Jim Hagarty

I have the world’s oldest, stupidest dumbphone.

Seriously.

I bought it off a guy named Alexander Graham B. He didn’t give me his last name and I soon learned why.

Or maybe it’s just me. I’m sure any child of eight years of age could operate the darned thing but I have never been able to access voice mail on it. And lately, people have been leaving me voice messages. I would like to hear them.

Two months ago, I phoned Virgin Mobile and asked how I could do that, because the phone was not co-operating. A polite woman told me how to do it and I thanked her. Except her instructions didn’t work.

So today, I decided to phone Virgin and get this fixed once and for all. So I did.

Within the space of half an hour, I made five phone calls to the company and spoke to five different people. They all gave me the same instructions which I tried and which didn’t work.

It was kind of funny because each person who helped me was so confident that they had the proper method to get it going. Alas, none of them worked.

Finally, I reached a very helpful woman – support person number 6, who seemed to really know the answer. She was overflowing with confidence and I felt that I had found the right person at last.

She said she would reprogram my phone from her end and she led me through about five steps on the way to achieving that. She even stayed on the line while I tried the newly programmed phone but still no messages.

Let me look up the manual for your phone, she said. And the line went quiet as she did that. A couple of minutes later, I got the good old dial tone.

She hung up on me.

I know that she did because she had asked for my cellphone number and I gave it to her. If she had been cut off accidentally, she would have called me back.

It was 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and I think somebody wanted to go home.

Writing this little tale, I was thinking of making a joke about Virgin and getting screwed but I know you are sensitive so I won’t do that. (Too late?)

My father always said the only way to punish an enterprise is to not do any business with it so it might be time to take a little fatherly advice.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

I have no plans to hang around with Dylan McWilliams.

Three years ago, the Colorado resident was out hiking in Utah when he was bit by a rattlesnake. A year later, he was attacked by a 300-pound black bear when he was camping in his home state. The bear grabbed his head and started pulling him away from his friends but they raised a fuss and Dylan was freed.
And last week, the poor man was bit in the leg by a shark while he was boogie-boarding (whatever that is) near Hawaii. He kicked the seven-foot-long tiger shark as hard as he could then swam to shore.

If all this happened to me, I would be downright negative. I would lock myself in my bedroom and never come out again. I would nail boards over the windows. And wear an impenetrable metal suit.

But that’s not how old Dylan rolls.

“I don’t blame the shark, I don’t blame the bear, and I don’t blame the rattlesnake,” he said. “I’m just mad that I can’t get back in the water for a couple days.”

Dylan is welcome to think what he wants. As for me, I blame the shark, the bear and the rattlesnake. They are a bunch of nasty critters and I have lost all respect for them.

©2018 Jim Hagarty

Language, like fashion, is trendy. And like those who rush out to buy the latest in clothes, some people just can’t wait to wrap their tongues around the latest in expressions.

For some people, this ever-changing vocabulary is refreshing and proof that the English language is alive. To me, many of the new words are sources of irritation because they are so often brought into being by political groups and activists and they are grabbed up by those who want to impress and be “correct.”

Therefore, I just about flipped recently when I was reading an article about a Canadian activist who referred to herself and others working for women’s rights as “strugglists.” What? I couldn’t believe my eyes.

This word is proof positive you can add “ist” to anything. I’m an apple fritterist, or a worryist, a sit-aroundist or a televisionist. If an activist can call herself a strugglist, then I can call her an aggravationist.

This has nothing to do with the worthiness of her cause, just the way she describes it.

It doesn’t take politicians long to gobble up any new expression they might hear and I think they do it because they believe it makes them relevant.

That’s why you get U.S. politicians saying the recent Los Angeles riots were a “wake-up call” for America. And in this country, opposition politicians like to say unpleasant events – you pick the one – are a “wake-up call” for the government.

The trouble with politicians using trendy expressions, however, is they often serve to show just how out of touch they actually are when they use them for two or three years after they’ve gone out of vogue. Remember “touch base?”

Another favourite of politicians and activists lately is “reality check.” They’re forever advising their opponents to conduct one, whatever a reality check might be. Does anybody know?

One unnamed party leader has more modern expressions than a cat has whiskers and he loves to use them. In fact, I believe he’s even started a word trend or two with some of the ones he employs in his language.

For example, like so many other people now, he loves to tag “driven” onto at least one word in every other sentence. Therefore, the economy is “consumer-driven”, the country’s manufacturing is “export-driven”, and the business community is “profit-driven.”

I’m waiting for him to announce that the transportation industry is “driven-driven.”

This leader also likes to use “broad-based” and “wide-ranging” but his favourite expression has to be, “at the end of the day.” It isn’t good enough to say, “in the end.” Oh no. What if the end occurs at 3 p.m. Something might happen after that. It’s the end of the day that counts.

One politician often in the news also likes the expression “fit”, as in “casino gambling and border cities, I believe, make an ideal fit in a business sense.”

This is how words can mean nothing. “Canadian industry and labour, both recession-driven, will, at the end of the day, see where the interests of each can make a nice fit,” might say the party leader.

If “stakeholder” was a disease, it would be the common cold. It’s everywhere. Almost every day, in my job as a newspaper editor, I receive at least one press release that talks about how the interests of all “stakeholders” will be represented, blah, blah, blah.

Sometimes, “holder” is left off and they talk about those who are seeking a “stake” in the economy, or the education system, etc.

I’ve lost interest in current Canadian issues of the day after listening to commentators and politicians say, for about the 10th time, that so and so had “ratcheted-up” the debate a notch or two to a dangerous level and that someone was going to have to “ratchet-down” the emotion or the whole affair might blow up. I wonder how many people talking about racheting actually have any idea what a rachet is and does?

Now, I ratchet-off the TV as soon as the talkers come on.

And then, of course, there are our beloved euphemisms which we are using with such frequency now I can’t keep up. Somehow, we have to put a good face on everything. Just this week I heard our justice minister refer to prostitutes as “sex-trade workers.” How’s that again?

But most of all, I want to know one thing.

What’s a “sea change?”

©1992 Jim Hagarty

When I read about calls for a ban on pesticides and herbicides, I sometimes think back to the days when these chemicals were thought of as great breakthroughs and a good friend to farmers and gardeners everywhere.

Of course, these were the days when the majority of people smoked cigarettes, people still chewed tobacco, no one wore seatbelts, if you were alive you were a litterer, and there were no such things as family violence shelters.

On the farm we had cans and drums of chemicals everywhere and while we kids were given the occasional warning about them, they were not any really big deal. I remember standing on the back of the big weed sprayer hooked up to one of our tractors, pouring a powerful herbicide called Atrazine into the sprayer’s huge tank. Though I’d try to be steady, sometimes the stuff came rushing out too fast to handle and it would wash out over my gloveless hands and sleeveless arms.

I saw the same thing happen to my Dad. We’d wipe the stuff off on our pants and carry on.

Atrazine was to our corn-growing efforts what Maalox is to a human’s heartburn. And old TV commercial for the insecticide called Raid used to simply declare: Raid kills bugs dead! Well, Atrazine killed weeds dead and practically everything else it touched, except for the corn, somehow.

One day, Dad had been filling the sprayer, perhaps enduring a bit more than the average spillage. In the process, he must have stepped in some of the Atrazine that had puddled on the ground. Just then, he was hailed to come to the house to take a phone call.

He ran across the lawn to the front porch and in the path he took, for years to come, no grass ever grew, leaving an almost perfect set of bare footprints tracing out his route from farmyard to house. That was the first time, I think, that I began to realize how powerful this stuff was.

I heard this true tale from a former teacher at an agricultural college. A herbicide salesman, in a brave effort to show how harmless to humans was the product he was trying to sell to skeptical farmers, used to demonstrate that opinion by rolling up his sleeve and plunging a bare arm and hand into a pail full of the stuff.

I don’t know whether he expected oohs and aahs of disbelief when he didn’t drop dead on the spot but he did die – too young – of cancer. I don’t know if his death was related to his chemical bravado, but if he demonstrated its safety that way once, maybe he did it numerous times.

How did we live before all of this stuff came along? It wasn’t easy, but farmers had their ways. One method was called summer fallowing: A field would be plowed under during the summer and left that way almost a year before it was cultivated and replanted in a crop. The weeds’ roots, exposed to the elements, died, as did the rest of the plant, now buried.

But it was expensive to leave 20-acre fields unproductive for a year.

And what about homeowners and their lawns? Well, there weren’t many lawns way back when, especially in the country. Look at any
old photo of a farmhouse 100 years ago and you will see just a little strip of green running a 10-foot collar around the home. Crops were often planted right up to the start of that little strip.

Now, many farmsteads in Canada are bigger than the public parks in most towns and villages around. It’s kind of sad to see farmers spending their Sundays jostling up and down on riding lawnmowers, keeping these parks in perfect condition. For whom? The drivers of the one or two vehicles which travel past their farms each day?

At our home in the city, chemicals were dutifully applied to the lawns spring and summer, and the grass had many carpet-like qualities. Then along came our kids and the thought of them crawling around in herbicide-treated grass didn’t appeal.

As a result, 11 years have passed without a particle or a droplet of weedkiller or chemical fertilizer applied. We have not done this out of any virtuous principle beyond a concern for the health of our kids.

And we really don’t know what the best thing for our economy, our health, and our happiness is on the pesticide ban issue.

I once had a summer job spraying fertilizers and weed killers on farmers’ fields. When the wind was right (or wrong), the spray would often swirl back and hit me in the face. But the same would happen on our own farm when I was on a tractor spreading (particularly sloppy) manure on the fields.

I don’t know whether a fertilizer distilled in a factory is any worse than one made in a cow, but either way, I’m still alive.

Then again, I plan to live forever.

So far, so good.

©2007 Jim Hagarty

Most of the jobs college graduates look for when they come out of the schools nowadays didn’t even exist a quarter century ago. At least, they didn’t have names and nobody got paid for doing them.

A while back, I started a list of modern job titles I run across in my daily reading and suddenly realized that all these fancy functions used to be filled free of charge by Mom and Dad.

For example, they both shared the role of performance consultant – Mom reviewing in what shape kids left their bedrooms and Dad urging greater effort on the barn chores.

Both parents were also family therapists, now and then stepping in between feuding brothers and sisters and helping the seven of us get along without murdering each other.

Mom was a director of long-range planning, starting her Christmas baking way back in October and counting the days until we went back to school in September.

Dad was a crop scientist and a weed ecologist, locked in a never-ending struggle to keep the latter from overtaking the former.

Mom was a pork adviser, advising us to finish up our bacon and she was also our soil-conservation adviser, instructing us not to wear our muddy boots into her clean kitchen.

Dad was our media-relations co-ordinator, deciding which kid would be sent out to the road to bring in the newspaper from the mailbox. And Mom was our cereals agronomist, deciding whether we’d be eating corn flakes or puffed wheat for the next week.

Dad was our plant pathologist, bringing back crop-condition reports from the fields every day.

Long before there was such a thing, Mom was our family-studies professor, talking us into doing our homework before we turned on the TV and studying her family to make sure we were doing it. And Dad was the poultry-behaviour scientist who kept the eggs coming.

Mom was our environmental manager, directing efforts to keep the house clean and tidy while Dad was the environmental engineer, fixing the furnace when it broke and keeping a roof on the place.

Mom was our food engineer and shared the duties of information engineer with Dad: “For your information, young man, you are NOT staying up till 10 o’clock.”

Mom was the design-services engineer, deciding whether the wallpaper would be flowers or stripes. She was also our certified biofeeback therapist and counsellor, giving us awful-tasting pink medicine when we complained of stomach aches and telling us we were good as new.

Mom was our family’s health-care activator, applying mustard plasters and cough syrup as needed.

Dad was our water-management supervisor, fixing pipes and drilling wells. He was also the program manager, switching TV channels when the shows got too racy and the artistic director, asking the kids to sing that song we learned at school for the neighbours when they dropped around. And he was also the wildlife rehabilitator, administering needles to the rumps of cattle when they came down with yet another sickness.

Mom and Dad also wore a whole host of other hats as career counsellors, spiritual advisers, transportation engineers, recreation directors, financial consultants and life-skills coaches to name but a few.

But what they were best at being was a mom and dad.

Or is that childcare worker or primary caregiver or youth-activities co-ordinator or biological parent …?

©1989 Jim Hagarty

When the snow was still on the ground this spring and puddles of water threatened to turn our backyard into a marsh, I wandered outside in my boots to tackle a little project I’d been putting off for years.

A pile of soil in the yard, left over from the excavating that was done when our new shed was built, needed to be finally taken down and distributed in various flowers beds around our lot.

This I accomplished by chopping away at the “mountain” every day and wheeling five wheelbarrows full of dirt around the yard. After five loads of dirt, I’d quit and move onto other things.

People have laughed at my approach to my various household enterprises – for example, I clean one window in the house per day, and then quit till the next day – but I’ve discovered that by doing this, just as the turtle defeated the hare, I accomplish more in the long run, I don’t get sick of a task so easily, and I do a better overall job.

This method of mountain removal also gave me a bit of time to think, along with regular exercise. And I also discovered a few things I didn’t know.

For one, bumble bees were hibernating deep down in the soil of the hill I was taking down. My shovel uncovered little nest after nest (or whatever they’re called) and out would tumble very dopey, and no doubt surprised, bees. I hated to interrupt their long slumber party, but I had to get on with things.

I am still scratching my head wondering how these fragile little beings managed to burrow themselves so deeply into the soil. Or were they hatched from eggs in there?

The other surprise came in the form of a sprightly young robin, which became my pal for the next few months. We discovered each other first when I was removing a kids’ sandbox, uncovering juicy, appetizing earthworms in the process.

The robin had a picnic that first day and for the rest of the summer, whenever I was out in the yard, I could count on a visit from the bird, especially when I was digging up the mountain and uncovering more worms.

And even later, when I had planted a big patch of grass and was watering it with a sprinkler, the robin showed up to sit under the shower and take regular baths.

I know I shouldn’t do others’ thinking for them, not even for birds, but this little guy must have thought I was just about the best human being on earth, supplying, as I was, practically all of his needs.

As the days stretched on, the bird became more and more comfortable with me, and would inch fairly close to me. If I moved his way, he would do a little dance away, but not in any panic.

And when I turned, he would come back again.

But he was a greedy little lad, showing up alone on every occasion but two or three when I think he brought a girlfriend along. It was as though he didn’t want anyone else knowing about this secret Shangri-La on Albert Street that he’d found.

A couple of weeks ago, my buddy wandered away and I don’t know where’s he’s gone. South, maybe. To tell you the truth, I was kind of missing his comforting presence until last weekend when a replacement showed up to supervise my building of a clubhouse for my son.

Taking a break on Saturday, I sat in a lawnchair, admiring our work and trying to enjoy some pop and chips which is required carpenter fuel. A bee started a bit of a dive-bomb exercise, making relaxing almost impossible. At one point, I looked over to see him crawling out of my pop can.

I don’t like bees but this one’s been hanging around me ever since and he seems benign enough. But there is one thing that appears to get him riled up and that is the sound of my sawing lumber. He buzzes all around my hand as I try to do my job, as though to stop me.

Or maybe he’s still ticked off about that mountain thing, when I dug up his friends and family.

©2007 Jim Hagarty

I dropped by Woolco in downtown Stratford Saturday to say goodbye to the place and the people who worked there. Being sentimental, I tend to feel a bit blue when things I like come to an end. And I liked Woolco.

But as I approached the front doors off Albert Street, I could see the place was in darkness.

A woman, who, as it turned out, had the same idea as I, was peering into the gloom of what had once been a bright, lively place, open late at night and often teeming with customers, especially on $1.44 days. We showed up too late.

Everything was gone.

“I just came by to say so long,” said the woman, as she looked over a group of snapshots of store staff that had been assembled and were taped to the big glass doors.

“Me too,” I said, and joined her in examining the photos.

I spent a lot of time in Woolco over the years – in the restaurant, the music section, the pharmacy, men’s clothing.

And while I never won a prize for top shopper of the month, I did buy a lot of things there, from meals to cards to Christmas gifts, clothes, towels, plants and records.

But the store’s main gift to me were the hours it helped me wile away on rainy and snowy days when I had time to kill at noon. And over time, I got to know a lot of the employees from one end of the building to the other, especially in the restaurant, where I often met a friend for lunch. My friend and I and the waitresses had a lot of fun, traded a lot of jokes and I’m sure none of us thought the place would ever close.

But it did close and now I stared at snapshots on a door.

I know, I know. Progress is progress and something better will come along. Right?

“There were a lot of really nice people who worked in there,” said the woman on Saturday afternoon.

“That’s for sure,” I answered.

Really nice people.

As we turned to leave, another man tried the door. He looked disappointed too.

I think a lot of us, for a while anyway, are going to miss the old place.

May the road rise up to meet all those who lost their jobs.

©1994 Jim Hagarty

From 1994 to 1999, I taught journalism at a Canadian college. To those of you who complain about the sorry state of newspapers these days, I apologize. I did that. It’s my fault.

However, that is not why I have come to address you today. In my classes full of youngsters, mostly born in the late ’70s and early ’80s, there were a lot of smart people. It didn’t take me long to become aware that most of them were smarter than I am. So from then on my job was to hide that fact from them as best I could. I was often successful, sometimes not.

When some of them figured out what a clueless idiot they were dealing with, things became a lot more difficult.

But that is also not the topic of today’s speech. My teleprompter is broken so you’ll have to forgive me for that as well as for wrecking journalism for the foreseeable future.

What I want to tell you about is the wide cultural gulf that separated some of my students from me. For example, one day, I mentioned the name Roy Orbison. A girl’s hand shot up. “Who is that, sir?” I asked the class how many people had never heard that name. Half the class acknowledged their ignorance.

For a guy who was tucked into my bed every night with a picture of Roy Orbison and a pair of dark sunglasses, this was earth-shattering.

On another day, I threw out the name Paul McCartney. A girl’s hand shot up. “Is that that guy from Wings.” The band Wings was the one Sir Paul started after the Beatles broke up.

I didn’t ask her if she did not know about the Beatles. I was afraid that an answer in the negative might send me over the edge.

For a guy who went to bed every night in his Beatles pyjamas wearing his Orbison glasses with the picture of Roy pinned to the other pillow, this was a heart-stopping moment.

Fortunately, we all recovered from these near meltdowns and for six years, I will admit my classes were a very educational experience – for me. I learned a lot. I went to a couple of student parties and dances and even accompanied them out to dinner now and then.

I felt like a caveman suddenly introduced into a weird modern world, but I progressed fairly quickly. I learned from them how to operate computers and printers and cameras and we had some very interesting discussions about marriage and sex and life and death.

All in all, I finished my six years in college with a great education and didn’t have to pay any tuition to get it. I kind of feel bad about all those students I thrust out onto the unsuspecting world, but some of them have connected with me on Facebook, so maybe I’m forgiven.

Well, I have to have my afternoon nap now, if I can find my photo of Roy. And my PJs with the pictures of the guy from Wings on them.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

I am a pretty materialistic guy, I don’t mind announcing. I sit and read hardware store flyers on the weekends like others might bury their heads in War and Peace or Gone With the Wind. I begin to salivate at the appearance of a new catalogue in the house (and it doesn’t have to be Victoria’s Secret) and I’d rather window shop than sail the Mediterranean.

But there are a few things I have never wanted to own and looming largest in my mind among those is a snowblower.

I can’t explain my aversion to these big, efficient marvels of modern technology which are adored so deeply by Canadians. It doesn’t make any sense as I love anything powered by a little motor. I dread the inevitable day when my self-propelled lawnmower – 28 years old and counting – dies a smokey death.

Maybe snowblowers scare me or maybe they’re too costly. I don’t know. But I do know that in the face of my snowblower prejudice, I need one, sometimes badly. I have more sidewalks than a shopping mall and a double wide driveway that can comfortably hold four big cars (if four big cars could be found nowadays). During snowy days such as these, I feel like a one-man parks department.

But, I have another reason, I suppose, for not hauling a big snowblower home from the store. Four of my neighbours within just a few houses on all sides of me have snowblowers and they appear to be competing to see how many driveways up and down the street they can clean. They’re all men, of course, these mighty snow warriors, who bundle up like earthly astronauts (earthonauts, if you will).

Years ago, I solved a puzzle regarding these neighbours and things have been going my way pretty much ever since. I noticed that these guys seemed more eager to clean out a woman’s driveway than a man’s. They’d chug down the street past me on their way to a female neighbour, leaving me huffing and puffing with my little wee plastic shovel. They avoided eye contact with me and pretended, I’m assuming, not to notice me, though I stared right at them with come hither looks.

This went on for a few back-breaking years until I got married and one cold day realized that I could possibly make use of the fact that there was a woman living in my house all of a sudden. So, I don’t think it was a plan, but before long Barb ended up cleaning out the driveway. But not for long.

The race would always be on to see which neighbour could get to our place first with his snowblower. Because besides her snowblower-attracting gender, Barb is liked by everyone I know and a lot of people I don’t know. If there is anyone who doesn’t like her, they are probably deranged in some pitiful way.

As for me, on a good day I could easily elicit a string of profanity from someone as holy as Pope Francis. Let’s just say I was born pissed off and have been getting steadily worse ever since.

So the snowblower dilemma seemed to be solved but a theory as important as this needed to be tested. Therefore, I ventured out a few more times with my shovel only to see the blowers blow right by me. I sent Barb out on the pretence that my back was hurting and voila! Snow was flying in every direction as though we had our very own personal blizzard, but in a good way.

These days, I hide behind the living room curtains and peek out to see that everything’s going according to plan and so far, so good.

During our marriage vows, I mumbled something about “till death do us part” but someday that might be changed to “till driveway do us part.” If we ever move to a part of the world that doesn’t get snow, I don’t know how this 24-year experiment will hold up. But if we’re in a neighbourhood with lots of men on riding lawnmowers, we might just make it all the way. Especially if my mower goes up in smoke (while Barb is pushing it).

And my back keeps bothering me.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

The other night, a television news anchor asked some expert if he thought a proposed constitutional change was a “must pass.”

I grimaced at the expression, as I often grimace nowadays at the way the English language is being used by journalists on TV and in newspapers and magazines.

A “must pass”, I guess, is an offshoot of the “must see” and the “must read”, phrases which have been around, unfortunately, for too long. They seem innocent enough and probably they are. But what’s next? The “must eat”, the “must visit”, the “must drink?” Keep it up, TV news readers and soon my TV will be a “must unplug.”

One particular nightly newsman is out in the lead of those who just can’t find that right word or combination of words among the 400,000 English language words at our disposal and so, must invent some new ones. Or at least, come up with new uses for some old ones. And the constitution controversy seems to have set his word-inventing mechanism into overdrive. For a while, he kept talking about efforts to “unbundle” the proposed “accord”. Do you know what that means? I don’t.

He also loved to quote the Canadian prime minister who kept insisting that the accord was a “done deal” and I swear I saw a twinkle in the newsman’s eyes every time he said it.

In today’s media-driven world, words have become little status symbols, used to “impress” as much as to “express” and making an impression is the name of the game. Therefore, you have another news anchor saying that the expert she intends to interview in another city is being “conferenced” and will be on the air shortly. It’s too much too ask, I guess, for her to tell her viewers that a conference call is being placed to so-and-so. Instead, a noun – conference – has to become a verb and those who don’t like it are crochety old rednecks like me.

Being “sexy” used to mean having “sex appeal.” No more. Now, “sexy” is an adjective to describe something – anything – that appeals to the silent majority. Supporters of everything from reducing acid rain to upgrading health-care facilities explain their lack of progress by claiming their cause isn’t “sexy” enough for the general public.

People used to “sign” deals. Now they “ink” them. They used to collect “information” and then “study” it. Now, they assemble “data” and then “massage” it.

What did we ever do before the “troubleshooter” came along? Or the “’change agent?”

And what does it mean to “ballpark” something? Does that mean to leave something at the ballpark or does it mean someone’s going to come up with a “ballpark” figure about something? And what in the world would qualify a numerical figure to not be absolutely precise but instead, just a ballpark number?

We’ve been “earmarking” things for so long, I can’t even remember what we did before that. We used to total up projected costs of things. Now, we “expense” them. Not for us are the “guess” or the “estimate.” Now, we “guesstimate”, of course.

What does it mean to be in a “mentoring relationship?” And if you’re “short listed”, is that good?

What is the difference between a “lifemate” and a “lovemate?” What are you doing when you’re “liaisoning?”

I guess I should stop my word “bashing” and look for the “positives” in all of this. But I worry about where all this word play is going to end up. In a society which says it has a major problem with illiteracy, don’t journalists above all have a duty to make sure the consumers of their news can understand what they’re trying to tell them? Where’s it all going to end?

Perhaps I should contact the woman who, according to a press release I recently received, was scheduled to “crystal ball” about the future at an upcoming conference. Crystal balling, please forgive me, sounds almost painful.

In fact, maybe I could conference her about her conference.

A recent national newspaper article explored the practice of “stopping out” – a combination of “stopping” and “dropping out.” Yuppies do it when their “stressors” get the best of them.

These days, that sounds like a pretty sexy idea to me.

©1990 Jim Hagarty