They Still Make You?

Negro

The 2010 census form, a beacon of multicultural enlightenment*, provides the option for race:

That's right, Negro is a choice, here.  On the 2010 United States Census Form.  You may identify yourself as a negro.

According to New York Magazine's Daily Intel blog:

A Census spokesman says the word was included this year, as in previous years, because "many older African-Americans identified themselves that way, and many still do."

Negro: They Still Make You?

*But still no box marked "human."

People Who Use Their Work Email Address for Personal Correspondence, Colorado Employee Sends a Racist Email

With Gmail, hotmail, and even aol, you would assume that J.Crew would not be sending ads for its boyfriend merino wool sweaters to an email address with the suffix .gov.

Or that is to say, with the availability of boundary protecting (and free) email accounts, no one needs to rely on their work email to conduct personal business. 

Work email addresses, issued by an employer to employees to conduct professional business, join professional list serves and figure out who is bringing what to the office potluck, are great for many things... Your work email address, for instance, can be used to ask your boss a question about an assignment, or be used to get an update from your interns on the project they are working on. 

On the other hand, work email addresses are not so great for making plans to go out to dinner with old college friends, or for receiving automated reminders to pay your personal credit card, or to do what a Colorado Department of Transportation employee did recently.

The Associated Press by way of the Huffington Post reports that:

A Colorado state employee could be disciplined for sending an e-mail showing President Barack Obama shining the shoes of former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The 73-year-old Colorado Department of Transportation worker forwarded the e-mail to at least four co-workers and others on Dec. 22 using her state e-mail account.

As Atlantic commentator and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in her blog entry titled "People Who Use Their Work E-Mail To Send Mass Jokes",

Get a gmail. Takes two seconds. Then you can traffic in all the racist jokes you want.

All social commentary aside, however--

Using a work email address for personal corespondent: They Still Make You?

They Still Make You? The Business Insider Hopes Not

As the decade winds down, I have stumbled across several lists of technologies and customs that became either obsolete or far less prevalent over the past 10 years.

They Still Make You? covered New York Magazine's list a couple of weeks ago. 

We also covered the Law Librarian Blog's list of obsolete learning technologies.

The Business Insider has compiled it's slide-show of technologies it found had become obsolete in the past decade:

1. PDAs
2. E-mail accounts you have to pay for
3. Dial-up
4. Getting film developed
5. Movie Rental Stores
6. Maps
7. Newspaper classifieds
8. The Landline
9. Long-Distance Charges
10. Public pay phones
11. VCRs
12. Fax machines
13. Phone books, dictionaries, encyclopedias
14. Calling "411"
15. CDs
16. Backing up your data on floppies or CDs
17. Getting bills in the mail
18. Buttons
19. Losing touch
20. Boundaries
21. Paper
22. Bonus: Record Stores

One caveat is that many of these are still ubiquitous---no one knows quite why--- but still a good indicator of what we will be seeing less of in the years to come.

The article is worth the read for the commentary and pictures.

Beepers

For a moment in the early nineties, the electronic pager was the it-electronic communication device.  Call it the iPhone of 1991.

Doctors had them.  Drug dealers too.  And that one pathetic suburban homeboy in your middle school? Yep, he had a pager too.  You knew the only person paging him was him mom, and not his homeboys back at the Robert Taylor Homes. 

Pagers, or "Beepa's" as we called them, were memorialized in songs such as N.W.A.'s canonical "Fuck the Police":

Fuckin with me cuz I'm a teenager
With a little bit of gold and a pager

And when we played the dozens (i.e. yo' mama jokes), we knew we could crush our opponent with the following:

Your mama's so fat, when her beeper goes off, people think she's backing up.

Good times.

With the advent of sophisticated cellular technology, the pager was abandoned by most people in favor of cell phones, and now smart-phone (e.g. blackberries and iPhones).

And by most, I mean pretty much everyone but the Ontario (California) Police Department.  In the matter of City of Ontario v. Quon (see Ninth Circuit opinion, cert petition, Adam Liptak's coverage in the New York Times, Emily Bazelon's coverage in Slate) Jeff Quon, a sergeant with the police department, was issued what the court described as "an alphanumeric pager" for job-related communication. 

The police department capped pages at 25,000 characters per month, and required employees to pay out of their own pockets for pages transmitted subsequent to reaching that cap (also known as overage). 

Quon paid overage and used his work-issued pager to send sexually explicit messages to his girlfriend.  Quon sent so many sexually explicit messages and exceeded the allotted character limit to such an extreme degree, that his boss conducted an audit.  Please note that Quon paid for these messages using his own after tax dollars.  Anyway, the sexually explicit messages were discovered. 

Quon sued the P.D., arguing that his boss' review of his text messages constituted unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment.  The case presents many gray areas.  On the one hand the pager was owned and issued by Quon's government employer.  On the other hand, the messages searched were funded by Quon.  The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case in order to determine whether a government employee has a right to privacy in his pager.

Pagers:  They Still Make You?

Mailing Newspaper Clippings

Before the advent of email (and gen-X/Y-ers' remarkable ability to cut-and-paste urls right into the bodies of emails) if you wanted to share a newspaper or magazine article with a loved one, you had to take scissors and cut out the article and mail it to that person.

The other day, I received an envelope from my grandmother containing a couple of newspaper clippings she thought I might be interested in:

I suspect that this is probably one of the last times I will receive actual clippings in an envelope sent via the U.S. Postal Service.

Mailing Newspaper Clippings:  They Still Make You?

Follow Up Friday

We here at They Still Make You like to revisit past blog posts, and find out what has happened to our found arcana since first writing about it.

• PRI's The Takeaway reported this week that vinyl albums are making a come back, and may be this holiday season's hottest gift.

• A friend told us of her experience encountering a cash only deli.  

The deli had not posted a sign indicating that it was cash only, which is specifically why our friend chose to get a salad at that establishment.  She had canceled her ATM card due to fraudulent activity and was waiting for her bank to issue a new one.  To fill the gap, she was relying on her credit card only.  So, she went into the deli, ordered a big salad, waited as the clerk made it, and then when it was time to pay she flashed the plastic -- you know where this is going-- only to hear:

"Sorry, cash only"

And because our friend could not get cash due to not having an ATM card, she had to walk away from the salad.  The joke's on the deli.  They are the ones who relied on a 'nearly bygone' business practice, failed to post signs informing customers of that fact, and then wasted supplies on a salad they could not sell to our friend because they refused to accept her [necessary] method of payment.

• And finally, a follow up from Katie W., our Tab drinker: "Me and my mom and my aunt are keeping Tab alive!! :)"

Let us know what you think about these things they still make, or anything else.

Anglicizing Your Name to Get Ahead in Business: Taos New Mexico's Paragon Inn Owner Orders Hispanic Employees to Adopt Anglicized Names

Last month, the AP reported on a Taos, New Mexico hotelier and his archaic business practice of requiring his employees to adopt new names. 

Specifically, Larry Whitten demanded that his majority Latino staff at the Paragon Inn adopt names that, according to Whitten sounded more American and would not confuse tourists who had purposely chosen to visit a city "where Spanish language, culture and traditions have a long and revered history."

As the Paragon (of what?) Inn's new owner, Whitten's first order of business made an impression on several of his Hispanic employees. Allegedly Whitten's told employees, including Kathy Archuleta and Martin Gutierrez that,

he was changing their Spanish [] names.

because according to Whitten

it's a routine practice at his hotels to change first names of employees who work the front desk phones or deal directly with guests if their names are difficult to understand or pronounce.

And

"It has nothing to do with racism. I'm not doing it for any reason other than for the satisfaction of my guests, because people calling from all over America don't know the Spanish accents or the Spanish culture or Spanish anything."

[crickets chirp]

When Archuleta and Gutierrez protested, Whitten fired them.  And the New Mexico chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a national civil rights group, sent Whitten a letter, raising concerns about treatment of Hispanic workers.  In response Whitten alleged that the group's letter contained a racist slur against him.

Talk about Chutzpa nerve.

Whitten maintains that what he did was just good business practice and has nothing to do with ethnicity or race. 

Anglicizing your name to get ahead professionally: They Still Make You?

Not Playin' The Ebony and The Ivory: Racist Judge in Louisiana

Last month, Louisiana justice of the peace Keith Bardwell gave miscegenation the old niche-niche and denied an interracial couple a marriage license.   

Bardwell explained to the Associated Press that,

“I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way… There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage…I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

It’s as if the 40-plus years since Loving v. Virginia, where the Supreme Court found that laws prohibiting interracial marriages were unconstitutionally discriminatory, never happened. 

Keith Bardwell, antimiscegenationist: They Still Make You?