IT Insights Blog — Employment

If you've spent any portion of your free time over the last month either watching TV (or various streaming media) or surfing the web, then you may have an inkling that there's a new Star Wars movie about to show up in theaters. No, really. There's a Death Star (the Death Star, actually) in it and everything.

WOW! What a week this has been. The country has gone to the polls and elected a new president, the stock market is up, and TestOut just celebrated its 25th Anniversary. Back in 1991, Noel Vallejo was working for a major IT company. One afternoon he was called down to HR and informed that he was one of a large number of employees who were soon to be ex-employees. He went home with no idea what to do. His twin daughters were too young to know what was going on, but his wife cried with worry about how they were going to make it.

Every so often a news story comes along that is just plain bizarre. Earlier this week, for example, an Associated Press reporter relayed the details of the strange case of Tommy Thompson, a former deep sea treasure hunter tied up in an ongoing legal harangue over gold coins lost at sea in 1857. Thompson is believed to have located and salvaged the wreck of the S.S. America, which sank in a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina nearly 160 years ago.

Earlier this week I stopped at a roadside fruit stand to buy some apples. A teenager was working there who I know to be an honor student at the local high school. I bought a case for $12 and handed her a $20. She paused for a second and then began searching for her phone. An older worker asked what she was doing. She responded, “I’m getting my calculator.” The older worker rolled his eyes and said, “Change is $8.” I thanked them, pocketed my change and walked away more worried than ever about the quality of education in America.

One of my favorite actors is Paul Giamatti. His performances John Adams and Cinderella Man are spot on. Whether screaming pugilistic encouragement to Russell Crowe or reluctantly accepting acting advice from a family of cinephiles, he always seems to sum the situation up with a sentence or two. In the 2015 disaster flick, San Andreas, Giamatti (son of former baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti) plays Caltech seismologist, Dr. Lawrence Hayes.