Filed under: holidays, Uncategorized | Tags: careers, jobs, Labor Day, old-fashioned jobs
Today is Labor Day so we take a moment to salute all the people with real jobs who work hard. This past week, The Word Mavens were hardly working.
Joyce is an “international restaurant reviewer and location scout” –that is, she is on vacation. And Ellen is an “adolescent behavior expert, personal assistant and schedule wrangler” because her last kid at home starts high school tomorrow.
But we did manage to write the Labor Day editorial in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper!
Here it is — and we’re sorry to see the summer come to an end.
Where have all the copy boys, blacksmiths, and elevator operators gone?
We could ask the same of coopers, the artisans who crafted wooden barrels back in the days before plastic bottles — when households needed churns, casks, and hogsheads to hold liquids.
The word milliner might ring a bell with some hat-wearing church ladies. But, really, when was the last time you bought a custom-made, hand-fitted hat?
Jobs must change with the times. Grandpop Henry delivered blocks of ice for kitchen iceboxes in a horse-drawn wagon. Years later, he switched to a truck and joined the Teamsters.
A dead landline recently had us looking for an old-fashioned telephone repairman. We blew the dust off the Yellow Pages and flipped to “Small Appliance Repair,” only to learn that the independent telephone repairman is extinct.
The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker are disappearing, too. Instead, you can buy filet mignon from the Omaha Steaks website, get the location of the cupcake truck via Twitter, and order handmade soy candles from Etsy.
But you can’t get your hair cut online, which is why hands-on service providers, like manicurists and massage therapists, are still around. Patty, the colorist at Curlz, will never be replaced by a robot.
As our kids wander along their own career paths, we find it hard to give them advice. Although we know what it takes to become a doctor or an accountant, we don’t know what skills one needs to be a distance-learning manager or luxury-brand consultant.
A twenty-something friend was recently selecting her occupation from a drop-down menu in an online form, fully expecting “holistic life coach” to be one of the choices. She had to settle for “other.”
It’s especially hard to wrap our heads around 21st-century jobs in the tech sector. We finally understand that a search-engine optimizer is the person Frank calls to make sure “Frank’s Honest Auto Repair” is the first name to pop up on Google. But what’s on the to-do list of a cloud architect or mobile-app manager?
We do know what’s on the agenda of a professional pooper-scooper. It’s one of the many tasks that people are outsourcing, but not to India — tasks people used to do themselves but are now hiring others to do.
Pet owners can avail themselves of dog walkers and canine behaviorists. Parents can turn to baby-proofing technicians and summer-camp consultants. They’ll be lucky if they don’t need the services of professional nitpickers when head lice spread through the third grade.
Along with tech and personal service jobs, green jobs are on the upswing. We’re in favor of going green. We recycle and carry reusable water bottles. And we have instituted all these measures without the help of a corporate sustainability manager or recycling coordinator. But we might need a wind-turbine fabricator if we want our homes LEED-certified.
So as we drive home from the beach on Labor Day, and zoom through the E-ZPass lane, we’ll take a moment to salute the one remaining toll-taker. Her job may be on the endangered list. 
Filed under: calendar, holidays, Jewish holidays, Uncategorized | Tags: Gregorian calendar, High Holidays, Jewish calendar, Labor Day, Rosh Hashanah
Rosh Hashanah 5771 begins on the eve of Sept. 8, just two days after Labor Day. In 2011, it falls on Sept. 28. Huh?
The Jewish calendar is a mysterious thing – even to Jewish people. Which helps to explain the old Jewish joke:
Esther: When is Rosh Hashanah this year?
Mollie: Same day it always is, the first day of Tishrei.
The punch line is the fact Jewish holidays have a fixed date on the Jewish calendar – e.g. Hanukkah is always the 25th of Kislev – but when these dates are transferred to the Gregorian calendar – the civil calendar that hangs on your kitchen wall – they don’t sit still.
That’s because the Jewish and Gregorian calendars are radically different. The Jewish calendar is a lunar one, and the new Hebrew month always coincides with the new moon. The Gregorian calendar is a solar one – based on the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun. On that calendar, it’s the full moon that’s hard to pin down.
In ancient times, the new month was determined by observation. When the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court of law, heard testimony from two independent, reliable eyewitnesses that the new moon had risen, it would declare the “Rosh Hodesh,” the first of the month, and send out messengers to tell people the new month had begun.
Try putting that in an e-mail.
Both of these calendars sacrifice accuracy for ease. Though it takes 365-1/4 days for the earth to revolve around the sun, the civil calendar has 365 days. To adjust for this, a leap day is added in February once every four years.
The Jewish calendar has 12 months, but there are actually 12.4 lunar months in a year. So, a leap month – Adar II – is added to the calendar seven times in every 19 years. This ensures that Passover (also known as Hag ha-Aviv or the Spring Festival) falls in the spring. It also helps keep the other holidays in check.
Although Christmas and July 4th can sometimes creep up too quickly, they never catch us by surprise, like Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah do. In 2007, the holiday also took President George Bush by surprise: He issued a statement “wishing greetings to those celebrating Rosh Hashanah.” Unfortunately, he was a week early.
This year, the two-day period between Labor Day and the Jewish New Year just isn’t long enough. After dropping the kids off at college, we have to turn right around and drop the matzah balls into the soup. And is it legal to barbecue for Rosh Hashanah dinner?
An early holiday creates clothing dilemmas, too. As children, Ellen and her sisters have fond memories of campaigning to go bare-legged (no pantyhose) to Rosh Hashanah services on years like this one, when they were still warm and tan from the beach.
As adults, we are wondering how we can debut our new fall clothes at High Holiday services when the extended forecast says it will be 89 degrees? We haven’t even had time to buy new fall clothes. (Actually, neither of us are big shoppers. We always pull something old out of the closet and hope nobody will remember.)
Like Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah sometimes pops up way too early. This year it follows Thanksgiving by less than a week, which is better than the year it began on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend – when were still recovering from turkey and not yet ready to tackle potato latkes. Without advance planning, we would have had to venture out with the Black Friday crowd to buy Hanukkah tchotchkes.
Next year Hanukkah will fall on Dec. 21, which would allow us to schedule a family party on Christmas itself – though, in truth, we would miss the Jewish custom of celebrating with Chinese food and a movie.
Wishing all our friends and readers a Happy New Year.
