Mike Redmond

We’re heading into the Summer Travel Season, and travel this year likely will be even more ridiculous than usual. Gasoline will be more expensive, traffic will be heavier, roads will be messier. Tempers will flare and danger will lurk at every intersection. And that’s just driving across town to pick up those spare suitcases from Mom. In this country, we are given two choices for summer travel, driving or flying. The train is kind of a non-starter, which is a…

On the first day of Christmas, the workplace brought to me: One allegedly funny memo written in the style of Clement Clarke Moore: “‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through Accounts Receivable, not a creature was stirring, isn’t that unbelievable?” It goes on like this for 27 stanzas, representing at least four hours of someone’s workweek. On the second day of Christmas, the workplace brought to me: Two half-gallon cartons of eggnog for the kitchenette refrigerator, where they will…

I take a back seat to no one in my love of the Indiana State Fair. I haven’t missed one in about 35 years-including those years when the fair seemed outmoded, doomed to go the way of the Model T and the icebox. I was there when it struggled through the Injun Andy mascot debacle, the concerts with attendance numbering in the dozens, and the shocking revelation that elephant ears did not come from actual elephants. And so I have…

Gather ’round, kids. Let me tell you a little story about how things work nowadays. Or maybe how they don’t. Once upon a time, there was a customer named Mike. He had two accounts with a credit card company known as-well, let’s just say it’s the card you don’t want to leave home without, according to the TV commercials. Mike had recently closed one of the accounts, with a balance due of about $100. However, he left the other account…

Being self-employed -a term I prefer to “being a guy who sits around the house in sloppy clothes, unshaven, making fun of things”-I worry that I might have trouble adjusting, were I to go back to an office job. Would I fit in? Would I be able to get along with people? And most important, would I be able to come up with convincing excuses when I am scamming a day off by calling in sick on a lovely day…

All right, boys and girls, what are we to make of the survey that says worker morale in America is tanking? Harris Interactive conducted the survey for staffing agency Randstad and came up with figures showing only 40 percent of employees said morale at their workplace was good or excellent, down from 44 percent a year ago. This, of course, raises the question: How did it get so high to begin with? I see little good coming from this survey….