You Dig?

In the category of We Should Have Seen This Coming, it is now apparent that baby boomers are to blame for the lost generation of gardeners. Seriously. Seriously?

Well, seriously in Britain. Folks in their twenties, thirties and forties were never taught to garden by boomer parents according to the Royal Horticultural Society.

Come on. Just because boomers did not encourage their kids to play in the dirt (too many germs there), their offspring have rejected any interest in gardening. I call bullshit. My parents were not gardeners but I still jumped on the Mother Earth bandwagon in my late twenties and ended up with three zucchini mounds that produced 100 pounds of zukes per week (I may be exaggerating). It was a 20 foot by 70 foot garden with corn, tomatoes, peppers and strawberries surrounded by an eight foot fence that deer easily leaped right over for breakfast. We thought we were getting back to the land and earning self-sufficiency merit badge. No parent involvement whatsoever. They marveled over the fact that we had any interest in growing our own food but they certainly knew that it had nothing to do with any example that they set for us.

If millennials and GenXers really have a yen to garden, lack of parental guidance or childhood experience is not going to stop them. In fact, I would posit that all the interest in organic food and veganism would be all the encouragement these deprived folks would need to get motivated to get dirt under their fingernails and grow their own food in their own gardens. Younger generations can go online now and get 100 times more information on gardening than we had access to almost 50 years ago. Our wellworn Mother Earth News magazines were the go-to resource back then and we learned by doing and from our mistakes (3 zucchini mounds will feed a family of 30. I know that now).

Don’t have your own home with space for a garden? That might have been an impediment back in our day but not anymore. Community gardens are everywhere now, so you can till your own patch along with like-minded gardeners and bring home the bounty.

So no, we’re not taking the blame for this one. And that’s final.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

Time Machine

For all outward appearances the TMI looks like a sophisticated virtual reality machine. You wear this clunky looking goggle-like apparatus with a wire coming off of it. Then there are the earphones to enhance the audio experience. Maybe some day it can be surgically placed right on top of our retinas, but that’s way off in the future. The one piece of technology that makes the Time Machine Input completely different from VR is the cord that goes right into the brain’s cortex to the neurons that control our sense of time.

If you have visions of Hot Tub Time Machine (or Hot Tub Time Machine 2 or 3), let me assure you that the TMI does not take you back in time. It’s not going to fulfill some juvenile fantasy of going back in time to be cooler than you were in high school or to erase all those embarrassing moments that all of us would like to delete from our memory bank. The TMI extends time, stretching the boundaries of time and space in a way that just a few years ago we thought would be impossible.

We hear people say all the time, “if only there were more than 24 hours in a day, I could get so much more done.” The amazing TMI technology makes that possible. You need more than one hour to get yourself going in the morning? TMI can add as much as 15 minutes to the basic 1 hour block of time. Repeat that setting for a full 24 hours and you pick up a net gain of 6 hours. Over a week that adds up to 42 hours, or almost 2 full extra days in your week. But that’s not all. You could gain 104 days in a year, and over a lifetime, are you ready for this, you could gain 260 months or an extra 21 years.

Personally, I’m not interested in extending my lifespan by 20 or more years. My goals are much more modest. I just want that extra 15 minutes when the clock is running down and I need that boost. Let me spend 15 more minutes with the one I love, or sleep for 15 more minutes in the morning, or take 15 minutes our of my day to do nothing more than contemplate my navel.

The choice is yours with the TMI. You decide how and when you want more time. Just remember, batteries are not included.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

What Shortage?

Haven’t they run out of baby boomers in the workplace yet? I keep reading articles about how thousands of boomers are leaving their jobs and there will be severe shortages of knowledgeable workers to carry on the business of business when those folks retire.

Only I’m not seeing it. Looks like plenty of gray hairs (eminence grisers as I like to call them) are still on the job, still standing in the way of GenXers and Millennials waiting to take their jobs. With the promise of 10,000 retirees per day, I thought we were going to see a dramatic denigration in the quality of worker output. Is it possible that worker output already sucks because everyone is shopping online for half the workday?

Admit it. If you’re a boomer, there’s a part of your psyche that wants to see the entire economy come screeching to a halt as the boomers take their leave. They need us, they really, really need us. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe we’ve done such a great job training our replacements that the transition to the next generation will proceed in a calm and orderly way.

One fly in the ointment. There are not enough replacements. Boomers are such a big cohort that only the milennials can match us for sheer numbers. Unless you think we can throw a twenty year-old into the breech to replace the sixty-five year-old worker, we’re all kind of screwed. And that means you too boomers. What kind of service do you think we’re going to get down at the doctor’s office, the motor vehicle department or the social security office if these places are all run by kids that just got out of college?

Stop shaking, it’s going to be okay. Everything will be computerized. We will just complete the forms on the website and then robots will process our request. If the robot screws up, you just complete the form again until the robot gets it right. Sure, it could take three or four tries before you get what you need, but we’ll have time. We’ll be retired and there won’t be any rush to get anything done or go anywhere.

Feel better? I know I do.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.