What to do about agressive male co-workers

That's me, by the way. I'm the agressive male co-worker. Angry at work because of lack of sleep plus dealing with small business owners. Small businesses, that noble breed, you say? How on earth could they be frustrating? Well, even though it happens week after week, it always astonishes me when these people (who often have 20+ years of experience) call me with a problem and just say that they're 'confused.' They're not confused, there's nothing confusing about the business I'm in. It's so clear cut that with 25 pages I can have a temp worker do my job (4 hour workweek anyone?). What's clear cut for me is even easier for them. Yet, they get confused, meaning that I have to step in and offer them concessions because they're unhappy about something.

This business that I'm in offers:

100% return policy on product, meaning all products that don't sell in the store can be returned for the money owed on them.

100% replacement policy on damaged goods

All sorts of retail incentives in the form of coop, or money back for promoting our items. Oh, by the way, isn't promoting items to sell something that businesses should do so that they can, I don't know, sell items?

Fair business policy. Meaning, we cannot offer a great rate on our product to the biggest vendor, and a lesser rate to the smaller vendor. It is against the law. The only time we can offer a better rate to a vendor is if they, essentially, do some of our distribution job for us. If they distribute to other vendors (or to their own locations, essentially other vendors), we can offer them a better discount. This is about as level a playing field as it gets (how would you like to be told that a bulk discount is illegal???)

And boy do they complain. Everything is a complaint, and they are flabbergasted when we do not single them out for the best promotions.

I do sympathize with them. All of these small business owners got into the business when it was not that great of a business to begin with. Then, national players opened successful, attractive chain shops, plus online retailers flipped the playing field even more. These small businesses are dropping like flies. One minute I'm trying to help figure out their promotions, the next minute I hear that they're closing. The amount of closings is at least one store a month, and a few major stores each year.

The survivors of this bunch are a mean, Dickensian lot who do whatever it takes to stay open. I need to compile the dirty playbook at some point because these businesses truly have the Darwinian gifts to survive against all odds. They will do anything to stay open, anything to extend their credit, and then when folding, 'settle' with the suppliers only to somehow reopen again. Can they be ignored? Hardly.

But back to me. My boss used to say that she thought it was good that I didn't just roll over and take what these small business owners were dishing, that it was good to stand up to them. Yet, is it really? I know I get some bad vibes coming off me, and I don't like to give out the bad vibes. Is the agressive male co-worker toxic or just a part of the cog in the wheel? Is being nice all the time to people who're taking advantage of your corporation just as bad?

That is more than enough questions for one day!

New Movie Review: Milk

There is no such thing as having too many civil rights heroes. I certainly had another in Milk, a movie that resonated with me deeply. I have spent my entire life dealing with powerful emotions based on the hatred and fear of homosexuality. I only wish I had known about him in middle school or before. I hope that teens watch this and the casual words of hatred towards people of different sexual orientation are not bandied about to establish a crude cameraderie amongst supposed equals.

There could be so many movies made about San Fran in this time period. It wasn't only Harvey's time, though he was a shining beacon of light. Some were controversial, such as the Black Panther Party. Others, such as Jim Jones with his People's Temple or the Symbionese Liberation Army, are regarded as blights of history with no apologists. All would make good movies. For a fun recasting of the SLA, don't miss the movie Network, a classic.

I'll have to watch Milk again, and I agree with what the Czech mentioned to me, that it's a movie you can watch again really soon. Some movies are great, but are nearly impossible to watch again (holocaust movies). This movie, though, succeeds in helping deepen Mr. Milk's place into the canon of American history, at none too critical a time.

Old Movie Review: Silence of the Lambs

Last night I watched this '91 Oscar winner for the second time, the first time being over 14 years ago. Back then, I was just plain scared. I wasn't a habitual watcher of horror movies. My first experience with a horror movie, Bug (1975, I watched a TV or VHS version in '84), left me absolutely terrified to put my body anywhere.

This, and a few other horror movies I probably shouldn't have seen, were due to my loving nanny at the time, an El Salvadorean in her 60's who had escaped the civil war. She loved horror movies. We speculated it was because of the real-life horror of being in a vicious war and also a huge earthquake, but perhaps she just needed suspense and bodycount to carry a storyline. Her English never got so good anyways, and this was long before Spanish cable was available nationwide. So, shows like Dallas didn't have enough going on to follow the story without understanding the conversations (not like she missed much).

This time around, I wasn't terribly afraid. I knew, for instance, that this movie (like the best of the suspense genre) traded a lot of outright gore and violence for suspense (reducing the 'cringe count'). Now that I could focus on other parts of the movie, I appreciated it for something wholly outside of suspense: Jodie Foster's acting around her character's gender role.

Jodie Foster is, as Hannibal Lecter pins her, a rube in cheap shoes dreaming to make it big in the FBI. She has an accent that she flips on when she needs to gain the trust of local police in rural or Southern areas. Likewise, she turns it off at the bureau's headquarters in Quantico. She's adapting because she's fighting an uphill battle: in the spheres of law enforcement and (yes) criminaldom, men are typically the enforcers and criminals and women are the victims. The men in the movie, whether nerdy Ph D's, G-Men, or lunatics, view her as a sexy catch or someone to fling semen on. The men who try something on her vastly outnumber the ones who don't: even Hannibal Lecter cops a 'pinky feel' as she grabs her case file back in Memphis. The movie isn't sexist; Demme's point is that this particular world (and the world at large by extension) is sexist. A criticism I would levy, though, is that it came off as a bit heavy-handed and not too subtle. I appreciate subtlety in art.

It was important for me to see this for another reason, as I had watched Manhunter this year, Michael Mann's original version that flopped at the box office. The difference lies in the directors. Demme is heavy-handed and obvious, while Mann uses his usual stoicism in guiding his monomaniacal male leads (with no big female protagonists, very typical Mann). Like all classic Mann (all Mann is classic), the men discuss the situations with extreme brevity and economy. Mann's Hannibal Lecter may be the exception, but he isn't given enough screen time to play tug-of-war with the detective lead like in Silence of the Lambs. And, unlike nearly all serial killer portrayals, Mann's killer on the loose actually has a sympathetic, human side. Michael Mann has guts--he's not afraid to lose audience in the romanesque gladiator simplicity of good and evil.

I am a Mann fan, though, and I make no bones about it. Is Manhunter superior to Silence of the Lambs? If you like Michael Mann, it's just an unfair fight, but yeah, it is superior.

Hey, I got a response!

A few weeks ago I wrote against Dick Cavett's wildly popular NYT article about Sarah Palin and her bad grammar. It reeked of class warfare, specifically Dick Cavett of the upper class against Sarah Palin of the lower class. Though, I did not deny that Sarah Palin didn't really answer questions, which scores her no points in my book.

I specifically took issue with, ironically, the grammar in Dick Cavett's column. If he's so high-and-mighty on grammar, shouldn't his column be Strunk and White clean? Not so! Says the new Strunk and White: Patricia O' Connor.

The grammar issue in question was this sentence above all: May I confess that upon first seeing her, I liked her looks?

To me, this looked like a declarative with a question mark. For example, on work emails I get these all the time, mostly from very-higher ups:

"This is being handled?" "I'm copying the right person on this?" (Instead of "Is this being handled?" "Am I copying the right person on this?")

Well, I wanted to ask her about what I saw as a lazy, passive question (on work emails) but I used Dick Cavett's quote, and here's what she said (note the very correct "Hi comma Wells:"



Hi, Wells,

In his Op-Ed piece for the Times, Dick Cavett wanted to say that he found Sarah Palin attractive, but he didn't want to come right out and say it. So he used two evasive constructions.

(1) He framed his first comment in the form of a question, beginning "May I confess that ...." This is a way of sneaking in a remark you're afraid might make you look bad. In essence, you're asking the reader's permission beforehand.

(2) He used a roundabout, double negative construction in his second comment: "not uncomely." In other words, "comely." Another way of evading a direct statement.

There's nothing grammatically wrong with either of these methods. But they're both intended to let you say something indirectly. In this case, Cavett used the coy phraseology to convey humor.

Pat O'Conner

So, what it comes down to is what I find to be funny or not funny. Dick Cavett: not funny, except as I said on the "Homer the Clown" episode. His humor probably appeals to the older demo that usually reads the NYT, not the Onion reading, Ali G show watching, Family Guy revering age.

But I have a taste for older humor too: I think that Garrison Keillor has a schtick that works (tho the show is too long) and I still smile remembering the antics of the late Victor Borge. Even Peter Schickele, who my parents listed to all the time, had some great riffs about big band and classical, which is NOT EXACTLY a minefield of laughs.

To me, Dick Cavett's blog postings are about as funny as Leno, without the band, studio laughs, or the economy of words. They're kind of vacuous.

But he did make me feel sorry, in his latest column, for poor Richard Widmark. The moral of Mr. Widmark's life is, if (IN A MOVIE) you push an invalid in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, you will always be remembered for doing that. Nevermind the rest of the ouvre! You, sir, are a nasty individual.

Old Testament rules apply to theater patrons

Because the Czech riffed off of Ebert's brilliance (it comes out beautifully both when he's irked by crap or amazed by craft), I had to go to his site, to be greeted by a nice list:

Roger Ebert's top Foreign Films of 2008.

I only saw Tell No One, dogged not by reviews but by the reports of sold-out showings at the local cinemas. A foreign film, without zero-gravity martial arts, selling out? Well, it wasn't as widely distributed as Crouching Tiger, but it was popular in New York.

And, for a suspense movie, it accomplished its feat. The director takes the wheel and you're at the edge of your seat. Though as I read his praise (and agreed), I felt sad because my suspenseful moment was robbed from me. In a very empty theater (late showing on a weeknight) I sat with an old high school friend, when during the previews two ladies in their 50's or 60's sat in our row. And, they immediately started talking. I told my friend that instant that I knew they would talk throughout the movie.

Boy do I wish I was wrong about that. Not only did they intermittently break up a rather quiet, tense movie with their whispers (loud enough to determine that they were trying to piece together the plot, which movies usually do for you eventually), but they took advantage of the most tense scene in the movie (the meeting in the park scene) to whisper furiously. They must have been oblivious and perhaps a bit deaf. And I was f***ing pissed off.

So, in characteristic teapot fashion, I leaned over and hissed,

"Will you two SHUT THE F*** UP?!"

They certainly did. Too bad that my adrenaline from movie frustration was in overdrive. It was worth enjoying the rest of the movie in quiet comfort.

There are two axioms that everyone should know before going into a movie theater:

1. No one wants to hear you talk.
2. Even if you whisper, the people around you can hear you talk.

Yes, it was weird saying such vulgarities to women my mother's age, but they should know better, and that cancels it out.

Oprah's weight, not a 'big' deal

200 pounds over a 5'10" frame of a middle-aged woman? This is not a problem. I am close to 200 over a 5'7" frame and I feel like Clarence Darrow trying to convince my peers that I'm out of shame shape. From this, I can tell you that People mag's attempts to make an issue of this are totally flawed.

I'm more concerned about Oprah's yo-yo dieting, which purportedly pumps triglycerides through the arteries as they become metabolized for nutrition.

If you've been on earth for at least 14 years you've heard enough contradictory nutritional information to be able to block it out. My solution: go to the doctor almost yearly and get tests run. Because if there's one thing that's always been a problem, it's people who have treatable problems that let them go undiagnosed.

Here's a Globe and Mail article, if you're in Oprah-withdrawal. I apparently am, writing this.