I’m irritated…the paper must be back

posted by jakevest on 17th, 2010

We came very near to breaking two lifetime habits and saving me a lot of work…but the Olympics messed us up.

Somehow our newspaper subscription managed to lapse without any fanfare, something I find amazing. We must have gotten a dozen advertisements per week asking us to subscribe when we already had a subscription, but nothing happened here. It is like they are all trying to pull people aboard but when one starts to slide back into the water, nobody reaches out to grab them.

Oh well. Neither my wife nor I cared that much except we wanted to keep up with the Olympics. Feel free to laugh. A Florida paper is NOT what I would call “astute” coverage and I should have known better. Back when the Winter Olympics were in Lillehammer, the sports department sent a guy from Cuba, not that there is anything particularly wrong with that — if baseball or boxing or Jai-alai were medal sports. This gomer came to see me the day before he left and wanted me to “tell him about skiing” so he would have some expertise.

I about swallowed my candy. He had never been on skis.

Then again, that gives him about as much to go on as the average sportswriter has with football.

So I told him all I know about winter sports: You ride up, you slide down and then you drink.

Still, we wanted the paper so we resubscribed and I will once again be hauling most of it out to recycle on Sunday night, still unrolled and unread. But not before at least one thing irritates me out of each issue.

This morning was the headline “Blood Bank Chief’s Pay Increased Right Before Layoffs.” A woman who runs a “non-profit” organization was increased to $605,000 per year right before she axed 42 people. At that salary, it is no wonder that her organization doesn’t make a profit.

This salary is, of course, absurd. It is a regular candy-gram sent to a person of privilege by other people of privilege who serve on a board and vote themselves too much money. We might as well be in England supporting official inbred royal fops as to have this, but there it is.

There is absolutely nothing that a person can do for $605,000 that could not be done for the previous $588,000. It is free money. And she earns it by canning people who might actually be doing something, and as a result of her highly paid efforts services will probably suffer and if you happen to need blood in Orange County you won’t get it unless you know somebody.

I had the same problem when the mayor down there hired an arts guru for a ridiculous salary or when a consultant who happens to be a friend of a crony gets a big check around here. Lake County is as silly and insulting to taxpayers as any other place where money can be given for “services” that might not be exactly called “earned.” There’s not a city in the United States that is getting $30,000 a year worth of city manager “service” but those gomers routinely pull down athlete money. And what about that lineup of welfare suits knocking down blood center executive salaries for standing on the sidelines at Magic games…soon to be in an arena paid for by people who don’t know people.

While we are at it, how about a non-skier getting sent to the Olympics because he is chummy with the brass? Is there anybody at your place making too much for too little? It happens everywhere, so I shouldn’t be THAT irritated by this…except for one thing.

The layoffs in a time of crisis. The attitude is “I got mine and I’m keeping it and I don’t care if the ship goes down.” It is shameful.

My fourth-graders know better than that. They may not be able to do fractions with numbers, but if we have 16 Oreos and 21 mouths, they will figure out a way for everybody to get a bite. I wish we had people like that running things.

The only decent way to do it would be to figure out how much money you have, figure out how many people are on your team, and then slice up the cookies. What is happening at the blood bank down in Orlando is an instance of the teacher taking 9 servings, splitting the rest among teacher’s pets and sending the kids who don’t get any to study hall.

Are those people who were laid off necessary? If so, figure out a way to keep them. If not, having them on board in the first place was a misuse of funds and they should have been let go back when there were jobs to find.

Possibly I would not be so offended except for one of the girls in my class yesterday. She had some kind of strange skirt on over blue jeans, which is sort of a thing they do at 10. I said it was pretty. She beamed and said it was her sister’s and is too big but she wears it sometimes.

Then she added this: “When Momma gets her first paycheck from her job, she’s going to take me to the mall and I can pick out any clothes I want.”

She knows this won’t happen. It is just something you tell kids when you don’t have a job and kids pretend to believe it and bring it up to let you know they will be dressing better soon. We all know that the money will go for electric bills, food, medicine, gasoline and rent. It’ll take a lot of catching up after being laid off for so long.

The little girl did mention that when she goes shopping she will get something for her sister, too, because she loans her things. She might have to do without, but that’s okay. It would only be right to share.

That’s character. It’s a shame we can’t elect 10-year-olds.