What’s the correct email format? Should it look like a letter or be as brief as possible, with plenty of LOL acronyms and emoticons :•)) ? Continue reading
Dear CyberChat Correspondent
76
What my guru says about getting older
I asked the “Wise One’’ how those who are conscious and enlightened, and well into middle age, might go about conducting their business.
He suggests: Continue reading
Have a nice bray
Don’t you just love it when the words we lob at each other have no thoughts in them?
Words shouldn’t be empty of meaning, coming from minds devoid of consciousness.
Okay, one complaint: Excellent customer service I can do without
“He shouldn’t have told you that!”
That’s what the customer service representative for the phone company explained to me when I called to ask about the discount I was promised the day we switched our mobile phone service over to the same carrier that provides our home phone service. The move was made, in part, because of the savings mentioned by the sales person Continue reading
What I don’t miss about the ‘old days’
When we begin to wax nostalgic, thinking about all of the things we miss from the old days–either a generation passed, or just a few years ago–I like to remind my self of what I do not miss.
(Watch for the companion blog–“What I Miss About Times Gone By”)
• Carbon paper; and typewriters for that matter
• Smoke-filled rooms, restaurants and theaters
• Pay phones
• Parking on the side of the road and changing a tire (even though it happened only every couple of years or so)
• Arranging toilet paper…
About that picture of a Studebaker over my desk
When a young friend saw a photo of a 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk on the wall near my desk, she asked if that was the car Abraham Lincoln used to drive.
She was kidding, of course. She knows that driver’s licenses weren’t being issued in the mid-19th Century. But as far as she’s concerned, the car I so admire belongs in the same dustbin of history as the Civil War and, for that matter, most anything that occurred before, say Lady Gaga and Justin Whatisname.
Is she wrong to think I’m so traumatized by modern times that I need to hide in “fuddyduddydom” by clinging to reminders of my youth?
Use Mature Professionals? No thanks.
There was a time for me, maybe you’ve had this experience too, when I got a little anxious as someone the age of my kids introduced himself, or herself, as my new doctor.
Or lawyer.
Or Dentist.
I’d look at the impostor’s bright and clean facial features, that fresh skin and eager expression. If this kid was the valet in a parking garage, would I feel comfortable handing him or her my car keys? Never mind the old Toyota. What about entrusting the youngster with my health? My legal problem? Continue reading
Well, What Did You Expect?
I expect that since sales people are hired here to wait on customers, these two will stop their social chatter long enough to attend to me.
It’s a false assumption based on the recollection of my evenings as part-time grocery bagger when I was in high school. One time, the kid working the checkout stand next to mine
Even a Boomer Can Need A Job
OMG!!
Using a declaration he borrowed from Gen Xers and Millenials, my friend Sid sends me an email expressing the realization that he needs to find work to keep his house, to keep his car, to keep his lifestyle. I can easily empathize because Sid made many of the same decisions I did. His background is similar to mine.
Sid’s dad, like mine, served in the Army during the war. The good, brave, noble war. The last one that we actually won. Both dads experienced the Depression (last century’s Depression, not the more recent one ), and they taught us the value of a dollar and the importance of hard work.
And that’s pretty much what Sid and I have been up to for the past, um, five decades. Working and saving. Raising families. Having our lives.
“How’d that work out for you?” Sid would be asked if he happened to appear on Dr. Phil’s program..
Continue reading