Travel agents? They're advisers now, and they're making a comeback.

In August 1972, my college roommate and I set off on a cross-country adventure in her little green Karmann Ghia.

To find our way, we followed a route laid out in the AAA Trip Tik, augmented by (free) maps we picked up at gas stations along the way. 

Other than staying a few days with my grandmother in Chicago, we mostly camped, both at commercial KOA campgrounds, or in state or national parks. Occasionally - in Las Vegas, in New Orleans - we stayed in hotels. I don't remember how we found out about any of these places. Were they in the Trip Tik? Did we research them at the library? There may have been some sort of (free) national parks campgrounds book, and we likely had a guidebook with us.  

The next year, when we trekked (car-less) across Europe, we definitely had a guidebook, the Harvard Student Agencies' Let's Go Europe! I think we also had Arthur Frommer's Europe on Five Dollars a Day. 

We camped and hosteled, and - to get around - hitchhiked, with an occasional train or ferry ride. 

To get to Europe, we flew BOAC (now British Airways) from Logan to Heathrow. We picked up our tickets (which cost $206 if you were a student or under the age of 26) at the BOAC outlet in the Park Square Building.

In big cities, most of the airlines had storefronts where you could make reservations and pick up your tickets. In Boston, a lot of them were in the Park Square Building. 

I guess if you weren't in a big city, you had to use a travel agent. Which I did sometimes.

I remember - late 1970's? early 1980's? - planning some trip at Crimson Travel in Harvard Square, and setting up another trip at a long-gone travel agent on Beacon Hill, a few doors up from where I live now. That Beacon Hill visit must have been in 1976, because I remember the travel agent explaining to us that we could get a cheap flight - to where, I don't recall - using something called the "Bicentennial Nightly" program.

Mostly, however, for personal travel, I was - even in those pre-Internet days - a DYI traveler. Called the airlines to make reservations. Picked up the tickets at the airline's office. Bought guidebooks - Fodor's, Frommer's - and sent faxes (if memory serves) to make hotel reservations. 

Business travel was another story entirely. 

Companies of any size whatsoever had a corporate travel department. Smaller outfits worked with a travel agency like Crimson. 

You put in your request for a trip - through your group's admin (those were the days!), and you got a packet with your tickets and hotel reservation info in it. If something got screwed up - your flight was canceled, the hotel was wrong - you called an 800 number and whoever answered the phone (and someone always answered the phone) figured it out for you.

I remember returning from Orlando, sitting in the waiting area when they announced a long delay. Simultaneously, every business traveler hopped up and hit the payphones to get on another flight. Meanwhile, the traveling families, groggy kids in lopsided mouse ears, sat there trying to figure out what to do. Surely, they had made their plans through a travel agency. They just didn't seem to know enough to call them. 

And then the Internet changed everything.

All of a sudden, even if your company still had a travel office, you found yourself making your own reservations. It was just easier and more straightforward than going through an intermediary. (Or at least that's what we were convinced of. Sort of like it's easier and more straightforward to pump your own gas and bag your own groceries.)

And travel agents - other than for tours, niche travel, or luxury trips - seemingly went the way of the dodo bird. 

Dodo bird? 

Not so fast.

...the recent jumble of airline cancellations, staffing shortages, lost luggage, and fluctuating COVID-19 restrictions has helped buoy a profession many long perceived to be on the wane: the travel adviser.

“Suddenly, I feel like I’m in vogue again,” said Susan Bowman, a Toronto-based travel adviser. “It’s been a remarkably busy summer, and I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. It’s been a renaissance for us.”

At last week’s Virtuoso Travel Week, an annual gathering of 5,000 luxury travel advisers in Las Vegas, the talk wasn’t about clients lost to websites such as Travelocity and Expedia. Instead, for the first time in nearly a decade, the scuttlebutt was about record demand, full schedules, and pruning client lists as the need for travel advisers balloons. It’s the biggest thing to happen in the industry since travel agents officially rebranded themselves travel advisers in 2018. Agent or adviser, the bottom line is that they’re swamped. (Source: Boston Globe)

The demand for agents/advisers at the high end, never went away. But now even plain vanilla, lower-end travelers are using advisers.

“If you book online, who do you call to try to help to get your money back? Or, who do you call to rebook the trip to another time? Those folks that weren’t working with a travel professional learned very quickly how painful and time-consuming it was to try to take care of it themselves,” [Elaine] Osgood [Marlborough-based Atlas Travel] said. “We have cruises that we have booked and rebooked. You lose count after a while.”

I understand the hassle up close and personal.

Although it was a minor inconvenience, I recently had to change flights and hotel to get down to Long Island to visit an old friend who hasn't been well. (I had a covid exposure and had to reschedule my trip.) Booking online was easy-peasy. Changing, not so. Maybe because I went through Orbitz, I had to make the changes directly with the airlines - American on the way down, Jet Blue on the way back. 

American flight change was pretty straightforward, but the Jet Blue one was peculiar. The website said to call, but when I called it said there was a cost to actually speak with someone. If I didn't want to pay, there was a chat option. That worked out fine. Still...

Anyway, I'm happy to see travel agents, errrrrrr, advisers, making a comeback. After all, they've been in decline for quite a while.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of full-time travel agents in the United States dropped from a high of 124,000 in 2000 to around 74,000 in 2014.

The bureau put the number of full-time travel agents at 70,000 in 2019 and projected the industry would lose 25 percent of its workforce by 2029. 

No numbers yet, but the decline seems to have ended, and the profession is on the upswing. Agencies are hiring, and travelers are deciding it's worth it to pay a bit of a premium to have someone to call to solve your travel problems for you.

I'm heading to Ireland next week. A DIY trip. Let's see whether I live to regret that I didn't find a travel adviser to pull it all together for me. Maybe even find the 2022 version of the Bicentennial Nightly fare. 

Imagine you found yourself homeless

Brandon Bradford is a political consultant and one of the folks I follow on Twitter. He recently posted this:

Periodic question: If you woke up homeless, hungry, with $20 to your name, and had none of the connections you have now, how would you get off the streets?

There were 4,000+ responses, and I flipped through enough of them to get a sense that the responding tweeters were mostly earnest and/or thoughtful and/or full of hubris and/or woefully naive.

It all got me thinking about what I might do.

Because I live in Boston, for starters, I'm going with waking up homeless, hungry and with $20 to my name in Boston, which has better support and services than most places. And, although, according to the thought experiment I've lost all my connections, I'm going with I'd still have my awareness of the shelter system and, at least at a high level, how it works.

So the first thing I'd do is get me to St. Francis House, Boston's largest day shelter, where I've been involved for years (as a 25-year board member until last September, as an occasional volunteer during that time, and as an active, regular volunteer since 2016.

I love St. Francis House, especially my interactions with guests when I sign them up for showers, hand them a toothbrush or clean undies, or ask whether they want salad on their lunch tray. (My regular SFH gig is in the Resource Center - showers, toiletries, computers, phones, etc.  - but I also do at least one shift a week serving in the kitchen, and occasionally work in the clothing department.)

Once I got to SFH and grabbed breakfast or lunch or an in-between sandwich, I'd ask to talk to a case worker who could help me navigate "the system," advising me on how to sign up for whatever aid I'm entitled to - SSI, SNAP benefits (a.k.a. food stamps) - and to get on as many housing lists as I could get on. (SFH has 56 units of single room occupancy housing. Folks get their own room, but share bathroom and kitchen facilities. Before covid, there was a 7 year waiting list to get one of these rooms.)

But navigating the system takes time. 

When I woke up homeless, would I have any ID?

Getting a new ID (Mass License or equivalent, Social Security card) ain't easy - especially if you don't have your birth certificate (especially if you're from another state or - far worse - another country). 

You can hang on the phone for hours - while others are breathing down your neck because they need to use the phone, too - before talking to a human who may or may not be willing and able to help you out. And if they need to call you back, and you don't have a phone, where are they going to call you back? And getting an ID isn't free. That $20 I woke up with? It wouldn't get you very far.

Anyway, a good case manager could help with all this, but case workers are not miracle workers. And even when they manage to work miracles, miracles take time.

So I'd (eventually) get a government ID, and maybe line up some government bennies. In Massachusetts, we have one of the better social safety nets, so I'd be entitled to some income and food assistance. And if I'm lucky, I won't lose the Electronics Benefits Transfer card I'm issued to get my food benefits.

And I'd better have that ID if I want to open a bank account so I can get my Social Security benefits sent there. 

The good news at St. Francis House is that you can get your mail there - including my Social Security check, if I don't have direct deposit.

Insta-homeless, I might just have the clothes on my back, so I'd see if I could get some new duds. The undies would be the same ones I'd get if I were in prison. (Same supplier.) Just the basics: cheap cotton. The socks would be Bombas, which donates a pair of socks for each one they sell. But they wouldn't be the cute colored Bombas socks I wore in my pre-homeless life. They're going to be basic black or white. Nothing wrong with that, but they wouldn't be cute. The other clothing would be a crap shoot, depending on what had been donated. Fortunately, there's usually a pretty good supply of women's clothing, as women - in my experience - are more likely to jettison clothing before it's worn out. 

As a homeless woman, among other things, at St. Francis House, I'd probably be able to procure okay clothing. Maybe not exactly what I wanted - although, since a lot of our donors are middle aged and older Talbot's shoppers, it might be right up my alley - but okay. And I'd probably be able to get a warm enough coat. 

Shoes would be a problem. "Gently used" donated shoes are never great, and they're always in short supply. The new sneakers donated by, say, Converse, probably wouldn't be in my size. And they might be weird ones, that just didn't sell. (Flamingo pattern.) In winter, you might luck out and get a pair of new boots, but shoes and boots are the hardest thing to come by if you're in need. And if you're on the streets, good footwear is the clothing item you're most in need of.

Anyway, before I put on my new clothing, if it's the morning, I'd be able to sign up for a shower. What I'd do with my old, dirty clothing, I have no idea. 

Do I have a backpack I can stow them in until I find a place to wash dirty clothing? (Good luck with that.) Do I have a shopping bag, a garbage bag? Is my original clothing even worth salvaging? 

Even supposing I do have something to carry my stuff in, just how much stuff can I carry around with me?

And the stuff I couldn't carry wouldn't include the stuff I have a sentimental attachment to. Like my grandmother's cookie jar.

Because I'm an elderly woman, I'd actually be more privileged when it comes to services, and I might even scoot to the front of a housing line, so I wouldn't have to spend all that many nights "sleeping" on a cot in a large dorm room in an overnight shelter. Where I'd probably have a nervous breakdown on Night One. Or, worse (maybe) out on the streets, where I'd be physically vulnerable.

There's nothing about being homeless that's easy. There's nothing about being homeless that doesn't take time to resolve.

However smart, competent, and tough you think you are, if you're on the streets, you are up against it.

I've just set out a circumstance in which I somehow manage to take care of my basic needs. (And that's in a state with a strong social safety net, and in a city where there's a reasonably good shelter system. I often talk to folks in the Resource Center who've made their way to Boston from Florida or Georgia - sometimes even in the dead of winter - because they heard they could get better help here.)

Try looking for a job if you don't have a phone, your own computer, an address, clean clothing, or a place to get a get a good night's sleep. Especially if you have (or had) a substance abuse problem and/or mental illness and/or major health problems and/or you just got out of jail and/or you don't have much of an employment track record and/or you've burnt every bridge you've ever walked over.

When we learn that one of our regulars has found a job or a place to live, we literally jump for joy. The only downside is that we don't tend to see them after that happens. Oh, the regulars we've gotten to know may show up for a meal or some clothing for a while, but they're not as dependent on us on a daily basis. 

So I miss seeing Kenneth, and Deborah, and Darryl, and Mike. And hope their luck is still holding. 

I have zero illusions about how easy it is to wish/work/save your way out of homelessness. I can glibly tick off what I'd do if I found myself on the streets with twenty bucks to my name. But in real life, I'd be frightened, depressed, and stressed out of my gourd. 

I'm glad there are organizations like St. Francis House. And the Women's Lunch Place. And the Pine Street Inn. 

But, even with all that I know about the resources available to the homeless in Boston, even with all the strengths I'm equipped with, the idea of being homeless and contactless is something I can't wrap my head around. 

All honor to those who manage to rebuild their lives and make their way out of the terrible experience that is homelessness. And all sympathy to those who aren't there yet, and may never get there.

Good question, Brandon. Thanks for asking it. 

AITA? No, hon, you most assuredly are not

Here's what I know about Game of Thrones, all of it picked up through the culture ether:

• It was a fantasy multi-year cable series.
• Written by someone named George Martin.
  
• Acronym'd: GOT. 
• There were characters named Arya and Daenerys.
• One of the characters was a dwarf.
• Or was played by a dwarf.
• The ending was controversial.
• Lots of people lived and breathed it.

Among those who lived and breathed GOT is a couple who decided to have a GOT-themed wedding.

Now, I'm no authority on weddings, to put it mildly, but I find the idea of a themed wedding a bit strange. Sure, pick a color scheme for the bridesmaids' dresses and the groomsmen's ties, and extend the color scheme to the flowers. Maybe even have a light theme - a little bit country - and pick the theme up in the decorations (wildflowers in Mason jars). But a Disney-themed wedding, where all the bridesmaids are Disney princesses, and - I guess - the groomsmen are the seven dwarves - or whatever - INCLUDE ME OUT>

The GOT wedding was going to go beyond, say, a run of the mill Harry Potter wedding where everyone carries a wand and munches on Bertie Bott's Jelly Beans. Or where all the guests are instructed to wear Wizard of Oz or Great Gatsby costumes. 

The GOT wedding was a destination event, which means people were going to have to pay to get there. And it was going to be conducted in the High Valyrian, GOT's invented language. The ceremony was going to be in High Valyrian, and all the speeches and toasts at the reception were going to be in HV. 

And the bride was also sending guests links to Duolingo, where they could/should learn High Valyrian. 

The GOT wedding came to my attention by way of Twitter, where tweeters occasionally post items that come up on Reddit's AITA. AITA stands for Am I The Asshole, and folks write in to describe a situation and their response to it, and crowdsource an answer on whether they're being an asshole or not. 

If you're not familiar with AITA, which is generally outrageous and often quite funny, here's how they describe the forum:

[AITA] is a catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument that's been bothering you. Tell us about any non-violent conflict you have experienced; give us both sides of the story, and find out if you're right, or you're the asshole. (Source: Reddit/AITA)

The question posed to Reddit world was: AITA for not wanting to attend a Game of Thrones themed wedding? [Note: the questioner had initially said she'd attend, but that was before the bride let her know that she wanted the guest to learn High Valyrian.] 

The verdict: Not the A-hole

By looking through the responses, I learned a bit more about Game of Thrones. 

I was not surprised to learn that GOT was pretty violent. I had pretty much surmised that. But hadn't picked up on it being violent towards women. Which seems to make GOT a questionable theme for a wedding. 

I also learned that there have been plenty of GOT-themed weddings, and a lot of responders have been to them, if not had one.

At these, and at non-themed weddings where the bride and groom are fans nonetheless, the song "Rains of Castamere," a GOT theme song is commonly played as the processional/recessional. "Rains of Castamere", on the show, "was played right before a bunch of people were murdered at a wedding. It’s the signature song of the family that orchestrated the murdering."

Wow! What a swell party this is!

I'm all for special songs that mean something to the couple. First dance to "At Last"? Sweet!

But "Rains of Castamere," which, admittedly, I'd never heard of before I started looking through AITA? Sounds right up there with couples that use "Every Breath You Take" somewhere along the line.. Nothing says lovin' like a creepy stalker song. 

Sure, I can see how folks who are completely in to something - a show, a sport, an historical event, a common hobby - might want to have a theme wedding. And friends and family might enjoy getting into it, especially if they shared whatever the obsessions is. But the idea of schlepping to a destination wedding where I was asked to wear a costume and learn a language I'd never use again is just beyond my ken. 

So I'm with the majority: the poster asking the question is not an asshole. 

And whether I'm an a-hole or not - it's up for debate - I'm pretty sure I'm never going to watch Game of Thrones. 

Treed

I grew up in the era of free range children. I also grew up in a house that was next to the woods. So there was ample opportunity for tree-climbing.

While I did my share of roaming around as a kid, I was never an extreme physical daredevil. Oh, I clambered over rocks. I loved going like lightning on an icy flying saucer run. I was as raucous as all the other kids running around in packs. I snuck into Mr. Downey's creepy, falling-down garage and pawed through the junk stored there. But I always had a fear of heights, so I wasn't much of a tree-climber.

By the time I was ten feet up, I was pretty much done for. And I didn't get that high, that often. I was okay reaching a treehouse if the kids who built it nailed climbing boards to the trunk. Free form climbing, not so much.

I much preferred playing on a tree that had fallen down.

One in particular was a colossal old tree that had fallen down in a nearby field - a field that shortly thereafter was developed into a nursing home. (Now that I think of it, the tree might have been knocked down to make way for said nursing home.)

Anyway, it was there for months, and the raucous neighborhood pack took it over. Who needed slides, swings, and jungle gyms when we had this old tree. We dubbed it Dinny the Dinosaur, and it made a spectacular climbing and play structure. You could rock on Dinny's branches. Ride his back and pretend he was a bucking bronco. Dinny could be a train, a boat, a plane, a fort, a castle - whatever we needed at the time. Alas, I sprained my knee - pretty badly - falling off of Dinny. But up until then...

Thanks to Dinny, most of my tree-climbing was horizontal, not vertical.

But real tree-climbers are of the vertical persuasion. And some of them are even professional.

Pros like Andrew Joslin.

Joslin has been climbing high into trees since 2005, inspired by an article about researchers who had pioneered a way to get 200 feet up into redwood trees to study the unknown world in their canopies. Long a serious birder, Joslin began cobbling together an education in “recreational tree climbing” and spent his early years figuring it all out on tall trees in tucked-away spots. Soon, he was putting others up on ropes, and today he estimates he’s put hundreds of people into canopies. (Source: Boston Globe)

Two-hundred feet you say? That would be about 190 feet above and beyond my high-arbor mark.

Joslin is 66 now, and this amateur tree-climbing passion that arrived in his late 40s has long since become professional. He makes his living from a combination of teaching through his Tall Pines Tree School and freelance work for commercial tree companies, climbing to places many can’t reach. Then there is his side work rescuing cats from trees — even indoor cats have four-wheel drive to get up a tree, he says, but unless they learned when they were young, they don’t know how to claw down the same way. He also does a lot of work with wildlife officials returning birds to nests they’ve fallen out of.

In his Linkedin profile, Joslin calls himself a "professional arboreal aeronaut." I'm not quite sure what it means, but we should all be fortunate enough to be able to come up with a job title like that. And an actual job to come with it.

Joslin's also an artist, who worked for many years for IBM as a visual designer.

But that was then, and this is now. And now Joslin's all in on arboreal aeronaut-ness and his Tall Pines Tree School, which:

...is dedicated to teaching the art of tree climbing using rope and harness. The school was founded by recreational tree climber and arborist Andrew “Moss” Joslin. Our purpose is to teach and promote tree climbing as an enjoyable and safe outdoor activity.

I have no desire to get up into the canopy. I'd find those heights way too wuthering. But if Tall Pines Tree School finds a fallen tall pine that I could do an old lady, Dinny the Dinosaur clamber over, I might give that a whirl...

Starving artists? Not if Trader Joe's can help it.

Not that I ever tried it, but I do know that being a purist "in the arts" is a tough way to make a living. Writer, poet, singer, actor, sculptor, painter, dancer. Whatever floats your creative boat is unlikely to make you rich or famous. 

Some get to keep at it because their spouse or parents are willing and able to support their habit. 

Some forge careers that are creative-adjacent. They churn out marketing materials when they'd rather be writing the Great American Novel. (Been there, done that.) They keep their day job and participate in community theater. They're Sunday singers-in-the-choir. Sunday painters.

Most "creatives" that I know consider the arts their hobby or a retirement career, OR they juggle a lot of balls to keep their creative life going (adjunct professor, anyone?).

But some artists, as it turns out, get to be artists if they work for Trader Joe's. 

You probably know the idiosyncratic chain for its eccentric snacks and peppy cashiers, but that festive atmosphere extends to the stores’ interior design, too: Each of the 500-plus outposts has custom, handmade signage, all created by staff artists. Your grocery store is their art gallery. (Source: Washington Post)

This is the art work that greets you when you enter the TJ's nearest to me, which is in Boston's Back Bay. You can't miss it, as when you enter this Trader Joe's, you need to take the escalator (de-escalator?) down a flight to get to the store, which is subterranean.

Maybe if I shopped there more frequently, this artwork would have grown invisible to me. But I only stop in every once in a while and I always notice it. And always get a kick out of the baseball theme. This is Red Sox territory, and the Back Bay store isn't that far from Fenway Park - maybe a ten minute walk.

What I hadn't known was that one of their employees created it.

Zoe Terrell is the artist in residence at the store in Athens, Georgia. 

As what Trader Joe’s calls a “crew member with sign making talent” (we’ll just call them sign artists), Terrell, 40, spends much of her workday at the Athens, Ga., store wielding a paint pen in a backroom studio. She makes signs to promote products with puns like “Hot Grill Summer” and creative drawings such as the Powerpuff Girls reimagined as vegetables. She paints murals that represent the local area, University of Georgia sports teams or the surrounding rural landscape. 

The pay may not be great. As far as I can tell, sign-making doesn't earn you much of a premium over whatever Trader Joe's pays entry level cashiers.  (In Massachusetts, that's $17.39 per hour.) And the sign artists, when they're not arting, work as shelf stockers and cashiers. Still:

...for many, it’s the stable art job they never thought they’d have.

“I always tell everybody, it’s probably the best entry-level artist position that has a steady paycheck, good benefits and everything,” says Dan Kaufeldt, a 35-year-old sign artist in Sacramento, who has been with the company for 16 years...

Kaufeldt left art school because it was too expensive, but working at Trader Joe’s was a welcome, if unexpected, alternative: “Where else can I just sit down and draw all day?”

Probably not many other places. While so much commercial art has been digitized, it might seem absurd that Trader Joe’s still pays people to hand-draw cartoons of dancing potatoes to sell a new type of chips. 

But it's all in keeping with Trader Joe's friendly and personal brand, which extends to letting the artists do their thing. 

So the artists aren't just asked to draw a dancing potato. They're given a lot of creative leeway. Trader Joe's doesn't want all their stores to look a like. That's part of their appeal. You want bland nothingness? Go to Walmart. You want to feel that you're in a place that's got more personality, where you get a sense of the neighborhood? Shop at Trader Joe's. (And even though TJ's appeals to an audience that overlaps quite a bit with Whole Foods', the TJ prices are generally cheaper than those at Whole Wallet.)

Working as a sign artist lets artists be artists while earning a living, however minimum-wagey and minimal that living might be. They can hone their craft and, with a little luck and a little pluck, branch out to working other gigs.

Anyway, next time I'm in Trader Joe's, I'll have to pay more attention to the in-store, occasional signage, not just to the entryway. Who knows, maybe the cashier will be the person who created them, and I'll be able to relay my compliments to the artist.

Meanwhile, Trader Joe's employees get a discount on their groceries. So if you're one of their sign-makers, you won't have to worry about being a starving artist. 

So, how do these algorithms work?

When ads pop up, I can usually figure out why.

I live in sneakers. I walk a lot, and even if I'm just hanging around the house, they're my default. So I go through a few pairs a year. 

I buy good ones - New Balance, Asics, Brooks, etc.  - and I like to have a little fun with colors. So I'm always out there looking to see what colors are on offer.

As a result, a lot of sneaker ads popup.

I get it.

The feet I put in those sneakers are flat. So I'm often grazing around for orthotics or arch-binders or other items to relieve the stress on my poor fallen arches. 

As a result, a lot of arch-y ads popup.

I get it.

One of my clients is an embedded systems engineering company. I'm off and on their website.

As a result, ads for their boards pop up. (Which is too bad because, while I do buy sneakers and arch-binders, I'm never going to be in the market for a system-on module.)

But I get it.

Back to the clothing world, in keeping with the sneaker look, I dress pretty casually, living in jeans, khakis, sweats. Tee-shirts, fleece. I no longer buy a ton of clothing, but a lot of what I do buy is from L.L. Bean.

As a result, a lot of L.L. Bean ads pop up.

I get it.

There are times when you pretty much HAVE to order stuff from Amazon. Silicone lubricant for my treadmill. Speaking of silicone, that silicone Le Creuset handle sleeve. For the new Le Creuset skillet. (Love it. Perfect for making the perfect frittata.) Goody bags and goodies to celebrate Juneteenth at St. Francis House. Etc. 

As a result, a lot of Amazon ads pop up.

I get it.

But what am I to make of the ads the appear with fair regularity, on my Twitter timeline, for Oscar De La Renta gowns, coming through Lyst, a "global fashion search engine"?

Why me?

I'll confess to ordering an occasional pricey sweater from Peruvian Connection.

But, unless I was sleep-searching in the middle of the night, I have never searched for a gown, let alone one that costs over $10K.

Why me?

Where would I wear it? The last fancy evening wedding I went to was maybe 20 years ago. I wore a very nice magenta Duponi silk suit from Talbots. I think I paid about $400 for that outfit, which was plenty. The last fancy day wedding I went to was eight years ago. I can't remember what I wore. Maybe that same magenta Duponi silk suit?

For the two non-fancy weddings I've been to in the past decade, I wore an arty dress from the Artful Home catalog. Which may have cost $200, but probably not even that much. 

But fancy-arse $12,000 Oscar De La Renta gowns, and fancy arse $6,000 Oscar De La Renta day dresses. 

Whoa, baby. Someone want to explain to me how these algorithms work.

(And what's with that dress? You'd have to be about 6'4", and 5' of that 6'4" would need to be leg. How does that work?)

I don't get it.

We're keeping score. So tote more barges, lift more bales.

The summer before I started college, I had a plum job working on the assembly line in a shoe factory. Not surprisingly, I was at the end of the line, where the shoes and boots were cleaned up and packed in boxes. The work didn't require the skill level of, say, the leather cutters who cut the hides into shoe and boot pieces, and who were rewarded for using as much of the hide up as humanly possible. But it wasn't entirely unskilled. (Mostly it was lower-paid and female-dominated, unlike the male jobs: cutting, stitching...)

My task was cleaning the boots and finishing their raw edges. Mostly combat boots.

Cleaning the boots required sponging off, with a sponge soaked in acetone, bits of gluey gum that was stuck here and there. Finishing the raw edges was trickier. You used a different sponge to apply shoe polish to those raw edges without dribbling any polish on the boot's innards. 

The boots showed up on racks that held a dozen pairs. Attached to the side of the rack was a piece of cardboard that held the piecework coupons. (Pronounced KEW-pons.) 

By the time the boots arrived at my worktable, most of the coupons had been clipped by the earlier workers. 

For each rack completed, we clipped the coupons and inserted them into a coupon book. At the end of the week, we turned the coupon books in and, if you exceeded the required productivity level, you got a pay boost.

At first, I misunderstood how this worked. I thought that, in addition to the pay - $1.40 an hour, the then minimum wage - I would make extra for each coupon I turned in. 

Not so, as my friend Kim and I found out after we saw our first paycheck. (Kim worked on the table behind me. She was a "heel podder," tasked with gluing the leather heel piece into the boot. Heel podding didn't hold her back. Kim went on to become a partner in one of Boston's most prestigious law firms.)

So we both decided to really turn it on. Working at a furious, work-up-a-sweat pace (needless to say, the factory wasn't air conditioned), we managed to get ourselves up to the minimum expected standard. No extra for us!

After that, we didn't even try to make the rate.

I guess I just wasn't cut out to be a boot polisher, but some of the women I worked around could really go. I remember in particular a Polish woman named Helen. Talk about fast and furious. She probably made another thirty or forty cents an hour, and her work (unlike mine: I slopped a lot of shoe polish on those boot innards). My productivity levels weren't helped by the fact that Helen occasionally eyeballed a rack that I had pushed on to the next stop and rolled it back my way as not being good enough.

Since I wasn't able to achieve the productivity goal, it was fortunate that, halfway through the summer, I was promoted to office work. (I think it was because I wore glasses and knew enough Spanish to tell the Cuban ladies when there was no work on Saturday, which was usually a half day.) Not that I needed much convincing that white collar work was going to be the way to go, but yippee: for office work, I was paid a whopping $1.70. 

When I showed up at the office on my first day - wearing a turquoise cotton pique A-line dress, tottering on a pair of three-inch heels - I found that my first task was operating the tiny rotary printing press used to make the piecework coupons. 

Anyway, not making the piecework rate when I was on the shop floor was pretty much my one and only experience with workplace productivity monitoring. Blessedly.

But fast forward fifty-plus years, and many workers are not so lucky. 

As New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram chronicled in “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score,", productivity monitoring tools are becoming more and more prevalent. 

IN LOWER-PAYING JOBS, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others. Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time, according to an examination by The New York Times.

Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating” and “toxic.” Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said.

The stories are U-G-L-Y ugly. 

A finance executive took a job as a contractor that promised to pay $200 an hour. To her chagrin, she found out that she was only paid for "active work." Reading, thinking, mentoring staff. If you were doing any offline work, a.k.a., "manual time," it had to have been approved. And as if monitoring "active work" weren't enough, the productivity system her company used snapped periodic photos to see if you were working.

At a major healthcare company, when therapists gathered to discuss cases, or social workers were counseling patients, the hours spent were considered "idle time," which didn't count toward bonuses and promotions. 

Worse yet, hospice chaplains at one organization were caught up in the productivity madness.

But two years ago, [an] employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.

...Sometimes the chaplains sacrificed points, risking reprimand or trying to make them up later. But their jobs depended on meeting the standards. So they shifted whom they saw when, the time they spent and the depth of their relationships with the dying, some said. Group settings like nursing homes were rich sources of points. Single patients in homes ...were not.

Swell.

No surprise, counter tools that tap the keyboard have sprung up. But those won't help if you're on candid camera. And I'm sure it's a matter of time before the productivity software companies figure out what's real work and what's fake work.

Nor is it any surprise that there's been pushback: unionization efforts are, against all odds, succeeding. And employees are voting with their feet and leaving productivity gulags for places that don't evaluate their accomplishments based on how fast you type. 

No wonder there's a Great Resignation on.

Happy to have gotten out of the workplace before this became a thing. Hard to imagine anything more dreadful.

All meetinged out, no place to go.

When it comes to working, there are plenty of things I absolutely DO NOT MISS. High on the list are politicking, managing, and commuting. But a tweet that flew across my timeline the other day reminded me that meetings are right up there, too.

Here's the tweet, from "@Katiohead" - someone I don't follow and who I don't remember crossing virtual paths with before - which made me, if not laugh out loud, then at least chortle silently:

Three stages of career development are: I want to be in the meeting, I want to run the meeting, I want to avoid meetings.

Yep, I remember when I actually wanted to be included in meetings, where sometimes I felt like the Poor Little Match Girl. There I was shivering, nose pressed up against the window, lighting my rapidly dwindling store of matches, hoping someone would notice me and let me in. 

Meetings were where the big dogs hung out, where the best info flowed, where the decisions (bad as they were) were made. Second prize was that, as often as not, I was tight enough with my boss to find out all the good stuff after the fact. But mostly I wanted in.

Sometimes it was just galling, as when I prepped my boss for a meeting with the bigs at corporate - we were in the goofy Cambridge outpost. I pulled everything together and packaged it up in a set of spiffy "foils" - transparencies that were used with overhead projectors back in the pre-PC/pre-Powerpoint days - and even prepped a script for my boss.

I had made my case for attending the meeting, but it was a no go.

Then, what to my wondering eyes did appear, but one of my peers heading out the door with my boss to schlepp out to Waltham for the big meet up. Somehow this ahole had weaseled his way into the meeting. And he had the nerve to come into my office to thank me for all the prep work I'd done. Grrrrrr.

And then, fast forward only a bit, and I was both invited to more meetings, and, day-um, running a lot of meetings of my own. 

I was suddenly in charge of products and projects that mattered. I was the one running not all the meetings, but plenty of them. I was the one rallying at least some of the troops, the one giving the shout outs, not getting them. As I explained once to my boss, who had told me that he was going to give me credit for something or other at a company all hands, I'd rather be the one giving the praise than getting it. Even though I was never power-mad, I knew where the power was. And I wanted at least a modest little piece of the modest power one might hold at a small goofy company. 

And then...

I joined a large company. A company that was colossally meeting happy.

Some days, I found myself in back-to-backs from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

It was like being in an extended version of high school, without the bells to remind us to pick up our books and move on to the next class. 

Somehow, you had to wedge in an occasional free period to get some work done.

Earlier in my career, I'd spent a few years in another large company. There were plenty of meetings, but nothing like this. (The culture there was more "copy everyone on everything." When I first got there, I was given the list of people who needed to be copied on every memo I wrote concerning the product I was managing. As I pointed out to my manager, there were more cc's on the list than there were clients or my product. Hmmmm.)

Back at the meeting happy company, a treacherous aspect of the culture was that there was food served at many of the meetings.

A 7:30 a.m. meeting guaranteed you a complete breakfast. A 9 a.m. meeting meant muffins or bagels. Lunch meetings were very popular, with a full spread (sandwiches, chips, cookies). Afternoon meetings meant cookies, sodas, and candy bars. I remember one mid-afternoon meeting where there were two platters of petit-fours, dozens of candy bars, and a wide selection of waters and sodas. The spread was enough to cater a small wedding. (The admins ordered the food, and knew that everything that was leftover was set out for anyone to grab and go. So they generally ordered excess so that there would be lots of grub to go around. This went on for a couple of years until a new president blew in and put an end to it.)

I think I gained 10 pounds the first few months I was there before I realized that I'd have to mitigate things by avoiding the elevators and walking between floors. 

I had joined Meetings, Inc. as an individual contributor, but pretty quickly found myself accumulating a team. I had experience managing small groups - 3 or 4 directs, no layers - but here I was with a couple of dozen reports and an intervening layer between me and them. 

The best thing about it? I could dispatch one of my directs, or they could dispatch one of their directs, to attend some of these meetings. 

Not that I wanted to waste anyone's time, but I just couldn't take the 12 hour non-stop meetings where there was often no reason for me to be there other than to hear stuff and/or answer an occasional question. 

I made it easier for folks not to resent going to meetings because I tried to make sure that, wherever possible, they would have an opportunity to make a presentation and/or get some exposure to senior managers. So it wasn't all about their being stuck at the really low-end meetings. 

(I wasn't all that noble. If the meeting was a one-on-one with the company president to brief him on overall product positioning, that was a me meeting.)

I also became more careful about what invites to accept, for me or anyone in my crew. Some meetings, I just refused to deputize anyone to attend in my place. Meeting organizers sometimes got pissed, but the meeting thang was really out of hand.

After that gig ended - I volunteered for separation - I had one more corporate stint in me. We had a fair number of meetings there, but the company was an agglomeration of a bunch of small internet services companies scattered all around the country. This was before Zoom and Webex were around - there were remote video systems but they were expensive and not very good: lots of latency and jittering - so meetings were conducted via phone bridges. So you could sit at your desk and parallel process: getting some work done and/or instant messaging with your friends.  

Ah, meetings...

Not something I miss about not working. 

@Katiohead definitely has it right. 

Jello molds? Yes and, sometimes NO.

Many years ago, while on a client visit to State Farm in Bloomington, IL, I had lunch in the State Farm caf. While I didn't convey any of this to our client, I was naturally (and snobbily) cracked up by the fact that there were multiple types of jello* mold on offer for dessert. 

In truth, although I haven't had any in years - probably since my mother died, and that's 21 years ago - I have to admit that I've always been pretty darned fond of jello molds, and my mother made some pretty darned tasty ones.

My all-time favorite was Waldorf Salad Jello Mold which combined chopped up apples, walnuts, and celery in apple jello. This she made every Thanksgiving. 

Once Jell-o stopped making apple jello (or the Morris Market stopped carrying it), my mother tried using lime, which didn't quite make it. So she switched to another mold. Strawberries, green grapes, and walnuts in black raspberry. When demolded, she frosted the mold with sour cream. It was another winner.

For Easter, the standard offering was orange jello with pineapple and shredded carrots. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. 

My mother didn't have a fancy jello mold, not one of those fancy crown-ish ones that used to be shown on the Royal Gelatin box. No, hers was just a plain round aluminum mold. Which I thought I had hung on to, but which I must have pitched. (I still have her Dutch oven, even though it doesn't work on my induction cooktop.)

My father had a sweet tooth, so we always had dessert after supper. Although she wasn't a sweet-eater, my mother was an excellent scratch baker, so several times a week she was whipping up a cake, a pan of brownies or Congo bars, a batch of cookies, a pie... If she didn't have time to bake, her emergency dessert was pudding or jello. I could still go for her chocolate pudding parfait, which layered a stack of Graham crackers with chocolate pudding. Or her other parfait, a chocolate-vanilla pudding combo: layer of choc, layer of vanilla, topped with a maraschino cherry. 

Jello was seldom served plain. Lime jello had a can of pears thrown in it. Strawberry jello would have fruit cocktail added in. Grape jello called for grapes, of course.

I actually like jello, but I pretty much only eat it when I'm prepping for a colonoscopy, and you're pretty much only allowed broth and blue, yellow, or orange jello.

So, yeah, jello and I go back a long way. And, even though I seldom eat it, and can't picture myself making a jello mold, I like it.

But there are some molds that I would just have to say one loud NO to, and these include one that my sister Trish recently spotted on Twitter in a tweet from Arlen Parsa, who IRL is a documentary filmmaker, but on Twitter, I guess, sometimes chronicles JELL-O.

If you can't see the "recipe", this is lemon jello with cabbage and chives that have been marinated in salt and vinegar, sliced radishes, and hardboiled eggs. The "advantages?" "Shimmering good looks...whole-family appeal..." and you can make it ahead of time.

No, no, a thousand times no. Make that J-E-L-L-NO!

Celery in the Waldorf Salad Jello Mold, or shredded carrots are one thing. But cabbage? Radishes? Hardboiled eggs?

Come on, man! Did anyone ever actually make one of these. Did Dad and big bro really carry Mom in on his shoulders? And did the kids all stand in cheer. (Okay, maybe the baby doing the balancing act on his highchair tray is cheering because he's still too little to eat it. Or he could be scheming to stab mom with his diaper pin.)

Somewhere along the way, I saw something about jello with cut up hotdog embeds. (The sound you just heard was my gag reflex going into overdrive.)

Anyway, all this jello-molding has got me thinking. I'm doing Thanksgiving this year. JELL-O may not make apple jello anymore, but SONIC and Jolly Rancher both make a green apple version. Or I can mix things up and try to make the Waldorf Salad Jello Mold with JELL-O's cranberry jello. I just need to find a way to order less than the 24 pack I saw out there. (Talk about a lifetime supply.)

So, JELL-O Mold on!

-------------------------------------------------------

*Yep. I do realize that jello is actually JELL-O, a trademarked brand name. But jello is just such a kleenex-like generic term. When I explicitly refer to the brand, I'll JELL-O it.

Knock Knock

Back when I was growing up, an opportunity to be a door-to-door sales child manifested itself every fall, shortly after the school year began.

A man named Mr. Barnett would show up at our school, the guest speaker for an all-student assembly.

Mr. Barnett - who, the nuns assured us (and, by extension, our parents), was a good Catholic family man who made his living by getting Catholic school kids to go door-to-door selling subscriptions to good, wholesome magazines like Catholic Digest. The nuns liked it because they got to collect some of the take and direct it towards the missions, where it was definitely put to good use. E.g., baptizing a pagan baby which, as I recall, cost $5. The kids liked the idea of selling because they could earn swell prizes. And Mr. Barnett liked it for obvious reasons.

Even at a young age, we all understood Mr. Barnett's angle, and the afternoon after his presentation, our annual chant would break out in the patrol line on the way home:

The more you buy, the more I get

That is the slogan of Mr. Barnett

Make fun we did, but we also wanted to win swell prizes. Even the worst one - for selling a single subscription to Catholic Digest - earned you a Hershey Bar. 

After Mr. B's preso, we'd head back to our classrooms, where the nuns would hand out the glossy brochures showing all the magazines for sale, and the simple to fill out sign-up sheets.

Go forth and sell, junior salesmen!

Trouble was, my parents wouldn't let us go door-to-door selling magazines.

They rightly pointed out that, since pretty much every house on our block had kids who went to Our Lady of the Angels, there was no one to sell anything to. And they weren't going to let us both our grandmother, our Uncle Charlie, or our Aunt Margaret, let alone pester the larger part of our family, all those aunts, uncles, and cousins a thousand miles away in Chicago. Our Chicago grandmother, who surely needed to improve her English by subscribing to more better magazines. Grandma was off-limits. Incur the cost of a long distance phone call to try to sell her? Preposterous!

Of course, Chicago would have been the territory of our Dineen cousins - a family, like ours, with five kids: three girls, two boys. Surely, there was a Midwest version of Mr. Barnett who was revving the students of St. Bede's Elementary to go out and flog subscriptions.

Most families were, of course, in the same situation as ours. Who do you sell to when everyone in the 'hood has kids selling magazines? But these other families either let their kids sell to family members outside the parish, or they relented and bought one subscription for each of their kids so they'd have something to report back to their classroom's nun.

My parents did buy one subscription per year - good old Catholic Digest - but they rotated kids.

In fifth grade, it wasn't my turn. (No Hershey Bar for you, girlfriend.)

Unfortunately, in fifth grade, we had an especially vicious nun who was hell bent on getting 100% Barnett sales participation from her classroom.

At one point, my friend Bernadette and I were the only holdouts among the nearly 50 kids in our class.

Sister Saint Wilhelmina didn't like us to begin with. (Long story, but she was the absolute worst nun I ever encountered. And I encountered some pretty terrible nuns over the years.) Not selling magazines didn't help us. 

One afternoon, Willie decided to whip the classroom into a go-go sales froth. "There are two girls who aren't selling," she screeched. "What should we do with them?"

I remember Billy Mullin leaping out of his chair, turning to confront me, and, his face contorted, hollering, "Lynch 'em!" to the cheers of my classmates.

(Parochial school in the postwar "Golden Age of American Catholic Triumphalism" was no place for the faint of heart.)

Eventually, Bernadette's Aunt Anna bought a subscription from her. (Probably Catholic Digest.) She was a very kind woman, who doted on Bernadette, and probably would have bought a subscription from me, if I'd asked her.)

Honestly, I don't suffer from PPSSD (Post-Parochial School Stress Disorder), but a recent article in The New Yorker did dredge up memories of my non-experience as a door to door sales child. (I did knock on doors for The Heart Fund a couple of times. My mother would sign up to take care of our street and would dispatch me and/or my sister Kath to collect for her. As I recall, Heart Fund collections took place in February, and the weather was always miserable. Anyway, my mother was tied up with the baby or making dinner, so she dispatched her minions. I don't imagine we collected all that much. It's not like our neighborhood was well to do. And I believe my entire sales pitch was "my mother's collecting for the Heart Fund.")

The New Yorker story is focused on one Sam Taggart, a D2D (that's door-to-door, in current speak) guru who runs an annual conference dedicated to the art and science of door-to-door salesmanship.

Having grown up in the era of the Fuller Brush man, I was familiar with this form of sales. 

The Fuller Brush man paid an annual call on our house, and my mother always bought a brush or two from him - hairbrush, clothes brush, scrub brush, and I think we had a Fuller carpet sweeper. I looked forward to his visits, as he always gave my mother a couple of tiny vials of lilac toilet water, which Kath and I used as perfume when we played grown up lady. We especially got a kick out of something as gorgeously fragrant as lilac toilet water could be called toilet water. 

I can still conjure up the lilac smell. It may well be one of my Proustian madeleine moments.

I would have thought by now that the door-to-door salesman was pretty much a thing of the past, gone the way of the record player, the blunderbuss, thanks to online and Mary Kay-style house party multi-level marketing schemes.

Oh, every winter there's an article about scam artist roofers who con someone into a bad roof repair by knocking on their door and telling the homeowner that they were driving by and spotted a problem, but living in the city, I don't tend to encounter them. The only people who've ever rung my bell are volunteers for political candidates, kids from MassPIRG (Public Interest Research Group), and - once - a couple of Mormon missionaries who were definitely barking up the wrong tree.

Turns out that ex-Mormon missionaries are among the biggest success stories in the D2D world. Having spent two years away from home, knocking on doors - mostly to be turned down - and only occasionally scoring a win with a conversion, they're very well prepared for the world of selling solar panels, pest control, and alarm systems, which are among the products and services that are being sold D2D. 

Salt Lake is the home of modern door-to-door, in large part because it’s the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bryce Roberts, a local venture capitalist, told me, “You’ve got seventy thousand kids going out every year for their two-year missions and getting trained on knocking doors, dealing with rejection, and selling a very difficult product—Jesus.” As a result, he said, the Salt Lake area has become “the Silicon Valley of direct sales and multilevel marketing”—sometimes known as pyramid schemes.

Hmmmm. I'd argue that Jesus actually shouldn't be a very difficult product. Selling Mormonism - or any religion, for that matter - is another story.  

The best door-to-door salesmen can earn more than a million dollars a year, but it’s a punishing way of life. Unlike the salesman who hawks minivans or enterprise software, the door knocker can’t network at the Rotary Club, make a catchy commercial, or research his prospect’s needs. He faces an unknown and often hostile customer with only his own brain for backup.

To help D2D-ers succeed, there are a number of outfits like Taggart's - himself a highly successful salesman - that help others learn the tricks of the trade, through conferences, online learning, videos, books that help sales folks get to that all important 'yes.'

Although I've never sold anything, my career was in marketing, so sales-adjacent. And a few times during the course of my career, I've gone through sales training. Solution Selling was one that I recall. But these were geared toward selling large-scale, expensive systems. Not hawking solar panels D2D. 

In any case, there are a lot of these salesmen, both Mormon and Gentile, out there. 

Industry leaders estimate that between fifty and a hundred thousand knockers go out every summer. The boom was fuelled in part by the advent of the national “Do Not Call” list, in 2003, which dampened phone solicitation, and in part by the very information glut that helped cripple door-to-door in the first place. To deter customers from doing research—to reconstruct the gloriously profitable world of information asymmetry—companies need to catch them unawares. Who among us, when we answer the door, has any inkling of the actual cost of a treatment for ants, roaches, and mice in a three-thousand-square-foot house? Shopping online is about finding the best price; shopping on your doorstep is about being bowled over by someone with all the answers.

Just reading through the concepts used to sell D2D, largely based on psychological manipulation and bull-shittery, raised my hackles. But hopefully, if anyone ever does try to sell me, I'll be prepared to not get bowled over. (Best not to answer the bell to begin with.)

Knock. Knock.

Who's there?

D2D Salesman.

D2D Salesman who?

D2D Salesman selling an alarm system.

Go away.

Go, Old Ladies!

As a bona fide, certified elder (Social Security, Medicare, half-price T-pass), I know full well that us old gals still got it - or, if not it, at least something - going. 

Sure, at least a measurable percentage of each old-to-old convo is devoted to health issues, from the most minor (crepey skin) to the pretty substantial (fractured sacrum). Or worse: someone's dying, someone's died. But, for most of the old ladies I know, life is good. 

We travel, and most of us are coming out of the covid cocoon and are going places.

We lunch, sometimes trying - catch this - new restaurants. Sometimes we even have a glass of wine at lunch

We take long walks and only take rest stops when we want to sit there and contemplate the water. Or the zinnias. Or the trees.

We go shopping. And not just for groceries. We still buy stuff. We still buy stuff whether we need it or not.

We hang with family and friends, and often manage to connect with old old friends. 

We laugh a lot. Sure, some of the time we're laughing about the young folks. But sometimes we're laughing at ourselves. 

We take courses for the hell of it. We book club. We share recommendations on our cable/streaming series binges. (Old Man is confusing, but seeing that old men Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow still have it going makes it worth it.)

We talk about the good things about being old. And that's not just Medicare and the half-price T-pass. Okay, hair-on-the-head thinning isn't a joy fest, but it's nice not to have to shave under our arms.

We dance at weddings without caring what anyone thinks about our technique. 

And we're do-gooders, volunteering our time, talent, and treasure to do what we can to make the world a better place before we part company with it.

Among the old lady do-gooders are a girl gang on the Cape who have dubbed themselves Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. OLAUG for short.

OLAUG, who run the age gamut from 65 to 82, are cleaning the ponds on the Cape - there are nearly 1,000 of them - diving and retrieving the trash that has accumulated along the edges and along the bottom. According to their website, they scour about 6 ponds a year. So they won't be making much of a dent in their lifetime. Nevertheless, they persist.

Their top finds are: golf balls, fishing lures, beer cans, nips, fishing line, and sand toys.

But they also find hats, jackets, shoes, and "waterlogged dog toys" which Fido refused to water fetch. They've found cell phones and boxes of used fireworks, car tires and, once, a load of bricks. So far, nothing as dramatic as a body or a car, but that's not surprising, as the ponds on the Cape are smallish, and if a

body, a car, or a body in a car splashed into one of them, surely someone would know.

The teams have someone in a kayak who collects the junk, and a vanguard swimmer who swims ahead on the lookout for snapping turtles. (Ouch!)

In 90 minutes, a team typically removes hundreds of pieces of trash. 

Susan Baur, a retired psychologist, founded the group a few years back. She's 82, and the oldest member. 

To qualify as a member of the group, Baur says, prospective members must prove a few things. First, they’re strong enough to swim for hours, making repeated eight- to nine-foot dives. And second, they’re actually an old lady.

“There was a guy who absolutely wanted to join. I said, ‘No,’” Baur says. “Often they’re men, very often they're not old at all, and they're quite miffed when they say, ‘But I could help. I’m stronger than you guys. I could do this.’ I said, ‘Yeah, there's nothing three women can't do.’” (Source: Boston Globe)

Although I would qualify as an old lady, I can walk for hours, but not swim for hours. And I've never liked to put my head underwater. So I couldn't dive. Plus I don't live on the Cape.

But what a great crew. (I wonder whether they've cleaned any of the ponds I know: the kettle ponds of Wellfleet, the pond my cousin lives on in Dennis. I'll have to ask MB whether she's seen OLAUG in action.)

“I think middle age is often seen as the age of competence. It's when you do things… And then we're supposed to sort of stop,” Baur reflects. “But we are heroically adventurous. And I'm not leaving the age of competence, thank you very much. Not for a while.”

I'm with Susan Baur. I may not be OLAUG material, but I don't intend to leave 'the age of competence' anytime soon, either. 

Brava, OLAUG!