Dateline Normal, Mn.: "Seniors Swamp College Job Fair"----FICTION

Well it's been a pretty bleak news environment lately---with the massive layoffs at auto manufacturing plants and all the other related firms that supply them. Add to that the steep decline in retail sales and the closing of hundreds if not thousands of retail stores all across America---still midst all the gloom is the announcement that college recruiters were still expecting to recruit new college grads---and even HIRE some in the Wall Street firms----something about that story just did not add up. How could thousands of investment professionals be summarily fired and yet at the same time entry level college grads hired---who for all practical purposes had no street smarts at all. How did this all add up.

When I wonder about these things, and I have been wondering a lot lately, I just pick up the cell phone and give my old friend Herman, the countryboylawyer from Normal, Mn. a call. Herman is a prominent lawyer....well he is the only lawyer...in Normal, Mn., a small fishing resort town just south of Garrison, Mn.---and he is also a member of the Normal School Board. I just wondered what he knew about employment law.

I just blurted it out:

"Herman, this all just does not make sense to me. How can there be college recruiting when all the rest of America is being laid off?'

Herman just let out a huge bellylaugh:

"Shucks, Wolfman( that's what he always called me), that is easy to explain. Dumb youthful beauty has always trumped old, wise, experience. ...with ONE exception."

"What do you mean ONE exception, Herman. There seems to be NO exception to me.?"

Herman went on: "Years ago we faced this same problem in Normal, Mn. The Seniors, or what we call a senior in America---an employee older than 28 years old....just got sick and tired of being discriminated against in employment and they went about it in two unique ways. First, they picketed all the retail stores in neighboring towns that did not have a fair share of seniors working for them. And secondly, they began bussing to college job fairs and swamping the application pools. The hip metro employeers made the mistake of hiring the hip, young, and dumb applicants, the seniors sued and won a mutimillion dollar settlement. They are on easy street now. What a wonderful revenue stream. Why even today, the busses leave every Monday morning from the center of town to the local colleges that are having the job fairs.

Wow. What a solution. I was pretty stunned.

Thank goodness I am back in good old Wisconsin. Where we do not have problems like this. Where students just leave the state to go elsewhere to be hired anyway. Where even seniors head out for better climates where their pension funds are not stolen from them by high taxation. We have our own ways in Wisconsin.