Corporate culture. (Editor's Note).

I ONCE WORKED FOR A NON-profit organization that had payroll deduction for coffee, forbade conversation in the hallways and required everyone to work 8.25 hours per day. (Yeah, I got a check from the inevitable wage-and-hour settlement.)

I later worked for another nonprofit organization that had a refrigerator full of soft drinks free for the taking, gave employees a third week of vacation after two years on the job and paid me to visit Mackinac Island, Mich., in the fall; Portland, Maine, in the spring; and Washington, D.C., in the winter. (Why did I ever leave?)

The personality of a workplace, its corporate culture, can be as distinct as a human face. Some workplaces are sweatshops, others are like candy stores. Most fall somewhere in the middle.

The Arkansas Teacher Retirement System has clearly been of the candy store variety. Evidence has been stacking up for a while that ATRS -- at $7.5 billion, arguably the largest pile of money in Arkansas -- has been a playground for the well-connected. Now we know that its beneficence has extended to the employees as well.

A legislative audit revealed that deputy director Angelo Coppola had been using an ATRS-provided wireless phone for personal calls, using the system's FedEx account to send personal items and, most telling of all, letting ATRS pay for repeated trips to New Mexico, where he apparently spent most of his time on Boy Scout projects.

Does anyone else see the irony of this? While Coppola may well be helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, cheerful and clean, it's harder to make a case for trustworthy, loyal, obedient or thrifty. Even legislators, whose ranks have produced some of the most creative explanations and rationalizations in recorded history, were not impressed with Coppola's official reason for taking five trips to Santa Fe in three years: that he was working on developing a national association for deputy directors of retirement systems. Rep. Terry McMellon, D-Waldron, dismissed it as "a total bogus operation," and I can't improve on his language.

But it apparently satisfied Coppola's boss, ATRS director Bill Shirron, who accepted blame only for failing to remind Coppola to count half his time in New Mexico as vacation. Coppola, who forfeited a month's worth of his $74,000 annual salary and reimbursed the system for the personal expenses, has taken the fall on this one, and I'm not excusing him, but I strongly suspect he was merely living by the ATRS culture.

Enron, which either is or is not a political scandal, depending on which partisan you hear, has started to encroach on the newsprint space and the cable news air time previously reserved for the War on Terrorism. (ATRS had a piece of that action, too, but I won't get into that now.) Here in Little Rock, another development has started to clutter up our lives. It's the city's decision to make it illegal to feed parking meters after their allotted time has expired.

Back when I was a Girl Scout, putting a coin in an expired parking meter to save a total stranger the cost of a parking ticket was considered a random act of kindness. Now even feeding your own meter rather than moving your car to another parking space is punishable by a $30 fine.

I know the city, like governments everywhere, is hurting for money, but this is ridiculous. It's worse than a speed trap. The city clearly has no interest in which car is parked in a given space on a city street as long as the meter is paid, so the intent of this new policy can only be to increase the number of violations and the amount of fines collected. There is something un-American about criminalizing an act for the sake of collecting fines.

Accenture seemed like a really dumb name for a giant management and technology consulting firm, but I'll bet those employees are really, really glad they aren't still called Andersen Consulting.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. E-mail her at [e-mail].