Hey.....I resemble that remark.

Please don't tell me her boyfriend's name was Ben Dover.

Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink.....

Reminds me of another story (you people are gonna wind up getting sick of me.....seems like I have a story for everything these days. No wonder SC wants that Windbag Filter set on “High”) which, strangely enough, has to do with my experiences in the car service business.

We’re gonna go a long way here for not much of a punch line, but I like to write, so….

Today the whole corporate car service dispatching process is computerized. Call takers enter the passenger’s information in a computer, and it goes directly to the driver via a mobile data terminal in his car. They even have it at the point now where the driver can get it on a Blackberry or other hand-held device.

But 20 years ago, when I started, it was all on paper. A call taker would ask the questions (name, address, destination, etc.) and write the information on a little 3 x 5 piece of paper called, not surprisingly, a “dispatch slip”. The slips would then go by conveyer belt, from one of the 8-10 call takers at one end of a long room, to one of the two or three dispatchers at the other end.

The dispatcher would give the driver the information for his next call via two-way radio, and then the slip would go to yet another person, who would call the customer back and give them their car number and an E.T.A., and then file the slip away in case the driver had a question or a problem later.

We used to handle thousands of calls a day like that, so naturally there were always lots of these slips going all around the room at any given time.

Now remember, this was before the days of cell phones, so the dispatcher had to give the drivers personal messages as well.

Like if a driver’s wife wanted him to call her, she’d call a special number for driver’s messages, and when the call taker answered, the wife would say “Please ask Car #265 how long it will take him to call home”, or a driver’s friend would call and say “Ask Car #143 how long it will take him to meet his friend Joe”, or whatever. Then the person would wait on the phone until someone got back to them with the driver’s answer.

Now, when it was busy, time on the radio was at a premium, and we had to take care of the customers first, so when a driver got a message, the dispatcher didn’t spend a lot of time spelling things out.

For example, the dispatcher wouldn’t call the driver and say “How long will it take you until you can meet your friend John Smith?”

The dispatcher would simply say “Call home, how long?” or “E.T.A. to John Smith?”, the assumption being that the driver would know what the dispatcher was talking about

OK. So there were, and still are, basically two sources for finding new dispatchers. The first source is the call takers, or operators, mostly female, the brighter and more ambitious ones, who are able to pick up the job by observation. That’s how the pregnant one who I didn’t hire got started.

The other source, of course, is the drivers. That’s how I got started, and moved from behind the wheel to behind a desk.

A few weeks of driving was all it really took to learn the job from the driver’s POV, and it was very often a smooth transition for an experienced and articulate driver (like myself ) to go from one side of the microphone to the other.

The thing is, though, that no matter how experienced and articulate and intelligent the driver was, he was never prepared for the "mechanics" of dealing with the flow of the dispatch slips, and how they had to be kept moving.

It was very dangerous to let them start piling up all in one place. It would’ve been kinda like the “I Love Lucy” episode with putting the chocolates in the boxes as they came off the conveyer belt.

The slips came from the left, so you had to take it off the belt with your left hand, time stamp it, hold it in place while you wrote down the car number and E.T.A. (assuming you were right-handed), time stamp it again, then hand it off to your right to the call-back operator to tell all of this to the customer, mostly all with your left hand since you were holding a pen in your right, and all the while opening and closing the microphone with a foot pedal and talking to the driver all at the same time, and making sure that you weren’t stepping on the pedal and opening the mic at the same time that the driver was trying to talk to you.

So naturally, when it was busy, the brand new dispatchers were understandably nervous and anxious not to have the slips start to pile up. So as soon as he got one in his hands, he’d start reading it before he really knew what he was about to read. He'd just read it "cold."

So we had a nasty little trick we’d play on a new dispatcher, and on a driver we didn't like at the same time.

Someone would go the other end of the room and write out a slip with a message for the driver that said “How long to Ben Dover” or “How long to Mike Hunt”. Then we’d put a car number on the slip, put the slip on the conveyor belt, and go back to where the dispatcher was sitting to wait for the fun.

It usually went something like this:

Dispatcher: Car 265, How long to Ben Dover?
Car 265: Say again?
Disp (impatiently): How long to Ben Dover?
265: Who?
Disp: Ben Dover. You have a message here “How long to Ben Dover?”

Or

Disp: 143, How long to Mike Hunt?
143: Again?
Disp: (impatiently) How long to Mike Hunt?
143: Who?
Disp: Mike Hunt. Mike Hunt. You have a message here from Mike Hunt.

_____________________

Well, I warned you…it would be a long way to go for not much.

Strangely enough, they pulled this same “Mike Hunt” gag on the Sopranos a few years ago.

I started a thread about it HERE , and managed to tell the same story in 59 words instead of 913.

Get that Windbag Filter set back up to “High”, JG.

Cute story Plaw. Keep em coming. I don't tire of those kinds of stories and thoroughly enjoy reading or hearing them. I think that as far as the older people on here go, we all have many stories similar to yours to tell about goofing on new employees and playing tricks on them. Initiation stories.

They had paper back then, or did you really use a chisel and a stone?

.....or Morse Code when Plaw first started.

It couldn't of really been that hard to learn how to drive a horse and buggy.

I wouldn't have expected you to have it any other way!

See, no matter how far to the left you really are, you always wind up going to the right to get things done properly!


:p :p




Don Cardi

Here in Holland we have a minister now carrying her second pregnancy DURING her 4 year term in service!

I think the criteria for discrimination being illegal or not should be simplified and better enforced.

Let's start with the people who already have jobs: woman are underpayed in the exact same positions as men, all over the world. This needs to be changed, regardless of how good men supposidly are in negotiating in comparison to men.

I believe you may never discriminate on the basis of race, religion or sexual preference. However: There are some selection grounds (discrimination criteria) that sometimes do affect one's ability to do a certain job.

Example: It has been scientifically proven that women are generally better at multi tasking than men because their brains work differently. Would you not prefer a female secretary, just to be sure you have a good one, even though some men seem to be equally qualified?

Discrimination on religion should be forbidden, as long as religion is considered to be a private matter for both parties. How can somebody despising gay people or somebody unwilling to shake the hand of someone of the opposite sex work in hospitality?

I think that discrimination cannot be justified even in privately owned companies. Gender discrimination is a reality. Women face "glass ceiling" even in jobs that do not involve blue collar workers or first generation muslims. But the reverse is also true. You only find air hostesses in planes, not men! The only tricky case is the pregnancy one, becasue it is biological and there are no good solutions for it. All the other problems of integration with workforce are easy to solve. If a worker does not work well in a team, he/she can be fired. It could be a homosexual or a person discriminating against a homosexual.

OK.

To those that have come down fairly squarely on the side of laws against private busines owners having the right to hire or not hire their employees for whatever reasons they wish, or at least for some reasons (race, religion, sexual orientatiton).....

And I'm thinging primarily here of Sicilian Babe, The Dr. who fixed Lucy, E Lucky R and svsg, allow me to ask you this:

Suppose you own a two-family house and you and your family occupy half of it.

Should you be alllowed to discriminate against who you rent the other half to?

If someone has children and has strong moral objections to homosexuality and don't want to rent their apartment to two men who are clearly homosexual (they are holding hands and talking to each other as lovers would while thy look at the apartment) because they don't want to expose thir children to that lifestyle, they shouls not have the choice of not renting to them?

If members of a certain nationality, race, or religion would simply feel "more comfortable" living in the same house - their house - with "their own kind". they shouldn't have the option of selecting a tennant on that basis?

If someone doesn't want to rent to a 19-year old man, because he fears he might hold wild parties, make noise, or be irrespnsible about paying the rent because that was their prior experience with that type of tennant, that shouldn't matter?

And, if you think that they should not be allowed to discriminate, what is the difference between that and hiring someone for a job?

Yes.

But I don't agree that it follows that privately-owned businesses should be allowed to discriminate at will.

The family home is primarily a family institution, although of course it has some economic significance as a source of ready cash through mortgage, or rental income. The impact of decisions vis-a-vis the family home is pretty much contained to said home.

A private business - and this is more true the larger the business - is primarily an economic institution, and the economy, even if dominated by private concerns in the legal sense, is very much the public's business.

Here's the deal for you business owners. You want to run a business and make money. Fine. For that to happen, you need a stable society where private property laws are enforced. Fine, you've got it. The quid pro quo, however, is that you recognize that society only remains stable so long as the masses are content, and for the masses to remain content they need basic things: which includes the right to be employed for jobs for which they are qualified or suitable.

Plaw, you can't have your cake and eat it. Private business needs a stable society to survive. A degree of regulation is the price you pay for this security. And all the discrimination laws require is that everyone has a fair crack, regardless of race, gender or ethnicity.

If you are talking about your house, I think you should be able to choose to not let homosexuals, blacks, muslims, 19-year olds or whatever. This is because you are living there and this is not a business for you. But on the other hand if you are an owner of an appartment complex that has say a 100 appartments and you are just making money out of this business, you should not be allowed to put a board in front of your appartment complex saying "blacks not allowed". Why talk of hypothetical situation? I live in a appartment complex adjoining my university. It allows only students from my university to stay there( that is a deal between my univ and them). As you may be knowing, I am not American/white/christian. I will be pissed off if the appartment owner said "brown asians not allowed". But I am not pissed off when someone puts an ad in my university saying "American female student wanted as room-mate". The difference is obvious. When you are doing a business and discriminating just for the heck of it, it is wrong.
I will make it even simpler for our argument. Everything should be done to make people forget about race,gender, sexual orientation etc as a factor. If you are doing something to re-inforce a bad stereotype, then you are discriminating and a law should be in place to prevent it.
And just to clarify, I did not think your not hiring the pregnant woman was bad becasue as I said, the case is tricky and may need further thought. Also think about the stockholders for the comapnies - do these cmpanies say we don't want women, blacks and homosexuals buying our stocks? No, they are just greedy and want business.

First of all if you are a business owner with less than 15 employees, the discrimination law (Title VII) is not applicable to your choice of hiring.
So the example of being discriminative about the person who rents your house is not a valid example.

Secondly, all these laws are good and beautiful. But do they make you hire a person you really don't like based on gender or whatever else the reason that might be? You simply would tell them they are not qualified compared to other applicants. So what's the use of having laws that are useless? They keep the face of your country. The US is supposed to be the place of equal opportunity for all people regardless of race, sex, blah blah blah.

My personal experience is an ugly one. It took me a little while to know what's exactly going on, but I found out that I was hired with a salary less than the amount that's supposed to be paid to a person of my qualifications, although laws require the employer to pay the equal amount to an alien worker as what he/she pays to a US citizen. The law is there to protect the rights of the US citizens so that alien workers would not get the jobs because they'd get paid less. There was not much to be done really. Should I have hired an attorney to pay whatever I've earned to eliminate the source of my income? Get real people.

Also it is further explained here:

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

It's not an example, it's a separate issue.
I'm asking if the people who think that anti-discrimination laws in employment practices are good also think that individuals should be subject to the same types of laws when renting an apartment in their home.

No... because the two situations are entirely distinguishable, for the reasons afsenah and I have outlined above.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

It's not an example, it's a separate issue.
I'm asking if the people who think that anti-discrimination laws in employment practices are good also think that individuals should be subject to the same types of laws when renting an apartment in their home.[/b][/quote]I don't know how I can be any more clear about this. If this example is a separate issue, why bring it on here?

If it is not, then according to that law, you are not required to be indiscriminative by the US government. I think the title was about too much interference of government into your lives, which is simply not true. You can choose anyone you please as the tenant of your property and be discriminative about it.

When you have a business with 15 employees or more, that's hardly just your own life anymore and government sees to it that you run it as an equal opportunity job provider because your society is a blended one. If you think that it is your life and you could do it on yourself, fire all and do it by handful of selected people, which is fine by government again.

It's a separate question, but it's related to the original question. Do I need to start at separate thread to raise the issue?

And where do I say whether the U.S. does or does not have such laws with respect to housing?

I'm simply asking if people who support anti-discrimination laws would support the same types of laws for housing.

The topic is "Too Many Laws & Too Much Gov't Interference In Our Lives?"

If people think that there should (or shouldn't) be laws that tell people who they can rent their homes to, how is that not part of the topic?

A Man Who Was Opposing a Law, Which Didn't Exist.

Didn't think of that one. I can make a movie of that. I too can play with words you see. :p

It's a hypothetical situation.

I'm trying to illustrate that there are people woth high ideals on high moral horse when it comes to anti-discrimination laws whci don't affevt them, but when it comes to those which hit a little closer to "home" they may feel differently.

I understand that there is obviously a difference between someone hiring someone for a job in their company and renting them half of their two-family house, but how much of a difference is it really?

Someone is either prejudiced or they're not.

But, as you say, this thread is about "Too Many Laws...?", not prejudice.

So I'll re-phrase:

Do those who think that laws against discrimination in employment are not part of "Too Many Laws" think that there should be even more laws regarding discrimination in housing and, if so, how far should those laws go?

No, I don't think there should be even more laws for housing. If it is your house, you should have the right to choose tenants. Housing has its own peculiar problems that are not seen elsewhere. Like someone having a pet, or playing loud music or not keeping the house clean.