All posts in category Work and Money

Views across the board

When my computer failed last month, I spent a few hours at the Apple Genius Bar, a sort of emergency room for digital devices in distress. As I waited for new software to install itself very slowly, I got to hear snippets of people’s lives as told through their troubled phones and iPads and MacBooks. […]

Quintessential Chapel Hill Fan

When friends and I would go to baseball games at Yankee Stadium, we always scanned the crowd for nominees to our Quintessential Yankee Fan Hall of Fame. Yankee fans were quite different from Mets fans, I noticed on my very rare trips to Shea Stadium. Perusing crowds became a habit, and when I’m out and […]

Onward and upward together

Instead of going to the library for our next Town Council retreat, perhaps we could go to Africa and climb Mt. Kilimanjaro together. Business leaders talk about the benefits mountain climbing can have for team building; mountain climbers talk about the necessity of having a strong-functioning team before you set off up the trail. One […]

Launched

You might expect a low turnout for an event scheduled at the end of a hot day, toward the end of a week of hundred-degree days, in a warehouse venue with only a hint of air-conditioning. But as Thomas Edison said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Last Thursday, the anteroom of TOPO Distillery […]

The Woman Card

It didn’t take long, after Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of gaining an advantage in the presidential race by playing the Woman Card, for an editorial to circulate on the Internet delineating the advantages of having a Woman Card — like receiving a 25% discount on your salary and paying 10% more for personal care […]

What we do best

Decades ago, a running coach told me, “The only way to run faster is to run faster.” Pre-empting Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan by nearly a generation, the coach’s advice has proved useful in all sorts of situations in my life. Now it appears I can apply it to Town Council work. The town has […]

Disclosure and N&O

After I read the story in Saturday’s News & Observer about Blue Cross Blue Shield looking at off-shoring some of its work and jobs, I couldn’t help but get in touch with my inner cynic. It seems the folks in Raleigh believe that BCBS outsourcing work overseas is wrong. The story quoted Dana Cope, executive […]