Good evening, 919 Gang. If a headline is meant to make people want to read the story, I think the subject line on this piece is a winner. Steve Casey sends us a prize.
STEVE CASEY writes:
Envious.
That's what I was when I read Calvin Trillin.
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MICHELE DAVIS writes:
I was at Costco in Mission Valley today. After finishing shopping there I stopped by another facility in the same shopping center. A Parking Enforcement Officer was circling around and came upon a car parked in a handicapped spot without the proper license, placard, or paperwork. He wrote the ticket. All this time I watched and laughed my head off. (I am handicapped and have the proper credentials to park in said spaces). A woman came out of a restaurant, order in hand, and looked shocked at the PEO.
She tried to explain to him that she was “only inside for five minutes.” The PEO pointed out that the privilege to park there does not allow for a five-minute grace. As he put it, “The handicapped cannot be unhandicapped for five minutes. They are not handicapped Mon-Fri 9-5. They are handicapped 24/7." I thoroughly enjoyed the shocked look on her face, especially when he told her the ticket would run close to $500.
I will never understand why people think it is okay to just park there “for five minutes.” I hope she learned her lesson.
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DICK DANIELS writes:
My old friend Tom Gable may have to rethink the plaudits he wrote about a week or so ago about the sterling track record achieved by the U-T newspaper delivery persons, given developments this week. For the better part of three years or so, U-T home subscribers in our neck of the woods, southwest Escondido, have had excellent delivery service on the part of a couple of carriers who never missed a subscriber's house or threw a wet newspaper. Then this week, we began to walk out to empty driveways. On the fourth service error call I made this morning to 299-4141, there was a recorded message indicating that due to a severe work shortage of workers in parts of the county, they wouldn't be able to guarantee home delivery until they could recruit new employees -- and train them where their circulation districts were. They suggested subscribers go online and request non-delivery credits for each day the U-T would be unable to deliver newspapers. Pretty sure this will deflate the paid circulation numbers even more than past reductions.
I can understand why non-career employees would dislike going to work in the post-midnight hours every night to pick up their newspapers, fold and wrap them and then drive their routes until dawn or even afterwards. My first newspaper job was at 14, delivering the afternoon Imperial Valley Press, trying my best to outrun packs of dogs on my bicycle and then going door to door at month's end collecting the monthly $1.50 subscription fees. At my tender age, I thought that was hard work but seeing what these deliverers go through makes what I did child's play, literally.
Thinking about this situation, brought my memory back to my days in the mid-70's as President of the San Diego Newspaper Guild whose members included Circulation Department employees when there was such a thing. They had bargaining issues over the weight of newspaper bundles and other needs along with living with the rest of us in a double-digit inflationary economy and trying to counter a 6 percent annual pay raise proposal. I can remember one afternoon during the 1976 negotiations, I slipped down the back stairs to Ollie Peters' office to ask him outright why a company that was financially strong back then couldn't agree to an escalator clause that would at least move, if not close the gap, thereby keeping their employees whole.
Relationships between us as the Guild bargaining committee had collapsed to the point that the company asked for a state mediator to intervene. That was shortly after either Jerry Schultz or John Edgington, the guild's executive secretary, told Ollie and Garfield Wood at the end of a really bad session that the Guild should amend its proposal to provide a "scorn differential" to compensate employees who faced scorn in their daily lives because they worked at the U-T. That day ended with Ollie slamming his notebook and plodding out the door. At about the same time, we asked our members to approvea strike vote that we could invoke in case we couldn't break the impasse we had reached. As a scare tactic, the company erected large fences at the entrance to the parking lot and elsewhere. I was just married and got at least two dozen phone calls at night from scared members.
That was the atmosphere in place at the time I walked into Ollie's office and asked him when would expect a proposal that was fair and equitable; one that members could approve and live with. He looked at me and said something to the effect that our reporters, editors, advertising and circulation employees were not worth a "plug nickel" more to the publisher than they were being paid now and that the whole reason for contract negotiations is to settle on something that we could live with, but not because it made economic sense to the publisher. That ended the brief meeting for me, and, strangely enough, it was a few weeks later that we got a counter that we dusted off a little and took to the membership to approve.
Schuttz, Edgington, and I met Ollie and Garfield at the Hungry Hunter bar in Mission Valley and signed the agreement right after Christmas 1976. I think about that era because what's happened in the decades since with workforces. Would Circulation Department district managers of old been more skillful and successful in recruiting and retaining delivery personnel than an outside private company? Hard to say, but for now, getting tomorrow's newspaper on our driveways is not a given.
REBER: I had not thought of it before, but it makes great sense that there is a shortage of carriers. A lot of low-paying jobs are going unfilled. Why not carriers? We stopped for breakfast in an Escondido restaurant recently. The woman took our names, and we sat, along with about a dozen other potential customers. When she called our name and led us to a table, I was surprised to find the restaurant more than half empty. Why did we have to sit in the waiting area so long when all these tables were empty? Then it dawned on me: the restaurant was not short of tables, it was short of employees.
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LESLIE WOLF BRANSCOMB writes:
Greetings 919ers, and may our new year be so much better, for all the reasons we don't even need to talk about here.
Today's question (unrelated to the new year): does anyone have any insight into how the social media job site LinkedIn works? It was pretty helpful to me when I was job-hunting three years ago, providing me with listings for job openings and related contacts. But I have not been job-hunting since, and changed my profile to indicate that I am not looking, but available for limited freelance work, and looking to mentor young women.
Today I received a notification from LinkedIn that 15 people had recently looked at my profile. Really? I clicked on it, and while the app doesn't always give names, the first one was from KPBS. Ok, that's reasonable, since in my current job we work with them, and it's quite possible that a reporter or editor might want to know more about me. But the next few: Chicago Magazine, an IT company in Minnesota, a law firm in Chicago, and Chamberlain University, a nursing school in Chicago.
What's with the Chicago connection? No idea. I've worked and lived my entire life in California, and never been to Chicago. Anyway, we don't have to go down the black hole about how algorithms work -- I just found it amusing.
Happy New Year's to all of us who will be in bed before midnight!
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DAVID FARMER writes:
From a movie description on IMDb: "A Crazed Maniac Stalks Best Friends in a Small Town in New Jersey." This is by far the worst kind of maniac. Many who are not crazed are perfectly harmless.
The movie recounts a perfect storm of circumstances. If the victims had only split up with their best friends, stayed away from small towns, or gone to another state, none of this would have happened. The film is named "The Destroyer" if you want to seek it out.
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REBER: Happy New Year to all, and Happy Birthday to Edna Whiteley, born on Jan. 1.
P.O. Box 2239
Ramona, CA 92065-0938
United States
