From Bob's Cluttered Desk

An entrepreneur in France has invented a pill that will give flatulence the smell of roses. I could just end this blog post with that statement, and let your wicked imagination take you for a ride, but no, that is not my style. You gots to get my opinion on the matter. Or in this…

We had just finished the national bloggers’ panel at the National Workers’ Compensation Conference, where one of the things we had discussed was how employers can improve outcomes by being more engaged, concerned and communicative with their injured workers, especially early in the claim cycle. I was approached by an attendee who happens to be…

Yesterday morning employees of SAIF Corporation received an email from Interim CEO John Gilkey announcing that VP of Operations and Human Resources Ryan Fleming had resigned effective immediately. Fleming was indicated by company documents to be a central player in what is now being called Plotkin-Gate, where former CEO John Plotkin was terminated after just…

It was about a week and a half ago, but it feels like only 10 days or so. Several of us gathered at the National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference in Las Vegas to resurrect our role on the National Bloggers Panel; to once again save the workers’ compensation world from imminent destruction. Fellow bloggers…

Well, the holiday season is officially upon us. The decorations are coming out, turkeys are being administered last rights, and by the end of this weekend some retail employee somewhere will have been trampled to death by an idiot mob in pursuit of cheap televisions. Ah, the holidays….. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, most of…

I stumbled across a news story out of Texas recently that surprised me a bit. It concerned a woman who had been denied treatment for her wrist by Medicare, because she had an open workers’ comp claim in the state. Even with all the talk and hullabaloo over Medicare and MSA’s the last few years,…

Over 15 years I’ve attended what feels like a million conferences, and about a billion individual conference sessions. While there is a plethora of quality content available across the nation, in many situations the content for me is of a “been there, heard that” variety. That is not a criticism, just the lament of someone…

It turned out to be one of the most remarkable birthdays of my life, although the fact it was my birthday was a happy coincidence. I spent last evening with a group of SAIF employees, finally having the opportunity to put some “faces to the nameless” that I have come to know through the ongoing…

In a live demonstration of the importance of workplace safety, the nations attention yesterday was riveted on two unfortunate window washers after they became stranded on a partially collapsed platform 700 feet over Manhattan. These two hard-luck cleaning engineers found themselves dangling precariously off the side of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in…

For those of us who have been following the saga of John Plotkin and his unexpected termination from Oregon Insurer SAIF, we appear to have entered the eye of the storm – the quiet period where we anxiously wait in anticipation of whatever comes next. It is that phase beyond the initial shock and anger,…