Business Casual

The last battleground in the ongoing war for gender equality is — and will continue to be — the office thermostat.

It was a spirited but civil exchange between the two nice ladies asking for a refund and the wily old mechanic refusing their request.

Conventional wisdom says you don't leave a good job without having a better one lined up. And you sure don't do it in the middle of a recession - unless you come to believe you have no choice.

On that television staple of my childhood, "The Ed Sullivan Show," there seemed to be an endless supply of acts featuring old vaudeville guys who kept a series of plates spinning on the ends of long sticks.

We lived in Atlanta's Inman Park during the height of the "Presidential Parkway" protests in the early 1980s.

Once, at another job, in another state, a co-worker who was struggling to meet a deadline asked if I could "send that little black girl over" to help in his office.

No doubt your mother raised you, as mine did me, to be polite, courteous and considerate, and to observe a few basic, but non-negotiable, rules of etiquette.

At a national magazine conference, an early-morning session featured an odd-couple pairing of speakers. The first was well-tanned and well-tailored with impeccably blown-dry hair; he was a marketing guru. The other was less polished, maybe even a little scruffy-looking; he was an editor.

When the Atlanta paper broke the story of the flap over a controversial issue of a student newspaper in a DeKalb County high school - students wrote stories critical of the new county school superintendent, and administrators responded by recalling copies not distributed - I reacted like the former high-school newspaper adviser that I am.

In the foreword to J.B. Fuqua's memoir, Fuqua, Tom Johnson writes that his friend's monumental accomplishments are "all the more amazing because he has battled severe depression for over fifty years.