SANTA CLARA, California: On a recent Saturday, John Toppel, a retired Hewlett-Packard sales manager, did not spend his leisure time golfing or mowing the lawn. He spent it at a local electronics store extolling the virtues of HP laptop computers to customers.

He was not paid by the store or by Hewlett-Packard, for that matter. Toppel, 62, left the technology company four years ago, but he remains a volunteer cheerleader for Hewlett-Packard, one of thousands of its retirees whom the company is trying to galvanize into an auxiliary army of senior marketers, good-will ambassadors and volunteer sales people. None of them get paid. They do it, they say, because of their affection for the company.

“I feel like I have two marriages: a wonderful marriage at home for 36 years and a wonderful marriage at HP,” Toppel said. “I guess thats now a former marriage, but I still have strong feelings for it.”

Across the United States, companies are making use of retirees as part-time or temporary workers. They are taking advantage of not only their expertise, but also their desire to stay involved and engaged with the world through work.

Hewlett-Packards twist is particularly unusual in Silicon Valley, where long-term company loyalty is as rare as pinstripe suits. Here, people switch jobs and companies on Internet time, chasing the latest technology developments and the chance to cash in stock options or catch initial public offerings.

But Hewlett-Packard, founded in 1939 before there even was a Silicon Valley, has tens of thousands of alumni, many of whom spent decades at the company, which is based in Palo Alto, California. Old-timers express a familial loyalty, telling stories of eating meals and drinking coffee with the founders, David Packard and William Hewlett, or receiving baby blankets from Packards wife, Lucile, when their children were born.

In a move that Hewlett-Packard says reflects a renewed emphasis on grass-roots marketing in the Internet era, the company is seeking to turn its retirees into a valuable asset that other, younger technology companies lack.

“Were moving forward with an effort to capitalize on the fact we have these great brand stewards,” said Michael Mendenhall, chief marketing office of Hewlett-Packard. “When you look at the importance of great word of mouth and great third-party endorsement - who better to do that than your own employees?”

Mendenhall appeared recently at the retirees annual gathering with Hewlett-Packards chief executive, Mark Hurd. The two executives urged more than 500 retirees who had gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California - hundreds more watched over the Internet - to do volunteer sales, join local alumni clubs, get involved in legislative issues that the company cares about and represent Hewlett-Packard in philanthropic and community events. The companys goal is to inspire involvement by as many as 40,000 retirees.

The idea of encouraging retirees to work free has inspired some criticism. Susan Ayers Walker, founder of SmartSilvers Alliance, which offers consulting services to business looking to connect with older consumers, says she is offended that Hewlett-Packard cannot find some way to compensate volunteer workers, particularly salespeople.

HP said participation was the reward. “Its about being part of the HP community and its rich heritage,” Mendenhall said. “Thats what they get.”

The involvement can be bittersweet, said some of Hewlett-Packard retirees. The oldest among them - now into their 90s - are the last of the generation that helped build Silicon Valley, watching it evolve from endless fields of almond, plum and cherry orchards into laboratories, semiconductor companies and software makers.

They also are workers from a bygone era of paternalistic employers that promised lifelong employment. That era is largely gone in the United States, including at Hewlett-Packard, which broke a tradition of avoiding layoffs and has dropped more than 30,000 workers in the past five years.

The contrast between the Hewlett-Packard of yesterday and the typical Silicon Valley company of today is especially pronounced, said Joe Schoendorf, 62, who spent 18 years at Hewlett-Packard and is now a venture capitalist.

“If I look at a rйsumй today, it says two years at Netscape, two years at Google, two years at Amazon, and then Facebook. That used to be a bad rйsumй: That meant the person couldnt keep a job,” Schoendorf said. “There is no institutional loyalty.”

Leslie Berlin, a project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, said the ethos had probably changed at Hewlett-Packard, which has 172,000 employees. But in Silicon Valleys history, the loyalty engendered by Hewlett-Packard stands alone, she said.

The expansion on 21 December of the Schengen border-free zone is great news for the citizens and residents of the European Union’s new member states. For other Europeans, however, it means that the wall dividing them from their lucky EU neighbors will become even higher and more difficult to climb.

Despite some efforts to soften the impact of the new rules, the changes will make EU visas even more expensive and complicated to obtain for the vast majority of people from Eastern Europe, the western Balkans, and Central Asia.

Of the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004, all but divided Cyprus are now incorporated fully into the Schengen area, which abolishes systematic border controls between participating countries and includes provisions for the harmonization of external border controls and a common “Schengen visa.”

Ordinary citizens of the new Schengen members will no longer have to queue to have their passports examined at border checkpoints when traveling within the area. The change will improve the shipment of goods within the EU significantly, as lorry drivers will no longer face long delays.

Last but not least, the expansion of Schengen is a politically salient step toward the completion of the EU enlargement process. It will abolish the tacit division between “first class” and “second class” membership.

Schengen expansion, just like the signing of the Lisbon Treaty earlier in December, shows that the EU is emerging from the doldrums following the French and Dutch referenda on the EU constitutional treaty in 2005. Likewise, the results of the recent Polish elections, in which the voters swept away an EU skeptic and his populist ruling coalition and replaced it with a pro-EU government, suggest that contrary to the “enlargement fatigue” lingering in old member states, the enlarged EU does work.

PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE

Unfortunately, things do not look so bright from the other side of the newly beefed-up EU borders. Citizens of countries outside the new Schengen zone must now meet more stringent criteria to travel to neighboring countries such as Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic republics. And they will pay more to boot, because last year the EU raised the price of a standard Schengen visa from 35 to 60 euros.

This decision was justified by the costs of the updated Schengen database of criminal records. In short, non-EU citizens have been forced to contribute to the maintenance of a system the purpose of which is to weed out undesirable visa applicants from among them.

To make the changes more palatable, the EU has negotiated special agreements with Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and western Balkan countries. These agreements provide for similar visa procedures among Schengen members’ embassies, simplified application procedures, and lower visa fees.

In some countries, the fee is waived for certain groups. Even then, for ordinary Ukrainians traveling to Poland, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic, who until now have obtained visas free of charge, this will be a change for the worse.

The citizens of other countries will have to bear the full visa costs. For example, the hapless citizens of Belarus will have to pay about one-third of their average monthly salaries in order to visit neighboring Poland or Lithuania, doubtless to the delight of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, a tyrant who thrives on his people’s isolation.

A BETTER NEIGHBORHOOD

What can be done? EU policy-makers are careful to draw a line between visa facilitation and visa liberalization — namely, visa-free travel. Until now, Brussels has been willing to discuss only the former.

The EU should adopt and make public a set of common standards for visa applicants, as has been proposed by the European Commission. The new standards should ensure that visa procedures are not humiliating to applicants. Nowadays, even the people who obtain visas often feel shamed by the arbitrary decisions of clerks asking personal questions and assuming “evil intentions” on the part of the applicants.

NEW YORK: Fueled by a continuing weak dollar, crude oil futures surged above $107 Monday, a new inflation-adjusted record and their fifth new high in the last six sessions.

Light, sweet crude for April delivery rose $2.30 to $107.45 a barrel at midday on the New York Mercantile Exchange after earlier setting a new trading record of $107.

The dollar, which has driven the rally from $87 in January, remains a force in the market, though the U.S. currency firmed a bit Monday from lows hit at the end of last week.

Gasoline prices, meanwhile, were poised to set a new record at the pump, having surged to within half a cent of their record high of $3.227 a gallon, or 85 cents a liter.

The average price of a gallon of U.S. gas rose 0.7 cent overnight to $3.222 a gallon, 69 cents higher than one year ago, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Last May, prices peaked at $3.227 as surging demand and a string of refinery outages raised concerns about supplies.

That record will probably be left behind soon as gas prices accelerate toward levels that could approach $4 a gallon, though most analysts believe prices will peak below that psychologically significant mark. In its last forecast, released last month, the Energy Department said prices would probably peak around $3.40 a gallon this spring; a new forecast is due Tuesday.

There was little in oils price uncertainty to convince analysts that the huge run-up in oil prices had run its course.

“Weve got a Fed meeting on the 18th that could see a sizeable rate cut,” said Brad Samples, an analyst with Summit Energy Services, in Louisville, Kentucky. “So, its not over.”

Many analysts believe speculative investing attracted by the weak dollar is the primary reason why oil has risen so far so fast in recent months. Crude futures offer a hedge against a falling dollar, and oil futures bought and sold in dollars are more attractive to foreign investors when the dollar is falling.

Indeed, while the dollar fluctuated against the euro on Monday, many investors believe the dollar is likely to keep falling as the Fed continues to cut rates. Many analysts believe the rise in crude prices is not supported by the markets underlying fundamentals, noting that supplies are generally rising while demand is falling.

Investors “are pushing food and fuel prices to ruinously high levels,” said Peter Beutel, president of the energy risk management firm Cameron Hanover, in a research note.

Investors shrugged off a weekend cooling of tensions in South America, where Venezuela said Sunday that it was restoring full diplomatic ties with Colombia after they were broken off following a cross-border Colombian attack on a leftist rebel camp in Ecuador.

Last week, rebels shut down a Colombian oil pipeline in retaliation for the Colombian raid into Ecuador. Venezuela threatened to slash trade and nationalize Colombian-owned businesses, and Venezuela and Ecuador briefly sent troops to their borders with Colombia.

The potential for conflict involving Venezuela, an OPEC member and major U.S. oil supplier, helped push oil higher last week.

“The Venezuelan production was at risk there,” Samples said.

Other energy futures were mixed Monday. April heating oil futures rose 2.05 cents to $2.9675 a gallon while April gasoline futures rose 0.37 cent to $2.698 a gallon.

April natural gas futures slid 2.6 cents to $9.743 per 1,000 cubic feet.

In London, Brent crude futures rose 95 cents to $103.33 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.