After the close of World War II, thousands of veterans flooded job markets all over the country in hopes of building new lives. During the 1950s, looking for work was markedly straight forward. You found jobs listed in the classified ads in local newspapers. Or, you registered with your local Unemployment Office. Sometimes, you might even find a job posting written on a 3 X 5 index card thumbtacked to the bulletin board inside your supermarket. With luck, you’d compete against a handful of candidates and eventually be asked to interview. If you were lucky, you got the job. A lot has changed since those days. How the job market…
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Instructions 101 We all need a little help... even with toilet paper
For the past year and a half, I’ve woken up to a familiar greeting from my digital alarm clock. 12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00. Ever since the power went out, my alarm clock has been winking at me, hoping that one day, I’ll learn how to set its time. Fat chance. I don’t have a clue how to follow instructions. It’s not that I haven’t tried. One evening last week, I dragged out the user manual to try to figure out how to change the time from 12:00 midnight to the correct time of the day – which, as luck would have it was 12:00 midnight. Like most user manuals,…
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Space-aged, High Capacity Sports Bras How Madison Avenue got involved in high definition, titanium, see-through products
While rummaging through my old junk drawer, I came across one of my prize possessions: a space-aged ballpoint pen that writes upside down and was endorsed by NASA. In 1965, it was the must-have accessory of the times. Not only could you use it to write letters while lying in bed, you could draft a note in zero gravity, on greasy paper in a wide variety of temperatures – all while submerged underwater. For the life of me, I can’t think of a single instance when I’ve cursed to myself, “Dang, I wish I had a pen that wrote upside down, underwater and on greasy paper.” But, it probably would…
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Are We Losing Our Kids to Social Media? Smartphones have made it infinitely easier (and harder) to live in our world
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on June 29, 2007, he couldn’t have anticipated the tidal wave he was about to unleash on the world. To be sure, Jobs was a technological visionary. He recognized the potential power of combining into one device, an internet-connected cell phone with a mini-computer capable of hosting email, playing music, surfing the web and a crude digital camera that meant people could share selfies the instant they heard the shutter click. Perfect for the generation of instant gratification. Jobs would have been hard-pressed to anticipate the raw power of something as compact as the smartphone and its long-term impact on society and human behavior.…
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I’ll Show You How It’s Done Once you hit 84, maybe there are certain things you should leave alone.
It’s been more than ten years since I lost my mom. Frankly, I’m glad she’s gone. Now, before you accuse me of being a shallow, selfless, ingrate, let me explain. I loved my mom. I really did. But technology made the decade beginning in 2008 brutal for old people. First there were self-driving cars. Then came the Amazon Kindle, followed by the Mars rover and the Hadron Collider. Even I felt overwhelmed. No sooner did my mom learn how to retrieve re-runs of Bonanza using her TV remote, someone went and moved all the controls to her cell phone. Her cell phone! “Let me get this straight,” she said. “I’m…
