Category: Commentary

I remember the night of April 8, 1998 well. I was living in Dunwoody, Georgia at the time. My ex-girlfriend was (if I’m not mistaken) in New Orleans, at a “group meeting” for her job. Since New Orleans is an hour behind Atlanta, and since her boss had treated everyone to a fancy dinner that night, it wasn’t especially unusual that she called me a few minutes before midnight to tell me about her day.

I remember the weather being bizarre that night. It was raining like I’d never seen before, there was so much lightning that it almost seemed like daytime, and it was windy… so windy, in fact, that the rain was falling sideways! The whole thing was so unusual that when my ex called I went out on the covered porch by the bedroom to describe it for her. We then continued talking for a half hour or so as I sat on the porch, watching leaves and small branches fly every which way. I remember bringing up the weather several more times in our conversation.

Although the weather was bad, I didn’t think anything of it… until I turned on the TV the next morning to catch the headlines before leaving for work. Not more than two miles away from me, this happened:

It’s now known as the “1998 Dunwoody tornado”, and it was so bad that it got its own Wikipedia page several years after the fact. The tornado itself wasn’t especially powerful, but when it hit Dunwoody it hit its greatest strength (an F2 on the Fujita Scale) and expanded to 800 yards across. Yes, the tornado was as wide as eight football fields!

I drove through the area pictured above the next day, and I know people often use the phrase “it looked like a bomb went off”, but in this case, it really did look like a nuclear bomb had gone off. Tress were ripped out of the ground and thrown hundreds of feet. Many houses were simply gone, and some of them were absolutely, completely gone. As in, there was only a concrete foundation left, and the yards where those houses once stood were completely empty of any debris. Not a single 2×4 or sheet of siding was seen anywhere.

It was surreal. It was depressing. I couldn’t believe that it’d happened.

Companies love outsourcing. It saves them huge amounts of money over hiring Americans, not only with salaries (why pay an American $9/hour to do a job you can pay an Indian $9/day to do?), but also with benefits, payroll taxes, property taxes, and a million other things.

Consumers, on the other hand, hate it. The hate is partly due to the language barrier that often comes with outsourcing. But it’s also due to some of the things the foreign companies do themselves, such as order their call takers to adopt an American name and persona when talking to customers. When a guy that sounds like Apu from The Simpsons tries to tell you that his name is Bob and he’s from Kansas City, Oregon… well, it’s just insulting.

And now it seems like you can add identity theft to the list of concerns over outsourcing. Actually, identity theft via outsourcing is nothing new… but this story from The Consumerist should give you pause. The Consumerist article, written by one of the call takers at a Chase call center in the US, is a giant bucket of fail.

It seems that Chase has a call center and a “security team” in the the United States, but their off-hours security is outsourced to a call center in the Philippines. The US call center people noticed a male with a distinctive voice calling them frequently, apparently probing for any information he could get about a few accounts. The call takers passed the information on to the US branch of Chase’s security team, who quickly put a block on the account.

Continue reading “Another Reason to Hate Outsourcing!”

The other day I decided to change the “In Memoriam” picture on the home page. In the past I dedicated it to brewers Arthur Guinness and Frederick Pabst, as well as Art Rooney, Sr., founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I thought about it for a while then decided on Horace McKennie, longtime bartender\waiter at Moe’s and Joe’s, a bar in Atlanta’s Virginia-Highlands area. The bar opened in 1947; Horace went to work there just a few days after it opened and worked there until he retired in the early 2000s. We went to Moe’s and Joe’s all the time in high school, not because they served us beer (in fact, we never even tried to get beer there), but because of the great food. You could get a “Moe-Joe Burger”, fries and a Coke in a glass bottle for less than $5 back then, plus we were always the “cool kids” that had to go to downtown Atlanta because just getting a burger somewhere near Gwinnett Place Mall just wasn’t “hip enough”. And it seems that Horance was always our waiter!

Anyway, while looking for a picture of Horace, I stumbled across a really cool site: the Atlanta Time Machine. The site’s circa-1997 web design isn’t all that great, but that’s not a problem. What’s cool there are the thousands of pictures of Atlanta from as early as 1900, as well as scans of ads for the original Underground Atlanta (which was actually worth going to) and the Clermont Lounge.

Check out some of these really cool pictures:

This is what Moe’s and Joe’s looked like back in 1949! The area really hasn’t changed that much, has it? One of the most interesting things about the ATM site is to see how much really hasn’t changed. Sure, most of the buildings in downtown have changed hands several times since the 30s and 40s, but you can look at the original pictures and ones taken in the past couple of years and see that the buildings haven’t really changed much. Sure, that high-rise was an insurance company in 1942 and is loft condos today… but the facade looks pretty much as it did it the 40s.

Here’s something really cool:

This is the very first Waffle House, located at 2719 East College Avenue in Decatur. This picture is from approximately 1965, which is ten years after this location opened on Labor Day in 1955. According to this page at the ATM site, as of 2005 the location was a run-down Chinese takeout place… however, according to this page at the Waffle House’s official website, it’s now the “Waffle House Museum”. I’ll have to check it out the next time I’m in the area!

Seriously, though… it’s an awesome site! I’ve kept a tab open in Firefox for the past few days and have found myself spending way too much time looking at the old photos!

This is a large Heath Shake from Baskin Robbins. It contains 2310 calories and 266g (9.38 ounces) of sugar. It also has 108g grams of fat, including 64g of saturated fat (320% of the USDA recommended daily dosage).

A McDonald’s Big Mac has “only” 540 calories and a mere 29g of fat (10g saturated fat) in comparison. The “Death Shake” also has 295mg (98% of the recommended dosage) of cholesterol and 1560mg (65% of the recommended dosage) of sodium.

On the plus side, it has 120% of your daily recommended level of calcium!

Think I’m making this up? Check for yourself on Baskin Robbins site!

I found this cool picture online and thought I’d share. The filename is “ChileanVolcanoLarge.jpg”, and according to this article at the Daily Mail, the provenance is correct. The article says that “while scenes of molten lava are relatively commonplace, this otherworldly picture of Chaiten Volcano in southern Chile shows a truly spectacular, and devastating, volcanic phenomenon”.

Back in 2002, South African Breweries bought Miller Brewing, forming SABMiller. And then, in 2005, Coors merged with Canada’s Molson to form Molson Coors. And of course, earlier this year Belgian brewing giant InBev bought Anheuser-Busch. Are there any AMERICAN brewers left any more?

Look, I’m not normally one of those “BUY AMERICAN!” people. There are several reasons for this. First of all, American companies own huge chunks of foreign companies around the world, so it would be hypocritical of me to scream “BUY AMERICAN!” then complain when British people bought Sainsbury’s baked beans instead of Heinz. Secondly, global business is such that it’s hard to tell what’s “American” and what’s not these days. My maternal grandfather would never even have considered buying a “foreign” car, even if Ford owned 25% of that “foreign” company, or even if 45% of the car’s parts were made in the US and the whole thing was assembled in Tennessee. I just don’t have the time and energy to track down who owns what or where it’s made, so I just try to buy the best thing I can afford. Lastly, although I generally don’t have a problem with patriotism, there’s just something… ugly about “BUY AMERICAN!”. There’s an implicit xenophobia there, as if the Belgians are going to buy Anheuser-Busch… then take our women! As my econ professor pointed out, foreigners buy American companies because they’re a good investment, not to run them into the ground or take them home with them. Back in the 90s, there was a huge brouhaha in Atlanta over a Japanese company buying the IBM Tower… which my econ professor put into perspective by joking “What, are they gonna put it on a flatbed and take it home with them?”

Whew! With that rant done, let me get to the point of this article, which is this: now that America’s top 3 brewers are all either completely or partially foreign-owned, can you guess which are the three largest American-owned brewers?

1) The Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams)
2) Yuengling
3) Sierra Nevada

In the US, packaged sandwiches – and by this, I specifically mean those that come in the triangular boxes – are the lowest form of cuisine there is. People typically only eat them if there are no other food options. It’s the kind of thing you’d eat if you’re stuck in an airport at 4am and all the restaurants are closed, or if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, the nearest diner is 50 miles away, and packaged sandwiches are all the service station has to eat.

The sandwiches always seem half stale, are thin on the ingredients, and usually only come in three or four flavors: ham and cheese, baloney and cheese, tuna or chicken salad (and maybe, if you’re in the South, pimento cheese). Honestly, the only people I’ve seen that eat these poor little sandwiches on a regular basis are construction workers and people on the go all the time, like messengers or delivery people. I’m 37 years-old, and it’s always been this way here in the US, at least in my lifetime.

In the UK, on the other hand, people seem to eat these sandwiches all the time. And why not? They usually taste pretty fresh, and they come in a freakin’ galaxy of flavors. Here’s a short list of just a few of the flavors offered by Marks & Spencer, a single British retailer:

Aromatic Duck, B.L.T., British Ham & Cheddar, Chicken & Bacon, Chicken & Balsamic Roasted Tomatoes, Chicken & Stuffing, Chicken & Sweetcorn, Chicken, Avocado & Bacon, Coronation Chicken, Crayfish & Rocket, Egg & Bacon, King Prawn & Bacon Caesar, Poached Salmon, Red Salmon & Cucumber, Roast Beef & Horseradish, Sausage & Ketchup, Seafood Cocktail, Smoked Salmon & Cream Cheese

I can’t speak for the rest of the UK, but in London and Bath you can buy sandwiches just like these almost anywhere. Drug stores (chemists) sell them. Convenience stores (newsagents) sell them. Many department stores (like the aforementioned Marks & Spencer) sell them. And almost any time of the day, you can look around and see someone eating one of these sandwiches.

Continue reading “Packaged Sandwiches: US vs. UK”