Tidbits and Outrages
Tidbits and Outrages Rubber Stamps As the cost of the food stamp program grows, it is coming under increasing criticism from right and left. But imitations also continue to flower. For example,...
...After 43,000 letters were mailed, only 254 condom stamps were ever redeemed, despite extensive efforts which persuaded hundreds of drug stores to participate in the program...
...The cost worked out to more than $30 for every condom purchase...
...Although doctors and dentists are among the nation’s highest paid professionalsdoctors earn an average income after expenses of $52,000 a year, jentists net $37,500-and are the only professionals to receive direct federal subsidies for their education, the students said they could not afford the idded $8,000 debt the iew law would entail...
...The Wyrick story gives no details on how such a list was assembled...
...When I was a boy growing up in New York City, Vassar’s image was a little different than it is today...
...Bob Wyrick of Newsduy has now discovered that the federal government has spent about $100,000 mailing letters to teenage boys offering them discount stamps good for a dollar off on the purchase of a dozen condoms...
...Somehow, in late 1974, the FEA caught on to these computer whizzes, but justice didn’t exactly trimuph...
...And I’d see them at the Biltmore Hotel on the arms of tall bronzed jocks from Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and I used to sit there in the lobby fantasizing that one of those Scarsdale goddesses would get into a fight with her Ivy League boy-friend and throw her gardenia corsage into his face...
...Selfless Idealism Stuart Auerbach of The Washington Post has come up with more evidence of the selfless idealism of our doctors and dentists: Medical and dental students have told Congress they strongly object to a bill that would force them to pay back some of the federal funds given their schools to pay for their education...
...In those days Vassar girls wore Angora sweaters, plaid skirts, silk sockings and high-heeled shoes...
...In this case the test mailing was a failure...
...Somehow they learned how to falsify computer records and arranged to give themselves extra vacation days and over-time pay for work they had never done...
...So with a somewhat red face, FEA called them back to duty...
...She said that it had taught her little more than L‘how to trace some body else’s blueprints...
...And her name was Mary Ann and we would fall in love and then she would tell me that we could never get married because of our religions-she was rich and I was poor...
...The program never really got off the ground, but it was tested extensively in Cleveland and Philadelphia...
...There is no room in my economy,” he continued, “for the demands this bill is trying to force upon me .” Lawsuit of the Month The dim prospects for -eform of our system of iigher education bright:ned last month when Veronika Nicolas’ suit against George Washington University resulted in the refund of her tuition for a course she depicted as “a piece of junk...
...It involves five lower-level employees of the Federal Energy Administration who were left unsatisfied by the federal government’s exceedingly liberal vacation and over-time policies...
...Man Bites Hot Dog...
...And then she would come up to me and ask me to take her to the Stork Club-with her money...
...Years would go by, in my fantasy, and finally one day she would come back to Poughkeepsie with her banker husband for the graduation of her daughter, and I would be standing at the podium addressing the 116th commencement of Vassar College, and she would be sitting out there in the audience looking at her dull husband, and say to herself, “Arthur, why couldn’t I have waited for you...
...Now Let’s Gear Up for Inhuman Cruelty Day The final police report on Human Kindness Day, which was celebrated in May at the Washington Monument, states that there were 637 complaints arising from the happy occasion, of which 598 were robberies, larcenies, or assaults...
...And this does not count the cost to the Postal Service of handling several parents’ complaints that their sons were receiving obscene mail from the government . Incidentally, now that the government is into the direct-mail game, it could probably earn back that $100,000 by licensing those 43,000 names to a list broker for sale to other direct-mail advertisers and political groups...
...The FEA even gave them administrative leave with pay for the day they were suspended...
...Since it is rather difficult to fire anyone in the federal government, regardless of circumstances, the FEA merely suspended them pending further investigation...
...The idea is to see what kind of response you get from a representative sample before sending mailings to a larger group...
...In the long term, however, we’re confident that the professors and the insurance companies (the incompetent professional’s best friend) will come up with some kind of educational malpractice insurance and when the extent of their ineptitude is made clear by a flood of claims that threaten the insurance...
...The boys on the “sexually active” list were subjects for what direct-mail professionals call a “test mailing” of the condom offer...
...Here’s a paragraph: In any case, I’m thrilled you would ask me because you have made a dream come true for me...
...The notion that courses have an obligation to teach something will, of course, be novel to many of our institutions of higher learning-and could be quite bracing in the short term...
...Another dental student, Gerald Shinkawa of san Francisco, complained that he would have “the problem” of passing “the costs to the patients’’ and then justifying them to dental insurance companies...
...One employee was even able to program the FEA’s computer so that it produced a W-2 form for the IRS which both understated his earnings and exaggerated his income tax withholding...
...It took just one day for the agency to realize “that it literally could not meet its payroll later that week without the computer expertise of the five employees it had just suspended...
...Press coverage of American space efforts has been a competition in mindlessness in which the early leader was Life, replaced since its demise by Walter Cronkite...
...A third-year dental itudent at the University If California at Los Angeles, Jeffrey White, xomised that “any sum of noney which I as a dentist nust pay the federal (gov:mment) after graduation vill ultimately be paid for )y my patients...
...In both cities the stamps were mailed to a list of boys believed by the local community action agency to be “sexually active...
...We now nominate a new champion: The New York Times: Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back in Again This month’s story of life in the federal bureaucracy comes to us from the pages of the Washington Star...
...The American Dream Our favorite among this year’s commencement speeches was made at Vassar by Art Buchwald...
...Assuming that cost was the only reason young men did not use prophylactics as protection against venereal disease, someone in OEO back in 1971 dreamed up the idea of condom stamps...
...It might be the most profitable list since that jealously guarded compilation of 1972 McGovern contributors...
...companies, the educators will follow the doctors’ example and pressure the government to insure the insurers...
...For example, a spokesman for a garment workers union recently proposed that the poor be issued ‘‘clothing stamps” because their self-images were being eroded by having to wear hand-medowns...
...Not only that,” notes the Star, but “the five are still on duty...
Vol. 7 • September 1975 • No. 7
