FunnyBusiness: Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line

Notes From The Road -- Passengers Tell You The Darndest Things

  It wasn't until we began our descent  into the Twin Cities that I learned the passenger sitting next me was a prosecuting attorney on his way to interview a defense witness in a very high profile case.

Despite the fact that I shared I was a freelance journalist, he chatted with me about the case and the witness who by now has undergone his interrogation.

The case involves the death of an infant back in the 90s. A man was convicted of the murder and spent 10 years in jail before a higher court reversed his sentence on grounds that his defense had not provided proper counsel. He has been out of jail for nearly 5 years.

The county has recently reopened that case and my seat-mate is part of the prosecution team. The defense witness he was interviewing is a pathologist. Evidently the state maintains there is no way that the head injuries that caused the baby's death could have occurred from her falling out of her high chair.

The defense pathologist says those injuries could have occurred that way. So it is  a professional he said-she said. The prosecution's strategy is to attack the credibility of the pathologist. That is what my seatmate was hoping to do.

He indicated that her resume had some questionable entries and it was on those points that he was hoping to put into question her integrity as a witness.

I have no idea whether he succeeded or whether the pathologist was able to explain away the discrepencies.
He did tell me her name and gave me her website.

I will be checking in with her next week.

Iraq's Only All Women Radio Station

If there is one thing that unites all small businesses it's cash flow. Yesterday as I was driving in my car and listening to the Satellite Sisters  I heard them mention the campaign to save radio Al-Mahaba--the only first all independent women radio network in Iraq.

They are having some serious cash flow problems and need to raise $100,000. It seems that a roadside bomb blew up their transmitter. A new one costs $100,000.

The fund raising is being managed by  OKIINC.org—Opportunity for Kids International, a nonprofit  American relief organization that helps the street children of Iraq. OKIINCwas instrumental in starting the station with a grant from the United Nations Development Fund for Women.According to the Satellite Sisters, "100% of the donations will go directly to the radio station for a new transmitter and other operation expenses.

The fund raising campaign started last October. At the time the radio station did receive a great deal of media attention including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today
Mona Mahmoud wrote an article in USA Today...

A woman called to say she had been beaten by her husband so much she feels like killing him. Another  woman said she was afraid of her husband at the outset of her marriage, but she has learned to assert herself. Now he is the one who is  afraid.              

Other women said they never wore a hijab but are now being forced to wear the head covering because of pressures or threats from  newly powerful religious groups in their neighborhoods.

Launched earlier this year, al-Mahaba, which means "love" in Arabic, is the first independent women's radio station in Iraq. The format is a mixture of news, music and talk.

Ruwaida Kamal, 30, who hosts a program, said callers address a slew of personal and political issues that affect them as women,  including family relationships and the wearing of head scarves.The station receives between 70 and 100 calls a day, says station executive director Ali Abbass Hamoudi, 42.

And as Donn Esmonde wrote in the Buffalo News

"The station is the 21st century version of Radio Free Europe, which broadcast the sweet               breeze of freedom across the Iron Curtain's stale air. The same message falls now on ears of Iraqi women still in shackles who fear that the new constitution will turn extremism into law."

 

Your support will be appreciated.

Baby Love

To read the legal blogs, it would  a stretch to say that Elizabeth Vargas lost her job because of pregnancy discrimination.--there was that thing about ratings and chemistry..yada yada yada. However, there is a underpinning to Vargas' dismissal as discussed at the Feminist Law Blog

At the core of all this chatter is also an interesting and unspoken problem about pregnancy and maternity—and the ways in which women who are fully competent to do any job, at any other time—may nevertheless falter or choose to rejigger their priorities for a few years. There were days during my pregnancies when I couldn’t even rinse and spit, much less cover a major news story. When do you think I’ll be allowed to write that without setting back the feminist cause?

So while bloggers have been weighing in on the pros and cons of the Vargas case, over in Illinois a woman received a $500,000 uury award for pain and suffering, medical care, and front and back pay.settlement in what can only be classified as one of the more unusual pregnancy discrimination cases so the bloggers at The HR Cafe hypothesizes could open the door for even more lawsuits.

She felt that her supervisor, knowing she was pregnant, pushed her too hard, making her climb a rickety stairway to a mezzanine level where she had to crawl under desks to install computer equipment. She claimed her computer was sabotaged and her office moved so she couldn’t locate essential paperwork. On top of that, the supervisor gave her what she perceived to be an impossible mountain of work, and fired her when she couldn’t do it all.

She successfully sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The court said the jury was allowed to consider the fact that the worker was “particularly susceptible” to distress because of her pregnancy.

Different discipline
In this case, the courts ruled that a demanding boss went too far. But all companies have demanding bosses, and employees don't always agree what's reasonable and what's not. This case teaches us that criticism and discipline that might be appropriate for a male worker, or a non-pregnant female one, could be seen as inflicting an unacceptable level of distress on a pregnant colleague.

It's been nearly 10 years since actress Hunter Tylo received a $5 million award because Aaron Spelling fired her from Melrose Place when he learned she was pregnant. At the time Tylo said,

I was attacked on every side. People were telling me I would never make it, that I was hurting my career. But I came through all of it" said Tylo, following the verdict, which she pronounced as a victory "for every woman, for every child that's not born."

Sometimes, victory is fleeting.

Image Credit: Flickr member Krissypants

What were they thinking? Advertisers Gone Wild

Advertisers will tell you the point of advertising is to generate awareness, support a brand image, and motivate a target audience to take some action ( often to spend money on the product or service being advertised)

Over at WonderBranding, Michele Miller is wondering about Tampax's latest spot, dubbed the" Tampax Dance".It's an ad to get "pad" users to convert to the joys of tampons.

Click here to view

Since I'm not in the 'target market' I sought the advice of someone who is: my 17- year old daughter. As I showed her the spot, I watched her facial expression--it's best described as her WTF or  Elvis look...you know where you do the one-sided nostril scrunch.

Here are my research findings based on a sample size of one.  "I get it. If you wear  Tampax  you can be do whatever you want and you won't have leaks. Notice," said Berit, "That when she did the cartwheel they focused on  her butt."

"Would the ad make you want to use Tampax?" I asked.

"No," she said."I don't like them."

For me the problem with the spot is not the creative -- it's the entire message that if you wear a "pad' your period is not private and if you wear a tampon it is. Having worn both over a very long period of my life, let me say that ifyou want your period to be private ( no leaks) unless you are on the pill and enjoy mercifully light periods,  there are many a day when you will want to double dip-- pad plus tampon.

No mention of advertising today could go without mention of the very serious and troubling lawsuit that the

good folks at  WarrenKremer Paino Advertising have filed   against blogger Lance Dutson for copyright infringement, defamation, and trade libel/injurious falsehood.

Dutson is a Maine resident and blogger who was less than impressed with the work and dollars that Maine's Office of Tourism was spending with the New York ad agency. He found an embarrassing, and depending on your perspective, amusing "mistake" . It seems that on their 'rough drafts' of an ad for the state they used a dummy phone number . And, of course, the number they used  was for a sex phone service. Now, these dummy ads were on the state's web site for anyone to see.

For his part, Dutson is getting a lot of support from folks who see this as a First Amendment Issue.  While this case is fascinating, it also has long -term ramifications for business and bloggers. As they advised  at PR Speak,

Whatever side of the coin you're on when it comes to the effect blogs have on business, this much is true: they're a force and they're not going away.  If you don't believe me, just do a Google search on Warren Kremer Paino Advertising LLC. What pops up in the first result set?  Something positive?  Nope.  A couple more days of this and blog posts will be the only Google results for the firm. 

This is a tired theme in PR blogs, but..."note to business": you have to start working with blogs and bloggers (or at least paying attention to them), even if you don't "get" the technology or don't subscribe to the notion that blogs represent a tectonic shift in mass communications.  Spend the time to learn about blogging, or run the risk of suffering the kind of negative attention this particular advertising agency is working through today.        

Publicity specialists will tell you there is no such thing as bad publicity. The Chinese would say: Be careful for what you want...you may just get it.

Tags: blogs, advertising, tampax, branding, law, first amendment

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Ryan's Catch 22,000

When  I saw Ryan recently and learned that he was waiting on a $22,000 payment for work completed last November,I was shocked.

Up until then, I thought Ryan had it made. For the past 10 years he had been on his client's Corporate A-List. He was part of a closed, secretive society known as an approved vendor..

He enjoyed direct deposit. He had several projects with different areas of the company going on concurrently.  Budgets never seemed to be an issue.

I wanted to be an approved vendor. I wasn't.

Ryan's world changed when the client spun off from its mother ship and became an independent company.

In  the beginning of January, about the time Ryan thought he would be seeing that $22,000 in his bank account, he learned that the company had no record of him in its system.

"How can that be?" he said.

By the end of January, and quite a few email correspondences later, Ryan saw his future and his future looked grim. Even when the company has his info, he's not guaranteed payment because not only does Ryan have to have a Master Contract , he has to have a project contract for every single project he works on.

Under the old system, as long as Ryan had a Master Contract he was golden. He could hop from project to project, division to division, by just giving his client his Master Contract Secret Code.

If a couple of divisions needed him to work on projects at the same time, as long as Ryan could time manage the situation, he could double dip.

No more. According to procurement, NEWCO does not allow you to have concurrent purchase orders.

"You have to make sure you schedule your projects so one is paid after the other. This involves a tricky coordination process with business units, but this is the only way to avoid incorrect billing."

Tricky Coordination? How about idiotic coordination?

Policies and procedures are wonderful things, unless they are  completely incoherent and ridiculous.

Anyone who knows anything about  corporate culture  knows that projects are not consecutive in nature, they overlap.

Ryan has many clients at this company. I should say he had many clients at this company.

From now on, he is going to have to weigh the risk of accepting an assignment with one division because agreeing to work with that group will now mean he can no longer accept work from another area, unless, of course, the first project is completely  finished.

Ryan's projects are not tidy. They tend to be of the start, stop, and rush nature. Being able to have concurrent projects meant that Ryan could support himself because while one project was in hiatus, he could devote time to another project.

No more. if the project is on hiatus, so is Ryan. At least for the time being.

If there is one thing you can count on it's this:there is someone in that corporation diligently reading in between the lines and figuring out  a way to beat the policy at its own game.

There will be a workaround for this no concurrent purchase orders policy, its just a matter of time.

At this point, Ryan doesn't care about concurrent, consecutive or workaround purchase orders.  He has a bigger issue. 22,000 bigger issues.

NOTE: RYAN AND NEWCO are pseudonyms.

The Email Heard Round The Legal World

Name

NOTE: Spellchecker not working...again.

Not to long ago I was chatting with a former client who happens to be an attorney. I asked him about his email habits. He responded that he didn't use email very much. At the time I thought he was so 20th Century. In reality, he was probably being a very wise lawyer.

And so, I share a cautionary tale.

Remember, before you send an email always ask yourself, 'can it pass the test of public scrutiny? 'Or, in other words, could my email jeopardise my chances of ever getting hired or even worse, could this email be the start of the dreaded email chain?

A bit of background.

Prior to any of the emails in the chain,a  new lawyer was offered a job with a small firm.They agreed upon her salary and set a day for her to begin. Then, the firm contacted her and said ooops...we've decided your starting salary needs to be less than we agreed on because we are going to hire an additional associate.

That is the context for the emails heard round the world.

"Then Korman received an email from Abdala on the Friday evening before the Super Bowl. She had changed her mind. Abdala wrote: "Dear Attorney Korman: At this time, I am writing to inform you that I will not be accepting your offer. After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living in light of the work I would be doing for you. I have decided instead to work for myself, and reap 100% of the benefits that I (sic) sew. Thank you for the interviews."

Korman called Abdala and left a message for her, asking if they could talk and work things out. He suggested she call him on his cell phone. Instead, Abdala called Korman's office and left a voice mail, again declining the offer.

That's when Korman wrote the following in an email to Abdala: "Dianna - Given that you had two interviews, were offered and accepted the job (indeed, you had a definite start date), I am surprised that you chose an e-mail and a 9:30 p.m. voicemail message to convey this information to me. It smacks of immaturity and is quite unprofessional. Indeed, I did rely upon your acceptance by ordering (sic) stationary and business cards with your name, reformatting a computer and setting up both internal and external e-mails for you here at the office. While I do not quarrel with your reasoning, I am extremely disappointed in the way this played out. I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors."

Enough said, right? A young lawyer declines a job offer and some awkwardness ensues. Not the biggest deal in the world.

Well, here's where things go haywire.

Abdala countered with the following email: "A real lawyer would have put the contract into writing and not exercised any such reliance until he did so. Again, thank you."

Oh man. "

To read the entire chain, check out Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. What's most upsetting about the article is that it seems to slam the woman attorney and not the guy who renigged on the salary.

Here's a quote from the male attorney.

"This has taken on a life of its own," Korman told me. "The legal community is tiny, and the criminal-defense bar even smaller. They are surprised by this attorney's responses to my simple queries. It's so early in her career to be attacking someone like this. I just wish it had played out better."

And they included emails from some of his supporters

"Though you don't know me, I wanted to extend to you my sincere apologies for your recent encounter with an extremely unprofessional young attorney. ... It is my hope that your opinion of young lawyers has not been too tarnished by your experience. ... I felt compelled to apologize to you on behalf of the community of young lawyers all across the country that are not sympathetic to Ms. Abdala's egoism."

Am I missing something here? Didn't he change the salary after hiring her? Didn't he hit the keystroke to share a private email converation with friends? Isn't he the scumbag? And doesn't he owe her several apologies?

He acted like a jerk. She responded in kind. Yet, somehow the article doesn't criticize him for forwarding personnel issues from his office. And even worse, changing an 'employment contract' after they had agreed to the terms.

No, the focus is on her bad behavior. How convenient. How myopic. How pathetic.Chalk one up for the boys club.

Shopping Blind

There is something counter-intuitive in hearing that Target is being sued because its website is not accessible to the blind.

Thanks to technology, people who are blind can access web sites by  using keyboards in conjunction with screen-reading software which vocalizes visual information on a computer screen.

However, in order to have that access, the websites have to be coded in a specific way. Target, as well as many other retail websites , don't offer that coding. That in a nutshell is what the lawsuit is all about.

I  first heard about this lawsuit as I was browsing through some of the posts on the Blogher network. Now, given that I live in Minneapolis --the headquarters for Target Corporation I was a bit surprised that I hadn't heard about it in the local news.

But, when I went to the StarTribune  and the Pioneer Press Websites and did a search for "Target sued by blind student"  or "Blind Student sues Target," the searches came up empty. What's with that?

The Blogher post links to an article that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on February 8th.

"Target thus excludes the blind from full and equal participation in the growing Internet economy that is increasingly a fundamental part of daily life," said the suit, which seeks to be certified as a class action and alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and various state statutes.

A message left this morning to Target's corporate office in Minneapolis wasn't immediately returned.

Advocates for the blind said the lawsuit is a shot across the bow for retailers, newspapers and others who have Web sites the blind cannot use. They chose Target because of its popularity and because of a large number of complaints by blind patrons.

"What I hope is that Target and other online merchants will realize how important it is to reach 1.3 million people in this nation and the growing baby-boomer population who will also be losing vision," said plaintiff Bruce Sexton Jr., 24, a blind third-year student at UC Berkeley.

Sexton, who is president of the California Association of Blind Students, said making Target's Web site accessible to the blind would also make it more navigable by those without vision problems.

The lawsuit is causing quite a conversation within the tech community.To get a better understanding of the technology issues (or non-issues) behind this suit, there is a comprehensive conversation at Derek Featherstone's Box Of Chocolates.

Meanwhile when I typed in How do Blind People Shop Online on Google,   a Google Ad appearedon the right sidebar. It was for Target.

Being Annoying is now a Federal Offense

It's being coined as the e-annoyance law. As C-Net reported , this law  which was signed in January states that if you are going to send an annoying email or comment on a blog, you better not do it anonymously.

"In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."

Over at What Pisses You Off which bills itself as the Best Damn Debate Forum, the posters are debating the issue.

Ray says," If the ISPs hadn't been so intransigent when people complained about TOS
violations, and terminated accounts when it was clearly warranted, the new
law would not have been necessary."

Chadwick Stone replied, "Your silly little law wont silence:

1. Non-anonymous poasters
2. Poasters living outside of the U.S.
3. Poasters in the U.S. who realize that it it is unenforceable due to
it contradicting your first amendment

The thought of any prosecutor coming after an individual who posts an annoying comment to a blog is very funny(can you say the delete button) if it weren't so sad. As the C-net article states,

"Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.

In each of those three cases, someone's probably going to be annoyed. That's enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won't file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.) "

Taking it a step further, does this mean that when journalists quotes a " high ranking member of the justice department" could those anonymous comments fall under this law?  It was bad enough when journalists are hauled in front of a grand jury to disclose sources. Now, under the e-annoyance law, they may not even be able to quote them.

My American Office _Episode 4_ Paula Kaplan Berger

I met Paula Kaplan in 1969. We were both freshman at the University of Missouri. We both went to "J' school. I went on to be a reporter. Paula went to law school. Today she is a partner with Neal Gerber Eisenberg in Chicago. She practices real estate law.

This is her office.

Checking In on Opinionistas

Opinionistas is a blog written by a New York law associate. It is a risky blog. Like many  bloggers before her, if discovered, she will be fired ,and chances are she will find a difficult time finding a new job.

While she worries about being "outed", there is also a sense, that is exactly what she wants--someone else determining her future for her.( In the previous post she shares a conversation with an old friend where she confesses she writes the Opinionistas blog. The friend says, " I knew that was you."

Chances are if that friend knows, a whole lot of other folks know.

Yesterday's Post is titled Ogre. It details the rants of a partner who is less than impressed with her research on a memo.

He enters my office in the full throes of a tantrum, nostils flared, cheeks flaming red, protruding belly thrust forward.

"What the hell is this? I give you a simple research assignment and you're incapable of even finding the basic cases?" He hasn't bothered to close the door, which means everyone within earshot will be treated to this afternoon's slaughter spectacle.

"Actually, the research didn't end up being so simple, as you'll recall X and Y cases made the issue far more complex and-" Out of the corner of my eye, I'm running through the document on my computer screen, trying to remember what I wrote two months ago. I've perfected this skill over the past few years.

"Don't bother with excuses, don't even bother, this is ridiculous! I can't even trust you to perform basic tasks! You did say you graduated from law school, right? What the hell is the matter with you! You can be Goddamn sure I won't be forgetting this level of ineptitude any time soon." At this point, scorn practically dribbles down his chin and drips to the floor. He's gesturing wildly, yelling in my face, I can see the roof of his mouth from my chair as he looms over me, spewing a lifetime of barely-repressed anger.

At last count, over 60 people  have shared comments on that post. Many ,who also work at law firms, wrote to share their own experiences with law firm Ogres.

Reading this blog, you get the idea that the place with the worst, most abusive working conditions  in the entire countryare law firms.

Corporate executives can't get away with that kind of behavior any more  without severe consequences--it's too costly.  In the corporate world, they know that if they try to pull a stunt like that, they'll get called into HR, sent to anger management class ,and then have to submit to a deposition when the employee's lawyer sues the executive for creating a hostile work environment.