duck hunting journal
The hunter in the Jurassic work
Hunter at work JURASSIC
Lately, I have felt very much like Gregor Samsa.
Gregor, the main character of Franz Kafka's metamorphosis, El, he woke up one morning to find he had been transformed into a giant insect. I woke up one morning and discover that somehow had become a dinosaur.
For over 30 years, had been in the business of newspapers. I learned to report the who, what, when, where and why thousands of stories. I owned and operated two weekly newspapers and have developed an instinct for creating print advertising.
Then one morning, I opened my eyes to find I had become little more than an interesting curiosity in the fossil history of American labor: a kind of duck-billed dinosaur, persevering to along the high speed road work today, "world of hunting.
The ability to write a series of clear and concise phrases (including verb and real names), had suddenly become an asset infinitely less valuable than the ability to "Twitter".
It is not a good start to my day and things would get worse.
I realized that if they "chirp" on Twitter.com was a hot commodity on the market work, then blogs, was an even hotter.
It is true that blogging is incredibly democratic form of communication. Anyone with a computer (or even a mobile phone), now can blog on the Internet. Trivial little things like grammar, spelling, data verification and no editorial oversight are prerequisites for reaching a mass audience. That scares me. Poor spelling errors grammar and lack of fact checking bothers me, but all the bad writing out there now that really scares the pants off me.
And speaking of scary stuff at the time of light early this morning in particular, have filled my bedroom, George W. Memorial recession Bush was beating the economy, with all the sound and the fury he could muster. Obviously, I thought, this was more than a tale told by an idiot. It was an economic tsunami created by one four years before, had actually voted for the idiot in chief.
At this point, I decided I'd better take the example of Kafka's character and counting my legs. Fully expecting the worst, I was relieved to find that it still had only two, but I could not help noticing a kind of soft feeling in the stomach. As a cricket about to enter a ballroom full of flamenco dancers, I suddenly had the feeling that my life was going to get easier.
Bush's recession had already beaten my business so hard that I was forced to close. My staff and I were all working in a less-than-receptive job market.
I had been able to get a job as director of the "creative" for a small retailer Internet, but it was a match made in heaven.
For starters, I am a dyed in the wool type of Macintosh computer and was the first operation PC.
Gertrude Stein was right when he wrote that "a rose is a rose is a rose", but unless she had been eating at some of Alice B. Toklas' s famous brownies, Gertrude good times would never have said that a computer is a computer is a computer.
(Most of us in publishing the Mac had chosen decades ago, because the best publishing software at the time was written for Mac only. Add to that the fact that they are smart, nimble and intuitive. PC, even in its best days are clumsy and counterintuitive. I mean, when you want to shut down a PC, you still you have to click the icon on top!)
In any case, my life in this on-line retailer of PCs in the world was dominated, In a word, miserable. The work lasted a month and now I'm looking again.
As I search the Internet job sites each day, has become painfully obvious to me that although journalism and publishing can still be based Mac, not one of them is the employment of those days. In fact, the business of newspapers seems to be heading toward extinction outright something like light speed.
The rest of the business seems to do only a little better, but as some online retailer that has also embraced the evil empire of the PC and is not good news for me.
(Actually, I can face the PC itself, but all subsequent programs that serve to make the particular platform lets me buffalo.)
Take, for example, the spreadsheet.
For me, a spreadsheet sounds like something one would expect from a cabinet clothing. Somehow, he managed to run a publishing business for 30 years, dozens of people working, bought a house and generally led a life of dignity for all without the benefit of an Excel spreadsheet.
He had also written thousands of articles, read by millions of people, not knowing what was a PowerPoint presentation.
In today's job market, however, employers are demanding experience in Excel, PowerPoint and a multitude of other programs that I never knew were there.
Then there is the matter of foreign languages.
Though it took me four years of the French when my partner and I dinosaurs roamed the school yards, today's employers want people who speak in something called HTML.
For the uninitiated, HTML is the code that tells your computer how you want to display your blog, website or other online content: what you want in bold, you want paragraph breaks, so images to display and so on.
If you're 30 years or less, you can probably read the HTML code faster than you can read a sign that you zoom past at 55 mph. If you are over 40 years of age, probably same HTML code looks like the results of some office prankster sticking a ball Cyrillic on an old IBM Selectric typewriter.
If, like me, has more 50, the HTML is much closer to what would be obtained REALLY puts the proverbial one hundred monkeys in front of a hundred typewriters, hoping to return to create the complete works of Shakespeare. No sense at all.
It would have better luck trying to decipher the Maya hieroglyphs of Tikkal.
However, I guess I have a slightly better in my hands that poor Gregor Samsa. In its metamorphosis progressed, it was no longer able to communicate at all with anyone in their environment and ultimately his death. Alone.
I still have the opportunity to make my voice heard.
Okay, may sound to some like a distant echo of some duck-billed dinosaurs of the early Jurassic period, but it is very possible that there is an employer out there who remembers the days when the actual words were the HTML or text messages from your day.
Should it be that luck, probably would try to come across a more modern variety of dinosaurs and send this simple message:
<span>
<p> NEWS
<font size="3" face="Times">
</ Font>
Dude! UK recruitment?
NEWS </ p>
<span>
About the Author
Newspaper and magazine owner, Tom Lloyd, has 30 years of publishing experience under his considerable belt….and no hair left on his head to prove it.
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