Washington (not D.C.) and creativity

Abe’s been getting all the attention.

Not that he doesn’t deserve a great deal, especially in light of Barack Obama’s election. And his birthday does come first in the chronological  list of  February presidential anniversaries.

But George Washington, who would be turning 277 next Sunday, Feb. 22,  is due for some notice now.

Many historians imply that Washington’s greatest contribution to the founding of our nation was, in effect, his character. A man of great dignity, resolution and incorruptibility, his determination to do the right thing by his countrymen in all situations – war or peace – made him a uniquely awe-inspiring hero, a unifier of factions and a quiet reproach to malcontents more concerned with self than service.        

But he also had creative nerve that was second to none. If he had been playing chess instead of fighting an actual war, you could say he won with only a knight, a castle and a handful of pawns against the full forces of his enemy.  

Take, for example, his execution of the plan at Dorchester Heights, outside the city of Boston, at the beginning of the American Revolution. Frustrated by the impasse he had been facing for months there because his generals repeatedly vetoed a direct attack by the ill-supplied and -trained Continental Army on the strong British force trapped in the cul-de-sac of the city, Washington took his counselors up on another plan they suggested exactly 233 years ago today: fortifying a series of hills directly across a narrow stretch of water from Boston, a position that would directly threaten the British and provoke them into leaving the city to attack the fortifications.

(George Washington. Charles Willson Peale (1776); Washington on Dorchester Heights after the siege of Boston. The White House Collection,  Washington, DC) 

  As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough recounts in his 2005 chronicle, “1776,” Washington moved with a speed and canniness that may be unequaled in the annals of war. In two weeks and two days, he mustered 2,000 extra troops from the Massachusetts militia, rounded up wagons and 800 oxen, had his army’s hospital over in Cambridge stocked with extra beds and thousands of bandages – miraculous for such an impoverished and amateur army.

Most important, he had fortifications built offsite, including multitudes of dirt- and rock-filled barrels that could both fool the British by looking, from a distance, like stout barriers, and also serve as deadly bowling balls when rolled downhill at the enemy.

And then, in one night, from the fall of darkness on March 4 to dawn on March 5, Washington moved all of it – men, materiel, animals and large cannon brought down from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in a perilous, two-month-long winter mission led by a 25-year-old colonel with a maimed hand, Henry Knox - and got it set up under cover of a diversionary bombardment of Boston proper.

When the sun came up the next morning, the British essentially took one look at what was looming over them and – after a potentially suicidal attempt at attacking the American position that was thwarted by a terrific storm – fled, frantically provisioning their fleet and sailing away.

Most Americans of school age or more also know about Washington’s creative cunning against enemy forces at Trenton on Christmas night of that same year, when he dared – in the worst possible conditions of frigid winter, storm and big, loose chunks of river ice – to cross the Delaware in three places at midnight with a total of 4,600 men and surprise the holidaying Hessians who were holding the town.

But perhaps his most imaginative and effective tactic was the very opposite of  ambush: evasion. With an army so outclassed by the British in resources and training, Washington realized his best bet was not to worry about taking territory, but to keep his army as intact as possible and pick off parts of the opposing force as he could . By avoiding battles in which the Americans were likely to suffer great losses, the general was able to prolong the war and, with some talented officers, score a few key wins, finally convincing the French that the nascent United States was worth a bet and bringing them in on our side. 

His strategy of keeping his army alive to fight another day with better odds would be taken up four score and less than seven years later by a U.S. president who won the Civil War with it and so kept together the nation that Washington helped create.

And so we’re back to Abe, an immensely capable leader we perhaps know better and identify with more. But without George’s creative courage, we would have had no nation for Lincoln to lead.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Photograph Studio

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, American, 1816-1868
George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851

TED for your head

If you don’t already, you need to know about TED. The acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.

According to its posted history, TED started in 1984 (fateful year) as a conference exploring those three fields. Since then, it’s grown into a global community based around lectures held at TED’s annual conference in Long Beach, Calif., with a website that offers for public view the podcasts of these 18-minute lectures, called TEDTalks, by some of the most amazingly creative people you’ll ever encounter.

TED also hosts conferences in different countries, awards a fascinating TED Prize and has a new Fellows Program for innovators around the world.

The TED site does in podcasts what Geniocity.com aims to do (better and better as we grow, I hope) in news and opinion writing, images, interactivity and consumer access to original creative goods:  spread the word about creativity and the future that’s in the making right now for all of us in labs, studios and brains around the world.

The video of  extraordinary author Elizabeth Gilbert that I posted yesterday, which had just been featured on YouTube, was a TEDTalk. And there’s a lot more where that came from, at www.ted.com. For sure don’t miss the one by MIT graduate student David Merrill about his computerized toy blocks that think, Siftables.

Creative terror and madness

For those of us with creative callings, it can be hard to explain to others how the thing we love and know we were born to do can cause us so much fear and anguish and reluctance. Author Elizabeth Gilbert expresses all that in the truest, funniest talk I’ve ever heard an artist give on the creative process. Also the most vividly literate and moving. Listen and feel better about your gift.

Creativity unfounded

 This is kind of random, but I discovered something odd today.

I went a-Googling for creativity-related foundations and found a number, one or two of which appeared to have long and illustrious histories. The entire group of them was notably diverse, with themes ranging from just plain creativity to creative education, the philosophy of creativity and creative healing. 

But there was a characteristic other than creativity that they shared:  All but one of them was defunct.

I don’t pretend to have a clue what this might mean. Maybe the kinds of people who start foundations supporting creativity aren’t much at  management or maybe they get bored easily and move on. Maybe the organizations weren’t strong enough to survive the passing of their imaginative founders. Maybe the foundations’ dying simply illustrates that it’s more fun to create something than to sustain it. 

I hope it isn’t that creativity and the people who promote it seem too flaky to the rest of the world to deserve support. I hope it isn’t that, because the world needs more champions of creativity – especially the kind who can make a positive difference in how creativity is viewed, nurtured and practiced, and who don’t give up. 

 The kind willing to embrace an idea wilder than wearing a yellow tie instead of a red, who have a more vital mission than sitting home and logging in their dividends over a nice hot cup of Postum. The kind who’d think it was better to try to start a creativity foundation and have it die than never to try at all.

Especially the kind who would try, succeed and then give grants to visionary people with important creative ideas. 

For the record, that one surviving creativity foundation I discovered was the Louise Blouin Foundation, named for the French-Canadian, art-and-culture-media mogul who established and runs it. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t support anyone’s projects but its own.

Are you inexperienced? Maybe more creative, too

Here’s one of the best and simplest explanations I’ve found for why so few people in positions of authority have any creative vision about their own areas of expertise: They know too much.

The December 2007 New York Times business story by Janet Rae-Dupree, which is what that link will lead you to, notes that as people get crammed full of the history, methods, myths, attitudes and common wisdom that study and personal experience bring them in the course of a career, they lose the ability to see anything in their fields with unschooled eyes.

It’s like trying to appreciate written characters purely as geometric shapes and patterns once you’ve learned to read -  it’s pretty much impossible not to recognize the words.

And that’s the best reason I can think of for 1) bringing in idea people from other departments or disciplines to help organizations – or even individuals – reimagine themselves, and 2) rotating staff into unfamiliar jobs or projects every so often, even briefly. A fresh view leads to freer thinking and new ways of doing.    

Too many industries – including my own, journalism – simply look within their own circle for answers to their shortcomings and failures and get old, worn-out copies of copies of copies of once-original ideas. Maybe what we need is a new profession – call it change agency or, as Cynthia Barton Rabe suggests in the story, “zero-gravity” thinking - whose smart and creative practitioners get paid simply to walk into situations they aren’t familiar with and tell the residents what they see.

I think it should be an iron-clad part of their contracts that whoever hires them has to act on their advice within three months.

Photo found in darkmatter’s photostream on flickr

Top photo found in superrine’s photostream on flickr

Some facts about the arts’ effect on the economy

An interesting comment was posted here over the weekend. The writer said he used to work for a consulting firm that assisted the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s. He observed, “Bureaucratically funded arts endeavors remove dollars from the economy they [sic] do not add tax revenue directly.”

Wow. Where to begin? Well first, a little back story: On Friday, I posted a press release from the office of U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, stating that  the Congressman planned to hold hearings this spring on the economic and educational value of the arts. Miller’s staff has promised to forward to the Congressman some questions I e-mailed that afternoon in regard to these hearings; in the interim, I’m guessing that Miller’s decision to hold the hearings may be a reaction to the apparent elimination of some arts- and culture-related businesses from the list of those to be supported by the national stimulus package currently being considered by the U. S. Senate. Perhaps he’s interested in giving citizens, or at least his fellow elected officials, an accurate picture of the effects that arts have on learning and the economic health of communities.

But even if his intent is something completely different from that, the fact remains that the arts do have measurable effects on both education and the economy. 

Perhaps the commenter doesn’t realize that not all arts businesses are nonprofit. Broadway productions, the popular-music industry, most of the film industry, art galleries and auction houses, publishing houses, commercial and journalistic photography, graphic design - all these and more are for-profit, and immensely profitable they are, too.  

Perhaps he also doesn’t realize that even nonprofit arts organizations have a tremendous effect on local, regional and national economies through both direct and indirect economic impact. Like for-profits, nonprofits employ people and buy local services and products. They generate tourism, drawing visitors who not only buy tickets and paintings, but also pay for hotel rooms, parking, meals, drinks, souvenirs and other goods. Local residents buy many of those same things because of the arts; they also hire babysitters. 

In addition, excellent arts and cultural amenities help cities attract new businesses and help established businesses attract new employees.  

In the Cleveland area of Ohio, arts and culture generate over $1 billion annually in direct and indirect economic impact.  (Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, Northeast Ohio Arts and Culture Plan, May 2000). Nationally, they generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs and create $30 billion in government revenue – and that’s just the nonprofits. For every $1 billion of that arts and culture spending, nearly 70,000 full-time-equivalent jobs result. (Americans for the Arts, Economic Recovery & The Arts). 

(The Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit organization. Think it has no effect on the local – and national - economy?)      

 I won’t even go into the educational benefits of the arts here, but I hinted at the basics in my Feb. 5 post about ways that President Obama can promote American creativity.    

As the purpose of the national economic-stimulus package is not solely to generate tax revenue, anyway, but to help fund obvious economic sine qua nons such as education and to keep operational industries that employ people and provide needed products and services, I find it pretty bizarre of anyone to assert that arts and culture have no place in it.

It’s one of the most deeply ingrained and egregiously wrong myths of American society that the arts are a burden on the economy. The truth is that the arts are a large and vital part of the economy on all levels and that they enhance the educations on which our success as a nation ultimately depends.

U.S. Rep. George Miller to hold spring hearings on value of arts

This just in through the e-mail:  U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who is chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, plans to hold a series of hearings to examine the impact of the arts on the economy and education and determine what can be done to strengthen support for them. 

The press release follows. What are your thoughts?

   EDUCATION & LABOR COMMITTEE

Congressman George Miller, Chairman

________________________________

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Press Office, 202-226-0853

Chairman Miller Announces Plans to Examine How Arts and Music Benefits
the Economy and Education

Arts organizations generate $166 billion and over 5 million jobs each
year

WASHINGTON, D.C. – With the arts and music among the many industries
being hit hard in economic downturn, U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA),
chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, today announced
plans to hold a series of hearings this spring to examine how the arts
benefit the nation’s economy and schools – and what can be done to
improve support for the arts and music fields.

“Like so many other sectors of our economy, the arts and music are
suffering greatly – hurting millions of workers and families who depend
on these industries for good jobs and the students who benefit from
participation in arts and music education in school.

“Research shows that when students are exposed to arts and music, they perform better in
other subjects, said Miller. “In states and communities around the
country, like my home state of California, these industries are vital
engines for local economies – making up a large share of revenue and
providing employment for a wide array of jobs, from construction to
musicians to art teachers to sound editors.

“President Obama has made it clear that arts and music have a critical
role to play in improving our schools, our workforce and our overall
quality of life. These hearings will give Congress the opportunity to
hear from experts in these fields about how supporting the arts and
music can help us build a stronger America.”

Arts organizations generate $166.2 billion in economic activity,
support 5.7 million jobs, and return nearly $30 billion in revenue to
the government each year, according to a 2007 study by The Americans for
the Arts.

Recent news reports have highlighted the tough economic realities arts
organizations are facing – many are cutting budgets and programs that
provide important services to local communities. According to the U.S.
Department of Labor, unemployment in certain arts fields was far higher
than the overall workforce in 2008.

The goal of the House Education and Labor Committee in the 111th
Congress is to rebuild and strengthen America?s middle class by
improving the lives of students, workers and families. For more
information on the committee’s work, click here:
<http://edlabor.house.gov/blog/2009/01/making-college-more-affordable.shtml>
.

Friday dance party!

And now for something insanely different: things you can do with a journalism degree after all the newspapers die…

How Obama can help America create a better civilization

The most important word in that title? ”Create.” It’s the key to our success. And the United States needs to be more successful in many ways.

That’s why at this moment – with a president in office who embodies the nation’s new attitude toward difference and change – I think America is, at long last, ready to begin the creative revolution it must go through to become the thriving, peaceful, stimulating, wise, caring and accomplished society that its citizens have always hoped it would turn out to be. 

I call it a revolution because a culture of creativity will turn the U.S. completely around, away from narrow, outmoded perspectives and failed ways of operating and toward a broader view that encourages people in every field of endeavor to imagine and experiment, discuss and collaborate – and then innovate. When we can embrace fresh ideas and support each other’s efforts, we will be able to solve a lot more of our problems.

How can President Obama lead us through this fundamental makeover? Americans for the Arts has made official recommendations to the new administration; what follow are the suggestions of other arts leaders, as well as some of my own. 

Education. As with any lasting change, education matters most.  But our educational system itself – what it teaches and how it teaches - desperately needs the same transformation as the rest of our culture. So it must be both the agent and the subject of change.

Like the military-style, 19th-century factories and workforces on which they were modeled, U.S. public schools still aim to turn out masses of identical products through a rote process. They largely emphasize conformity and uniformity - children stand in line, sit in rows, raise their hands to speak and are made to repress their natural inclinations to move around, explore and question.  They generally learn identical lessons in large groups, take identical standardized tests and are often strongly discouraged from deviating in any way from a predetermined norm. 

That may have been effective learning in an age when most people ended up working on assembly lines for rigidly structured corporations, but it doesn’t prepare today’s students for the flexible and adventurous thinking demanded by our 21st-century’information and service economy, where competition requires constant  reinvention of complex processes and products.  Even more important, a tool-and-die schooling makes most people bored, restless and miserable.

Our system ignores “the fundamental truth about how young people learn,” says Steven Tepper, associate director of The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.  “Clearly, refocusing U.S. education around creativity and creative engagement is central” to improving educational results.  

Studies, including the RAND Corporation’s significant 2004 Gifts of the Muse report, have shown that creative teaching methods and creative subjects help people learn better, enjoy themselves more, stay in school longer and develop the creative skills they need to lead successful, productive lives including, but not limited to, better employment. Creative disciplines such as the arts can provide the inspiration, stimulus and opportunities for discovery and self-expression that students often miss in standard curricula. Arts-related teaching methods - movement, building, illustration, composition, acting a role – can also help students better understand the concepts of their academic subjects.

In just one example cited by the Cleveland-based Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC), young people attending Cleveland’s School of the Arts  – part of an extremely troubled public-school system – last year scored higher than Ohio statewide averages in eight types of Ohio proficiency tests; 100 percent of them passed their Ohio graduation tests. (Full disclosure: I work with CPAC as a free-lance writer and editor.) 

America needs more arts in its schools and more creative teaching methods. We also need better teachers.  Here’s what Obama could do to help:

•  As Robert Lynch of Americans for the Arts suggests, create a Secretary of Arts and Culture position, or the equivalent, to oversee and coordinate U.S. arts and creativity policy and initiatives
• Direct that official to work with the U.S. Department of Education on a task force to develop what Tepper sees as needed curriculum standards for creative instruction, to give state education departments guidelines for what methods to use, what to achieve and how to measure success 
• Fund and foster teacher training in creative classroom methods through community consortiums of arts, science, technology and arts-education organizations similar to Cleveland’s annual Summer Teacher Institute  
• Encourage, through Department of Education funding for teacher salary enhancements, the abandonment of tenure and the adoption of merit-based pay determined by administrative, peer, parent and student review 
• Establish an Artists Corps, as Lynch recommends, to provide jobs and job-training to artists of all ages in the effort to improve America’s infrastructure – but make it one section of a permanent  Service Corps offering environmental, technological, educational and entrepreneurial services to communities, and jobs and job-training for retirees, students between high school graduation and college enrollment and adults in career or life transitions in need or desire of employment, new skills or contributing to society. Coordinate the different sections’ initiatives to encourage collaborative programs, such as having artists and environmental workers provide creative and green-practices training to businesses

Which brings us to the next area of change …

Organizational culture. Like our schools, our other organizations – from bureaus and agencies to companies and unions - tend be structured like the  Army: highly regimented, top-down outfits with their own strict class systems, ingrained operational methods and culture of absolute power at the top and absolute obedience everywhere else.

The Army is not known for its creativity. Neither is the Navy, where insiders describe their institution as “over 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.”  But they have missions vastly different from civilian groups, which must use the imagination and knowledge resources of all their members or risk being ineffective, inefficient, outmoded and – in the case of business enterprises – uncompetitive and eventually bankrupt. 

If American education becomes more creative and sends more inventive, unrepressed people into the world, chances are that our other organizational structures will change, too. But with all this bailout money being handed to dangerously flawed corporations and the president reevaluating the usefulness of government entities and programs, now seems a good time for Obama to urge some new organizational creativity by:

• Making a bailout contingent on the internal restructuring of receiving companies, to allow greater employee input, eliminate reprisals against whistleblowers and create transparency in communications and reporting
• Ditto for government departments and agencies, which can be made more creative and open while being streamlined to reduce spending and waste 
• Making creativity a goal for all government departments by directing them to work with the new Secretary for Arts and Culture and/or an expanded National Endowment for the Arts on incorporating arts, design and cultural heritage components into U.S. transportation infrastructure, health and human services programs and education, as Americans for the Arts director Lynch and CPAC president Tom Schorgl recommend (for more on the NEA, see Matt Charboneau’s Geniocity blog)
• Capitalizing on the unions’ delight at being included in the national agenda once more by urging a creative modernization of their missions and rules, especially as regards teacher tenure and arts unions’ restrictions on the ways their members’ work can be used. Theater companies, for instance, would be able to support themselves more effectively if Actors Equity Association permitted to them record their own professional stage performances for sale as CDs and DVDs       

Which leads to a final creative area …

Entrepreneurship. This country will never get anywhere if creative individuals and their endeavors don’t get more support of all kinds. As things stand now, people with ideas that will innovate society and the economy face a desperate struggle to get noticed and encouraged with advice, seed money and start-up resources. Whether they’re one-person projects, nonprofit organizations or for-profits, smaller enterprises generate billions of dollars in economic impact, create jobs, provide needed services and products and inject fresh energy and ideas into communities. But only if they don’t die a-borning.

To help, Obama should:

• Encourage public-private partnerships among banks, credit unions, foundations, industry associations and private investors to seek out creatively promising individuals and embryonic projects and provide them with grants, loans, mentoring, resources or combinations of all four. These services should not be open to the high-growth-potential tech start-ups exclusively favored by venture capitalists and incubators (See Will Limkemann’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• Change any tax restrictions preventing nonprofits, including arts groups, from supporting themselves by selling products derived from, or related to, their own work and missions
• Support revisions to intellectual property law, especially copyrights, which can discourage creativity by preventing entrepreneurs, artists and others from sharing ideas and work, Tepper suggests (See Peter Friedman’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• And because creativity depends on the even bigger and wider flow of ideas that comes from intermixing peoples, Tepper says, change American immigration policy to permit greater freedom of cultural exchange and increase entrepreneurship

We and our president have a big job ahead of us, revolutionizing America. It’ll be hard. But because it’s creative, it’ll be fun, too.

Self-serve technology: Doing more of what we’re bad at

I think technology is killing our efficiency. I think it’s killing our efficiency by returning us to a prehistoric  system of individual survival. 

I bring this up because it’s about time I pointed out that creativity has a dark side. Generally, I talk a lot about how great creativity is because – in brief – I think it will save the world. Including our own brilliant, horrifying, mixed-up little species.

But like everything else human, it’s corruptible. For every Pieta or penicillin drug, there’s a WMD or an environment-wrecking industrial process. And in between the gloriously good and the grotesquely bad, an unobtrusive zillion of smaller, tamer creations hums along,  fulfilling  daily purposes with much subtler effects.

Within that horde is the expanding colony of  computerized self-service systems and personal tech toys. Like a sea of shiny-carapaced cockroaches, they proliferate geometrically, take over our dwellings and workplaces and survive … everything. Oh, they may not be functioning most of the time, but they’re still there.

These things, with all their futuristic microchips and LEDs and incomprehensible coding, are nuking us back into the Stone Age.  And this is why: Because they’re reversing the division of labor that early societies discovered would make their individual burdens of work less crushing and more effective.

How can this be? Well, what were the first computer gizmos that entered your life? ATMs? VCRs? Self-serve gas pumps?  How long did it take you to figure out how to work them?  (Did you ever figure out how to work the VCR?). Let’s use a scientific phrase and say that mastering these things took you a while.

Now let’s look at how many more gizmos have been created since, say, the 1980s: digital thermostats and thermometers, computerized dishwashers and cars, CD and DVD players, personal computers in endless evolutionary phases, e-mail, self-checkout scanners, cell phones, digital cameras, cell phones with cameras and computer keyboards, photo scanners, disc burners, BlueTooths (BlueTeeth?), iPods and Skype.

Those are just the obvious ones. How long is it taking us to learn how to use each one of these things – and their inevitable upgrades? Let’s call it an eternity. But that’s not the back-to-Gondwanaland effect – that’s just an irritating one-time loss of, oh, a couple (five?) hours per gadget. The real problem lies in the fact that, once we’re forced to start using some of these things, we have to keep on using them to do jobs for ourselves that other people used to do for us.

Many people are in love with what they consider the personal empowerment of making their own music mixes instead of buying albums, of checking out their own groceries, of e-mailing photos they snapped, uploaded, Photoshopped and downloaded themselves. And yes, there is creativity, even art, involved in some of these self-services. They do result in skills. 

But our lives are now consumed with tasks and technical snafus preventing us from doing the things we want to be good at and that most benefit others. And that’s costly in many ways. 

Long, long ago, tribes of humans divided up the hunting and the gathering so both tasks could be performed simultaneously by the people then best suited to them. It saved time, focused the available talent where it would be most successful and effective and so increased the survival rate of the whole group. 

Tribes eventually became nations of villagers: Some farmed, some made shoes, others taught school. It become ever more unnecessary for each person to do everything for himself – people were turning into specialists, attaining much higher-quality results that they then shared with their fellow citizens in an mutually beneficial exchange of pay or barter for services. Humans had better stuff and more free time as a result.

Just as important, they knew whom to take the goods back to when the damn things broke.

Look at us now: Instead of having a quick full-service stop at the gas station where we’re attended to by paid employees, we have to get out in all kinds of weather to pump our own, clean the windshield, not check the oil because we don’t know how and are wearing clothes we don’t want to grease up, not check the tire pressure because there’s eight inches of filthy snow on the ground and we don’t have a pressure gauge anyway, watch the pump reject our card and shut down, forcing a move to another pump, and end up driving away after expending more time and getting far inferior service than we did in 1965.  And, we’ve deprived two whole generations of decently paid gas-station jobs.

We non-experts lose hours doing our own photos now, posting them online where we can’t see them if the server goes down and where Grandma can’t/won’t attempt to search for them, and getting poorer quality prints because – admit it! – we forget to buy photo stock and just use copy paper.

Wasn’t it easier to drop the film or disc off at the drug store and forget about it until they called to say it was ready? Wasn’t it much more efficient to have a phone receptionist who directed calls to the correct person as opposed to a confusing automated menu that diverts you to some bizarrely wrong department with a vague phonetic resemblance to some company member’s middle name where you get abandoned in a jungle of voice mail-options? Wasn’t it better not to lose business and productivity and sanity? 

What didn’t work about being able to take any tool you could name to the hardware store and get it sharpened or fixed there? Do we really think trying to troubleshoot our own equipment breakdowns – with a different tech-support line for every component, on hold forever, trying to communicate with people in other countries, not understanding the technical jargon and discovering they can’t help after all – will lead to anything but our own breakdowns?

Wouldn’t you rather be skiing or reading or woodworking or going to the movies or something than being your own store clerk, mechanic, programmer, operator and repair person? Wouldn’t it be better if you could focus on your real job or hobby, the one you’re good at and like to do?

It really isn’t these new creative devices that are evil – it’s the culture of not being allowed to rely on full-time skilled help that is. With so many Americans out of work, maybe it’s time to bring back trained service providers for everyday tasks. They’d be welcome to use the most advanced, innovative, imaginative, complicated tools on the market.

Just so I don’t have to.