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Archives for November 2018

Hang In There

November 29, 2018 By admin

The workplace is still a gray place as baby boomers hang on to jobs and careers. How long can they hold out? That depends upon their ability to change and adapt.

Over 40% of baby boomers stayed with the same job for more than 20 years. And 18% stayed at least 39 years. And you thought the days of working for the same employer for your entire work life went out with your parents’ generation.

But now everything has changed. There is no loyalty to an employer. Millennials make up 35% of the workforce and they are mobile. Not only do they work from anywhere, they may well work for six or seven employers during their worklife. Five years might be considered a long stint with the same employer. They are less focused on making a product and more focused on being part of a team that solves problems. Bottom line: boomers are not in Kansas any more.

Many companies now consider age a disadvantage and an obstacle to rising talent. Ouch. What happened to the eminence gris thing? We were supposed to be the knowledge base that could be tapped when you needed that whole “experience thing.” Now days, not so much. It would appear that experience has lost its cache and maybe boomers were just kidding themselves when they thought that corporations really needed that understanding of solutions that used to work.

Boomers who are kicked to the curb have only a few choices if they want to keep working. Some are getting the training they lack to be competitive with younger workers, a reboot if you will. Many more boomers are going to work for themselves. About 16% of seniors are now self-employed. Not only they happier, they also say they have more job satisfaction than they did when the worked for “the man” in the corporate world.

As the title of this post says, our only option now is to hang in there. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer noted that “once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.” Of course that could mean we are moving faster toward our own demise, but I’ll take the more positive spin on this one.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

Filed Under: ESSAY

Jodie

November 29, 2018 By admin

It took a while for her to understand that bringing  together a group of musicians, writing and rehearsing some decent songs, playing a handful of local gigs, developing a website mailing list, buying gear and then more gear, firing and re-hiring the guitar player before performing in the music video that went viral and raised $2,000,000 for UNICEF, getting an agent and doing a bunch of auditions most of which were bogus- that was the price you had to pay in order to book that cameo appearance in that film that wins that Oscar for that “Best Song” and gets you that Rolling Stone Interview that finishes your career, and that all of it was a lot easier to write about than to live through.

She stares down at her boots and tells herself she’s not going to miss the endless packing, unpacking, loading in, tearing down of gear, or saying “Cheese” and making nice with the backstage circus. She wants to replace her dreams of being a performer with sentences describing the thrill of standing in the wings the night they made the “Toast” video, and the way she felt hearing the Mayor introduce the band and express his appreciation for her song that was making international news and bringing all the positive attention to Albuquerque.

Then the stage manager touches her right arm, somebody cues the band, and the lights come up. Jodie runs her hand over the wrinkles on her sleeve which probably nobody will notice, puts on a smile designed to brighten the balcony seats, and walks to the microphone center stage. The band is vamping and smiling back at her winding down the intro with a fermata, and she launches into the song that got us to this gig.

I’m gon-na get me a judge

Gon-na get me a ju-ry

Get me a law-yer, get me a mis-trial

I’ll be the toast of the town, dammit

I’ll be the toast of the town.

The audience is screaming and already singing along because they know the words from youTube, and on stage during the guitar solo Jodie is laughing and wondering where did all these people come from and the whole idea of adults who never grew up being such a large percentage of the population.

As a writer she could also tell how the only time she is ever comfortable anymore is holding a guitar.

Anne Animas lives, writes and hides out in Southern Colorado.

 

Filed Under: FICTION

Safari So Good

November 29, 2018 By admin

I had two big reservations about our Kenya Safari.

  1. Could I stand all the air travel?
  2. Could I stand the other tourists in our group?

Our itinerary from our home in southwest Florida was: Tampa, Philadelphia, London, Nairobi.  Two hours to the Tampa airport from our house, 24 hours on various airplanes and layovers in airports. A total of thirty hours of travel!

Nancy has no trouble sleeping on planes. She is often dozing before the plane leaves the gate.  I’m not so lucky. I’m 6′ 5″ and 250 lbs.  I just can’t get comfortable sitting in an “economy” seat.

I loaded up my phone with podcasts, bought an Amazon Fire tablet with audiobooks and games that didn’t require WiFi. I had battery backups to last 24 hours.

The plane from Tampa to Philadelphia was an Airbus 320. The seats were OK. I jinxed us by commenting: “If I have this much room all the way, I think I can make it.”  I had about three inches between my knees and the seat in front of me. Doable. Even if the seat was reclined.

Yeah, didn’t happen.

The British Airways segments were all Boeing 474’s. “Jumbo Jets” they used to be called. A plane that has been in the air 50 years. I suspect the planes we were on were among the first to fly. Now they are “Cattle Cars” for economy class passengers.

I wear hearing aids. I knew that putting earbuds in with aids probably wouldn’t work, so I packed some old headphones that lay on top of the ear. Not the fancy new over the ear headphones that everyone else had… so they didn’t block out the engine noise. Closed captioning was an option for the first run movies, but it was so small – I couldn’t read it!  ARGH.  The hearing problem kiboshed my audiobook and podcast options. With the volume set as high possible, I just couldn’t understand.

My entertainment for 30 hours +/- of flying consisted of — staring at things. Nancy dozing, the people around me dozing or watching movies/television programs, the back of the seat, the flight attendants.

We toyed with the idea of spending a day in London to break up the trip. We did – and it was excellent advice. I may not have made it from London to Nairobi otherwise.

After the thirty minutes into our first game drive on the third day in Kenya we looked at each other and said “It was worth it.”

The answer to Question 1 is “yes.” The answer to Question 2 is to be determined.

Mark Van Patten writes a blog called Going Like Sixty and has been married to the same woman since 1968.

Filed Under: TRAVEL

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