This Is Not News

Celebrated my niece’s second birthday today, which was nice. My mom gave me an office chair that she found uncomfortable and which seems like a vast improvement over the last one I was using, but we’ll see how it holds up over the next few days.

I also gave my brother back is copy of Batman #430. It’s cover-dated February 1989. It’s the first Batman comic published after “A Death in the Family,” the famous story that killed the second Robin as a result of a 1-900 number reader poll. (Am I the only one who remembers news stories about Robin’s death like they were last month?) It was also the comic he bought when he started collecting comics, and he started a month or so before I did. So it’s the beginning of a hobby and a collection that’s been part of our family for two decades. Since he decided not to collect Batman as a regular title and I did, he traded it to me somewhere along the line. He was younger than my daughter is now when he bought it. Now he has a daughter of his own. The cover has a couple of folds and wrinkles. The pages are a little yellow. The story’s been written out of continuity by at least a couple of universe-changing events DC Comics has published in the last 20 years. But in spite of that – maybe because of that – he wanted it back, and I was happy to give it to him.

He’s promised to give me another copy, which is certainly a fair trade. To be honest, I’m just glad he gave me a reason to pull it out of its longbox and relive the memories.

It’s amazing to me how much I can read thanks to the Internet. When I was a kid, I’d get one newspaper a day and maybe a newsmagazine or two each week. Now I’m practically inundated with online magazines, the blogs connected to those magazines, blogs by experts in fields like political science and education. Now that it’s election season I can totally get lost in it. And now I’m thinking about buying a Kindle. I can’t keep up with the information I already have and I’m trying to get more.

And I spend so much time dashing from site to site that I don’t know if I’m actually processing the information or finding ways to add to it. I’ll worry about that another time. Right now, I’m just gonna enjoy living in the future.

I am sure that mine is not the only household where this is true, but it certainly defies stereotypes. My wife is far, far more interested in the start of the NFL season than I am. I was already feeling iffy about the sport giving its reliance on violence and the possible effect on players’ brains, but throw in the fact that the NFL has locked out its referees and I just can’t bring myself to care. I’m willing to at least listen to the conversation when a struggling business says it has to reduce costs to stay competitive, but the NFL is such a money-printing machine that I have no sympathy when it tries to avoid sharing that wealth with the people who actually make the games happen. (And yeah, no one watches the game for the refs. But who’d watch a sport where anything goes or where the players were expected to call their own penalties?)

Meanwhile the NHL is getting ready to lock its players out as well. Never mind that the sport already has a hard salary cap and that the last contract negotiation involved big salary rollbacks. The way TV networks are throwing insane money at live sports programming these days, I can’t really buy into the league’s claims of poverty.

I don’t even want to talk about the hypocrisy of college sports. But you can go read Michael McCann discuss Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against the NCAA.

I dunno. I used to be able to overlook the rooting-for-laundry aspect of sports fandom because these business, for all their mercenary nature, were supported by and helped to sustain a kind of civic identity. But if I don’t like the organization and what it does, should I want it to represent me? Should I tie myself to it just because of its location?

If you were to suggest that I’m going through this in part because I’m a Pennsylvanian whose state university and its athletic program are currently undergoing a major identity crisis, well, I don’t think I could argue with you. But I think there’s a deeper issue that recent events (and not-quite-so-recent-events like the Eagles signing Mike Vick) have forced me to think about, and that make it harder to be entertained by the games.

On the upside, it’ll probably improve my productivity if I have my Sundays free.

Found another corner in my rec room office today after I set up some shelves in the garage and moved some books there. As I looked at some of the journals and how-to-books and other texts that I had barely cracked open, I tried to remind myself, and not for the first time, that I need to take on fewer projects but make sure that I see the ones I do undertake to full completion. Otherwise I wind up with my time and attention and energy scattered, which just makes me loath to get anything done.

I think this is something I picked up in high school and college. I would let assignments, projects, newspaper stories, etc. pile up while I went over them in my head. Then, when the panic of the final for-real deadline hit, the adrenaline – and the fact that I was 19 years old and, sadly, probably at my physical peak – would give me enough energy and focus to get the thing done.

Now, I’m under deadlines all the time. There’s no adrenaline. Just dread of the deadline and the sinking feeling as it approaches. I still write and plan in my head, but it takes me longer to get the words and the work on paper. But in my head I’m the same 19 year old counting on my ability to pull out of the dive at the last minute.

I take this don’t-make-the-same-mistakes-as-I-did mindset into the classroom sometimes. It’s one reason why I am probably not as radical as some of the other progressive teachers I talk to sometimes. I tell myself, maybe if I had built some different habits in school I would be more effective than I am now. (Not that I’m saying I’m a total yutz, of course. Just looking in the direction of Getting Better.)

Then again, if I had a dime every time my mother has watched me try to give my daughter the same advice she gave me – with much the same rate of success – I would be paying other people to alphabetize my bookcases on a daily basis with plenty of cash on hand to spare. Some things ya gotta learn my doing, I suppose.

I’ve been sitting at my desk for the last two hours trying to think of something to write. I’ve been walking around all day putting sentences together in my head, starting and stopping. I’m wondering what I have to say that I haven’t said before. I’m walking around the rec room that I use as an office, noticing the objects that I take for granted as my surroundings.

Bookcases full of texts. Some I’ve read closely in order to glean insights that guide a lot of my thinking today. Some I barely glanced through to try to keep up with my assignments for a particular class.

A tower of CDs that I ignore because the songs I want to hear are all in my iTunes library. But the tower in still here in case of emergency.

A poster of R.E.M. from around 1991/1992 that has hung on the wall of every place I’ve lived in since then.

Office supplies and teaching resources that I will sort out “one of these days.”

Bills and financial records that track the growth of my responsibilities and exaggerations.

Crafts that my daughter made next to a small wooden box that my great-grandmother gave me when I was younger than I can remember.

Comics, novels, toys, games, movie posters . . . doorways into fantasy worlds that inspire my imagination but can also be a tempting refuge from reality.

I looked closely at all of these things as I walked around the room, tried to take stock of what they represented and how they formed part of the journey that’s brought me to now.

I spent a lot of this summer trying to organize all of this stuff. I made progress. I will make more.

And as I do, I hope I also find the resolve to clear the clutter in my mind enough to have something to say and the confidence to say it.

Me to Alex, as she’s in the middle of a project: Don’t make too much of a mess here.

Pattie: Let me amend that. Don’t make a mess.

Gotta admit, at 11 PM that’s a fairly rational amendment.

I’ve been watching the Saints destroy the Lions for the last hour or two and trying to figure out what to write. Don’t have the energy for much, but I’ve been reading about Penn Alexander, a school that the School District of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania run in West Philadelphia. Like Masterman High School, this is one of those success stories that Philadelphians line up to get their children into. (Literally, in the case of Penn Alexander – the registration line starts the night before signups begin.) The thing that keeps running through my head is, with examples of success stories in front of us, why aren’t we trying to apply those lessons elsewhere? It’s like no one knows how to learn from experience.

Anyway, here are some links I was reading tonight:

West Philly Local

Daily Pennsylvanian

University of Pennsylvania

CityPaper

These days, some people view holiday shopping as a sport or game: collecting the best coupons, sussing out the best deals, beating the crowds, picking the right stores at the right time, suriving the long lines without having to use the bathroom… It takes physical and mental strength, right? If shopping is your game, this is your season. So lace up your comfy shoes, fire up your shopping smart phone apps, and enjoy.

One thing I will ask you to keep in mind this season is that there are no extra points or bonus credits for ripping apart retail employees in the course of your shopping. They are not your enemy, there’s no need to treat them as such. I’ve assembled a list of five things you may not know about retail employees which I hope encourages you to spread a little more holiday spirit and little less retail rage when you shop this season.

1. Retail employees work insane hours.
In the somewhat fictional, sepia-toned time of Norman Rockwell’s painting of an improbably large and perfect Thanksgiving turkey, the only people working on this holiday were police officers, firefighters, hospital workers, and other essential workers, most of whom got holiday pay for sacrificing their “family time for the greater good. In our high-definition, modern reality, Thanksgiving seems to have become yet another meal we rush through in order to get to something else. That ‘something else’ being a sale on the latest gaming console at the local electronics store that requires you to line up at 5pm for the 10pm store opening. Think about it: if you’re in line at 5pm on Thanksigiving, and the store opens at 10pm on Thanksgiving, it means that dozens of employees who work at that store were there all day, stocking, cleaning, and getting the store ready for you. They didn’t eat Thanksgiving dinner and they will likely be there for most of the night and into the following day. For some, they’ll get six to eight hours off, to eat, sleep, change, etc. before they need to be back again for the next shift. No one gets Black Friday off, not if they want to keep their jobs.

And Black Friday is just the start. Most stores have extended hours throughout the holiday season. That means closing at 11pm, restocking through the night and re-opening at 7am for nearly eight weeks. If the person ringing up your purchase looks a little bleary-eyed, this is why.

2. Retail salaries are low, with very few benefits.
Sure the hours are insane, but retail workers get paid well to compensate, right? Wrong. Labor unions are non-existent at the major retailers these days so there’s very little pressure for national retailers to pay very much above minimum wage. That fact, coupled with high unemployment, means that there is no shortage of new workers to replace the ones who complain, burnout, or get fired. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average non-commissioned retail sales employee makes just over $9 per hour with few, if any, benefits to boost their overall compensation.

Most retailers manage their employee payrolls systematically to keep the majority of their employees just under the threshold for which the law demands that the employees be given medical and other benefits. So that means if you work full-time and have medical coverage, the person waiting on you in your favorite store works one or two hours less per week and gets none.

Most retail employees are eligible for a modest employee discount at the stores where they work, often between 10% and 15%. However, these days, any savvy online shopper with a good search engine can match or exceed that on any given sale day so can it really be called a perk?

3. Retail workers do not order stock or set the sales.
So your favorite store put ads out everywhere touting the fact that they will have half-price Whatevers on sale starting at 11pm on Thanksgiving night. Those Whatevers are sooooooo expensive and hard to find, so you get yourself there, line up in the cold, and have your credit card at the ready. But cue sad trombone, the ad didn’t exaclty say that each store was only getting two of said Whatevers and the extreme couponer in line ahead of you got them both. So what now? Well, if you’re like most people, you march over to the first store employee you see and you tear them a new one, right?

Um…why exactly? Let’s think about this. Did the store employee you’re ripping apart actually order the shipment of Whatevers from China? Did he or she actually decide that each store would only get two? Did he or she decide how much the discount would be? The answer to all of those is almost certainly no. Let’s get this straight, the people who make ordering, shipping, and cost decisions for major retailers make way more than $9 per hour, don’t wear logo imprinted polo shirts, and are sure as Hell not going to be in a store on 11pm on Thanksgiving night. Store employees, even store managers have no say in these decisions. The stores are expected to execute sales directives, make sales goals, and keep costs down. That’s it. Even if the employee you tear apart passes on your complaint to the “higher ups” it’s likely to get lost in the internal bureacracy because corporate offices never take employee complaints seriously.

If you have a complaint, make it to corporate yourself. Do it publicly on their Facebook page or to their Twitter account. The likelihood for real change or compensation is much higher.

4. If they could open more registers, they would. Seriously.
Long retail lines during the holiday season are a fact of life but isn’t it infuriating when there are eight registers and only four of them are open? I completely agree! Someone get me the store manager so I can tell him or her that this simply cannot be tolerated. Yes, the same store manager who has no power in the corporate structure and whose promotion to store manager likely meant that he or she gets to work twice as many hours for a fixed salary instead of an hourly rate with some overtime. The store manager who is given a strict holiday payroll budget in September which is based on maxmizing profits, not on customer service. Give it a shot. You can certainly make your opinions known. You can even yell or scream a bit. It’s not going to be the first time this manager has gotten yelled at today and it probably won’t be the last. It also probably won’t get any more registers open either. My advice, shop early in the morning or later in the day on weekdays, as store hours allow. The lines will be shorter.

5. Retail workers have not declared “war” on Christmas, they have to follow a script.
Thanks to the modern innovation that is mystery shopping, almost every second of your three-to-five minute interaction at the cash register of a major retailer is now scripted. They have to ask you if you found everything you need (even though there’s not much they can do if you didn’t), they have to pitch you on the store credit card (even though the last thing they want to do with a long line of customers is check your credit), and they have to give you a cheery greeting and farewell (even though they’re probably so tired they can’t remember what year it is). The fact that the last item may be “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” or whatever seasonal holiday you enjoy, is not their choosing. The corporate office likely wrote the script based on focus group research and whole bunch of other factors that have nothing to do with the person packing up your newly purchased sweaters. The employees have to follow it to the letter or they can be fired or, at best, lose any slim hope they have of bonus pay. So feel free to reply “Merry Christmas” in your snottiest voice at the employee who tells you to have a “Happy Holiday.” That embodies to spirit of the season and will likely make their day.

Or you could both just say “have a nice day” and mean it.

Bottom line: it’s all about profits.
I know it sounds like I’m going out of my way to make excuses for retail employees and I admit to being somewhat biased. I managed a retail shopping mall for three years. While there are lousy retail employees out there (I certainly fired my share), the vast majority just want to do their jobs well, earn their pay, and support their families. They don’t want to make your lives harder nor do they want to ruin your holiday. They rely on shoppers and need you to come back. Unfortunately, most of the key decisions that impact the shoppping experience are made by people who don’t set foot in the stores at all, let alone during the holiday season. Keep in mind, most major retailers in this country are publically traded companies. A successful holiday season for them maximizes profits to shareholders, not positive experiences for customers. It’s not likely to change until customers remind them, en masse, that the two are not mutally exclusive.

Happy Shopping!

On the way home from a walk the other night, I made sure to remind Alex that the fact that the Phillies have won the National League East in half of the baseball seasons that she has been alive should not, in any way, be taken as normal. I explained to her that I started watching baseball around Game 2 of the 1983 World Series – so I even missed the one game of that series that they won, along with the rest of that 1976-1983 run. So we’re trying not to take division titles for granted, even though I’d sure like to see Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Raul Ibanex and everyone else who joined the team after 2008 get their turn with a World Series ring. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m going to go back to pinching myself.

Had my sister and her boyfriend over today for pizza and a game of Ticket to Ride. Once again we relied on Alton Brown’s dough recipe from his grilled pizza episode, although we made the pizza in the oven. Nearly killed my mixer making a double batch of dough because I forgot to use the paddle wheel to mix the ingredients before switching to the dough hook, but we got through it. Pattie and Alex got to laugh at me putting an ice pack on top of the mixer, the pizza was tasty, and we have leftovers.

We also just finished up a batch of pork tacos using the slow cooker recipe from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Everyday. I love this cookbook. Great salsa recipes. I’m trying to think of how to modify this recipe to make barbecue pork.

Not sure what the next major project will be, but it may be time for fried chicken before too long.

Read this story by Jayson Stark about how detailed scouting information on hitters in baseball is stored, analyzed, and disseminated. It’s a great piece of writing that dives into one of the big reasons that scoring in baseball is down. Teams now know so much about individual hitters’ tendencies that they can craft a specific game plan geared to exploiting each player’s weaknesses and getting them out.

Stark is a longtime Philadelphia resident, so it’s not surprising that he uses an example that’s familiar to most Phillies fans. Ryan Howard had a couple of gigantic offensive years when he first became a regular. But as teams gathered more data on him, they realized what a phenomenally bad idea it was to throw him a fastball, so they’ve done it less and less often. They also move their fielders from where they traditionally would position themselves to the spots where Howard usually hits the ball. The result is that while Howard has had good numbers since his early years, they haven’t been as good.

As Stark says, more and more teams are using “unconventional” defense on more and more hitters. Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon sits down with an iPad each morning and combs through the statistics his organization has compiled in order to devise defensive positioning and pitching approaches for that night’s game.

There are a couple of things that fascinate me about this story. One is that I like the example of a way that technology has made specific information available and accessible. We hear a lot about how the Web and Google put a lot of general information at everyone’s fingertips, but this is much more detailed information than you find on Wikipedia or Retrosheet, and it’s easier for people to process because it can be presented using the iPad.

The other is that Stark suggests that even as Maddon’s Rays have shown a lot of success with their defensive shifts, many teams don’t replicate his aggressiveness because they’re too comfortable with traditional approaches. It’s an interesting example of how information can help you – if you’re willing to use it. That lesson applies to a lot more than just baseball.