Managing the message

OK, last bit of talk about bin Laden. I think if we had the cast of The West Wing in the White House, even without their script writers, they could do a more coherent job of managing the message coming from the executive branch right now. This isn’t high school people, and they’ve pretty well managed to squander the normal popularity/approval bump this would bring to the presidency by constantly changing their story. And this goes beyond the normal confusion of first details being wrong, this is approaching mythic, conspiracy feeding, mis-management. And yes, I’m sure OBL is dead, the attacks on the World Trade Center were not carried out by our own government, we actually went to the moon, and there wasn’t anyone on the grassy knoll.

Had an employee break her arm in three places my last night of work. Stepped over a caution cone into an area that was being waxed and BAM! Hit the floor like a ton of bricks. Had to take her and a female hourly manager to the hospital and were there for almost the entire shift. Had to take the female manager with us to be sure there were no accusations of hanky-panky, though this particular associate and I get on like oil and water, policy is policy. She’s probably going to need plates and screws, she broke her radius and ulna both less than two inches from the wrist. And then, in five or six months when she’s all healed up, we’re going to have to write her up for a safety violation which resulted in an accident. That sounds mean right now, but because she didn’t want to spend an extra thirty seconds walking around the waxing area, she’s cost us a $50k charge to the store and an increase in our insurance premiums for the next two years. Not to mention the lost productivity of an hourly manager and myself, and the gas my truck ate traveling all the way to the after hours hospital we have to use since the local one won’t take our worker’s comp insurance. From what I understand our worker’s comp policy pays out pretty fast for that type of policy, they just don’t like our carrier for some reason. They won’t even take our group insurance since it’s managed by the same company, which is seriously inconvenient for the folks that live over in the area the store is in.

Anyway, while I was gone the folks that remained took advantage of the new senior manager and didn’t get anything done that they were supposed to. At least he threw himself on his sword during the morning tour and I didn’t get yelled at for it.