Communications

Yesterday I was at the local supermarket which is our favorite.  I was waiting near the checkout, and noticed the employees were unusually animated (read: silly).

These days the store is usually a serious place, with Covid-19 and all.  I particularly noticed one employee who some weeks earlier had seemed pretty depressed and angry; today she was among the silly ones.

I got to thinking back to the silliest meeting I ever had to preside over, which was impossible to control.  It was 20 years ago – about a dozen professional people, the Board of a state-wide organization, normally serious and professional, but this particular day “off the rails”.  “The meeting from hell”, shall I say….

After that meeting I found we’d been meeting on the day of a full moon.

This morning – today – the trivia question, at the local coffee shop I frequent, was when the next full moon would be.  Were we at the the time of that full moon?  Was it coincidence?  Of full of meaning?

(Spoiler alert: the next full moon is actually Oct. 31, the last was October 1).  I googled “full moon human behavior” and here’s one article at the top of the list.  Doubtless there’s many more.

Beware the full moon?

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Another discovery, yesterday, was an e-mail list from January, 2013, containing 287 names.

A few months earlier , the Fall of 2012, I had received a book originating from my college alumni office: “Alumni Today 2012”, the meat of which was 239 pages of names and data about alumni, the oldest from 1923 (one entry) to more entries from my years at the college (1958-61), to the most recent year (2011).

I have one earlier college Directory, from 2000.  Of course, that one was more ‘primitive’ in a technological sense.  There was a 16 page E-mail address section at the end at the end of that book.  In 2000, the college did have a website and an e-mail contact, but it was hard to find, at page xii.  For most of us, then, the home address (U.S. mail) and phone number were the main connection method.

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In 2012, the Directory came at a reflective time for me.

I “mined” the directory for e-mail addresses of people I knew of, especially from my years as a student at the college.  I came up with the aforementioned 287 names.

In college days, I was a worker-bee, but in no sense of the word, a party-person.  I wasn’t outgoing, in a going-out sense!

At the end of 2012 I spent a lot of time preparing sort of a retrospective on my college years, and at the New Year in 2013, I sent a reminiscing blog to the 287.  Here is that blog.

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I’ll be sending today’s blog to the same list.  Today, 7 years later, that list is 104, compared to the earlier 287.

I haven’t analyzed the attrition, but obviously I know of its existence.  People “leave” such lists for varied reasons, especially senior citizens like myself.  There are elective drop-outs, of course; but there is also the normal attrition: death, disability, changing e-mail address, ending up on the wrong end of “spam blocker” features, people no longer doing computer, on and on.  You can expand the list.

How we’ve changed.

A new Alumni directory is in preparation.  I’ve ordered it.  It will be interesting to see.

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Full moon, communication styles, ideology, whatever….

We have more ways to communicate, and as I sort of coined many years ago, “more ways to communicate less”.

I’m glad the alumni directories came out, and will come out again.  And I’m glad I did the project. We need to work at staying in touch.