Monthly Archives: July 2014

Cell Phones–A Modern Day Wonder or a Modern Day Curse?

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Do you have a cell phone? I do; it’s very useful indeed and I wouldn’t be without it. I’m no Luddite, either, so I have a reasonably up to date Smart Phone and certainly don’t make the oft heard cry from oldies like me “but I only want it to make calls”; Internet on the go? Yes please!

But I’ve been heard much about the negative side of cell phones recently. or rather the negative side of the people that use them. Can it be true that something so innovate and useful can be brought into disrepute by ignorant users?

Sadly it is true.

I read today about some research done by a restaurant owner in New York City who, it’s claimed, studied a ten year old tape from a night’s business in his restaurant against a recent night’s business. He discovered, much to his horror, that increasing delays in serving his clientele were attributable to most of his customers using their phones before during and after their meals. Their distraction caused delays to the restaurant process and significantly increased turn around times and, interestingly, complaints from customers about tardy service. Oh the irony!

I went to a little dinner party a couple of months ago; five people enjoying good food and excellent conversation. Until, that is, one of the party received a text on his cell phone. His attention was lost and he buried himself in his LCD screen for a minute or so, without a word of apology to his host, and only returned to the company when he’d transacted his business. I thought that pretty rude. Then all the phones came out (except mine!) and people spent some considerable time proving that their external business was more important than the business in the room.

My step-son has a Smart Phone and it seems to be permanently in his hand. Worse than that, he cannot stop his eyes drifting to the screen every couple of seconds. Have a conversation with him and ten seconds in, his attention is elsewhere, and it’s the same for all kids of his age.

The same step-son was actually abused by a ‘girlfriend’ who heaped her bile upon him via SMS texts, and the boy appeared unable to counter it with the simple press of the ‘Off’ switch, so inured was he into the “constantly on line” culture.

The examples of bad behaviour by cell phones users are everywhere, and the world is a poorer place for it.

It’s easy to become dispirited by the people’s reliance, nay dependence, on these tools. The guy who picked up his texts at the dinner table claims that it “might have been important”, and perhaps it might have been, except who passes on really important messages via text? Anyway, what did he do before the advent of the cell phone? The answer, my friends, is that he’d have had a pleasant and uninterrupted meal as would we.

I’m fighting back, though.

For me, my cell phone is a tool that I control. At the dinner party it was resolutely switched off, as it is at all social functions; there’s nothing wrong with being “unavailable”. If I’m driving, calls and texts go unanswered and even if I’m not driving, if it’s not convenient to me them I’ll ignore the call or text until it is convenient. A ringing phone does not have to be answered. If you have my attention then it will not be distracted by the imposition of an external, unsolicited demand. In short I will not be rude.

It’s a shame that more people don’t remember that they are in control.

To round off, I shall recount a tale from the days when cell phones were quite new. I was on a train in England with my boss and a guy opposite was fiddling with his phone. I think he was expecting a call but he kept pressing the buttons, making calls that weren’t answered and getting more frustrated by the minute. My boss and I both felt that the display was as much for our benefit (Look at me, I have a cell phone!) as his. So, when the call finally came for him he positively beamed. He hit the answer key, started to speak and…

Silence.

We’d gone into a tunnel and he’d lost the signal.

We laughed out loud and enjoyed the man’s strangled look all the way to London.

Job Hunting Hell

12 Saturday Jul 2014

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I’m a fellow of a certain age, not over the hill but I’m a little closer to sixty than I am to fifty. I’ve had a reasonable career in public service and, having jettisoned that for big change in course, I’m now looking for some work to keep me active and to earn a little money.

How hard can that be?

Harder than I’d ever imagined.

It’s a tough employment market out there, I know that. It’s not that I have to work to survive, nor am I seeking to pick up where I left off when changing course. I don’t demand a big salary and I’m pretty flexible about what I’ll do. But why is it so hard to get back into work?

I’ve lost count of the number places that I’ve applied to work; I couldn’t tell you where I have current applications, either, so many have I sent off (in to the ether it would appear). I can, though, count the number of acknowledgements of application on one hand, and I have recorded just one “Thanks but no thanks” letter. The number of interviews offered remains resolutely at zero.

There’s no doubt that my Canadian style resumes and cover letters may have been somewhat off the mark, particularly when I started. They’ve been quite dense, partly because I have much to say and partly because I’m honest, and I think that may have been an issue. I need more white space and more bullet points.

I don’t have a University Degree, which doesn’t help. Its seems that a degree is the key to a lot of jobs, and the fact that I’ve managed thus far without one seems to elude the people making the decisions. My education is from a foreign country, too, and that has some scare value I’m sure.

The biggest resume issue is, though, my age. There are laws about age discrimination but recruiters seem to routinely ignore them and we oldies get automatically overlooked. I’d heard that companies are looking for “thirty year hires” but I really don’t see that. Most companies plan in the short term these days so a three year hire is more likely, but it’s still no more advantageous to the old folk it seems. You’re not supposed to put a date of birth on a resume, with good reason, but when you’re asked to give your educational graduation years then it’s not too hard to work out just how old that applicant is. It might be better if job adverts said that people over fifty need not apply, but that would be illegal, so the hirers just use other means to filter us out.

The issues I’ve raised thus far are only part of the equation, of course. Some of the employers in this part of the world need a really good kick up the backside when it comes to recruiting quality people.

There is a major employer in town who is very prescriptive about requirements and experience needed to get a job with them. Close packed text lists the specific requirements, so tight and so thorough that the only people who could possibly comply would already be working at that company. If that’s the case, why advertise externally? One, public, employer seems to demand such a high level of educational excellence for their new recruits that I wonder how they get anyone at all, especially on the mundane salaries they offer.

Another bugbear is the vocational qualification. There are many healthcare jobs in town but all of them, however menial, require some certificate or diploma obtained at a college somewhere in the Province. I’m all for professional standards, but it rather limits the intake of good new staff when you restrict recruitment to only those who have gone through the vocational education mill.

The biggest and most difficult thing to bear is the wall of silence once you’ve e-mailed that resume. Rarely an acknowledgement and almost never a written rejection; it’s maddening. Certainly, most employers do say that they won’t contact you if you’ve not been selected for interview but, frankly, that’s just not good enough. All applicants put in spades of work when making an application and most prospective employers won’t even acknowledge it, let alone let you know if you don’t make the cut. How hard is it to despatch a two line rejection e-mail? To me it shows what employers think about the great unwashed who are trying to get work; absolutely nothing.

I will round off this diatribe by highlighting one very good experience and one very bad experience. Firstly the bad:

A family member (not me) had been called to an interview for a student’s summer job at a publicly funded body. The call for interview took considerably longer than was promised but it arrived and the person concerned pitched up on time. He answered questions, correctly by the sound of it, and that was it. No further contact whatsoever. It’s shabby treatment at best, but of a fifteen year old, well they should be ashamed that they couldn’t make a thirty second phone call to put the kid out of his misery.

The good was another publicly funded body. I applied on a long shot and my application was acknowledged. They said that they’d not contact applicants who didn’t get an interview but in this case, they did; a two line e-mail, for which I was eternally grateful. Thanks but no thanks is so much better than silence.

I’m still plugging away, I have a few applications in (on modified resumes – white space, bullet points!) so we’ll see what happens. I don’t hold out any hope but heck, something has to stick at some point, doesn’t it?

The Broader Picture

10 Thursday Jul 2014

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Love it or loathe it, the Internet has made the world a smaller place. Instant communication, relatively uncontrolled for many of us, has revolutionised the way we think.

It occurred to me the other day that I have been exposed to so many more opinions than my parents would ever have had access to. Yes, they’d have been able to read books and newspapers, listen to the radio and watch the television, but the opinions there were always filtered through an editorial process and was always subject to the whim of a publisher (or Government, of course).

The Internet though, for me in the “free” world, doesn’t always have those filtering processes applied. Yes, owners of on-line publishing outlets do apply their editorial policy and ownership prejudices, but those who comment on pieces published are not too often reigned in.

There are, of course, acceptable standards applied at particular access point to the World Wide Web. I’m sure if I were to publish something that was abhorrent to the standards that apply to my locality then at best I might have my work removed, at worst I may get visit from the authorities. But I’m not talking about extremes here, I’m talking about normal human reaction; opinions that in the past may never have been aired because they didn’t fit the editorial or ownership policy. It’s those things that have broadened my outlook somewhat, albeit that opinion is good, bad and just plain wacky.

Let me offer you an example. After the terrible tragedy of Sandy Hook, I read many articles from professional reporters and commentators, all of them angled in one way or another to reflect the view of the writer or the organisation they represented. It was the comments from ordinary people that absolutely staggered me. I’m from the UK and I live in Canada, both democracies that believe in stringent gun control, but here I was reading people who genuinely believed that the way to reduce gun violence is to arm more people. They were saying “Give the teachers guns so that they can take down gunmen before too many kids get killed”. That kind of view is an absolute anathema to me; where I come from you take guns away to reduce the risk, not the other way around. But thinking about it now, at least I have been exposed to those views and am beginning to understand more about a people for whom gun ownership is important.

A similar exercise in the incredulous for me is when I hear comments about healthcare being delivered by Government and paid for by taxes. My background is the British welfare state and healthcare free to users at the point of delivery, but I read commentators every day suggesting that to use taxes to provide healthcare is, well, criminal – “Don’t put a gun to my head to make me pay for someone else’s healthcare” were words I saw written just yesterday. This opinion, widely held in the US, just doesn’t compute for a Brit who lives in a another country where healthcare is also provided by taxation.

I’m not getting into the semantics of whether I agree with someone else’s opinion or not, but it is educational (to say the least) to read and learn how others think. Instant publication of opinion through the Internet may not always be entirely palatable to me, but to have access to such opinion is priceless.