A Declaration Of War!

How do we know that the maybe-perhaps strike threat is pure theater? All this great theatrical hyperbole:

The MTA proposed yesterday giving city bus and subway workers a 5% raise over two years, provided they call in sick less often — prompting one union official to call the offer a declaration of “war.”

With the contract set to expire in just eight days and the union not ruling out a strike, the MTA’s chief labor negotiator, Gary Dellaverson, made the agency’s first wage offer: a 3% raise followed by a 2% increase.

But the workforce would have to earn the second-year increase by reducing the number of sick days taken.

MTA officials say key groups of workers — including bus drivers, motormen and subway station agents –average more than 13 sick days a year.

Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint called the proposal an “insult.” Vice President Ainsley Stewart went further, saying: “They have declared war.”

At least they didn’t declare jihad . . .

It’s Endemic, Pandemic, This Epidemic

The Times follows up on the bedbug scourge, reported last spring in the New Yorker (Bug Off Pest Control Center proprietor Andy Linares is perfecting his soundbites!), and finds that it has only gotten worse:

They’re the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they’re a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night.

But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The suit was quietly settled last year.

And bedbugs, stealthy and fast-moving nocturnal creatures that were all but eradicated by DDT after World War II, have recently been found in hospital maternity wards, private schools and even a plastic surgeon’s waiting room.

Bedbugs are back and spreading through New York City like a swarm of locusts on a lush field of wheat.

To make matters worse, there’s nothing we can do to stop them:

“It’s becoming an epidemic,” said Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating, an Upper West Side business that receives about 125 bedbug calls a week, compared with just a handful five years ago. “People are being tortured, and so am I. I spend half my day talking to hysterical people about bedbugs.”

Last year the city logged 377 bedbug violations, up from just 2 in 2002 and 16 in 2003. Since July, there have been 449. “It’s definitely a fast-emerging problem,” said Carol Abrams, spokeswoman for the city housing agency.

In the bedbug resurgence, entomologists and exterminators blame increased immigration from the developing world, the advent of cheap international travel and the recent banning of powerful pesticides. Other culprits include the recycled mattress industry and those thrifty New Yorkers who revel in the discovery of a free sofa on the sidewalk.

And that new mattress delivered from a reputable department store, which kindly hauled away your old one? It may have spent all day in a truck wedged against an old mattress collected from a customer with a bedbug problem.

Once introduced into a home, bedbugs can crawl into adjoining apartments or hitch a ride to another part of town in the cuff of a pant leg.

And now the Times adds a twist — we can now blame bedbugs for more of society’s ills, including licentiousness:

Kellianne Scanlan, 30, a hairstylist who lives in Washington Heights, has been living like a nomad since last month, when she spotted a bedbug on her pillow, and then whole families ensconced in the frame of her platform bed. Despite the visit of an exterminator, the problem has not been vanquished, and every last item of clothing is sealed in plastic bags and piled up on the living room floor.

“My life has become all about bedbugs,” she said as an exterminator arrived last week.

. . .

“The psychological damage is probably the worst thing about it. I mean, how long will it be before I can sleep soundly and not worry about some creature sucking my blood?”

Still, for Ms. Scanlan, there has been a silver lining. The night after she discovered the bugs, she went out drinking, intent on avoiding her own bed. That evening she met a man at a bar, and, contrary to her usual instincts, accompanied him to his apartment.

There’s No, Like, Training

In a watershed year for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade that includes the first Latina character ever, the Times sounds the alarm about balloon safety:

After volunteers at the 1997 Thanksgiving Day parade lost control of a balloon in the wind, nearly killing a 33-year-old woman, Macy’s said that balloon handlers would never again be sent down Central Park West and Broadway without proper training.

Though the company welcomed the press to watch as it trained a thousand balloon handlers on an empty soccer field in Hoboken, N.J., in 1998, over the years Macy’s has quietly backed away from that assurance, internal company documents and interviews with handlers show. So tomorrow, with forecasters calling for rain and heavy winds, many untrained volunteers will help wrangle flopping towers of polyurethane through Midtown guided only by instruction sheets reminiscent of airline safety cards.

“There’s no, like, training,” said one first-time handler who was given an instruction sheet and told to report for duty at 6 a.m. tomorrow. John Piper, vice president of Macy’s Parade Studio, which is owned by the company and charged with supervising 2,000 balloon handlers, said Macy’s held four training sessions a year and invited all volunteers, though the training was mandatory only for a few hundred team leaders.

The bombshell article explores the instruction sheets, which obviously include important safety information:

A chart marked Balloon Handlers Instruction Guide explains hand signals with sketches of a torso in a baseball cap marked with arrows for forward, slow down, stop, left turn and right turn. Another sketch marked Landing a Balloon shows four figures holding a rope just below chest level while two others bend down, appearing to tie their shoes.

“Continue to hold your lines, until the balloon is stabilized,” the section concludes. “Please do not inhale helium escaping from the balloon.”