I hadn’t thought of it in these terms until reading your comment, but whenever I hear private equity has purchased a business, my first thought is basically “welp, employee dignity is about to take a turn for the worse.”
Great take! In my view, those are some of the best enterprises. Solve an immediate and personal problem. So long as one is not alone in that problem, a lot of good is baked right in.
I always had a bad cursive handwriting from early age to young adult. Partly because I just couldn't form the letters nicely, and partly because I had (have) a bump on my middle finger just were I held the pen due to an accident where the finger got stuck when I tried to snag out some peas out of our kitchen drawer for my 'pea, toilet roll, balloon gun'. :-)
Not writing as much as before, but still writing the occasional card and such, I one day decided I would try to improve my cursive writing. Not doing any extra training as such, I just started to write a little more slowly and at the same time I made the letters a little bigger and made the loops larger for letters like: f,g,h,l etc.
Looks like it has been working out for me, as one day my nephew said: "You have a nice handwriting". I smiled to myself, and thought: "You should only have known". I savored the moment and kept the trick to myself like an old magician. Will let him know though :-)
When I write fast and long (seldom), I need to concentrate to keep the letters looking good; but at least I know now that 'I am not just a bad handwriter and that is just the way it is'. So take hope! :-)
My cursive was always terrible! Sometimes, just the initial letter, some squiggles and maybe the end, done!
I could read it, but... yeah.
When I switched to lettering, I also was beginning to do a lot of detail work with my hands. Basically took everything I had apart.
You know, "What's inside?"
Most of it went back together.
And I switched to lettering because there was just no fucking way. Cursive and I just do not get along. It is fast, but I just do not flow that way at. All.
That saw an improvement in writing, but the big one was just knocking out essays. Had one high school teacher who wanted one every week. They would pick a rando topic, and GO!
You got about 40 mins to get it said, whatever it was.
He struggled to read them, said I should use pencil, and also said don't cut it short for being neat. He wanted the words, however ugly.
But do patch it up where I can.
So I did. This guy graded them over the weekend and basically wrote back to us. Was a little bit like a message forum. The following Monday we got them back, and all the good stuff was in the margins. Often, he would read excerpts too, for discussion.
This was extremely high value to me personally, BTW.
On some of mine, he would highlight letter combos that sucked. Would suggest challenge words to emphasize them and if I could pack those into the next go, cool! (And points!)
TL;DR: Write every day.
I suggest a journal. Write it, glance at it, patch it up a little and keep going. Get a cool book and a great pencil you just want to write with.
I bet you will improve in a month being able to go back and see where your writing glitches up here and there.
If someone reads it, great. Do what that teacher did. It was fun.
I also suggest lettering, no cursive. If you want, upper case only, making capitals bigger. That is how I started. Kept the problem scope down.
Roughly a decade after polishing it up, I did half a decade of adult tech training where I put notes, problems, you name it on whiteboards. Nobody ever said they could not read it, and yeah, was still upper case, caps bigger.
For techy stuff, you can totally skate on that method. I still use it.
If you can weave detail hand work in, say some craft, or hobby, electronics maybe, it could really help.
I still do scribble a sort of cursive fast for my own consumption. Fast note taking usually. These days I can almost always record or take pictures so that is fading.
But, I gained a little odd skill out of all that, and that is I can usually read most terrible writing! If it has a hint or two in there, mostly right, I am usually good. Can almost always read what doctors write, for example.
Good luck.
Oh and just care a little. Not much, but form the glyphs your way. Have a way. It counts. Adds up.
What’s cooler is coming up with the idea for MTV, or being executive producer of Repo Man
> Nesmith created a video clip for "Rio", which helped spur Nesmith's creation of a television program called PopClips for the Nickelodeon cable network. In 1980, PopClips was sold to the Time Warner/Amex consortium. Time Warner/Amex developed PopClips into the MTV network
Mike Nesmith didn't like being in the Monkees. They would headline concerts with the likes of Jimi Hendrix as a support act, while the Monkees would mime their set
Same here over in Sweden, I would go so far as to say that it's gone complete genericized trademark. I would have to think in order to even come up with the proper generic name for Tipp-Ex (i.e. something like "correction fluid"), and it feels like nobody would understand me.
Disclosure: I don't use correction fluid, although I remember owning a bottle of Tipp-Ex sometime in the 90s when handling printed paper was more common for me.
In Italy it's called bianchetto, and it was already on its way out when I was in school 25 years ago. The smart folks had white adhesive strips, and the smarter folks used computers already. But to my parents' generation, it was essential.
There was a long overlap, when the same office might be using both computers and typewriters.
For example, not all internal processes might be on the computer. Or external processes often still used paper forms, especially externally. A typewriter was also handy for shipping/courier forms, and for addressing envelopes. (When I was doing shipments for a small computer products wholesaler, UPS still had us record shipments as line items in carbon-forms book, and tear off the top sheet or more to hand to the driver when they came to pick up the boxes for the day.)
Somewhere in there, the IBM Selectric II Correcting typewriter came out, which I imagine took some Liquid Paper sales. I had a chance to use one of these, after using computers for years, and they were still a blast. The "mechanical keyboards" meme has nothing on the visceral, powerful typing experience of a Selectric II. (I fully intend to get at least one, in excellent condition, once I'm out of student/startup-apartment mode.)
Internationally I'd guess not under that brand name (never heard of it)? And at least here in Germany, in school in the 90s/00s we almost exclusively used ink eraser pens, not the equivalents to Liquid Paper - but then again those parts of Europe are probably unusual internationally by sticking so much to fountain pens in school.
When I pick up a loaded trailer at a shipper, or after they load an empty trailer that I brought, they give me a bill of lading, paperwork that I eventually give to the receiver, and present to law enforcement if necessary.
The BoL includes details about the freight, from/to parties, the carrier (me), etc. And the serial number of the trailer seal.
Sometimes I notice that the number on the seal doesn't match the paper work. I take the paperwork to the shipping office. They either print out corrected paperwork, or they use whiteout (or Liquid Paper) to cover the incorrect number and write in the correct one.
Wonderful story. Scratching your own back is always the best way to reach a good product. It is also obvious that having a good product is just the beginning of success, the extra miles you have to travel in order to make all your work pay off, is so important. Everyone can make it and everyone can not make it.
Maybe I'm just weird, but they've remained somewhat culturally relevant through the years. They had a reunion hit in the 80's and were in The Brady Bunch movie in the 90's. As a grade schooler, they were my favorite band for a while in the mid 90s.
I think my favorite was "Pleasant Valley Sunday". Although I did end up picking up a second greatest hits CD because the first didn't have "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone".
Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents and especially not with flamebait material. It leads to much less interesting, and usually nastier, discussion.
It's a story of someone less-known, yet who invented an iconic product of an era, despite ordinary circumstances, built a business around it, and even survived aggressive business moves by more traditional actors.
Part of the ordinary circumstances -- but not the only achievement -- were due to being a woman in that time and place, when business mostly saw women as doing only certain kinds of jobs, and reserved much of the more prestigious jobs for men. (Sounds worse than today, but there's obviously still biases and inertia.)
Here's another point of this story: it seems it was because of the diversity of experience that she brought to the problem&solution space (i.e., working as a secretary at the time, understanding the costs and difficulties there, having also worked in painting) that she was able to invent this, and then to bootstrap a business from zero.
Whether or not you want to look at the part about her being a woman then (which I think makes the story more interesting), it still seems an interesting story, maybe inspiring, and maybe causes us to reflect on all sorts of changes since then.
I don't interpret it the same as you. I know this is probably obvious, women faced and continue to face different challenges in the workplace and in business than men do. I feel the writer is simply attempting to acknowledge that fact.
More cringe-worthy, in my opinion, is the trend for people to attempt to create victims of others. Not everything is an attack or laced with some subtext begging for analysis and blame to be attributed. But, that is just me.
People in underrepresented groups benefit from being made aware of successful people from those groups. It shows them that the lack of representation is not the result of some inherent lack of ability, but rather other social factors, such as institutionalized bias, which is still discouraging, but not as much as feeling incapable.
I know what you mean. The forced positivity of "you will never believe what this <insert underrepresented group of the month> did!". However, when there's a story behind it, I don't mind. It's fine to show that people can achieve something noteworthy from a disadvantaged position. And in this case, it's interesting enough. I've used "liquid paper", or Typex as its successor was called here. Not an earth shattering invention, but a clever one, that has saved many people a lot of time, although at the expense of the swearing vocabulary. And apparently the inventor also had business sense. Not the most frequent combination.
The problem is it's very hard to tell whether it's actually interesting, or it's just standard female worship that crops up on here all the time. This is the main reason I argue against thing like quotas: it takes away the possibility of people being credited for their achievements. If I see a story of a successful woman at this point, I assume it's either unimpressive and only notable because of sex, or they are trans. I know I'm not the only one.
Also, the part about benefits for her employees: Aflac was big on stuff like that.
My first week, the last still living founder, Paul Amos, said to me something like "If the company takes care of you, you will take care of it."
People who don't do right by their employees are often just shooting themselves in the foot and haven't yet realized it.