Sanitation Expert And A Maintenance Engineer; Garbage Man, A Janitor And You My Dear . . .

Every executive knows that the cheapest way to keep employees happy is to give them exciting new job titles:

Five years into the tenure of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, a major administrative restructuring of the city schools has brought the wacky culture of corporate job titles to the Tweed Courthouse.

There, among the ranks of top school officials working for Klein is a chief accountability officer making $196,000, a chief knowledge officer making $177,000, a chief talent officer making $172,000 and a chief portfolio officer making $162,000.

There’s also a chief equality officer, but he’s working for free this year.

Then there are all the corporate titles, in spades. Several divisions each have a chief executive officer, there’s a product manager for knowledge management, a demand research manager, a director of virtual enterprise and dozens of senior achievement facilitators.

There was someone called the director of restructuring and human capital, but he’s now the senior director of sustainability, at $123,000.

Parents say it’s enough to make them dizzy.

“It’s a whole mess,” said Anastatia Davis-John, the parent association president at Brooklyn’s Public School 135.

“It’s totally confusing. They switched from districts to regions and now they’ve switched back, and half the titles you don’t know what they mean. . . . It’s especially difficult for parents who can’t speak English. They don’t know who is representing what and who is doing what.”

Teachers are still called teachers, of course. And principals are still principals — though under a new system that gives principals more autonomy and Klein often calls them “school CEOs.”

Leading Economic Indicators Portend Lump Of Coal For 2008

All you all are cheap-asses:

The Christmas season was no bell-ringing bonanza for Salvation Army volunteers — who reported smaller donations and emptier kettles compared with previous years.

“This year is the worst year,” said Salvation Army bell-ringer Emma Quinones, 56, of Astoria, Queens. “I guess it’s because of cutbacks, rent going up, the economy.”

On Christmas Eve, Quinones took in just $40 in three hours at Rockefeller Plaza, down from the normal $100.

The Salvation Army doesn’t keep a national count of kettle donations. But “the overall sense is that people are more cautious about their giving this year,” said Melissa Temme, a national spokeswoman for the Salvation Army.

Those who depend on handouts and tips have also had a rough time of it.

“This is my worst year ever,” said panhandler Jack Mitchell, 67, who plies his trade in his wheelchair on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street with the help of his dog, Lucky.

Normally during the holidays, Mitchell said he takes in $150 to $200 a day, but he’s been averaging about $60 — more like an ordinary day the rest of the year.

The Metropolitan Museum Of Gawker

I don’t know which is worse — that the Met is incorporating blogging into its exhibits or that the Post actually used the word “fugly” in a headline:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is inviting the public to unleash its inner fashion critic, and blog about all 65 items found in a new exhibit.

The museum, which just kicked off its “blog.mode: addressing fashion” exhibit, will periodically post its objects on a special online site — and anyone can comment on them from the comfort of home or a computer station at the exhibit.

“While painting and sculpture can sometimes seem to be an intimidating conceptual remove, fashion is so familiar, so ubiquitous to our experience, that it is inherently and immediately accessible,” Harold Koda, curator in charge of the Costume Institute, said.

“Individuals who might shy away from commenting on the merits of a Juan Gris or Henry Moore will readily disclose their thoughts on a gown by John Galliano or a mule by Manolo Blahnik.”

That said, it actually may contribute a new thin slicing technique: intuitively avoiding pretentious exhibits that use periods and lower case in the title.

Talking Christmas Bonus Blues

There’s no guarantee that your attorney isn’t quietly going home and turning your embarrassing custody battle into a song:

The skills of successful litigators with three decades in the law profession include the ability to craft an unfortunate situation into a lawsuit and arrange the evidence into a persuasive argument. But producing songs from those experiences and scoring them to electric guitar riffs is a more unusual skill, the domain of one lawyer, Lawrence Savell, who does his part to bring the insider world of high-power litigation to the masses.

A partner at Chadbourne & Parke, Mr. Savell, who just turned 50, waxes poetic on the intricacies of seeing opposing counsel and of emotions running high on late nights. This year, he produced his fourth album, “The Lawtunes, Live at Blackacre,” while earlier albums have had holiday themes to their songs.

. . .

Slightly hokey but with earnest charm, the songs cover topics with which lawyers are all too familiar. The lyrics are filled with references that include emerging issues like electronic discovery, the joys of reviewing briefs in early morning hours with cold take-out, and imaging the life of Santa Claus’s general counsel.

“The inspiration is really just working as a lawyer and trying to find, especially at the holidays, a little bit of humor in what we do, and not to take ourselves so seriously,” Mr. Savell said.

There are love songs to law and inspirational ballads, like “Law Man,” which Mr. Savell describes as “a hard-pounding and blunt explanation of exactly what it is that lawyers do.” The title character offers his fighting services to any lawyer facing the wrong end of a lawsuit, or losing a promotion to nepotism.

Scofflaws!

The question is whether those who offer credit — who these days seem to have little problems extending it to virtually anyone — have a problem with your overdue library book:

Eleven years ago, the Queens Library system, the largest in the nation by circulation, hired a professional enforcer to collect the 25-cents-a-day late fines as well as missing library materials from books to DVDs to rare musical scores.

The gambit has paid off handsomely. The haul so far: $11.4 million, about half of that in fines. That’s a lot of quarters.

. . .

It works. About 70 percent of the people contacted by the company [Unique Management Services] (who, in Queens, have ignored or missed four notices from the library) return some of their overdue materials or pay part of their fines.

“Once reported, this adverse information can stay on your record for seven years!” declares one of the company’s standard letters, which goes on to warn that car dealers, department stores and banks may learn of the library users’ misdeeds. “Why allow this to happen?”

Rabbi Avrohom Sebrow of Far Rockaway said he was flabbergasted when it happened to him.

As a child in Forest Hills, Rabbi Sebrow said, he loved to visit his local branch, and he grew up to be an enthusiastic library patron. He is a teacher at a yeshiva, where instilling reverence for texts and scholarship is central to his calling. Sometimes, like many library patrons, he is late in returning a book, he admitted in a recent interview, but he said he always paid his fines.

In 2005, Rabbi Sebrow said, he was overwhelmed after the birth of twin daughters and found himself six months overdue on materials he had checked out from the North Forest Park branch in Forest Hills. He cannot remember exactly what was late, but he thinks that several CDs were involved. He received a letter from Unique Management, which also uses the name Unique National Collections, demanding $295.40 — the cost of replacing the materials, plus $66 in late fees.

“I figured, ‘I’ll take care of it eventually,'” Rabbi Sebrow said. He did not believe the section of the letter that threatened to report him to credit agencies. “I thought it was a complete empty threat,” he said.

But when he applied for a mortgage and a credit card, he discovered that the oversight had blemished his credit record.