracles of technology and science. It’s good to have some cash around. (Isn’t it?)

Oh, I know, I know, if the entire digital infrastructure crashed and burned, it probably wouldn’t help to have four twenty-dollar bills and a change bucket full of pennies. I suspect that, if all systems were no-go, chaos would reign and it wouldn’t matter it you had a roll of quarters on you or not. Someone would soon be breaking down my door for a couple of cans of soup and a jar of peanut butter.

Yet it remains unsettling to see one more part of the realm become ever more incrementally taken over by the non-cash world.

Just the other day, I got to see for myself how much I’m going to like it. Or not.

I was in Boston’s Back Bay, walking past a CVS, when I remembered that I was out of milk. Of course, I could have gone to a grocery store, but most of them were out of my way. And the one that wasn’t so much out of my way – a small shop just around the corner, a 20 second walk from my home – is one that, for a variety of reasons, I just plain don’t like. I will occasionally make a desperation purchase there. And it is easier to lug an 8-pack of Diet Coke from 20 seconds away, rather than from 10 minutes away. But mostly I avoid this store like the plague. Come to think of it, one of the reasons I avoid it is fear of catching the plague…

Anyway, there I was needing milk. And there CVS was, with, I was pretty sure, milk for sale.

So I went in and grabbed a pint, and headed to one of the self-check out kiosks to self-check out.

The first clutch of kiosks all had signs that said “Debit/Credit  Purchases Only.” So I went to the next pod. Same deal.

A helpful CVS employee came over to tell me that, if I wanted to pay cash, I had to go through a register manned by a human being.

I’m all for human beings (mostly). But there was a line. And I really didn’t fell like waiting in line to purchase a pint of milk for $1.49. In fact, I liked the idea of waiting in line to pay in cash even less than I liked the idea of not waiting in line, but having to pay with a credit or debit card. Thus I found myself at the self-checkout register, self-checking myself out, paying with a credit card. (Although I do have enough in my bank account to cover a $1.49 purchase, for some reason – possibly the idea of using my pin – I just didn’t want to pay with my bank card.)

There’s plenty that we’re going to have to answer to the millennial generation for-  college debt, the environment, decaying infrastructure, not to mention developing the foundation for all the glorious technology they’re so smitten with – so maybe this ‘just say no’ to cash annoyance is their little way of getting back at us.

Me? This is one aspect of our changing world that I’ve got a feeling I’m not going to like.

 

 

 

On the Waterfront

One of my all-time favorite movies is On the Waterfront. Marlon Brando – and I’m not a huge fan – at his mumbly, heart-breaking best as Terry Malloy, the boxer turned longshoreman. You know, the guy who could have been a contender, but instead is just a bum. Then there’s Karl Malden – at this righteous, soul-stirring best as the priest who helps the longshoremen stand up to the vicious, mobbed up waterfront boss. And Lee J. Cobb as that vicious, mobbed up waterfront boss. Et al.

The acting is terrific. The setting authentic – the movie was filled on the Jersey waterfront, not in a Hollywood back lot. (This was a time when most films weren’t made on location.) The plot tough and gritty. The black and white cinematography just perfect.

I haven’t seen On the Waterfront in a good ten or so years. Maybe I’d find it overblown. But my memories of watching it are vivid, strong and positive.

Longshoreman is one of those jobs that’s been going buggy-whip since the advent of container shipping. And it’s about to get worse.

At one end of a dock at America’s busiest port, tractor-trailers haul containers through dense, stop-and-go traffic. Sometimes they collide. Sometimes the drivers must wait, diesel engines idling, as piles are unstacked to find the specific container they need.

A few hundred yards away, advanced algorithms select the most efficient pathway for autonomous carriers to move containers across the wharf. The four-story-high orange machines cradle their cargo, passing quietly within inches of each other, at speeds as fast as 18 miles an hour, but never touching. Self-driving cranes on tracks stack the containers and then deliver them to waiting trucks and trains with minimal human intervention.

TraPac LLC’s Los Angeles marine-cargo facility demonstrates how autonomous technology could revolutionize freight transport as much as or more than personal travel. TraPac’s equipment doubles the speed of loading and unloading ships, saving money and boosting profits. Their impact is rivaling that of containerization, which eliminated most manual sorting and warehousing on docks after World War II. (Source: Bloomberg)

This will be good news for the environment, as there’ll be less idling time for trucks to do their diesel-spewing as they wait for the containers to get loaded. It will, of course, be a boon for the companies that produce the equipment. Not to mention to the port facilities that will no longer have to deal with as many human beings. (Who wants and needs them?)

In truth, automation on the waterfront has been going on for a quite a while. And, to some degree, the longshoremen have been able to resist some of the efforts to do away with the human element. But, surely, the handwriting’s on the wall. More automation = fewer people needed. And that is not, of course, limited to longshoremen.

All this automation is, of course, cool.

Any day now, we’ll have autonomous cars and trucks and trains and boats and planes. Which not only means that we can sit back and enjoy our commute by texting without guilt, it also means that the world will need fewer truck drivers and fewer engineers and fewer captains and fewer pilots. It also means fewer Uber drivers: Uber has an order in for the first half-million self-driving cars that roll off the (automated) assembly line. Thanks for playing, Uber drivers, thanks for playing.

We did not, as an economy, do an especially good job at planning for what should have been the obvious outcome of so much manufacturing moving overseas: people who worked in factories lost decent-paying jobs. Yes, indeed, many communities – and I live in one – can congratulate themselves for having replaced those odious, low-end manufacturing jobs with jobs of the future in technology, healthcare and financial services. And weren’t we the lucky ones that so much of our crappy manufacturing (think shoes and clothing) went South long ago enough to have made an adjustment before globalization began? But there are plenty of communities that got just plain hollowed-out, and for them the replacement jobs have been lousier and less well paid than what left when the washing machine and air conditioning plants upped-stakes and moved to China. For these places, the brave new world opportunities are working as a prison guard, or at the landfill, or in Wal-Mart.

I saw some of this up close and personal this past weekend, when I spent a few days in upstate NY, “out west”, which is really where the Rust Belt begins.

So what are we going to do about all the jobs – more blue collar jobs like longshoremen, and plenty of white collar jobs thanks to AI – that are going to disappear over the next few decades? Make that what are we going to do about all those people in all those jobs. Let the market take care of it? We’ve seen how well that’s worked for the folks who used to work in factories but now run meth labs our of a shack in their back yard. (And, no, taking care of old ladies in nursing homes will not be for everyone.)

We’ve got lots of crumbling infrastructure to rebuild, for starters.

I’m guessing that longshoremen displaced by automation could help out there.

What’s the plan, Stan, for when automation fully takes over on the waterfront?

Getaway

I just got back from a long getaway weekend. The getaway was with my sister, and we got away to upstate NY to visit her daughter, who is in college there. We stayed in a comfy old house that used to be a B&B until they decided not to offer the second B. Fine by us. Any town with a lot of colIege kids is going to have a number of places where you can get a pretty good breakfast.

I will probably have some sort of “real” getaway vacation this year, but this is it for now.

Or so I was thinking until I got home and saw an article on Bloomberg on Getaway, a young Boston-based company that has a novel vacation concept, one that is based on one of my favorite things: the tiny house.

Somewhere, in rural locations outside of Boston, there are three 160-square foot houses just a couple of hours away. (In June, there’ll be Getaway cabins for NYC as well.) For $99 a night, you get a tiny house getaway.

Hook Number One is that there’s nothing to do once you get to your tiny house except commune with yourself, nature, and whatever companion you’ve brought along (included a 4-legged one for an extra $15). There’s no wifi or TV, and only spotty  cell phone service. For emergencies there’s a landline. Needless to say, there’s no room service, but the tiny houses are stocked with provisions (like pasta and pasta sauce, beef jerky, s’mores mix) that you can buy on the honor system.

The toilets run out of space after 15 flushes, so if you’re there with a full house – some cabins sleep up to 4 – you probably don’t want to spend more than a night there, enjoying life in the woods. Unless you’re happy with enjoying life in the woods the old-fashioned slit-trench and poison ivy way.

Hook Number Two: you don’t learn the secret location until 24-48 hours before your reservation time. All you know is that public transportation and a small town won’t be that far away, and that you’re in for a “stripped-down adventure.”

Which, as it turns out, a lot of people are interested in being in for. The Boston houses are fully booked through July, and Saturday nights are booked up until December.

“I like to call it the anti-vacation,” said Chief Executive Officer Jon Staff, who launched Getaway with his friend Pete Davis, a first-year student at Harvard Law School.

For the past half-century, the American vacation model was to spend a small fortune to fly to a faraway place to which the vacationers would likely never go back, said Staff, 28, who is completing an MBA at Harvard Business School. “You’re probably only going to go there once, so you feel incredible pressure to do lots of things." Now that Americans work longer hours and spend their nights and weekends chained to handheld devices, there’s less call for capital-V "Vacations" and more for basic respite, he said.(Source: Bloomberg)

“Basic respite” aside, Getaway is also used by those who want to see just what tiny house living is like before deciding to go minimalist, forsaking his and her sinks, walk-in closets, and things like privacy, to own a tiny home of their own. Which is why I’d be tempted to try one out.

Not that I’m ever going to have a tiny house. I’m too much of a city girl for that. Where would you plunk a tiny house in downtown Boston?

But, in truth, much as I’d like to a Getaway anti-vacation, I’m also too much of a city girl to be comfortable out in the sticks where I couldn’t see any other human habitation. I don’t care if I’m just a jog away from public transportation and small town whatever. Being in a cabin in the woods would creep me out, unless I took the full house option (plus dog), so that there would be enough of us to have at least two night watchmen/women on duty.

Cities don’t scare me, but the little house in the big woods sure does.

Many years ago – in a time before mobile phones – my sisters and I rented a house on a lake outside Worcester, and we rotated in and out with friends and family, so that at any given time, there were at least two of us there overnight.

Other than the fact that the walls to the bathroom didn’t extend all the way up, making it a bit difficult to achieve any privacy, the place was quite nice.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that there was no one around, and, come nightfall, the surrounds were pitch black and scary. No landline, either. To make a call, you had to walk a couple of miles down a pitch black, winding, narrow, rutted dirt road, to the spot outside an auto body shop where there was a pay phone.

Oh, there was a house next door, but the owners were on vacation. They’d left their two dogs, Doberman pinschers named Rocky and Erica, behind. Someone came over to feed them during the day, but Rocky and Erica had the run of the place, thanks to a dog door that this duo made frequent use of throughout the night. The clatter made by their entrances and exits made it all but impossible for me to listen to what I really wanted to keep my ear out for, which was the arrival of an ax murderer with my name on his blade.

I guess in case of an emergency, one of us could have risked the wrath of Rocky and Erica and slithered in through the dog door to use the neighbors landline.

For me, this was an almost entirely sleepless vacation, other than the day time napping.

So much as I’d like to experience tiny house living and make my way to a getaway, I guess I’m just too much of a chicken. Not to mention that I’m just too much of a non-hipster, and thus am not the demo being targeted here.

Nonetheless, I think the idea is a fun one, and I wish the founders well. Maybe I’ll wait until next year, and book one for late June. I can check in at 3 p.m., enjoy tiny house living until 7:45 p.m., and make my way back to safety before dark.

The Gig Economy? Yes and no.

There was an article in The Boston Globe the other day on the gig economy. I really wasn’t going to read it. What would it have to say that I didn’t already know up close and personal, after more than a decade of loadin’ my 16 tons on a freelance basis?

I was not surprised that there were no surprises, although I found the profession of the gigster that was first mentioned as an exemplar of free-lancery an odd one. I mean, can a professional stunt performer in Boston work on anything other than an occasional basis? Oh, sure, there are some films made here, but we’re not exactly Hooray for Hollywood territory.

I’m pretty sure there are more gig economy workers doing tech work, writing brochures, or driving for Uber than there are stunt men.

According to a 2014 study commissioned by the Freelancers Union, 53 million Americans are independent workers, about 34 percent of the total workforce. A study from Intuit predicts that by 2020, 40 percent of US workers will fall into this category. (Source: Boston Globe)

For some of us, the growth of the gig economy has been a boon.

When I jumped corporate ship I was dee-lighted to be out of the commuting, managing, and politicking fray. And thrilled that I was able to immediately find work through my network, without having to do any self-promoting, me-branding or glad-handing. I’m fortunate in that my work has just pretty much shown up when I needed it.

And most of the folks I know who are freelancers are just as happy with it as not. Which is apparently in keeping with others:

According to the Freelancers Union, a 300,000-plus member nonprofit, nearly nine in 10 of its members surveyed said they would not return to a traditional job if given the chance.

Nonetheless, the freelancers lot is not necessarily a happy one. You’re on your own for benefits – health insurance, vacation, the company holiday party – and when you’re goldbrickin’, you’re goldbrickin’ on your own dime.

Most likely, unless you’re on a long term contract, your income is not going to be even from one month to the next. And you’re subject to the bureaucratic accounts payable whims of your clients. On that front, I’ve been spectacularly fortunate. Several of my clients pay net 15. Another’s somewhere between 45 and 60, which is predictable enough.

I did have one client that announced with great flourish that they were going onto a new payment system “for the convenience of our vendors.” Now, how a payment system that went from paying in 30 days to paying in 70-90 days can be positioned as for the payee’s convenience rather than that of the payer is beyond me.

But to me the real downside of the gig economy is that it’s more difficult to build relationships with folks if you’re not actually working with them, day in, day out. Some of my closest friendships were forged at work. I’m sure that’s true for many people. Yes, I have made a couple of reasonably strong friendships with my clients, but most of the relationships are just not the same.

Full-time work is where I also built the network that has always been the source of my freelance projects. I didn’t build this network consciously. The folks I’ve found my work through were the people I liked; some of them are true friends-for-life.

Plus, full-time work is where I developed the skills that enabled me to make a living as a free-lancer. I’m not talking about being able to write. That I could do before I entered the workforce. But the ability to write about technology, to develop messaging, to understand markets, to “get” the B2B enterprise world, etc. That’s all stuff that I learned on the job. And that’s where I’ve made my living once I decided to jump out of corporate and into gig world.

I might have been able to cobble together a living as a writer without knowing anything about technology – but it wouldn’t have been in technology companies. So would not, quite frankly, have been as rewarding monetarily as scrambling about looking for any-old-writing project would have been.

And I wouldn’t have had that wonderful network of mine. I’d have to have built “my brand”, be perpetually on the lookout for opportunities, and other things I didn’t have to do, thanks to all those years in the full-time world.

I feel bad for “the kids” who won’t have the chance to ever experience a full-time job. Who won’t be able to make those friends, develop those skills, and, frankly, drive your self nuts by getting emotionally invested and all swept up in the meshugas of the workplace.

I do have supreme confidence that they’ll figure something out. But good luck to them. I think they’re going to need it.

Home Ec meets 3D printing

My mother was a pretty fair seamstress, and she made a lot of clothing for me and my sisters.

Of course, just as I always craved “store-bought” cake, which we had in our house once or twice a year (my father had a tremendous sweet tooth, and my mother did scratch baking several times a week), I always craved “store-bought” clothing. As great as everything looked in the pattern book, a home made outfit wasn’t quite couture. Not that something bought off the rack was, either. Still, at least it had the potential of looking like what everyone else was wearing. I say potential because it was just as likely that what my mother bought for us when we did get something she hadn’t made was some sort of off brand. Like that Anderson Little suit that sort of looked like a John Meyer of Norwich. But not quite.

Unlike my mother, and both of my sisters (who still whip up curtains on occasion), I never really learned to sew. The one item I made, a sort of hang-around the house muumuu, had a crooked yoke.

Learning to sew, however, was pretty much a staple requirement for girls during my youth. All of my friends could sew a bit. For starters, we could all sew on buttons, make minor repairs, and hem a skirt. And most of us at least learned the rudiments of cutting out a pattern and working a Singer sewing machine.

I took sewing lessons at the Girls’ Club.

And I was aware that there was something out there called “Home Economics” that public school girls took at some point during high school, while the boys went off and learned how to build a bird house in “Shop.” Catholic schools, in my universe, didn’t go in for Home Ec. Maybe we were too close, generation-wise, to having been maids, seamstresses, cooks, and cleaning ladies. Let those swanky Protestant girls whose grandmothers hadn’t scrubbed floors in the New Country learn how to clean in high school. We would take Latin instead.

I’m guessing that at this point in time, the arrival of boatloads of cheap clothing items has done away with the need to learn to sew. Why toil for valuable hours that could be spent on Snapchat to make a dress you could get at H&M for $20, wear twice, and toss out?

And now, on the horizon, is 3D printing of clothing.

So far, it’s used for the hautest of haute couture, destined for display at the Met’s Costume Institute, clothing that cannot actually be worn by anyone, even if they could afford it to begin with.

But it’s heading our way.

When that happens, “it can be as revolutionary as the sewing machine,” said Andrew Bolton, Manus x Machina’s [Met exhibit] curator. “It means you can 3D print your dress to your exact measurements at home.”

Couture clothes, in the traditional fashion industry definition, are “items made for you, that fit your body,” Bolton explained. Usually that means the garments are expensive, rare, and difficult to obtain. But with 3D printing, this extravagance will move into any home that has a printer. “Because it has the ability to mould exactly to your measurements, it’s environmentally friendly, too” Bolton said. “There’s no waste, whereas there’s always waste with textiles.” (Source: Bloomberg)

So far, most of what’s getting 3D printed is not exactly wearable, unless you’re interested in wearing something highly structured and inflexible. Forget that comfy jersey dress, or even an uncomfortable Lyrca club mini. Forget that flowing, drapey crepe number. The chiffon bridesmaid dress. Body armor is more like it.

But the “early adopters” are working on hard goods: jewelry, footwear, eyewear, pocket books.

Just think, by the time all those self-driving cars are out there, ready to take us shopping, there’ll be no need to actually go shopping. Admittedly, a lot of our shopping is online. But most of us still have occasion to go into a brick and mortar and buy physical goods. We want to see what’s out there. We want to see what’s on sale. We want to do some impulse buying. We want it now.

Before we know it, now will actually be now. Push a button and watch your 3D printer whip you up a little black dress, a new pair of jeans.

Who needs home ec?

What to name the baby

If it had been up to me, I would never have named myself Maureen.

It’s not the ethnic-ness that bothers me. If I’d had children, I might well have gone the ethnic-naming route (only mine would have been more au-tentic). It’s probably the “een-i-ness” of the name. Who wants a name that’s a perpetual diminutive, Maureen being Irish for “little Mary”? Not to mention that, while Maureen as a name has gone the way of Bertha and Ethel, it was very popular in my time and place. I was one of 6 or 8 Maureen’s in my high school class. Everyone else was pretty much named Kathleen (which is my sister’s name; my other sister avoided the direct “een” hit – her middle name, however, is Eileen).

But, hey, my parents’ kids were theirs to name.

I do think that figuring out what to name the baby must be one of the most fun things that expectant parents do. Oh, I’m sure that the task has its ups and downs, not to mention all the arm chair quarterbacks with their own suggestions. Still, it must be a great pleasure to name that little tune of yours.

But apparently for some parents, it’s a lot more difficult than googling baby names and trying on names that go with your last name. Not to mention making sure the initials aren’t an obscenity, etc. These folks turn to professionals for help.

They can consult the work of Albert Mehrabian, a UCLA professor emeritus of psychology who’s come up with a method for scoring names along a number of dimensions, based on how people would rate someone when only their name and gender were known.

• Ethical-Caring (e.g., trustworthy, loyal, sincere, kind, generous, respectful, warm, patient, responsible)
• Popular-Fun (e.g., playful, humorous, cheerful, outgoing, good-looking, adventurous, athletic, healthy)
• Successful (e.g., ambitious, intelligent, independent, confident, assertive, creative)
• Masculine-Feminine
• Overall Attractiveness (a statistical combination of the first three dimensions)   

Source: KAAJ.com

I don’t know how Maureen would fare here. And in fact I don’t want to know. But I will note that, according to this scheme, a John would be deemed more successful – 9 times more successful, in fact – than a Knut. (Whaaaa? Did they leave Knute Rockne out?) And will further note that the names that achieved a perfect score were Elizabeth, James, and Steven. Perhaps that is why I would always have preferred to be named Elizabeth, which is my middle name, rather than Maureen. (I did choose my husband well, good name-wise. He was a James.)

If you don’t want to trust your own instincts, or to futz with books and survey results, you can hire a professional naming service to help you out for a fee.

Last year, Marc Hauser, who runs the Switzerland-based naming agency Erfolgswelle, went from solely serving brands to also branding children. His firm charges over $29,000 for every baby it names, devoting two to three weeks and around 100 hours of work to the process. (Source: Bloomberg)

First off, I don’t know if I’d be entrusting someone with a company called “Erfolgswelle” to name – errrr, brand – my child. Yes, it does translate from the German into ‘wave of success.’ Still…

Though Hauser thinks that approaches rating baby names strictly by data (and not emotion) are “overrated,” his firm does check to ensure that a baby name has not already been trademarked. “If it’s a little close to an existing brand name, it will not survive,” he said.

Trademarked? Trademarked? Huh? Let me three-peat myself here: Trademarked?

Who trademarks their kids’ names, I must ask.

And then the answer came to me: Jay-Z and Beyoncé, of course.

I don’t know if that means you can’t name your little darling Blue Ivy without paying Mr. and Mrs. -Z a fee, or whether it just means you can’t come out with a line of cute-kid clothing called Blue Ivy. Need to know basis only, I suppose.

Historians also vet the name to ensure it goes not have “an aggravating past.”

Hey, maybe I could be a historic name checker. Just say no to Caligula and Adolph. (Sorry, Adolph Menjou.) And Typhoid Mary’s been taken.

You don’t have to spend $29K, of course. Sherri Suzanne – a name I would rate high on Feminine and Popular with the boys – will help you out for a few hundred bucks.

“While some criteria, like name popularity, can be measured and ranked objectively, I find that other qualities, like morality of a name or likelihood for success, are very subjective and vary from person to person, community to community and particularly generation to generation,” said Suzanne. She often works with cultural experts to ensure that a proposed name suits the family’s background.

What, pray tell, is the morality of a name. I would think that most folks would realize that Liar, Bestiality and Skanky-Ho are not good choices.

Professor Mehrabian is a big believer that it’s worth paying someone to help you out. “Believe me, you don’t want to name a child with an unattractive name and have them go through life and suffer the consequences.” But something tells me that the folks who give their kids rotten names – remember those clowns who named their kids after Nazis? The ones who later lost custody for being abusive? – aren’t going to pay for someone to tell them different.

Anyway, back to the “wave of success” folks.

It turns out they’re all about originality (a la Blue Ivy).

Would you like to find a unique name for your unborn child? A wonderful first name that sounds so good that it just had to be invented? A brand-new name with an exciting derivation and unmistakable history?



We will create one for you - and for your child. (Source: Erfolgswelle)

They make sure it sounds good. That it looks good, and has a good font associated with it. (Does that mean a special font designed just for you?) That it’s in harmony with your last name. That it passes the bad word check in multiple languages. They’ll even test it out by putting a few different selections before a “large test audience.”

And – my favorite part -

We develop a credible new history and mythology around the new name.

And my other favorite part:

You receive a scientific certificate from the naming center of the University of Leipzig

While Bloomberg pegs the fee at $29K, the website states $31K. Maybe that’s with the “scientific certificate.”

So far, it doesn’t appear that they’ve actually done any pricey naming. Sure, they’ve “received many inquiries.” But, “up to now, all families want to keep the new name secret as long as possible, which we understand.”

Hmmm. Are these weasel words for ‘we haven’t actually gotten beyond an inquiry, but if you bite and let us advertise it, it’s free.”

They’re looking for an American. (I think lots of European countries have laws about what to name the baby.) And the baby has to arrive by June 10, 2016.

Forget all you single ladies, how about you all pregnant ladies.

If you like it, then you gotta put a birth certificate on it. Or it on a birth certificate.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of renaming myself.

I don’t want to start from scratch.

How about Mauritzila, which was what my Uncle Charlie dubbed me. (Was he channeling his inner Yiddishe goy or what?)

Sure, it sounds a little like Bridezillla, but I’m going for mythology here. Mauritzila, like Rapunzel, lived in a castle. She had long blond hair. Along came a handsome prince, with the perfect name of James. And he told her that, according to his survey – which he didn’t charge $29K or $31K for – Mauritzila got a perfect score on ethical-caring, popular-fun, successful, feminine, and overall attractiveness.

Now I just need to find the right font…

Coffee time?

As anyone who’s been in my home for a meal knows quite well, I’m not much when it comes to coffee.

Other than an occasional cup o’ joe when I’m out, or, more usually, a cappuccino, I don’t drink coffee. Hot coffee, that is. I like nothing better than popping into Dunk’s on a hot summer day and getting a big old ice coffee for myself.

I don’t know why I never developed a coffee habit, as I like the flavor (and love the aroma) just fine. But somewhere along the way I became a tea drinker.

My parents did drink coffee, but they were just as apt to drink tea. My first cups of tea, however, were at my grandmother’s house, as that was the beverage of choice at Nanny’s, served even to children – milky and sweet, the Irish way.

I went to a Catholic women’s college, where the ethnic makeup was largely Irish Catholic. We were told by the food service provider that we were the only college with a cafeteria system run by them where the students drank more tea than coffee.

When I go to Ireland, one of the great pleasures is going into a pub and ordering a cup of tea and not being looked at like you have two heads. (Of course, it’s also a great pleasure to order a Guinness or a Bailey’s on ice.)

I do have a coffee maker (courtesy of my sister Kath), and a coffee press (courtesy of my sister Trish), but they are used pretty much only when Kath or Trish is around to do the honors. Coffee is whatever’s in the freezer.

My husband was a coffee drinker of sorts, but he was content with a spoonful of instant added to a cup of microwaved water.

Occasionally, I consider getting myself a Keurig, which would at least let me offer guests a decent cup of coffee, with their flavor and caffeination-level of choice. What’s held me back is largely inertia. But it’s partially the thought of all those little plastic cups making their way into landfill, or – worse – into one of those big garbage sludge islands floating around an ocean.

Last year, more than 9 billion of those K-Cups made their way into the trash-o-system. None of them lent themselves to being recycled.

This inconvenient fact has provoked a decade of hand-wringing within the company [Green Mountain, which acquired Keurig in 2006] and discontent among consumers. Placed end to end, the pods sold in a year would circle the globe roughly 10 times. Concerns among environmentalists are mounting, and sales growth is slowing. (Source: Boston Globe)

But they’re doing something about it, and will soon be selling K-Cups “made of material that is easily recycled.”

Unfortunately, those new cups are not compostable. Nor are they reusable. And those are, apparently, the environmental gold standard (to the silver or bronze of mere recyclable). Bottom line, those K-Cups will still be plastic. (Wasn’t it just yesterday – or maybe 50 years ago – when the cocktail party guy was advising young Benjamin in The Graduate to consider a career in plastics?)

And though Keurig’s new K-Cups might not mollify all of its critics, the company says it is trying its best. “When you look at the trends toward single-serve generally, you can either villainize it, or you can fix it,” said Monique Oxender, Keurig’s chief sustainability officer. “We’re trying to fix it.”

I’m with Ms. Oxender. Better to fix than to “villainize”.

I’ll be on the lookout for the release of the new, recyclable K-Cups. This may be enough to get me off the dime on a Keurig.

Let the coffee mugging begin!

Patriots’ Day, 2016

No doubt about it. Patriots’ Day is one of my favorite holidays, mostly because it’s almost gloriously and exclusively ours. By that I mean, it almost gloriously and exclusively belongs to Massachusetts. Almost, but not quite. I knew that it was observed in Maine as well. Which sort of makes sense, given that Maine used to be part of Massachusetts. But, from google, we learn that it’s also observed in Wisconsin and “encouraged” in Florida, whatever that means. (Perhaps my cousin Ellen, still biding her winter-time in the Sunshine State, can fill me in.)

Anyway, it’s a holiday I’ve always enjoyed. So I’m partially taking it off this year with links to a couple of prior posts on the subject.

Here’s my first Patriots’ Day outing, way back in 2008. The sentiments still hold, although I will note that, in a season after the Red Sox finished last, it’s easier to get tickets for the day’s game than it is in a season after they win the World Series. Thus, I will be at today’s game with my sister Trish. The game starts at 11:05 a.m., which means it will let out after the elite runners have long sped by. But the timing should allow us to see plenty of good runners as we stream with the rest of the fans into Kenmore Square. Based on game timing and his timing, my friend Jake informs me that I may be able to give him a wave as he runs by.

(Meanwhile, I have gone to a number of Patriots’ Day games, but I can’t for the life of me remember how they let pedestrians through the race route. I think that they did used to let us thread our way through the runners. But given the unpleasantness of 2013, the security has to be a lot tighter. We may have to head over towards Huntington Ave to walk home. That of back-trail to the starting point in Hopkinton. We’ll figure it out.)

Anyway, last year, Patriots’ Day coincided with the ghastly anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which I mulled over here.

2014 was a lousy year, Patriots’ Day wise. It was one year since the Boston bombing attack and two months since the death of my husband. Here’s my post from that year, which incorporates links to my reflections on the bombing and the bombers. And since I guess the whammies of life often come in threes, I must note that, on Patriots’ Day 2014, we were a week away from the death of my oldest and dearest of friends, Marie. As I said, 2014 was a lousy year.

But this year is better.

It’s beautiful out there. The flowering trees are starting to flower.I’ve got Sox tickets. The swan boats are back.

Happy Patriots’ Day. Observance encouraged!

Tax Day. Jackie Robinson Day. Earworm Day?

Today should be Tax Day. But, thanks to Emancipation Day, it’s not.

I wasn’t familiar with Emancipation Day because it’s only celebrated in Washington, DC. The actual day is April 16, but when that day falls on a Saturday, the observance is on Friday, making today a holiday in DC. And putting off Tax Day until Monday. Unless you’re fortunate enough to live in Massachusetts, where, on Monday, we’re celebrating Patriots Day. Thus, our taxes aren’t due until April 19th. Except for estimated taxes, which, because they’re sent to an IRS facility outside of Massachusetts are, in fact, due Monday. That’s Federal estimates. State ones, of course, aren’t due until Tuesday, since Monday, after all is a real holiday here. Got that? (That old bureaucratic magic…)

Up until this year, I had no reason to concern myself with the filing date, as I always got my taxes done in plenty of time. But this year, having mislaid a key paper file in the course of my renovation shuffling about, I have been putting taxes off. I’m organized. I’ve started. And I will be done today. But it’s nice to know that I actually don’t have to be done-done until Tuesday. Except for my Q1 estimate.Which is due Monday.

Anyway, Happy Tax Day.

It’s also Jackie Robinson Day, when baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson, who broke major league baseball’s color line on this day in 1947. Interesting that, on that same day 85 years earlier, Lincoln signed into law the Emancipation Compensation Act, freeing the slaves but offering compensation to slave “owners.”

Shamefully, the Boston Red Sox were the last team to have an African-American on their roster – Elijah “Pumpsie” Green. Their second African was Willie Tasby who was with the Red Sox when I saw my first game at Fenway in 1960. Someone in the bleachers had a sheet sign, which he unfurled halfway through the game, that read “This is your night, Willie Tasby.” It apparently was: Tasby went 3 for 4. (Ted Williams hit a homerun; Jimmy Piersall, a local fellow then playing for the Indians, hit two.)

Anyone interested in baseball, American history, the Civil Right movement, etc. would do well to watch the most recent Ken Burns PBS documentary on the life of Jackie Robinson. What a fascinating and complex man he was!

Meanwhile, today, in honor of Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color barrier, all MLB players will wear the number 42.

So, Happy Jackie Robinson Day.

I’m also declaring it Earworm Day as, for the past week, I’ve been plagued by not one, but TWO – count ‘em, TWO – earworms.

Earworm number one: Burl Ives’ “Jolly Holly Christmas.”

Now I can see if it were mid-December, and “Jolly Holly” was playing in every store I walked into. But old Burl – who has always creeped me out, by the way - has been off the airwaves for a good 3+ months now. Off the airwaves, but embedded in my earwaves. Thus, I found myself going out to the building’s vestibule to pick up my mail, only to realize that I had spontaneously broken out into “Oh, by golly, have a jolly, holly Christmas, this year.”

Oh, ho, the mistletoe? How about OH, NO, THE MISTLETOE.

Of course, once I was able to shake free of Burl Ives ratcheting around my brain, something even worse replaced it.

Not in a million years could I come up with the how or the why of the theme song to Daniel Boone come a-calling.

Unless I had Me.TV on for a second there at some point.

However it got there, I was suddenly possessed by the Daniel Boone ditty:

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
With an eye like an eagle
And as tall as a mountain was he!

What a Boone, what a do-er,
What a dream come-er true-er was he!

Nothing like a nightmare-come-er true-er like this one to have me praying to the earworm gods for the return of Burl Ives and “Jolly Holly Christmas.”

So, Happy Earworm Day.

I will spend the remainder of it completing my taxes, and wondering what song to my wondrous ears will appear to replace “Daniel Boone.”

Pinball wizard

My sister Trish lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

Salem is, of course, famous for witches. And for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. And for the Peabody-Essex Museum.

But the real gem of Salem may well be the Willows, a lovely ocean-side park – with plenty of shade trees, which doesn’t always happen in an ocean-side park; on the other hand, for an ocean-side park, it doesn’t have much beach. There is nothing fancy about the Willows. It’s just a nice place to stroll around on a nice summer evening, especially if you stop at Hobbs – home, I have learned of the first ice cream cone in New England (bless ‘em) – for an ice cream cone. (On the Willows web site, I also learned that “’Blind Pat’ Kenneally introduced Spanish ‘double-jointed’ peanuts to America from his cart” there.)

The Willows also has a couple of kiddie rides – nothing overwhelming or too pricey, and a merry-go-round where you risk breaking your neck getting on and off of one of the horses. There’s also a machine where you can buy a balloon, only the machine was made elsewhere, and has the words “Fanky Malloon” written on it, which we have translated as “Fancy Balloon”. Perhaps we are wrong, and there is something called a fanky malloon out there in a parallel universe.

While it’s hard to top the fanky malloon dispenser, the best thing about the Willlows is the arcade, which has plenty of skee ball, an automated gypsy fortune teller, a moth eaten mechanical monkey band, whack-a-mole, and plenty of old timey attractions. Sure, it has electronic games. But it also has pinball machines.

I never saw a pinball machine growing up. Not that I would have hung out any place that had one – Friendly’s certainly didn’t  – but did Worcester even have any pinball machines?

Nonetheless, when I’m on occasion at a beach arcade, I do tend to gravitate towards the pinball machines.

I just like the idea of them.

Thus, a headline on Bloomberg the other day caught my eye: Japan Pinball Maker Tied to IPhone Hack Set for Terror Fight.

Say what?

First off, I was surprised that there’s still a pinball manufacturer out there. Turns out, if there is one, it isn’t Sun Corp., which actually makes digital pachinko machines, pachinko being a Japanese form of pinball. But, to me, digital kind of disqualifies it from being a pinball maker. Pinball just has to be mechanical. Accept no substitutes.

My second question-to-self was ‘what’s pinball got to do with iPhone hacks, let alone terror?’

As it turns out, Sun Corp. has a forensics unit, Israel-based Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization, Ltd., which has been in the news because of the recent set-to between Apple and the US government over getting at the data on the San Bernardino shooter’s phone. Cellebrite was the company that was going to do the hacking.

The thought came to Sun’s CEO that the ability to pick the lock on an iPhone could end up being big business.

Chief Executive Officer Masanori Yamaguchi says his company wants to expand its work countering tech-savvy terrorists. Yamaguchi says he’s willing to spend as much as 20 billion yen ($185 million) to acquire or merge with companies to expand its sought-after data extraction business.

"Demand will never go away," Yamaguchi, 67, said from the company’s headquarters in Aichi prefecture southwest of Tokyo. "Extracting mobile phone data is the fastest way to solve crimes nowadays." (Source: Bloomberg)

Cellebrite has an impressive client list – FBI, CIA, Interpol – and, since Sun acquired it in 2007, its headcount has increased by more than an order of magnitude. The company anticipates that revenue growth will be as much as 20 percent annually.

"There are very few companies like us, and I think this is our strength," Yamaguchi said. "As for the next step, we’re open to the idea of teaming up with companies that possess unique technology in forensics. We will continue to search for an appropriate partner."

“Very few companies like us”? I’ll say.

Of course, Sun being in the electronic spy biz is not as farfetched as it might sound at first. Sun isn’t just a pachinko gamer, it’s been a PC and video game developers, and a maker of mahjong apps for the iPhone. How much of a leap is it to go from a mahjong app to security?

"We’ve been cutting weight of pachinko-related business while becoming increasingly reliant on Cellebrite," said Yamaguchi. "We want to keep improving our technology to provide better services and skills to make the world safe and peaceful."

Admittedly, pinball machines don’t make the world safer. And although they have, historically, kept young guys occupied who might have been up to no good, the pinball machine is probably not an instrument of much peace. But they have put smiles on many a face, including mine.

Next time I’m up in Salem, I may bop over to the Willows for a bit of pinball and a cone from Hobbs. ‘Blind Pat’ Kenneally, I suspect, is long gone, but I will also be on the lookout for double-jointed peanuts.

The “grey-quake”? Once again, Boomers are the in thing.

Occasionally, when I’m bored, I’ll answer my landline – the phone that no one who actually knows me uses. The callers typically fall into one of three categories:

• Trying to scam (sub-categories: “your credit card”, congratulations-you-won-a-vacation, in trouble with the IRS, sent by Microsoft by way of India);
• Looking for money (sub-categories: charities I’ve given to; charities I’ve never given to; politicians – nice talk to you last night, Russ Feingold dialing-for-dollars guy);
• Polling for my opinion (generally political, occasionally commercial product).

It’s when the pollers come a callin’ that it gets reinforced that I’m in the not-so-desirable “over 65” cohort.

Oh, I suppose we’re desirable enough to the politicians: we actually vote.

But, except for “no one can tell” adult diapers, nutritional supplements, and retirement communities, ain’t no one trying to sell us old geezers anything.

And this is not just my perception.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) calculates that less than 15% of firms have developed a business strategy focused on the elderly. The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister organisation to The Economist, found that only 31% of firms it polled did take into account increased longevity when making plans for sales and marketing. (Source: The Economist)

And Germaine Greer – and who would know better than Germaine Greer (b. 1939, and thus a pre-Boomer)  – has quite aptly said: “just because I’m over 60 nobody wants to sell to me.”

But the times, they might just be a changin’.

Those over 60 constitute the fastest-growing group in the populations of rich countries, with their number set to increase by more than a third by 2030, from 164m to 222m. Older consumers are also the richest thanks to house-price inflation and generous pensions. The over-60s currently spend some $4 trillion a year and that number will only grow.

Why, just yesterday (i.e., 50 years back), us Boomers were the “youth-quake.” Now, well, welcome to the “grey-quake.”

First, a bit of a digression. I know, I know. The Economist is a Brit publication. But I do think they’re off the mark with that “generous pension” bit. My career was in high tech, where there’s very little by way of pension, generous or paltry. So maybe I’m biased here. But most of the folks I know who actually have pensions taught school or were otherwise part of a unionized workforce. Those of us who labored in the tech vineyards got options (generally worthless) and have been pretty much left on our own with defined-contribution plans, where our employers as often as not defined their contribution as something as close to zero as possible. Which is not to say that we’re all hurting. Some of us just plain aren’t. Still, I know plenty Boomers who are plenty worried about retirement, even the ones who’ve been max funding their 401Ks all these years.

Of course, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, all Baby Boomers can’t be lumped into one big same-same demographic.

They loved Bob Dylan or the Beach Boys. (Sometimes and/or.) Boomers went to college or Vietnam. (Sometimes and/or.) The toked up or run a meth lab in the shed out back. (Sometimes and/or.) They worked in white collar jobs or broke their backs on construction sites. (Rarely and/or.) They retired – or plan to retire- in relative comfort. Or they’ll be working as Walmart greeters until they drop dead.

This lumping everyone together is not, of course, limited to the Baby Boomers. When people talk about Millennials they’re probably thinking more about kids in pricey colleges, sipping their lattes, being ironic, and requesting trigger warnings when a micro-aggression is coming on. Not a high school grad in upstate working as a prison guard so he can stay in his home town.

But when you start breaking down the Boomer demographic, and ignore the ones that will not have any money other than their Social Security, the marketers will be coming after the ones sitting pretty.

Some industries such as health care and automobiles have been thinking about the grey market for a while. Others such as retailing and consumer goods started paying attention more recently. Now comes the silver rush. A report by the McKinsey Global Institute points out that older consumers are one of the few engines of growth in an otherwise sluggish global economy…The old are becoming the new new thing.

The trick for marketers is figuring out how to pick our pockets without constantly and explicitly pointing out that we’re on the back 9, heading for the eternal 19th hole. Which – forever young until we’re forever dead – we just don’t want to hear:

Retailers are surreptitiously lowering shelves and putting in carpets to make it harder to slip. Package-goods firms are printing larger typefaces and using more white space. Kimberley-Clark has overhauled its Depend brand of adult nappies to make them more like regular underwear. Sabi, a design company, now sells walking canes in bright colours. Car firms don’t make a song and dance about the fact that old people with stiff necks and fading vision will benefit disproportionately from self-parking cars.

Well, hand me down that bright colored walking cane. And, please, do start marketing to me. Let’s see if I can figure out when it’s happening. I’ll be expecting a survey call any evening now. Love being part of the new new thing.

Codista? What’s YOUR time worth?

Not that I’m in search of one, but I’m ever on the lookout for interesting jobs. This has been a Pink Slip standby since way back in the day, when I believe my first one was about professional nit-picking, a job that has taken off since lice were reintroduced to the school systems a while back.

The one that I came across the other day was, alas, not in the US but, rather, in Italy. And the position of interest is “codista”, or queuer. As the name implies – queuer, not codista – a codista is someone who runs those errands that involve standing in line, like buying stamps, I guess which, other than TSA, is probably the line we’re most apt to find ourselves in. That an the line at the coffee shop. The closest thing we may have stateside to a codista is the guy that your car insurance company has run to the registry to get your plates.

Anyway, while the position is just invented, there is, apparently, quite the need for it in Italy:

According to Codacons, a consumer group, Italians spend on average 400 hours a year queuing. The annual time wasted is worth €40 billion ($44 billion), it estimates. (Source: The Economist)

400 hours a year? That would be roughly 8 hours a week?

I know that the Italians aren’t famous for their efficiency, but I’m calling cazzate on this one.

One workday per week devoted to standing in a line to get a paper stamped or a bill paid? Is this really possible? It sounds more like Soviet era life, when someone could spend a day in line hoping to get a roll of toilet paper made out of sandpaper.

Or course, while this just seems astounding to me, I really don’t know my Italy. I’ve only been there as a tourist, and the lines I’ve stood in have been at the Sistine Chapel (until I figured out you could pay a bit extra ahead of time to avoid it) and St. Peter’s (where my triumph on my last trip was body-blocking an aggressive young Spanish priest who was trying to push through the line. Sorry, padre.).

But Italy is known for its rather convoluted bureaucracy, and:

…it is not just Italy’s complex bureaucracy that keeps people waiting. Italian idiosyncrasies, which reflect a certain fiscal timidity, also play a role. Italy has one of the lowest rates of non-cash transactions in Europe. “Paying in cash is very widespread and people are generally reluctant to use either credit cards or direct debit,” says Mr Cafaro. This is consistent with the fact that Italy has one of the largest shadow economies in the rich world.

Anyway, the idea is the brainchild of Giovanni Cafaro. Cafaro, from what I can make of his Linkedin bio, is a marketing communications guy. Having lost his job, it came to him while he was waiting in line to pay a bill that he could offer his services to others who didn’t want to blow 8 hours a week waiting to pay their electric bills.

This is a real profession Cafaro has invented here, not just a one-off for himself.

Mr Cafaro has given the occupation a legal footing, with its own standardised contract, minimum pay (€10 an hour before deductions) and access to state-run industrial accident insurance (“in case, say, a codista trips on the stairs of a government office,” he explains). Mr Cafaro offers a five-hour course, which he gives over Skype. This includes learning the tedious requirements of central and local government departments for documents, signatures and charges.

I went over to the website of the capo di tutti codisti, but something was lost in translation.

They have left and are having considerable success my courses for Codisti with Skype.

Which I’ll translate as: unlike grads of Trump University, Codisti Skypers have found work in their chosen field.

I am receiving requests for Codisti from companies, professionals, caf and private, to be able to select Codisti trained and certified by me, I receive requests from North to South.

Can’t seem to find what “caf” means. The Italian is “caf,” and I’m too lazy to ping my paisano Peter to see if he knows what it means.

The Codista once trained and certified by me may practice codista-both as an employee or as a freelancer in Italy.

A codista may actually be hired by a company to run errands for employees so that they don’t spend all that time out of the office paying their cable bills. Or, like me, they can stay independent.

The bottom line is that it sounds like Cafaro is onto something here. The only downside is the paper work involved with hiring a codista requires standing in line. Or using a codista.