1/4/2010
HEADLINES
PERSPECTIVE: 2009 Quips of the Year

In the midst of the recession, a one-time fastener buyer long-since turned fastener rep spotted a purchasing job opening and applied. The Human Resources interviewer looked at him, looked down at his resume, looked up and exclaimed, “The last time you bought fasteners I wasn’t born!”

The job went to someone with “more recent experience in fastener buying.”

Fastener veteran Jack Fellin said the recession and plummeting stock market left him with two options: “Work five more years or die nine years sooner.”

Pacific-West Fastener Association president Kelly Cole of WCL Company was introducing a speaker on the topic of “improving our bottom lines.” Cole quipped the bottom line subject was timely “since we are all at our bottoms now.”

“I used to hate lawyers more than anybody,” remarked one industry veteran having trouble extending his line of credit. “Now I hate bankers more than lawyers.”

Jim Derry was on the National Fastener Distributors Association board from 2003 to 2006 and was brought back in 2009 to fill a vacancy. Derry explained to the membership that it is part of a new “green policy” for NFDA: “We are now recycling board members.”

Fasteners created global quips this year: Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post described the situation: “Four astronauts with Ph.Ds, backed by the collective brainpower of NASA and riding a multi-billion-dollar spacecraft, came face to face yesterday with what appeared to be an immovable object: a simple bolt.”

Under the headline “Telescope bolt flusters Atlantis astronaut,” Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press led off: “Spacewalkers’ specially designed tools couldn’t dislodge a balky bolt interfering with repairs yesterday at the Hubble Space Telescope. So they took an approach more familiar to people puttering around down on Earth: brute force.”

Sitting in the conference room awaiting the first session, Southeastern Fastener Association members bantered about how they use texting.  At one point one member joked that Ed Ambrose would start texting “when his hair grows back out.”

Ambrose, who started in the fastener industry with Lamson & Sessions in 1961, harrumphed and ran his hand over his the limited amount of white crew cut hair on his head and offered another timeline for him to begin texting: “I’ll grow duck tails first.”

As a new SEFA member, Gerry Bates told the group about Industrial Assembly Solutions. In closing he acknowledged being a Midwest transplant to Sarasota, but noted he now uses “you all.”

The SEFA members instantly responded in loud unison, “It’s y’all.”

Robbie Gilchrist followed the “Midwesterner” at the SEFA spring conference and quickly announced he wouldn’t need a microphone because he was a “local boy from the South” and members could understand his English.

Galvanizers have learned that customers prefer the term “progressive dipping” as more politically correct than the traditional galvanizing term “double dipping,” Paul Skiles of Tennessee Galvanizing told SEFA.

A distributor talking “doom” about the economy: “I want to go to sleep and wake up in a year or two.”

Mike McGuire’s own American Fastener Journal copyright prohibits others from using his articles, but year after year McGuire has posted articles on his website from other publications word-for-word without attribution or written permission.

The pattern of surfing the web, copying & pasting articles without crediting the original source and thus making it look like his own work continued in 2009. 
Among the publications which paid reporters and editors to develop articles were: The Fond du lac Reporter (FDLReporter.com); Cleveland Plain Dealer (Plaindealer.com); Cincinnati Enquirer (Enquirer.com), the Wichita Eagle (Kansas.com) and the Associated Press.
That led to a quip answer to a question being asked in the aisles of Fastener Tech 09: ”What is the difference between a bank robber and Mike McGuire posting other publishers’ stories on his website?” The question triggered a quip:”Mike doesn’t need a gun!”

After acknowledging he had been contacted by Defense News and he removed their 893-word NavyTimes.com article from his website, McGuire dismissed it as “missing a small copyright detail.”

McGuire’s comment led to another bank robber quip: “Can a bank robber claim to a judge that he was just ‘missing a small withdrawal detail’?”

The industry may get chuckles from the quips, but McGuire may be getting the last laugh: According to InsideGNSS, the average bank robber runs away with $4,221.  Just one article may cost other publishers hundreds or thousands of dollars. Year after year of articles could add up to ??? ©2010 GlobalFastenerNews.com