Email Blues: Are You A Dinosaur?

"Four things come not back: The spoken word, The sped arrow, The past life, The neglected opportunity" Proverb

About a month or so ago, a student in my program offered to exchange email addresses so we could stay in touch. As I uttered the word @ AOL, he burst out laughing. "Oh no, Ms. Frank, you must lose this email as it dates you back to the days when computers took forever to load." Hm mm, I thought, I never measured my age or level of hipness by my email address but I suppose some people do. I laughed it off and insisted he write it down anyway.  Mind you, I do have both  gmail and ymail accounts, however, I must confess that because my AOL account has been around since ... well, you understand, I proffer it without thinking much about it.

"People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.' Let us not erect walls without doors of friendliness or windows of love." Joseph Fort Newton

Honestly, I truly don't recall getting the memo about hip and unhip email providers. Back in the day, if you were averse to paying for email service, you picked a popular free hotmail handle and left it to the hipsters to duke it out. Life went on and nary another vocal reaction to our email choices until last week. Well, as if my last email bashing experience wasn't enough, I was confronted or read accosted by another friend recently who chose to throw diplomacy out the window when she uttered; "Oh, Oh, has anyone told you that you must be a dinosaur to have AOL?"

Get a Life: Ten Tips for the Ardent Job Seeker!

 Get a Life: Ten Tips for the Ardent Job Seeker!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the arctic region, you know by now that millions of people in the USA, and to some extent globally, have become casualties of the economic downturn.

Since the housing recession began in 2007, we have seen unprecedented job losses and many of us have been directly/indirectly affected by the shifting job search winds. A quick Google search on the topic of current unemployment numbers in the USA produced 779,000 results or communiqués from a wide range of sources; government and otherwise, on the subject.

The US Bureau of Labor statistics indicate that in a twelve month period (Jan 08-Jan 09) the rate of unemployment has increased from 4.9% to 7.6% with 11.6 million people out of work. While the federal bailout plan could eventually create an infusion of job opportunities, it will not happen overnight.

I Twitter, Therefore I am not a twit?

Okay, I am willing to admit a level of ignorance in this venue... Yes, I do blog elsewhere and I have heard of the twitter trend but this is both fascinating and slightly confusing.

On my first twit try, I found myself with 23 connections to follow and 0 followers. What gives? I chose to mark some of them as favorites and send a quick hello via a tweet message; wondering if anyone will follow me and if I will be updated when they burped or yawned?

Will this come back to haunt me if my potential, future followers find I might have nothing to share? I have written a few short, pretentiously pithy comments somewhere out there in twitter world and I am not quite sure what the point is really; but I am excited!