A number of both police and fire & rescue personnel at Raleigh-Durham International Airport have been terminated for not meeting physical fitness test standards.
Emergency response agencies all have similar standards for recruits - but they have different ideas about keeping workers in shape.
Like other employers trying to curb health costs, RDU has stepped up its emphasis on employee wellness. Fitness testing for police, fire and rescue workers started in 1996. Those employees were told in 2007 that merit raises would be postponed for those who could not meet an evolving standard.
In 2008, they were told they could be fired. That year, 11 police employees and 10 fire-rescue workers failed the test several times. [Lt. Billie C.] Rose was one of them, and she says the pressure was intense.
Rose doesn’t sound happy to be let go:
It’s not fair to measure a person’s overall performance by just one or two sections of a physical fitness test.
… I’ve been an excellent employee. I have the evaluations to show it.
Except, every job has key criteria and employers can say, “this is essential.” A multi-year warning seems quite ample to get compliant, particularly in a public safety situation where the fitness of the responder can be a significant factor in their ability to act successfully. Further, as the article states, RDU kept the criteria lenient. I’d find the standard challenging right now, but if my job depended on it, I’d get there.
I can see this happening elsewhere, in the not-too-distant future.
Physical fitness is only tangentially related for most white-collar work, but I can definitely see companies being more vocal in encouraging employees to get into shape to keep company-borne health-care costs down. Currently, there’s mild encouragement to improve health and bring issues like obesity, smoking, high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes under control. I can see companies setting fitness targets (body fat percentage, cholesterol balance, blood pressure, run time) in order to stay in a particular cost tier. Out-of-bounds? Your share of the premium is higher.
Yesterday, I posted thoughts on what Apple would announce at today’s iPhone 4.0 OS event. Today, Apple announced seven “tent-pole” features. There are 100 or so other features, so while I can say I hit on some things, I can’t say I hit or missed on others.
Multitasking. I was right on being able to background and that it would be limited to the iPhone 3GS (and I presume the iPad). I was very wrong on how it would be implemented. Apple’s solution looks elegant
Fast user switching. No info, but I doubt it for the initial 4.0 release.
A more mature mechanism for notifications. Notifications are part of the background piece, but it doesn’t appear to be what I thought it would.
New maps features Unknown.
Lock screen widgets. Based on the brief lock screen I saw, I’m calling this a miss.
Lock screen emergency number dial. As above, a miss.
Unified inbox for Mobile Mail. A hit
Email signature differentiated by account. Unknown.
Multiple Exchange-account support. A hit.
A better document management method. Unknown.
No Wallpaper on the iPhone. Very wrong.
No (native) turn-by-turn navigation. Not seen, but since they demo’d TomTom, I’m going to guess Apple’s not pursuing this themselves.
No video-conferencing support. Unknown.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with what was announced and I’m looking forward to seeing the rest this summer.
I have no particular insight into the iPhone OS development. I don’t have sources. I’m not an iPhone developer. But, since I found myself thinking about it earlier, I came up with a few things I’m hoping Apple announces as part of iPhone OS 4.0. I’m not claiming any particular ease, but these are generally things I think could be implemented elegantly and straightforward for the vast majority of users.
Multitasking. If they stopped here and allowed me to background Pandora, I’d be happy. If I was drawing up the feature, I’d have people explicitly ask for certain apps to run in the background vs. everything automatically getting to run in the background. With limited memory on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, users are going to have to specifically request a small subset of apps be able to run in the background. I can see this being limited to the iPhone 3GS and iPad since they have 256 mb of RAM.
Fast user switching. Or, some other method of allowing an iPad to be used by multiple people in a family and keep settings straight.
A more mature mechanism for notifications. As Fraser Speirs has requested, the ability to have a notification quiet period would be nice. There’s also room for having a way to review all notifications, particularly if you have several of them.
New maps features including cycling directions, terrain tiles and, for the iPad, street view.
Lock screen widgets. The iPad has the slideshow. I wonder if Apple might add the weather, the stocks widget or something similar.
Lock screen emergency number dial. There’s a number to call if your phone is found or you’ve been involved in some manner of accident.
Unified inbox for Mobile Mail.
Email signature differentiated by account. I’d like to keep the same signature for each domain I send from the same as my desktop. The iPad (as near as I can tell from the Mail guided tour) doesn’t offer this, but it would be a big step forward to thinking of it as a primary tool if it did.
Multiple Exchange-account support. Alternately, push support for Google apps like Mail and Calendar. Right now, the iPhone is limited to one Exchange account for email or calendars. If you have multiple GMail or Google calendar accounts, you only get push support for one (by way of the Exchange functionality).
A better document management method. Maybe it’s MobileMe, maybe it’s a Time Machine-like hands-off sync mechanism. Maybe iWork gets more robust. But somehow, someway, there’s something better than what John Gruber describes in his iPad review.
What I’m not expecting to see
Wallpaper on the iPhone. The app icons are too close together to really make out anything else.
Turn-by-turn navigation. I don’t have a great reason, I just don’t think it’s going to be there.
Video-conferencing support. I believe Apple’s thought this through and thinks the experience of holding a device in front of you for a video conference is going to suck.
First, the House Creek Greenway is going to connect the area near the NC Art Museum and Meredith College with the Crabtree Creek Greenway right behind Crabtree Valley Mall. That’ll make it possible to ride from east of Downtown near Millburnie, through Umstead and then south to Cary’s Black Creek trail.
That’s serious riding.
Then, there’s the Neuse River Greenway, which will open in phases and run from Falls Lake Dam to Johnston County. It’ll hook up with the Crabtree Creek Greenway and the Walnut Creek Greenway, too. The first stretch is slated to open in April 2011.
I’m still looking forward to the Crabtree Greenway extending west across Duraleigh Road and connects to the north-side of Umstead, but this is a fantastic investment for Raleigh. I’m looking forward to some epic all-greenway rides in the years to come.
When you attend tech conferences, local or not, take the opportunity to give a lightning talk. My five minute presentation took about an hour and a half to put together and I had a great deal of fun.
