There used to be a common complaint among shoppers that they felt set upon by store personnel. How many times can you say, “no thank you, just looking?” It was a real annoyance. You ended up wishing they would just go away and leave you alone. Be careful what you wish for, it just may happen.
I went to the local store of a national electronics chain last week, with a simple request. I needed to get a few of those small audiotapes that fit into my telephone answering machine. This is the kind of item that you find hanging on pegs in a corner of the store. It’s a no brainer really. I had a part number and knew exactly what I wanted. The item required no knowledge transfer. No one needed to tell me how to use it, or what comparable items might be better suited to my needs. But there I stood in a line with eight other people, while the sweet young thing behind the only checkout counter alternated between staring at her pager and entering UPC’s that wouldn’t scan with a pencil. She poked each key methodically, biting her lower lip, while she shook her head.
That sounds awful, but I was one of the lucky ones. At least I had what I wanted to purchase in hand. And, while little miss pager wasn’t the quickest checkout person on the planet, the line was moving, painfully slow as it was. There were other people in the store who were far worse off. Consider the man who was there to buy a Direct TV system. Short of a stack of brochures on the counter, he had no way of getting information. He tried a couple of questions of the checker, who responded by shrugging her shoulders, glancing again at her pager and pointing her pencil toward that stack of brochures. Then there was the family looking at a large screen television.They literally were standing there asking each other questions about the TV. They were lucky enough to catch a “salesman” walking by with box under his arm. “Excuse me”, he was asked, “is this an HDTV?” Without breaking stride the “salesman” said, “Yes” over his shoulder and continued on his way.
Meanwhile, there were now three people ahead of me on line. Then it happened. The girl with the pager went on a break. Her productivity, incidentally, remained constant throughout that period. She was as helpful on break as she was behind the register. The person who replaced her was a woman in her 40’s wearing bright green eye shadow. Of course, she was chewing enough Juicy Fruit gum to fill a penny loafer. Her first official act was to announce to the guy looking for a Direct TV system that she "...don't know nuthin' 'bout it neither". Down the aisles a man looking for a camcorder and another wanting to buy a fax machine joined the family quizzing each other about HDTV. The customers now severely outnumbered the staff. It mattered not to me, I was at the register now. What a great place to be. The woman with the green eye shadow took a moment to enjoy a sip of her soda and scanned my card of tapes. The scanner didn’t work; she muttered under her breath, pulling a pencil out of her hairdo, she punched in the numbers. A short forty-two minutes after I arrived I was back in the parking lot. The store got my $5.19. They lost the Direct TV guy, the big screen television folks and the guy looking for a camcorder. We all arrived back in the parking lot in a dead heat. The guy with the fax machine was pulling out enough identification to get into the Pentagon in an attempt to use his credit card.
Somewhere in the chain's main office a bean counter is smiling, knowing that his stores are running "mean and lean". Overhead is down. Efficiency is at an all time high. And the parking lot is filled with disappointed, angry people. But there is no column on his ledger sheet for people, so how important can they be?
"The March of the Modesto Mommies and their Mutts"? Beautiful
Junk television used to consist of surfing from Springer to Ricki Lake to Judge Judy. Jerry always had those ridiculous fights, which would always end with one of the combatants proposing marriage to the girlfriend of the other, thereby starting the fight all over again. The titles of Ricki’s shows always had a certain Jesse Jackson meets Johnnie Cochran flare to them; “You Think You’re All That – But You Are Just Fat”, “Ya’ got a Great Booty, But Your Mind’s Off Duty”.
There were paternity tests, where a couple would seek to determine the father of one of their five to seven children. Sometimes DNA testing was no help when the mother had actually slept with identical twins. “Milo”, Ricki would say to one twin (the one actually married to Wanda), “What will you do if it’s determined you are not the father?” “Well Ricki”, Milo drawls, “I still wanna’ be in that child’s life”. This always meets with thunderous applause from Ricki’s audience of unemployed, judgmental fans.
The lie detector shows are quite another issue. One particular favorite, “I Don’t Want You No More Go Back to Your Whore”, examined the frailties of the human race. “I don’t know Ricki, sometimes he goes away for a couple of nights and he always says he’s helping friends with their cars and stuff”. Okay so you seem somewhat naïve, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be happy. All of this is, of course, inconsequential. It is the trumped up stuff of which voyeurism is built. All well and good. No harm and no foul. But television has taken a nasty turn of late. Real stories of life and death consequences are being trivialized to feed the television monster.
Dan Abrams hosts a show called The Abrams Report on MSNBC. He is an attorney and he first came upon the television scene as an anchor on Court TV. One segment of an Abrams Report featured a story about John Walker Lindh, an American, who trained in a Taliban camp and fought against U.S. soldiers in the Middle East. An attorney named Ted Simon had appeared during the segment to defend Lindh’s right to due process. Several days later Simon was back on with Abrams at the end of that appearance this disturbing exchange took place:
Abrams: Ted hang on a sec, I want to read you an email that was directed specifically at you. All right.
Simon: Sure. This will be a great surprise.
Abrams: All right. Angela writes
“I think he Ted Simon deserves an award for coming on and “supporting” Lindh in the current environment. You should have him on alot more, if not because nobody else wants to legally defend Walker, then because men with beards are hot (except for Al Gore)”.
Abrams: What did you think of that, Ted?
Simon: (smiling) There’s nothing more to say.
Today on Abrams – “Your Position is Weird, but I’m Lovin’ Your Beard”
Groundbreaking legal issues reduced to its cutest lowest common denominator. And it doesn’t stop with Abrams. Greta Van Susteren of Fox News is all over the Kobe, Michael Jackson, and Scott Peterson venues with in-court reporters and an assemblage of legal experts. Those panel discussions take on a corner bar quality as these great legal minds chide each other about never being asked to the other’s home, or never picking up a check at dinner. Just like an episode of Friends with a double murder, rape or child molestation back-story. Beautiful.
Court TV features a battery of talking heads with legal minds. Perhaps the most offensive of these are Lisa Bloom and James Curtis, the Regis and Kelly of Court TV. They host a little thing called Trial Heat, which follows the unfolding stories of cases throughout the country. But it is done in an interactive, ESPN-like atmosphere that I found particularly disturbing. They, like all other shows, “welcome your emails”, but it doesn’t stop there. There is a feature called “The 13th Juror”, where you get to weigh in on the guilt or innocence of a person, the importance of evidence, or why James and Lisa seem grouchy today. Lisa’s mom is a frequent visitor. She’s renowned attorney and expert in self-promotion, Gloria Alred. In a particularly distasteful display, Gloria analyzed the Scott Peterson case, while representing “the other woman” Amber Frey. “Amber is a victim in this”, Gloria told Curtis and Bloom, who both nodded. While Scott may have victimized Amber, she pales as a victim next to the Peterson’s wife, unborn son, family and friends.
But the Slick & Inappropriate award goes to Lisa Bloom herself. The defense in the Peterson case maintains that Laci was seen in the neighborhood long after Scott was gone. The prosecution assembled several women from the neighborhood, all about Laci’s size, all with dogs and several pregnant, to attempt to defuse the defense case. These women appeared for two days.
Lisa Bloom referred to them as the March of the Modesto Mommies and their Mutts. That is solid reporting. A woman is murdered, stuffed into an oil drum and thrown into San Francisco Bay, and Lisa Bloom is giving it the Henny Youngman treatment. Reality TV should be left to mindless game shows. Murder and jurisprudence are way too real for this kind of treatment. The victims, the suspects, the system and society deserve better.
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In Other Words...
Used cars are now “pre-owned vehicles”. What used to be cheese is now “processed cheese food”. Guys playing football in their fifth year of college are still called "seniors". Commuter trains in some places are called “people movers”. Cemeteries are now “memorial parks”, giving the impression that each person is represented astride a stallion and waving a saber. I remember, when I was a kid, undertakers became “funeral directors”. I always pictured them sitting in a beach chair shouting, “more crying in the back” through a megaphone.
Several years ago the New York Yankees started calling the bleachers “open reserved stands”. This was the way they justified bumping up the price of a ticket. They didn’t clean the place up or paint it. Making it more comfortable was not cost effective. The real money for any baseball club is in the skyboxes, corporate accounts and television. The bleacher fans don’t affect the bottom line with any intensity. They are the heart and soul of the fan base. They are the foot soldiers of the team followers. For their undying loyalty, they are only made to think they are being catered to. Just put up new signs renaming the place and you’ll have instant renovation.
One of my earliest lessons on euphemisms came from Brian Finnegan. He was a guy I knew since grammar school. He was very intelligent and very talented. Brian was a three-sport letterman at Hofstra University, on Long Island. He was the first real success story out of our group of friends. He even had his own place. Back then, your “own place” was the pinnacle. Guys with their own place were heroes to those of us still living with our folks. Of course, it wasn’t clear to us until years later that young men who had their own apartments were usually underwritten by their folks in one way or another. Upon graduation, Brian went to work for Gimbels Department Store as a buyer. Gimbels was huge. It was the main competitor of Macy’s. It never kept pace with Macy’s, however, in terms of advertising, customer service or a variety of criteria.
Gimbels started slipping about a year after Brian came on board. Ultimately his department was eliminated. I was unfortunate enough to meet him on the subway the very day he was terminated. Finnegan was carrying an attaché case, and a small box with the contents of his desk. He smirked and said,“Laid off? They say I was laid off, I wasn’t laid off, I was fired”. “Laid off suggests you are coming back to work eventually”, he went on, “I ain’t coming back, it ain’t happenin’, they iced me” It was the first time I had ever really considered the expression “laid off”. I agreed with Finnegan. It didn’t describe the situation accurately at all. That is what crafted, contrived language is all about. It is meant to dazzle you until you are far enough away from the person who gives you the news to make it safe for them.
As years have gone by, the volatile and chaotic state of the economy has expanded the euphemisms for being fired to an incredible assortment. The increase in the number of terminated people calls for a larger list of benign words to describe their condition. Downsizing, re-orging, call it what you will, you are still unemployed. My particular favorite was told to me by Eddie Woods, another friend of mine from the old neighborhood in New York. Eddie worked as an auditor with Aetna Insurance for three years. In an effort to make Aetna more attractive to Wall Street, and that is what this is all about in most cases, Eddie was, get this, “deselected”. That is the Sistine Chapel ceiling of unemployment euphemisms. Guys like Eddie get deselected. The people who do the deselecting get company cars, and yearly bonuses. Eddie’s deselection and the existance of executive perks that are not at all performance related makes no sense to me. The great film producer Mike Todd once said, “You don’t make up a billion dollar debt, by giving up cigars”. That is honest. It is far more honest than Fortune 500 company suits trying to appear to affect real change by firing auditors and receptionists, while still holding onto their own entitlements.
Euphemisms are, by and large, insulting. They provide spin to make you feel better without doing anything to provide more than a cosmetic remedy. I would think that if you have the audacity to fire someone to balance the books, call it that.If you are hugging your six-figure salary with both arms to allow yourself to be kept in the manor to which you’ve become accustomed, while eliminating pizza Fridays or subsidized soda machines for the staff, admit it. Those guys on Wall Street are going to be with you. They are absolutely on board with someone in a Botany 500 suit being paid a king's ransom to be a lieutenant in a corporate bureaucracy. They are also fine with that person being handsomely rewarded upon leaving, with buy outs and stock options replacing the cardboard box full of coffee mugs and note books. They know about form over substance, it's a way of life with them too. They understand all too well what you are doing. So be up front. I mean, what are they gonna’ do "delist" you?
Take the Money and Run
Back in my old New York City neighborhood, there were lots of characters. There were con men, good guys, thieves, gamblers, junkies, churchgoers and more. One of the most reprehensible members of the community was Larkin. He was a degenerate gambler and never worked a day in his life. Larkin’s family had money, he ran through it like excrement through a waterfowl. He had offended, disappointed, scammed and generally outraged everyone in the old neighborhood. Larkin was in a hole of his own making, and he would never be able to climb out. Then Finkel, the neighborhood bookie, hit on a great idea.
“Hey Larkin”, he shouted down the bar at Thirsty’s one night, “Why don’t you charge people $50 to buy back their introductions to you?” What a concept this was. For fifty bucks you can just forget you ever met Larkin and, more importantly, he would forget he ever met you. Talk about a win-win situation. Of course, putting the plan into effect was impossible for someone with Larkin’s less than stellar character. So it never got implemented. Too bad too, if Larkin had just changed from his jeans and t-shirts to Botany 500 suits, he would have been in clover. He would have been so far past even that it would have made his head spin.
There is, in corporate America, a process currently in place that makes Finkel’s idea seem way less than radical. People are having their introductions bought back every day. In the litigious, nebulous economy in which we are awash, it is a better idea to just pay the get-away money and be done with an underachiever.
Someone once observed that “…prostitutes don’t get paid for sex, they get paid to go away after sex.”This approach has found its way into the boardroom. Bad judgment, under achieving, and incompatibility are all rewarded. Millions of dollars in cash and perks are handed to people, not for productivity, but rather for the inability to produce. It’s a corporate “pre-nup” if you will. An employee sits down with upper management, of which, incidentally, they are part. These are not file clerks we are talking about. These are people who have titles and company cars. They negotiate a deal with their company. The focus of the deal from the company’s point of view involves incentives based on performance. Many executives, however, put their emphasis and concentrate their efforts on “What do I get, if you don’t want me here anymore?” Exit packages are incredible. There are lump sum payments, deferred payments, stock options, country club memberships, forgiven loans. This is all given to someone who couldn’t get the job done. Beautiful.
There is a strange incestuous twist to all this too. Frequently, some underachiever had negotiated their get-away package with someone, who since had gotten their get-away package. So current management is forced to honor a completely insane compensation package for failure not of their making. When asked to explain why this package is in place, why these people are offered such “rock star contracts”, we are told it is to ensure that the company can retain quality executives. No one seems to find it amazing that this “quality executive” is being shown the door. Isn’t it logical that you should give money to people you want to stay based on performance, thereby ensuring that they not only want to stay, but that you want them to stay?
There are people who have built their fortunes on failing. They go from executive position to executive position, conjoined with a lawyer, who makes Finkel the bookie look like Clarence Darrow. They negotiate the deal, with special emphasis on get-away. They come to work and never unpack. They take a couple of meetings, go on a few business trips, make some really bad decisions, display an overall lack of awareness, and they are handed their walking papers and a ton of cash. The incestuous factor continues, when this frequently dismissed person connects up with another frequently dismissed person, who is always willing to hire an old friend. And so it goes.
The SEC reports in the press on these transactions, and no one seems to become outraged. It is business as usual. Sadly for him, Larkin was way ahead of his time and a mere novice when it came to chutzpah and sleaze. In these strange times, he’d have been a captain of industry.
