Do you believe in Fairy Tales?

When the melody and lyrics of “Young at Heart” were first pressed into vinyl by Frank Sinatra in 1953 they quickly became a best-selling, million-dollar hit.  The song was later recorded by at least a dozen other greats of the time and, in our era, Canadian troubadour Michael Bublé is keeping its memory alive.



Employees listening to Arthur T. Demoulas  (Steven Senne/AP)

Would you agree with the lyrics of that tune’s opening stanza:  “Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart.  For it’s hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind if you’re young at heart . . . . ?

What if you were asked to apply those words to corporate America?  Would you believe such a thing could happen within that environment?
 
Suppose you were made aware that nearly 25,000 employees in three states walked off their jobs overnight this July; closed down the operations of 71 supermarkets as tight as a bug in a rug; and, in doing so, tens of thousands of that chain’s customers supported them in their walkout.  Would you believe that?

To top it off, what if you found out that the immediate causal factor that led to this massive walkout is that the CEO of the chain was fired?  What?  Employees jeopardizing their jobs en masse merely because a rich CEO gets canned?
 
That makes no sense, because it’s like turning the corporate power structure on its head – an inversion of who is in charge.  Who would put themselves at such peril, especially in this fragile economy where finding a job can be like looking for hen’s teeth.

Summer Recollections

A goldfinch rests and feeds in one of our front yard planters.

I anticipated the arrival of summer in earnest this year, especially after the long, severe winter of cold and snow.  But spring follows, as it always will, and soon summer makes its elegant entrance.  Now there is August left, nearly spent, but still strong – my favorite month.

School days are  imminent, college beckons, and vacations are coming to a close as Labor Day traditionally marks summer’s end.  However, there is still plenty of juice left in summer, because fall season is still almost a month away – September 22.

This year, as has been my custom, I engaged in a great deal of outdoor gardening.  Most of our plantings are already in place, and I don’t plan to expand them any more:  At least that is my thought – one never knows. There are sufficient garden beds out front, one out back near the patio, and a shrub line on the east-facing property line

Verizon Wireless is Hiring for its Bridgewater Smart Store

Job opportunities are coming to Bridgewater in the form of “Sales Solutions Specialists” at a Verizon Wireless Smart Store in Bridgewater.  On Friday, I received a press release from an agency representing a Verizon Wireless senior account executive asking for “The View from Bridgewater” to publicize these available jobs.

That could be good fortune for those of you who may be looking for a sales job in a good company.  The full text of the job announcement appears below unedited and in italics.  I checked out each of the hot links included in the press release, including the key one which refers you to a generic Verizon page that includes “Search Careers” in its ribbon.

I tested that link and drilled my way through it until I came to a page that highlights the specific career openings for Bridgewater.  Although I found it somewhat tedious to drill down to the Bridgewater openings, that’s the way it is for a big corporation with so many job opportunities. 

Playing Poker

Life resembles a poker game.  None of us has any choice but to play out the cards that we’ve been dealt, one hand after the other, until the game is over.  In this country, for the most part, we can reasonably assume that the deck is not marked and that the dealer is honest – or, if he is not, that he will be replaced.

There are those elsewhere who don’t enjoy that advantage:  Today, one of the worst subhuman games of rigged poker is being played out in the hostile environment of northwestern Iraq, close to the Syrian border to the west and to Kurdish territory in the north, where the chances of ever being dealt a decent hand are low to nil. 

The Middle East on Fire, Again

On Friday August 1^st, in a full-page ad in the print edition of the Washington Post, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel directed a plea to Hamas, imploring it to reject what he termed the practice of “child sacrifice,” Hamas’s alleged military tactic of using children as human shields in its war against the State of Israel.

With the clarity of a survivor of WWII’s Nazi genocide, Wiesel stated that “what we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus Arab, of Israeli versus Palestinian,” but that “it is a battle between those who celebrate life and those who champion death . . . . a battle of civilization versus barbarism.”