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ADJUSTING TO OUR ECONOMIC MELTDOWN  The official corporate aircraft of TheColumnists.com has been this DeHavilland DH9A, acquired from a Deming, Washington, crop-dusting outfit, but originally built for the Canadian Air Force. Pictured are the original flight crew. We are having to sell this key segment of our transportation program in order to meet increasing costs of our web operation. |
Our website not immune to corporate budget slashing
Managing Editor
TheColumnists.com
At first we thought we might be immune to all the bad stuff that'z been happening to some of the blue chip companies in our economic community and to the newspapers where most of us used to work. But it turns out we weren't immune. These bullets aren't bouncing off.
We figured we don't carry any advertising, so what do we care if advertisers are spending less. Our publication doesn't need them.
And we knew we certainly don't need to go slashing the salaries of our columnists or our editors because we don't pay them any salaries.
And so what if gasoline prices have made it too expensive to distribute products like newspapers anymore. We do all our business on the internet and don't need gasoline because we never go anywhere.
But none of that makes any difference. The cost of running this popular website has grown and grown since we founded it in 1999. We simply cannot any longer pay our expenses without severely cutting back on our spending.
So, I, as the manager of this enterprise, have had to make some tough choices in order for us to survive long enough to celebrate our 10th anniversary on the internet next Dec. 1. Here are the key elements of my "save the columnists.com" program:
1. WE WILL SELL THE CORPORATE AIRCRAFT.
This was the easiest of all the hard decisions. Until last fall, we have based the corporate aircraft in a hangar at the Municipal Airport owned by the City of Blaine in Washington state. But the city closed down the airport late in 2008 and we had to remove the wings from our vintage DeHavilland bi-plane and store it in my garage at Resort Semiahmoo in Blaine. This has been rather troublesome because it means having to leave my only car, a 1952 Nash Metropolitan, in the driveway, along with all my file cabinets and about 40 boxes of old videotapes and paperback mystery novels. Because it rains a lot here, I've had to cover them all with canvas and the resort management has started abatement proceedings against me for harboring a public nuisance.
If we can get a fair price for the aircraft, it certainly will help our bottom line. We bought the plane from a crop-dusting outfit, so maybe some out-of-date Washington farmer will want it.
2. WE HAD TO LAY OFF ALL OUR FOREIGN LANGUAGE TRANSLATORS.
We've been employing six former French-speaking foreign exchange students from the Far East--okay, to be brutally honest, they were "boat people" who washed up in the offshore islands of the San Juan group out here--to translate the tons of emails we get in French in response to the columns of Michael Johnson, our columnist who lives in Bordeaux, France. Of course, that means Mike now will have to read all his own fan mail and we'll have to trust his translations when running them on the Talkback page.
We did not lay off everybody in that department, though. I felt it was essential to retain the retired high school English teacher who reads Andy Murcia's column for me each week and translates it into grammatically correct English. "Sophie" is rather old and quite feeble, so I didn't have the heart to let her go.
3. WE RECALLED ALL COMPANY CARS.
The three other 1952 Nash Metropolitans used by my co-founders of the website--Murry Frymer, Gerald Nachman and John Stanley--have been recalled and will be sold at auction. Nachman was actually grateful to be able to use his own vehicle for a change since he always claimed he didn't fit into the Metropolitan too comfortably and couldn't master the vacuum shift.
4. WE CANCELLED ALL THE SUBSCRIPTIONS OF PUBLICATIONS WE PROVIDED TO OUR COLUMNISTS.
Frymer was furious when we stopped his New York Times. ("This is the second time in a row that an employer has cancelled my New York Times," he said.) When we explained to him that his favorite paper probably wouldn't last another year anyway, he wasn't mollified.
Also cancelled were Joyce Kiefer's Arizona Highways, Stan Isaacs' Philadelphia Inquirer, and John Stanley's Famous Monsters of Filmland. I told Joyce she usually writes about California highways, so she could afford to stay off the ones in Arizona until we recover from the recession. I told Stan I thought he was trying too hard to compete with the Philly columnists since he moved to the Philadelphia suburbs and, anyway, he's so much better that he doesn't need to try showing them up anymore. And our Ethics Committee is looking into John's standing subscription order since we found out the editor of Famous Monsters died last year and the magazine hasn't been published for some time. I have the fear John has been trying to finance a sequel to his movie "Nightmare in Blood" and may have been re-routing that subscription money to his bank account in the Cayman Islands.
5. WE HAVE DOWNSIZED OUR ANNUAL OFFICE PARTY.
Last year we arranged a catered dinner for all colunnists in a private dining room at a leading San Francisco restaurant, but we no longer have the resources to do such things. This year we are planning an outing in a public park with buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken for all. (Don't bother asking me where it will be. We don't want any gate-crashers.)
6. WE WILL LAUNCH A NEW FRANCHISED PRODUCT SALES DIVISION.
Until now, we have had no incentive to cash in on the popularity of our columnists, but these tough economic times have forced us to consider all possible revenue sources. Our staff artist, Jim Hummel, is now imposing concentric circles over all the drawings he has done of our columnists so that we might market a new line of games called TheColumnists.com Dart Boards. We accidentally discovered that a great number of readers were copying Hummel's drawings of me, as well as my photos, and using them as targets for dart-tossing. We figure this signifies a demand for such products using a variety of columnists' likenesses.
We're also considering setting up a Patricia J. Geister Dating Service in connection with this website, if we can talk Pat into signing an agreement in which she promises not to try dating all the applicants first in order to "see if they're OK."
7. SOME OF US WILL GET PART-TIME JOBS TO HELP DEFRAY OUR DEBTS.
Ann Jillian has agreed to resume her acting career and give us 10 percent of her earnings, but she only will come back if she can play a detective. The staff is busily turning out scripts for a TV series called "Sister Poirot," in which she plays Hercule Poirot's sister, who's a nun at a Catholic School for Wayward Girls in San Diego. Ann wanted to wear a wiry mustache like Hercule Poirot that she could twirl the ends of while considering clues, but we've talked her out of that.
Meanwhile, Gerald Nachman has agreed to try earning some money as a stand-up comedian in San Francisco, but may need some kind of prosthetic support in order to stand up long enough to do his act. Andy Murcia will make use of his police background by getting a job as a security guard at his neighborhood grocery store. Michael Johnson is considering an offer to become a special public relations consultant to French Pres. Sarkozy. Len Klempnauer is willing to go on the road with a polka dancing act if he can convince his sister, Marcia, to revive the act they did as kids. Paul "The Poet" Hertelendy has been persuaded to try writing rhymes for radio breakfast cereal ads. And Joanne Engelhardt, who's becoming a big name in local dinner theater in the San Francisco Bay Area, wants to do a one-woman show as a benefit for TheColumnists.com, trying to re-create the life and career of famed "Mexican Spitfire" Lupe Velez on stage, including her suicidal death scene in which she drowned with her head in a toilet.
During our struggles to keep TheColumnists.com afloat as we approach our 10th anniversary on the internet, we are doing everything in our power to maintain the high standards we've set for ourselves in the past. We hope our loyal readers will stick with us and keep swelling our readership numbers, so that we can survive this recession in good shape to start another cycle of outstanding columns for another decade.
©2009 by Ron Miller. This column first posted March 9, 2009.
TO ACCESS RON MILLER'S ARCHIVE OF COLUMNS ON THIS SITE, CLICK HERE: MILLER ARCHIVE
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