It may not come as a news flash to you, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the fundamental corporate commitment to customer service is dead — at least in the banking industry.
I reached this epiphany when I determined I no longer have the bandwidth or patience to deal…
The best day of the year is coming up fast.
That’s the winter solstice — December 21 — the best day of the year, because from here on (for the next six months) the total hours of daylight start increasing each day.
And up here in the great white North…
“I can’t believe this is happening” is the subject line in the email.
It comes from a respected colleague, a mover and shaker and innovative thinker whose work I admire greatly. This individual regularly offers new ways to approach old problems, leading to unexpected solutions. …
Halloween and Diwali are behind us, and it appears all the stores and advertisers and websites are operating on the same schedule: it’s time for Christmas shopping.
Argh.
Please, hear me out: there’s never been a better time to reconsider the suggestion that celebrating Christmas automatically signals time to buy…
I was reminded of this fact the last time I went through the process of advertising, screening applications, interviewing, reference checks, and finally making an offer to the successful candidate. Ironically, the position was being created to give me more time to focus on my client-facing activities, but for quite…
In which the writer finds her world transformed by COVID and QR codes.
Music lovers, I’m sure you can relate to this experience: you learn of an interesting upcoming concert. You contact the ticket broker, box office or other seller and purchase tickets, which are typically in the form of…
I was out for a morning walk, and I was late.
It was 9 am and I still had about five minutes’ walking to do before I got to the coffee shop for my 9 am appointment.
At first, I thought the furry critter beside me on the path was…
Celebrating Academic Collegiality
On several occasions, I have had the privilege of working with a group of scientists who came together from across the continent or even around the world. They traveled (or Zoomed) to put their collective heads together to consider a particularly thorny research problem.
The experience always…
In which the writer considers her mortality, one square at a time.
One of my favorite Medium writers, the indomitable Julia E. Hubbel, recently wrote movingly about how a return trip to Africa helped to get her adventure groove back and shake off the existential dread of life in a…
There’s been a lot of talk about front line workers lately — how they’re heroes, how they are putting their lives on the line so that the rest of us can reduce our own risks of infection and contagion.
And there’s also been a fair bit of conversation over past…
