In praise of old timers

This is a blog  post, by Craig Pearce , which is so generous to the working skill of oldies, that I am going to plagerise it, word for word.

I am not even going to ask his permission. I hope he sues, because it will give me a chance to holler from the highest court, what he says:

I was nearly fooled into discrimination by age

A few years ago I was recruiting for a role that reported to me. There were a number of younger, as well as an older, candidates. Compared to the others, much, much older in fact. And considerably older than most of the team I had working with me.

Yet, according to the job specs this was clearly the most qualified and suitable person for the job. But I wavered.

What if this person wouldn’t fit into the fast-moving, fluid culture of the team I already had? Would the candidate be able to offer the insights into new technology that were emerging for web and digital communication? (Somewhat ironically, this role was all to do with managing a website, supposedly young turk turf…)

But I hired the old guy (oh yes, he knows who it is!), and you know what, here’s what happened:

• He educated all of the team, but me especially, on a range of digital communication capabilities
• He was way ahead of most other IT/web-related professionals I’d interacted with
• He recognised age as a perception-barrier from other people so worked extremely hard to deliver not just what was required by the role, but to provide value-add on top of that
• His energy levels and devotion to the job meant you had to prise him out of the office and even then, as we soon learnt, he’d continue working on delivering beyond best practice outcomes at home
• His experience enabled him to navigate turbulent political waters and interact with those unhappy with change (because this guy led a huge seachange in website communication at the organisation) successfully
• He provided sage advice to me many a time, sometimes specifically relevant to his own role and sometimes in relation to leadership, management and business communication in a broader sense.

And you know what, he also became a good friend. Not just of myself, but of all those younger folk in the team as well. Multiple wins all round.

Suffice to say, lesson well learnt.

Why age rules in public relations

Hopefully (!), the more you do something the better at it you get. The flipside of this is that you can also get jaded by it, losing enthusiasm and hence an edge or creativity or freshness that is required. Like most things, it comes down to the individual and their attitude.

Certainly, as writing is PR’s number one skill, we can do with all the expertise we can get. I’ve found younger people in PR to often possess very poor writing skills. Age can be a real winner in this regard.

The more you write, the more feedback you get, the more lessons you learn – the better you get. Either that, or you get unemployed.

Dealing effectively with people – whether they be journalists, senior management, colleagues and others – is probably PR’s number two skill. And as you age you naturally encounter a range of different people and are put in a range of situations, many of them confronting. These experiences impact not just on knowledge, but in the array of responses we develop to resolve and leverage them for the best possible outcome.

This is nothing against youth (which has plenty going for it too!) it is just a simple result of aging. Age definitely wins in these regards!

Within PR, age seems to me like it should be perceived as having excellent POD. This is an industry dominated by youth. Perhaps this is partly because it is a female-centric industry and women tend to leave the workforce (due to family commitments?) as they age. I don’t know, I’m just speculating, because having a lot of women in PR is one of the best things about the industry.

The dwindling of PR professionals as we age underlines that in PR we should be trying to hang onto older workers for as long as possible. The knowledge they possess is equally important, and in many situations vastly more so, than whatever we learn from doing a Masters degree or deep-diving into social media 24/7/12/52.

Funnily enough, in my experience older people in the workforce tend to behave in a young way. That’s if you characterise the young as having:

• Energy
• Creativity
• A willingness to try something new.

We could all do with a bit more age in our workforce.

You are not my pet, little mouse
How can I get you from my house.
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a picnic, what a feastie
Of cheese I put in a useless trap;
Many a nibble you thieve whilst I nap.
Thou need not start away so hasty
I would be loath to run an’ chase thee
With tail-removing carving knife,
Like the upset farmer’s wife.
I simply wish you’d go away
But my hopes oft gang astray.

With a wink to Robbie Burns

For anyone with eyes to see, living amongst the aging and the elderly is a tonic for the funny bone.

An old auntie in the unit across the driveway is collector of potions, lotions and pills. She has racks of vitamins and herbal remedies. She doesn’t trust doctors but accepts advice freely from strangers she sits next to on the community bus.

She tells me that she believes in natural healing, but her view of this form of medicine is a little different to most. She uses her bible. She doesn’t read the book, but keeps it on her lap during the day. At night, when she goes to bed, she rests the book on whatever part of her body has caused her most problem during the day.

Not so dependent on kindness of strange healing rituals is an old friend several suburbs away. She’s very much my senior and very alert, very switched on to using email to keep in touch with her old cronies. Its not her body she wants fixed, but her gadgets.

Yesterday I had a phone call for urgent help; all she’d done was rest a book on the keyboard, and her online world had turned on her, the image on her computer monitor was turned upside down, and she didn’t know what to do.

I suggested that as a first aid step, she turn the computer off, wait a while and switch on again. She came back a little while later to say she didn’t know how to do that. Switching on was OK, but she had been taught to shut down, not how to turn the computer off. So a 45 minute trip across town, and I was able to set her screen right through the use of the right function keys on her keyboard.

Today is The International Day of Older People, started twenty years ago by consensus in The General Assembly of The United Nations .

World-wide, there are now around 600 million persons aged 60 years and over;  the party to celebrate this auspicious day could be a fairly wild affair. So far, I haven’t seen as much as a boy scout waiting to help an old lady cross the road, let alone a celebration.

Many a city has issued a press release to mark the importance of the moment; days like this are a tired public relations officer’s dream run. But at least they’re doing something; some big cities’ officials are just too busy to do more than pay  lip service to their elderly. This is also World Smile Day and World Vegetarian Day, and it can be hard to fit every event into a crowded calendar.

This day is meant to recognise the contributions of older persons to family, business, culture and society; and provide a backdrop in which family, business, culture and society can examine issues which affect the lives of their venerable elders.

And what do we get? Politicians make speeches, children at schools make drawings. Some older people are wheeled out of their wards in retirement homes, for TV camera, to fill a few seconds on the nightly news.

Lucky ones get to go to Bingo to help them avoid Alzheimer’s, or to enjoy tea and biscuits at the local library.

Is that enough for the International Day of Older People?

Why can’t movie  theatres make a special effort, program a special screening of The Buena Vista Social Club, with free entry to old timers. I’d like to see a Nostalgia Fest in the local Shopping Mall, a pensioners’ edition of The X Factor on TV, and a Tea Dance where-ever in town the Y generation normally hold their rave parties.

Thanks to the New York Times for bringing this new blog site to our eyes, demonstrating the different ways seniors live now at Brave Old World Its a site worth several visits.

According to NYT “This summer, 10 fellows at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism reported on a graying nation for News21, a national initiative to promote innovation in journalism. The results included these video portraits of the many ways older Americans live, from an off-the-grid couple felling trees in rural Montana to a woman who requires assistance to leave her nursing home bed each morning. Find more of the fellows’ multimedia work at their Web site, Brave Old World “

Call me an old fuddy-duddy if you like, but I really don’t like giving my grandkids plastic toys or big cuddly animal things stuffed with foam. I’d rather give them toys made from a natural product

Sure, plastic and foam toys look bright and colourful, and make noises guaranteed to drive parents mad, but there’s too much wrong with them on the negative side of the ledger.

There’s little emotional involvement involved with these toys, except greed of possession.

Comparatively, they are poor value for money. They don’t last long. People who give plastic and foam as gifts or bribes seem to believe the bigger the box, the happier the child will be The novelty of the surprise soon wears off, and the kids are looking for the next big box to rip open.

There’s no sensible way of getting rid of all this juvenile flotsam and jetsam when it has passed its two weeks use-by date.

Charity shops will take some, a few. Many of them are too broken to be saleable, or carry so much baby dribble Mum doesn’t want to risk catching a neighborhood baby virus. Most will end up discarded and dumped.

Drive along any street on any garage sale day, and see piles of plastic that’s selling for pennies, or heaps of cuddly toys with one eye and an ear missing and no longer worth a hug.

What about reputable useful stuff like Lego? And surely companies like Mattel are PR conscious enough to think of safety first with children.

Well, I have a paranoid distrust of their plastic toys

When the kids are young, everything goes into their mouths and is chewed, experimentally. Rip the arm off a new doll, and pop it into your mouth, is standard operating procedure for kids.

In chewing and sucking the toys, chemical additives can often leech out of the plastic – into the kiddie.

What kind of plastic has been used in these toys, and what sort of additives are in the plastic? . Often the distributor of the toy doesn’t know exactly how it is made, or won’t tell us buyers, in case we get confused.

Known additives have included pthalates,  but also lead and cadmium, and as vinyl breaks down, this toxic stuff leaches.

Some adult plastic items carry a little triangle symbol surrounding a number, which indicates the type of plastic used. With toys, its rafferty’s rules (no rules at all). With these labels on the plastic, we could, perhaps make an educated guess on the degree of risk hidden in the toy – when we know were to find an explanation for the numerical symbols.

Meanwhile, I want to give my grandkids a wooden top or a wool doll.

Max was loved – by a lot of people

He was a devoted husband, friend and partner to Mary, a close and caring father to Rebecca, John and Nicholas – and Tracy, Jane and Wendy. He was a loving grandfather who thoroughly enjoyed the company of all of our young ones, especially Melanie, Darcy, Riley, Georgina and Anastasia.

He was a wise uncle, a loyal friend and a trustworthy comrade

At sea, off Queensland coast, 1945-05-03. Lieutenant-commander j.i. Moore, (1), in the paymasters' office aboard the troopship HMAS Kanimbla, with able seaman J.M. Belchamber, (2).

With service in the merchant navy as a young man, Max took his place in the wartime fleet which kept Australia supplied with essential goods, under conditions that were continuously dangerous. His job as a communications officer meant that he was a key player in getting ships and crew safely to their ports.

Max had great communications skills, he was a good listener and had printer’s ink in his blood.

While he set lead for the day’s news, at the same time Max corrected grammar, edited spelling mistakes and saved many now famous journalists and editors from printing embarrassing mistakes.

As a child, I visited Max at his work a few times, and saw the monster machines he operated with ease, as he produced the lead slugs for the paper. To my small eyes, those machines were like dragons Max had tamed.

I’m sure that Max’s skills and pride in doing a job as the best as it could be done, set me and others, on a path for getting-things-right. Even today, I can’t write a letter to Forrest Avenue without checking to see if there are errors that would immediately catch Max’s eye.

My earliest memories of Max, even before he and Mary were married include sitting behind him on his motor bike. This was superman, I thought.

I also remember him showing me a sword, a very big sword. I can tell you, I decided then and there, I was never going to miss-behave around an uncle with a motorbike and a sword.

Max enjoyed life – especially when good food, and fine red wine were included – He enjoyed time with his close family, time with his extended family, time with his many loyal friends. He was always there for us.

Max had a sharp memory, a mind full of wonderful human details — like the name of his butcher 40 years ago
He loved to tell a story, and when he spun a yarn, he left us wanting more.

Today, we would all like more of Max.

I imagine him half opening one eye and saying “ I’m still listening”.

Only two weeks into retirement, and already I have discovered great joy being unshackled from business time and Daylight Saving Time and other routines.

All my working life I have run to the beat of another clock, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, clockwatching from 5.30 am till lights out, always driven by the thought that “Time is Money”.

I would wake up by the alarm clock, spend a day driven by rosters, schedules, appointments, timetables and meetings that overlapped. Try to race the clock to meet deadlines, cram more into each hour to meet ‘key performance indicators’ set by a faceless cost accountant and keep a record of billable time in 6 minute divisions. Eat by the clock, go to bed early so I’d be fit the race again tomorrow. No more

Now, if I want to stay up all night to finish reading a good book, that’s OK; I don’t have to get out of bed till I wake.  I can sleep-in till 7.30, or 8.30 or even 9.30 if its cold outside. I can eat when I am hungry, not when it’s lunch time. I can work at my own pace. If I’m late for a meeting I can phone and say “Start without me”.

More importantly I can pick and choose my own work. I have piles of work to be done – jobs I put at low priority when Time was Money, promising myself to do them “when I retired”.

Jobs like sorting out all the photos accumulated in a box, projects like learning more Greek language, tasks like repainting the flat, plans like sorting out all the magazines I’ve stored to read when have the time. There’s still tax to do, banks to scold, doctor’s waiting rooms to sit around in for an hour after the time allocated.

I don’t know why they call this The Golden Years. I spent the first two weeks of retirement making lists of all the duties and odd jobs that I’ve hoarded for retirement. Now I am sorting them into priorities, and setting target dates for their completion. These go into my daily ‘To Do’ lists in the calendar. Days aren’t long enough. This time they have to be done, I don’t get a third chance.

If you want me to spend some fun time with you, you’ll need to make an appointment.

Alright, I confess. I was a little wet eyed when I drove out of the gates at work for the last time yesterday. There were good people, friends still chained to their desks, to their collar-and-ties, and their power walks. There had been good times. Some good results were on the scoreboard.

It was a double whammy. I accepted a redundancy, meaning the job I did has been declared ‘excess to requirements’. But at age 70, the reality is that now I am also facing retirement.

No longer a wage slave, now a pension slave.

Still I’m in good company. There’s great populations of peoples who have retired, been made redundant or fired. And they still have as many skills as those left on the job. They just don’t have the same value in dead-wood land. Perhaps we should start our own political party. There’s strength in numbers.

Being retired will be a foreign country for me. I am going to have to learn a new language, one without acronyms, cliches and business speak. As a refugee from the work force I will have to learn a new culture, a new economy, new dress code. I need to learn to deal with new prejudices – those against the aged. I will need to adjust my expectations and keep my history private.

I intend to find the best I can in this new world, just like those other refugees arriving by rickety boats when they step ashore in their new adopted lands.