Posted on 10/13/2002 9:22:35 AM PDT by American Preservative
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:41:09 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Many middle-class people joke about being "one paycheck away from the street." This is the story of a couple who've slammed hard into that reality.
Over the past 18 months, they've gone from his six-figure salary and life in a tony townhouse apartment complex in Silicon Valley to collecting aluminum cans and sleeping in a 28-foot-long recreational vehicle in a parking lot behind the husband's old office building. Once distracted by VCRs and mega- cable, they now watch local television on an old black-and-white set, stand in line at a public food bank for groceries and do their laundry with a garden hose.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
remember its only OK to laugh at rich people who go broke, not factory workers etc who go broke.
Unless they were union, then screw 'em.
Mike Barnicle was fired by the Boston Globe. I read the Globe. I don't think that writers are fired from the Globe for writing drivel - nor for fabricating stories. Again, I read the Globe. I think that Barnicle was fired for other reasons.
By the way, it does sound like Barnicle's style.
to share their story only if they were identified by...nicknames they call each other: Clark and Carole
Yes something doesn't seem quite right.
Can the people, facts and circumstances in the story be independently verified? Do they all relate to the same (real) people, or is this a composite?
Very strange...
$2300 a month isn't living extravagently? Most of my life I never made that much in a month. I'm not a class-warfare kind of guy - but these people are spoiled brats (as well as not existing) and I have no sympathy at all.
Yup. In the mid-60's about the only time there was any traffic on that road was on the weekend.
Jeepers, what a way to go to school. No need to wake up to catch the bus, you're already sleeping in it.
"Fortunately" Child Protective Services would have already taken the kids away....
Rich people who go broke have pissed away their money because they thought it would never end. (There's a quote in the article about having ridden out the last recession without a problem.) Go ahead and laugh at their arrogance and stupidity.
Factory people who go broke probably never had it to piss away. There's nothing to laugh at there.
Is the old "Chateau" bar off Summit Road still there. I used to go there and watch the hippies and bikers mingle. Also, I saw the Dooby Brothers play there the first time they ever played together. Went to the Bodega bar to watch Boz Scaggs. (Those were 'strange' days in that area)
Huh? Barnacle was SPECIFICALLY fired for fabricating stories.
Its not a burning issue with me, but I found this link, (which could be drivel)... But then, they royally screwed up. Along came Mike Barnacle, a very popular columnist at the Globe and a marginal national media figure. Barnacle got caught swiping a George Carlin routine and passing it off as his own in a column. Did they fire him? Nope. Then it came out that there were numerous columns that Barnacle had written in which he apparently made up everything. Barnacle wrote a touching column many years ago, for example, about a white family and a black family meeting in a Massachusetts hospital where they had children who each needed an organ transplant, and in the end the white family helps pay for the transplant for the black kid. The only problem is Barnacle made the story up.
It took forever for the Globe to finally fire Barnacle, compared to how quickly they showed the other columnist the door. Flash forward to a couple months ago. The Globe's only conservative columnist, Jeff Jacoby, decided to write a July 4 column based on a widely circulating Internet e-mail that describes what happened to those who signed the Declaration of Independence. The Internet e-mail version has a lot of errors, so Jacoby hit the books finding out what really happened to the Founders. Unfortunately, he forgot to mention in his column that he took the idea from an Internet e-mail. He was suspended without pay for 4 months which is basically the death penalty -- clearly the Globe wanted him to resign.
Yes, the IT industry has taken a bad hit, but there are areas of the country where IT is tied in to another major industry and it is still possible to find a decent job and affordable housing.
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