Ex-employee equates H-P to “slow cancer”
Workers at Hewlett-Packard’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., described last week’s round of 14,500 companywide layoffs as “The Big One.”
At least one of H-P’s former workers in Colorado – the company employs 5,400 workers in the state, down from as many as 9,000 in the 1980s – offers a darker euphemism.
“H-P in Colorado has been like slow cancer,” said Bill Van Eron, who worked for H-P from 1978 to 2002. “Watching it has been ugly.”
Van Eron, who has formed the Fort Collins-based Headwaters Marketing agency, still owns H-P stock.
But he feels bitter about what he said a midlevel manager told him in 2002: “If you have 20 years of experience and you’re over 40, the writing is on the wall,” Van Eron said. “You’re not wanted.”
Three months later Van Eron was laid off.
Van Eron attended meetings of NoCoNet, a local job-seeking group founded by laid-off H-P employees in the winter of 2002. Within a few months, meetings swelled to 100 people, and the organization has grown ever since.
“It was like going to your favorite friend’s funeral or a reunion,” says NoCoNet founder Doug Johnson of the first meetings. “But when you have been part of something for 20 years, you need a sense of belonging.”
Heat drives golfers away from courses
Golfers at Lone Tree Golf Club and Hotel in Lone Tree last week may have been melting in triple-digit temperatures, but those who stuck it out got a side benefit: emptier greens, according to The Associated Press.
Typically the club averages 250 golfers a day, PGA professional Rynk Strothers said from a building where the thermostat was set at 60 degrees.
But the heat wave meant that there were only about 100 people playing rounds Thursday.
Strothers said he was relieved some of his students canceled lessons on the course outside.
“It feels like you’re making something to eat in your oven and you open it up,” Strothers said. “Or being down in Mexico.”
Nabisco website full of fun and games
The makers of Oreos, Ritz Crackers and Fig Newtons are trying to divert your attention away from work. Nabisco’s website, NabiscoWorld.com, contains more than 50 online video games. Nabisco says that 50 percent of adults logging onto the site do so between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., making it a new way to spend an office “coffee break.”
Although the site has offered games since 1999, the company recently added new games, including Texas Hold ’em and billiards. Web users can play games individually or with other gamers visiting the site.
Nielsen’s Net Ratings report for May stated that 60 percent of NabiscoWorld.com visitors are age 18 and over.
Sewage sludge has nice ring to it
One person’s processed human waste could be another’s garden fertilizer.
But what to call it?
Depends if you’re the sewage treatment district selling it as compost or a journalist writing about it.
On a journalists’ newsgroup recently, a reporter writing an article on the substance queried colleagues on proper nomenclature.
Not surprisingly, journalists preferred the no-nonsense term “sewage sludge.” And equally not surprisingly, Denver’s Metro Wastewater Reclamation District prefers the less-explicit “biosolids.”
You can buy your own, marketed by the district as Metrogro, for $2 a bag or $21 a ton.
And on the subject of names, the district’s feelings are hurt when it is called “sewage treatment.”
“I prefer wastewater treatment,” said district spokesman Steve Frank, “because it’s not so pejorative.”
Foundation launches campaign for aviary
The Gabriel Foundation is launching a $1 million capital campaign to fund construction of its new aviary just outside Elizabeth in Elbert County.
The foundation hopes to relocate from its digs in Basalt by December, said Anna Gonce, the nonprofit’s executive director. The new facility, being built by Lakewood-based Burlstone Inc., will include boarding, birdie day care, quarantine services and a lifetime sanctuary for birds that cannot be adopted.
“We have some birds at our facility that live to be 85 years old,” Gonce said.
The Gabriel Foundation is a nonprofit corporation promoting education, conservation, rescue, rehabilitation, adoption and sanctuary that cares for the needs of parrots everywhere.
Broomfield group comes up Roses
What do the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl have to do with Colorado? Broomfield-based Creative Strategies Group has been retained by the Pasadena Tournament of Roses to evaluate and redesign their sponsorship program. At the Tournament of Roses, CSG will be developing a marketing plan to attract more corporate sponsors. CSG has done local sponsorship representation at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival and the Starz Denver International Film Festival.
