Triangle journalist and big thinker Fiona Morgan, an associate in research at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy, (man, that's tough to get on a business card) challenged her friends on Facebook to come up with Office Frustration Band Names. These were some of them, with credit where credit is due.

Fiona Morgan Lost Comp Days
Andy Bechtel The Thought Leaders.
Paul Jones Outside Consultants
Maria Bebop O'Lea State Gas Card
Mark Chilton The New Health Plan
Rhonda Nicole Tankerson The Staple Guns
Sandy Smith Misplaced Synergy
Damon Circosta Press 1 for more options
William Haywood Carey Fluorescent Light Orchestra
Charles Mangin The Billable Hours
Zeno Gill Coroner Office
Brendan Love Low Hanging Fruit

and my favorite Corporate Conference Call/Webinar House Band:

Who Just Joined? posted by Carolyn Siefken Wiley

Last May, the Associated Press ran a story about how the U.S. thwarted the plot of an al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen to blow up a U.S.-bound plane with a bomb that was designed to be undetectable. We ran it on Page 1. It was a huge story. And this is the story that triggered the investigation that led the federal government to seize a couple months of AP reporters' phone records.

The government wants to find out who leaked the highly classified details of the CIA operation that foiled the al-Qaida plot. The AP has reacted angrily to what it calls an unprecedented government intrusion into the newsgathering process.

In a letter to the editor today in our print edition, film industry exec Bill Vassar challenges a couple of points in J. Andrew Curliss' story last week on the growing cost of the state's incentives to movie production companies.

One of Vassar's contentions is flat-out wrong: He writes that Curliss' story "failed to note" that productions in the state last year employed 14,083. Here's the relevant paragraph from the story:

"Film companies reported employing about 14,000 people in films here last year, although many of those were “extras.” The Wilmington Regional Film Commission says there are 4,000 “well paid, clean” film jobs in the state, based on data from the state’s film office."

Perhaps Vassar just overlooked that paragraph.

On to his other challenge: "Your story mischaracterized the incentives' cost to taxpayers."

We would disagree, and so would the state Department of Revenue.

John Frank, one of our reporters who covers the legislature, had an item on Page 2 of the local section Thursday about a bill in the legislature relating to beer.
As North Carolina General Statute 18B-1009 currently reads, beer vendors can only go into the stands at Carolina Panthers games. The law restricts that kind of thing to pro stadiums with 60,000 seating capacity and up. At smaller, more intimate sporting venues, you must leave your seat and go to where the beer is sold, in the concourse or wherever.
House bill 610 changes that. If it is enacted, beer vendors would be able to roam the stands at venues with seating of 3,000 and up during professional sporting events, such as, I suppose, minor league baseball and professional hockey.
However, as John pointed out, section 5 of the statute would be unchanged. Vendors can roam the stands and sell their malt provided "(t)he employees do not verbally shout or hawk the sale of malt beverages."

I do not know which lawmaker years ago stuck this in the law, but John spelled it out thusly: "The legislation prohibits vendors from yelling 'beer here'." Well.

I was born in Boston, and at Fenway Park, that is pronounced: "beahh heahh." It is one of the sounds of a real ballpark, and adds to the overall ambience. Although no real Bostonian would ever use a fancy word like ambience. I've been away for more than 40 years. Sorry for that.

Perhaps State Sen. Bob Rucho, a native of Worcester, Mass. -- pronounced Wis-tuh -- and someone who I'm sure walked a few blocks to Fenway to see the Sox while a student at Northeastern before coming South, can get the "beahh heahh" ban lifted in conference. That would be wicked cool.

President Obama says that if his daughters want to get tattoos, he and the First Lady will get the same tattoos. This is meant to discourage his daughters by making the tattoos uncool.

I had a slightly different situation. My son, starting about when he was 15, got me to promise to take him to get a tattoo when he turned 18 and to get one with him. I assumed he would forget about the deal, which he did not.

And that is why I have a tattoo on my left bicep. What I am saying, Mr. President, is that I don't think your strategy, or any strategy, vis a vis your children's future tattoo plans is going to work.

Here is the Washington Post story.

Last month on the front of the local section of the March 14th paper, Richard Stradling and David Raynor combined on a story based on census figures. The top of the story noted that the Triangle was among the fastest-growing places in the nation. But it also said that 47 of the state’s 100 counties have lost population since 2010.

Basically, it's tough to fight geography and history. When industrialization came to North Carolina, it came in a funny way. In the northeast and midwest, industry was concentrated in big cities. In North Carolina, the textile companies settled in small towns. There were textile mills all over North Carolina, so even though our state became one of the most industrialized in the nation, it did so in a very decentralized way.

There were some good and not so good reasons for this. Water power was an early energy source, and so you wanted to set up the mill near a river or stream. And for folks in rural areas who were barely surviving on small farms, a factory job in a company town had its appeal.

So generation after generation worked in the mill, and families all over North Carolina grew up in small towns centered around the mills. The factory owners had a hard-working, pliant workforce far from the temptations of the big city and not easily organized by labor unions. If you were hard-working and had a strong back, you didn't need much education to support a family.

And then, in the 1970s, the mill jobs started going overseas, first a trickle, then a torrent. I remember this well. I was a reporter in a mill town in Southwest Virginia, and thousands of jobs disappeared.

That's globalization for you. The price of cheap sweaters was a hollowing out of North Carolina's rural economy. Here we are, now, 40 years on, and it is still happening.

It is not a new theme that there are two North Carolinas, but it's one thing to talk about it and it's another thing to see the map. In the paper, on newsprint, the counties that lost population were shaded in gray, and the counties that grew were shaded in green. Wake County is green. Even as gloomy as we get, we're in the green. Since 2010, Wake's population has grown 5 percent, Mecklenburg about the same.

Anyway, today the state unemployment numbers came out. The state jobless rate is 9.2 percent, as of March, one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. That's what happens when a big industrial state de-industrializes. But this number understates how bad things are in the former mill villages. The Triangle's jobless rate, seasonally adjusted, was 7.2 percent. More than half the counties in the state have double-digit jobless rates.

Which is why they are losing people.

I honestly don't know what can, or should, be done. There's a lot of infrastructure out there in the counties that are emptying out. Water and sewer plants, highways, rail. There are a lot of people who want to work, but there aren't enough jobs, particularly the old industrial jobs.

Education might be part of the answer. Over at the UNC System, they have adopted a strategic plan to raise the number of people in North Carolina with bachelor's degrees. That's kind of a long-haul approach. Obviously, if more people get educated, some may come back home to Scotland County or Edgecomb County and start businesses and put a charge under the local economy. Maybe. Or they'll leave App or ECU or State and buy a house in Cary, and visit Rocky Mount or Laurinburg at Christmas.

Twice a day, I drive by a big MetLife billboard seeking workers for the hundreds of jobs that are soon coming to the Triangle. I'm guessing there are billboards in Charlotte, where MetLife is also moving down jobs from the Northeast.

The state is going to shell out a lot of money in incentives for those jobs, jobs that are coming to the fastest-growing, lowest-unemployment regions of our state. And things will get progressively better in the urban areas, islands of green in a state with too much gray.

--Dan Barkin, senior editor

Tom Ross, president of the 17-campus UNC system, said Monday that the university had become more efficient and was working to do more.
Ross said UNC has closed more than 300 programs in the last five years and that the cost per degree granted had declined by 17 percent in recent years.
"We've been doing almost all of the things that people suggest," Ross said at a meeting with journalists at Gravy restaurant in downtown Raleigh. The gathering was hosted by the UNC Program on Public Life.
Ross said some administrative functions, such as payroll and procurement, were being handled centrally. The UNC system is considering determining residency questions in one office. Thousands of students apply to more than one UNC campus; from time to time, UNC campuses have issued different decisions as to whether an applicant was considered in-state. "That's embarrassing," Ross said.
Ross said some course duplication was appropriate because some courses, such as history and economics, should be taught at all campuses. He also said it was appropriate to train some occupations, such as teachers and health-care workers, across the state so that those regions have a supply of those workers.
UNC gets about $2.5 billion from the state, Ross said. UNC's budget was cut in 2011 by about $400 million a year. Gov. Pat McCrory's proposed budget calls for cutting UNC's budget by another $140 million or so in the next budget year, which begins July 1. Said Ross: "We definitely want to get the size of the cut down."
--John Drescher

Jonathan Katz has written a well-regarded book on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the relief efforts that followed. It's titled, "The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster." Katz was then an Associated Press reporter and was the only full-time American correspondent in Haiti. Katz now lives in Durham. He will sign copies of his book Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Via email, I recently asked him a few questions.

Q: Why did you write "The Big Truck That Went By"?
A: In may ways it was an extension of the work I was doing as a correspondent in Haiti. There was a much more profound story going on than the one we were able to tell in news stories, from the day of the quake itself, through the misbegotten relief effort, and the political turmoil and massive cholera epidemic that ended the year. What happened over the course of about twelve months in Haiti was simply extraordinary, and a story that has implications for people all over the world. A complete work of narrative nonfiction seemed like the best way to give the necessary context, blast through our pre-conceived notions, and bring that story to bear.

Q: For those who want to help (individuals, countries or groups, including those that are faith-based), what does it take to make a difference in Haiti?
A: Making a difference is easy. Improving lives over the long term is what's hard. In some ways it comes down to humility: knowing the limits (and costs) of our power, the ill effects of so many efforts in the past, and being willing to step back and listen to people about what they want and need in their own lives. That requires a lot of direct engagement, a lot of patience, and a lot of creativity. Any aid effort must begin with the principle of "first do no harm," and have as its ultimate goal its own irrelevance. Haiti, as anywhere, needs strong, durable institutions that are accountable to its own people. If your work is helping to build, and not undermine, those institutions, and is leaving behind something durable that will last long after your organization is gone, you're probably on the right track.

Q: How did you come to live in Durham?
A: As I mention at the end of The Big Truck, I ended up leaving Haiti to move in with my girlfriend, Claire Payton, in Brooklyn. Well, after the book was written, Claire, now my fiancée, transferred to Duke to complete her history PhD at the university's terrific Haiti Lab. I came with her. So here I am!
--John Drescher

The New York Times published a story that our real estate reporter, David Bracken, has been writing about for months, if not longer.
The housing industry is experiencing a standoff of sorts. There is a shortage of single-family homes for sale around the country. We have been seeing this in the Triangle. But it is a strange kind of shortage that doesn't seem to result in a big jump in prices or a buyer frenzy. It is as if supply and demand are existing in different economic universes. Let me explain.
At the end of February, there were 7,515 homes on the market here. That was 20 percent down from last year and 40 percent down from two years ago, according to Triangle Multiple Listing Services data. That means that this area has a five-month supply of homes for sale.
But the average sales price of a home is up just 1 percent and a crucial metric, the number of days a home stays on the market, continues to drop but is still at 117 days.
So, while the Times story suggests that in some markets around the country sellers are getting multiple offers, prices are jumping and the homes are flying off the shelf, something is still holding this market back.
I think that's because the Triangle housing market is still recovering. There is an undercurrent of buyers and sellers still groping around, trying to get a bead on things.
Unemployment, by Triangle standards, is still very high, at 7.7 percent at year end. At the end of 2006, the Raleigh-Cary-Durham jobless rate hovered at 3.5 percent. People without jobs don't buy houses. OK, maybe they did during the subprime days of yore when you could get a mortgage by fogging up a mirror. But not today.
There are other wet blankets on the market. Buyers and sellers are playing a waiting game. People who bought a house back in the mid-2000's for, say, $250,000, may be sitting on real estate that is now just worth $220,000. They may owe more than their house is worth, and sellers don't want to come to the closing table having to write a check to pay off the mortgage balance that the sales price doesn't cover. They were raised by their parents to believe that you walk away from closing with money, the equity that has grown over time.
Buyers, for their part, aren't sure that prices have really, finally, absolutely bottomed, despite evidence to the contrary. Somewhere, out there, is a crazy good deal where they can practically steal a house from desperate sellers.
And, believing that they have the upper hand, they want the homes to be brought up to pristine condition.
No nail holes, no carpet stains, no loose hand rails.
So while the things we learned in that 8 a.m. Econ 101 class -- you never missed a lecture, right? -- suggest that we should be reaching equilibrium soon where all buyers and sellers come together where the supply and demand curves intersect at a price they can live with, it hasn't happened. (Editor's note: For the econ professors out there, I know the curves represent "quantity supplied" and "quantity demanded." Don't email me. I was awake in Econ 101. I'm a journalist engaging in shorthand.)
Sellers are on a sort of strike, keeping their homes off the market, and buyers are being tougher than maybe they should be.
The only thing that will deliver a jolt to this impasse is going to be a significant drop in the jobless rate. In other words, more people working. That isn't going to happen fast. A couple of the historic engines of growth in the Triangle were state government and the universities. Well, the Republicans who now control the legislature and the governor's mansion are definitely not interested in boosting the number of public sector employees. The reverse is true.
They will argue that shrinking government leaves more money in the hands of the private sector, and the jobs will be created there. I have no doubt of this, over time. But it will take time for this transition. Someone who loses a government-funded job -- in the state bureaucracy, as a teaching assistant in an elementary school, or at a university -- doesn't walk into a new private sector job overnight. Then there is the sequester, which may cost this area jobs -- we have folks here who commute to Ft. Bragg and to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, as civilian employees and defense contractors.
And there are plenty of private employers who are uncertain about what Obamacare will mean for them. Will that additional employee push them over some magic number that will increase their health care costs?
I don't want to sound overly pessimistic. Eventually, the market clears. We have been in a five-year funk. It has been so long that people forget what good times feel like. There is a lot of pent-up demand for housing. In the past five years, a lot of kids have graduated from college and are now in their mid-to-late 20s, and they are forming families and they want a backyard. A lot of folks who bought starter homes back in 2008 want to move up to a bigger house. The Triangle is still growing; Raleigh-Cary is still one of the fastest growing areas in the country.
So the housing market will continue to stabilize, prices will be firming up and rising, and more sellers and buyers will come to terms. Just how fast is tough to gauge, but things are a heck of a lot better than they were a few years ago.

MetLife's big move means 2,600 and some jobs moving to Charlotte and Cary. I wondered where they are coming from. Some of them are apparently coming from Lowell, Mass. So history repeats itself.
Lowell in the early years of our nation was a center of manufacturing innovation, and the textile industry flourished there throughout the 19th century. There were jobs in Lowell for hard-working immigrants flooding to our shores.
One of the people who was drawn to Lowell was my great-grandfather, Elias, who came to this country in the late 1800s, a young tailor.
He lived a few blocks from where the MetLife building now sits in Lowell. He made suspenders.
Things were tough in the early years. The Overseer of the Poor files in Lowell show that Elias applied for financial assistance. But he provided for his family the best he could, and his descendants did better and better, largely because of educational opportunities that Elias never had, and now are spread out from coast to coast and north to south.
Maybe some of the employees in Lowell will follow their jobs here. Maybe some of their great-grandparents worked in the mills of Lowell with Elias, and someday soon I will be sitting in a restaurant one booth over from a person whose ancestor worked on the factory floor next to Elias.
One of the economic truths that we have come to understand is that capital is mobile. Lowell lost its textile jobs when they came south in search of cheap labor, which North Carolina had as Tar Heels were leaving the farm.
In recent decades, many of the South's textile jobs left for lower-cost locations overseas, because there is always cheaper labor somewhere. Now, in an effort to consolidate and reduce its costs, MetLife is doing what the textile manufacturers did a century ago, and that's one big reason jobs are coming to Cary and Charlotte.
We also have a well-educated technology workforce here in the Triangle, which MetLife needs.
It is important in our celebration of the MetLife announcement to remember that we are all residents of Lowell, living in a global economy, and most companies are not sentimental about location. So we'll keep these new jobs in North Carolina so long as MetLife thinks it makes business sense. Companies that get the hang of moving in search of efficiencies don't forget how to do it.