From Bob's Cluttered Desk

The year is 2022. The world is an overpopulated and polluted place, where the oceans are dead and many common creatures are now extinct. The wealthy elite live in the protected countryside, while the great unwashed masses reside amid general squalor in crowded tenements within the cities. The population of New York is over 40,000,000.…

I have been deeply involved with Kids' Chance for a number of years now. The charitable organization dedicated to providing scholarship opportunities for children of severely or fatally injured workers has exploded across the workers' compensation industry in recent months, in no small part to the efforts of Executive Director Vicki Burkhart, extremely committed corporate…

My wife and I purchased a new Christmas tree a couple weekends ago at our local Hobby Lobby (that is where Florida Xmas trees are grown – in retail locations that had them “grown” in China). As we waited for the tree to be brought up front from the storeroom, I watched the employees, busily…

I am just back from the National Workers' Compensation and Disability Conference in Las Vegas, where the challenges of being me continued unabated. I wrote about this several months ago, and to fully understand this entry you should probably read that article first if you have not done so. It is available here. You go…

If you have been preparing to make the trek to the industry annual national workers' comp sojourn in Las Vegas, it has likely been a fairly hectic time. You no doubt have been inundated with event invitations, “Visit us in Booth XXXX” postcards, and emails from people who would love to meet with you in…

In many ways, the feeling was reminiscent of a scene from the classic Steve Martin movie, “The Jerk”; a moment when his character, Navin R. Johnson, realizes the new phone books have arrived. He gallops around the service station in front of his boss, excitedly shouting “The new phone books here, the new phone books…

A few weeks back I wrote about the most recent Opt Out news, a ProPublica/NPR article looking at the Federal Governments potential interference in workers' comp with Opt Out being a final ingredient in the interventional stew. In that article I had a bit of fun with a public relations firm hired by ARAWC, the…

As many of us are preparing for next week's big workers' comp soiree, the National Workers' Compensation and Disability Conference, we find it challenging to determine which after hours events we should attend. Wednesday night might have been a particular challenge for me, as several big events are planned that evening in conjunction with the…

Kids’ Chance of Maryland launched Kids’ Chance Awareness Week Monday in grand style, appearing on a local Baltimore CBS affiliate and singing modified lyrics to the song “Manic Monday”. Kids’ Chance is pushing awareness of their cause the entire week, and this was probably the most visible effort to date in the project. Kids’ Chance…

I spoke at the Idaho Industrial Commission Workers' Compensation Seminar in Boise, ID last Thursday, on the topic of what our industry may look like in the year 2020 and beyond. It was a very future oriented conference, with the morning Keynote Tom Lynch going into extensive detail about Artificial Intelligence and the future of…