So many of us are trying to manage the busy-ness of the four week sprint between Thanksgiving and Christmas with the aid of technology. Yet I’m beginning to wonder if electronic calendars really assure productivity, or if they simply create the illusion that we can do more with the twenty-four hours that make up a [...]
Nowadays Clancy’s is open, but if you passed by any other time of year, you’d think it had gone out of business. And it has, except for the turnips. When I moved here to Eastham a dozen years ago, Clancy’s was a thriving farm stand. It was always manned by a member of the family [...]
An editorial cartoon recently appeared in the local paper showing a massive traffic jam. In the picture, one driver is standing on the roof of his car, looking off into the distance at lines of cars that stretch as far as the eye can see. Heads are popping up through moon roofs. A sad-faced man [...]
Reading Robert Sullivan’s, The Thoreau You Don’t Know, recently inspired me to visit the Concord Museum in Concord, Massachusetts. The museum contains the furnishings from Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond along with a replica of Emerson’s study, and it is easy to imagine the two of them there engaged in lively conversation. Thanks to the [...]
I usually look forward to business slowing down a bit in the summer, but this year, when my workload started to slacken, I caught myself starting to worry (probably because I wrote a column about it last month), thinking “What if—?” You know the rest! Right? So I stepped into my husband’s office and asked [...]
Months ago, in the early stages of the economic downturn we’re in now, I read a report in the New York Times that over half of working adults were worried about losing their job. My instincts tell me that this proportion has significantly risen since then. Let’s face it—it’s hard to rest easy when giants [...]
Have you ever watched a movie you really liked for the third or fourth time and all of a sudden seen something there you never saw before? It happened to me the other night watching The Insider. On previous viewings, I’d been so caught up in the drama I didn’t realize that The Insider is [...]
When unemployment figures are announced, the media takes up the challenge of trying to show what x% of joblessness looks like in human terms, and the images they choose are predictable—long lines of applicants trying to get into job fairs, rows of jobseekers at computers in job centers busily scanning listings. These pictures reinforce the [...]
When you tell people you live on Cape Cod, they often tell you you’re lucky, and for three-fourths of the year, they’re right. What they don’t know—and you do, after you’ve lived here long enough to experience a few Aprils when the daffodils seem to shiver in the cold rain and the forsythia refuses to [...]
As we were leaving, one of the guests turned to me and said, ” hope I don’t have to use your services!” I felt as if someone had just thrown a bucket of ice water on me. It was the first time I had ever had anyone talk about dreading the prospect of coming to [...]
It’s important for me to get out of the office on a regular basis and talk with groups of people who, in the neat language of business jargon, are part of a statistic called “job churn,” the movement of people in and out of the labor market. Right now, churn—which suggests violent splashing—is making us [...]
Judging from conversations I’m having these days with loved ones of those who have suddenly found themselves unemployed, or fear that they might be, there are a lot of people entering 2009 with concerns about another person’s employment status. While we all recognize that it’s difficult being the one out there looking for work, we [...]
