Want to buy or sell something? Check the classifieds
  • The Fedora Lounge is supported in part by commission earning affiliate links sitewide. Please support us by using them. You may learn more here.

Anyone have a maid when growing up?

LuvMyMan

I’ll Lock Up.
Messages
4,558
Location
Michigan
The answer to many problems are already known....ammo, food storage....everyday items like aspirin, toilet paper, matches....the list goes on.

One thing that is so very important and most of "us" here do share and should always recall within ourselves no matter what...is lOVE and RESPECT.

For anyone that is really concerned about "what may be next", please check out a website NOREEN arms. They make one hell of a nice semi automatic custom order 30.06 that is based upon the assault rifle platform...however it is also designed for some accurate long distance use.....they make serious tools to deal with serious times.....

I do not think everyone from any one time period could be "cataloged" as being the base problems of the current scene of today's world. I have to look at two examples of what WWII children have produced and the family structure of those two examples. First my own Family. My Father was a returning veteran from serving in the military, he used what meager benefits he could as a veteran. Was a hard working man, directed his life to a tool and die maker. Not a wealthy man by any means, but we were far from being broke. I have no negative issues that make me think of anything less of how we were raised or the outcome for myself or my other family members. My Father gave a good example of how to work hard and to learn.

My next example would have to be my Husband and his family. My late Father-in-law, his story is amazing., Raised until he was 14 in a shack house, no running water or electricity. Worked on a nursery selling plants and trees and cooked soup for those coming to the nursery. Was befriended by executives that ran large manufacturing companies like Fisher Body, before they became part of General Motors. He served in the military and was offered a job cooking for an elite private mens club for executives. Worked there for a few years and they liked him and offered him school and training, which he did take them up on. Part of that agreement was to work for Fisher Body for five years to use the skills he would learn from his school. During the course of his working for Fisher Body, he observed problems that the production line would have come up almost daily...limit switches that would catch on fire, those switches were vital to the production line to keep moving and a fire would bring the line to a halt. So, he secretly developed a new type of switch and the day his five years was up, showed his friends at Fisher Body the new limit switch....and offered to sell them the switches he was going to make at his own business. Soon all the auto industry and aircraft industry became customers and of course, that made my Father-in-law a very wealthy person. He did pay a price personally for the success....he worked 60 to 80 hours per week for about 25 years. Naturally he also took some month of two long vacation periods which gave my Husband at a young age a chance to see the USA, and it also gave my Husband a similar upbringing that I had as well...you work hard and obtain success from your efforts.

These two examples for the sake of writing about them here, are of course a short version of lives of two families that to my best observations had success in life. My Father was not a multi millionaire but not broke either, my Father-in-law went from living in a "out house only" home to owning many homes around the United States and being able to be in a position to help thousands of people in life. It is really (my opinion) that most of us only get out of life what we are willing to put into it. My own Husband followed in his Fathers footsteps of finding a way to work hard and produce a high income and to help others the majority of his adult life as well.

One wonderful aspect of life to me is, you can never discount any one section of life or times to say those are elements of a problem or negative. Each and every aspect of time periods of History have success as well as failure. It is up to each of us to seek a direction to take life and then go there.
 

Stanley Doble

Call Me a Cab
Messages
2,808
Location
Cobourg
Scanning your list Lizzie, it looks like pretty well all of them are in place. As far as the 6 hour day and 5 day week go, 30 hours (or 29 hours) is now the typical work week at Walmart, fast food restaurants etc. and this is the only type of employment that is growing. Plus, the minimum wage is at least 10 times what they were fighting for back then (too bad about inflation, wonder how that happened).

if you take the number of people with no jobs or part time jobs and average them with the dwindling number of full time jobs, I should think that would average 30 hours as well.

If you went on disability and coasted the rest of your life you would average a 30 hour week if you lived long enough.
 

rjb1

Practically Family
Messages
561
Location
Nashville
We definitely did not have a maid - I know that for sure since my mother often told me she wasn't my maid.

As for typing skills -or the lack thereof - I'm also a Ph.D. who types using two fingers. It *might* be a small-scale handicap, but I've been fairly successful at doing what Ph.D.'s do for a number of decades now, despite that.

I find that I type with two fingers just about as fast as I think. Maybe I should think faster, but I don't, so putting the words on the screen is not a significant bottleneck for me. Whether writing research papers for NASA, or ordinary engineering-class notes, how I do it works fine for me. (I sometimes use just *one* finger if it's a difficult concept.)

At one time there was a behind-the-scenes good reason for paying someone to type your Master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation. Graduate Schools were fanatical about using their particular specified formats. You could have as much trouble - or more - battling the grad school office about periods and colons as you did with your academic advisor(s) concerning substantive content.
I paid the ME Dept. secretary to type my Master's thesis and when I took it to the grad school office their first question was "Who typed this?"
When I told them that it was "Susan from ME" they put their Seal of Approval on it immediately without even looking at it (or giving me a hard time). They knew that she knew how it was supposed to be done.

I "typed" my own dissertation and had some major shootouts with the grad school. They finally got resolved, but not as easily as the "good old days" of paying someone (a known expert) to do it.
 

Edward

Bartender
Messages
25,082
Location
London, UK
I wrote it by hand first.

That takes me back.... I wrote my entire masters dissertation, all 66,000 words, by hand. Took me six weeks, and then a further three weeks to type it up. I still use the same two fingers, but I can easily type that sort of quantity in three days now. Result of spending five to six days a week behind a computer, nine to ten hours a day, often, for nearly sixteen years. I'm almost touch type now, but still with just two fingers.

And, I don't see where that somehow means they didn't legitimately earn their academic degrees.

Not at all. If that invalidated us, then surely it was a bust when Gutenberg went into business anyhow, unless everyone set up the printers for their own manuscript too.. .

I'd think that any academic whose profession requires them to "publish or perish" would need to know how to type. Anybody who writes for a living at any level ought to that skill, if only for the sake of efficiency. Feeding your ideas thru the intermediary of a typist adds an unnecessary step to the process and takes that much longer to get the job done.

Very few of us touch type - 99.9% of academics are two-finger peckers, albeit very quick at it. The norm nowadays is for everything to be written onscreen from the get go - far easier than writing it on paper first, and then you can easily edit and reformat and such.

When I'm dictator, typing, home ec, and auto shop will be compulsory for everyone.

Frankly, that's not a bad idea. I'm all for education for education's own sake, and it having a value in and of itself, but there are far too many kids out there end up the worse off because nobody ever does teach them how to balance an account, or how to stick to a budget, or cook a cheap, healthy meal, or whatever... I hear that since I did it long ago, the driving test now includes an element of basic car maintenance, which is a positive development. (Mind you, I'm hoping that I never need to run a car again... something old, and maybe a modern Morgan, would be lovely if I won the Euromillions, but seeing what others go through I'm well glad not to have to run a car as things are. They seem to be little other than moneypits most of the time...).


Well, they would argue that their time is more valuable on the academic part and less valuable on the administrative. That while someone else is typing, they can still be doing whatever it is that they do.

So you'd think. Then The Powers That Be tell you they bought you a laptop so you wouldn't need a secretary.... we all write on computer directly nowadays, anyhow, so it's typed right from the off...

When I write for publication I compose the whole thing, in finished form, right at the keyboard - there's no dictating, no umming and ahhing into a voice recorder, no reviewing a typed manuscript for errors, none of that. When I finish typing, the article is done, finished, and ready to be submitted with no further fooling around, and I can immediately move on to whatever else I'm working on at the moment. Seems to me that would be a more efficient way of doing things than messing around with hirelings, but hey, I only write for a living.

That's how it is done in academia now. Computerisation has resulted in (and occasionally been used as an excuse for) a very significant drop in the levels of administrative support available to the average academic. In my department, which has around fifty staff and about a thousand students, only the Director has his own personal secretary... and 50% of her time is spent on other admin issues.

The Help was about 10 years before my time but dead on.

Including the poo cake? :eek:

Typing was mandatory at my high school. I made beer money typing papers in junior college for guys who never learned to type. I took 2 years of typing in high school because the typing teacher was hot & class was predominantly female. Oh how a high school boy's mind works...

lol In my lower sixth year (penultimate year of school, I was seventeen), I signed up to do an additional GCSE in RE because I fancied a girl in the year below. Gave up two lunchtimes a week to do it. Didn't get the girl (which turned out to be a lucky escape), but I did get an A in that GCSE, with which I was pretty pleased.
 
Messages
10,524
Location
DnD Ranch, Cherokee County, GA
...
Including the poo cake? :eek:
....
Got some soap powder biscuits once...never knew anybody that treated their help as mean as in the movie.
My "maid" raised me from 3 years old on. My mother was too busy with Garden, Music, Bridge, etc. clubs.
She had raised my brother & sister & got my dad's practice up & running, so she was enjoying the rewards when I came along.
You knew everybody's maid, what meals were their specialty & what day of the week they cooked them...
 

LizzieMaine

Bartender
Messages
33,766
Location
Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
That takes me back.... I wrote my entire masters dissertation, all 66,000 words, by hand. Took me six weeks, and then a further three weeks to type it up. I still use the same two fingers, but I can easily type that sort of quantity in three days now. Result of spending five to six days a week behind a computer, nine to ten hours a day, often, for nearly sixteen years. I'm almost touch type now, but still with just two fingers.

Not to beat this typing thing into the ground but I'd honestly think it'd be easier, in the long run, to learn to type properly than to spend the time it takes to learn to do it the two-finger way. Obviously the way you're doing it now works for you, but for kids starting out, why not learn to do it correctly? I've yet to meet a two-finger typist who can get up into the 85-90 wpm range, and when you've got a lot of writing to do that really makes a big difference.
 

LuvMyMan

I’ll Lock Up.
Messages
4,558
Location
Michigan
Not to beat this typing thing into the ground but I'd honestly think it'd be easier, in the long run, to learn to type properly than to spend the time it takes to learn to do it the two-finger way. Obviously the way you're doing it now works for you, but for kids starting out, why not learn to do it correctly? I've yet to meet a two-finger typist who can get up into the 85-90 wpm range, and when you've got a lot of writing to do that really makes a big difference.


I have to agree it is easier and much faster if you just learn the proper way. I watched my Husband type a few years back and asked him what he does when he types, as it is fast but not the normal way to type? He said he learned patterns of the words he would type and use those patterns sort of memorized so that he could type faster. For someone that was not typing properly he was about 40 WPM not too bad. I'd sink in my work if I was not able to type at least 100WPM. Yes I took typing in school to start me out when I was a youngster. I think the "browns cow jumped over the moon" or was it the lazy dog?....I can still recall some of it but gee whiz that was over forty years ago or more...lol! I loved the old manual typewriter as it did not allow for errors like computers and programs do. The more you can practice and make NO errors, the faster you can become in my opinion.
 

LuvMyMan

I’ll Lock Up.
Messages
4,558
Location
Michigan
No...that's starving.

With the cost of living in todays world, $1300 a month does not cover even half of our household budget let alone anything "fringe" oriented such as maybe something as simple as a cup of coffee at Denny's....
 

Horace Debussy Jones

A-List Customer
Messages
417
Location
The Bowery
I heard tell that my grandparents on my dad's side were fairly well to do before the Great Depression hit. They owned a store and had at least a nanny to mind the kids. Then everything went south,..and I am NOT a department store heir now! :( Oh well, maybe in an alternate universe?
 

Edward

Bartender
Messages
25,082
Location
London, UK
My best friend is on disability. $1300 a month isn't coasting.

Jinkies, no. I have a friend in the same position. Lives with an elderly mother (can't afford to move out), so doesn't have to pay rent, but has an income of precisely GBP400 per month (that's currently around USD650) plus some buttons in "permitted work". It's a tough job market out there in the UK these days if you're middle thirties and well educated; the jobs for which these folks are qualified are being snapped up by folks fifteen years older with more experience, and anything else won't even give them an interview because as far as an employer is concerned if you're over-qualified for the job, you'll only ever want to jump ship for something better. Tough breaks, especially when you throw a disability into the mix and its effect of cutting drastically the jobs that suit, along with the unpsoken truth that a lot of employers will find someway around the law to avoid having to make "reasonable adjustments".

Got some soap powder biscuits once...never knew anybody that treated their help as mean as in the movie.

Jings, you'd hope not... great film, but I'd like to hope some of those folks weren't the norm...

Not to beat this typing thing into the ground but I'd honestly think it'd be easier, in the long run, to learn to type properly than to spend the time it takes to learn to do it the two-finger way. Obviously the way you're doing it now works for you, but for kids starting out, why not learn to do it correctly? I've yet to meet a two-finger typist who can get up into the 85-90 wpm range, and when you've got a lot of writing to do that really makes a big difference.

These days I stick with whatever works. No idea what my pm is, but it'd take me far too long to relearn and only be a pain... Fair argument, though, for having kids learn it in school. For most of them, and I'm thinking kids the age of my brother's, four and seven, they'd likely get far more benefit being taught to touch type than handwriting. The day on which all exams everywhere are done on computers is only a small matter of resources away.... I can't wait. It's becoming common in the US now, and I've informedc faculty that I'd be very happy to be the pilot programme on that one. Using something like examsoft, the student's entire system bar one word processing document can be shut down for the duration (to help prevent cheating), and only comes back up once they hit the "submit" button. It would significantly cut my marking time (bearing in mind that between June and July I process upwards of 600 scripts) if they were clearly typed rather than handwritten.
 

Forum statistics

Threads
109,304
Messages
3,078,444
Members
54,244
Latest member
seeldoger47
Top