Open Letter to Target

I would like an explanation of why it is necessary to scan a drivers license for the purchase of alcohol at a Target store. I asked the cashier this question today. It was obvious she really didn't know why licenses are scanned. Her explanation and the explanation of another employee who was in line behind me was "it is to ensure minors don't buy alcohol." That answer makes no sense as a response to my question. I understand liquor laws and age limits. I am willing to show my ID to prove I am not under 21 and can legally purchase a bottle of wine. Why do you scan the drivers license? What purpose does this serve? I don't know of any other store that scans a license. It does not have to be scanned. A cashier can look at the date and determine if you are of legal age. This is far more secure than scanning the license where the information can be stolen. In light of Target's recent track record with cyber crime and identity theft, it is absolutely insane that you continue this scanning policy. You obviously do not know what the cyber criminals are capable of stealing when you collect driver license information. The easy answer for me is to never purchase alcohol at Target again. I only buy a few bottles a year, so I'm sure losing me as a customer won't concern you much, but it is in Target's best interest to reduce the possibility of identity theft and prevent these lapses in cyber security. Take the necessary steps to protect your customers so they remain your customers. My hope is that you review your reasons for scanning licenses and discontinue this policy immediately.

The Cleveland Browns Marketing Team

I can't decide if I should feel sorry for the marketing people who work for the Cleveland Browns, or if I should be super impressed by them. Those poor saps have to put a positive spin on everything to do with the Browns. That is a damn hard job! Every week during the season, they have to come up with something 'good' about every freaking game we lose. Hey, it's nice that Josh Gordon set some NFL records, and I'm happy for him, but we lost those games. It'd sure be nice to play a game, or two, in January. I would say February, but I'm smart enough to know that is asking too much. It's far more pleasant to be golfing in Hawaii in January than to be playing football on a frozen field somewhere. Why mess with a good thing? Keep the status quo. Ensure another losing season by hiring a coach from a losing team. What a concept. Ah, but this is where those brilliant marketing people come in. They've actually written that it's a good thing! That Pettine's defense finished in the top 10! Wow, how great is that? Who gives a damn if your defense is good when you lose the game? I'll tell you who--no one! No one gives a damn about any stupid ranking for a losing team. You know the truth? Those Buffalo players were staying in the same condos and playing the same golf courses in Hawaii as the Browns were while teams like Seattle, Denver, New England, Green Bay and San Francisco were still doing their damn jobs on the football field!! I mean, seriously, can the Browns or the Bills even spell playoffs?? I'm looking forward to seeing who our new coach is for the 2015 season. I know our spectacular marketing team can handle the job!

I Spend a Lot of Time in Airports Trying Not to Cry

Those of you who know me, know that I have the worst luck when it comes to air travel. If something can go wrong with my flight, it will. Lost luggage, interminable delays, security issues. I didn't know what else they could come up with to ruin my travel. This past week I learned not to underestimate them--they will always find a new way to screw me over. I should be smart enough to give up on travelling at Christmas time. It's expensive, it's crowded, and there is weather, but I do it anyhow. My 3-hour layover in Newark on my way to Ohio became a six-hour delay. The plane was there, but we had no crew. I think they had a weather delay somewhere. I figured I paid my dues on the way to Ohio, so they trip home should be OK. The weather across the country was perfect and I got to Pittsburgh Airport in plenty of time. I strolled around for a while to get some exercise, then went to my gate. Pulled out my boarding pass, which I had printed out the night before, and noticed that it said "No seat assigned. See gate agent." I had chosen my seat when I purchased the astronomically expensive ticket back in September, so I wasn't worried. I just assumed it was some kind of system glitch. I went to the gate agent and she explained that they had overbooked and would call me when they "free up some seats". I told her I had already chosen my seat. She said that really doesn't mean anything. They make that announcement saying "We have an overbooked flight. If you have flexible travel plans and can wait for the next flight, please come to the podium and we'll give you a $400 travel voucher." They made that announcement a few times. They start boarding the plane by groups, but she hadn't called me back to the podium. They boarded the next group, then the next, and finally the last group. I was still sitting there. I went up to the gate. They had overbooked by 3 passengers. No one volunteered for the $400 voucher. Three of us would be deemed "involuntary denied boarding." I was being bumped from a flight that I reserved and paid for in September! I didn't think that could really happen. I should have known better. My gate agent Alisa, who was very nice, explained that they would pay me "for my inconvenience". Whatever--I just wanted to get rebooked on another flight. So Alisa is looking on the computer for another way to get me home, while she is on the phone to the people who make the payments. She writes down a number and shows it to me. This would be the amount they would pay me in cash--not flight vouchers, or tickets, but cold, hard cash! It was 205% of my ticket cost! Yes, you read that right: more than double what I paid for the ticket. Suddenly, getting bumped from a flight didn't seem so bad! Although, she wasn't having much luck rerouting me to Orange County. I told her I could fly into Long Beach or Los Angeles, if it would make it easier. It made it a lot easier. She booked me in the front row of a direct flight to LAX, leaving at 7pm--6 hours after my original flight left. She handed me my boarding passes and that large check, and mentioned that there was also a flight to LAX via Chicago leaving at 3:30. It was full, but I might want to try stand-by. What did I have to lose? I went to that gate, got my stand-by ticket and headed to the bar. Ordered a beer and watched the Notre Dame - Rutgers bowl game. It was getting close to the time I needed to check my standby status, but ND had the ball and was marching down the field. As soon as they scored the winning touchdown, I mosied over to the gate to check the standby monitor. There were 3 names on it, but only one with a check mark next to it--mine!! It was the happiest moment of my life! I turned in my standby ticket, got my boarding passes and got in line. I spend a lot of time in airports trying not to cry, but this time was different. I was so overcome with joyous happiness that I was a little teary as I boarded that flight. My original flight took me from Pittsburgh to Newark, with a 3 hour layover and arrival in Orange County at 10:30pm. My standby flight was scheduled to touch down in LA at 7:45. To make that silver lining just a little shinier, I landed half an hour early--3 hours and 15 minutes BEFORE my original flight. Earlier and richer! A shared-shuttle to Orange County was supposed to be there in 20 minutes, but it got there in 5 minutes. We were on the freeway and home-bound by 8pm. Got home, collected my mail, checked on my new car, unpacked my suitcase and was in bed 35 minutes before my original flight landed. It was bliss! Who knew that being bumped from a flight could make me so happy??

What I Learned From My First Job

Lately, on LinkedIn, a bunch of rich, famous CEOs of major corporations have been writing posts titled "What I Learned from my First Job." Today I read the post from the guy who runs eBay. He delivered beer and got to drink at 7am. The perfect summer job for an 18 year old! But he claims he took away leadership qualities and trust from that job. So, what did I learn from my first job? At first, when I started thinking about it, I was pretty sure the answer was 'absolutely nothing'. I was a 16-year old waitress at a Perkins Pancake House. I ran track in high school, and they worked my hours around my track schedule until school let out for the summer. I worked a few days a week, in the evenings--when no one goes into a pancake place. Minimum wage for servers was $1.85 and I'd usually come home with less than $5 in tips because the place was empty. Every once in a while I'd get to fill in for one of the 'regular' girls--the 20-somethings who got to work the breakfast shift--and I'd make $30 in tips. It was an interesting clientele at Perkins in those days. We had two groups of regulars who came in every night: the Arabs and the Mafia. The Arabs were nice and were probably just escaping from their wives for the evening. The Mafia tipped slightly better so we all wanted to wait on them. The Godfather, Tony, Shadow, Big Ed, and few others whose names have faded from my memory. They'd sit around, talk, and study the racing sheets from Waterford and Thistledown Race Tracks. They were all up in arms one night after a horse, in a 'fixed' race, came in 4th. They'd been double-crossed and were not happy. Someone would have to pay for that. The only other major issue was when Tony's son was murdered. Junior ran a strip club. The place had been bombed in the past, but he met his demise when someone gunned him down outside his apartment. Tony never came back to the restaurant after that. And the other guys had zero sympathy. Junior had either threatened or tried to kill every single one of them and they were glad he was dead. Nice things to tell a 16-year old, but I guess I could say I learned loyalty. They were united in their dislike of Junior, and in the dog-eat-dog world of organized crime, they had each other's backs. Surround yourself with people who share your values, and together you'll go far. Maybe it's not the ideal way to present a lesson in loyalty to a teenager, but hey, it was Youngstown. And, then again, maybe I really didn't learn anything--I'd much rather have drank beer at 7am and ended up as the multi-millionaire CEO of eBay.

Another Senseless Shooting

We only get a few days, or if we're lucky a few weeks, before the news of another senseless shooting takes over our airwaves. I get alerts on my phone of major events from the LA Times. Obviously those alerts were going off all day today, especially since this happened in my little corner of the world. I watched all the early coverage on the live feed on my computer at work. I spent most of that time wondering how the family and friends of the victim will find the strength to go on. How do you deal with sending your loved one off to work, and not having them ever come home again? Do you struggle to remember their last words, the last thing you said to them, the last touch, the last kiss? How do you accept that finality? How do you wake up tomorrow? Especially when it happens at the hands of an unstable element with access to guns: high-powered unnecessary assault weapons. I know that, in a society unwilling to give up guns, or even agree to stricter gun controls, this event will occur again and again and again--in another workplace, another school, another mall. I can accept illness, car accidents, plane crashes, and the wrath of Mother Nature. I don't like any of those things, and some have affected me personally, but I understand them. What I have a very hard time with is dealing with man's inhumanity to man. How is it possible to point a gun at another human being and pull the trigger? It is completely unfathomable to me. I realize I've probably written these same exact words in an earlier blog post commenting on another shooting. And I wonder how many more times I'll have to write them again.

Automation Dependency

In light of the Asiana Airlines crash at SFO, many articles and newscasts are discussing the dependency of pilots to use automated systems to fly and land an airplane, instead of an 'old-fashioned' visual/manual method. In this fully automated world, that applies to far more than just flying an airplane. It is getting to the point where we have to ask ourselves: Are we better off with technology, or not? Who writes a letter anymore? Blogger.com is blocked on my computer at work, so I'd hand write out a blog post, but due to not writing for years, my penmanship sucked! So now I just type my blog in an email to myself, and copy and paste it to my blog page when I get home. When you go to a meeting at work, does anyone takes notes with a pen and paper? I'm sure it's few and far between since most people type notes on their iPad or laptop. I used to know hundreds of phone numbers by heart. People were impressed with how many numbers I knew. But I only know a few now because I simply pick up my phone and tell it who to call. I don't even have to dial the number. We're losing our ability to do things on our own. We need to find a happy medium between manual processes and technological evolution. If we allow machines to think for us, how long will it be before we can no longer think on our own? Are we making ourselves irrelevant? Maybe this is how the world ends--no huge cataclysmic disaster, no new ice age or dinosaurs--we just simply phase ourselves out. In evolution theories, we came from animals with tails, but since we didn't use them, they became unnecessary and disappeared. What's next?

My Garden

Every year I plant a few different types of vegetables in my patio garden. Last year I tried potatoes for the first time. Red potatoes. I made potato salad, potatoes sautéed with peppers and onions, potatoes boiled with the skins on, then fork-mashed and drizzled with butter, salt and pepper. Each dish was awesome, if I say so myself! Last October I went to Italy and discovered I actually like eggplant--especially when it's smothered in sauce and cheese! So, this year, I planted eggplant in my garden. Can't wait to try them, but it'll still be at least a month or two. I'll let you know how they turn out. I also planted basil from seed for the first time. It only got so big, then stopped. It's not dead, but I have to figure what I can do to boost it up. Maybe I'll Google that later. I always plant tomatoes and tried the grafted tomato this year--which means extra yield. There are already a ton of tomatoes on my plant. Today, I harvested the first one of the season. Wow, was it good! There is nothing like a home-grown tomato! Store-bought, or even those bought at a farmer's can't begin to compare with the incredible taste, juiciness and freshness of a home-grown tomato. Sometimes, it's hard to believe they're even the same plant. I can't wait to harvest the next tasty batch!