Word: 18th
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Johnson took her chance and ran with it. She woke up at 5 a.m. and spent two hours on buses, dragging the kids to day care and then getting to training classes. For nine months now, she has been an operator at Sprint's calling center at 18th and Vine, and she's a star. She sits at a computer with a headset on, placing calls and billing calling cards. She handles 600 calls a day, at an average of 38 seconds a call. Already, she has racked up four "good customer-contact reports" from satisfied callers...
Johnson is part of a small but impressive welfare-to-work program Sprint began last October in one of Kansas City's poorest neighborhoods. Sprint's 18th-and-Vine call center employs 48 operators, half of whom were on public assistance. The center is meeting its performance standards, and its 77% retention rate is more than twice as good as Sprint's call center in the Kansas City suburbs. That's a big deal in an industry where every employee departure can mean $6,000 to $15,000 in lost training and productivity. Sprint is thinking about upping the 18th...
...Hazel Barkley, 18th-and-Vine's operations manager, is a believer. She tells her welfare-to-work employees they can rise as far as they set their mind to. (Sprint reimburses tuition for skill-boosting classes.) And she lets them know she herself started by working the phones. Yvette Johnson has already picked out a computer-spreadsheet class she wants to take during her daily noon-to-2 p.m. break, and she's aiming for management. "There's a lot of things we can do here," she says. "One thing I know, I won't be on welfare again...
...with flintlock rifles, Heston takes down a skinning knife made from a deer antler. "It was given to me when I was made a blood brother of the Miniconjou Sioux in 1951," he explains. He fingers it lovingly. And then the actor, who traces his Scots ancestors back to 18th century Canada, exclaims with sudden passion, "I'm pissed off when Indians say they're Native Americans! I'm a Native American, for chrisakes...
Lavinia Currier's Passion in the Desert begins as a historical chronicle of the late 18th-century Napoleonic wars in Africa, but soon reveals more central concerns as a meditation on the ties between man and beast. The central conceit of the picture is a love affair, not as platonic or intellectual as you might think, that springs up between a soldier and a leopard. Yes, that is what I said, and it's a lot of ground for one picture to cover conventions of visual storytelling cannot easily accommodate such philosophical ambitions. It's hard enough to stage this...