Rights Only Is Wrong, Jury Says
--A confrontation between a left-handed checkout clerk and a food store chain’s right-handed work rules has resulted in the jurors (all right-handers) handing down a judgment of $136,700 in favor of the clerk. The store was discriminating “against left-handers,” said Crystal Sagen, 24, of the requirement by the Jewel Food Stores chain that she check out groceries with her right hand. She says that until the store where she worked in Naperville, Ill., switched to computerized checkout scanners in 1981, she was one of the company’s fastest clerks, working with her left hand. But after the scanners were installed, Sagen said she was told company policy was that all checkers had to check right-handed, and she was forced to sign a form that she would always check right-handed “because I needed the job.” But she soon returned to checking left-handed because it was easier and she was faster as a lefty, said Sagen. Sagen said she and the store manager often argued, and she eventually quit. Sagen said it was her first encounter with discrimination as a lefty, but acknowledged: “It’s a right-handed world. The Jewel attorney dismissed the only left-handed juror,” she said. Sagen now delivers newspapers, but said she would like to work for another supermarket. “I loved the job and working with the people,” she said. “You know, I really was a great checker.”
--With Valentine’s Day coming up Thursday, the flower business should be blooming. Kevin Milmoe hopes the same holds true for dead flowers for dead romances. Milmoe, 28, started the Dead Rose Co. of San Diego--which charges $25 per bad bouquet--after helping a friend over the pain of being jilted. “He was miserable and he didn’t know what to do about it,” Milmoe said. “I said, ‘Why not send her something to let her know how you feel?’ ” Milmoe took a wilted bunch of roses, wrapped them in black tissue with a black ribbon and delivered them--brown, limp and ugly--to the offending party. “She didn’t know what to think, but it cheered him right up,” Milmoe said. “It seemed like a polite way of telling that not-so-special someone exactly how you feel.”
--Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie jammed with Cuban jazz artists and played be-bop at the opening of the “Plaza 85” jazz festival in Havana, the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina reported. “We did not come to compete, but to show that although our governments do not agree, we, through music, can know how to communicate,” Gillespie, 68, was quoted as saying. Gillespie dedicated a concert at the Karl Marx Center to the late Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo.
