Rechauffees

Upper management once caused a stir at the American branch of a French company I worked at by referring to the (female) customer service workers as "rechauffees." Not speaking vernacular French myself, I was not offended till someone told me that the word meant "re-heats" or "leftovers." Maybe this is particularly offensive in France, where every 4th grader studies la cuisine.

Nonetheless, I was very pleased to look in the refrigerator this morning to find some spaghetti squash and meatballs already packaged for today's lunch. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

YouTube: Christmas Blessing

"Red wine or white?" I was proud to be able to ask Maria, who had only been in the States a few months. That, unfortunately, was the extent of my conversational Russian, and she was my Christmas guest.

Fortunately, between dinner and dessert, we found that there are plenty of Stalin-era movie clips on YouTube. I wish you had seen her smile when we played "Ochi Chornoye," "Podmoskovniye Vechera" and "Kak mnogo devushek xhoroshik."

Christmas blessings to all of you, and especially to those of you who posted clips that made my guest smile.

At Least I Can Copy Edit

Neil Howe made an interesting point in the Washington Post, about what it's like to be the pig's tail in the python.

Lately demographers have been calling me the tail end of the baby boom, but I proudly insist that I am Gen X. Howe makes some interesting points about us

• "relatively large share of higher-order siblings"
• "By the time they entered middle and high school, classrooms were opened, standards were lowered and supervision had disappeared."
• "they arrived too late to enter the most lucrative professions and the cushiest corporations, by now glutted with Boomer yuppies."

Howe calls Sarah Palin typical of my cohort, alas. In general, he calls us "practical and resilient, they handle risk well and they know how to improvise even when the experts don't know the answer."

The article itself is thought-provoking for Americans in their early 40s and people who care about them.

I do hope that whoever wrote the headline was not one of us. "Early Xers..." Howe writes "are impatient with syntax and punctuation and citations--and all the other brainy stuff they were never taught." In fact, I was very fortunate to attend private high school on scholarship, where I learned a lot, and I've gone on to learn a lot more.

The headline "The Kids Are Alright. But Their Parents ... " may pass the Word "spelling and grammar" check, but even this Gen X-er would not let "alright" past her copy desk.

LinkedIn II

An article by Dana Mattioli in yesterday's Wall Street Journal says that LinkedIn memberships have increased 36% in the last six months.

This is a real trend.

LinkedIn

In 2003 a friend asked me to join her social network, but I was dubious. Why would I want friends of friends to contact me, and how did I know that I wouldn't get on a million spam lists? I turned her down, thinking that this idea would die aborning.

Often I am wrong, but rarely so spectacularly.

I signed up for LinkedIn last year but didn't think much about my membership. No one I knew seemed to belong.

This year, though, lots of people I know have joined. Suddenly I am reconnecting with former colleagues and trying to build a network as big as Len's (208). Get in to LinkedIn now while it's hot stuff.

http://www.linkedin.com/

Stick a Fork in These Domain Names

I ordered the following domain names for a project, but I don't need them any more. They have now baked at ICANN for the requisite two months, so they are ready to transfer to you. If you need a domain name that connotes instant service for PCs, or service that keeps PCs running trouble-free, consider the following

• pcindependence.com
• pctogether.com
• steadfastpc.com (PC stays fixed, like the Steadfast Tin Soldier)
• sturdypc.com
• desktop999.com (may work well in countries where you dial 999, not 911 for emergencies)
• pcminuteman.com (do many people in the US know who minutemen were anymore?)

Hmm, not very inspiring, you're thinking? I agree--and I dare you. Think of any domain name for a PC repair and maintenance service. (Helpful hints.) Every good name is taken, except for these.

If you want one of these domain names, drop me a line at katharine@katharinehadow.com.

Christmas Pageant

I was always the narrator and never the angel.

What fun is it to stand up at the lectern, knowing that the grownups chose you because you can pronounce most words right? So you mumble and rush through the story, watching the angels trip down the aisle in their lovely white robes.

Now, though, I'm on the other side of the lectern, coaching the children to SLOW DOWN for heaven's sake.

They've narrated before, they think. Obviously THEY don't need to listen to me. They know the story. Everyone else knows the story. Ho hum.

Besides, it doesn't make any sense anyway, they think. Why should the shepherds be terrified? Angels are just overgrown fairies, right? And, look, the angel appeared to Mary, too. Obviously, angels positively infested Bethlehem, like pantry moths. Big deal.

But for one person in the audience, this will be the first time to hear the story. And if that one person can see a miracle instead of juvenile ennui, we will have succeeded.

It's my job to make sure that they tell the story again for the first time.

I guess it's not too different from my day job.

Delete Delete Delete

I'm so proud. I brought the number of unread emails in my inbox under a hundred.

I guard my email address zealously. I am only on a few email lists, mostly for organizations that encourage me to think of myself as I would like to be.

• Expert (ok, conversant) on businesses in New Jersey--NJBIZ.com
• New media mogul--GoDaddy.com
• Self-supporting freelance writer--eLance.com

Boy, do they send me a lot of emails! And if I get busy for a few days, which often happens, I can't even sign in to my account, let alone delete unwanted messages. After more than a few days, I hate to even scroll down my messages.

A salty old salesman I once worked with filed by the "foot method." He piled his paperwork up. When the stack was two feet high, he threw away the bottom foot. I take a similar approach to my emails. I sort by "sender" and delete the old unread messages. Annoyingly, some of my accounts put entirely different senders on various email messages, making this approach more difficult.

I also get emails from companies to which I have applied online. If I lose my job, I don't want to have to retrieve my account information for all of them. This has a handy side benefit. I'm sorry to say that several of my friends are out of work. When I get an email for a job that looks right for someone, I forward it to them. Here's hoping that I don't need those auto-alerts myself for a long time, and that they can help someone else.