March 2, 2016 Article

The Old Coot isn’t a 24/7 guy.

By Merlin Lessler

I’ve had it with the term “24/7.” I’m sick of it. It’s lame. It’s been in use for more than two decades, but it’s older than that. It was first uttered in 1983 by LSU basketball star, Jerry Reynolds. He said it in a Sport’s Illustrated article describing his jump shot, “It’s good, 24/7.” It’s now a term in common use. Common OVERUSE! I look at it as an assault on the language, replacing words with numbers. Gone are the old phrases that served us well: every hour, every day – constantly – all the time. That’s bad enough in itself, but even worse, 24/7 is usually an overstatement, if not an outright lie. No one does anything 24/7 except to maintain a pulse.

We didn’t brag that we were on the job 24/7 in my working days. We bragged about our forty-hour workweek; we didn’t refer to it as “8/5. It was a big deal back then, the 40-hour workweek. It was a new standard. For the first half of the 20^th century, people worked 6 days a week, 8, 10 or 12 hours a day. But, even my “8/5” (forty hour work week) was a misnomer if you subtract the time I spent daydreaming, on coffee breaks and at the water cooler swapping gossip. It was more like 6/5.

It’s tougher in today’s work world. The 40-hour workweek has morphed into a 50 or 60-hour week, spanning six or even seven days, back to the early twentieth century standard, because corporations have workers by the short hairs, now that job security and job opportunity have become so fleeting. People are gently, and not so gently, forced to put in more and more time. Modern technology, E-mail and text messaging, make it harder to disengage from the workplace. To get away from the boss. 

Many of today’s workers are connected to the office with this electronic umbilical cord, yet their claim that they are on the job 24/7 is still an overstatement. Even if the time spent sleeping and eating is ignored there is still a lot of work time spent “occupying” a desk, not working. Especially when you deduct the time spent sending and receiving personal e-mails and text messages, playing Candy Crush and surfing the Web. 24/7 is in truth, a lot like the 8/5 or 6/5 of my employment era. In fact, us old coots probably put in more productive “work” hours than employees today. We were lucky; we weren’t interrupted by a Type A personality above us on the corporate ladder, constantly barraging us with texts and e-mails, asking for a progress report. We had the freedom to do our job. Today it’s a highly prized rarity.  

Back to my gripe, the overuse of 24/7. It’s at the top of my list of hip terms that should be retired. The old coot world I live in doesn’t fit an, hours/days, concept anyhow. Some weeks we’re productive 2/3. Even that’s a lie, because one of those three days is simply a repeat of what we did the previous day, and forgot. Like mowing our lawns two days in a row. The only thing we truly do 24/7 is to moan about the good old days, give updates on our physical condition and ask, “What was that guy’s name?”

February 24, 2016 Article

The Old Coot lowers the bar.

By Merlin Lessler

I’m ready for a girl’s bike. It’s been a long journey, from my first two-wheeler to this point. And, I better act fast or I won’t be able to find one. Girls don’t ride girl’s bikes! Not anymore. Old men ride girl’s bikes. Two years ago I discovered that I threw like a girl (sounds like a sexist statement, but I’m just reporting the facts). I was tossing a football back and forth with my granddaughter, Oriah, who was 8 years old at the time. I threw as hard as I could, but most throws were landing two feet in front of her. All her throws made it to me; some sailed over my head. I don’t play catch anymore; someone watching might say, “He throws like a girl.” My granddaughter moved on; she plays with kids who don’t throw like a girl.

Yes, a girl’s bike is looming in my future. They are so much easier to get on and off. I will no longer embarrass myself, falling off when I try to swing my leg over the bar to dismount and then rise from a tangle on the ground like a newborn colt standing for the first time. When I climb off a girl’s bike it will be as smooth as silk. Of course I’ll lie about it, “It’s my wife’s bike,” I’ll say. “Mine’s in the shop.” No different than when I tell Oriah my arm is too sore to play catch.

I hope my new bike will inspire my age mates to join me; then I won’t stand out so much. I started the long journey to a girl’s bike when I was seven and had to stand on the curb to get my leg over the bar on my first bike. Besides the bar issue, that bike was too big. Everything we got in that era was too big. “You’ll grow into it,” we were told. We didn’t reside on a pedestal, like today’s kids. We stuffed wadded up newspaper in the toes of new shoes to get them to fit. We rolled up the cuffs on a new pair of dungarees (now called jeans). We swam around in coats and shirts. And, new bikes were mounted from a curb. When I first started, my sister held my bike steady while I got on, and then rode ahead to catch me when I came to a stop.

I never understood the boy’s bike - girl’s bike thing. Why couldn’t both of them have a bar a person could easily swing their leg over? The “Google” informed me that the first “girl’s” bicycle was created in the late 1800’s, an era when women wore full-length dresses. Bicycles were a common form of transportation back then (a bike was a lot easier to take care of than a horse). The bar was lowered, so to speak, and the rear wheel was enclosed in a skirt guard so a dress wouldn’t become tangled in the spokes. It’s an idea that’s gone out of fashion. Equality has moved into the bike word. And why not? Women are allowed to wear pants, something that wasn’t done back then.  What a wild time we live in!

A “boy’s” bike, with its high bar, has a stronger frame. Girl’s bicycles aren’t recommended for rugged trails because of their weaker structure. That won’t bother me when I get mine. The only rough terrain I’ll encounter are the uneven, slate, sidewalk slabs in the village. A running start will get me over most of them. If I’m forced to stop and go around, I won’t fall getting off, because it will be a GIRL’S BIKE!