cronereport.com

My latest shipment from Amazon did not include a coupon for cold cuts.

And I was so looking forward to some tasty, yet economical, pimento loaf.

I posted the other day about age discrimination. A 50+ friend of mine who has struggled with this issue commented to me via email—he didn’t want to make a public post lest some employer find it via Google. He also sent me a link to this article.

The gist of the article is (1) people don’t want to hire you if you’re old, (2) pretend that your experience magically came to you one night and was not the result of decades of experience, specifically by deleting 10-15 years from your resume, as well as all dates, (3) you don’t need to look younger, except that you do.

What’s the flaw in this thinking:

Many mature job candidates rest on their laurels and fail to create a modern image…Looking young isn’t the key: Attitude and knowledge of today’s world are just as important…To show she’s as hip to new media as her 20-something rivals, Ms. Johnson Mandell launched a video-blog site, LisaLiveinHollywood.com, with the help of a young Web designer she found on CraigsList.

Notice that she found a “young” web designer. Because there are no 50-year-old web designers around. Ahem.

When her husband suggested she hire a stylist and photographer to shoot photos of her, Ms. Johnson Mandell asked a 20-something friend to come over and root through her closet for a handful of young-looking outfits. Ms. Johnson Mandell wound up with at least one that she would never have chosen herself: a studded T-shirt and jeans.

A studded t-shirt and jeans? This is her youthful look? The last time I saw a studded t-shirt was on my boss in San Francisco in 1983. And jeans? In the late mid-90’s a 20-something I worked with recoiled at the 30- and 40-ish engineers’ dress code with the wail “I’m lost in the land of stone-washed!!!”

Although this article is based on the premise that “attitude and knowledge of today’s world” are what’s important, the advice is clear: (1) lie about your age, but by omission, and (2) pretend to be younger than you are. Because nothing is as attractive or employable as a 50-year-old dressing and talking like a 20-something.

The author of the article raises the question:

But is employers’ apparent preference for youth really about wrinkles? Or do companies simply want workers who keep pace with the times?

Here’s my take on that:

1. Younger workers have the energy to work 12-14 hours a day.
2. Younger workers are ambitious, stupid, scared, excited, desperate, etc. enough to work 12-14 hours a day without saying “Hey, I think I’d rather have a life.” (Younger workers who are also single and childless and want to stay that way are especially attractive).
3. Younger workers want to work with younger workers, because middle-aged people are boring stick-in-the-muds who want you to turn the music down. Which is totally true, by the way.
4. Older workers have never used a computer or a cell phone. They think HD means Hot Dog! They don’t know XHTML from XML, or C++ from C#, or jpegs from gifs. They all use typewriters and dial phones, and if you shown them your facebook page they say “Golly! What kinda new-fangled gizmo is that?”

OK, I don’t really believe the last one. But I think some of the hiring managers do. Otherwise, wouldn’t the woman in the article have found a web designer her own age?

“God was looking out for me that day,” Linda said, “because I called four different exterminators and none of them could come out for four or five hours and I was trapped in my house watching my animals die.”

This is the closing quote from the article Bees trap woman in home, kill her dog ‘Chewy’ as she watches in horror

Alternate interpretations:

God hated your dog, so he sent a plague of bees to attack him and delayed the exterminators.

Your dog was a sinner.

Your dog was gay.

You’re a sinner.

You’re gay.

God hates you so much that he sent a plague of bees and made you watch while they stung your beloved pet to death.

Or, how about: there was a swarm of bees in your yard, and you escaped in the house and one dog escaped by diving into the pond, but Chewy? Not so lucky. Not so smart. He trusted you to open the door but you wouldn’t because you didn’t want to get stung, too. And God was not a factor in this whole scenario.

It’s amazing to me that places like this still exist:

Women at the [Phoenix Country Club] are not permitted to have lunch in the men’s grill room with their husbands after a round of golf; they have been barred from trophy ceremonies after tournaments, even ones they have sponsored…As teenage boys saunter into the sumptuously appointed men’s grill room, their mothers are relegated to the ladies’ grill, down the hall with a hot plate, some card tables and no bar. “The ladies’ grill is a very small room where a bunch of little old ladies gather to play cards…” [the men's grill room] has three high-definition televisions, a buffet and a bar, and gorgeous views of the course.

Attempts to change the policy resulted in that ever-so-popular method of mature, sophisticated debate, urinating on private property.

The women have been accused of being FemiNazis…because the Nazis, they were all about equal rights.

I have no problem with calling myself a feminist, a tag that apparently women of a younger generation avoid (I’d like to meet some of these women, and maybe hire them, because it would be to my personal advantage to pay someone less than they’re worth). My personal introduction to separate-but-unequal male and female facilities was at the age of 10.

In 1967, my parents sent me to a Catholic girls’ camp called —I kid you not—Camp Immaculata. We had some cabins, and an arts and crafts shack, and sing-a-longs around the piano. Outdoor activities were mostly some simple game played in an empty field with a ball, such as dodgeball or kickball or spud. Swimming meant marching across the highway to the Peconic Bay, where we wore color-coded bathing caps to indicate our age, and could only go out so far. At 10, I was relegated to 3-feet-deep water, even though I’d been swimming in the deep end of the pool for years.

We had two field trips that summer. One was walking down the highway to Dairy Queen. The other was a trip to the boys’ camp run by the same Catholic Youth Organization (CYO).

That trip was a revelation. They had tents in a forest, a lake with a dock and canoes and a diving platform, sports facilities. They had a bonfire. It was like going from the Motel Six to the Sheraton—everything was so much cooler, looked so much more fun, was so far superior to playing dodge ball in a field.

That was the first time I ever saw with my own eyes a place where I was getting the dregs simply because I had the tough luck of being female.

I hope the women of the Phoenix Country Club are successful in their lawsuit. And the men who have joined the effort—a lot of the men also find the policy appalling, and would like to have the option of having a beer with their wives.

And if the lawsuit is unsuccessful, they could always try urinating on the green.

There was a crash of breaking glass from the living room. My first thought was: Oh, no! Not the blue vase. I like the blue vase. Pretty blue vase.

No, Barry was on the other side of the room, and one of the table lamps was on the floor. My thought was: Oh, well. We need new shades for those lamps anyway, maybe we should just get new lamps. I bought those to go with the furniture two sofas ago. Not a big deal.

But Barry said “The lamp doesn’t appear to be broken. What could have made the noise?”

Then we saw the ashtray on the floor. And my thought was verbalized:

Oh nooooooooooooo.

The ashtray is merely ornamental. We don’t smoke or allow smoking in the house. Occasionally I’ll fill it with Hershey Kisses or some other foil-wrapped candies, but mostly it just sits empty on the end table. It’s green, bowl-shaped glass, a smooth, modern-artsy 50s design.

I can remember my parents using this ashtray in the early 60s, in our first home, before the Surgeon General’s report caused them to change their habits. It’s the only thing in my living room that was in that very first living room that I knew, with the white vinyl Danish Modern chair and the sectional sofa and the piano with sheet music from the 1940’s in the bench.

Had the ashtray disappeared from my life decades ago, I’d still remember it—in fact, I’d asked my mother about 20 years ago if it was still around, because I remembered it so vividly. I thought it would look great on my new mirror-topped tables (which it did). She was concerned that I actually needed an ashtray, but I assured her I only wanted it as an objet d’art. Had she told me that the ashtray was long gone, it would not have been a big deal.

And had it truly broken today, it would hardly have been the end of the world. Fortunately, today’s fall only shaved a sliver of glass from the bottom. You can hardly notice the damage. It already had one small chip in the edge, so its value as an antique was already compromised. But it’s not its monetary value, or even its aesthetic value, that accounts for its hold on me.

Any object can have value if the associations are strong enough. In the film “Throw Momma From the Train,” the character played by Danny DeVito shows his coin collection to the character played by Billy Crystal, who is baffled by the collection, which consists of perfectly ordinary quarters and dimes and pennies. DeVito’s character explains: this quarter was the change from the hot dog my dad bought for me at a baseball game, this dime was from the time…

This ashtray is a relic of a place and time and people who are long gone.  And it is not just my father, dead now for 12 years, who is long gone. It is also the 5-year-old toddling around that living room, and the mom with the jet black hair sitting in a teal chair and smoking a cigarette. We are still alive, but those two people are long gone.

But the ashtray is still here.

Facebook, the fast-growing company that now boasts the world’s biggest social-networking site, is planning to move from its ad-hoc, five-building “urban campus” in downtown Palo Alto to a nearby property that can accommodate the company’s expanding workforce.

Any such move figures to alter Facebook’s evolving internal culture while raising the average age of the workforce in downtown Palo Alto. More than 500 youthful Facebook employees now work at five buildings in close proximity of each other along University Avenue, frequently strolling between offices.

Imagine this excerpt from the above article with a different demographic.

Any such move figures to alter the company’s all-male internal culture while restoring gender balance to downtown.

Any such move figures to alter the company’s predominantly white, Christian culture while African-Americans and Jews will no longer be so outnumbered downtown.

Too bad we don’t have some sort of law to prohibit discriminating against people based on age. You know, maybe something like this:

SEC. 621. [Section 2]

(a) The Congress hereby finds and declares that-

(1) in the face of rising productivity and affluence, older workers
find themselves disadvantaged in their efforts to retain employment, and
especially to regain employment when displaced from jobs;

(2) the setting of arbitrary age limits regardless of potential for
job performance has become a common practice, and certain otherwise
desirable practices may work to the disadvantage of older persons;

(3) the incidence of unemployment, especially long­term
unemployment with resultant deterioration of skill, morale, and employer
acceptability is, relative to the younger ages, high among older workers;
their numbers are great and growing; and their employment problems grave;

(4) the existence in industries affecting commerce, of arbitrary
discrimination in employment because of age, burdens commerce and the free
flow of goods in commerce.

(b) It is therefore the purpose of this chapter to promote employment of
older persons based on their ability rather than age; to prohibit
arbitrary age discrimination in employment; to help employers and workers
find ways of meeting problems arising from the impact of age on employment.

Oh, right, that. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. That’s just some throwback to the hippie days that we can ignore, right? The congressmen must have been smoking pot when they wrote that.

Age discrimination is real, and it’s commonplace—perhaps even pervasive. As a recent NY Times article noted,

At the top of the corporate ladder, executive recruiters are routinely told not to seek anyone over 50…In an industry survey, a majority of technology companies candidly said they would not hire anyone over 40.

I myself have decided never to take a “real” job again. It’s tempting sometimes—running my own business is a constant struggle which is on my mind from the moment I wake up in the morning until I finally drop off to sleep at night. But the alternative is, if someone were to hire me, to risk a layoff at 58 or 62 or some other age when starting over may be to daunting a prospect.

Several of my friends have struggled to find work, any work, after being laid off after age 40. One of them—with a master’s degree in international marketing, 20+ years experience in high-tech business development, fluent in French—gave up after years of unemployment, living off his retirement savings, and no health insurance.

He shot himself in the head in a park in Mountain View. Home to Google and about a hundred other high-tech companies that could have used his skills and experience.

When I was still under 40, I worked for a company that, like Facebook, was based in several buildings in downtown Palo Alto. I certainly snickered when my boss called me at home on a Sunday to ask how to send an attachment with an email. On the other hand, he had an office decorated with all the Emmy awards he’d won during his career. So maybe he knew a few things I didn’t.

But it was at that company that the project manager brought in 15 futons so that we could all sleep at the office, where ordering dinner for 10-15 people was a nightly occurrence. I had dinner at a conference table at 10pm with my co-workers many, if not most, nights. The blinding migraines that would wake me up 2-3 nights a week got so bad that I called a lawyer to see if I could claim disability to reduce my hours to no more than 54 a week. I figured I could handle 10 hours a day and 4 more on Saturday, but please, please, I needed some rest.

After all, I was almost 40.

I’ve been going to a gym or pool pretty much consecutively for about 30 years, but tonight was the first time I had to leave in less than 10 minutes because I was becoming physically ill.

The booming bass from the spinning class at the downtown YMCA was so loud that I couldn’t take it even though I was halfway across the room in the cardio area. Granted, I’m extra sensitive to odd things like feeling my sternum vibrating from the force of sound waves—one of the joys of migraine. I didn’t stay long enough for a headache to take full hold, but nausea set in almost immediately.

I complained, and the staff was very nice, and explained that “they like the loud music because it gets them going.”

Or, because the instructor decided to crank up the music and nobody asked her to turn it down. The step class seemed to be getting a good workout without needing to shake the walls to get going.

It’s a well-known fact that loud music causes permanent hearing loss. Poking around the web, I also read descriptions of not only nausea and migraine, but epilepsy (a cousin of migraine), raised blood pressure, even ruptured lungs. So why is this allowed in a facility whose mission is to “promote good health?”

According to today’s junk mail solicitations, I am

one of “our country’s most accomplished women”

and part of “a small, select group of creative professionals.”

Please, please, don’t send accolades. Send money.

I got a letter in the snail mail today inviting me to join the National Association of Professional Women. The letter states “There is no fee to be included.”

They forgot to add the disclaimer “…until we charge your credit card. But by then you’ll have forgotten that you ever signed up for this and HA HA HA we’ll have your money by then, sucker.”

Their FAQ reads:

Every woman who applies receives a complimentary basic membership. Beyond that, we offer many different membership levels, which are customized to fit your unique needs.

OK, that makes sense. Basic membership is free; premium membership is not. That’s a pretty standard course of business.

If you read the Privacy Notice, though, it’s a different story:

The National Association of Professional Women provides many different tiers of memberships, all of which are annual. On your anniversary date, which falls on the 15th of the month one year from the date of your inclusion, your membership will automatically renew at the discounted loyalty rate of only $99.00.

Oh, but should that happen, you can just say “Ooops” and get your money back, right?

Wrong. In the FAQ, in answer to the question “Can I cancel my membership?”:

Depending on the status of your membership and account, certain fees and restrictions may apply.

Perhaps they should call themselves the National Association of Sneaky Women Hoping to Dupe Other Women into Signing Up for Hidden Fees.

Banking irony:
With the free checking account
there are no free checks