Journalists call this 'burying the lead'...

when the biggest, most important element of the story isn't on top, but gets buried deep within the article.  This story is a perfect example.

Darden Restaurants Inc., is the owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster and they took a lot of flack earlier in the year when they announced that they would be reducing the hours of a number of their full-time employees to part-time status to avoid increased costs due to the provisions of "Obamacare" that go into effect on January 1, 2014.

I read last night that sometime today, the company will announce they have chosen to abandon this plan, due to consumer feedback that has resulted in lowered sales and levels of customer satisfaction.  Seems like great news for all of those employees.  Now this commitment is only for the next year as the company makes it clear that it may have to go in that direction when all of the costs of compliance in 2014 become better defined.  Now the company has 185,000 employees, and an employee turnover rate of 50% annually. 

But the factoid that was buried is that at present, 75% of that 185,000 workforce are already only part-time workers.  So this big change that had people upset, customer satisfaction going down and sales dropping actually would involve only part of a group of one out of four of the firm's employees.  The big news here isn't that the company is abandoning this plan to make themselves more cost-effective.  The big news is that they've already configured their workforce to prevent having to provide benefits to three out of every four workers, without regard to how Obamacare works.  That's the big story.

We didn't do too well at trivia last night, mostly because we were without two of our players and that we aren't teenagers any more.  One of the categories was SMS text abbreviations and I'd never heard of any of them.  Here they are:

TOY
BCNU
?RUD
IMPOV
GAL
NAGI
YGTI

Translations:  TOY = thinking of you.  BCNU = be seeing you.  ?RUD = how are you doing?  IMPOV= in my point of view.  GAL = get a life.  NAGI = not a good idea.  YGTI = you get the idea.  Fortunately, I think the trivia host GTI (got the idea) this was not a good direction to take the game in and we won't get puzzles like this again.  He's actually a pretty good host and works hard to make his games fun.

We also suffered because the final round was all pictures of symphony instruments and I couldn't pull the label of "tubular bells" out of my mind, nor could I properly label a French horn, thinking it was a Sousaphone.  But even if we'd gotten those two, we still wouldn't have won.  I'll miss trivia next Weds as I have a meeting to go to.  Same situation for the following Tuesday.  I really do enjoy getting out of here to go play trivia and I may have to go play elsewhere to get my "fix" for missing those nights.

This Date in History:

On this date in 1534, the city of Quito, Ecuador is founded.
On this date in 1768, the first edition of Encyclopedia Britannica is published.
On this date in 1790, the U.S. Congress moves from New York City to Philadelphia.
On this date in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment is ratified, banning slavery.
On this date in 1877, the first edition of the Washington Post is published.
On this date in 1897, London becomes the first city to host "licensed" taxicabs.
On this date in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt announced his "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine.
On this date in 1917, Finland declares itself independent from Russia.
On this date in 1933, a federal judge ruled that the James Joyce novel, "Ulysses" is not obscene.
On this date in 1953, Nabakov completes his novel "Lolita".
On this date in 1969, Hells Angels members working as security guards at a Rolling Stones concert stab and kill Meredith Hunter.  The stabber was later acquitted on grounds of self-defense.