Word: shocks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Chief villain is the rich wall-to-wall carpeting, without which no new office is self-respecting. The deeper the pile, the worse the shock-particularly if the material has a high synthetic fiber content, which gives a carpet outstanding durability but equally outstanding shock qualities. Next comes wool, with cotton at the bottom of the shock list. A com pounding factor is the increasing prevalence of metal desks, typing tables and wall trimmings, which are brisk conductors of any static charges that anybody can scuff up. Driest days are the worst. When the humidity falls below 20%, executives view...
Meanwhile, office workers have to live with the shock problem. In the higher echelons, where the carpeting is lushest, the shocks are worst. To offset this human storage-battery syndrome, some top brass try grounding themselves with door keys, like Franklin's kite. Juniors are careful to pause on metal thresholds before entering the boss's office, in order to discharge accumulated voltage through their shoe soles. "Maybe," says the office manager of a large Manhattan corporation, "we could all trail chains behind us like gasoline trucks...
...Meanwhile, the earthy queen is in a state of sexual shell shock, as who wouldn't be after making love to a part-time vampire? Faustus has the vampire put to death by impalement and recovers his ring. Then master alchemists appear before him (old Ben Jonson characters like Linus Pauling) to urge that he destroy the ring and save the world. He does-by plunging with it into the fires of Hell, where he ends up playing cards with the Devil...
...Wide Eyes. On Wall Street, the stock market took 15 months to recover from its Blue Monday crash. Rebounding quickly from the initial shock of President Kennedy's assassination, it went on to set records. Last week the Dow-Jones industrial average hit a new high of 767.21. The little man is buying stocks again, but there is less wide-eyed speculation, and fewer stock prices are way out of line with earnings than when the market hit its precrash high two years ago. Many Wall Streeters look for stock prices to stay about the same...
...Hamilton, and only 900 production workers will be kept on in South Bend to produce some of the parts for the Canadian assembly plant. Realizing that Studebaker's future was precarious, the city of South Bend has been diversifying its industrial base for several years to cushion the shock; Studebaker has recently accounted for only 3% of the city's total payroll. Still, that payroll amounted to some $600,000 a week, and its loss will be intensified by thousands of job-searching workers joining the unemployment rolls...