Wendy's vs Wareham

A leaked customer service complaint blows up in the face of a Wareham fast food franchise.

Birds have an expression, which translates into human pretty much as "Never sh*t where you nest." I don't know who runs the Wendy's in this district, but he certainly isn't a bird.

A Wareham resident had a bad visit with the Wendy's franchise on the Cranberry Highway in East Wareham. Rather than go over the counter to maul someone, he chose the more reasonable path of writing to the district manager.

The district manager immediately shouldered the blame, sent the guy a stack of free Son Of Baconator coupons and the problem was solved with no social media backlash.

Just kidding. The manager instead said that Wareham was full of junkies.

I'm not making this up.

“Not an excuse but the town of Wareham has little to no talent pool to hire from. This is an ongoing issue in that area.

“We are constantly interviewing and hiring any and all qualified candidates. Unfortunately, those candidates are hard to come by, as most are recovering addicts, and we cannot hire them.”

That, my friends, is a declaration of war.

Wareham had a philosophical social media reaction, as long as you count "rage" among the philosophies.

As the story leaked onto Facebook and then WCVB and WBSM, the recoil hit. Wendy's suspended the district manager, but that wasn't enough.

As you can see below, the parking lot was empty after 7 PM.

McDonald's, KFC and even Burger King were busy when the shot was taken.

They say that Colonel Sanders used to drive across the country, visit random Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and have dinner.

If the dinner was poor, Sanders jumped up in a hell of a rage. He'd haul the entire staff into the kitchen, where they would get a cooking lesson from Mister 11 Herbs And Spices himself.

Does that sound like the kind of man who would answer a customer service complaint by saying, "Ah, ya know, this town is full of junkies."

Dave Thomas and his hot daughter also seem to be cut from that cloth.

Even the ever-complaining Where's The Beef lady never blamed Oxycontin for the shabby burger that she got.

There are four factors at play here.

1) Fast Food is a low prestige occupation.

Their workers are usually at the front line of any Fifteen Or Fight rally, the pace is breakneck, the rate of injury is astounding (just the teenage section of the fast food workplace sent 28000 kids to the ER in 2017, while the Afghanistan war has produced 22000 wounded Americans in 18 years... 44000 teens were injured if you count all restaurants) and only the lowliest masochist wants to be seen frying up some McChickens by someone they went to high school with.

There's a reason those jobs are hard to fill... and the reason is that they suck. They tend to hire exclusively from a pool of kids, Mom hourlies and adults with no other option. I doubt that Mitt Romney wasted much time choosing between "Taco Bell cook" and "Senator."

2) Wareham has a drug problem. So does every other town in America.

We wouldn't have to go too far back in the archives to show you a Dead Kennedy getting pulled out of the ritzy Hyannis Port Compound with painkillers in her autopsy. Robert Downey, Jimmy Page, Kurt Cobain, Rush Limbaugh and many other millionaires played the fool to opiods at one time or another.

Painting Wareham as a unique den of sin is disingenuous at best.

3) As we said before, you never sh*t where you nest. You end up with bloggers shooting rush-hour pics of your empty restaurant and parking lot.

Wareham is voting with their purses. AIDS-burger was probably busier last night.

You do not want to insult the entire town that your fast food business is in, especially if McDonald's, Burger King, KFC/Taco Bell, Papa Ginos, D'Angelo's, Subway, Chili's, Charlie's, Rice Bowl and Pizza Boy are within 200 yards of you.

You especially don't want to do so in a response to a complaining Wareham resident who might share the letter on social media.

The no-longer-open Sagamore Beach BBQ showed us how social media storms can wipe out a business. Nobody is rooting for Wendy's to be shuttered.

Speaking of which...

4) How does Wendy's get out of this jam?

I have some ideas.

- For the rest of the year, you get free fries with every purchase if you flash a Wareham ID.

- Wendy's pays for the Onset fireworks in 2020.

- Wendy's sponsors and supplies a Beach Day in Onset with free food.

- Double down. Hire a punk rock grrl, name her Wendy O. Wendy and have her sing commercial jingles about junkie cooks and one dollar baked potatoes. Her showstopper could be her "Brockton By The Sea" ballad.

- Sponsor every rec league team in Wareham. I want to go to any little league game in town and see the Wendy's Yankees taking on the Wendy's Reds.

- Dis-inter Dave Thomas, and re-inter him in East Wareham somewhere, perhaps at Wendy's.

**********************

This column goofs on Wareham from time to time, but we do it because we love Wareham. If you take a left outta my house, you end up in Wareham. If you take a right, you hit a rotary where two of the exits will send you back to Wareham eventually.

I've dated Wareham girls, I shop there and even buy my legal weed there. My last ER trip was Tobey Hospital. I even run the Onset Facebook page.

Wendy's has a week to adopt (or top) at least one of those ideas I listed. Otherwise, we'll be back, and we'll be talking Boycott.

Route 105 Sunday Drive

We took a Sunday drive up Route 105. 

Route 105 is a decidedly rural area. Her only "urban" area is Middleboro Center.

Corn, you say? Just happen to have some right here.

If someone knows the story behind this single fenced-in tree in an empty field, let me know.

That tree is spooky at 10 AM on a summer Sunday. I wouldn't go near that house on Halloween night... unless they had Kit Kats.

I didn't actually count the miles, but this was the first Dunkin that we saw heading north on 105. This may be the longest no-Dunkin stretch in Massachusetts, or at least Eastern Massachusetts. By contrast, Bourne has 3 within 100 yards of each other. This is why we publish out of Bourne.

Best garden on 105.

How To Not Get Eaten By A Shark

I don't know about you, but it is the opinion of this column that the worst way to die naturally would be a shark attack. I use "naturally" differently than you might, but you get the idea. You are seized out of nowhere, dragged beneath the sea and torn to pieces by a torpedo with teeth.

It's on us to help you avoid that.

We'll mix in tips from experts and officials with some of our own observations and inclinations.

Never Swim With Seals, And Do Nothing At All Seal-Like

One thing that our recent shark attacks had in common was that the victims were messing around near seals. Sharks eat seals, as eating seals is the whole reason they're hanging around Cape Cod Bay.

There wasn't that much time between when Americans first began recreating by the sea and when we had our first fatal modern shark attack. One of the reasons we hadn't suffered one until 2018 is that we had a bounty on seals. Fishermen hate seals, who compete for the same fish. Up until 1962, you could kill seals and get cheddar for it.... not too shabby, as long as you aren't a seal. 

There were 40,000 bounties paid in Maine and Massachusetts between 1888 and 1962, when Massachusetts stopped paying bounties. Maine stopped in 1945.  Experts say that 70-130K seals were killed once you factor in data fraud, boat strikes, and so forth. That's a lot of shark food exiting the ecosystem.

The region suffered a huge decline in seal activity, and they only really started turning up in large numbers on Cape Cod around the turn of this century. It, in turn, took the sharks about a decade to figure it out.

Humans are pretty easy pickings for a shark if he wanted to have some People Food for a change. We can barely move at all in the water. Even a crippled, drunken, lazy shark could swim circles around Michael Phelps. Other than the slow-motion punch of an underwater boxer, we have no natural defenses against the shark. We're a free lunch, at least from June through September in these parts.

The fact that we have so few attacks means that sharks aren't interested in us as a food source. Neither of our recent human-attacking sharks was killed in the attack... they just went away on their own. They had no interest in continuing the meal.

So, you can really lower your chances of attack by not swimming or boating near the shark's primary food source. Seals are fun, cute, and can even be friendly. They also do tricks, like the one where they disappear faster than you can if a shark comes into the area. Don't be the guy left standing when sharks and seals play Duck Duck Goose, lest your goose be cooked.. 

If seals are around, we can not stress strongly enough that you should make like a TV show and be St. Elsewhere.

Never Swim Near Fishing Boats (Or Fishing Men)

Sharks also have a tendency to follow fishing boats. I suppose they are after table scraps or something, who knows? 

Two of the regions's fatal shark attacks involved people swimming to or from a fishing boat. Two others involved sharks swamping smaller boats and devouring the occupant.

Sharks are attracted to several things associated with fishing. Fish, naturally, lead off the list. Injured fish writhing in pain on a fishing hook are also on the list, as an injured fish means an easy meal to a shark. Fishing can be bloody, and blood in the water is like doing a rain dance for a shark. Smarter sharks may know that a fishing boat will throw away smaller fish, who then become almost like delivery food at that point.

Don't Go Over Your Head

Almost all of New England's shark attacks involved the shark hitting someone in deeper (10 feet or more) water. Massachusetts doesn't have a shallow-water shark attack fatality on her books, and most of the non-fatal attacks involved fishing boats or surfcasting.

Sharks like to come up under their prey for the Hit. None of our shark attack victims had any idea there was a shark around until it attacked them. Only one attack I read of had the shark coming at the victim in a manner where witnesses reported seeing a dorsal fin before the strike.

As we just saw with the recent Chatham stranding/rescue of a Great White, they do go close to shore. However, the very rare shark attack becomes very, very rare if you stay in the shallows.

Shark Repellent

If you can get Bat Shark Repellent like Batman has, do so. He's smart, and his repellent probably works.

Scientists began work on shark repellents after WWII, when shipwrecks like that of the USS Indianapolis saw hundreds of people eaten by sharks. They've been working at it ever since, and generally can't come up with anything that is 100% efficient. They've tried electricity, chemicals and even magnetism.

It may or may not amuse you to know that Coppertone was one of the big investors in shark repellent research. Your sun tan lotion may have been doing double duty if someone hit the right chemical signature in the repellent lab. SP-40 may have had a more Sharkish meaning to it had they stuck it out.

They did find one thing that repels almost all sharks all the time... dead sharks. Fishermen and scientists both agree that sharks don't like to be around dead sharks. Glandular secretions from dead sharks are the current focus of shark repellent research.

Of course, that was in a 1994 article I found. I assume that someone from Coppertone pointed out that A) you can't swim around with a dead shark, and B) "Honey, would you rub the lotion with the decaying shark liver oil into my shoulders?" sort of takes the fun out of sun-tan-lotion application.

Swim With People Who Are Fatter Than You

Sharks around New England aren't sick, lost, old or demented. They are exactly where they are supposed to be and where they have always been. However, one attacking a human is generally making a mistake.

The mistake is thinking that the human is a seal/tuna/sea lion/sea turtle or whatever else it eats. It's unavoidable, and the shark- to his credit- usually breaks off the attack once he realizes his mistake.

For a fish with such a ravenous reputation, sharks don't eat that much. They expend a lot of energy attacking, and risk significant injury. They want the most bang for their buck when it comes to Epic Meal Time.

That means smoking a Fatty.

Fat people swim slower, and look more like seals than thinner people. They have more flesh, which makes them less crunchy (sharks don't do crunchy if they can avoid it) to the shark, as well as more filling.

I actually asked Dr. Gregory Skomal about this. He did admit that it made perfect sense, but that no research had been done on the subject.

This is a steroid-powered version of the Don't Ever Swim Alone rule. Sharks will pick off soloists if they can. However, given a choice, they will always Super-size their meals.

Remember this, use it to your advantage, and waste little pity on the run-stopper. You don't have to swim faster than the shark... you just to swim faster than whoever else the shark is chasing.

Avoid Guido-like Bejewelment

I'm not sure if there is a noun for what I'm trying to say there, hence the odd sub-title. I had no way to tie Only Built 4 Cuban Linx to anything sharky.

Things like necklaces and bracelets shine sort of funny in the water, and will look like fish scales to a shark in the wrong conditions. Fish are right at the top of the shark's menu, and he may come closer to see if you are worth biting. You want to avoid being in this calculation if at all possible.

Experts say only the filthy, polluted waters of Boston Harbor prevent more shark attacks from happening at Revere Beach, which has a lot of guidos running around. Boston Harbor had an attack in colonial days, and a Boston kid was the meal in 1936.

Be Local

Just as "Swim with fat people" is probably my advice and not the official advice offered by experts, this one also springs exclusively from my research.

Here's a list of who was bitten in Massachusetts shark attacks... guy from England here courting a woman, a guy from Swampscott, a Boston kid, a Nahant local, a bunch of tourists chartering a boat, a NYC guy, a pair of Truro rental guys, two Plymouth girls... and it didn't bite the Plymouth girls, just their kayak. A guy from Brazil was the most recent victim.

You see the pattern. 

It's not just a Cape Cod thing, where there are masses of tourists. Three of the last four fatal attacks were in Mattapoisett, Scituate, and Boston. Sharks seem to go out of their way to avoid locals, even passing on the two Plymouth girls (who were cute, I might add... I don't have records of the charisma of the other victims, but it may or may not be important) after knocking them both into the water.

Maybe we have Spider Sense from living near the water, and we can subconsciously read the signs of imminent danger. Maybe "exotic" people taste better. Maybe tourists lack tans that locals have, and stand out more in the water. Who knows?

What I do know is that sharks seem to favor out-of-towners.

The Other White Meat

I so wanted to find a racial trend I could exploit for laughs here, but I was amazed to find that sharks- at least our sharks here in New England- attack pretty much along the demographic averages regarding skin color. We've had about 20 attacks in our post-colonial history, and maybe 2 were on black people.

The number might be one, I'm not 100% sure of a Connecticut attack. Even with just one Black Attack, you have to crunch the numbers with the knowledge that white people beach out more than blacks do, at least around here. "Like I need a tan," as my black roomie used to tell me.

I think the sharks have bitten at least one Jew. He may have been feasted upon by a shark who wished for a kosher meal. He was taken on the Sabbath, I believe.

Anyhow, your race or your God won't save you if Ol' Toothy thinks you look tasty. To my knowledge, he doesn't give a damn about such things. We all look alike to apex predators.

Swim During The Day

Sharks attack with power and speed,but they hunt via stealth. They also don't really sleep, to my knowledge. 

While they hunt all day, they are more active and more successful at night. The shadows work in their favor, and they work against the prey. 

What weak and pitiful defenses you have in the water vanish at night. Even if it swims around you with his fin out of the water, you won't see him coming.  They started Jaws the way they did for a reason.

In Conclusion,,,,

Follow these rules, and you'll have mad bread to break up. 

If not, 17 feet on the wake up....

Mashnee Island Sunset

Mashnee Island in Bourne... 

We happened to be driving by as the sun was setting.

My camera gets a bit blurry with distance shots.

I think that is a restored version of Bourne's summer White House. Grover Cleveland loved it here, and he'd run the country from here for months at a time. He was an avid fisherman.

Rebranding The Sachems

Middleboro is in the midst of an internal debate. Some people in town seek to remove the Sachem name, which they think of as racist, from the sports teams at the high school. Other people disagree.

I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm no great thinker, so you'd do better just thinking on it yourself. I'm also a Duxbury kid writing from Bourne, and this is a Middleboro Matter.

What I can do is fast forward to a theoretical victory by the PC police. Pretend that the Sachem name is doomed. What name should go in her place?

Naming a sports team is fun but important work. If you do it wrong, your kids are wearing a stupid name on their chests for a century's worth of football, field hockey and wrestling.

Bourne, where I live, has the Canalmen. That name is so whack, it hurts. You can count on me addressing that in the future, but Middleboro is now.

I have the Death Star Indica going, and it is time to name us a sports team. If you have better ideas, hit us up in the comments.


CRANBERRIES

Ocean Spray has a plant in town, and you can't swing a dead cat around without almost hitting a bog. No one is offended by cranberries. The jerseys would have an excellent and trendy color. This might work.

It does move the needle on the Whackometer, however. It would also make for a terrible mascot. It's tough to rock an oversized cranberry costume. You'd look like a Fruit Of The Loom commercial reject.

It would be cool to dye the football field a cranberry color, sort of like Boise State does with blue.

My gut tells me Carver would be better suited for this name.

Next!


SHAMROCKS

Middleboro doesn't have the half-the-town-is-Irish demographics that you see on the Irish Riviera, but they still have a robust 21% Irish ancestry share, and that's good enough to name a team

No one would be offended by a shamrock, although the inevitable Leprechaun mascot might do the trick. I suppose that the uniforms would look like the Celtics.

Shamrocks are also lucky, and any team could use a bit of luck.


COYOTE

Animal names are common enough, but the local fauna evolves periodically. We have animals here now that weren't around back when we were naming our local high school teams.

Cool schools spot these trends and ride the wave. Monomoy named their teams the Sharks, for instance.

I'm not sure if Coyote is both singular and plural. I like no S on the end. It puts us in a rare group with the New England Revolution, the Utah Jazz and the Minnesota Wild.

Middleboro would be very vulnerable to teams with a Roadrunner mascot as well as catastrophic failure of ACME products.


ZOMBIES

Fan interaction is the love child of school spirit and spectator sports. Naming the team after Zombies would make every game Halloween.

It would definitely intimidate other teams if they drive out to some weird forest for a game, and the whole crowd is dressed as/acting like Zombies.

Crowd participation is key. Everyone at the game should dress and act like a Zombie. The P.A. announcer should do nothing but moan. The cheerleaders could abandon typical routines in favor of just shambling about and occasionally biting people.

Paranormal/cryptozoological names aren't that unusual. I assume that Salem teams are the Witches. Duxbury has the Dragons. There's also the, uhmmmm... OK, paranormal team names are a bit unusual.

It'd probably be easier costume-wise to go with Ghosts, but it would be a bad scene if an urban team drove out to the country and found a crowd of people in white sheets. Football games shouldn't have Shirley Jackson endings.


MIST

People who write headlines sometimes get carried away with Alliteration, but I do like me some Middleboro Mist.

The uniforms would rule. All grey, with grey numbers. I'd paint the field grey as well.

Old people would like this, because the team would look like photographs from the old days, before they invented color.

Games played when it was foggy would rule. Middleboro kids would be all but invisible. It'd be hard to cover someone who vanishes if she gets a step on you. It's also hard to pass to someone you can't see, but the Mist QB would have the advantage of knowing the play. I assume he'd also get used to playing in fog eventually.

If it isn't foggy on game night, the illusion can be created with a few cleverly placed fog machines.


MEAN

I'm into alliteration again, sincerely sorry.

Why not play off the Middle part of Middleboro? I needed a note from a shrink to pass Probability and Statistics, but I did retain some dim insight that mean = average, which I assume is close enough to Middle to name a golf team.

Mean is a noun in this case, but the homonym adjective has a bully vibe to it that goes well with sports.


BLIZZARD

Weather is tough to get offended by, even if it weather that can kill someone.

Blizzard sounds cool, it's local enough, it is evocative of toughness and no one else is using it.

There's also a Dairy Queen in town, so maybe kids will get free ice cream on game night.



PITBULLS

There are 10000 teams named Bulldogs... why not go for a dog name with more oomph?

Choosing the right animal is important. Batman is scary, fear is a great motivator, and that's why Bruce Wayne doesn't fight crime in a chicken suit.

This could backfire if a pit bull mauls a local child. On the other hand, they could play music by that Pitbull dude during games.


SOMETHING MORE OFFENSIVE

It would be funny if the PC crowd wins, mostly because "Sachem" is the name you come up with if you say, "Let's honor our Native American history with a tasteful name."

Humor tends to work full circle, and it would prompt a chuckle if they ended up with a more offensive name.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Middleboro Strippers!"

Cape Neddick Lighthouse, off York, Maine

The Cape Neddick Lighthouse went up in 1879 for $15,000. 

She is actually on Nubble Island, not Cape Neddick. The locals call it "Nubble" or "Nubble Light." She is just off of York, Maine. 

This lighthouse is so cool, they put a picture of it in the Voyager spacecraft. The Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China share this distinction. It is supposed to impress any aliens who might find it.

If you look closely, you can see a little gondola/tram thing. That runs 100 yards or so to the mainland, and was used to get the lighthouse keeper's son to and from school. 

Props to Sheila Spellman for the pics.

Cape Cod Tornado vs Cape Cod Hurricane

The tornadoes that huffed and puffed and blew down parts of Yarmouth and Harwich were more outlier than typical. Cape Cod doesn't get a lot of those.

We don't get a lot of hurricanes, either... but we get a lot of them when compared to tornado activity.

The tornadoes we had this week were of the F1 variety, with winds around 110 mph. People who are into storms know that F1 is towards the bottom of the scale. That can seem disappointing.

While I don't live in Iowa or anywhere like that, I'm not 100% sure that an F1 would even get on the news there, especially where it may just wreck Earl's cornfield before dissipating.

Of course, it would only take a short ride through parts of Harwich to remind a person of just what an F1 can do.

The 110 mph winds of an F1 would be a strong Category 2 hurricane. We don't get many of those here, but we do get them. It's tempting to say "every 25 years or so," but if you study it some, you'll see a more random pattern

We had a bunch in the last 100 years, but no trend shows itself. 1938 came after a lesser-known 1936 one, was followed by a 1944 one, then two in 1954, two more in 1960/61, another pair in 1991... plus a couple dozen near misses.

We're 28 years since our last direct-hit hurricane. This fact, and the list of New England storms, show two things.

One: We don't get frequent hurricanes.

Two: We're due for one.

This week's entertainment in Harwich and Yarmouth were a small example of what a hurricane of similar intensity could do if she made landfall on the Sandy Spit.

Keep in mind that tornadoes produce isolated damage and only hang around for a few minutes. Tornadoes are a mile wide at best, while peak hurricane winds may stretch 50 miles from the center.

While a hurricane won't stay for 6 tides like a Nor'easter can, they do have a wide time window when compared to a tornado.

The Harwich tornado was 250 yards wide and stayed down for 2 miles and change. Yarmouth was the same width, but it stayed down for 5 miles. They combined to last 15 minutes. Damages were more widespread, but still flowed along the narrow path of the storms.

A strong Category 2 hurricane coming ashore in Yarmouth would do damage similar to that seen this week. However, the damage would be regional.

The whole Cape may suffer damage similar to what Harwich got. You could probably throw in the South Coast and South Shore too.

Power was out for 4 days in Harwich, and that is with Eversource flooding workers into the area. I run a Bourne hotel, we were full of Eversource crews, and we turned away a dozen other crews. Fire departments, the National Guard and even prison labor helped get the power back on as quickly as they did.

Imagine if all of Cape Cod was like Harwich? Exponential damage? Eversource and company wouldn't be able to focus on one line of damage, in one or two towns, like they did this time. Crews would be spread out from Provincetown to Fall River to Hull. Power could be off for months.

Harwich lost 150 trees, all along the tornadoes' paths. A Cape-wide version of that may take down 20000 trees, dumping them across roads, through houses and onto power lines... from Onset to Orleans.

Let's not forget that even minor hurricanes do catastrophic damage along the coast, via wave action. Our tornados were ashore and inland for most of their lives.

As bad as these tornadoes were... we got off easy. Our next natural disaster, for which we are far overdue, won't be so isolated.