Talk about a soap opera!

Who among us hasn't had at least a tiny bit of a fantasy about a celeb? 

Say, when you're twelve, you might dream about being Dr. Kildare's fellow-intern girlfriend? Or an older woman might have George Clooney enjoying her cacio e pepe. 

Not that either of these fantasy sitches ever happened to anyone in the real world - not that I know of, anyway -  but I can imagine that they could possibly occur. The fantasies, not the realities. 

But for Roxanne Doucette, her fantasy life spilled over into her (sur)real world, and she's now being charged with attempted murder of her husband, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer - all because someone pretending to be a soap operat star she crushed on urged her to off her hubbie.

For poor addle-brained Roxanne, the messages from the guy who played Ridge Forrester - a soap name, if ever - on The Bold and the Beautiful were a dream come true. Here she was, getting on in years, a blue collar "girl" from Central Mass, living a life that was none too exciting. 

Roxanne Doucette had always wanted to meet a celebrity. And there she was, at 64, receiving a string of flirty text messages from soap opera veteran Thorsten Kaye. He called her “honey” and sent her heart emojis. He said he missed her, that he needed her in his life.

Then the messages took a sinister turn, according to police records. The mysterious admirer told her that she needed to get rid of her husband. (Source: Boston Globe)

Her MO for getting rid of her 73-year-old husband Paul was poisoning his soup. (Old family recipe?)

Meanwhile - and I can sympathize here - she was also duped out of $4K or 8K - I've seen both numbers - she could ill afford by the scammer she thought was (dropdead good looking) Thorsten Kaye. 

The plot unraveled when Paul D ate the soup and was hospitalized. While sitting with her mother in his hospital room, daughter Nicole Heath began "scrolling through her mother's phone" - as curious folks are inclined to do - and found some pretty incriminating Facebook messages between her Roxanne D and the fake Thorsten K. 

Here's what Heath found:

“You have to get rid of your husband honey. I need you so much,” the scammer told Doucette, who responded that she needed to do some thinking and would talk to him later. “Okay honey,” the scammer wrote back, according to the police report.

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., Doucette wrote that she was “making an amazing potion. Special potion. He will be hungry when he gets back. Just enough for him.” At 4:26 p.m., she wrote, “Hubby got back not feeling well. Maybe I can collect life insurance.”

“Honey when will that be?” the scammer asked. “Don’t know,” she said.

But Roxanne D acted fast, and a few minutes after this exchange, she was calling 911 to say that her husband was "unresponsive but breathing."

Hmmm.

This understandably made Heath a tad bit suspicious, and when her father came to, she asked him what had put him in the hospital. 

He said her mom had made him some soup but it wasn’t very good — it had a bitter taste.

This prompted Heath to call the police. When they arrived and tried to get her phone and tablet, Roxanne D refused to give them up. After repeated requests,

“She still refused. She also stated that we were done and that she was going to go back to her husband,” according to the police report. 

The cops weren't going to let her back in the room with a husband she might have tried to kill, and, when they went to arrest her, she kicked one of them in the crotch. Oh. 

Roxanne D claims that it's all a big mistake.

“What they say is wrong. Because I’m a wonderful cook. My son’s gone to culinary school. I learned from the best — my mom,” she said. “And I did not try to poison my husband.”

Her position is that her husband may have had a stroke.  

Sure, Thorsten was Facebooking sweet nothings in her ear. 

('Thorsten' was) saying that they loved me and they wanted me to leave my husband, but I had no intentions of leaving my husband. I love my husband very much," she said.

Paul D has a restraining order against Roxanne D. I'm not quite clear on what her status is, but I think she may be in home detention while the police complete their investigation Preliminary toxology reports didn't show the presence of any poison, but the tests were supposedly incomplete. Anyway, she keeps claiming her innocence.

“I want you to come home,” Doucette said [in a plea to Paul D]. “I did not hurt you.”

Talk about a plot worthy of a soap opera.  

I saw Roxanne D interviewed on the news, and she is completely pathetic - young old and restless, definitely in need of some guiding light. 

Sometimes folks just can't keep their fantasies in their head, where they belong.

All that rizz, Daddyo!

The Oxford English Dictionary - and who or what would know better? - recently declared rizz the Word of the Year for 2023. 

Rizz is not a word I've ever used, but I can imagine doing so at some point. Likely once it's found it's way to into the public domain after Gen Z has dumped it and left it to us Boomers. 

If you're not familiar with rizz, which may or may not be rooted in charisma, the word means:

....style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner," according to the Oxford University Press. (Source: NPR)

There's also some thinking that rizz can (also) mean game, as in you got game. (For this Boomer, the word brings to mind Ratso Rizzo, the creepy, pathetic character played by Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy.)

Either way, as words go, rizz may not slay*, but it's fine. I might have gone with one of the nominated, runner up words: Swiftie (Taylor Swift fan). Because, seriously, all hail Taylor Swift. 

Other words in contention were situationship ("an undefined romantic relationship") and de-influencing (the opposite of influencing; instead of urging people to buy something, a de-influencer urges people not to buy it). I'd never heard either of these words. (I will say I like the idea of de-influcencing. All hail, de-influencers of the world.)

Anyway, having a slang word (that would be rizz) as the word of the year - vs. a not-so-slangy coinage like de-influencing - got me thinking about the slang of my youth, the 1960's and 1970's, when the Boomers were the Gen Z of our era. 

Fink. Neat. Neato. Cool. Groovy. Far out. Bummer. Bummed out. What's the skinny? Right on. Threads. Bread. Grass. Dig it. 

Fink was very popular when I was in high school, and I definitely used it. It sometimes meant ratting someone out, but mostly it was used for a suck-up, goody-two-shoes, brownnoser. Or as an all-purpose word for a jerk, used where people today might say a-hole. 

Neat and cool were also in my vocab, but I don't think I ever uttered the word neato, unless I used it with air quotes. (If we had air quotes back then. Maybe we just rolled our eyes.)

Same goes for groovy and far out. Those were words I only used sarcastically, likely when making fun of real hippies, or the fake hippies that appeared regularly as characters on Mod Squad and Dragnet. (I did use groovy when I was feelin' groovy singing along with Simon and Garfunke's 59th Street Bridge Song.)

I'm pretty sure I used bummer, and bummed out. (Still do.) My mother - no slanger, that's for sure - also used the word bummer when desribing someone (a male someone) as being at least somewhat dissolute. Wondering about this usage, I did a quick search and found that - in my mother's usage - the word came from bummler, German for loafer. Another of her drag-overs from her mamaloshen was lausbub, which is German for brat. (We thought she was saying "louse-poop", by the way.)

I don't remember using what's the skinny back in the day, but I do use it on occasion.

Although I was pretty political back in the day, I don't recall using the term right on, but I may have gotten caught up in things and shouted it out to show my approval for a speaker at some demonstration or other.

Did I use threads for clothing? I don't think so. Did I call money bread? Maybe once in a while. Did I call marijuana grass? Absolutely. Dig it? 

Dig it? Never used this term. (Other than singing along with Friends of Distinction's Grazin' in the Grass - baby, can you dig it.)

Given my spotty record of fully adopting the slang of my generation, would I have used the word rizz? Well, Daddyo, I guess the answer's yes, no, maybe.

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*Look at me, using young folks slang! Sometimes I just slay.

The heart is a lonely worker

There are plenty of reasons to envy the younger generation. Most of these reasons fall under the umbrella of "they have their entire lives ahead of them," and all the joys and heartbreaks, the ups and downs, that comes along with having your entire life ahead of you. (Others fall under the umbrella of fewer aches and pains to deal with.)

There are, of course, countervailing reasons to feel bad what the young folks are dealing with. Factors like the existential threat of climate change. The uncertainty about what AI is going to do to wreak havoc with the job market. The crushing educational debt so many carry. The affordable housing shortage in so many cities. (Looking at you, Boston.) Political divisiveness. 

Every generation has its challenges, but the younger generations have them in spades.

And then when you add on the plague of loneliness.

...thanks to a longstanding decline in social connection, and a pandemic that forced much of the world into isolation, employees today are lonelier than ever. Earlier this year, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published a report that described “an epidemic of loneliness” that has taken root in America over the last several decades. Making matters more complicated is hybrid work, which has workers spending less time in the office than they did before the pandemic. While many employees enjoy more flexibility — and fewer days commuting — it also means that forming social connections with colleagues is more challenging than ever. (Source: Boston Globe)

And this difficulty forming social connections is worse when you're new to the workplace. You may have moved to a new city for work. You may have gone to college somewhere else, and your college buds are scattered all over the place. You may be living at home with dear old mom and dad.

Many of us meet lifelong friends, our significant others, at work. I know I did.

Work is where people connect in the kitchen making coffee, over an after-work beer, pre-meeting when we find commonality bitching about our boss, working together on a project team, sitting in the airport when our business trip flight's delayed. 

Even if the relationships we forge at work don't stand the test of  time, and even many that survive for years after you work together eventually peter out, they're still important while they last. Having work relationships can mean having someone to go to lunch with. Or hang with over the weekend. To go to a ballgame with, to go shopping. For most people, and even for many of those of us who are hard-core introverts, having folks to share life with is important for our emotional health.

I feel bad for the young people who don't have all the easy opportunities to socialize that my generation enjoyed. 

There's some good news:

Now employers are stepping in to do something about it, creating new initiatives that encourage workers to interact with each other outside of typical work meetings. One of the more common programs among Boston-area companies is a system that sets up randomized coffee chats for employees to get to know each other.

More or less good news, I suppose. A necessity given that normal social interactions no long come as naturally as once they did. 

Coffee chats aren't always in person at Blueprint. Some of them are over Zoom, which takes a little away from it - at least to me.

Blueprint, for example, has a program that pairs employees together for a coffee once a month. Workers can meet up in person, or sip coffee together over Zoom, and talk about life, hobbies, even work, if they so choose. “It’s been a game changer for me,” Durkin says. “I’ve met people at the company that I never would’ve met otherwise.”

The idea, says Debbie Durso-Bumpus, Blueprint’s chief people officer, is to more often stimulate the kind of water cooler discussions that once happened naturally. Those interactions, she says, can start friendships and help workers engage with the company at a deeper level. “We want people to feel connected to this company,” Durso-Bumpus says. “And we know people work better when they have relationships they look forward to at work.”

There isn’t one well-defined reason why Americans today are feeling lonelier than before, but office interactions are increasingly important. Constance Hadley, an organizational psychologist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, says Americans simply aren’t as social as in decades past, are less involved in civic groups, and don’t attend religious services at the same rate. That puts additional pressure on interactions at work to fulfill our social needs, Hadley says. While it may seem unnecessary, that water cooler talk is key for office workers to have adequate social lives. So, hybrid work may be leaving something of a void for workers.

Recent studies have indicated that some 60 percent of US adults reported feelings of loneliness. That should be alarming to companies, Hadley says, because there is a direct link between loneliness and productivity — it’s in an employer’s best interest for employees to have their social needs met. “We really can’t understate how pervasive of an issue loneliness is for workers,” Hadley says. “It impacts every part of their lives, and that comes back to harm the companies they work for. It’s a bad cycle.”

Programs such as Blueprint’s coffee chats are trying to break that cycle.

Entrada Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotech, has a similar program called “Coffee Roulette” that follows the same idea, with employees getting paired together every two weeks to meet up and have a discussion. Entrada started the program back in 2020 as a means of connecting employees when the office was fully remote, and it has stuck around because of its popularity.

“One of our company’s core values is humanity,” says Kerry Robert, Entrada’s senior vice president of people. “We think quite often about how to cultivate a culture that makes people feel included and part of a team. Coffee Roulette is just one small way that we do that.”

Triverus Consulting, a Woburn-based IT consulting firm, which is still mostly remote, has taken a different approach, giving workers the option to participate in virtual events such as a baking class with a chef from Flour Bakery + Cafe, meditation sessions, or company-wide games.

“It is particularly challenging to get employees feeling connected when we’re still remote,” says Kim Kuzmeskas, the company’s vice president of marketing. “We get great participation in our programs, and I think that speaks to the fact that people really do want to feel connected with their co-workers.”

While these programs are a great start, there’s still some work to be done. Laura Putnam, a workplace well-being expert, said that with loneliness on such a stark rise, employers need to establish a broader culture that makes their workers feel comfortable. Wellness programs can be a part of that, but it also means workers shouldn’t have to hesitate to speak openly about mental health, and there should be abundant resources for struggling employees.

“Loneliness is pretty tricky, and it can be difficult to talk about,” Putnam says. “These wellness programs are great, but they’re designed outside of how the work gets done.” The next step is making sure they’re incorporated into the regular work routine, to keep the connections coming.

Dumpling Daughter

Years ago - make that decades ago - there was a wonderful Chinese restaurant on the top of Beacon Hill that I frequented. If I've got my nearly 50 year recall right - and I'm pretty sure I do -  it was called the Great Wall. And if I've got my nearly 50 year recall right - and I'm pretty sure I do - it was run by Sally Ling and her family. 

And part of that family (although they weren't running the restaurant) was her kids, who were often there. There was a very sturdy little boy - maybe her son, maybe her nephew - who I picked up once, and it felt like lifting an anvil. And there was an adorable China-doll little girl, Sally's daughter (maybe three or four years old), who would come around with an order pad and pretend she was taking an order. 

Sally Ling, in the mid-1980's, went on to open the eponymous Sally Ling's, which may have been first "fine dining" Chinese restaurant in Boston. 

The Great Wall had closed, and we quickly switched allegiance to Sally Ling's, which was fabulous. There was one especially wondrous dish, some sort of noodle appetizer in a dark sauce. I can still taste it!

One thing we missed about Sally Ling's was that Sally Ling's kids weren't around, as they had been when she ran the Great Wall. They were, of course, growing up, no doubt staying home to do homework, etc. 

Turns out that little China doll grew up to be a restauranteur herself. Nadia Liu Spellman is the CEO of Dumpling Daughter.

I can't believe I'm just learning about her now, as she opened her first storefront in 2014, and now runs a mini-empire of informal restaurants and grocery store and online product sales. In 2023, she did over $4M in business.

But better late than never.

Sally Ling's was a white-tablecloth restaurant, and Nadia Liu Spellman deliberately chose a different route:

Dumpling Daughter is intentionally less glamorous than Sally Ling’s. Liu Spellman modeled it after her father’s advice. He [Edward Nan Liu] told her if she entered the food industry, she shouldn’t “open a high-end restaurant. [Instead] make a business model where you can sell a lot, but you don’t always have to be there,” Liu Spellman, 41, tells CNBC Make It. (Source: Boston Globe)

Before she got into the food-biz - which her parents had advised her against - Liu Spellman graduated from Babson College and spent a few years in finance in NYC. And while she was there, she realized that she'd rather cook than play with numbers. 

“As you get older, you think about [the] highlight moments of your childhood, and in a way, I really wanted to relive those moments,” Liu Spellman says. “I also wanted to pay respect to my parents’ [legacy].”

By the time Liu Spellman decided she wanted to do food, Sally Ling's in Boston had closed and had re-lo'd to Fort Lee, NJ. Liu Spellman became Sally Ling's GM "and used her observations to develop a 'quick service' restaurant business plan."

She decided to put this business plan into action in Boston. Actually, in suburban Weston, where she opened her first Dumpling Daughter. Her second was opened a few years later. 

There was a hiccup. Two former employees decided to open their own version of Dumpling Daughter, cleverly calling it Dumpling Girl. Liu Spellman sued them and "the competitors quickly asked to settle."

During covid, Liu Spellman started selling boxes of frozen dumplings direct to consumers. That business has expanded, and Dumpling Daughter now sells her dumplings and other products online and East Coast and Midwest grocery stores. One of those products is her "special brown sugar and chili oil dipping sauce," which sounds quite a bit like the sauce-that-I-can-still-taste on those scrumptious tiny dumplings I used to mow down at Sally Ling's.

Dumpling Daughter is still not profitable, but I'm going to do my bit to help. "My" grocery store, Roche Brothers, sells Liu Spellman's products, and I'll be on the lookout, once I free up some room in my freezer (currently over-stocked with Christmas cookies). If I can't wait for that to happen, I'll wait for a fine winter's day and stroll over to the Dumpling Daughter in South Boston.

I know that part of Nadia Liu Spellman's model is that she "doesn't always have to be there," but I'll be hoping I run into her and ask her whether she remembers taking orders at the Great Wall. 

There's mountains, and then there's molehills

I like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups as much as the next guy. After all, it combines two of my favorite food items: peanut butter and chocolate. What's not to like (even if the peanut butter doesn't actually taste like real peanut butter, at least not any brand I use)? 

And if I bought one of Reese's seasonal offerings - say, the Halloween pumpkin edition - I really wouldn't care if, when I opened the wrapper, the piece of candy I uncovered didn't look like a grinning jack-o'-lantern. Even if that grinning jack-o'-lantern was what was depicted on the wrapper. As long as I got the key ingredients - a chocolate something-or-other full of peanut butter.  

But I'm not Cynthia Kelly, a Florida woman who is suing Hershey's - maker of Reese's - for $5 million, through a class action suit, because she feels she was tricked into buying the "cute looking" candies, withe their "artistic designs," lured by a bogus picture on the bag. The pumpkins, she claimed, were:

...falsely advertised since the actual treats don’t have details seen on the packaging, like mouths and eyes... 

She submitted photos that compared the chocolate to the packaging. “Reese’s, what are you doing,” the lawsuit reads. “Look at the picture on the packet. It’s like a pumpkin with faces and a little mouth—then you open up the packet and you are presented with that monstrosity.” (Source: Yahoo)

Not that I looked all that hard for a jpg of it, but "that monstrosity" looked like an uncarved pumpkin. But, to Cynthia Kelly, it was $5M worth of aggrievement. (The Yahoo article, btw, reported that Kelly was seeking $5B worth of damages. As in $5 BILLION. But the correct - but still mountain-out-of-mole-ish amount - is $5 MILLION. And it's not clear whether a judge will accept this case.)

According to some of those commenting on the articles I've seen, the fine print on the packaging states that the purchaser needs to do the carving to get the cute little face. But who reads the fine print on candy packaging? And, truly, who has the time, interest, and skillset to carve a face in a Reese's pumpkin? Even if you have the toolset - in my case, that would be a lobster pick, trying to carve the small squishy Reese's pumpkin surface would result in a tortured mess, far uglier than Cynthia Kelly's "monstrosity." But is this issue worth $5M?

FFS.

Yes, the packaging is a bit deceptive, but the normal reaction should be rolling your eyes and proceeding to bite in. Whether there's a cute little face on the piece of candy or not, it all ends up in the same place in your stomach, no? In fact, it can be argued that, absent the carve outs, you actually get more chocolate. 

The level of harm isn't even equivalent to what someone would experience upon buying a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken only to take the lid of and realize that the bucket is NOT overflowing - filled to way beyond the brim - with gorgeous, greasy KFC drumsticks. 

Surely, there are more important things to fight for. 

Not so fast, says attorney Anthony Russo, who's bringing the suit on behalf of Kelly and every other duped Reese's buyer in the state of Florida.  

"Today, it's a $2 item — tomorrow it's your vehicle, the next day it's your home," he told NPR. "It could be your life savings or your nest egg that you're saving for your retirement. It could be anything if it is not kept under control." (Source: NPR)

First, they came for your candy money, then they're killing your 401K.

Yet again, FFS!!!

Aren't there more worthy causes that Russo's firm could be working on, rather than tying up the courts with this nonsense? 

Guess so!

Russo's firm is also representing the plaintiffs in a class action suit against Burger King, claiming that the company uses misleading advertising to represent its food items as larger than they are.

Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce!

Whatever happened to caveat emptor?

Geek companies rule? (Sorry I missed it!)

My career was in the tech world, in geek companies. 

Prior to the late 1970's/early 1980's, the word geek had a meaning that wasn't associated with technology. In the least. It meant a carnival worker who "entertained" the audience by, say, biting off the head of a chicken. The word then migrated to mean techies - largely guys - who were totally absorbed in the tech world and, as likely or not, were also social oddballs. (Think Asperger's.) 

The word geek in the techie world initially had a slightly pejorative context. (Think Asperger's.) But over time, it developed into a badge of honor. 

In the early days of the Internet, someone came up with the idea of crowning the Sexiest Geek Alive. It was supposed to be based entirely on brains and tech cred, but the 2000 (I believe this was the inaugural year) winner had the bonus of being pretty good looking. I know this because, in the year 2000, the Sexiest Geek Alive was Tony Northrup, a colleague of mine at Genuity. I can't say I knew him all that well, but we worked together on a few projects, and he was definitely brainy, very easy to work with, and - yes - pretty darned handsome. (I justgoogled and he became a professional photographer. And he's still pretty darned handsome.)

Whether we called them techies, nerds, or geeks, for all their brainy weirdness, I much enjoyed working with them and being part of the tech world. 

But there was nothing that I experienced in that world that led me to believe that a tech company was any sort of paradise. 

I worked for companies that were absurdly bureaucratic. Secretive in their decision making. Deceptive in their communications. At times anything but human or humane. And not exactly open to openness and criticism. 

This was the case whether the companies I worked for were led by geeks, or just employed a ton of them.

In other words, for all the laxity on dress codes, widespread irreverence, and tolerance of oddball behavior, which were hallmarks of the places I worked, those places were pretty much like every other business.

So I was a bit surprised - and maybe even a bit-een skeptical - when I saw a Boston Globe article a while back headlined Why are ‘geeky’ companies winning? It’s about culture, not tech.

The article profiled MIT Sloan School researcher Andrew McAfee who, at a 2009 meeting at HubSpot, where he was doing some consulting. (True confession: HubSpot is a marketing services/tech company where, if I were younger - a lot younger - I would be interested in working.) 

Back in 2009, McAffee, along with Brian Halligan, HubSpot's cofounder, made a presentation to employees. Then came the post-preso feedback/Q&A session. When here's what happened:

“This baby-faced, brand-new hire was the first person to speak,” McAfee recalls. “And he stood up and began by saying, ‘There are a couple things I don’t like.’ And he went on from there.”

McAfee knew this guy had stepped in it. Later, he told Halligan how weird it was that a young employee had contradicted the boss in front of other people. And Halligan looked at McAfee and said: “What kind of company do you think I’m trying to build here?”

Nearly 15 years later, McAfee — who has spent decades advising corporations and executives — believes that meeting at HubSpot was transformative in a way he didn’t understand at the time. The company was part of a new wave of what McAfee calls “geeky” companies, which he believes have outcompeted traditional corporate America — in large part by eschewing bureaucracy, red tape, and boot-licking.

“Standard practice is when the very senior person asks for feedback, what they get is applause,” McAfee says. Their ideas are brilliant, inspired, genius. Even if most people know they’re not always so hot.

With the exception of Wang Labs, I don't recall any company I worked for that expected/demanded applause when the head folks spoke. (Wang was a special case. When I was there, in founder An Wang's final years, there was breathtaking reverence for Dr. Wang that definitely approached boot-licking at its most craven.)

No, most of the places I worked invited direct feedback, however reluctantly, and withstood direct questioning at all-hands meetings and other forums. It was just that anything that the head honchos didn't want to hear, let alone act on, went in one executive ear and out the other. 

But McAfee contends that, just about the time Tony Northrup was being crowned the Sexiest Geek Alive, a "new breed of company" emerged which:

...has proven that its approach is far superior to that of more old-school companies. And he says those who cling to the old ways will soon be eclipsed by cultures that allow people to say what they really think, value data-driven decisions over cults of personality, iterate quickly, and give their employees more autonomy and responsibility.

And these "geek" companies don't necessarily have to be techie companies. Whatever the industry, it's the culture that matters not whether the industry is tech (as in Amazon and Google) or not (even though non-tech companies are increasingly tech-driven).

Anyway, I hope it's true that geek companies rule, and that tech companies are leading the way. 

I'm just sorry I missed it....

Bye-bye anxiety. (What, me worry?)

No doubt about it. There are plenty of reasons to be anxious. 

Climate change. The ghastly political situation in general. Trump & Company in particular. Covid. Racism. The immigrant crisis. Gun violence. Ukraine. The scourge of addiction. Incipient fascism. Reproductive rights under threat. Homelessness. The Mideast. The availability - and cost - of healthcare. AI, and the big question: will the benefits outweigh the prospect of wholesale job loss? Etc.

If we're not worrying about all of this for ourselves, figuring that we'll be dead and gone before the full apocalypse is visited upon us, we toss and turn about the generations coming after us. Our family members, our younger friends, their kids and so on.

Speaking of younger, if you're part of the rising generation, you can heap on a surfeit of college debt and the lack of affordable housing. 

If you're gay or trans, well...

I have friends - a gay couple who live in Texas - who are actively figuring out where to flee to. They're looking in the Northeast, where they're both from. But they're also considering a move to Europe. J just got his Irish passport, and R is going after his German one. Lucky them: if things go completelyto hell here, they've got an escape hatch. (I have told them that their options are figuring out how they can adopt someone who's old enough to be their mother; or, their getting divorced and one of them marrying me. I'm good either way.)

Every generation has faced difficult situations, but the mix today is so grave, existential on some fronts - with everything compounded and magnified by relentless 24/7 social media and blaring news - it's no wonder that anxiety is so prevalent. 

Fortunately - and not surprisingly - there's "an industry eager to monetize our distress."

...Where there’s a panic attack, insomnia, a racing heart, there’s an industry eager to monetize the symptoms, and by this point in our collective breakdown, CBD gummies are just the start. (Source: Boston Globe)

Once you get past -or out-anxiety - goodies like CBD gummies, and old standbys like anti-anxiety meds, cures for the anxiety that ails you include "an anti-anxiety IV drip at a hydration bar run by nurses." You can tap anti-anxiety sound apps that are supposed to calm your nerves, choosing from a long menu of variations on the theme of rain, including "rain on a tent, rain on an umbrella, [and] rain on leaves. 

You can lay your anxious body down on a an acupressure mat, which is a rebranded bed of nails. There's even a popular brand called Bed of Nails. (Truth in advertising?) 

You've heard of ThunderShirts for dogs? The wraps that help your pupper through stressful situations like a thunderstorm? You can get yourself, or the human of your choice, an anti-anxiety blanket. 

There's also the rise of anti-anxiety influencers, who take to TikTok to tout their coping strategies, including mowing down Sour Patch Kids. 

I don't know about you, but the thought of there being anti-anxiety influencers kinda-sorts is raising my anxiety level. 

If only I had some Sour Patch Kids to suck on. A cure for hiccups I've used is gulping down a jigger of vinegar. Wonder if it'd work on anxiety?

Only connect!

Other than Twitter/X, where I mosey around, occasionally commenting but rarely tweeting, I'm not really part of any online "community." But I think if I were still working, I'd be inclined to join - and actively participate in - a high-tech marketing community. 

Pre social media, I was, after all, something of a half-baked expert on core messaging, product positioning, product marketing, etc. I wrote a series of articles for Pragmatic Marketing, the mag of the Pragmatic Marketing Institute (now renamed the Pragmatic Institute) which were turned into a eBook. And damned if it's still out there. The overarching theme was that there was a set of timeless rules that product marketers live by. The cover design of the ebook showed the title carved in stone. I never liked it, but given how old - and old-school - that ebook is, the ancient look is kind of appropriate.

On occasion, someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn because they just read my book. At least one marketing professor out there used it in his class at one point.

So, yeah, I do like to share what I know, and if I were still a marketing professional, I might take part in an online community. 

But since I'm no longer a professional anything, there's no need and little interest in my doing so.

Nevertheless, I do have a residual, teensy-weensy bit of interest in reading about online communities. 

So I was residually, teensy-weensy-ly interested in an article by Scott Kirsner I saw in the Boston Globe last month. 

The article centered on HubSpot, a local marketing software company which I have long thought would be an interesting place to work. If I were a professional anything interested in any place to work. (Among other attractions, one of the cofounders is a fellow MIT Sloan School alum, although way, way, way after my time.)

HubSpot owns an outfit called Connect.com, which provides a forum where marketing pros are invited to:

Grow your career by joining communities of like-minded professionals where you can connect with others, all on a network that lets your expertise and personality shine.

I might not have been drawn to a forum that explicitly said that I could let my personality shine there, but, come to think of it, why not. If I were going to join, sure, let that shining personality rip. And, of course, my expertise. What's not to to like about "spend[ing] time chatting and answering each others' questions."

Turns out that getting Connect.com to actually start connecting folks hasn't been all that easy. 

Most of the forums on Connect.com are as quiet as the halls of the convention center on Christmas morning. The bulk of the messages are written by HubSpot employees, except for one forum, “Talent Match,” where people post in search of jobs or freelance work.

Connect.com has about 30,000 members, but hopes to grow that number by an order of magnitude in 2024. (Order of magnitude? Let that MIT freak flag fly!) 

There are doubters out there - one who posits that Connect.com is too generic, and that the communities that take off tend to be more niche focused. 

Case in point: the most active forum on Connect.com is niche-y: focused on using AI. 

Hmmmm.

As I said, if I were still a professional, I'd be inclined to take a look. And I'd be inclined to take a look at what's going on with AI.

Over the next decade, AI is going to upend a lot of professional, knowledge-worker jobs. I do believe the survivors will be those who don't resist AI, but learn how to exploit it.

Just sayin'.

And if I were still a professional, I just might be over on Connect.com just sayin'. After all, wasn't that what E.M. Forster advised us to do? Only connect?

Wayfair, you got just what no one needs

I don't actually need much of anything. 

But if I did actually need much, a lot of what I need house-wise (or at least want) would come from Wayfair. 

So in December, when I decided not to use paper napkins for my Christmas Eve gathering, I ordered some nice festive read and green cotton/linen napkins from Wayfair.

And on Christmas evening, as I was settling in after a couple of long (but merry and bright) days, I decided I was going to replace the silverware chest that holds my late mother's silver. My sister Trish and I share custody of this silver - my sister Kath has my grandmother's - but the ancient (c. late 1940's) mahogany chest has gotten pretty battered over the years. The velvet lining, in particular when it comes to the slots for knives, has seen better days. Even when my mother was alive and in possession, some of the slots were thumbtacked into place. The lid is scarred. And I just got sick of looking at it. (My niece Molly, who is artsy and crafts-y, is going to turn the original into something or other.)

Anyway, Wayfair. I'm not a capital-F Fangirl, but it has met my, ahem, needs over the years. 

But I know the company - which I really and truly want to like, and want to succeed, given that it's local - isn't perfect. They've had some how-not-to-do-layoffs issues over the years, and those issues haven't going away. They had multiple pink slip events last year, both major and minor weekly (minor unless you're one of those laid off). And right before Christmas, their CEO sent out the Grinch-Scrooge of a tone-deaf all-company email.

Before I take on the tone-deaf email thang, a quick comment on weekly lay-offs. As a high tech veteran, I've been through more lay-offs than I can count, but one of the worst was with a company that wanted to stay under the public-announcement radar, so they conducted irregular mini-layoffs that kept everyone on edge. I also did freelance writing for a company that did the same thing. It's far worse than anticipating a major lay-off and getting it over with. Wayfair had a couple of major lay-offs in 2023, including one that cut 10% of their workforce. But I'm sure it's the ad hoc mini-layoffs that get on everyone's nerves.

Anyway, in mid-December, what to the wondering eyes of the surviving employees did appear but a jolly-holiday all-hands email from co-founder and CEO Niraj Shah.

“Working long hours, being responsive, blending work and life, is not anything to shy away from,” Shah wrote in the email obtained by the Globe. “There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Admittedly, Wayfair has had a rocky boom-bust time of it, with sales fluctuating and stock price rollercoasting (and way off it's 2021 peak).

But did anyone in HR or Shah's communications team check this bah-humbug message larded with gems like "working long hours...blending work and life...history of laziness." Which, of course, the average employee will infer means 'the head guy doesn't think we work long enough hours even though with all the layoffs we've all taken on more tasks; he wants us to be on the clock 24/7; and he thinks we're lazy.'

Happy holidays to you, too, Mr. Shah.

Shah’s pre-holiday email, which went out at 2:07 a.m. on Dec. 13, also requested that employees be more frugal. “I would also encourage you to think of any company money you spend as your own,” he wrote. “Everything is negotiable and so if you haven’t then you should start there.”

Nothing wrong with encouraging employees to spend the company's money carefully. But couldn't this be reserved for a post-holiday email? Or something that you'd have managers with employees with spending authority convey directly, because - get this - at least in places I've worked, most people don't have any spending authority. 

Shah's email did include some more rah-rah sentiments - the kind that seem more appropriate to an end-of-a-tough-year message to the troops. Market share is up! Repeat customers are doing more repeating! (Hey, that's me!!!) We're profitable!

I've experienced grinchy holiday messages. 

The last (blessedly) Christmas I worked at Wang, the new CEO canceled the sweet tradition of having department holiday parties on Christmas Eve morning, for which employees were encouraged to bring their kids in. There was Santa, gifts for the kiddos, etc. And we all got the afternoon off.

But Rick "Scrooge" Miller decided this would no longer fly, and we all got this snippy email saying that anyone who took off a moment early on Christmas Eve better be putting in for vacation time. Bah to your humbug, Wangers. 

After Wayfair's grumpy email went public, the company released a statement touting their "culture of open communication" and "the values that have contributed to Wayfair's success."

Hard to believe that one of their core values is crapping on their employees by implying they're lazy...

Perhaps inevitably, late last week there was this from Wayfair:

Wayfair is cutting jobs for the third time in the past 18 months as the struggling online retailer strives for profitability.

The Boston company on Friday said it would cut 1,650 jobs, or 13 percent of its workforce. “We’re reducing team sizes across the organization, as well as reducing seniority in certain roles that we plan to rebuild with modified leveling over the course of this year,” chief executive Niraj Shah said in a statement. (Source: Boston Globe)

I trust that the announcement of this latest round of layoffs was ably, kindly, and gently communicated to Wayfair staff. /s

Talk about ghost written...

Years ago, one of my clients was trying to come up with a lot of content for their website. And come up with it cheaply and quickly. 

They got what they paid for: a lot of half-arsed content that was in large part cut and paste from wikipedia articles, with an occasional word change so that the content could qualify - at least in their minds - as original.

The client ended up paying me to redo the content, which - of course - they should have hired me to do from the jump.

This was before the days of ChatGPT. But it was in the age when services were offering "writing" - or cutting and pasting - for cheap, often from folks from overseas who were willing to work for pennies an hour.  

I suspect that outsourced writing now would be better, and that if AI were the "writer," it could be instructed to create content that wasn't a direct grab from wikipedia. And that the content would likely past muster for several page layers down on the website, where it's purpose is to provide generic background information and to help with search engine optimization.

And I suspect that this is what Sports Illustrated had in mind - at least kinda sorta - when they used AI to create a bunch of lowdown articles. 

Sports Illustrated’s website, beneath the quality articles from its remaining magazine staff, is a content mill with little to no quality control. Freelancers paid very little churn out content on team-oriented sites, slap the Sports Illustrated name on the articles, and post them on various social media outlets to chase clicks. These sub-sites aren’t about journalism or quality, but hitting quotas. It’s a cynical play, but not an unfamiliar one.

In the case of the AI articles that were scrubbed, they were affiliate-link partnerships so deep on the site, most of Sports Illustrated’s actual editors did not know they even existed — and there was little to no oversight from those in charge of the content farms. (Source: Boston Globe)

But AdVon Commerce, the content mill SI used to come up with the bogus content, went beyond just providing the "written" word. 

Unlike my client, on whose website the content (other than their blog) is all anonymous, the content on SI was:

...an assortment of articles bylined by writers who didn’t exist — with accompanying headshots that originated on a website selling images generated by Artificial Intelligence.

Bylined articles? Fake writers? Bogus headshots?

Even if no one reads the articles, this is pretty scandalous behavior. 

AdVon, the outfit that produced the fake crap, claims on their website that "We Don’t Capture Value, We CREATE Value."

Well, value for themselves I guess.

But for Sports Illustrated readers? 

Way back in the way back, I was one of them. When I was a kid, my family subscribed to SI. Most of the folks in our house, from my father on down, liked sports. Plus we were all readers. So we got, along with Newsweek, Look, Readers Digest, Catholic Digest, The Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Family Circle, Jack 'n Jill, Boys' Life, Calling All Girls, Seventeen, whatever the VFW and American Legion's rags were called, and as my sister Kath and I entered our sophisticated teen years, The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly - Sporting News and Sports Illustrated.

Sporting News, as I recall, was a bit lower-brow, or was at least more focused on data and just-the-facts, ma'am news - while Sports Illustrated had the better sportswriters. 

SI, ironically enough, is owned by an outfit called Authentic Brands Group. Authentic? Hah! But, of course, Authentic isn't to blame. 

(...It licensed publishing rights to Arena Group, which outsourced some content to third-party company AdVon. Arena Group pinned the situation on AdVon, so it also outsources blame, apparently.)

AdVon, for their party, supposedly told Arena that "the posts were written by humans but that they had used a pseudonym to protect authors’ privacy." (There's precious little info on the AdVon Commerce website. I'm wondering whether the people shown on the team page - first names and pics, only; no click through to even a slim little bio - are real. But on their linked in page, they lead with the company providing ML (Machine Learning)/AI solutions for eCommerce. Hmmmm.)

It's easy to see that things on the AI-as-writer front are going to get a lot worse, at least for human writers who love to write, and readers who love to read material written by real writers. 

I don't think we're there yet, but will we know when it happens? Will we perceive a difference between human-written and AI-generated content? Will anybody care?

Hard to believe that AI - at least, here's hoping, in my lifetime - will be able to write poetry like Seamus Heaney or short stories like Alice Munro. But easy to believe that AI can generate a script for a Hallmark holiday movie, if it's not doing it already.

There's ghost-written, and then there's ghost-written. 

Shame on Sports Illustrated- or whoever owns or publishes or outsources or whatevers for them - that they would resort to this approach.

I was going to leave the last word to Chad Finn, an actual human Boston Globe sportswriter, who wrote the article cited here:

...it’s so sad to see the life wrung out of it by parasitic owners who value Sports Illustrated’s name as a brand while disregarding why it once meant so much to so many.

And then I saw this in Globe:

Much of the staff of Sports Illustrated, and possibly all remaining writers and editors, received layoff notices Friday, which essentially could spell the end of a publication that for decades was the gold standard of sports journalism.

R.I.P, S.I....

Did we really need something else to worry about??? (Part Two.)

Just yesterday I was doing my not-so-friendly-skies fretting about the lack of air traffic controllers.

Today, it's windows - or doors, or kinda-sorta doors - popping open. (Note to self: never sit in a window seat next to one of those kinda-sorta doors, and keep that seatbelt buckled.)

Frankly, this is something that, in all my years of flying, I've never worried about. 

Not that I shouldn't have been worried about it. 

In 1989, a door blew off a United Airlines flight, sucking nine passengers out the hole. What a ghastly way to go, but I'm guessing that the death would be pretty instantaneous.

In the 1989 case, the plane was a Boeing 747. In the most recent incident, which was on a Alaska Airline flight, it was a Boeing 737 Max 9.

Fortunately, in the recent incident no one was sucked into oblivion. One passenger's shirt was ripped off his body but - thanks to his having his seatbelt on - he didn't follow it.

One of the reasons no one was sucked out the door was that the seats in that row were empty. As my friend (and Pink Slip regular) Valerie noted in an email, "When was the last time you were on a domestic flight that had two empty seats near a window .. or anywhere?"

Good point.

The blown out door follows other problems for the 737 Max line, which is Boeing's best seller.

In 2018-2019, 737's were involved in two fatal crashes in which nearly 350 people were killed. Boeing lost billions, and all kinds of questions about the company's commitment to quality and reliability were raised. 

And now this.

The entire situation is, of course, a fiasco for Boeing. Financial. Employee morale. Marketing. 

Boeing's stock price has plummeted.

Whether they were directly involved in design or production of the 737 Max 9's, Boeing employees have to feel terrible.

And I'm guessing that there are plenty of airlines rethinking the orders they've placed for 737's - a complete sales and marketing nightmare. How'd you like to be a Boeing salesperson in negotiations for a big sale, or about to go knocking on an airline's door. Or a marketing professional working on a new campaign. Who needs a reliable airplane, anyway? Yowza. 

But one company with wares that played a minor role in the Alaska Airlines' debacle is coming out looking pretty good, and that's Apple. After all, along with the teenaged boy's shirt, a passenger's iPhone was also sucked out the hole in the fuselage. And it survived a 16,000 foot plummet to the ground, where it was found in Portland, Oregon.

The iPhone was lying on the ground, in airplane mode, with its battery half full. The screen, fully intact, showed a $70 receipt for two checked bags on Alaska Airlines flight 1282. (Source: Washington Post)

The phone was found by fellow who posted about it on Twitter. Another phone that was on flight 1282 is also in the hands of the National Transportation Safety Board, but there's no word on what type of phone it is, and whether it, too, survived the fall. Whether Phone #2 was an iPhone or not really doesn't matter. An iPhone survived a 16,000 foot fall! 

This would no doubt surprise many smartphone owners, iPhone or other, given that "nearly anyone who’s owned a smartphone has had the experience of dropping one and cracking the screen." (Been there/done that.)

No one (including iPhone marketers - so far anyway) is claiming that this translates into the survival superiority of the iPhone. 

Here's what the iPhone user guide says:

“Handle iPhone with care. It is made of metal, glass, and plastic and has sensitive electronic components inside...the iPhone or its battery can be damaged if dropped, burned, punctured, or crushed, or if it comes in contact with liquid.”

The iPhone survived not due to any special design, but thanks to physics.

...though smartphone screens have become a lot stronger over the years, this phone’s survival is most likely because of physics.

“The basic answer is air resistance,” said Duncan Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo. “I think the counterintuitive thing here is that an iPhone falling from the sky doesn’t end up moving that quickly because of air resistance.”

Any object falling through toward Earth will reach a point, known as its terminal velocity, where the force of gravity can’t accelerate it anymore because of resistance from the air in the atmosphere.

“If the phone is falling with its screen facing the ground, there’s quite a lot of drag, but if the phone is falling straight up and down, there’s quite a bit less,” Watts said. “In reality, the phone would be tumbling quite a bit, and get quite a lot of wind essentially giving an upward force.”

That's about enough physics for any one post. I also read that it helped that the tumbling iPhone may have had its fall broken by landing on a bush, and from there, soft ground, and not the pavement. 

Still, it's interesting to think about what iPhone marketers could make of its survival. Here's what my friend Valerie - a highly successful, long-experienced tech marketing professional - had to say:

...the  iPhone that fell 16,000 feet landing unphased and uncracked fully operational? Visions of 'takes a lickin and keeps on tickin' [a long-ago Timex ad campaign] or an ape using a samsonite suitcase like a jungle gym ...

I could only imagine what happy dance the marketeers at Apple did on hearing the news. Talk about campaigns that write themselves... Never mind all the people who've tanked their iphones by a dip in the toilet or a 3 foot slip to the floor.

As a committed non-Apple person, I usually don't pay much (if any) attention to iPhone ads. But I'll be on the lookout for any ads showing the iPhone being sucked out the hole in an airplane. (Which should, of course, include the David Bowie music from The Man Who Fell to Earth.)

Still, the issue of the day isn't the survival of the plummeting iPhone. It's the worrisome issue of getting sucked out a hole in the fuselage of a Boeing 737 Max 9...As if we need something else to worry about.

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

Thank you, Valerie, oh content queen, for your timely and crucial contribution to Pink Slip.  

Did we really need something else to worry about??? (Part One.)

I suppose if I thought about it, flying would make me nervous. After all, there you are, tens of feet in the air in a long skinny metal can loaded with highly-flammable jet fuel. And at any given time there are about 10,000 other long skinny metal cans loaded with highly-flammable jet fuel sharing air space and runways with yours. 

And yet, I've never - despite having an immense fear of heights - been nervous flying. 

But maybe I should be. 

Or at least when it comes to the bit where you're taking off or landing. 

This after reading a December NY Times article on how air traffic controllers (ATCs) are being pushed to the limit. The article created a fair amount of buzz when it was published, with a ton of focus on (rare) instances of drunk or stoned controllers falling asleep on the job. But it's the overall picture, the "glaring vulnerabilities," that are pretty grim:

In the past two years, air traffic controllers and others have submitted hundreds of complaints to a Federal Aviation Administration hotline describing issues like dangerous staffing shortages, mental health problems and deteriorating buildings, some infested by bugs and black mold. (Source: NY Times)

Sure, they can make pretty good money - the median salary in 2022 was $132K - but it's a highly pressured, high stakes job, that has ATCs spending "hours a day glued to monitors or scanning the skies," which sounds absolutely dreadful. One thing to be glued to monitors when your tasks are varied. Another to be staring at the same old, same old. ATCs are working 10-hour days, 6-days a week. The facilities they work in are often old and deteriorated. Broken elevators mean climbing hundreds of stairs to get to the "office." Etc.

The result is a fatigued, distracted and demoralized work force that is increasingly prone to making mistakes, according to a Times investigation....

While the U.S. airspace is remarkably safe, potentially dangerous close calls have been happening, on average, multiple times a week this year, The Times reported in August. Some controllers say they fear that a deadly crash is inevitable.

"Significant" issues are up 65 percent over last year, while air traffic itself was up just 4 percent. "Significant" incidents are things like having one plane turn into the path of another, or bringing in a plane too low 

As with pilots, many ATCs experience mental health problems associated with job stress. As with pilots, many don't want to risk jeopardizing their jobs if they report mental health issues. 

Instead, many are taking early retirement or just deciding it's just plain time to find a new line of work. 

The lack of ATCs is nothing new.

Ever since the Reagan administration replaced thousands of striking controllers, the agency has struggled to keep pace with waves of retirements. The problem grew worse during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the F.A.A. slowed training of new controllers.

Yet another thing to thank Ronald Reagan for.

For the current fiscal year, the F.A.A. sought $117 million to train controllers and hire 1,800 new ones.

But all these new hires are only projected to produce "a net increase of fewer than 200 controllers by 2032."

Overall, over the past decade, we have fewer ATCs dealing with an increase in air traffic. By some measures, "99 percent of the nation's air traffic control sites are understaffed."

I don't suppose that Boston's Logan is among the 1%?

Just what we needed: one more thing to worry about. 

The man in the gray flannel suit

Over the course of my career, I saw the corporate dress code go from button-downed/buttoned up to pretty much anything goes. This was, of course, before work from home was much of a thing, so I never worked in a "pants-optional" environment. 

Still, there were standards of sorts, and certain things were frowned on. One colleague (not surprisingly, a techie) showed up one day in a pair of cut-offs that barely covered his junk. He completed his ensemble with a pale yellow shirt that looked suspiciously like a pajama top. His shirt/PJ top had a number of small holes in it, and the back was enhanced by what appeared to be flecks of blood. He was read the riot act by pretty much everyone whose path he crossed that day, and from that day on, pulled his socks up, metaphorically. 

My career was in high tech, which was notoriously leading- edge when it came to informal work garb. I worked at one place that had a "corporate tie," which the execs would put on if they were called in (unplanned) to a client meeting. 

Other places I worked were dressier. At Wang, the techies - as I recall - wore collared shirts and maybe a tie. But the folks in product management and marketing, as I was, wore suits every day. (This was in the day of the menswear suit for women, worn with a menswear shirt with floppy bowtie or a silk shirt with a pussy bow.)

All in all, as time wore on, dress codes at work because less and less that of the prior generation, when white collar men wore suits, and pink collar women wore suits or dresses. 

Even as dressing down became more common, I was never much of a jeans-at-work person. Over the years, I eventually gravitated towards pants or skirt worn with a sweater or shirt and jacket. Men (other than techies) wore khakis and a polo or collared shirts, maybe with a navy blue blazer. All of this came under what we thought of as the business casual category.

The work world is now a different place - even in the downtown precincts where suits were pretty much de rigueur. The man in the gray flannel suit? He's no more.

And downtown folks are apparently grappling with just what business casual means. As local stylist Tara West has observed.

It’s particularly confounding for clients who traditionally have operated in  a conservative suit-and-tie business environment, West says.

“It’s: What do I do? How do I dress? And how do I feel comfortable and show up in the right way?” says West, who runs an eponymous fashion styling company. “People get stumped, especially now, on what is too casual and what is right.” (Source: Boston Globe)

It doesn't sound like any formerly-formal places are moving to "anything goes." If jeans are okay, it's non-ripped jeans. If sneakers are okay, they're Allbirds. 

The relaxation of the corporate dress code is largely happening because the rising generations in the workforce expect it. The ability to dress down is seen as a means to recruit and retain employees. 

Beyond wanting to remain an attractive place to work, however, the shift toward a less-formal dress code allows employers to be more inclusive of gender-fluid workers, those with disabilities, and a multigenerational workforce.

And as UNLV history professor Deirdre Clemente has observed:

“Dress is now a variable in workplace culture in ways they couldn’t have imagined a century ago,” Clemente says. “It’s individuality, personal expression, ethnicity, sexual identity. . . . Those are protected spaces.”

All this is bad news for the likes of retailers like Jos. Banks and Brooks Brothers. And folks can no longer fall back on the old get-Dad-another-tie-for-Father's Day habit. Plus it's not good news for dry cleaners, either. Dockers and jeans go in the washing machine. But informal dress at work is good news for the athleisure market, which is growing crazily. 

The bottom line is flexibility, self-expression, accommodation, use your judgement, un-relax as needed. For CarGurus, a local tech company, they have "explicitly...'no dress code dress code.'

I'm all for it. As long as no one shows up with a junk-revealing cut-offs and blood-flecked PJ tops...

MLK Day, 2024

If Martin Luther King, Junior, had lived - rather than get mowed down in his early prime, at the age of 39 - he'd be an old man. Ninety-five. Today. 

When anyone dies so young, especially leaders, it's hard not to play "what if?"

What would have happened if MLK had lived? What would he have made of Obama's presidency? Of Clarence Thomas? Of hip-hop? Of rap? Of racial progress, of racial stagnation, of racial setbacks? Of NBA salaries? Of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland? Of Trayvon Martin, the Central Park Five? 

Would his presence have made any difference in any and all of the above?

What would social media have done for him, to him?

Would he and Coretta have stayed together?

What sort of difference would he have made? 

What would he have written? What would he have said? 

Would he have ended up on the faculty of Harvard? Of Howard? 

Would he have been a guest pundit on MSNBC, on CNN? Would the Room Raters have rated his background? 

Would he be a hale and hearty 95, or a little old man suffering with Alzheimer's?

(The other great martyred civil rights leaders of MLK's era - Malcolm X and Medgar Evers - if they had lived, would both turn 99 this year. Malcolm X was assassinated at the age of 39. Medgar Evers, a few weeks short of turning 38. MLK's age, plus or minus, when he was killed.)

All I know is that, with Martin Luther King, Junior's murder, we lost a lot. An awful lot. 

Today, I'll be working in the Resource Center at St. Francis House, and there'll be an awful lot of Black faces among those sitting there waiting to take a shower, looking for a ticket for a clothing appointment, waiting for lunch, watching TV. A disproportionately awful lot of Black faces. 

I sure hope that the arc of the moral universe really does bend toward justice. Seems a long way off just about now.

I carry a badge, Federal Air Marshal edition

I have to admit that I've never given a single moment of thought to what it must be like to be an air marshal. Even when I was frequent flying after 9/11, I don't remember wondering whether there was an air marshal on the plane.

Many years ago, I was on a flight on which a prisoner, in handcuffs, was being transported. But from what I gather, the escort wouldn't have been an air marshal. More likely a local police officer or statie escorting someone apprehended out of state home. And those sorts of situations are rare. They may not even happen any more. (My spotting the guy in cuffs was decades ago.) 

Instead, prisoners - at least those in federal custody - are transported by something called the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System, "the only government-operated regularly-scheduled passenger airline in the nation." This service is run by the US Marshals Service, which is under the Department of Justice. This crew protects judges and the courts, executes federal arrest warrants, and runs the witness protection program. 

Despite their running their own airlines, the US Marshals have nothing to do the US Air Marshals, who do their thing within TSA. 

I have given just about as much thought to the US Marshals as I have to the US Air Marshals, which would be nothing. But it seems that this is somewhat by the service's intent:

If you don’t know much about air marshals, mission accomplished.

The service has been an anonymous layer of public security since the concept was created in response to a spate of plane hijackings in the 1960s and expanded in the 1970s. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, air marshals moved under the newly created Department of Homeland Security and TSA. The number of air marshals grew from 33 to thousands.

...Today, the exact number is secret. They travel among us, armed and undercover, on planes, subways and ferries and monitor airports, train and bus stations. It’s a lot of pressure, they say, particularly on a plane. Source: Washington Post)

They could be on trains and boats and planes? Even the subway? Who knew?

That's the point: we're not supposed to know. Air marshals operate with a zipped-lip omerta requirement. They can't talk about what they see or do.

What they can disclose is that FAMs always travel in “squads,” never alone. They’re not on every flight as there are simply too many to cover (the Federal Aviation Administration handles more than 45,000 each day). They’re allowed to watch in-flight movies, read books, take breaks to nap and eat. They are not allowed to drink alcohol on board. Sometimes they tell flight attendants they’re on board; sometimes they don’t. They fight jet lag with regular exercise.A

And they're given cover stories to tell the chatty passenger in the next seat.

The job only pays $60K for starters, and that's with a bachelor's degree or "three years of relevant work experience." Many recruits are ex-military or worked somewhere in law enforcement. The pay may not be all that great, but you get government benefits, which are. And you get to fly. A lot. (Unfortunately, air marshals aren't allowed to accumulate frequent flyer miles.)

Their initial training is referred to as "Police 101," and trainees learn the ropes alongside potential Secret Service agents and Amtrak Police, among others. Then it's off to specific officer-on-an-airplane training, which includes "learning to handcuff in an airplane aisle." And presumably, how to fire a weapon on an airplane so it doesn't blow the plane out of the sky. 

Students carry out high-pressure drills designed to mimic a crisis, like an active-shooter and terrorist attacks, as well as lower-stakes scenarios like disruptive travelers. Although the air marshal program is rooted in counterterrorism, dealing with unruly or intoxicated passengers has always been part of the job.

Flight attendants are the first line of defense against those "unruly and intoxicated passengers." Which is a good thing, given that it's not all that likely that there'll be an air marshal on your flight when someone stars acting up. 

Air marshals train "in warehouses with replica airplane cabins, jet bridges and terminals." Actors, complete with suitcases, play travelers. (What an acting gig...It reminds me of a long ago trip with my sister Trish. We were having lunch in a restaurant in Carmel, California, and one of the woman sitting at the next table was talking about her latest acting job, which was in a Delta Airlines training film.  Air marshaling may be tough, but acting isn't for the faint of heart, either.)

Since they're not allowed to talk about what they do on the job, and they travel with cover stories ('heading to Uncle Joe's funeral'), the air marshals are something of actors, too.

I'm still not going to spend much if any time thinking about air marshals. But I'm guessing that, on my next flight, I'll be sussing out whether there are any of them on the plane. 

And those badges that they carry, guess those are hidden on the inside of their jacket lapels.