Painful Notes

Stand Up: Gilda left me an article from the local newspaper about the health benefits of working at your desk while standing instead of sitting. I’d seen TV news reports several months ago about the idea (some of the set-ups even include a treadmill) but had not acted upon it.

However there’s nothing like the incentive of your spouse asking, “So, what have you done about it?” to propel one into action. I took two plastic storage bins, propped them on my desk and, voilá, I am now typing while standing. I feel healthier already.


I Feel Their Pain: I can empathize with St. Louis Cardinal fans in the aftermath of star Albert Pujols’ broken wrist, suffered in a collision with Kansas City Royal Wilson Betemit. Betemit ran into the all-star first baseman as he tried to snag an errant throw. A three-time most valuable player often cited as the best in the game, Pujols will be out about six weeks. When injured, his team was tied for first place in the National League’s Central Division. It’s anybody’s guess where the Cards will be when he returns.

Pujols was hurt on Father’s Day. Some 25 years ago, on Mother’s Day, my softball team’s slick fielding first baseman, David L., had his elbow smashed on a similar play trying to catch a ball in the path of a batter running to first base. Now, the rest of this story is all hearsay as I was out of town at a business convention. But numerous sources corroborate the essential facts: we were playing Harrison JCC, at their field. With David writhing in pain and teammates organizing efforts to take him to the emergency room in White Plains, Harrison players kept pressuring our team to get back on the field to continue the game. Not the most sportsmanlike of conduct. We never really liked their attitude to begin with, but this iced the cake, so to speak.

Anyway, David never played again (though his two sons did when they grew up). His injury came back to haunt us in the championship game that year. On top of his injury, our second, third and fourth string first basemen were away, so we had to play a scrub, Alan, at first. The first two batters hit ground balls to short. Alan could not handle either throw from the shortstop. By inning’s end we had given up three unearned runs. One of our wayward first basemen arrived before the start of the second inning, we played flawless ball thereafter, but the deficit was too much to overcome. We lost 5-3. We finally won the league title some 23 years later.


Trouble Comes in Threes: That’s a popular saying and in this case true as it pertains to the name Weiner.

First there was Anthony Weiner. No need to dwell on that walking disaster, or should I say, tweeting disaster.

Second was the Saturday small plane crash that took the lives of pilot Keith Weiner, his wife, Lisa, their daughter Isabel and her friend Lucy Walsh shortly after taking off from Westchester County Airport on their way to Montauk. A real tragedy.

The third Weiner-related trouble came to my attention while scrolling through the Internet. Are you familiar with Michael Savage? To me, he’s a really despicable right-wing radio talk show host. How despicable? Well, the British have barred him from entering their country because of his invective. The Savage Nation is our third most popular radio talk show, which, again to me, says something about our country.

What’s this got to do with the first two Weiner items? Michael Savage’s original name is Michael Alan Weiner.


Wal-Mart Fallout: Does Wal-Mart discriminate against women in its employment practices? Thirty-two years of covering retailing, much of it spent watching Wal-Mart grow into the world’s largest retailer, leads me to say the Bentonville, Ark., company does not have a corporate policy favoring, or even tacitly condoning, discrimination. Do I believe bias occurs within its ranks? For sure.

Wal-Mart is no different than almost all other retailers, except in size, of course. By no different I mean that from time and memoriam retailers have favored male workers for almost all of their managerial posts. Women were to be tolerated as clerks on the sales floor and in the back office, but hardly ever given control of an enterprise or a department within it. Throughout most of the 20th century, few women reached the corporate suite, unless they started a company, like Frieda Loehmann did 90 years ago in Brooklyn.

I’m not going to review the reasons why women, who make up the majority of customers and often the majority of workers, fail to secure better paying and more responsible jobs within retail companies (they’re often similar reasons to what goes on in other industries). Rather, let’s understand that in a company such as Wal-Mart with some 3,400 stores in the United States, there are bound to be some managers who are less sophisticated, less open to change and progress, more set in the old ways than the ideal the law seeks to promulgate.

Does the existence of a few bad apple managers, okay, even a bushel of bad apple managers, justify a class action lawsuit? My sympathies lie with the women, but my intellect sides with the company. I agree with the Supreme Court majority ruling rejecting class-action status to the 1.5 million women who have worked for Wal-Mart. I encourage each and every women who feels she was a victim of discrimination to continue to challenge Wal-Mart in court.

(PS—I hope siding with the Supreme Court majority doesn't mean I'm getting conservative in my old age.)