Pay a robot to say nice things about you. The new “Hug Line” offers “an ‘upbeat’ message that tells you that you are a very special person” to any touch-tone phone user who can dial its 900 number.
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“It was evident during our site visits that neighborhood park employees had been ‘warned’ by the Chicago Park District administration that Friends of the Parks was making random visits,” report Anne Ryder and Debra Nelson in Recreational and Cultural Programs in Chicago’s Parks: The Need for Change. “Our surveyors saw several occasions when employees that had been relaxing in the fieldhouses began to teach classes or clean floors upon our arrival.” And then there were the serious nonworkers: “On one occasion at Grand Crossing Park most of the recreation staff was sitting in the supervisor’s office with the supervisor conversing after 3:00 PM while children waited in the halls for classes to begin. These staff members and the supervisor did not attempt to accommodate our staff, but continued with their conversation as if we and the children were not around.”
Where’s mine? State senator Richard Newhouse, quoted in a press release, on the last McCormick Place expansion: “I walked through the parking lots during the construction and I saw license plates from Oklahoma, North Dakota and West Virginia. I saw numerous suburban stickers on Illinois cars…. What I want to know is, are those jobs [in the next expansion] for Chicagoans?”
