On a kayak trip on Sucia Island, San Juan County, WA
It has a Spanish name, but it’s a long way from the Sea of Cortez.
Archive for the ‘My Old Salon Blog’ Category.
Isla San Carmen, Baja
It’s a sunRISE. So sue me.
Loreto, Baja
Taken from the rooftop restaurant of a hotel. the Alamo-style building in the foreground is from around 1680.
A Little Tease of Spring
An odd, springlike squall moved through Seattle Friday while we were walking around Wallingford/Fremont doing errands. It passed through downtown, then headed east past the University of Washington.
As it passed Udub, it formed a double rainbow, perhaps a sign that the cloud of the Hedges-Neuheisel era has passed (just kidding - I don’t really care).
To top it of, we saw the first crocuses poking their way through the soil. Seems a long way away from the Frozen Tundra of cheeseland, from whence I’m writing this week.
Did Janet Jackson Miss a Product Placement Opportunty?
Or did they intend it all along?
I was driving down an “auto row” today in Milwaukee and caught the Nissan logo on a dealership out of the corner of my eye. It stirred a kernel of recognition in my memory, and I turned to check it out more closely. The clever thing is, they didn’t have to compete with Budweiser for incredibly expensive ad time at the Super Bowl.
I’m thinking of sneaking back there at night with one of those inflatable Woody Allen breasts and adorning it with the logo.
NIce guys get sued
Well, I tried. I wanted to handle it with grace and sensitivity. Then I get this today from the old coot’s attorney:
Dear Sir:
“Eddie” has retained me as counsel for his planned age discrimination and wrongful discharge legal actions. He maintains he has been damaged, (and desires remedies to make whole) by lack of an official Policy and Procedure manual the absence of which establishes an enforceable employment contract which cannot be severed by a sole party (”defendant”). It is also noted that the primary state of his residence does not recognize legal theory of employment at will.
Further to his complaint for remedy, he states his deteriorating physical condition is the result of being denied access to EAP (Employee Assistance Program) and also as a consequence of defendant’s agents (aka Northwest Airlines) groping him improperly and subjecting him to harsh environments for sustained periods of time, often in ergonomically incorrect positions. Having worked a large percent of his career in federal airspace, he is also subject to FSLA regulations and now desires back pay for overtime hours not paid or recorded.
Now therefore, access is requested to all corporate records pertaining to travel of the business during the period of his employment to include any and all videotapes he has been subjected to of adults engaged in suspect activities. The time frame for delivery satisfaction shall be two weeks hence from date of notification.
Ironically, I had a boss once who was a Danish national and used to call legal actions “suitcases”. ”Eddie”’s counsel, it turns out, is none other than my brother. None of my family knows about my blog, but since they had all hosted me and my supersized luggage at one time or another, I thought yesterday’s entry would amuse them, and I pasted it into an email.
My brother’s not an attorney, but he has spent way too much time, it appears, in large corporate environments where HR is a blood sport. He’s wrong, though, about Washington not allowing “employment at will”, but he’s right about the difficulty an employer has in establishing and perfecting it. I suppose I’ll have to offer a settlement, maybe even an employment “accommodation”. I know! I’ll turn him into a recycling container. Let’s see how long he stays on the job after spending days and nights sitting on the curb with beer cans, wine bottles, Pottery Barn catalogs and the other detritus of our existence jammed in his capacious craw.
Then, once he quits, there’s no outplacement with a cushy non-profit, no unemployment, and wait until he sees the labyrinthine vesting schedule for the pension plan. In fact, I may just demonstrate what is meant by “cliff vesting” myself. He can do COBRA for health insurance for 18 months, but I outsource all COBRA transaction handling to a firm that charges hefty fees to process them.
Bring it on, counsellor!
This Is The Hardest Job A Manager’s Got To Do, But The Organization’s Decided To Make A Change
I leave on a business trip tomorrow, and before I do, I have to find a way to fire one of my oldest and closest associates. Let’s call him “Eddie”. “Eddie Bauer”. This individual has been my faithful companion for nearly 5 years and, like all of the best lieutenants in business, has discreetly hidden, when necessary, any dirty laundry that my business ventures may have generated.
Lately, though, he’s started to let himself go physically, showing up for duty with an increasingly slovenly visage. I began to worry a bit about his ability to continue to perform his tactful office seamlessly. Then, on my last trip, the wheels (one, anyway) literally came off and, even in the dulcet confines of seat 3A, I could not relax for fear that he would leak something valuable down in steerage.
When we met after the flight, I was heartened to learn that he had managed to hold it together, and I walked him gently to our homebound shuttle.
He can probably sense my imminent departure tomorrow, noticing the unaccustomed absence in the closet of his less capacious colleagues. While it’s true that it will require two of them to do the job he used to do, we’ll all just have to pull together and try to cover.
I wanted to throw a more opulent going-away party. I tried to gen up one of those US maps that other bloggers have been posting showing states they’ve visited, but the link doesn’t work, at least tonight. It woulda done him proud, all those colored-in states.
He’ll get to stay around a few weeks, taking up space and enduring the euphoric whispers of his peers as they return to the closet festooned with fresh destination tags. He’ll get outplacement counselling, and we’ll eventually place him with another firm, Salvation Army or, better yet, Community Services for the Blind. He’s still got something to offer to the right firm, it’s too soon for the landfill. But he’s probably seen the last of his favorite carousels, #2 at Milwaukee’s General Mitchell, or the crazy shell game they play at Detroit’s new McNamara Terminal. He’ll probably never again sport the “Priority: World Business Class” sticker on his handle.
I’ll let him keep his “Heavy! Get help to lift” tag - I wouldn’t want to be party to that final emasculation. In better days, he’d proudly weigh in at just under the 50lb limit, leaving checkin agents gnashing their teeth at the near-miss of additional revenue, and not smiling at my “Careful! That’s my mother in there!” admonishment as they struggled to flop him onto the conveyor.
Vaya Con Dios, buddy. It’s been a great run!
Taxes Redux
Looks like I underestimated our city’s voters. Let’s hope my electoral pessimism is just as wrong in November!
While I was crabbing about Washington’s over-reliance on the sales tax, events in our alternate universe, Oregon, were sounding even more dire. Oregon has an income tax, but no sales tax, and the refrain coming from there is eerily familiar to the one you hear here in Washington - that revenue shortfalls are overaccentuated during recessions. Oregon had an income-tax increase measure on its ballot yesterday, and it went down in flames. Because the measure’s failure automatically triggers $545 million in budget cuts, Oregon is left with some hard choices about cuts in education, health care and other social spending.
The mirror-image between Washington and Oregon is illustrated thusly:
From the Portland Oregonian:
No state relies more heavily on income taxes, which tend to rise and fall even faster than the economy. As a result, the state tends to bring in much more than it expects in good times and much less during downturns.
From the Seattle P-I
Since Washington has no income tax and relies heavily on sales taxes for its revenues, our state government goes quickly and deeply into the red during hard times. That is not true in other states with more balanced tax systems. Our reliance on sales taxes, moreover, is regressive, hitting hardest the lower- and middle-income citizens least able to pay.
Is there an echo in here? Which statement above is right? I presume that the problem is the total reliance on one or the other instead of a balanced menu of taxes. It appears that neither state will move toward that balanced approach any time soon, as any mention of even the slightest change in taxation (unless it’s a tax giveaway) brings forth hyena-like howls of protest, not to mention a shitstorm of initiatives and referenda.
