Arbeit macht frei ... work will set you free

This kills me. When someone complains about jobs being outsourced overseas, consider the following item from Reuters' Ellen Wulfhorst titled "Workaholics struggle to say 'no' to work."

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sam used to sneak into his office before dawn so no one would know how many extra hours he worked. Charles goes on all-night work binges to meet deadlines, and Susan can't say no to volunteer projects, social clubs, bridge games, choral singing, lectures and classes.

Each one is a member of Workaholics Anonymous, a 12-step recovery program for compulsive workers based upon the structure of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each one opted to keep their identity secret.

"It's been called the addiction that society applauds," said Mike, a physician and member of the group known as WA.

"People brag about it and say, 'I'm a workaholic,"' he said. "But workaholics burn out and then you've lost them or they become very dysfunctional and bitter and cynical in the organization and corrosive."

Workaholics Anonymous keeps no central count of members, but organizers estimate dozens of weekly meetings are held in the United States as well as in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Britain. The group also sells about 100 books about WA a month via its Web site, according to organizers.

WA's roots go back to 1983, when a New York corporate financial planner and a school teacher founded a group based on AA but designed to fight compulsive working.

WA identifies workaholics as people who often are perfectionists and worriers, derive their self esteem from work, keep overly busy, neglect their health, postpone vacations and overschedule their lives.

Workaholics don't even have to have a job; they can just be compulsively busy as they seek an adrenaline high, to overcome feelings of inadequacy and low self esteem and to avoid intimacy, it says.

DESTROYING LIVES

The weekly meeting in New York draws an average of a half dozen people in a city that might be considered a hotbed of workaholism. Such meager attendance invites the predictable joke that most workaholics are too busy to attend meetings, a quip that organizer Charles has heard a million times.

"People think it's funny," he said. "It's amusing until you hear the stories. There have been many people who have come, and work is destroying their lives."

Unlike alcoholics, who can measure recovery by their days of sobriety, workaholics have no quantifiable gauge of their problem, or their recovery.

"In my case, my boss was telling me I had to get my work hours down to 40 a week, and I couldn't do it," said Sam, a former senior project engineer in California's Silicon Valley.

"I was sneaking into work at 5 a.m. on a Sunday so I could get work done and be out of the place before anyone else showed up," he said. "I didn't want people to see how much time I was putting in.

"Now I'm more willing to try to do a mediocre job and keep my own mental health and sanity than to do the perfect job on everything I attempt," he said.

Like AA, WA uses a 12-step program for recovery from addiction. At meetings, members share their experiences and study the organization's literature and guidelines.

"It really forces you to look inside and say, 'What's really going on with me?"' said Charles. "A lot of people don't want to do that."

Even if workaholism is hard to define, you know it when you feel it, said Mike, who has left his high-pressure urban job for work at a rural clinic where cows wander outside.

"After a while one gets a feeling of what driven, compulsive working feels like," he said. "There's a tightness to it. There's a lot of adrenaline surging. There's a lot of worry.

"There's a lot of preoccupation, which is different from just waking up in the morning and saying, 'Wow, I really love what I do'," he said.

... OK, I have a problem with this. For generations, the mantra was essentially work hard, get ahead. That's what drove immigrants to the United States. That was, in part, what brought my grandfather here from Eastern Europe almost 100 years ago and mother from France more than 50 years ago.

Everyone wants more, bigger, better: a newer home, better schools for the children, an SUV or two in the driveway.

Now, hard workers are seen as needing a 12-step program for it? If that is the case, then those same critics just have to sit on their hands when jobs are shipped off to India, China and other parts of the world. Simply put, you cannot have it both ways.

What people should do, and this is strictly my opinion, is focus energies on what makes them happy at work. Find the passion that drives you. I remember going to college with one fellow, and it was pretty much pre-ordained that he was to become a lawyer. I lost touch with him for a while after college, but found out through a third party that he went to law school in Dayton, was miserable there and gave up the profession.

Granted, I do not know what he is doing now. I can point to myself as an example as well. I started as a pre-med major in college. Deep in my heart, I knew it was never going to happen -- I didn't have the drive, funds, wherewithal to do that. I did it to try and please a family member who always wanted a doctor in the family.

Bottom line is, I was miserable. If adults would teach their children that it's not always about the money you make, but whether you deeply, truly enjoy what you do, there would be a lot less rage in the world.

If Bobby or Susie wants to dig ditches or be a butcher or whatever, nuture those passions.

What do you think? I'd like to know.

Frisco freak show

Hey, Barry? Hear that?

That sound of the freight train in the distance?

That sound is getting closer. And it's going to sweep you out of baseball before you can wrongly break one of the -- make that THE most hallowed record -- in the game.

That sound, hard to believe, is being generated by a single hardcover book, titled "Game of Shadows" by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who led the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage of the BALCO scandal.

They recount in exhaustive detail the specifics of Bonds' drug regimen, which they write started in 1998 with injections of Winstrol, a powerful steroid also linked to disgraced Baltimore Orioles star Rafael Palmeiro.

The book describes how the San Francisco Giants star started using steroids because he was jealous of the attention paid to Mark McGwire's home run race with Sammy Sosa in 1998, and felt he needed to bulk up significantly to compete with the St. Louis Cardinals' slugger.

According to the authors, at one time or another Bonds used the designer steroids the Cream and the Clear, insulin, human growth hormone, testosterone decanoate (a fast-acting steroid known as Mexican beans), trenbolone, a steroid created to improve the muscle quality of cattle, Clomid, a women's infertility drug (hmmm...could that be why he dressed up as Paula Abdul??) thought to help a steroid user recover his natural testosterone production, and Modafinil, a narcolepsy drug used as a powerful stimulant.

Furthermore, the book claims Bonds took the drugs in a variety of ways, including injection, pill form or liquid drops, either on his own or through the help of his trainer Greg Anderson. Bonds claimed in grand jury testimony that he did not know what Anderson was giving him.

So, let's see if I have this right ... Bonds -- as surly an individual that has ever existed in sports -- turns into a walking CVS taking drugs including one for things that go moo. And he did this because he thought no one was better, ever.

What galls me, absolutely rankles me to no end, is there are people willing to DEFEND him. Listen to the sound bites on the sports shows or some callers on talk radio. They insist he has not done anything wrong because nothing has ever been proven.

Agreed. But how do you get the chance to test him specifically when neither he nor the player's union would allow it?

Several years ago I was at New York's Shea Stadium, covering a Mets-Giants game for SportsTicker. I walked into the San Francisco clubhouse afterward just in time to hear Bonds bellow out to all, "Fuck all, y'all! I don't need any of you!"

Guess what, Barry? We're tired of you too. We're tired of you berating and belittling, fans and media alike.

The sad thing is a true gentleman of the game -- Kirby Puckett -- is forced out of the game with a debilitating eye ailment and dies way too young while Bonds, baseball's equivalent of something you step in, is still able to play. For now, anyway.

The big difference, though, is Puckett is enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Bonds will be there with Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson. On the outside looking in.

Do you hear that, Barry? Do you?

So long, Kirby

CORE ^^*2080< ^AP-APNewsAlert<,0018<
¶ PHOENIX (AP) _ Kirby Puckett has died, an Arizona hospital said.

This was one of those "Where were you when..." moments.

At 7:09 CT, news of Kirby Puckett's death came to me at my desk when I was monitoring the AP wire for work.

I first saw Kirby Puckett play in 1986 when I traveled to Minnesota to bring some furniture to a friend's mother. What I remember from by first trip to the Metrodome -- apart from the drunk frat boys sitting behind me yelling at California Angels infielder Rob Wilfong -- was this fire hydrant of a player in center field.

Funny, he did not look like a ball player. He was short. He was rotund. He reminded me a lot of the old swinging beer keg that was the Milwaukee Brewers' logo in the early 1970s.

It would be easy to Kirby Puckett was not. What he was, though, was one of the most exuberant players in an era of self-absorption.

And he could hit. And he could move. And -- if you ask the 1991 Atlanta Braves -- he could defy gravity.

Despite being one of the good guys on the field, it wasn't enough. His downward spiral started when glaucoma forced him to retire after the 1995 season.

Once out of baseball, the 5-foot-8 Puckett (and we're being generous) let himself fall out of shape. Some said he moved well past 300 pounds.

"It's a tough thing to see a guy go through something like that and come to this extent," former teammate Kent Hrbek said. "That's what really hurt him bad, when he was forced out of the game. I don't know if he ever recovered from it."

Though he would not speak pessimistically about his career's sudden and premature end, Puckett's personal life began to deteriorate after that.

Shortly after his 2001 induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame, his then-wife, Tonya, accused him of threatening to kill her during an argument _ he denied it _ and described to police a history of violence and infidelity.

In 2003, he was cleared of all charges from an alleged sexual assault of a woman at a suburban Twin Cities restaurant.

Farewell, Kirby ... and thank you.

Farewell to Puck?

One of baseball's all-time greats is fighting for his life.

Hall of Fame outfielder Kirby Puckett was in critical condition after having surgery for a stroke, according to a nursing supervisor in a Phoenix hospital.

The 44-year-old former Minnesota star, who led the Twins to two championships before his career was cut short by glaucoma, was stricken Sunday at his Arizona home.

Puckett, who broke in with Minnesota in 1984, had a career batting average of .318 and carried the Twins to World Series titles in 1987 and 1991. The Gold Glove center fielder and 10-time All-Star was forced to to retire in 1996 after 12 seasons with the Twins when he went blind in one eye.

Three years ago, he was cleared of assault charges after being accused of groping a woman at a Twin Cities restaurant.

Vindication?

Looks like Michael Brown was right after all.

You remember Michael Brown, don't you? Former head of FEMA? Looked like the biggest jackass after Hurricane Katrina nearly wiped out the Gulf Coast region?

Well, if you have been watching the news, Brown is almost certainly having a good chuckle. A videotape has been released by The Associated Press of a briefing, one day before Katrina stuck on Aug. 29, involving Brown, President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other officials.

Brown and others warned that the storm could breach levees, endanger lives in the New Orleans Superdome and overwhelm rescuers.

Five days after the briefing, with most of New Orleans underwater, Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

The video, obtained by The Associated Press, "confirms what we have suspected all along," said Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, charging that administration officials have "systematically misled the American people."

Even some Republicans are amazed by this turn. Senator David Vitter (R-La.) said the video "makes it perfectly clear once again that this disaster was not out of the blue or unforeseeable. It was not only predictable; it was actually predicted. That's what made the failures in response -- at the local, state and federal level -- all the more outrageous."

Again (and again), Bush has proved one of three things. Either:

A) he's an idiot
B) he's a liar
C) both

Can we survive until Jan. 20, 2009, the inauguration date of the next president of the United States? I wonder.

What do you think? I'd like to know.