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Home > Michelle's Blog > Previous Postings > 06/04/07
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Previous Postings |
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June 4, 2007:
Generations of ChangeI was having lunch with my dad the other day and we were reminiscing about the old days. My dad was an accountant at a hog refinery. My mom worked there too in the canteen, where they all ate lunch. One Sunday night they heard on the news that the plant had closed and all employees did not need to come to work the next day. After the shock wore off that they both just lost their jobs, my dad went to the town grain elevator the very next day and they hired him.
His new employer decided to have him take a competency test from this new company called IBM. In our small town in Iowa, this company and a competency test were both unheard of. But, he scored as high as anyone had ever scored, so they decided he should be a computer programmer. This was when he was about 42 years old – at that time in his life, he had 9 kids at home and my mother who had also just lost her job too! YIKES!
Computers were brand new – most of the people in town had not heard of them, including me and all my brothers and sisters. We all basically put them out in the same universe as UFO’s and Martians… “freaky” and of no use to anyone.
It was back when computers were still the card systems and brand new to our society. The first “laptop” could maybe fit on the lap of the Jolly Green Giant. And “PC” was not even a known acronym.
So with this career change, his new employer sent him to Chicago and Minneapolis for school to learn how to write computer software for grain elevators. My mom was home with the nine of us, while he went off and learned about this thing that most of society wanted nothing to do with cuz it would mean they had to change.
Since that time, a lot of change has happened. Let’s call it approximately 30 years difference between my dad and me. Cars, for example. The big three, Ford, GM and Chrysler, were so prevailing back then, that names like Toyota, Honda and Hybrid were not even created yet. Generation of Change…
My parent’s mortgage was $49 a month, until they built on a 4 bedroom addition and a bathroom, then it went up to $79 a month. They were going to be strapped to make that. My mom had to get that job at the hog refinery to afford that payment, and once she did, we finally had a savings account. It was in our basement in a jar hidden behind the tomatoes. Today, two of my brothers have homes worth over a million dollars. Generation of Change….
When my dad was a little boy, they didn’t have TV. I had 3 channels when I was little girl. Today’s kids have to be monitored so they don’t have access to over 200 channels. Generation of Change…
My mom told me once that when she was a little girl, her family was not hit by the depression, because they grew everything they needed to survive. All food, except flour and sugar, they had on their farm. Today, we can eat a Watermelon all year around because it was grown somewhere else. Generation of Change…
The word "harassment" was not even a word because we just treated everyone the way we wanted to be treated. And Divorce was virtually nonexistent. Back then, if there was a problem, you had no other distractions, so you were forced to talk about the problems as they were happening. Today it seems that the wedding is more important that the marriage. Generation of Change…
In Dad’s generation, most people kept a job their whole life. Paul Hawe’s dad owned the town bakery his whole life – I envision him as the guy that gets up each day and says, “Gotta make the Donuts”. Today jobs are disposable and we live in short cycles – “I’ll just get another one if I don’t get what I want from this one.” Generation of Change…
Where will we be in the next generation? Will there be cars? Will there be phones? What will food look like? What will our entertainment be? It’s hard to raise kids in this generation because there are so many distractions and things to keep them from “being bored” and so many dangers and fears.
Back then, we had to create our own distractions or we did chores. And we could walk down the sidewalk and talk to everyone with no fear – as long as we were home when the whistle blew. So will all creativity end because kids are not learning to think about change and create their own distractions? Or will the changes be so amazing that we cannot fathom them today?
Good Questions to Ponder! Ask your parents what life was like in their working world back in their generation. Was there resistance to change back then too?