February 11, 1992
Dear Everyone:
It never rains and then it pours.
After 5 years of standing next to
their empty swimming pools, crying for rain, Southern Californians are
now standing on top of their houses yelling for flood relief.
Some people are never satisfied.
Personally, I love all this water falling out of
the sky. Reminds me of Oregon.
Movie reviews:
Freejack.
Racing driver is killed except
that technicians from the future hijack his just-about-to-die body.
Lots of chase scenes featuring
"futuristic" cars that are built so low to the ground that they wouldn't
be able to clear the speed bump in the parking lot at Safeway.
Most notable for the acting (?)
debut of rock star
Mick Jagger, who apparently has decided to expand his horizons.
Not to be confused with
David Bowie who
set out to become an actor and wound up a rock star rather by accident.
(Life is what happens while you're making other
plans.)
Anthony Hopkins
is completely wasted in his role. Makes
you wonder: was he in it only for the money (and box office draw); or
was this not the movie he thought he was making?
Okay for a mindless couple of
hours eating popcorn in the dark; but you won't miss anything if you
wait for it to show up on network TV.
Shining Through.
Michael
Douglas looks great, by virtue of having lost some weight and had
his jowls removed. Melanie
Griffith plays yet another plucky secretary (remember
Working Girl?)
who, this time, insists on going undercover into Nazi Germany even
though she's Jewish and Michael Douglas doesn't want her to go.
Any hope of suspense as shot down
in the opening sequence which establishes that everything is in
flashback. Nevertheless, if you
decide to go to this one, choose the bargain showing and check your
credulity at the door.
In other news…
At our weekly IDI meeting, in which “Ashley Holtz”,
“Nelly”, “Carla” and I plan how we’re going to test the IDI Records
Management program, when it arrives, “Ashley” announced that he's 99.9%
sure that he's decided to take the early retirement package that will be
offered next month. The rest of
us looked at each other with little bubbles over our head reading, "Boy,
are we up the creek!"
The IDI project has always been “Ashley’s” baby and
he's really the only one who knows all the ins and outs of it.
However, he has been thinking
long and hard (since last October, when he passed his 25 year mark and
long before the package was announced) about setting up his own
independent consulting business. With
his contacts in Records Management, all over the country, he could make
a go of it. The hardest part will
probably be walking away from the IDI Project before it's completed.
On the other hand, IDI could, conceivably, hire him
to act as a consultant to them
in completing the Project. Keep
your fingers crossed.
Bombshell #2: Our
manager called an emergency staff meeting Tuesday afternoon to inform us
that he's been instructed to cut our 1992 Budget to 10% less than 1991
actual expenses. Since our
1992 Budget was planned for 50%
over last year's expenses (mostly because of the IDI Project), this
really means a cut of 25%. We sat
around the table, thinking: "There's
eight of us. 25% of eight equals
two people."
Actually, we’re cutting things like unnecessary
trips such as the Annual ARMA
Convention (thank God! No one has
to go to Detroit.) and visits to clients outside the Bay Area, unless
they pay for it.
“Ken” asked us to try and think up ways to save
money, so we’re all poking away at ideas to nickel-and-dime Company out
of the hole. My suggestion:
Get rid of the "Display Room",
which we don't use as a display room anyway and save the cost of one
unnecessary office. (What's a
display room? It's a room filled
with different types of filing equipment to show clients what they look
like. The filing equipment, I
mean; the clients already know what
they look like.)
Love, as always,
Pete
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