Coconut Writers Room

What do we do with a problem like Patrick?

In a few months it'll be somebody else's worry, but for now - what to do?

Suppose we could not walk on Main St. - avoid him entirely.

We could show an angry face or an indifferent one.

He'd deserve it after the vitriol and searing burning words we heard

How could we not hear, not shouted but angrily growled

and at children no less.

Oh! the anger we feel toward the hurt those poor innocents must feel all too regularly

Wouldn't it be raging at a torrent for taking the homestead?

Doesn't that same water feed life into us?

We are a community.

When his thoughts are clear and clean

he seems kind

and tells us how nice of a dog we have

Should we tell him thank you
Should we tell him off

Should we ignore him, pretend he's a bus stop sign

Inside Patrick

Isn't there also a poor innocent 

that we would hurt were we to hurt

Game theory says

start kind and return like for like

Why must every victory be pyrrhic?

What will you do when they try to disappear a person from the GCC Campus?

It's only a matter of time before it happens.

What, besides "Speak Out" will you do to keep you neighbors safe?

GREENFIELD – 

Newell is a multinational corporation that owns, among other things, the Sharpie brand, the Rubbermaid brand, and Yankee Candle brand. A local paper announced recently that 350 jobs would be leaving the area as Newell consolidates businesses and seeks efficiencies in operations. This story is so far from unique that it wouldn’t be worth noting, except that I think I have a bit of a unique perspective on the subject by having worked six years at Yankee Candle, by having helped design the facility they are closing, by having been both loved and mistreated egregiously by the company, and by having an audacious plan to get just a tiny bit of retribution or remuneration. Around the year 1997, I was 18 years old with a wife and baby son. I was working at a local vegetarian food factory doing manual labor, packaging and light warehousing. I saw an advertisement in the Greenfield Recorder for warehouse workers at Yankee Candle with a starting pay over $12 per hour. When I got that job I thought I was the luckiest person on earth. In 1997, this would be enough for rent and food and a car if I busted my butt. Prior to this my only daily transportation was a mountain bike. I started out on Christian Lane in Whately, loading boxes onto belts and into order-picking bays, and transitioned to driving a forklift shortly thereafter. I learned to drive a forklift by visiting an offsite warehouse with another young employee where Mike Kittredge stored some of his car collection, right along with excess candle merchandise. My first pallet move was over the hood of a black Porsche 911 Turbo. I met some of the most amazing people at Yankee, and am still very close friends with a guy who now lives in Sacramento. When I started working there, Mike K. was still the owner – he hadn’t yet sold it to the first of many subsequent owners. Things were good in the Mike K. years. There was free pizza for lunch every Wednesday. While the pizza came on Wednesdays, there were always leftovers on Thursdays, and often still on Fridays. This meant that my total lunch costs for the week usually worked out to about 80 cents, I would eat a pouch of Ramen noodles with microwaved water on Monday and Tuesday, and pizza for the remainder. Around 1999, Yankee began to build a new office headquarters and a new distribution center – both now closed or scheduled to close. The new D.C. would use the latest warehouse management software, so trainers were needed to teach the staff how to use these tools. Managers and Supervisors in the company selected some of their most capable floor workers to become Trainers. I made that list. After a successful transition, the company made my role permanent and I became a Warehouse Management Systems Specialist, which was a salary! No longer hourly, I’d have security to raise a family, with a second baby on the way. At the same time, things were changing for Yankee – Mike K. sold the whole shebang to a private-equity firm. The salary, I found out, was the lowest legal salary that could be offered without having to pay overtime and other hourly benefits. The minute I became a salaried employee, my relationship with the company changed. I was told to work all shifts, ensuring training was consistent throughout. I was told to stay as late as necessary to get certain jobs done. Our first inventory after the switch to the new WMS system was a huge debacle, and I was told “you do not go home until this is done,” I was on site 20 hours one day, and across three days was in the facility 50-plus hours. I was so sleep-deprived that I found myself one morning in the women’s bathroom, wondering what the machines on the wall were for, and why they weren’t there yesterday. I saved up vacation time, sick time, and whatever else I could so that I could be with my wife when my second son was born. I had three weeks accrued. The day he was born – five weeks premature, moved to Baystate’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit – I got a call from work. There is a problem, you need to come in. I told them I have time, I have a sick baby, a distraught wife. They said be here or you no longer have a job. I worked 12-hour days at Yankee, and from there went daily to Springfield to spend the night with the baby, stopping at the company gym to shower. I was tasked once with finding out why our shipping costs were wrong with a certain carrier. I worked with another leader, a very smart woman, and we figured out the issue was double-billing in the software we were using. We alerted the company, which in turn got a rebate check from that carrier for over $750,000. I was thanked with a $100 YCC gift card. I owe a tremendous debt to this company. Yankee put me on an airplane for the first time in my life – I went to visit distribution centers in Salt Lake City, Utah, and call centers in North Carolina. They paid me well. They taught me a ton. People were kind most of the time. In or around 2002, the changes that private equity had put into place were making life at Yankee pretty bad. Pizza was still free, but only once a month. The pool tables were removed from the breakroom, and the summer picnics no longer had vacation prizes, lobster, and steak on the grill. Those were the superficial niceties that disappeared, but the real trouble was when the company decided to institute productivity quotas. If you’ve never worked in a factory or manufacturing facility, a quota is a set amount of work the average worker should be able to complete in a given workday. This seems reasonable enough, but as anyone who works for Amazon or C&S will tell you, management slowly turns the dial... higher and higher until the average worker fails and only the strongest, hardest working survive... until they also burn out and get replaced. Workers are not people under a quota system; they are tools that can be replaced when they fail. A forklift operator I’d worked with for many years at Yankee approached me at my cubicle one day, I now having a luxurious office job. He told me that while they were setting the quotas, it would be helpful if the workers knew the metrics being used, so that they knew where they had to perform best and where they were being judged less harshly. Inside that request was a moral quandary. Is my responsibility to the mega-corp that paid me, or to my co-worker who simply wanted to make each work day a bit more survivable? I chose to help him. I told him the internal metrics that would be used. Someone overheard us – again, it was cubicles, not some clandestine meeting at Wolfie’s – and ratted us out. I was pulled into HR, where I first lied, then knew I was caught. I called a high school friend who ran the “packaged applications” (IT) department of Ringling Brothers Circus, and he got me a job in DC. That was how I left Yankee. I reached out to some friends still there years later, and was told in no uncertain terms that there was in fact a “DO NOT HIRE” list and I was on it. I’m kind of proud of that fact now, but at the time being barred from employment with the biggest name in the county was a challenge. So, to wrap this all up... Newell just announced they are closing this Distribution Center. Last year they closed that new corporate office building. In related news, Mike Kittredge’s son Mick has recently listed his father’s house in Leverett on the market for $23,000,000. It has a bowling alley, movie theater, lazy river, classic car garage, tennis courts... Mike worked hard to earn those things. He was smart. He was kind. He was savvy. Mike deserved this, all of it. I don’t know Mick, I’ve met him three or four times... shared lunch with him and a friend twice... argued with him about the stupid Dunkin’ in Bernardston. He might be as great as his Dad, I don’t know. But he didn’t start a business in his mom’s basement. He didn’t bust his ass to become a billionaire with a 270-foot yacht. He was just lucky enough to be born. I think the best way to honor Mike Kittredge’s true legacy would be to open that mansion as a public park and use some of his riches to pay to keep it clean, open, and free. Mike was a rockstar, both figuratively and literally. (The house has a full stage!) At the very least, and I mean really the very least... Open a weekend invitation to former Yankee Candle employees to visit the house, or the yacht. Let them drive one of the cars, drink one of the $500 wines. Why not? 

Chris Joseph lives in Greenfield. 

*Published February 2021 in Greenfield Recorder, Greenfield MA

The Greatest Country on Earth

*Published February 2021 in Greenfield Recorder, Greenfield MA

The Greatest Country on Earth

Sometimes a simple question requires a complex answer, and sometimes folks will just say that so they can profit from keeping the solution hidden.

How do we solve Hunger in America?

Our current solution is to setup a network of food banks, layers and layers of non-profit organizations and scores of volunteers filling bags in church basements. Selling pies and magazines and begging for change. Put a box near the cash register. SNAP benefits…

Stop just a minute and ask yourself a few questions:

• Who has all the food? (Warehouses full)

• Who has the means to transport food? (Big Rigs and Refrigerated box trucks)

• Who is profiting from Hunger? (Wholesale Grocers)

• Who uses food banks and SNAP regularly? (Warehouse workers)

The solution is right there. If you want to make literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profits from moving food, well then, you also have to be the framework that feeds the hungry.

Sending pallets of food to a Food Pantry is exactly the same as sending to a Piggly Wiggly. The only difference is the profit margin.

In our area, the Wholesale Grocer isn’t some evil multi-national corporation – it’s America’s #8 Largest Privately Owned Business with $30 Billion (with a B) annual revenue.

Something to think about anyway.

I wrote before the last election about how I’d be voting for Biden because, while I held out little hope for our nation, I felt he was the best of the little hope we could have.

I saw a photograph this week of President Biden fist-bumping Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That was the man who personally had a U.S. resident journalist tortured and murdered in an embassy while trying to get a marriage license. This was recorded and audio is available to this day on the internet. I’m certain our sweet uncle Joe heard it before his visit.

How, after this, can we pretend … even a little that we are a moral country? What is our center, if not basic justice?

Our own president has shown us that, in our country, only money matters.  I knew this was true of the modern Republicans, but I somehow thought the Democratic party were different. I was born here and raised here and I know that there is evil and I know that there is good but this American In-between is getting to be too much.

I just finished reading the complaint against the Greenfield Police Department. I am sick.

Why hasn’t the Recorder made this obvious corruption the top of every page?

Why hasn’t the mayor resigned in shame? Why hasn’t her chief of staff?

They let this all happen, they knew! Where was the oversight?

If you haven’t read it — it is so much more than just passing over a guy for a promotion.

Getting a nurse fired and calling child services for revenge. Frightening an innocent man to the point of physical illness over dating a cop’s daughter.

Drunk-driving in cruisers, not to mention the fake promotions and uninvestigated accusations. 

The Greenfield Police clearly do not care about protecting or serving anyone other than themselves.

I am ashamed and sorry that this happened in my city.

Shame on you all.

I was born in America. I grew up a proud American. As I came to understand that we are a nation with a violent and sometimes cruel history, I learned to love America, warts and all. …

But then ...

Yesterday ...

I had to drive to a pharmacy in a storm and wait in a line in hopes of getting some leftover vaccine that might keep us alive a bit longer. I’m remembering the stories of people waiting in line to buy bread. I used to wonder … how could they let this happen?

I was third in line. The woman first in line had arrived 15 minutes earlier than me. She got the vaccine that day, I did not. Fifteen minutes. I thought to myself … what if I was a millionaire? I could walk up to this woman and offer her $10,000 cash for her spot and she would have taken it. Extrapolate just a tiny bit and you see … how was it that I could be in line instead of at work? How was it that I even knew to go check for leftovers, except that I have access to high-speed internet and a good running truck?

In the greatest country on earth, how is it that to get medical care I have to use the skills I learned to buy concert tickets online through TicketMaster?

This is not a COVID-19 problem.

This is an America problem.

I was born here and raised here and I know that there is evil and I know that there is good but this American In-between is getting to be too much.

Have an honest talk with your school age children.

Are they really learning right now in their virtual classroom? I’d wager the answer for the overwhelming majority is No.

Is that the fault of the student? No, they were never taught how to learn remotely. It takes completely different skills than learning in person. There are variables that just don’t exist in a school — internet connectivity, internet attention magnets, no eye contact, limited one-on-one help, volume controls, screen reading, brothers, sisters, just a world of differences that we can’t pretend don’t require new techniques to learn around.

Since March I haven’t seen a local, state or national plan to teach these skills.

Are the teachers to blame? No, they were hired to teach in a classroom. They went to school and practiced in a classroom; they were taught a pedagogy based on in-person teaching. This is akin to asking veterinarians to play doctor. They can, and often do play this role in an emergency, but they don’t become doctors forevermore after the event.

Since March I haven’t seen a local, state or national plan to teach these skills.

Our state and local school boards are telling us that this global emergency requires we enlist all the classroom teachers to automatically become online virtual education teachers. They are telling us that because it is unsafe for kids to be in classrooms in person that the only alternative is to “go online.”

Virtual education is useless for allowing parents to go to work.

Virtual education will fail our students if they and the teachers aren’t trained in its use.

Physical classroom education is stupid and deadly right now.

Maybe we need to think bigger, shut down all schools completely, and use that time to teach our students, teachers, faculty and family what it takes to succeed in a remotely connected world.

We need to stop pretending COVID will just go away, and we need to wake up to the new reality.

This half-assed approach to education isn’t helping teachers, students or parents.