Month: September 2008

George “Mr. Sulu” Takei married his longtime partner Brad Altman yesterday. Fellow Star Trek alums Nichelle “Uhura” Nichols and Walter “Chekov” Koenig attended.

Congrats to the best damn helmsman in Starfleet and his hubby!

First, I gave you the “bad news meeting” photo at the London office of Lehman Brothers. Then I followed up with an imaginary scene that followed. Here, for those of you who like to follow business news, are some real scenes from the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse, courtesy of a Bloomberg News article titled Lehman Workers Clear Desks, Weep After Bankruptcy:

Left: Lehman Brothers employee moving his stuff out of the London office.
Right: Two Lehman New York employees saying goodbye.

A couple of bits from the article jumped out at me. First, this one about some very new employees:

A 21-year-old Lehman graduate trainee in London, who declined to be identified by name, said he and 90 to 95 colleagues were called in by the human resources department and made redundant. They started work a week ago.

I wonder if those new trainees were the people in the London office photo I posted earlier today.

Another notable excerpt:

“The Fed didn’t bail us out,” said Khash Sajadi, 32, a vice president in Lehman’s mortgage capital division in London. “That’s the right decision. As a taxpayer, rather than a Lehman employee, you shouldn’t have to foot the bill for someone else’s decision. It’s a sad story for me and very many others.”

It’s nice to see that there are businesspeople who don’t believe in the “privatize profits, socialize losses” mantra.

One more excerpt:

Sphinx Patterson, who takes a so-called body-pump and step class every Monday afternoon at Lehman’s seventh-floor gym, said the complex was shut today, and the piles of towels had gone.

“People were hugging each other in the corridor,” said Patterson, 35, who’s worked at the gym for five years. “I saw girls crying. They don’t know what to do,” he added.

My thoughts:

• “Sphinx?” This is either a nickname he adopted or his parents are from the Palin school of baby-naming.
• “The piles of towels had gone.” The gym might have gathered up all the towels, but having survived one or two “nights of the long knives”, I believe the more likely scenarios is that they got taken in the sort of mass theft that accompanies mass layoffs.

And finally, for “I saw girls crying. They don’t know what to do.”: This is an interesting one…

• My first thought was “Crying? Over the demise of a bank? I’ve seen much weeping and gnashing of teeth over the closing of small company created and built up by a group of artists and by the employees of various small businesses — cafes, record stores and so on — that went under, but for some reason, it seems weird to cry when a bank for whom your work, especially one that such global reach, goes under. Whether you make minimum wage or a Lehman-level salary, losing your job still hurts.
• My next thought was “Did any of them see this coming, and if so, did they take precautions?” When things were getting a bit iffy at OpenCola, I scaled back my spending and starting putting away extra money. My deadbeat then-housemate also worked for OpenCola and had access to the same information I did, and took no such precautions — my biggest mistake was not kicking him out sooner.
• The thought after that was “How hard would it be to bounce back from losing your job at Lehman?” Given that this is the third major Wall Street shake-up this year, I’m sure that the remaining finance houses are being careful about how they spend their money. Since Generally Accepted Accounting Principles hold that employees are expenses and desks are assets, the number of openings at banks and other financial companies is probably a small one. There’s also the matter of how much debt you’re in when you’re fired. Given that New York and London are two of the world’s most expensive cities, that could be a lot.
• And finally, I hit my bank’s web site and checked my credit card balance. This is the financial equivalent of throwing salt over your shoulder or crossing yourself when a funeral procession passes you by. My balance is zero, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not get fired or laid off right now.

I have no idea what the context of the picture below is, but I choose to interpret it as career retraining for Lehman Brothers employees in the previous entry’s photo who now have to become “rent-boys” in order to keep up with the payments on their expensive condos:

I must now ask a one-word question: “Wyner?”

My friend Miss Fipi Lele tells me that the photo below was taken Friday — it’s a shot of the London office of Lehman Brothers in Canary Wharf. Note the gathering in the window on the upper right and the body language of everyone except the guy on the left in the khaki pants:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

In my experience of working at small-to-medium-sized software companies, there are two reasons for the sort of impromptu all-hands gathering like the one pictured above, where everyone is called into the biggest room in the place and stands while one of the C-level people makes an announcement:

• The company has done well and has either acquired another company or been acquired by another company, or
• “Game over, man.”

Lehman filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy today, so the meeting is probably of the latter type. This article says that they’re in debt to the tune of 613 billion dollars to various banks in Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, Singapore and Taipei.

Some quick thoughts:

• Looking at khaki guy’s clothes — and the fact that he’s in khakis while everyone else is in “regulation charcoal business pants” — and body language, I think he’s got a backup plan.
• It’s probably a good thing those windows don’t open.
• I’m wondering what kind of impact that the implosion of yet another major financial house is going to have on me in both the short and long term.
• I’m reminded of the Simpsons episode in which Homer becomes the coach of the school football team: “You’re cut, you’re cut, you’re cut, you’re cut…”
• Maybe the truly dangerous “LHC” isn’t the Large Hadron Collider, but the Lehman Holdings Collapse.
• One wag who saw the photo posed an interesting rhetorical question: “What happens when you put frat boys in charge of one of the world’s largest banks?” Having worked for at least one irresponsible frat boy, I think the question’s got some merit.

Update

For more on the Lehman layoffs, see this entry.

Update 2

Hot man-on-man action outside the Lehman Brothers New York office!

…you see a sign like this:

Photo taken by your ‘umble chronicler.

(I saw this yesterday at my nephew’s birthday party at the Queensway Bowlerama.)

The Conservative Party of Canada has done an excellent job of marketing itself in the Canadian election by making party leader and Prime Minister Stephen Harper the face and focus of their campaign. As far as the ads go, this election is all about him. The Conservatives’ ads mostly boil down to “Stephen Harper is not a dick” and the New Democratic Party’s ads essentially say “Stephen Harper is a dick”.

The Liberal Party’s ads conspicuous by their apparent absence. Has anyone seen a Liberal Party ad on TV? I haven’t. Stranger still, with the notable exception of the Conservatives’ “slot machine” ad, I haven’t even seen an ad by the Tories or NDP that acknowledge the Liberals’ existence; if you didn’t live here, you might be led to believe that it’s a two-party race.

What is the Liberal Party doing?

First, Cold Stone Creamery

I’d heard of the ice cream parlor Cold Stone Creamery but didn’t get a chance to try it out until February 2007 while vacationing with the Ginger Ninja in San Francisco. It’s an ice cream shop with a twist: they create ice cream mixes by taking an ice cream flavour and toppings such as oreo pieces and graham crackers and blending them by hand on a chilled marble-like slab, as shown in the video below:

While this is fun to watch as it is, workers at some Cold Stone franchises like to add a little “flair bartending” style to the process, as the videos below show:

And Now, Marble Slab Creamery

Marble Slab Creamery is the company from whom Cold Stone took the idea — they predate Cold Stone by five years. They’ve come to the ‘burbs surrounding Accordion City.

According to their site, they’ve got locations in:

• Aurora (SmartCentres Aurora East)
• Milton (RioCan Centre Milton)
• Newmarket (SilverCity complex)
• Oakville (on Lakeshore, close to Trafalgar Road)
• Thornhill (Bathurst Centre)
• Woodbridge (RioCan Colossus Centre)

…and “Toronto” is listed as “coming soon”.

I heard about Marble Slab from my coworkers on Friday at noon, and that night after dinner, the Ginger Ninja and I hopped in the car and went to Oakville to give it a try.

Wow, is it goooood. Wendy had white chocolate ice cream with smashed-up bits of Coffee Crisp and Oreos, while I had “Birthday Cake” (sweet cream ice cream with cake flavouring, similar to a flavour called “Cake Batter” at Cold Stone) with smashed-up bits of Kit Kat and Oreos. There seem to over a dozen ice cream flavours and two dozen or so toppings to choose from, as welll as a helluva lot of types of ice cream cones.

We’ll be back.

Related Reading

Quite unsurprisingly, there are Wikipedia entries for Cold Stone and Marble Slab creameries.