In your business

I’m well aware of the trend toward people parking themselves at coffee shops to work, or look like they’re working, tapping away on their laptops while yapping on their mobile phones. Lord knows, I don’t think there’s a low- to medium-end restaurant in the Bay Area that doesn’t offer free Wi-Fi to encourage this lollygagging clientele.

But you can take this a latte too far.

The other day I was at my local Panera Bread in a booth next to a woman who was giving employee reviews—in-person reviews, right there in the booth—as well as taking conference calls regarding a lawsuit brought by a former employee.

I’m telling you, this woman has a clear, loud voice, & she enunciates very distinctly. The employee being reviewed when I sat down (sales rep for office supplies & equipment) apparently had already acknowledged that she’s been having problems getting motivated, but of course she’s going to do better.

& I’m sure her bonus & salary increase her boss announced will help.

The manager invited her to state some career goals—short-term ones, you know; for August. But the poor woman couldn’t cough up anything immediately, so that’s an action item for her.

Shortly after the hapless employee left, knowing that everyone at the three tables immediately around her had heard everything, the manager got on a con call involving this lawsuit. Apparently the former sales rep is suing for wrongful termination, but this manager had discovered that instead of making actual sales calls, he’d just gone to coffee shops & then falsified his route reports.

Looks like he hasn’t a chance, though, since he couldn’t recall the month he was terminated, & it’s clearly documented that he turned in fraudulent route reports.

Look—I understand that this manager works out of Santa Rosa, & apparently she needs to meet with her sales reps close to where they are (although 100 miles isn’t extreme for California standards). But couldn’t she have chosen some place with a little more privacy? Instead of using one of the back rooms in the restaurant (one of which was completely empty), she planted herself in the second booth in the main room, surrounded by tables.

Maybe it’s an extension of that invisible shield people with mobile phones seem to think surrounds them. You know—the one that enables them to shout into their hands while in restaurants, mass transportation & public restrooms without having to worry that they’ll be overheard.

Watching you

The WSJ reports on efforts by TV advertisers and service providers to collect and use personal information to enable the former to use the latter to target viewers with ads.

Cable/satellite companies are already collecting this data, which is creepy, but I suppose not surprising. Even creepier, though, is the writer’s (unsupported) assertion that the data matching includes personal health information coming from our insurance companies.

Like they haven’t already found enough ways to screw us.

But what I want to know is: if cable companies can beam demographic-specific ads to me, why can’t they let me bundle and pay for only the channels I want to watch? I’d be perfectly happy with 50 channels, as long as none of them involved ESPN.

Happy families

Jimmy Carter had his brother Billy, Bill Clinton had his brother-in-law Hugh Rodham, & Britain’s Royal Family has…the Royal Family.

If you don’t read non-US media, you’ve probably not heard about the latest on Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s ex-wife. That girl can spend like a bailed-out investment bank. She needs an intensive course in money management, because she just can’t seem to make her income stretch to cover her outgoings.

Last year she got jammed up for offering a tabloid journalist-got-up-as-an-Arab access to Andrew, for a small consideration of £500,000. (Andrew, since he left the Royal Navy, has had a jammy/dodgy job as “economic envoy” for the country, meaning he’s trotted out to any country that makes noises like it might like to invest in Britain.) When she was outed by The News of the World, she had to polish her apologizing skills.

But seems she can no more control her bribe solicitation jones than she can her shopping. This week she had to apologize for getting bailed out of debt by a known pedophile. An American one, at that.

Ferguson isn’t the first royal in-law to bring scandal to the family via TNOTW. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, had barely been married to Prince Edward for two years before the very same reporter punked her into indiscreet remarks about her new family in an attempt to bring in business to her PR firm.

Well, they did know about her PR tendencies when Edward took up with her, so it’s not like everyone didn’t have fair warning.

I hope Wills, who’s getting married next month, is luckier than his father & uncles with respect to choosing a bride who isn’t a loose cannon.

International Women's Day

I’ll bet you didn’t know it’s International Women’s Day—possibly that there even is an International Women’s Day.

Well, there is and it is. And here’s something to think about today. And tomorrow and the day after that.

Which bran-for-brains loudmouth?

Further to my vow not to add to the verbiage on The Sheening One, I took the Guardian’s “Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: Whose line is it anyway?” quiz.

I was able to match only two of the ten statements correctly with the appropriate self-proclaimed godhead. Really—there’s not much to choose from.

But I do have one comment: I don’t even want to know who’s responsible for this one, “These resentments, they are the rocket fuel that lives in the tip of my sabre.”

Coffee crisis

My coffee maker has started leaking water from the espresso tank when it’s under pressure. I mean, it still makes espresso, but leaks water onto the counter. So I have to replace it before it goes entirely belly-up. When I first noticed it, I was royally ticked off, but then I recalled that I bought the machine in 1990, with money from my first job after grad school, & it cost maybe $150 then. So that thing owes me nothing.

I have no time for any kitchen equipment that’s not multi-purpose—toaster oven instead of toaster, no Panini maker or hot dog cooker—so the ideal solution would be to replace the entire machine, which is an espresso-coffee combo. But I’m not looking to shell out $500 at the moment for anything that doesn’t involve the words “Saab” & “transmission”, & as the coffee maker works, I’m going for the espresso-only option.

I would have just bought another Krups machine—after all, you can’t argue with 21 years of solid service. But the consumer ratings on the Web have been really bad on both the quality of the equipment & the customer service, so that’s out.

& of course I could still pony up north of $1000 for a home espresso maker—well, I mean, there are machines on the market going for that, but I am still in possession of most of my senses. The way I look at it, whatever I get is interim—nothing’s going to last as long as my last one. Once I find a permanent (ish) gig, I should give it all due honors & a Viking funeral.

But if my options are a new machine or paying $4 per cup at a coffee shop, it’s a no-brainer.

I just hope it lasts long enough for the replacement to get here.

Faded Sheen

All the world seems to feel the need to talk about Charlie Sheen.

Not me, though.

Defending the thesis

Germany’s Defense Minister has resigned from Angela Merkel’s government in disgrace. The issue is that large portions of his 2006 doctoral dissertation at the University of Bayreuth was plagiarized.

For those Gen-Whiners who are the products of the US education system in the past 20 years, “plagiarism” means quoting other people’s words without attributing the proper source. You know—when you “research” a term paper by Googling & then cutting-&-pasting whole articles from Wikipedia or TMZ, pretending you actually, you know, wrote it. I know you’ll find this difficult to grasp (for one thing, we’re talking about more than 140 characters), but this practice is considered wrong in any academic community that hasn’t surrendered entirely to the text-crowd.

What gives Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s crime a particular irony is the fact that he was studying…law.

Well—part of the problem with lawyers is that they learn their ethics in law school.

Anyhow—the Euros take their academic credentials seriously (as opposed to Americans, who think the very act of getting a non-MBA advanced degree vaguely anti-democratic; certainly anti-Republican), so after some attempts to brazen his way out of the publicity, Guttenberg has resigned.

What I’m kind of confused about is why it took six years to discover the plagiarism. Was Guttenberg the only person at Bayreuth who had access to the Internet? Were his thesis readers unable to recognize the works he quoted but didn’t cite?

The words of one of my masters oral committee members, Eugene D. Genovese, come to mind. I’m going to paraphrase: Don’t plagiarize: if it’s good, your professor is going to recognize it; if it’s not, you’re going to get a bad grade.

Or you'll have to resign your political office.

Taps

The last known US veteran of the First World War died Sunday at age 110.

In 1917 Frank W. Buckles lied about his age to enlist in the army at 16, looking for adventure. He drove ambulances and found blood, mud and ugliness.

He got his adventure later, when he signed on as purser for a freighter. But that led to ugliness, as well—he was in Manila when the Japanese invaded in 1941, spent more than three years in prison camps and was rescued during the airborne raid on Los Baños in 1945.

Buckles’ generation never got the attention the World War II vets did, at least here in the US. The last two British soldiers from 1914-18 died in 2009; Harry Patch’s funeral was held in Wells Cathedral, with full honors and military representatives of Britain, Germany, France and Belgium. I don’t know what plans there are for Buckles, except that he’ll be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

I’ve met two soldiers from that war—one was a guest of honor at a Smithsonian lecture I attended in 1996. He was in a wheelchair and spoke very slowly, but his brain was as sharp as they come, even in his tenth decade.

The second I interviewed early in my reporter days—when my job was mostly to rewrite press releases. The city room received a mimeographed (yes, that long ago) announcement with the blanks handwritten about the election of this fellow to some office in a local service organization. To my utter chagrin I can’t recall his name and I can’t find a copy of the story I wrote, but I recall my interaction with him.

He was Scottish and had served in the trenches of the Western Front, part of the Gordon Highlanders. He told me it was awful and the only thing that got him through was the daily rum ration. Following the war he moved to Chicago and became a sheet metal worker. When the US entered the second war he was 49½ years old, and he upper limit for the Sea Bees was 50. He served in the outfit for six months in the Pacific.

And he told me John Wayne’s “The Fighting Sea Bees” was complete rubbish.

He was in his 80s when I spoke with him, and had only recently married for the first time. When I asked him why he replied, “Ooch, I was shy.”

Well, they’re gone, now. There’s one British soldier (in Australia) and one non-combatant woman in England. All the soldiers of the war to end all wars fading away.

Weather or not

The Bay Area was atwitter late last week, because there was a possibility of snow—for the first time in 30 years. I was actually looking forward to it because I knew whatever we got wouldn’t last long, & I enjoyed the prospect of not having to shovel (being in an apartment complex—someone else’s problem) & watching the reactions of the kids who live here.

Alas, it never happened—evidently some areas got a light dusting, but San José wasn’t touched.

Meanwhile, Seattle has been shut down again for the third or fourth time since Thanksgiving, because of snow, which they just can’t seem to figure out.

So much for being the vortex of innovation.