I'm NOT Loving It

I'm of two minds about this, which I will explain later.

Don't you just admire the razor sharp minds of the rich businessman, always looking for ways to do good. I mean what could do more good than jack up your profit by taking Thanksgiving and Christmas away from your minimum wage employees. Why should people be giving thanks to God and enjoying the company of their families when they could be out flipping hamburgers and contributing to the coffers of a big business? Why should they waste time watching the wide-eyed small fries opening their gifts from Santa when their are French Fries to fry?

It is my hope that Mr. Corporate Head slipped on a apron today and went down to the local Scottsdale restaurant to lend a hand. Surely when he calls for 18,000 to give up their Christmas we wouldn't find him sitting sipping a nice Bordeaux from his private wine cellar in front of one of his three fireplaces or perhaps watching Dicken's Christmas Carol being screened on his home theater.  Gee, I wonder how long it'd take the cashier at to save enough to buy a $2,175,000 home on a golf course. Maybe if she or he put away the overtime for working the holidays...of wait, a lot are being asked to work without any bonus pay for a holiday.

Now I said I had two minds about these food joints opening on Christmas. Some things are necessary to open all the time. My daughters worked today, Christmas, at an animal shelter because animals need to be cared for everyday. My friend worked at the hotel where he is employed today as well. Of course, in their cases, they volunteered for the duty and they also get paid a bonus for it.

People have to work in hospitals and nursing homes and police stations and other such places. They is no good reason on earth why a Target or a Walmart should be open on days such as this though. People don't die because they can't shop for one day.

Restaurants are a bit more tricky. I remember thinking about this when I was very poor many years ago. Those were the days I use to wander from trolley stop to trolley stop in Philadelphia looking for dropped change so I could buy lunch. I remember walking the deserted city streets on Christmas Day and seeing the restaurants and grocery stores and delis all dark and closed. I wondered where some of the lonely people went to eat on the holiday.

You have a family or friends and a home to go to Christmas is a cozy and bright day. If you are old and alone or down on your luck they may be no such place. It would at least be nice to find a cheap place to get a meal.

But the workers working such places should be volunteering for the duty and getting paid a bonus rate. So my suggestion here, as long as Mr. Corporate Head has assumed the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, is he play it out to the end, when Scrooge saw the light and sent the goose to poor Bob Cratchit. If you open on Christmas, then take the excess profit over a normal day and donate that to some local shelter. And even more, during the day bag up some of those burgers and fries and fish fillets and take them out to the homeless and the joyless and the old couple who can't get out of their apartment anymore.

But that will be difficult to achieve when you keep your heart in your pocketbook.

In the Land of the Last Stand, Part One

My mother's directive: "Larry, get me out of here," sent me on a quest for an open door somewhere. A month and a half later I felt I had gone about things backward. I should have dug deeper into my mother's purse and discovered it full of moths and looked to the financial future first, but I've had professionals tell me I did things right.

Anyway, I began by looking for a better "Home".

I began with the obvious, another visit to Mushmouth Manor, the place my mother pined for, though only she and God know why.

This time I called and made a set appointment. I also now knew exactly how to get there, thus I arrived at its doorstep over a half-hour early. I almost hate showing up early as much as showing up late, and I really hate showing up late. Showing up late is rude and inconsiderate. It inconveniences other people and it says to them, "My time is more important than your time." When I worked in the corporate world there were managers who came late to every meeting for that very reason, just to show they were somehow the more important person.

So I went a bit out of the way, stopped at a drugstore and bought a soda. I then went on to Mushmouth Manor where I parked in the back lot and drank the drink. Around five until the hour I ambled in and presented myself at the reception desk. The receptionist told me Ms Fingerrub would be right with me and please have a seat.

Mushmouth Manor had a large lobby, like a medium hotel, unlike Sunset City's modest entry with a table and one sofa. Mushmouth Manor had many sofas and chairs and tables and vases of flowers.

In the back, where the people were stored, it was not distinguishable from Sunset City at all. Long hallways lined with ancient citizens in wheelchairs or shuffling along with the aid of walkers. Every home was equipped with poor souls sitting still along some wall, hands folded in lap, back bent like a question mark and head down. It was as if you could order these people off Amazon.com for the singular purpose of decorating your nursing home hall.

I had downloaded two copies of Mushmouth's application and filled one out for each of my parents. After the tour I presented these, and was told there was a waiting list. My father might get in quicker than mom, but there was a wee bitty problem. Because of my mom's current condition she would qualify for Medicaid, but my father would not. He would have to come in as Private Pay (which would run around $9,000 a month), unless he might be eligible for veteran's benefits.

She gave me a business card. "This is our Veteran's expert. Call him and he will help you with your dad's benefits."

We bid good day (which was in reality goodbye) and I left with the same feeling I had the first time, Mushmouth Manor primary interest was dough-re-me. Some weeks later, an Elder Lawyer told me my parent's would not get into Mushmouth Manor with their bank account, confirming my initial gut reaction.

Many weeks and much aggravation later I was told a tale by a close friend of my parents, one of the coterie that had been looking after dad since mom was struck down. One whose husband was one of the most vocal about the indiscretions of Sunset City.

"I went through this with my father," she began. "He fell and broke his him and went into to Mushmouth Manor. Oh, what a terrible place. I came to visit and it was meal time. I don't know what was on his plate. It was a mess, pardon me, but it looked like dog dirt. I said, 'He can't eat that,' and the person told me, 'He can have a hot dog instead if he doesn't want that'.

"And while we were there I heard his roommate say something from the bathroom. He had been in the bathroom when we arrived. I asked, 'Do you need help?'

"'Yes, he said. I've been waiting in here for over an hour for someone to help me, but no one's come.'

"So, I got the man back to his bed and I went out to the nurse's station and told them, 'Have my dad packed and prepared to leave at 1:00 tomorrow. We're taking him out of here.'

"They said he needed a Doctor's permission and this and that. 'No,' I said, 'we're taking him out of here tomorrow.' I came the next day at 1:00 and he was prepared to go and we left."

I thought, why didn't you tell that story to my mother. Maybe she would have stopped yammering at me about the Great and Wonderful Mushmouth Manor. By the lady told me this story it didn't matter anymore.

In the time between my second visit to Mushmouth Manor and this lady's tale of woe, my mother had picked up a new mantra, PassingGo Homes.

It was mainly my own fault.

TO BE CONTINUED

Mitt Gives me Fits

I have always avoided writing anything political in my Blogs. For one, I don’t like politics. For two, I think it is a good way to lose friends. For three, no one seems able to discuss issues rationally. All people do is stick some brand on your hide and then they tell you what YOU supposedly think on every issue, whether you do or not. For four, I usually let anything these windbags of any and all parties say roll off my back blow away in the breeze.

But for some reason this Romney guy gets under my skin.

When asked recently if he thought he had the best chance to beat Obama, he said, “I don't think if I have the best chance, I think I have the only chance."

Maybe its just hubris, but we already have an egomaniac in the White House we don’t need another. He says things in a stupid way that can be used against him, maybe that’s why? A man running for President should know better how to phrase his remarks. “I just love firing people…”, “I don’t care about the poor…”, “I don’t think people want their President [paying more taxes than he owes…”

Opponents and Press took these out of context of what he meant, except the last statement where he was preparing everybody to hear just how little he pays in taxes compared to what he makes, yet he seems too dumb to understand that is the way his remarks will get played.

Now he tells us he is the only person in the whole wide world great enough to beat Obama. This guy doesn’t even know how to fake humility.

But he should learn or he shouldn’t give speeches in stadiums that make it look like nobody showed up to hear him. Maybe his ego told him 65,000 people would actually show up and fill the seats.

Personally, I don’t know why anyone wants to be President, but I really don’t know why this guy does. I can’t see where he has any strong convictions about anything. I get the sense of a salesman selling whatever is hot at the moment, but ready to switch his pitch as soon as it wanes. But his faulty marketing sense tells me he doesn’t understand the market he’s pitching too.

I think he wants to be President as a resume enhancement.

Now he is campaigning on rising both the age for receiving Medicare and Social Security. Well, isn’t that cute. If I had a quintillion dollars stashed away in the Cayman Island and a Swiss bank Account where I could avoid income tax maybe I wouldn’t care what age I got Social Security either.

To tell the truth, I think we might have all been better off never having the Social Security System. We would have been better off knowing it was up to us to set aside for our old age and as a society to look after each other within communities rather than ending up at the mercy of Washington politicians. But we DO have Social Security and just about every person living in the U.S. today has grown up under this system. It is what it is and I think we’re stuck with it. They promised us this would be there for us and forced by law to contribute to it all our working life. I am in my seventies collecting it, but also still paying into it when I work, and then paying some income tax on the portion I receive.

I remind those such as Mitt, rhymes with Nitwit, that I paid into this. I made premiums as I would into any annuity promising an investment to provide for my old age. I am sick and tired of politicians talking as if we are getting some kind of welfare. We are simply collecting what we paid for.  It was the politicians who cheated and took from the fund; it wasn’t my fellow seniors or I who not paying our premiums. We met our obligation; now the government must meet its own.

Mitt can run out there and talk about how everybody lives longer and therefore the age of payout should be later. Mitt finds that easy to say when he doesn’t have any worry about whether his car breaks down or the roof leaks or he gets sick, because he has a quintillion dollars. If I hadn’t been able to get Social Security when I did, I would have been in a world of hurt, maybe I really would be on welfare…and homeless. Mitt doesn’t have to worry about being homeless.

If you rich politicians, which is most of them and most of whom never did an honest days work in their lives, want to raise the age people can receive Social Security and Medicare, you better darn well do something on the other side of the equation.

You better tell those businesses out there not to terminate us old people. My friends and I talked about the fact that we don’t know anyone – NOT A PERSON – who managed to stay with a company and retire at 65. They could save a little in salary and benefits so bounced me out at age 60 after 21 years.

We can’t all get elected to the Senate and leach off the public until we die, now can we?

Many I know, including me, started working early in life. I began working in Grade School. I’ve worked continually ever since. I continued working after at 60. My jobs have been physical part time labor paying just above minimum wage. They keep laying me off because of the economy. You know, the ones on the bottom go first when the CEOs sees his or her stock options tail off. And you know at 70 it gets a little harder to get hired and a little harder to keep the body in working shape.

So, give me somebody with some positive ideas that help everyone, not the typical Corporate-think of let’s cut costs by cutting the employee health care and wages. Give me somebody who says what he means both today and tomorrow, and knows how to say it correctly so it isn’t misunderstood. And give me somebody who isn’t so rich they know knowing about the real world where most of us survive.

It is so sad if Romney is the best we can come up with.

...To the Dark of the Dungeon

As I entered the waiting room and looked around I saw the sign on a mantle.

"I guess my wife's out of luck," I said to another man sitting nearby.

"Uh?" he said and I jerked my thumb to the old notice.

My wife is Irish; well, part Irish anyway. She had an Irish maiden name. Her other main parts are German and Native American (one-quarter Creek).

T'is, me Lads, the irony that Mauch Chunk should end up named Jim Thorpe. It is also an example of how this country can and does change usually in the right ways. You see, Jim Thorpe had a part-Irish, part-Sac and Fox father, one Hiram Thorpe. Jim's mother, Charlotte Vieux had a French dad and Potawatomi mom. Hiram and Charlotte named their son Wa-Tho-Huk ("path lighted by great flash of lightning") and raised him as a Sac and Fox. He was also Roman Catholic, which was probably another strike against him in some places in those times.

Jim Thorpe was born in 1888. Eleven years earlier there was an incident in Mauch Chuck that shows he probably wouldn't have been welcome there in 1877, even possibly the decade-plus later when he was born in Oklahoma. He probably would have been shunned or worse for being  (1.) Irish, (2.) an "Injun" and (3.) a papist.

To illustrate some of the mind-set of those times I will take us back to those mansions on top of the hill, specifically the home of Asa Packer.  I mentioned therein that the Packers, rich as they were, but people of hard-working humble beginnings, existed in wealth a long while without the prerequisite servants, until Sarah Packer reached a point when doing it all herself was difficult. They hired a Butler and a Maid, who each had separate quarters in the house. The Packers, faithful to their Protestant morals wanted to be sure there was no hanky-panky between this single man and single woman. Thus they hired an Irish Catholic Butler and a German Lutheran Maid, knowing one would never have anything to do with the other. (This is another story with ties to The Little Woman, with her Irish father and German mother, and being raised a Lutheran.)

If that is an amusing story, there are many darker tales to tell of the prejudices of those times, especially against the Irish.

The Irish lot on their native sod was not a particularly happy one in the 19th Century. They were viewed as less than vermin by England, to which they were subject much against their will. Many lived in abject poverty; in fact, it was rare if an Irish family was able to serve one piece of meat a year in their meals. Beginning in the 1840s many Irish began to immigrate to the United States and this flow continued well into the 1880s. The English took a "good riddance to rubbish" attitude and encouraged this.

The United States also encouraged this influx of Irish, at least the industrialist of the day did. They saw these people as an underclass, a supply of cheap labor and a desperate people they could exploit. They were not welcome in every place of business, as the sign at the beginning of this post shows, but they were welcomed into the black holes of Pennsylvania and West Virginia where coal could be harvested.

Mauch Chunk was a coal town.

Working as a coal miner was far from paradise, not only might you be digging down toward Hell, your life was the Devil's own as well, barely a notch about slavery. You worked a long day on a dangerous job for very little pay. Worse yet, you owed everything to the company. You lived in homes provided by the company, so leaving your job was forfeiting the roof over your head. You had to buy your own work tools and supplies from the company, which you could get at the company store, where you also bought the other necessities of your life. You got credit on your purchases, so to speak, but then your bill was deducted from your wages on payday. It wasn't unusual for a miner to find he owed more than his pay and so go home with nothing in this pocket.

During the time of this miserable situation grew a secret organization known as The Molly Maguires. How secret were they? So much so historians really know very little about them. Were they the terrorist one owner painted them to be in their day, killing brutally and often? Were they a discredited and maligned group of fighters for labor reformation? Truth is they were probably somewhere in between, but they had enough influence that owners of the coal industry saw them as a threat to the status quo and of course blamed every dirty deed that came down the pike on them.

One such industrialist was Franklin B. Gowen (pictured left). Like Asa Packer, Gowen was a wealthy, powerful man in Pennsylvania. He was the president of the Philadelphia Coal and Iron Company and the director of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. He was also a former Attorney General.

To say he was anti-union is an understatement and he did everything in his power to destroy any progress by labor that might effect his business. He made this statement about the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal":

“Men were not created equal, the distinction between mind and matter, between the men who labored with their heads and those who labored with their hands. There [are] two great classes of people in this world, men of genius, or intellectual men, and those who [are] not so, the men of labor."

 Anyway, to make a long and fascinating story short, Gowen came to blame the Molly Maguires for all things Union and hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to bring the group down. Eventually several men were arrested and charged with murder on the word of one detective, James McParlan, who went undercover and acted as an informant. He began accusing Molly Maguires after a murder where he had a hand in and may have been responsible for.

Four men were brought to trial at the Old Jail of Carbon County in the town of Mauch Chunk upon the lone testimony of McParlan. This was not a criminal trial, but a private one in which the county simply supplies the facilities. The Judges were men connected to Gowen and there is the possibilities he rigged the jury. In 1877 four men, accused of being  Molly Maguires and murderers were hung inside the Old Jail on gallows brought in for the occasion. They were John Donahue, Edward Kelly, Michael Doyle and Alexander Campbell.

Campbell left an impression behind. Declaring his innocence, he rubbed his hand on the floor and pressed his handprint into the wall of his cell. This was 137 years ago, but the handprint is still there for all to see (I saw it myself). Attempts were made to remove the print, but all failed. Here is the history of the handprint as described at Paranormal@101:

Over the years, county sheriffs have tried to remove the handprint to no avail.

In 1930, Sheriff Biegler had the wall torn down and replaced. The next day, the handprint reappeared.

Around thirty years later, Sheriff Charles Neast covered the handprint with latex paint, but it reappeared. His son, Tom, in the 1960s, loved to tell friends about the ghostly phenomenon. Word spread and people visited the Carbon County Jail to see the print.

Attempts to wash the image away failed.

In recent years, James Starrs, George Washington University forensic scientist, and Jeff Kercheval, Hagerstown MD police chemist, analyzed the handprint using high tech equipment. They found no logical scientific explanation for the handprint’s existence. They finally measured the exact location of the image in the event it there were attempts to remove it and it reappeared, they would know if the phenomenon returned to the same location or a different one.

The jail’s last sheriff, Bill Juracka, said he wouldn’t try to remove the handprint.

Now a days you can tour the Old Jail in Jim Thorpe. It is fascinating and a bit spooky. You enter and get your tickets and then go to the waiting room to await your guide. This area was actually the home of the Warden and his family, so in a sense the Warden was in jail with his prisoners.  In fact, when you go upstairs you are brought through the Warden's family bathroom and into a side wing of the jail where women offenders were housed.  

From there you wend your way back down into the main cell block where the men were. Here you see the infamous gallows that hung the Molly Maguires and Cell #17, where Campbell's handprint can be viewed upon the wall. (Sorry, they would not allow photographs of the handprint. Now, to tell the truth, it would have been very easy to sneak a picture, especially with my Flip, but I chose not to do that. The photograph seen above is from Weird Pennsylvania.)

To say the interior of the jail is bleak is an understatement. It would not be a place I would ever wish to find myself. That in itself should encourage one to behave. More depressing were the dungeons in the basement. Visiting these isolation cells certainly gave more meaning to the old coal miner's song:

It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew 
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It's a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

I don't want to tell some of the stories I heard there because if possible I think you should go and enjoy the tour. One of the amazing things to me is this jail was in service until 1995. I will leave you with a few more photos of the place, including our charming young guide holding up the narrow window through which a prisoner once escapes.

Although this prisoner was only sentenced to about a third of a year, he determined to break out. His method was probably worse than his punishment. First he starved himself until he felt he had lost enough weight to squeeze through the window frame the guide is holding up. meanwhile he stole the soap from the shower room until he had a supply hidden away. On the day of his escapade, he striped naked and lathered up his whole body. With help from his cell mates he pushed this window frame out on its pivot. He tossed his clothes down in a pillow case and flung tied together sheets out to climb down upon. Believe it or not, he got through that window and probably would have been far away, except he attempted his escape at 12 noon. Some women eating lunch on their porch were surprised seeing a foamed up naked man shimmying down the jail wall and...well, he was soon caught.

A word about Franklin Gowen, the head of the Philadelphia and Reading railroad. Said Mr. Gowen was found dead in a Washington DC hotel room on December 19, 1889, a small caliber pistol by him and powder burns on his face. His hotel room was locked and his death at age 53 was ruled a suicide. Stories and speculation arose that he had been murdered, and it was claimed this was done by a Molly Maguire who actually looked like Gowen. It was said this assassin had stalked him for years, had even purchased the pistol using Gowen's name and had hid in the hotel room, did the deed and escaped out the window.

People questioned his taking his own life because he was still relatively young, had wealth, reputation and a family. They saw no reason to think he would do such a thing, so it had to be murder and who better to blame than the Molly Maguires. However, I lean toward it being suicide. Gowen was no longer the head of the railroad. In fact, he was seeing a number of bonds he was involved with declining in value at this time and it might have been more a financial concern that led to his self-elimination.

All photos inside and out of the Old Jail by the author except:

The portrait of Franklin Gowen
The Jim Thorpe Wheaties Box
The Campbell Handprint in Cell 17 is from Weird Pennsylvania.

Upticks and Updates: More Why the Rich Get Richer and You Don't

That is pretty much the stock market these days. They seem to jump this way or that on whispers of the least little thing. Yesterday the Dow jumped up 186.45 points for what reason?  What have we heard this week that says buy? Retail sales last month were flat, nothing was selling, especially clothes and back to school didn't sent people out spending this year. The number of people beneath the poverty line rose, the medium household income fell. Europe is in financial turmoil. We had a rise of violence in the Middle East. First time unemployment claims were up...again; and the unemployment rate didn't fall. There were no new jobs created last month and a number of employers announced big lay offs to come. The cost of living rose and ever people are moving in together in homes, which tends to decrease spending for goods.

It was noted Wednesday that mortgage applications rose last week because the interest rate had fallen to a new low. Well, hallelujah, happy days are here again. Of course, a good number are people refinancing while they got the chance to maybe lower their payments. Meanwhile, a way too high percentage of home sales are on foreclosed property and foreclosures remain a problem, bloating the inventory.

Stock Markets went well up today on the belief now that Greece won't default. That is the state of it now. We don't have stock growth on positives, just that the worse negatives don't occur.

But no matter the state of the state or whether Greece is well greased or not, it doesn't mean you can't make money in the market if you are a Wall Street type and have wealth. If you have lots and lots of money you can play the Long and Short Selling game and you can even make money by betting stocks are going to fall. If you have enough dough, you can even manipulate the rise and fall by buying large amounts of a stock.

The rich guy buys enough of one stock hoping others jump on the bandwagon seeing his buy and they start buying and the stock goes up.  Then when the rich man wishes, he dumps the stock at a high price and sends it plummeting. Once it has bottomed out, he may buy it back at the low cost again. This is having your cake and eating it too. The guy makes money on the profit from his initial purchase and then buys it back low, thus keeping his profit and having the stock as well.

Now to update y'all on my previous post, "Tangles of the Ticker Tape: Why the Rich Get Richer and You Don't". In that piece I spoke of a certain CEO who bought 342,876 shares of his own company at $.92 a share. That was the report I read that day. It seems he actually bought a bit more than that over a couple more days. He bought another 342,876 shares on the 9th at $1.19 a share and then 481,714 shares on the 13th at $1.36. Notice how each time he has bought, the price has been higher. He spent $1,378,599.40 overall and do you know where that stock stands now? It is currently at $1.59, meaning if he sold it this instant it would sell for $1,856,270.94, a tidy profit in a week of $477,671.54 less broker fees.

Now the price has went up because his purchases gave confidence to other investors to also buy that stock. They believe if he has this much faith in his company turning around, he must know something. So, his money enables him to manipulate the price upward.

Could you or I do that? Well, if you be rich, probably. I am not rich. I might have been able to buy, oh say, 100 shares of that stock at $.92, a cost of $92 (plus broker fees of course). I don't think my ninety-two dollars or my reputation is going to encourage any followers to jump on any stock because I do. Then if I sold my 100 shares at the current price I would make a profit of $67 (less those broker fees cause brokers gotta eat too). That is a nice gain on my investment of 73%, but a long way from making me rich.

Besides, by the time we little fish jump in the pool, the sharks have driven the price to the heights, then they drain the pool and leave us high and dry. Of course, a bit earlier in the day I could have made $79, but by the end of the day that stock dropped $.12 since the opening

Will the stock regain today? Will it continue up, stay even, begin to drop back where it started? A lot will depend on how well the CEO's new business plan succeeds. If the efforts to turn the stores around faultier, then so will the stock price, and then will the CEO dump the stock for a profit or go down with his ship?

We shall see.

Waters Rose, Factories Close, So It Goes

There is a great similarity between this year and June of 1972 in the upper central portions of Pennsylvania.  Land covered by flood water. In 1972, Wilkes Barre, Pa. found itself devastated by a little lady called Agnes. The storm and those floods were to have a direct effect on the course of my life.

That particular year found yours truly gainfully and happily employed by Olson Brothers, Inc. aka Olson Farms, Inc. We broke eggs.

Yes, there is an industry known as Egg Breakers.

The name is pretty much self-exclamatory. We would buy eggs, we would break eggs and we'd sell whatever we could get out of those eggs.

My position there was Office Manager/Cost Accountant. At the end of that year I was Assistant General Manager, but that was a brief tenure. The whole experience was somewhat weird, I suppose. In that year I learned a lot about corruption, bribery, stupidity, bullying and never putting all your eggs in one basket.

CORRUPTION

("Broken Eggs", Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1756)

They say getting there is half the fun. My half of the fun got lost somewhere along the line, replaced by a lot of anxiety.  I had been working for a bank, but my managers lied to me. I don't take being lied to lightly and I resigned. But before I dove off the deep end, I did go out and seek another job. I was able to be offered a position within two weeks of looking, and then I quit my banking job.

But then I wasn't hearing anything from my new boss. Time passed and I called the man and a person answered and said he was unavailable. This was not boding well. I had been told he wanted me to start before the person I was replacing had left, so I could get some training. But now the days ticked away and I had still not been told to report and the last day for that guy came and went. Finally I received a call and was told to report on the next Monday.

When I came to work that first day what did I find? A lot of missing people is what I found. The person I replaced was already gone. The General Manager, who had hired me, was gone. The new General Manager was gone, apparently to Puerto Rico although why or for how long was not known.

Eventually all this became clear. The man who had hired me had suddenly quit and disappeared to parts unknown. It was a mystery because he was something of a legend in the industry at that time, well known and the company was certainly showing a profitable operation. I know, because one of my duties was to do the Profit & Loss Reports each month. Each month our statement of condition certainly showed us well in the black and we were running at full production. However, this seemed odd because we didn't seem to be selling a whole lot.

I was to unravel this conundrum, conscientious accountant that I was. I decided to take a physical inventory of stock. Most of our product was frozen egg, frozen whole egg, frozen yolk, frozen white, frozen salted egg and frozen sugared egg. If their was a part of an egg you could freeze, we froze it, excluding the shell. So at the back of the plant was a huge freezer where all prepared egg product was stashed until sold.

Except it wasn't being sold.

I crawled about over and under and around all these big containers of frozen hen fruit, counting and checking off my list each drum there. Well, what do you know? No wonder the old General Manager was looking good. He was running at full production alright, but he was simply storing all that outcome away. We weren't looking good on the bottom line because of our low per unit cost and brisk sales, we were just carrying a very high over valued inventory, most of which would never leave our freezer.

Thus what product that did dribble out to customers was being sold way below cost.

This discovery was one of the nails in our coffin.

BRIBERY

There is no better way to learn a job than to be thrown into it with no one around to tell you how to do it. You just do. With the old boss out the door and the new boss on a distant shore and the once-upon-a-time holder of this job on to his next, I had to pretty much teach myself the egg business. The production manager certainly helped me on that and in the absence of the General Manager, who was officially the wheeler and dealer of the place, we had to step into the gap.

We did pretty good even though neither of us had any experience in buying and selling. We did have one philosophy about it, buy low, sell high. You'd think that was obvious, but I'll come back to this in a bit.

You'd be surprised (or maybe not) by what comes about in the egg business. Eggs are pretty durable product actually. You can store them for like six months if kept at the right temperature and a lot of eggs that look ugly are perfectly fine. Farmers sold us the eggs the supermarkets wouldn't carry. They might be oddly shaped or discolored. Some might have hairline cracks. Some were too small or too big. Mainly they just didn't look all nice, even and pretty sitting in a dairy isle.

You candled every egg that passed through the doors. Mostly you are checking for any fertilized eggs or eggs with blood. Such things would not please the Rabbi.

I guess I should mention the Rabbi. The Rabbi came around  couple times a year and wandered though the plant. If he liked what he saw, he would certify your product as Kosher. Now lets be brutally honest here. We knew when the Rabbi was coming and the day before arrangements were made, or should I say rearrangements, so nothing was touching anything that would perhaps conflict with the Laws of Moses, at least not until the days after the Rabbi left again. And also, the rabbi didn't spend a lot of time on his inspection. He tended to whisk through the place until we handed him the check for his services. His services did not come cheap. That check had a one on the left and a whole lot of zeros to its right.

Now, I'm not saying that transaction was a form of bribery, but I will say this next instance probably was.

Representative of a big time chicken guy came in to visit one day, trying to make a deal for us to take more of their eggs. Eggs weren't what they built a reputation upon, it was the chickens that lay the eggs that they concerned themselves with. They sold some pretty good tasting roasters, but I will tell you, they shipped us some of the worse eggs you'd ever lay your eyes on, let alone smell with your nose. Although I had the "white-collar" job of Office Manager and Cost Accountant, there were times my duties extended to a more hands-on approach.

Not that I wanted to lay hands on that companies raw materials, but I was out there unloading their truck and what I unpacked was black eggs, rotten eggs and eggs with maggots.

Now here comes this representative wanting us to take more of this stuff from his company. He came in like a movie cliche, big old cowboy hat and a sur'nuf down home good ol' boy accent, with y'alls and back slaps all around. "Want you boys to come visit our plant," he says. "We'll take good care y'all. You come on down. We'll get you a woman and a good bottle of bourbon."

STUPIDITY

Remember that thing about buying low and selling high? Well, after a few weeks our new General Manager finally shows up back from Puerto Rico. He's all proud because he made a deal to sell the people on the Island a lot of egg white to make meringue.

Now that he had returned, for the moment, the buying and selling was back in his hands. He apparently hadn't read any pillows stitched with the production guy and my philosophy, because he bought high and sold low.

Now, and maybe this will surprise some, but there are consequences to buying high and selling low, and to having an overstocked inventory, and of running full bore full productivity when your sales are underperforming. It is called, NOT MAKING MONEY! Now that the inventory ploy was exposed (by yours truly) and the valuation reevaluated our bottom line so it didn't look so great. It looked a little red in the face. Things needed tightening up and our General Manager's idea of tightening up was not paying our suppliers.

This resulted in some suppliers refusing to sell us anything and those who would demanding a premium to do so. In other words, our buying high got higher.

Then one day, this new General Manager was gone. It really wasn't unusual for him to be gone. He was gone a lot, a la Puerto Rico, but he wasn't selling more meringue this time. Oh no, turned out he had another business on the side and he was devoting more hours to that business than to our eggs. And like our egg products, he was canned.

I suppose this belongs here under stupidity, but I thought I had a bright future with that company. I liked working there, liked my job, liked the people. It looked like we were going to expand. They were going to buy a bigger and better plant in Blue Anchor, New Jersey, move operations out of the confines of North Philadelphia. They had big plans, big dreams and here I was in on the ground floor of all this expansion.

I revisited my old employer, the bank, and discovered those managers who had lied to me were gone. In their place was the former auditor and he asked me if I would come back to work there. He even asked me to name my own salary to do so. But I told him I had a great opportunity where I was and turned it down.

Then my wife and I moved to New Jersey. C'est la vie.

BULLYING

Despite the corruption and the stupidity, it actually looked for a while we might turn it all around and get that dream factory over in Blue Anchor. But something else happened, which I'll get to later. The result of what happened I will deal with here. Basically, we tanked.

When things became clear that hope was going south, the company stopped production altogether. Everybody in the back was laid off, all the sorters and the sniffers, the washers and the breakers. These people weren't paid a lot to begin with, now they were getting nothing.

It wasn't long after the workers were laid off that there came a loud knock on the office door. I happened to be there with my secretary and no one else. We answered the knock and there were these gentlemen standing there who would have made find cast members for The Sopranos. These were guys who instantly made you wonder just how much broken kneecaps hurt. They were Teamsters, the Union that represented our now laid off work force.

Were they here to plead for the works jobs? Not exactly. They wanted us to know that they expected us to make sure these workers continued to pay their union dues.

I told them we couldn't do that. They would have to deal directly with their members.

As you can see I am still around and my kneecaps are fine. I can't speak for those long ago workers.

NEVER PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET

So what happened to finally kill that job? What promoted me from Office Manager to Assistant General Manager helping to oversee the dismantling of the plant? A sweet young thing known as Agnes.

This hurricane came up the Eastern Seaboard and inundated upper Pennsylvania with water, lots and lots of water. Much of the same area was flooded by Agnes as suffered the same fate last week. Up in Wilkes Barre was a big company called Interstate Bakeries. Interstate Bakeries was our biggest customer, too big to fail, at least too big to fail us.

In reality, Interstate didn't fail. They had an old factory in Wilkes Barre and it was destroyed by the floods. Rather than rebuild this ancient structure, Interstate decided to pull up stakes in the region and as a result, they no longer needed our egg product. And without Interstate, we had no reasonable chance to make a profit.

Good bye Blue Anchor. Goodbye Philadelphia. For me, hello unemployment. No company, if smart, should ever depend too much on one large customer.

One other lesson I learned there. Never eat dog food. Eggs rated not fit for human consumption went into big barrels and was sold to pet food manufacturers.

Tangles of the Ticker Tape: Why the Rich Get Richer and You Don't

You can consider this a companion piece or a sequel or the continuing saga of "We All Must Do Our Part to Save a Sinking Ship."

We are approaching the infamous tenth anniversary of a hateful attack on America. I am certain there will be a million Blogs, columns, TV Specials and other media reports commemorating that dire event. This is not one of them.

9/11 marks a tenth-year anniversary for me as well, one of lessor importance overall, but one of some trauma in my own life.  On the morning of 9/11 I was scheduled for my first meeting with an Outsourcing Firm on the top floor of the tallest building in Wilmington. For some reason the meeting was cancelled and that building was evacuated.

I had just been jettisoned by the company where I had worked for 21 years. It was not for cause, in fact, along with another, I shared in rescuing from the ash heap a five million dollar blunder made by management. But I was 60 and a long-timer with a very good record, which meant I had a decent salary from a number of merit increases over the years and more troubling, expensive benefits. Therefore my unrequested departure was simply a case of economics. A number of us fellows and gals whose hair had turned gray and teeth had grown long, if indeed we all still had our hair and teeth, were set adrift to lighten the load on the bottom line. If at fifty-five many places offered us a senior's discount, to this company at fifty-five we had become discounted seniors.

Officially the department of my employ had been reorganized and my position eliminated.

I was to find myself on the law of diminishing jobs several times over the last ten years. I worked at a place for a year and a third and then was handed a letter stating I was being let go "due to cost reductions". I worked another place for four and a third years and found my hours greatly reduced and my days numbered do to faltering business. I left there for a promising situation, which did not blossom and after a year and a third (you gotta watch those fractions, especially one-third) I again became familiar with the phrase, my position eliminated. All these were economic considerations not in my favor and reminders of the old saying, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." I fall on the second side of that, I have definitely grown poorer.

Now I don't 100% subscribe to that bromine. But I got to tell ya, I don't completely discount it either.

There is another old saying, "It takes money to make money." If this is true, friends, then I am plum out of luck.

So let's review a bit about my last bounce into the ranks of the unemployed. But do not worry, I will not push up that 9.1 unemployed stat. I don't get counted. Anyway, I played my part in the grand plan to save the ship, which had barely floated the last five years and had a whopping loss in their last quarter pushing them ever deeper into the water of red ink. They got rid of the lowest level of employees, who really contributed little to the company failures, but are easy to make walk the plank. They plan to close 10 to 12% of their stores. Or as some one said on a financial message board, and I quote, "I just hope that the stores they are closing are the ones that are NOT profitable...lol". 


And of course, the CEO gave up his $1.00 per year salary.

Perhaps all this has bailed the ship out, especially that last, for yesterday when the stock market fell over a hundred points, this company bucked the trend and jumped a whopping 27% in their price. I mean, this was a stock with a steady decline, a penny stock that had fallen below a dollar making it a risk of being dropped off the NASDAQ board. Even though we are talking in cents, this sudden jump upward caused a bit of chatter and speculation.

What happened was the CEO snapped up 342,000 shares of his companies stock at $.92 a share. I guess dropping his $1.00 a year salary didn't dent his wallet too much. This is an expenditure of $314,640.

Perhaps this shows great faith in the company's future, putting your money where your mouth is, to use one more old cliche in this little broadside of mine. Perhaps this will infuse confidence in investors. At the very least, perhaps this will push the stock price above the one dollar sticking point and keep it listed on the NASDAQ.

Indeed it did accompanist the latter. The stock, in a down market, finished yesterday at $1.15. Yahoo, way to go and all that to the credit of the CEO for saving the ship from being striped of recognition in the world of Wall Street.

But there is a darker possibility and it is why the rich can get richer and you can't. This CEO bought this stock at 92 cents and by days end it closed at $1.15. On paper, in a few hours, this man made $78,660. That is not a bad days work, despite the fact no real work was involved. If he sells this morning he will grow richer over a cup of coffee.

Now I can't imagine he would do that. If he did it would go very badly for this company. But you know this type of quick profit taking goes on.

If he holds the stock, maybe the company will rebound with their fall collection, with their new TV marketing campaign, with their adding numbers of clerks and salespeople to the lines at the unemployment bureau. If so, well, then the rich man grows richer and I'm sure we will all be glad for that.

After all, none of us want to see our good old sayings prove false.

Photo is of the Breakers, the Vanderbilt Mansion in Rhode Island, taken by the author, 2009.

You Can Bank on Waiting

Once upon a time there was a strong and fiercely independent Family who dwelt in the land of the great Baron duPont in the village of Bankingshire. There were several proud families very like them striving there, but one by one they disappeared into the clutches of great and powerful Lords of Grab and Grasp from outside the realm. All these once noble names of Bankingshire disappeared, their legacies but memories. Except for this one family and somehow they resisted and fought and retained their name and history.

But like many a family empires preceding and surely many to come, discontentment with what they had seeped in and they began to overreach, growing careless and casual in their dealings. As a result, weakness was found within their house and soon they too fell to outsiders from a distant land.

And because of this I found myself having another change forced upon me late in life. My bank, The Bank, where I had served for many years, until they unceremoniously cast me overboard a decade ago, had fallen under a shadow that wouldn't pass. Instead it only grew darker, until they had no choice but to abandon ship. I now faced a transition of not only my financial services, but my pension as well. Do not think I did not worry.

Especially when between an earthquake and a hurricane, I lost my job. But what could I do about it except wait things out. (I'm sorry. I just looked at my photograph and two images came to mind and I don't want to mention either. Use your imagination.)

As fickle fate would have it, the Great Conversion fell on the dates Ms Irene choose to make an impression upon our little state. Just on the eve of when the new rulers of my money were about to rip off the bags over their new signs, Irene ripped down our electric wires and our cable services. Now just as I must call and activate my new access cards, because on that Friday my old had become deactivated, I had no phones. Now when I had to switch my on-line banking service, I had no internet and with no internet and no new on-line banking service, I could not see if my accounts safely made the transition and more importantly, would my pension deposit be deposited.

I've been through many conversions in my life. I have seen few (make that none) without a glitch, hiccup, speed bump or worse. It did not help that over the many months of anticipation as this conversion slowly, but inexorably moved toward completion, my peace of mind when The President said he could not guarantee Social Security Checks would be sent and my job seemed shaky. Amidst these my mind wondered would my pension get lost in translation?

Of course, the politicians made moot the Social Security question in their usual cowardly way. They simply kicked that can of worms down the street for some future gutless politicians to contend with. My shaky job soon collapsed over an abyss and fell from sight on the eve of both the great bank conversion and the hurricane. This left only the banking questions to be resolved.

After the winds blew by and the creeks rose and the power returned and the cable connected I opened a new on-line account at my new bank. Not too difficult to create, but not much to look at once I opened it. I have three accounts and all were supposed to make the trip. I see one, I see two, I see...I see...

I see one and I see two is what I see. Where is three? I look around the screen. I scroll up and down. I click on a few links, maybe it is hidden behind one of these. I do not find account number three. This is not a good thing. This is not a comfort. If they lost a whole account, one in which I OWE them money, what will they do with my pension where THEY owe me money?

I will have to wait a few more days to know the latter answer, but for now my concern is my missing number three. I see a link that says "Add an Account". Perhaps I have to add this one. After all, this one was a credit card and they not only converted banks, they switched credit card companies on me. Maybe that is why this one requires more from me here.

I click the "Add an Account" and begin filling out a form asking for account name and number and vital statistics, but I pause. At the end it has a fill-in blank labeled, "Pay this Amount". Hmmm! This isn't adding an account, this is adding a payee for Bill Pay. I don't want to pay any amount right now. In fact, if my pension deposit doesn't show up a few days hence, I won't be able to pay any amount to account number three, even if I do find it. If I don't see my pension deposit in a few days hence, maybe it'd be better if account number three stay lost. I cancel the form and return to my somewhat skimpy home page.

Then I notice near the bottom, "To add an account call 1-800-And-Wait." (That's not the real number. Don't call that number. There is no number 1-800-And-Wait. It is not a number, it is what you are going to do when you reach the real number.)

It lists the times of day you may call. I have to wait for the proper hour and when the clock strikes the time, I dial. A mechanical female voice answers with a greeting, a welcome, followed by, "All our circuits are tied up at the moment. Please call back later." Hoo ha!

High tide in the anxiety pool.

There's that word again, wait. I must wait until later and later I call again, around four in the afternoon.

Our cheery little mechanical greeter is there with another welcome and instructions: If you want this thing, press 1; if that thing, press 2; if another thing, press three and so on and so forth until, "If you haven't pressed anything because you are so overwhelmed by our 87 choices, then press 88 and we will start all over again. Just for your convenience. This time pay attention and press something."

I didn't know what to press, nothing quite fit my situation. There was no press zero for a real, live, possibly-even-breathing individual. So I did the next best thing, I picked a number at random and pressed. Our cheery greeter was back, but with a difference message. "We are experiencing a higher than usual call volume. Please stay on the line and our first available representative will be with you shortly." Meanwhile I get to enjoy the most sleep-inducing music I have ever heard on hold. I mean, I didn't want to be subjected to be-bop or hip-hop or rap or reggae or some kind of death metal play, but I wasn't ready for lullaby-time either.

Fortunately my dozing was interrupted at frequent intervals, about every other minute, by our digital hostess announcing the lines were still tied in knots, but "our first available representative will be with you shortly." Of course, "shortly" is a relative thing and it obviously was no relative of the bank's. After numerous "short-lies", a man answered.

He introduced himself. "Hi, my name is Peggy." And I introduced myself, "Hi, my name is confused." We were going to get along great. I begin to explain my missing number three account when I hear a click and nothing.

"Hello, is anyone out there?" followed by "did this guy HANG UP ON ME!" followed by my wife walking in the room announcing, "The cable is out."

Oh yes indeed, the cable was once again kerput. Along with my lost number three account was lost TV, lost internet and lost phones. I didn't lose everything. I still retained my sense of futility and frustration.

Our cable service didn't return until later that evening, too late now to call back. In the morning I decided to go to the nearest branch, track down my AWOL account face to face, Mano y Mano or Womano y Womano. Why does optimism ever ring in my heart? I drive to the bank, park my car and amble across the lot then do a U-turn back to car, to road, to home, to phone. Why did I not know the bank branch would be full. It just converted and I was probably not the only owner of a stray account or transaction about town.

I call the 800 number and our computer-generated Matron'd answers. Apparently they are firing on all circuits this morning, so she goes right into the laundry list of press-worthy buttons. They have still not added my particular problem to the menu and I still do not know an appropriate one to select. I choose to select a different one than I did the day before.

"We are experiencing a higher than usual call volume. Please stay on the line and our first available representative will be with you shortly."

I am back with the sleepy-time music and the constant notifications to stay tuned for the next available representative. And eventually the next available representative answers.

"Hi, my name is Peggy."

Wait a minute, this is the same available representative I got yesterday after pushing a different button. No wonder all their circuits are tied up, what do they have -- ONE! I mean, I was kidding about his name being Peggy, but now I'm not so sure, maybe this is Peggy. Or maybe I have entered the Twilight Zone or worse, this is Groundhog Day repeating itself over and over.

I don't want to disparage the man or imply he was anything like "Peggy". He was very nice and turned out to be quiet helpful, but in the beginning as confused about my missing account number three as I was. He also was having some computer glitches of his own. He asked me for some info on my on-line banking screen and I fumbled about seeking it, explaining that I was using a new computer and going through a learning curve.

"I'm going through a learning curve myself," he said. "I'm actually a former Wilmington Trust employee learning this new system."

He then asked if I minded going on hold while he asked his supervisor some questions. Ah, sweet dreamland.

After a couple snores my nap was cut short by the guy. "I'd like to ask you to do something," he says.

"Okay."

"Sign out of your on-line banking."

I did so.

"Now log back in again."

"Okay."

 "You should see your credit card account now."

Yes, I see it, I see it, it has come home. I thanked him for solving my problem and now all I needed to wait on was whether my pension check would show up in a couple of days.

A couple of days later I went back to my on-line banking account full of fear and trepidation. The accounts popped up, all three, and yes, my pension deposit was there. I was so happy, so relieved, that I even made a payment to the credit card.

Adventures in iLand: Cops, Computers and Breaking Bad

Now, about getting the new computer. My old iMac was slowing down, aging like your's truly. I was getting that pinwheel a lot and it was spinning there for an exorbitant period of time. Then the internet would freeze up. I had updated the machine many times since purchased, had installed Snow Leopard not so long ago and now wished to upgrade to Lion. Everything I read of Lion mentioned wireless mouse. I use to be very techno, but have been out of the loop a decade now and I wondered could I download the upgrade and still use my little plug in mouse with its skinny white tail? 

So Earlier last week, I went to the Apple Store, three doors down the mall from us. I had been waiting in the hall for one of our managers to arrive with the key. It was a little before nine. I was eyeing the gapping entrance of iLand. The Apple Store always flung wide it's doors by 8:00 AM, often to a long line of already waiting people. A few months ago it had begun hiring State Police to guard it in the mornings. I don't know if this was from mayhem or their. Probably both. One day I arrived at the mall just after the last iPad or iPhone or iPopular-beyond-all-reason Device came out and there were four State Trooper cars across the entrance. I was half afraid to go inside. Was it terrorist? Had the roof caved in? Were gunmen running up and down the corridors? No, Apple addicts were lining those halls waiting to snag the lasted upgrade from the Great Gadget God Steven Jobs.

It's been pretty much that way like that ever since. Apple announces another iThingee and the lemmings come scurrying to wait in line all night if necessary. I think they have more clerks in Apple to handle these hoards than we have customers in our (oh wait, I'm not an our anymore) store in a month, maybe a month of Sundays. For a long period these lines were made up of Asian-Americans. These were people obviously long accustomed to waiting in lines. They came equipped with tiny chairs and stool on which they could squat for hours. It mystified me where they were coming from because I didn't believe we had that many Asian-Americans in our little state. It was explained to me they were car pooling down from New York to escape the high New York sales tax. For what they saved in sales tax they could buy a few extra of these iDevices.

Anyway, on this particular Monday morn I ambled down to the Apple Store. There were no lines that day. It must have been a lull in product announcements. There was a State Trooper however, standing stiffly just inside the doors. Beyond this sentinel were wall-to-wall Blue Shirts apparently assisting customers. I asked the officer if the store was open.

"It's open to people having appointments," he said authoritatively in that clipped way cops and military sergeants speak. "The store opens at 10:00. Can you come back at 10:00?"

"Yeah, I can come back later. I just had a question I wanted to ask."

"Is it a simple question, sir?"

"Yes."

"If it is a simple question, go ahead in. Ask those three guys sitting there." He pointed to three Blue Shirts at a center table.

Simple question? I am sure those three Blue Shirts considered it a stupid question, but I asked anyway and was told that I could indeed use my plug-in old mouse.


So when I got home that evening, I went on the old iMac to download Lion. I am not totally bereft of good sense yet, so first I clicked on "system requirements". 

• Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor.   Okay, got that.
• OS X v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 recommended).  Yeah, I;m fine there.
• 7GB of available space.   Sure, no problem.
• 2GB of memory.  Dum-de-dum-dum! Problem. My iMac only had 1.8GB of memory.

I guess I'll live with my Snow Leopard. I didn't have enough memory to change its spots.

So I go to work on Thursday and I look at next week's schedule pinned to the board and I have no days after my name. Hmm, I had seen a schedule lying on the office desk on Wednesday that had me on for Monday, Thursday and Friday. What happened? 

So I asked.

My Manager said, "I need to talk to you about that" and I knew what that meant and if you read my last post, so do you. 

It wasn't a complete surprise or a shock or anything, but you still feel a bit discombobulated when such a thing is dropped upon you. There was a lot of work to do, too, and I knew it would take an effort to do all I would normally do to make everything tidy and neat, shiny and bright; more effort than my last two days would allow and more effort than perhaps I was psychologically prepared to deal with at that moment. But I tried. I really wanted to leave them with as properly stocked back room as I could.

But the sudden change to my life weighed on me and that computer situation nagged at me. I didn't want to go into the great unknown with a computer that might be wearing out. I really began considering buying anew iMac, if I could get credit to do it. I decided I would go to the Apple Store after work and check it out.

I didn't get off until 4:00. Four o'clock was the beginning of the rush hour, a miserable time to be chugging back up good old I-95 from their location. There was hope I could avoid that. I had a 15 minute break allotted to me, in fact, it was supposed to be mandatory: "All employees will take a fifteen minute break under penalty of death or termination because we care. So you better take it."

I never took it. I hate those breaks. What am I suppose to do for fifteen minutes? Pace about looking at the clock being bored out of my mind. If you want a break, need a break, then you certainly should be allowed a break, but if you have no use for one, then get out of my way and let me work. They had another stupid must do, lunch. "If an employee worked five consecutive hours, they must clock out and take a half hour lunch." That isn't the state law or the federal law, that was just a company law. Now if I am working full time and sever or eight or more hours a day, yeah, I want the lunch break. Five or six hours, come on, I'd rather get done and go home. Why clock out and then have to be about the place an extra 30 minutes. And the corporate MBAs were very adamant about it, too. More Moronic, Boobish Activity to justify their getting a paycheck.

I never took those lunch hours either.

But now, under these conditions, that my career would end tomorrow at 3:00, why not take the break?

So I trotted out of the store sometime after 10:30 that morning. I wanted to tell the Manager I was taking my break, but she was on the phone, so I just left.

The Apple Store was a-bustle as usual. Blue Shirts everywhere and customers trying do-dads and gadgets right and left. I walked into the sea of humanity and was immediately greeted by a male Blue Shirt offering to help. I told him I was interested in buying an iMac if they had financing. He said they did, and whipped out his trusty iPad. Well, he didn't actually whip it out of a holster on his hip or anything. he simply picked it up from a nearby table, but you get the picture. Everything was done through that device. he was apparently fairly new to this and had to ask assistance from another Blue Shirt occasionally, but even so, in about five minutes I had my credit and was pointing out the iMac I wanted.

"It does have Lion?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "when they bring it out we can check. Some do and some don't. If it doesn't we will install it for you."

Someone toted the box out from a back room and plopped it at my feet. He asked about Lion and no, this one didn't. No biggie, they would install it. So we completed the transactions and he took me over to a Customer assist desk and introduced me to a young Blue Shirt who would handle the install.

"Shall I just leave it and pick it up later.'

They looked concerned. "Oh no, said the Customer Assist Blue Shirt. The customer must stay with the computer. It'll take about 45 minutes to install Lion."

"Okay," says I. "Just let me run down to my store and tell my manager where I am."

"I'm sorry, the customer must stay with their computer."

"Well, I wouldn't be away from my computer very long."

"Uh, where is your store?" he didn't say your store, he said the name of the store because that is what I had said instead of my store. You would have thought he would know. We were only three doors down the hall. But then again, why notice us. We had trickles of clients while the Apple Store had lines in the seemingly millions every day.

"It's three doors down," I say.

"Okay," says he, "but you (turning to the sales guy) go with them and carry his computer."

So there we go, out the door and down the hall and over the bridge and through the woods to my Manager, me and my shadow, the Blue Shirt lugging my computer being me. I tell my manager I will be at the Apple Store for 45 minutes and she says okay and me and the Blue Shirt Computer tender traipse back to the Customer Assist Blue Shirt in the Apple Store.

Now I know I was breaking bad. I was certainly at the Apple Store more than 45 minutes. It wasn't something I would ever do, had ever done, in my fifty-plus years of working. I felt and feel bad for my manager for my doing it, but you know what. That corporation tossed me aside in the discard heap because their upper management didn't know how to make a profit in the last five years. I had given them my all and my best and I had a year and a quarter accrued breaks, so overall, I don't care.

I spent some time being instructed by the Customer-Assist Blue Shirt guy and then was turned over to a Blue Shirt gal named Lauren until the install was completed. They had me do it, but they watched over me and paid me attention and helped get things just right. Over the years I have had many a MicroSoft filled PCs and all those times of purchase, I paid and they handed me the box, rather boxes and wires and manuals, shoved me out the door into the cold, cruel world of do-it-yourself techno install. Apple had people who treated me with respect and took the time to make certain my purchase was working and I understood enough to leave the nest. Unlike some companies, Apple seems to know what they are doing.

And Amber and I (the cat in my lap in the first picture) are very perfectly pleased with the new toy.