Category: Life in San Francisco

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Sally Stanford: Grand Dame of Madams

Since I’ve been talking about some of the old characters of San Francisco fame, my friend Nikolai reminded me of one I hadn’t written about, Sally Stanford, the Grand Madame of San Francisco. Sally’s claim to fame was that she was the Queen of the bordellos in San Francisco who attracted numerous clients rich and famous from around the country, if not the world. Sally was probably the best marketing tool to get men to come to San Francisco in the 20’s-40’s.

Her best known bordello was located at 1144 Pine Street near Jones where Herb Caen even claimed that the United Nations was formed there because the delegates convened there and most of the negotiations took place in the bordello’s living room. Edmund G. Brown [Jerry Brown pappy] raided the place which led him winning the 1950 election for Attorney General of California. Sally was best known for her infamy as someone who ran a bordello, sponsored little league teams and even ran for the Mayor’s seat of Sausalito…AND WON!

Even during a century when women got the vote, danced in jazz clubs, built war-time battleships, and cracked the glass ceiling in business and politics, Sally Stanford broke more rules than most. She married seven times—but never to a Stanford—used more than two dozen names, beat seventeen arrests, and sued a famous businessman for non-payment.

At age seven, she convinced local golfers to let her work as a caddy. During the period when Al Capone was machine-gunning fellow bootleggers, she fed salty roast chickens to her speakeasy customers to heighten their thirst. Investing Prohibition profits in Tenderloin hotels, she polished her rough edges and climbed uphill (Nob Hill) to become San Francisco’s most successful madam. She kicked out Humphrey Bogart for disorderly conduct, welcomed Errol Flynn, and entertained delegates to the 1945 United Nations organizing conference.

[mappress mapid=”32″]In the 1950s, she retired from the bordello with a multi-million dollar fortune, joined the Chamber of Commerce, supported Little League and Guide Dogs for the Blind. She rehabilitated “Valhalla,” [a restaurant still in operation today in Sausalito] transforming it from bay-front dive to plush restaurant. It became the place to see and be seen. Patrons included Harry Bridges, Marlon Brando, Bing Crosby and Lucille Ball [Lucy…in a whore house?]. Never resting on last year’s success, Sally entered politics as a pro-business candidate for Sausalito City Council. She lost five times before winning three. In her final campaign (1976), she was the top vote-getter. Sally died in February 1st, 1982 at Marin General Hospital of a heart attack at the young age of 78.

And thus, the madam became Mayor. “Sinners never give up!” declared Sally Stanford, after losing her first political campaign. Sally had hutzpah for sure.

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Lombard Street: Not the crookedest street…

Everyone thinks that Lombard Street is the crookedest street in the world. Well while it’s sort of become a landmark of San Francisco for being such, I hate to tell you, but that’s not really true.

I do have to say it’s prettiest crooked street since either the residents or the city of San Francisco work hard to keep it looking nice for all the tourists who come to photograph the street or are stupid enough to bother to drive down the street [which yes, I have to admit I’ve done it as well], but it’s really only the best known crookedest street in San Francisco. There’s actually one that’s even more crooked and if you’re in a station wagon or large SUV you won’t be able to make the turns.

This is the street between 23rd street and Vermont street out in the Potrero district. It’s longer with tighter turns and my record for getting down the street is 25 seconds. You’ll have a hard time finding pictures of it, but I was able to find one after some hard searching. It’s not as spectacular and pretty boring, but I took my in-laws down Lombard Street when they were here and then drove them all the way out to the Potrero to get their opinion. I believe I might have had to hose out the car afterwards because it was a scary drive for them. It’s a real rollercoaster of a drive especially if I’m behind the wheel.

There were a few residents outside that we could hear them yelling, “SLOW DOWN!” thinking I had never driven this street before, but I’ve done this many times and had this trip down. This is an old picture and the weeds have been replaced by trees or overgrown weeds and lots of barriers to keep you from driving off and falling onto the freeway which is now to the right in the picture.

This part of Vermont street is kind of the ugly sister of Lombard. It’s not pretty, it’s tough to deal with and if you don’t understand her she will mess you up bad…real bad. I’ve told friends about Vermont and they’ve gone to check it out and several of them have bent fenders to show for it.[mappress mapid=”30″]

My dream for Vermont Street is that one day I’ll be able to rent a little Mini Cooper and shoot down at around 40 mph and see if I can break my record. I don’t recommend this for the faint of heart, but it is definitely the thrill ride in San Francisco and best of all, it’s FREE! Now I might end up catching some flack from people in San Francisco that don’t like me sharing this hidden little secret or perhaps the residents that don’t want people trying to sail down there to beat my time, but too bad. It’s San Francisco and I want people to know about it. There are even locals that don’t know about it.

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Raccoon Sex…

Well I suspect the title alone will cause all the freaky people who sit up late at night in the dark doing google web searches to come to this site, but after last night I feel I should write something.

While San Francisco is a major metropolitan city it doesn’t mean we don’t have wildlife other than rats and mice. You can find raccoons, skunks, possums and even coyotes within San Francisco. Luckily, I have yet to run into a coyote in my backyard, but raccoons are pretty common in the backyards as they’re a lot more agile. I did notice a skunk once when I went outside to throw some food on the grill thinking, “that’s an odd looking cat” and getting a closer look at the white stripe up its back I walked backwards very slowly until the skunk decided to check out the next yard.

Now raccoons tend to be on the rather friendly side. Either that or they aren’t afraid of people one bit. We used to have an old raccoon that lived in a tree in our backyard. He was blind in one eye and covered in mange and couldn’t compete at night with the others so he’d come out during the day. He was slow and probably had a lot of arthritis so we took pity on him as he would come up to the Indian grinding stones my Mother had in our backyard for water. One day I went outside with an egg and sat on the steps a few feet away and with his one good eye he saw I was holding out something that looked like food. He walked over to me and sheepishly took the egg from my hand and walked over, cracked it on the rock ate the insides and then washed it down with water [raccoons don’t have salivary glands like the rest of us, so they need lots of water to eat]. This continued for a few months until my new little pet would come up and actually sit by me while he ate and let me give him a good look over. He had fleas and ticks real bad. That was obvious and I would be checked every night after feeding him to make sure I hadn’t picked up any ticks.

While being stripped down to your underwear and checked for ticks every night was kind of humiliating, how cool was it to have a pet raccoon that would come up for dinner every night? He started slowing down and his condition came up when we took our dog to the vet one day and our vet had seen an article in the newspaper about our “little friend”. When I told the vet about his condition he mentioned that it would probably be best to have the raccoon put down because it was suffering. We called animal care and control one day when my “pet” was sleeping for what seemed like three hours in our back yard. They came out expecting him to have left, but there he was sleeping on the ground and they just picked him up and put him in a cage and took him away to be put to sleep in a nice warm comfy room. At least it was more warm and comfy than the outdoors in the Sunset district.

So where does the raccoon sex [warning audio not for the faint of heart] come in? Old raccoons are nothing like younger raccoons. They are all over the city even down in the financial district. They’re just very adept at hiding. I usually see them at dusk or after dark. Well, last night I was woken up to a sound I hadn’t heard in a few years. If I had been more awake I would have run for my microphone and recorded the sound because I would have made millions using the sound in a horror movie. There were a couple of raccoons on our back deck having sex.

Raccoon sex is nothing like a human porn movie or even human sexual relations. It sounds more like gladiatorial combat, only with more scratching and hissing. The only thing more horrifying is raccoons fighting. These nice fuzzy creatures aren’t so nice when it comes to sex. It’s worse than the sound of a cat fight and there are no quotes because I’m referring to actually cats, not drunk women at a bar. It’s also something that is extremely loud probably reaching close to the 100db range, but I didn’t have a meter to test the truth in that, but trust me, it was LOUD AND ANGRY. [raccoon sex audio]

Luckily, it only lasts a couple of minutes [no snickering now!] and then they go off along their merry ways. I suppose this was caused by our current warm weather that turned this pair into a couple of cats on a hot tin roof. Now I bet some of you will ask me, how I knew they were having sex and not fighting. I will only say this…

I know of raccoon sex, but of this I can speak no further.

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A lawyer walks into a store with a disabled person, repeatedly!

Heeeere's Tommy!

This is a story that I read about yesterday. Actually it’s about several stories I read about yesterday concerning a lawyer named Thomas Frankovich, he works for the rights of the disabled. Normally that is something to feel good about, but this time it’s not. Several businesses in the Sunset and Mission District have been sued by Mr. Frankovich with the assistance of a disabled man named Craig Yates. How they do it appears to look more like an organized crime shake down maneuver than a cry for help for the disabled. Mr. Frankovich’s offices I have just learned are located at the top of 19 steps with no elevator access, hence Mr. Frankovich’s law offices are non-ADA compliant.

Now let me set the record straight that my mother was disabled. She had had four hip replacements and was morbidly obese so getting up and down the stairs was something she stopped doing during the last year of her life and prior to that it would take her about ten minutes to navigate down our thirteen stairs. While she could walk it could be barely considered walking and caused her great pain. When she would go out she would have to ride in a wheelchair that she herself couldn’t even maneuver. Now, here’s how Mr. Frankovich works.

Mr. Yates [sometimes accompanied by Mr. Frankovich] travel to a local business and test to see whether or not Mr. Yates can get into the building usually a restaurant to eat and use the facilities. If Mr. Yates could not he would write a letter to the business telling them they were non-complient with the ADA act. He would visit the business a few weeks later and if no changes had been made he would send a second letter then visit again in a few weeks. If he still had trouble there would be a third letter which included a summons to court from Mr. Frankovich.

Over the past three years six business in the Sunset alone have been targeted. Three have settled out of court, two are in mediation and one of the business has shut its doors for good. From the research I’ve done it appears that the out of court settlements have yielded Mr. Yates and Frankovich money in the tens of thousands of dollars from each settlement. These six law suits are not the only ones though. The grand total comes to over 30 law suits by Mr. Yates and Frankovich over the past three years. If you run the numbers in your head you can easily see how on a 50/50 split that each one of them would be sitting on a seven figure income per year. What’s more is that settlement funds are not taxable, so Mr. Yates after deducting his expenses from paying off Mr. Frankovich is in a pretty good place for a disabled man.

I should note that not all cases have been won by Mr. Frankovich. As I previously mentioned, one of the businesses has shut its doors as have also a few in the Mission District. Mr. Frankovich has also received three disciplinary actions over the last three years on ethics violations according to information obtained from the State Bar Association. What makes this story even more compelling is that prior to this Mr. Frankovich had levied over 100 law suits for non-ADA compliance in the Los Angeles area with a Mr. Jarek Molski using the same tactics.

[mappress mapid=”28″]I have tried to find pictures of Mr. Frankovich and Mr. Yates so that any business owners who visit my site can see what they look like so they would know to close down their businesses if they see them coming to avoid their racketeering-like ways, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a picture of them anywhere and I’m quite good with search engines. So far all I could find was Mr. Frankovich’s website at http://www.disabilitieslaw.com/. From my years of work as a graphic designer it is of my opinion that this was a very quickly put up website with a cartoonish picture of a man in a cowboy hat with a phone to his ear riding in a tank  labeled “access blaster” and a couple of disabled people in wheelchairs on either side with a throng of others walking behind the tank.

There is also another picture to the right that says, “One for all, all for one. The power of a class action lawsuit” yet so far Mr. Frankovich’s name only comes up associated with non-ADA compliance cases among two individuals. I haven’t seen anything about Mr. Yates or Mr. Molski saying that they are fighting for the disabled. It appears that they are both lining their own coffers with the money of small businesses.

San Francisco is an old city trying to keep its feel for the days of old somewhat. Landlords who purchase buildings built in the 20’s through 40’s LONG before there was the American’s with Disabilities Act usually don’t have the money to put into making their businesses ADA compliant or simply leave it to the people who rent from them to make the changes, but the majority of these businesses do everything they can to help out the disabled. I remember a business owner of a small coffee shop helping me bring the coffee and pastries I purchased out to my car because my mother didn’t want to get out of the car because it would be too painful for her. I’m am all in favor of assisting people with disabilities because I know what it’s like, but these two people insult the disabled by their practices and I feel it should stop now. Destroying local small businesses to line your own pockets is a crime in my humble opinion and I urge all you who read this to contact your local Supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee to help bring this to an end.

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Super Bowl Madness @ the Grocery Store

Beer, Booze, Beef and Chips. That’s pretty much what I found missing yesterday at my local Safeway grocery store. Now I don’t know why we would have thought it would better to go during the beginning of the Superbowl pre-game show, but I’ve now learned why the grocery stores are so crowded on Super Bowl Sundays. The shoppers are of three types of people.

  1. The die-hard Super Bowl fan: They’re up and out early in the morning to get all the supplies for the day’s festivities early so they can go home relax and probably be drunk and passed out  into the first half hour of the game.
  2. The “intellectually challenged” Super Bowl fan: THey probably figure they can rush out right before the game because no one will be there because they’re all home watching the game or maybe they forgot something or just wanted their fried chicken hot out of the fryer.
  3. The “I don’t care about the Super Bowl” types: I have to admit, I fall into this group except when the niners are playing it. I could give a rat’s ass who wins because if it ain’t going to be us then it doesn’t matter. Unfortunately all of us think  that everyone will be watching the game so they decide to go shopping at the same time as the #2’s.

Well, it was packed and the aisles of alcohol, chips and meat looked like they had been picked over like some of the photo’s I’ve seen of back east during the blizzard. Empty shelves everywhere and the people were lined up down the aisles. People were complaining about all the people there yet these were the people with a six pack of beer in their hand or a loaf of bread. If you didn’t like all the people did you really need to go shopping on one of the worst days to go grocery shopping? If you need a six pack of beer why not walk down the street to the liquor store and pick it up and pay an extra buck for the convenience?

Well that wasn’t the worst of it. My wife when to pick up a box of rice and beans only find it all spilled out of the back of the box through a hole that had been chewed there. She grabbed another than hadn’t had been rat-shackled and continued shopping. Then as we’re standing in line my wife made a comment to the guy standing behind her. I didn’t know what they were talking about at first, but then realized that along with his groceries he had brought up a bag of hot dog buns that had cleared suffered from rat infestation.

Great, San Francisco has rat infested grocery stores?!?!? Well I guess so since I’ve begun to notice that Safeway stores [who are based in the Bay Area where they started] have started to have a rat trap need their elevator entrances [the rats take the elevator?] on the roofs or their front doors. Now there are sometimes two or three rat traps there. I don’t see them at any other grocery store I’ve been to in San Francisco, only Safeway. I dropped the two words “Safeway” and “Rats” into google and look what it gave me back. Not exactly giving me much reason to go back to shop there. The cashier even admitted to man with the rat chewed bag that they had been having a hard problem with the rat infestations. I really felt like telling her that it wasn’t just her, but every Safeway in the city that you’ll find rat traps outside, but she’s nice and knows me so I’d rather say it to her in a place not as open and public since saying something like, “Your Safeway is infested with rats” in a crowded Safeway may not be good for business and I wouldn’t want to get trampled by everyone running out the door.

This is a sign though that the Board of Health needs to be notified. I know I’ve got a lot of readers in San Francisco so I’m hoping at least one of the 5000+ readers in SF works for the Board of Health or hopefully one of the 50,000+ readers in California works for the state Board of Health and give someone a kick int he butt. When I purchase food I want to be non-rat involved. I know there’s all these weird government guidelines about how many rodent hairs can be allowed into certain food produces, but still when you’ve got obvious evidence a rat problem that you and the guy behind you in line discovered, more people are going to find out about it.

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Why is it called Baghdad by the Bay?

I was asked by a friend working in Kuwait the other day why I chose the name “Baghdad by the Bay” for my site. I realized that while almost everyone in the Bay Area knows about Herb Caen who dubbed San Francisco with that name, there might be people outside of the San Francisco Bay Area who don’t know or understand why he came up with that name for San Francisco. Well, I figured it would only be fitting to let Herb explain it for himself so Herb will be our guest blogger for today. I’m sure he’d hate being called that since he never in the 60+ years that he was a news reporter ever used a computer and was proud of his “loyal royal” typewriter that he used from the beginning.

Herb was also known for making the statement, “One day if I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven. I’ll look around and say, ‘it ain’t bad. but it ain’t San Francisco.'”

Please note that Herb died in 1997 so some of the references are a little out of date, but cut him some slack. Herb you may now take over the blog:

Hello, Visitors!

By Herb Caen

Greetings and welcome to San Francisco, city of the world, worlds within a city, forty-nine square miles of ups and downs, ins and outs, and going around in circles, most of them dizzy. A small “d” democratic city run by big-buck conservatives, a place where the winds of freedom will blow your mind and your hat off, where eccentricity is the norm and sentimentality the ultimate cynicism. Cable cars and conventions, boosterism living uncomfortably with sophistication, a built-in smugness announcing simply that we are simply the best. The only city better than San Francisco today was San Francisco yesterday–maybe. Remember, visitors, that you are lucky to be here. Have fun. Spend money. Marvel at our giddy combination of Kookville and High Kultur, busyness and booziness, millionaires stepping daintily over passed-out winos, hot-pantzed ladies of the night throwing themselves at your passing car. Enjoy yourselves, but don’t stay too long. Parking is such street sorrow.

Years ago, this wide-eyed kid from Sacramento dubbed it Baghdad-by-the-Bay, a storybook city of spires and minarets, gay banners fluttering in the breeze. A viewtiful city, he called it, a Saroyanesque pastiche of lovable gamblers and boozy bohemians spouting half-aphorisms in saloons run by patrician publicans. The most beautiful bay in the world–only superlatives were accepted–was breasted by ferries that looked like Victorian mansions with sidewheels. Then came the greatest bridges in the world–“the car-strangled spanner” of the bay and Joe Strauss’s suspenseful “bridge that couldn’t be built.” We looked around at the wonderful, funderful city and we were proud to be San Franciscans, the envy of all.

San Francisco, Queen City of the Pacific (the title was once non-ironic), gleaming jewel of the West Coast, surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by Republican reality. Occasionally a Republican mayor sneaks in, but it is essentially a city that votes the straight Demo ticket. I don’t even know how they get people to run for mayor: who wants to be Chief Kook of Kookville? We have a city father who is an unmarried mother of two and a gay seat on the Board of Supes, as befits the new demographics. San Francisco has a large gay population, and it keeps increasing, although exactly how gays multiply has not been explained. Nothing is ever explained in San Francisco.

“The city that was never a town.” There’s a thought that appeals to San Franciscans. Will Rogers may or may not have said it, but the phrase does conjure up a flash of the crazed and crazy place that was born in a Gold Rush and grew up overnight to become a fabled city. Tip to visiting journalists: “The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer in San Francisco” was one of the best lines Mark Twain never wrote, but who cares. Whoever said it was accurate enough.

Welcome visitors, to a city as confusing as the Democratic party. If you drive, don’t drink, but the driving will drive you to drink. We are casual about street signs, but you might find one if you look hard enough. Directions? Forget it, and don’t ask whatever looks like a resident. He won’t know either. If you keep going on a one-way street, you will soon come to another one-way street with traffic coming right at you. That’s what makes us colorful and our insurance rates the highest. Don’t worry about traffic lights. Green and red both mean go like hell; in fact you cross on the green at your own risk. Another tip: No Parking Any Time means park any time, usually on the sidewalk and sometimes on a pedestrian. There are a lot of tow-away zones, so check the signs. It is maddening to pay $60 to ransom your car from a towing company whose slogan is “Discover San Francisco”.

San Francisco, a city for all seasons (sometimes four in one day) and various reasons. A city that thinks nothing of spending $60 million to rebuild a cable car system that was obsolete a century ago and even less of letting drunks lie on the street as long as they aren’t in the way of the cables; “a sociological, not a police problem,” unquote. A city of soup kitchens and two thousand restaurants, some of them excellent and most of them crowded. A place where whites are a minority and “the largest Chinatown outside of the Orient” is no longer large enough. The mayor and both congressmen are Jewish women; do we need a Yenta Control Board?

So welcome, dear visitors, to Crazytown USA. You will either be crazy about it or become as crazy as the rest of us. Either way, may you all return safely to your funny country, that large land mass slightly to the right of Baghdad-by-the-Bay.

Thanks Herb, see you over at the Washbag later.




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You know you’re a San Franciscan when…

I just read one of the funniest articles that is even too San Franciscan for me. It was an article on “alternatives to the Super Bowl”. They suggested you take your kids down to the San Jose Museum of  Quilts and Textiles to learn about Mayan embroidery.

WTF?!?!? You’re suggesting that you should turn your back on the most American institutional homoerotic wargame that we know as the Super Bowl where you eat tons of fatty food, drink lots of alcohol and bet on which one of your friends will be the first to puke on your floor for learning about…textiles?

As you can tell, I’m not exactly down with football. Usually because the fans are mostly overweight now along with the athletes who the coaches push to put on pounds to keep the opposing side from “penetrating their end zone”, but textiles? At least I’m relieved that this over the top “San Franciscan” idea is taking place outside of San Francisco.

I guess I should blame my college broadcasting semiotics teacher who teamed up with folklorist Alan Dundes who did an analysis of the sport. He made it sound really, well, homosexual [I’d use the term gay, but being straight would be considered an insult.] When Alan talked about the terminology of players who’s title was the “tight end” and “wide receiver” c’mon you gotta wonder don’t you?

Now I’m not a total football hater. I played a lot of football as a kid, but then again, I played football, not watched it. As a kid I’d be off at the local playground playing baseball or basketball and come back and find the local kids playing football across our scattered lawns and join in, but when I’d come inside and my Dad was watching a baseball game and I didn’t want to sit there and watch I “wasn’t into sports”.

Go figure, I suppose I didn’t like watching a bunch of hunks dressed in body enhancing armor trying to penetrate each others end zone.

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Chinese New Year: Where you at?

Gong hay fat choy! I suppose I should be hearing that a lot more lately. My daughter’s pre-school was closed yesterday because of Chinese New Year, so why haven’t I heard anything about it other than a few friends on Facebook mentioning the year of the rabbit.

San Francisco has a huge Chinese population, 60% of the city is in fact Asian and the Sunset District where I hide out is probably even more Asian than that. We used to jokingly call it the “Chinatown Annex“. I even had a friend drive me home many years ago and after a trip down Noriega Street he remarked, “I didn’t know you lived near Chinatown.”

Well, he was from Marin so I can cut him some slack, but every year around Chinese New Year you’ll start hearing the firecrackers going off like it was 4th of July, maybe a few skyrockets that were illegally obtained, the usual. Some of the stores on Noriega, Irving and Taraval will start sprouting up  big red and gold banners and all of the Chinese people you see on the street are smiling.

So what’s up with dat this year? I haven’t heard one firecracker, I don’t see anything in the paper and I have yet to hear of the announcement of the Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco on TV or in the newspapers. I don’t hear non-Chinese trying hard to say, “Gong hay fat choy” to Chinese friends or even weirder any one they think is Chinese on the streets. This is the time the Chinese call “tuan yuan” which means reunion. It’s kind of like all the Chinese coming together to celebrate their friendship and families and the fact that they’ve made it through another year successfully. They all exchange red envelopes with gifts of money [not drugs as my father used to think, no really, I’m serious] to each other to show their prosperity. The only place I’ve seen red envelopes for sale was at the health food store I wrote about yesterday.

Well I did read something that may explain the somber tone. Apparently some Chinese think that this might not be the greatest coming year which might usher in terrorist threats, natural disaster, an 89 year old Oakland minister claiming the end of the world on My 21st? What’s next will Brad and Angelina break up because they were married in the year of the rabbit?

Well at least The San Francisco Symphony’s Chinese New Year symphony is sold out, but I don’t even know what date that is or when the Chinese New Year parade is going to be televised. It was always a guarantee around our house that we’d order out from one of our local Chinese Restaurants for the night of the parade and would sit in front of the TV watching while we stuffed ourselves with Kung Pao Chicken, Sweet and Sour Pork, Mongolian Beef, egg rolls, you know all the usual “white people chinese food” 🙂 I did try one of the cakes with a hard boiled egg in it once [which a Chinese friend I was working with couldn’t believe because even he thought they tasted nasty], only once and you well never get me to order jelly fish or sea cucumber from a Chinese restaurant.

Now will somebody please tell me what day the parade is so I know when to order the Chinese food to stuff myself with?

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So a Bull Walks into a Union Shop…

I was working at a printshop a little over a decade ago and lost my job after I had a stroke. I wasn’t exactly told why, but they let me go. I can only assume that it might have raised their insurance premiums because I has a health risk. As it turned out the company started to go downhill from there. I have a curse that I somehow developed in that every company that I have been laid off/fired from usually goes under within 6 months. There’s only one company so far that’s still moving along in a crippled state and they should be gone shortly.

Now after I lost that job it turns out there was a print service bureau up the street that was getting more work than they could handle and I was the cute hard working guy they new because when we had a breakdown in our film processing equipment they’d send me over there for a fix. This was a union shop and I had never worked for a union shop before and my eyes lit up. Unions! They always paid you big bucks, got you great health benefits and you got lots of time off and in this case you only had to work a 7 hour day which included your lunch. Two thumbs up! Strangely enough, the three owners of this small business started the company unionized. As a matter of fact the printers union was the first union ever started int he United States. Well, this is where the fun stops.

I was used to having to produce start to finish 30-40 jobs a day from electronic artwork to finished printing plates. Now I only had to produce the finished artwork. I liked starting at 7:30 in the morning which seemed ambitious to everyone except one of the owners who would open the place at 7am. While things went fine for a few months I noticed them asking me to slow down on my work because I wasn’t leaving anything for the other two workers to do. Then with the dot com bomb there slowly became less and less work coming in and because I was so efficient they were having to send home employee’s with more time on the job. This was totally against union rules and so since I was the newbie to the bunch they finally laid me off. The unfortunate part was that the others who worked there weren’t as efficient as I was so in the end even though they had less work, what was taking me 15 minutes to do was taking them 2-3 hours to do and they started to lose customers which meant even less work and they eventually closed down.

Today you won’t find a single union printer within San Francisco and you won’t find very many small non-union printers in San Francisco any more either. So now let’s move forward a few years. I was out of work and heard that Safeway’s union had re-negotiated their pay scale so that checkers were making $20/hour. I start thinking this would be easy so I went in and applied and they were very eager to hire me. I passed all the tests with flying colors and was invited to the first training meeting. Here’s where it starts to get weird. Most of the people in the meeting did not have English as a first language there were four people who fell asleep during the training session and one women who just about passed out, but it still sounded great so I went along with it. They didn’t say anything about pay though so after the four hour training session which happened to be at my local Safeway I went down and found the manager that I always said hi to when I was shopping there. I asked him, “So I hear that the checkers are making $20/hour now when does that start?” His answer, “They didn’t tell you in the meeting? You start at minimum wage which after a year you were eligible, but not guaranteed full time work at minimum wage and you get incremental pay increases each year so you won’t be making $20/hour for about 10 years.”

Crap, waste of time. I can’t raise my family on $9.75/hour part time. Start looking again. This led me to start thinking about unions.

Unions were started to protect workers from being exploited by their employees. This was a good thing. People weren’t being paid what their job was worth in the marketplace and when they unionized they had higher wages, job protection and benefits. In Safeway’s case they may as well have not been unionized because they were paying crap and had a high turnover rate. Most of the people in the training session with me weren’t even legal voting age yet. For them it was probably a good job. For me having a family it sucked.

Then you have toll takers on the Golden Gate Bridge that they’re going to be getting rid of because their union get’s them paid $27/hour and fully paid benefits for them and their families at no additional cost. They have to paid about $50 union dues a month which at $27/hour is nothing and their job…taking money and making change. $27/hour is a bit on the high side wouldn’t you say? You don’t even need a high school diploma to get that kind of job.

Workers do need some protection, but by this I mean good workers. People who have the talent and skills to do the job should be paid accordingly. We now have lots of “start ups” I attended a meeting of one last night and I worked for one a few months ago under the jobs now program. Then I was getting paid because they were getting reimbursed by the federal government for hiring unemployed parents. Great job. I was being paid what I was worth and encouraged to learn new skills. Then the subsides ended and so did the job unless I wanted to work for private equity. Private equity means you earn shares in a company that are pretty much worthless unless someone offers to buy out the company. There are many companies who managed to make this work, but there are far more who haven’t. While computing is moving towards the cloud, I’m not letting my paycheck move there as well.

San Francisco has tons of start ups all over the place. We have our Twitter who’s doing quite well and hasn’t gone public yet, but I’m not sure how they’re making their money other than getting rich investors to toss money at them thinking they’ll make it work one of these days. MySpace on the other hand which isn’t SF based, does or rather did have an office in SF where they just had to lay off everyone because they aren’t a cool start up anymore.

Just as our government has become polarized on the left and right so has the workplace. You have unions that support unskilled laborers with high pay and good benefits, then you have startups who support highly skilled laborers for little or no pay. We need something in between what San Francisco needs is a work meritocracy. If you’re good at what you do you should be paid for it. If you’re not good at what you do then you should be paid less or not at all and lose your job. Work efficiently and produce more at a higher quality means you are more valuable to your company and are a more commercial commodity. Let’s move back to that way of life.

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SFGate.com: Going down quickly.

[ad]Today’s rant is brought to you courtesy of sfgate.com, the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle. I being the techno nerd that I am like to get up in the morning and read my news online. Because of this I don’t need to buy the paper. We do get the Sunday paper, but really it’s more for the ads than the news in it.

Now I have to admit that the paper version of the Chronicle is put together right. They put the best written articles on the front page which amounts to about 4 stories. On the other hand the online version at sfgate.com can put somewhere around 30 articles on the front page and when you start to read them you have to scratch your head a bit. Yesterday I saw an article titled, “My Rush hating wife” with a picture of Rush Limbaugh. What? Republican’s in San Francisco writing for the Chronicle?!?!? It turned out to be an article on the band Rush, not Rush Limbaugh and how he loved the band, but his wife didn’t get them and didn’t like them. This is news?

Today I read an article on a Republican Senator that wants to ban the sale of “Drug-Like Bath Salts” that are sold with a wink and a nudge, but you’re supposed to snort them for a hallucingenic high, not take a bath in them. That’s pretty much the story. I’m curious what drug-like compounds are in these salts. What’s more is a quick google search shows that the article was pretty much lifted word for word from the Huffington Post without giving them any credit. This story didn’t give me any information on these so called bath salts that “pack as much punch as cocaine or methamphetamines.”

What has really gotten to me though is that in doing more research on an article on sfgate.com I came to a page which had what looked like a bunch of sfgate.com stories on the right. One was about the “make $5000 a month from home.” We’ve seen this all before, but it looked like they were going to take a look inside the offer and tell you what they expected you to do or how people had their entire income sucked out of their bank accounts by some Romanian hacker kid. No, it was an article telling you to go ahead and buy in. It’s a great idea! Then I looked at the top and realized I wasn’t on sfgate.com anymore. I checked out who owned the web address of that site and one for the page that was linked there where you could earn $5000 a month at home. They were both registered in the Grand Cayman Islands. Interestingly enough, this is were many US moles of the Romanian cyber-criminals open bank accounts.

SFGate.com, where is your due diligence? You put an ad on your website that looks like a link to an sfgate.com story, yet it sends you to a site that looks like sfgate.com, but is most likely a scam by cyber-criminals. Where are your journalists? I’ve got more meaningful content in this story than most of your articles do. Some of your writers I went to college with, did they learn nothing during that time in college? I earned my degree in Broadcast Communication Arts and we took classes on ethics and responsibility and how we were supposed to report the facts free of opinion. What the hell happened to that? Now it’s made up mostly of bloggers and I won’t say, “bloggers like me” because I think I’m doing more. I don’t even like to call myself a blogger anymore because I don’t tweet that I’m “ordering a tall half-caf latte @ starbucks…mmmm”. I write about things in San Francisco that I think other people care about or want to know about. Not articles about how I don’t understand why my wife doesn’t like Rush [which my wife does like FYI] or that people are snorting some powder that packs as much punch as cocaine, but should be banned even if what’s in it is legal, but we don’t know so we can’t tell you and while you’re at it click on one of our ads to make a Romanian kid rich.

I am about one step away from pronouncing real journalism to be dead, nope, I’m not. It’s dead.