The Right Person For the Job

Imagine you have a problem with the electrical wiring in your home. You call a company that advertises as an electrical contractor. However, it turns out the owner of the company is not an electrician. He's a guy who used to manage a pizza place, and he often talks about the "concepts of electricity."

You're not worried, because he won't be doing the actual work. He just hired a head electrician. Until recently, this guy was a swimming instructor. He has never attended a trade school to learn the electrician's craft, but he does have several family members who are plumbers or carpenters, and claims to have some important ideas about electricity.

There is another recently-hired electrician who is actually a lawyer, not a licensed electrician. He writes a blog explaining that county building codes do not protect public safety. He thinks building inspectors should be replaced by yoga instructors and nutritionists.

The third employee was a licensed electrical contractor, but his license expired three years ago. According to Yelp reviews, he often tells customers that spaghetti is a good substitute for copper wire.

Knowing all this, would you go ahead and hire this company, or would you look elsewhere?

 

Cheating is Hard Work

When I was in college I had a 4.0 GPA. I'm not a genius! The main difference between me and the guys who flunked out was that I paid attention in class, and I studied.

Once in algebra class, after a big test, everyone was comparing grades. Most of the people around me had scores below 60. Mine was 85. One guy asked me how I did it. I explained to him that I had spent approximately 16 hours studying. "Well then, you deserve it," he said. He looked very sad, though. I think he had been hoping I would reveal some magic trick that anyone could do. Actually, that's what it was.

Later, when I became a teacher, I noticed there were many students who believed the only way they could get good grades was by cheating. They would put a lot of energy into devising clever ways of cheating. Sometimes they got away with it, but in the long run they did not do well, because they didn't learn much. They were never able to pass the carefully proctored final exams.

If only they had taken all the time, effort, and ingenuity that went into cheating and used it for actual studying, they would have easily graduated with honors. Instead they had to take classes over, and some never graduated.

 

Call Back Later

There was a time when all our phones were landlines. We didn't call them landlines; we just called them phones. They were attached to the wall by cords. Some people equipped their phones with extra long cords so they could walk across the room while talking.

My friend Char, who lived in a small studio apartment, had a cord long enough that she could get to any spot in the apartment while she was on the phone. On a couple of occasions, while we were conversing, I heard the toilet flush.

"If you're going to use the toilet while we're talking," I told her, "I don't want to know. Please flush after we hang up."

Now that everyone has a mobile phone, it seems that making calls from the toilet is a common practice. I notice this in public restrooms, where I often hear the person in the next stall chatting away. Some women like to use the handicap stall as a phone booth. (These are probably the same people who use it as a dressing room.)

At home, it doesn't occur to me to carry my phone into the bathroom. In a public place, my phone is in my purse and goes where I go. If it rings while I'm busy, I don't answer.

Some people, though, can't resist answering a call. And if the call of nature happens simultaneously with the call of the phone, they multitask. Some see their toilet time as an opportunity for privacy, and schedule their calls accordingly.

A recent study suggests the 39 percent of people take their phones to the washroom, and that nearly half of those people have dropped the phone into the toilet. This isn't good for the phones. I once managed to accidentally drop my phone into a glass of water, just a week after I got it. Fortunately, it was insured, and I got a quick replacement. As silly as I felt at the time, how much more embarrassed would I have been if the phone had vanished into the commode?

Although the obvious solution is to stop making calls in the bathroom, it seems unlikely people will change that bevavior. I suggest wearing the phone on a lanyard. Many people have already thought of this, and there is a wide choice of suitable products available from all the usual places.

 

Who's Listening?

My college friend Eleni had both sets of grandparents who were immigrants from Greece. Both her parents grew up bilingual, speaking mostly Greek at home, and English in the world.

Describing her childhood, Eleni told me how annoyed she was by her parents and all her older relatives, because when she was little, they spoke Greek as a way of keeping secrets from the kids. "It was rude and sneaky," she grumbled. "They treated us like we didn't have the right to know what was happening."

One day I had a conversation with Eleni's mother. Reminiscing about the past and the days when her children were younger, she told me she felt sorry that her kids had never learned to speak Greek. "We tried to encourage them," she said. "We would often speak Greek around them, hoping they would pick it up, or that they would get curious and want to learn it. But they never did."