“Whether the Andrea Gail rolls,
pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a
position from which she cannot recover. Among marine architects this is known
as the zero-moment point – the point of no return.” –Sebastian Junger, “The
Perfect Storm”
Posts like this aren’t my usual fare, but there’s a lot of
readers on Tumblr. So y’all might be interested – or, if not, you really should
be.
On Monday, this went down:
That’s the bloodless, matter-of-fact, ho-hum business event
way of describing it. Let me paint you a different picture.
On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location –
that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The
eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people
responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people
responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should),
the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand
leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain
leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A
few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their
receiving managers, but not many.
Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The
unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.
People.
We’re not talking post-holiday culling of seasonal workers.
This was the Red Wedding. Every person laid off was a full-time
employee. These were people for whom Barnes & Noble was a career.
Most of them had given 5, 10, 20 years to the company. In most cases it was
their sole source of income.
Speaking vaguely from the inside of publishing: people have seen this coming, they’ve been trying to do something about it but it seems like B&N has been not super interested in help, it is bad for the book industry as a whole, no one is quite sure where we go from here.
for the first like 14 years of my life i thought that the story of saint valentine and valentines day were a celebration of a massive gay polyamorous marriage and let me tell you, i was sorely disappointed when i learned i had massively misunderstood that story
i was told the basic story of “the king had made it illegal for young men to get married so that they could be drafted off to go to war (as married men with families were not, apparently)” and that “saint valentine thought this was cruel, and married the young men in secret”
what this was supposed to communicate to me was “saint valentine would marry young men to their girlfriends in secret as a priest at his own risk and thats why we celebrate valentines day”
what i got out of it was “saint valentine married a shitton of dudes so he could protect his army of husbands from having to go to war and it was beautiful and love can halt war in its tracks and thats why we celebrate valentines day”
and thats why the assumption that a child would automatically get a hetero interpretation of the story and the innate unclarity of the english language made me think that valentines day was about mass gay poly marriage until i was like fourteen and recited the story to a friend who stared at me like id grown three extra heads
Penhales 