Learning and understanding

A friend of mine, who owns a small business, was very upset recently because she had received several bad online reviews from people who (by their own admission) had never used her services.  The reviews were written in support of a third party, who had asked people to “rate down” the business.  I watched, unable to do much to help, as she struggled to restore the good image of her business, and learned just how much power rests in the keyboards of users. Everyone has had bad service and bad experiences with businesses.  I will drag out my horror story of the restaurant that made errors in 4 out of 6 meals and failed to deliver a fifth, and then refused to do anything to correct the problem.  (If anyone wants the full details, I’ll happily share with you if you promise never to visit that location.) We’ve all encountered the surly salesperson who is rude and unhelpful; the waiter who messed up orders repeatedly and the restaurant that lost reservations.  As internet denizens, we can

Nostalgia is fun, isn’t it?  Looking back at the golden years gone by, when everything was rosy, life was good and things were rosy.  Things just aren’t what they used to be, are they?  Kids are just not like we  were; people are just so entitled, and nobody wants to work for anything.  Life was better then, not like now with the world being such a horrible place! We grew up hearing how good things used to be.  That there were jobs to be had for the asking, that our education was the door to a comfortable life.  I remember that in high school during the 1980s, we heard that if we studied hard and did well, we would be able to find good jobs that would take care of us for life. It wasn’t that simple.   Even then, that world was collapsing.  More people were educated than before, there was increasing competition for jobs, and automation was making inroads into jobs.  The manufacturing economy in the Caribbean was failing, faced with the rising output of the Far East (Singapore and Ko