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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 30, 1984)
34 Thursday, August 30, 1984/The Battalion/Page 5B nsl Telecommuting: some choose work at home rather than office an became J e amount J no his blood! lost weigl ng low calorj pes of foUil creasing ie they are tJ s that peojJ e poundsottJ slow diets tkjl ir doctoniijl i slowly bads" is part i ■sts thatpeo^l igh in fat, si (1 blueftsli, Hjl ople eatmosil llounder, bol iat hasbeeni'.l safer than tljl fisherman t^! ecked 1 it is also adi}| ikin. e fat in fistui below theskl moves i s.” accoidings ii by Margatel alth expen, Ithv tobroif 'atherthanbl do broiling a I excess calotin I ores of poteti emicah. FniJ ould also I ve chemical rol oaning the fsl t isn't as safe al take positiveaj irselves e two researcl United Press International WEST LEBANON, N.H. —Lloyd Kvam moved from New York to get | out of the city. Later he left his office [job to work behind a computer at [home — and make more money. Kvam, a data processing consul tant, works in an office below the I kitchen in his split-level home. He |does most of his work there with an .Apple computer for clients as far I away as California. Kvam is among a growing num ber people known as telecommuters, who have been able to leave tradi- itional office settings by virtue of the [powers of the microcomputer. “Being on my own was by and -large a matter of location,” said Kvam, whose wife and two young j daughters are often around when he 1 works. Dave Rochat, another transient [from greater New York, works at home in nearby Chelsea, Vt., ma- Jnaging a Washington-based money market fund. Rochat had spent about three hours a day commuting from his New Jersey home to a New York brokerage firm before he moved to his 75-acre farm four years ago. “I’ve got four kids and a wife and wanted a change in lifestyle. We kind of knew what we wanted,” said Rochat, who keeps an office over a nearby funeral home. A number of large companies, in cluding Digital Equipment Corp. and Southern New England Tele phone, recently paid Electronic Services Unlimited in New York to study the effects and future of tele commuting. The survey looked at various programs and the jobs of about 1,000 telecommuters. The companies with successful telecommuting programs spent time developing a solid plan and made sure a good manager was supervis ing the right people, said Marcia M. Kelly, president of Electronic Serv ices. “Obviously there are barriers and disadvantages that have to be thought out carefully,” she said. “The thing people are most con cerned with are the personnel is sues.” Those issues can become compli cated with telecommuters, determin ing what is a sick day or a day off when someone goes to the computer for an hour one morning. Mike Lawson, a management in formation systems specialist at Bos ton University, wonders about legal issues. For example, is an employee covered by workers compensation if he’s injured at home during the day? Aetna Life and Casualty Co. in Hartford, Conn., has allowed 16 programmers to do part of their work at home for about two years, but doesn’t have a defined policy to deal with the personnel issues. David Leclair, one of the pro grammers, said no problems have come up at Aetna — where the tele commuting plan started as a conve nience to everyone involved. “The work we did required major hunks of computer processing and it made it easier to do it at night (when the system isn’t being heavily used). It saved us a lot of time,” he said. Leclair will work at home about 12 hours in a typical week, and says he wouldn’t want to be away from an office environment all the time. “It would be very, very difficult to work at home all the time. I can’t see doing it five days a week,” he said. Kelly agrees the mix of work at home and in the office is best for most people. “We suggest people not work at home 100 percent of the time,” she said. Leclair initially had doubts tele commuting was for him at all. He was worried that domestic distrac tions would be a problem. “At first it was, until finally I sat down with the family and said this is the story: When I log on to the sys tem, I belong to Aetna just like I’m 30 miles away at work,”’ he said. Everyone agrees telecommuting isn’t for all people, but technical im provements continue to make it eas ier for those who want to give it a try. ERA’S dumping process questioned iw tube that J ig and injecEil <treme pain g, shock and t z, a professoii| university, s alcohol-n or perfume- xin. of hives or si he person sieI ing, he or il ) an emerge'^ ople, espeoi'l m massive expsl erial,” she said [ United Press International HARLINGEN — A congressman land an ecologist claim the Environ- Imental Protection Agency botched jthe recent emergency dumping of a Ipesticide in the Gulf of Mexico. But an EPA official called the dumping “the safest way to handle a [very bad situation.” Rep. Kika De la Garza, D-Texas, [said he is not convinced the 7,000 Icanisters of Brazilian-manufactured aluminum phosphide pellets would hiot damage the offshore environ- nent. And Sue Ann Fruge of the Gulf dioast Coalition for Public Health varned that some of the canisters light float ashore and endanger fexans. The EPA contends the chemical, ised to kill insects in stored grains, pimply evaporated and is no longer dangerous. EPA spokesman Roger Meacham said the situation became an emer gency after an explosion killed a Hbrklift operator unloading alumi num phosphide from a Brazilian ship on July 27 at the Port of Hous ton. The Coast Guard later discovered that the batch of pesticide, which was stored in a nitrogen-cooled van, had begun heating up and destabilizing, causing a risk of explosion, Mea cham said. He said the only alternative was to risk transporting the substance over land. The chemical becomes poison ous phosphine gas when it contacts- air or water. De la Garza said the emer gency disposal operation “began to resemble a car nival show in its clumsi ness. ” De la Garza, however, said the emergency disposal operation “be gan to resemble a carnival show in its clumsiness” because initially the can isters. containing the pellets simply were unplugged and tossed into the Gulf. “After sinking several hundred feet, the chemical began exploding on contact with the sea water, but the gas trapped in each bottle forced them back to the surface where the canister bobbed up and down on the waves. The Coast Guard issued rifles to sharpshooters to blast each canis ter before it drifted dangerously away,” he said. After discovering the canisters were not sinking, the Coast Guard “switched disposal methods,” De la Garza said. “They began emptying each canis ter upside down into the water as they should have done in the first place. The remaining canisters of pellets, representing about 10 tons of aluminumm phosphide, were dis posed in this manner. ... Nothing like good old ‘trial and error’ meth odology for a chemical thought too dangerous to keep on land.” Meacham emphatically denied Monday that the Coast Guard used rifles to sink the canisters, saying each receptable found still floating was collected and chopped with a fire ax to sink it. But the EPA spokesman telephoned UPI today to say he subsequently found out some of the canisters were shot. “Kika De la Garza was right,” Meacham said. Meacham said his agency was so sure that the potentially dangerous pesticide was disposed of safely that it plans no follow-up studies to de termine after-effects, if any, of the dumping 110 miles south of Galves ton on Aug. 7-8. Meacham said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis tration’s “worst case scenario,” de vised by “some pretty good scientific minds” prior to the (lumping, con cluded “there could be some short lived destruction of marine life, but it appears that didn’t happen.” The EPA spokesman also dis counted Fruge’s fear that some of the 3-pound canisters may have es caped the Coast Guard and could wash ashore. “The chance of any of the canis ters reaching shore are almost nil, but if any of them do, the material would be totally dispersed and dissi pated,” Meacham said. De la Garza said scientists have told him there has been very little re-~ search on offshore dumping. The Gallery of Dance Arts 696-3639 Valerie Taylor The Brazos Valley Gymnastic Center 779-8263 Ed Landty DANCE 0 GYMNASTICS NOW OFFERING JAZZ CLASSES FOR 6 YR. 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