|
TheBuzz Erika Engle |
Oops boss,
you missed a spotHey boss, wash my ride.
It's not the same as MTV's "Pimp My Ride" show, where a lucky person's car gets a stem-to-stern makeover, but it's gotta be worth something to have your boss wash your car.
"Make Your Boss Wash Your Car" from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday June 12, is a fundraiser for the creative arts program at the Rehabilitation Hospital of the Pacific, organized by MW Group Ltd. The soaping, scrubbing and rinsing will be on the second parking level at the Nimitz Center at 1130 N. Nimitz Hwy.
"I crack myself up every time I think about it," said coordinator Denise Nakano, chief of staff of MW Group.
The executive car wash is an offshoot of the company's bridge program, in which accounts are established and paid into for each hour of volunteer service an employee gives to the community. Half the funds can be donated by the employee to the organization, while the rest goes into a kitty, divvied up by an MW committee.
Nakano and others were thinking up ways to fatten up the pot. A car wash was suggested, which led someone to observe to a superior that they would be willing to pay more money to make the boss wash the car.
The cost will be $10 for cars, $15 for SUVs, trucks and vans, "no boats," Nakano laughed.
Pre-sale tickets and boss sign-ups are through Nakano's office at 533-7468, though tickets also will be sold at the event.
Business glitterati already signed up for scrubbing chores include MW Group's Stephen Metter, Tom Ocasek and Michael Wood; Storage Solutions' Steve Hatayama; Nordic Construction's Glen Kaneshige and Ken Spence; Salt Lake Self Storage's Christopher Ulu; Communications Pacific's Kitty Lagareta and Stanford Carr Development honcho Stanford Carr.
"The funniest thing about this is, employees are asking me, 'Where's the best place to go dirty my car before I come?' " said Nakano.
She may go to one of the company's construction sites prior to her arrival, she said.
Nearly meaningless factoid: The title song of the 1976 movie "Car Wash" starring Richard Pryor included the line, "And the boss don't mind sometimes if ya act a fool." A pre-wash perusal of the movie might not help bosses with technique, but at least the Rose Royce song lyrics will be streaming through their brains. They might even act a fool and sing them.
Hospital VOD
Patients at the Kaiser Permanente Moanalua Medical Center can now watch videos on demand.It is the first Kaiser hospital and one of the few hospitals in the nation to have replaced old-fashioned closed-circuit TV with VOD, according to Cindy Ajimine, patient education coordinator.
We're not talking "Soul Plane" or "Van Helsing," but healthcare-related educational videos for patients recovering from surgery, for instance.
Kaiser Multimedia Communications Manager Vernon Hiroe is sheepish about taking credit for the idea, but folks are giving it to him nonetheless.
"It was a team effort," he said.
The Audio Visual Co. was part of the team.
Hiroe "contacted us to come up with a VOD system where the patient can have the interactivity to get the video on demand, so based on our conversations with him as to what their needs are, what they currently have, and in conjunction with various manufacturers, we came up with the design of a cost-effective VOD system," said Patrick Lee, general manager of the Audio Visual Co.
Lee and company designed the system, wrote the software with the manufacturers, and installed and implemented it.
To install a VOD system such as those used by Oceanic Time Warner Cable or hotels would have been far more costly, Lee said.
"This was much more feasible. Kaiser Permanente can do their own ... production work and encode it into the hard drive themselves," he said.
Ajimine estimated the system cost at between $35,000 and $40,000.
The system has three channels offering 60 videos geared toward patients with various needs including post-operative care at home, newborn care, videos relating to patient rights and relaxation videos. While that means only three patients can choose the VOD option at a time, the system is expandable. About 25 more programs will be added next month.
The channels used by the VOD system have not replaced Lifetime or ESPN, "We knew for a fact we couldn't filter our those types of channels," Hiroe said.
Educational programming is probably not a patient's first choice, but the VOD availability makes the channels' content a more practical part of what Hiroe called the care delivery package.
"That's what's going to make it succeed. When our providers and nursing staff can make it convenient and treat it as part of the patients' care, part of the overall care plan, that's the way they will succeed," he said.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin. Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210, Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached at: eengle@starbulletin.com