Category: Nonfiction

Wages

– Wages – By Jon Reed Once upon a time, companies paid employees by handing them paper checks issued by a payroll department every other Friday afternoon. Not surprisingly, attendance was higher those days, much to the irritation of management. Except, of course, if Michigan’s first day of deer season fell on a November 15th …

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Top 5 Myths about the “Real World”

Top 5 Myths about the “Real World” by John McCarthy I recently read a syllabus for a college course that struck me as odd. According to the syllabus, the instructor stated that he was preparing his students for the real world. How? If students brought out their cell phone in class they would immediately be …

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Crowdsourcing

I was looking into crowdsourcing as a possible way to publish Broken String next year. Kickstarter.com is the one I was looking at, but there are others. Crowdsourcing is a way to find supporters to fund your “project.” That project can be just about anything from a space satellite to a movie, or a book. …

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Tales From the Garden – Part 2

I had such a good time volunteering at the Chicago Botanic Garden my first summer that I decided to go back the next year. This time I volunteered in the Fruit & Vegetable Garden. It was an entirely different experience. All the Fruit & Vegetable volunteers, usually about four of us, would arrive early in …

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Falling in Love with Perfect Arrangements

During my college days, I became friends with a girl who was valedictorian of her high school class. She sometimes annoyed me with her intellect. After a test in our art history class, she and I milled about and fretted over how our individual results would rank on the class curve. She worried and said, …

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