You'll need a carpenter for that....

Over the past few weeks my blog has been more political that I ever thought it would be, but I just write what's on my mind.

Anyway, when I first wake up, I usually make coffee, turn on the news and check email etc. So the news stories filter in.

Yesterday there was a story about the Auto Worker's Union was angry because of what they perceived as a "lack of concern" about the current state of the automotive industry. CNN did a poll to find out how the everyday people felt about it, and most were opposed. This evidently made the union angry.

You may be able to guess that I'm not a pro-union kind of guy. I'm not going to rant and rave about it, I just want to tell a funny story.

Early on in my career, I used to do a bit of traveling for work. I worked for a company in the Medical Physics business and part of my job was to travel and work the company's booth at trade shows.

I had never gotten to travel much growing up, so it was fun to travel to different cities. I didn't go to a lot of places, but every year I got to go to Chicago. Chicago was my favorite. We always went the week after Thanksgiving for a meeting of the "Radiological Society of North America" (RSNA)

Being a "ham and egg" southern boy, Chicago was quite an eye opening experience. At that time, the closest thing Nashville had to a museum was "Barbara Mandrell Country" Chicago had several museums. The first time we went, I talked my boss into giving me half a day off and I visited 3 museums in an afternoon (any one of which would have taken a full day to really appreciate).

Anyway, to the union story. The RSNA show was held in the McCormick Place in Chicago, it is a huge facility especially designed for large conventions and trade shows.

The first year I went, I learned a lot about unions. The McCormick Place is a union shop which means you can't do anything there "without taking somebody's job". We sold software and QA equipment so we had to have electricity at our booth to plug everything in. Well, as you might guess, you can't plug anything in at the McCormick Place, you have to go to the Shop Steward and hire an electrician. The minimum amount of time that you can hire for is one hour. I think it cost us something like $80 to have the guy come to our booth and plug in an extension cord. After that job was done, my boss wanted to make use of our helper who we had for another 59.5 minutes. He said "Why don't you put those brochures in that rack there" the electrician quickly responded "You'll need a carpenter to do that"

P.S. The story I just heard this morning was about Kim Kardashian appearing nude in playboy, when asked for her thoughts on it her response was "When you're naked, you're exposing a lot of yourself" thank you Kim for those words of wisdom....