Daniel B. Kline's Page

By Daniel B. Kline

With the economy struggling, unemployment peaking and the country not quite able to right itself, I'm a little more thankful for the small things this year. Sitting on the couch in our condo which is littered with toys and my son's "art projects," I find myself happy to have survived the year in relatively the same position I began it.

In 2009, I watched two friends go through unspeakable tragedies involving the loss of children. I saw others struggle to stay employed while some fought for their lives and two courageously battled against mental illness.

This was the year when I said "is there anything I can do?" often, but was rarely able to help. There's a frustration in watching those closest to you struggle without being able to do anything, but there is also a warmth that rises from knowing you would if you could and if you needed something they would be there too.

I learned this year just how many people cared and I was constantly amazed by people's willingness to give of themselves. Through the wonders of the Internet, I saw people rally around old friends and saw tattered bonds of friendship knit tightly together. Even as people struggled themselves I saw so many maintain intense compassion for others.

This was a year of worry and doubt, one where the good moments got dulled by anxiety over tomorrow. As a retailer in this frightening economy, I went to bed every night after hearing our tally for the day and whether it was good or bad, I fell asleep wondering if anyone would come tomorrow.

I'm thankful that people did and that in our very large little store, we managed to keep people employed and make our customers happy. There were countless people this year who spoke to me of buying a hobby item to fill the time while they were out of work and it's always an honor to bring a little happiness into a dark situation.

This was a tough year for many and nobody was untouched by hard times. Still, it's comforting to see how willing people were to be there for each other and to learn just how much compassion exists.

We may think of people as greedy and selfish, but that's people as a whole, not people in person. Up close, I've learned that people genuinely worry about each other and are often willing to put the happiness of others ahead of themselves.

Mostly this year, I'm thankful for people. From my immediate family where my wife put up with my work anxiety (and my tendency to solve it by working more) to my son who had to put up with a little less of me than he would like. My brother probably bore the worst of my worries this year and I'm glad he was there but wish he hadn't had to be.

Lastly, I'm thankful for my friends and that I got to be a part of their triumphs and that they allowed me to be there for their tragedies. I found that people can face anything when they don't have to face it alone and I'm proud that there are so many in my world who stand together.

Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.

By Daniel B. Kline

Letting majority rule be our main method of deciding controversial issues has left America as a country with institutionalized, mutually-agreed-upon prejudices. From slavery to denying women the right to vote to our current ban on gay marriage in most states we have made discrimination okay as long as 50% of us agree on it.

The people as a whole make bad decisions. Take a look at the most popular pretty much anything and you can easily see that the pubic should not pick a restaurant let alone decide who can marry whom.

Majority rule leads to "Two and a Half Men," "2012" and Lady Gaga. The people at large gave us the Big Mac, the Snuggie and the universal availability of the jalapeno popper. Letting the masses decide is fine when picking a prime time lineup or selecting a snack. It does not work when we confront vital issues.

People in general (not people specifically) lack the ability to govern themselves. As a voting public we are too easily swayed by our personal biases and most people make voting decisions based on their beliefs instead of actual right or wrong.

Denying someone else a right whether it be gay marriage or sitting in front on the bus because you find the idea distasteful is simply wrong. Even if you believe that a particular act or personal engagement is morally wrong, it should be easy to realize that we should not be making moral decisions for each other.

Put simply, I consider ordering well-done steak, enjoying Jay Leno and using the words "genius" and "Coldplay" in the same sentence as reprehensible. I will certainly express my opinion on those topics, but I would not vote for a law that outlaws any of those things (though Leno does make it tempting).

Even if I believed that some sort of higher power agreed with me and considered engaging in any of those three actions an affront to the heavens, I would express my thoughts but leave the punishing to whatever deity took my side. Never would I be so presumptuous to believe that my particular religious beliefs trumped all others and gave me the right to make laws that prohibit people from doing things simply because I choose to believe that they are wrong.

If the majority always ruled than American Idol would be on seven nights a week, dinner would be catered by Olive Garden and we wouldn't have things like religious freedom, the right to express unpopular opinions or minorities voting. Doing what most people want makes sense when you and your pals are picking a weekend activity. It does not usually represent good public policy.

Elected officials have become too beholden to polling data and enacting whatever policies keep them in office. Real leaders do unpopular things because they are the right thing to do. Sadly, we have no real leaders, just a sorry group desperate to stay with the in crowd even when the majority leads them in the wrong direction.

It goes to the old line, "if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you?" The answer appears to be if enough friends did then there would be a line of elected officials waiting to be in agreement with the majority.

Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.

By Daniel B. Kline

My wife never calls with good news. She's not much of a telephone person, so if I see her number on my caller ID, I generally know that something bad has happened. Perhaps it's as mild as her having to work late or maybe, it's, as it was today, that our five-year-old son had misbehaved yet again at school.

Since I had missed her call and was calling her back, I greeted Celine picking up the phone with an immediate "what's wrong?" Call it conditioning from my parents who would both answer an unexpected phone call assuming bad news or call it simple logic based on my wife's normal patterns, but when her number pops up, nothing good comes from it.

I was, of course, correct and my clearly distraught wife explained to me that she had just gotten a call from the school principal. Apparently, Joshua, our not-very-well-behaved kindergartner, had had a physical altercation with another child where he drew blood.

Not exactly an imposing physical specimen, Joshua weighs about 35 pounds and has the physique of a sunflower. Most kids his age could take him down pretty easily (girls included) but his unpredictable ability to get angry with limited provocation makes him a handful to deal with.

Joshua has a complete inability to follow directions and has never handled not immediately getting what he wants well. As parents we have brought him to psychologists, had him neurologically evaluated and have met preemptively with his teacher, the principal and the school psychologist.

Though this has made us appear to be responsible, caring parents (which we are) it has done little to improve our child's behavior. This has made every school day a potential minefield as we send him off each morning unsure as to whether our day will include a call from the school, a note home or something worse.

Always a good student who never got in trouble, my wife has a harder time with Joshua's behavior than I do. While I would prefer he not hit other kids and wish he would listen to his teachers, I understand Joshua's frustrations with following directions and remember being unable to react in an appropriate manner when things did not go my way.

What has struck me most, however, is our complete helplessness as parents. We have read the books, talked to the doctors, the teachers and anyone else who might listen and nothing has made Joshua any less likely to talk back to his teacher, randomly spit on another kid or become inappropriately violent.

As much as I enjoy having a fiercely bright, independent-minded child, I would greatly prefer he fit in a little better as his current age and perhaps save some of the independence for adulthood. I want desperately to be able to provide an answer or to at least convince my wife that some of Joshua's worst qualities now, may with more maturity, be some of his best.

Sadly, I have failed utterly in that respect and Celine (a PHD in developmental psychology) remains despondent and convinced that hitting in kindergarten leads to who-knows-what horrors as the years go on. As a parent, I feel hopelessly unable to help. But as a former difficult child, who has turned out reasonably successfully, I feel pretty good about the prospect that with two loving parents, a supportive school system and the simple passage of time, Joshua will turn out okay too.

Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.

By Daniel B. Kline

In the last few weeks I read two Star Wars novels, a collection of essays by Laurie Notaro, a biography of Axl Rose, Carrie Fisher's latest memoir, a book about the stomach disorder I may or may not have as well as three non-fiction books by Ben Mezrich. During that time period I also managed to read a newspaper nearly every day, countless magazines and, yes, a variety of news found online.

For those of you in the younger generations who may be unfamiliar, novels are like a series of pretend Facebook posts strung together to tell a story. Imagine if what your friends had to say went on for longer than 140 characters and was actually compelling. I know that it's hard to compete with "having a bad day" as far as storytelling goes, but trust me, some of these novelists have really mastered the whole multiple sentence plus a story arc thing.

Though I'm teasing a little bit, I do fear that the Internet and its penchant for short, easy-to-digest information is slowly destroying our ability to read. If you can be vaguely informed (or at least not embarrassingly uninformed) by glancing at Google News then I fear most people won't dig much deeper.

Depth has been replaced by a superficial knowledge of everything. You may not write long letters to any of your old friends, but you know a sentence or two about what every person you have ever met does every day. The same logic holds for newspaper and book consumption. We won't read Andre Agassi's biography, but we will skim a few paragraphs posted online giving us the highlights (he took meth and wore a wig).

Without reading -- the kind of reading that involves sitting for long periods of time and looking at multiple pages, not simply scanning headlines -- our capacity for in-depth understanding disappears. Reading serves as the foundation for pretty much all knowledge. Reading develops our understanding of the world, enhances our vocabulary and generally gives us something to build other skills upon.

It's possible to learn without reading (reading a book about ice skating would probably not help you actually skate) but in most areas not being a good reader makes learning much harder. Reading also allows you to learn a lot of things quickly without actually experiencing them.

For example, I neither enjoy the music of Guns N' Roses nor have any particular interest in partnering with a bunch of guys who abuse heroin. Reading Axl Rose's biography, however, gave me an understanding of both. Perhaps that's not immediately useful information, but if I'm asked a question about the derivation of "Paradise City," or what happens when your heart stops from drug abuse, I now have an answer.

Reading does not come easily for some people, but the more you do the easier it gets. If we fail to give our children the ability to read (not just the technical ability, the actual acquired skill of doing it well) then we handicap them for the rest of their lives.

It's easy to pretend that the Internet has somehow made reading less important when all it has done is make those who don't read a little harder to pick out. The prevalence of really short stories and news items hasn't made these people any less uninformed or any smarter. Instead, it has just given the stupid enough superficial knowledge to hide amongst an ocean of similarly misguided folks – none of whom are likely to have read this far anyway..

Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at DBKline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.

By Daniel B. Kline

As the email responses to my job posting came rolling in by the dozens, I searched in vain for just one that had a proper cover letter and resume. Instead, I found every manner of poorly written informal response along with the occasional generic cover letter full of nonsense words that in no way applied to the job I was attempting to fill.

My expectations for a seasonal retail job that pays poorly were not overly high. I hoped to interview a handful of people that responded with a brief cover letter that referred to at least some part of my detailed job posting. Along with the cover letter, I hoped to receive a resume even if the person had relatively little job experience.

Of the hundreds of responses I received not one person sent the proper combination. Nearly all of the responses were brief, informal notes along the lines of "I am interested in the job. Please call me if it is still available." This tells me that on a very large level our schools -- at least here in Connecticut -- have failed to prepare students for the job market.

I'm also pretty sure that at least on the lowest levels of the retail chain that any candidate that made even a reasonable effort would immediately stand out. You do not have to be a writer to prepare a proper cover letter -- one that refers to the job posting in question and contains no spelling mistakes or major grammatical errors.

Perhaps worse than the informal letters or the ones full of typos were the ones built around nonsense phrases like, "I hope to utilize my skills for the betterment of your company." That may sound like it's saying something, but a phrase like that contains no useful information.

Invariably these drivel-filled cover letters came paired with resumes that contained absurd objectives. "I want to obtain a position with your company so I can achieve my goals," or similar claptrap also says nothing. I'd prefer, "I have always liked toys and would enjoy working in a toy store." There's at least some honesty in that sentence and it suggests I might get an eager employee who would enjoy her job.

Ultimately, I selected a few people to interview based on geographic convenience. One person failed to show for her interview while another was only available to be interviewed on such a limited basis that it made me question whether he could actually work a demanding retail job.

The eventual victor got selected because she showed up on time for the interview, made an attempt at dressing appropriately and waited patiently while I finished up with a customer before speaking to her. Her cover letter had offered me nothing, but at least it was brief and avoided too many unnecessary big words.

She seems friendly, has some retail experience and had a good reason for wanting a full-time job that ends in January. I'm relatively confident in my selection and my staff seems to like her. That said, I remain appalled that not one person across the wide age range that applied for the position knows how to apply for a job.

Perhaps we don't have an unemployment problem in this country, maybe we have open jobs with no viable means to fill them. I'll be hiring some part-timers in the coming weeks and am expecting the email equivalent of "me want job" written in crayon to start showing up in my mailbox the second the ad goes live.

Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at DBKline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.