She Got A High School Diploma. She Can’t Read Or Write.

[00:00:04] You're listening to Casual Talk Radio, where common sense is still the norm. Whether you're a new or long-time listener, we appreciate you joining us today. Visit us at CasualTalkRadio.net. And now, here's your host, Leister.

[00:00:20] I really dislike work. I dislike the concept of work. I don't dislike the value of work, but the concept of work, I dislike it. And it occurred to me that I dislike work because of other people. It's not the work itself, it's the people that I'm surrounded by when trying to do the work.

[00:00:45] First, let me update. I did a thing. I've been battling a weird light switch electrical nonsense with my house and I just identified the culprit that shuts down, it literally shuts down a third of the house when this was happening.

[00:01:08] And I isolated it down to a switch panel. And for anybody that has lived in owned a house that was an adult, I mean, in about the 50s and the 60s, you may or may not have touched light switch wiring. If you did, the light switch wiring methodology has changed over the decades.

[00:01:34] In the old days, they would wire the house in a very specific way to support mostly, you know, the concepts of wiring and connections are fundamentally the same. But the idea of neutral wires, the idea of grounding, these were things that came later. And so when you put in a new switch, you're finding yourself having to, you know, cap off or splice or do these crazy things just to get it to work with modern switches.

[00:02:02] It gets harder depending on what the circuit is. And in this case, I have a switch that's at the bottom of the stairs and a switch at the top of the stairs, which is normal for houses in this situation. What was not normal is when I got behind the panel and see that the wiring doesn't match on the bottom versus the top of the stairs. The coloring is way the heck off. Nothing makes any sense. And I determined that the wiring of one of them to make it work. It's what was shutting down a third of the house.

[00:02:33] So what I ended up doing is changing around the wiring and getting rid of the wires at the top because it wasn't worth fighting it. And just I'll cap that off. But I got the switches at the bottom working really nice. And I put a custom, it's a looks like a tile type panel around it. And then it's got a wall covering. So it looks really high end.

[00:02:58] Now it's temporary until I can get a kind of home designer that they can look at it and I can show them this is the vision. What I want you to do is to figure out a way to make it look nicer. But that's the concept of what I want. Then I should be in good spin. I think it's just a matter of cutting out and embedding and doing creative stuff with the wall cover. And I have more of these panels.

[00:03:26] But once I got that done and I realized, okay, these people from like the 50s just didn't know what the heck they were doing. And I got that switch working and then realized I'm just going to put a motion sensor light at the top light fixture. So that because there's no real value in walking upstairs, it's pretty much just a living area. There's no real hallway. So there's no add value to having the switch. If you're going upstairs, you're going to want the light.

[00:03:56] And the only other lighting that can reach it is if another door is open, which they never would be. I'm trying to rethink that where I'm considering opening up the what is the bathroom to put a light transmission door to benefit from the window that happens to be up there. I've not committed this yet.

[00:04:18] But between getting the motion sensor light, capping off the upstairs switch, I now am in a good position once I finish the stair renovation, which I don't know how long it's going to take. Stair renovation to where the upstairs will become fundamentally usable. I still have to work the ceiling, the inner ceiling, because it's too dang low. There's not because of the ceiling itself, but because of the stairs.

[00:04:44] By the time you hit the third step, I'm tall, but somebody that's shorter than me, by the time you hit the fourth step, you're toast. You're going to hit your head on that thing. I've already hit my head on it once and it wasn't fun. Once all that's good, then the upstairs becomes usable. I haven't focused on it because I wanted to hit the kitchen and finish the kitchen renovation, which is more of a pain and more of a headache. That was my story on the personal side.

[00:05:13] But it also, as I was doing this, caused me to reflect on work because I can only do this stuff with the contractors. I can only do this stuff during work hours. I had a very difficult interaction with my client, not all of them, but just certain key people. I had a difficult conversation. And the thing about it is there's just, I don't know if, you know, I'm old, right?

[00:05:39] But it seems like my memory is better than most everybody else that I interact with in the workspace. My style of communication seems to be superior and I don't, I struggle that. And I work with a bunch of people who work technology, but many of them feel incompetent with technology. And I don't understand that because a lot of them, if not all of them, arguably have more college education than I do.

[00:06:06] So I can only suspect that the college education is insufficient compared to the kind of education that I went through, which was more hands-on. I speculate that, but there was a story and I'll get back to why this ties into work, but there was a story, a gal, and I think she's in the UK maybe, but, or no, it's US. It was US. There was a gal and she was a special education student.

[00:06:34] And apparently she believed she had dyslexia. And she was going through high school and she was telling the teachers, Hey, look, I, I'm having a hard time reading. I'm having a hard time with this and this is difficult for me. And they kept telling her it's too late for those that don't know. And I don't know how it is now, but I know how it was before. There are certain basic things that you learn in elementary school.

[00:07:03] One of them is the ability to read. One of them is basic math, basic arithmetic, add, subtract, divide, multiply your letters, you know, the alphabet, how to write in regular and how to write cursive. I was told they no longer teach cursive. I think that's appalling. I think I understand what their thought process is, but it's stupid because I guarantee you, you're going to end up writing a check for something.

[00:07:33] I don't know what it is, but you're going to end up writing a check for something. If you buy a house, a condo, something, you're going to write a check for something there. Most of them are starting to evolve to this world of like ACH and wire transfers and that. But I guarantee you there's going to my property tax bill. They said, yep, write a check on the deep. I don't mind doing that. It's cool because I'm not going to give them a plastic for it. I'd rather just write a check and be done with it.

[00:08:02] Now, there's nothing requiring you to use cursive for your signature, but you really, you really should. Because the whole intent behind a signature is that it should be unique to you in some regard.

[00:08:18] And the whole intent or the history, like I think back to the older generations and their style of writing in cursive was so much superior than what we do. Like our quality of writing has declined over many, many decades.

[00:08:37] And it seems as though we're just steadily deprioritizing the value of being able to write, being able to count and being able to read because they're rushing to a world of AI and text to speech and other things that you're dumbing down the competency of the person. If we were in a workplace, this is why I say it ties back to work.

[00:08:59] If we're in a workplace, you don't know what your customer or your end user or your business partner or whatever is going to expect of you. And simple things like signing a contract. Not everybody is okay with electronic signatures. Some of them want pen to paper. I know that when I closed on my house, I had to go there and sign a bunch of physical pieces of paper. I'm stressing if you're one of those.

[00:09:26] And I think the demographic of the show has not changed such that everybody listening is of the age of bearing children or you have already born children. So I'll say if you're hearing that we're seeing a decline of writing and cursive and everything, I'm here to debunk that narrative. They just haven't hit those things. There are parts of our economy that have not evolved like the assumptions being made.

[00:09:51] So this girl, she's saying she's she adamantly felt that she was being underserved as a special education student. They gave her a high school diploma. They graduated her even though she straight up cannot read. She straight said, I can't read signs. I can't read anything. And I'm concerned because how am I supposed to get a driver's license? What I was told, and I don't know if this is true.

[00:10:21] What I was told is that the end of the peninsula state that the driver's license testing. See, when I went through middle school, I was required to go through driver's ed. Driver's ed is where you learn the basics of what to do for taking the test. And at the time, the age that you could was 14. Now, I was dealing with a parental situation that was a bunch of crap.

[00:10:45] So I was not able to get the permit that I was entitled to get because of said parental situation that was crap. And I was not able to do it at 16 when I was eligible to get the full license for the same parental crap. Despite my brother, the one who passed away, working to try to keep me on tap and take me out and teach me how to drive actual behind the wheel and everything else. I had as many advocates as you could care to.

[00:11:13] And then there were other situations where I took it upon myself. But because of parental situations that were crap, I could not avail myself of that education such that when I went, when I turned 18 and said parental situation became a non-issue. And that person basically became irrelevant and was happy to be so at that point. But I still felt it was crap. I did not pass the very first behind the wheel test.

[00:11:41] That instructor, that evaluator, happened to be the father of my friend who lived across the street. I didn't know that at the time. I only figured that out because they had just moved in. I only figured that out after I come back home, pissed off because this guy failed me on the test. And I remember the criteria. He failed me because of the stop sign, the time to stop and the rear view mirror.

[00:12:11] Nonsense. Nonsense. Then I see that it's the same guy. He's out working the yard. Boy, I almost went up hitting. If he wasn't, if his kid wasn't my friend, I would have hitting one because I was pissed. And then I went to the read behind the wheel retest. And the next one was like, no, cool as a fan, passed it, breeze, never a problem. Okay.

[00:12:31] But the point is during that middle school experience, there were certain things you were expected, fundamental things you were expected to have, or you never would have been a success in the class. The fact that she was calling this out told me they've gotten rid of driver's ed in the school. And that's scary because I'm, I don't know about you, but I don't want to be on the road with people who were never taught the fundamentals of how to drive.

[00:12:54] So you're talking, getting rid of auto shop, getting rid of electric shop, getting rid of wood shop, getting rid of metal shop, getting rid of home ec, getting rid of driver's ed. And instead you're in, you're passing people, giving them a high school diploma when they don't have the fundamentals of how to count change fundamentals, how to balance a checkbook fund.

[00:13:15] Like these are things I actually learned in class, how to do the stock market, how to type properly type, how to spell the use of proper words, context, how to do these fundamental things that I was required to know how to do. Don't get me wrong.

[00:13:33] Don't get me wrong.

[00:14:05] Don't get me wrong.

[00:14:36] Don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong. And this person was lost and confused because they don't have a printer in the household. And so they had to figure it out and were lost. Didn't understand that most libraries have a printer if you need to use it because the idea of a library is foreign to these people, because the idea of books and reading is foreign to these people. So that's number one. Number two, I'm explaining the basic concept of if you do X, Y, Z, everything works perfectly fine.

[00:15:04] If you don't do X, Y, Z, you're going to have some problems. These people don't do X, Y, Z, and instead they're doing stuff that was common back in the 90s. And I'm telling them you're setting yourself up for failure and you're not going to listen. One year and a half later, and the exact thing I predicted to be the truth came true and caused an issue on an enterprise-wide event. And I'm telling people, this is why I told you, and I don't know why this is foreign because back in my day,

[00:15:32] somebody else would have called out the same thing that I'm calling out and it would have been obvious, clear, and apparent to them. But for whatever reason, you guys have lost the plot on basic troubleshooting, basic steps, basic principles, basic understanding of technology. And you work technology and the vast majority of you claim to have college education that I state is greater than mine. And yet you're nowhere near on my level.

[00:15:57] When I say these people can't even communicate as effectively as I do, I can't express to you how frustrating it is sitting in a meeting, hearing somebody read off a PowerPoint slide deck. There was no prep. They don't prepare what they're going to say. They don't use their own words. They don't elaborate on what's shown.

[00:16:22] They just read off what's on the screen or they'll pull up an email and read what's on the screen. Some people can't even manage to do email where you send them a message and they just didn't read it. And you have to ask them, can't you just read the freaking email? You were told everything you need to know in the email. There are people who get thousands of emails of which they only need one or two, but because they don't know Outlook hardly at all, don't know the concept of building filters and rules to put it in the folder.

[00:16:52] They don't know how to manage their own work. There are people who all they can deal with is text messages. They have no concept of a regular phone call to talk through these types of issues. There are people when they get on video, they can't lead a meeting effectively. They're just lost and confused. They don't know how to time manage and they don't know how to stay on target with the meeting, whatever the subject is. And they don't know the right time to share.

[00:17:20] They don't know the right content to share. And they don't know how to read the room and adjust accordingly. All of what I'm talking about, again, I'm old. So I've been in the workspace for a long time, but a lot of what I'm describing used to be prerequisites when we were hiring people. I noticed that the hiring process is slack. I understand some of the hiring things from the past were unacceptable.

[00:17:46] What I don't agree with is this idea of dumbing down the high school experience because a lot of that was set to prepare you for a college space. I don't agree with this that I'm hearing that the college is being dumbed down, the SATs and the ACTs and dumbing the criteria down. I don't agree with any of that.

[00:18:07] You think about all the people who spent wasted time going through the harder criteria, the longer criteria, the more rigid criteria, only to hear the experiences being dumbed down for the modern era because they're frustrated. They can't get through it. I hear 50 percent stats of this population of students cannot read or write at an adult level.

[00:18:32] And I question, is it really that, you know, people like myself are the problem for having that? Is it really technology that's the problem? I think it's a combination of technology being forced on people as well as our government coddling people as well as parents coddling their kids. We no longer have the same narratives that we used to have that would have improved the situation better than what we have.

[00:19:00] I would like to have seen more of an aggressive push towards quality, a more aggressive push towards value, a more aggressive push towards future state instead of coddling the current because we make them soft. We make them weak and they're not able to sustain.

[00:19:19] That creates the world that we ended up with in the Biden administration of dependency and the world of dependency created damage on every single person listening to me here. You may think you were not damaged. You were damaged. You were damaged in some way. You were damaged by the price of things. You were damaged by poor quality of education. You're damaged by the young people who can't count change on cash.

[00:19:47] You're damaged by the banks who freely block access to your funds. I just dealt with a situation with a bank that I set up with that approved two accounts, literally sent me a message saying it's approved and then blocked the money, canceled the accounts and said I need to walk into the branch because they can't verify who I am. And I know why. It's because their website is not equipped to handle my first name. You think that's a silly thing.

[00:20:16] I'm telling you in the modern era, we have lost sight of everything. We don't have the same basic core competency that we used to because a lot of these issues were not a problem before. And I'm concerned for the future. I'm concerned for the workplaces. I would love to see a return back to what I used to see, which is we are focused on quality. And guess what?

[00:20:41] Some people are going to get their feelings hurt along the way because they don't have what it takes to get to that. And they need to go back to the drawing board. And our government has failed them. But if that's the reality, that's the reality. And that's what I would love to see. I don't know if we'll get there, but that's what I'd love to see. Donald Trump has talked about this. Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg came out and said, you know, we're trying to get back to fundamentals and get rid of this fact checking stuff and getting rid of all the things that we were doing.

[00:21:10] And it got a little bit too much. And we were forced by the Biden administration to do X, Y, Z. He wasn't forced to do it. He chose to do it. I digress. I'm, you know, I'm really concerned for the future. I'm concerned. And obviously I won't be here to see the damage, but I'm concerned for the future. There's not a, there's going to be a societal collapse. We're not at the same type of people that we were in the industrial age.

[00:21:37] We're not the same type of people that we were during the various world wars. We're not the same type of people that we were, that were willing to stand up and defend ourselves and fight for ourselves. People that fought to be educated, people that fought to be hard workers, people that fought to be successful business people. We don't have everything that we used to because there's too much of a reliance on those impacts that I referred to.

[00:22:04] The technology being forced down the throat and insufficient education and parental failures and everything else. I am truly concerned. I am. I don't know. I don't know how it could have gotten so bad. Obviously the media played a part. Obviously the rise of technology played a part in everything I described, but the level of bad is what's got me kind of staggered and shocked and surprised.

[00:22:34] In closing, because I don't want to take too long in my rant, but in closing, I think I don't like work because of the people around me. I love doing things that benefit a customer, doing things that benefit other people that make their lives easier, using my skills to benefit others, mentoring other people. I enjoy all these things. I enjoy all these things.

[00:23:02] Where I am now, they don't value any of that. And I would argue where I came from, they don't value it. It's not a, it's no longer a sought after set of skills and principles. What's sought after now is being nice. Being nice is why people are weak because the focus is on being nice instead of quality and quality suffers case in point. I got my high end furnace put in.

[00:23:33] And when they came into the walkthrough and said, yeah, no problem. We can sell you this, that, that, and I'll have my guy come out. He's a nice guy. He was a decently nice guy at first and said, yeah, no problem. Should be easy. And it took him two days and it, it works. It's working now, but the quality isn't there in what I would have expected given what I was sold, which is no, he's the, he's one of the best.

[00:24:02] He's this, that, and the other. And the quality in there for simple things, we're talking simple things that were overlooked that if I had not had the water heater guys come in and do their thing and identify these gaps from the first one, I would have even known most of it. I'd have caught it eventually, but the other guys were nice enough to go ahead and just fix some of the stuff that the first guy screwed the pooch on. Guy who did the furnace, young guy. Guy who did the water heaters, not so much young guys.

[00:24:32] They're roughly my age and slightly younger, but not young like the first guy. The point is not to discriminate against age because I've met some very brilliant young people, some that went on to be CFOs of companies. It's not about age, but I have to be skeptical when you're younger. And I don't like that feeling.

[00:24:51] I'm looking for the ones that are hungry, the ones that want to be more than that, the ones that don't want to mess around with their friends and sit on text messaging and keep scrolling social media. I want the ones that truly are greedy and hungry and want to be the next something, not the next Taylor Swift, not the next Kanye, not the next Justin Bieber. I'm talking they want to be and not the next Elon either, frankly, not the next Zuckerberg.

[00:25:21] No, I'm talking they want to invent the next something, something that's going to benefit society in a positive way. They want to make a difference in their community. They want to make a difference in government. They want to do something that actually has value to people, not just financial value, but overall value. I would love to meet those kinds of people, but I'm concerned that those kinds of people are no longer being promoted in our school systems and in our parents.

[00:25:50] And, you know, everybody's not promoting that type of person anymore. Telling your kid, you should strive to be better than us because your kids should surpass you. If you're doing your job, your kids should surpass you. If you're jealous because your kid starts to surpass you and you suppress them, you're part of the problem.

[00:26:12] If your teachers for your kid are not doing enough to get your kid to surpass them, they're not doing their job. Everybody's goal should be to promote because we're not going to be here forever. So you should do your part to make sure young people surpass us. That's how we keep society going. That's how it was always built to be. And at some point we've lost the way and that concerns me. I don't know if we'll get back on track.

[00:26:42] I doubt it, but I'm a skeptic in that regard. I hate work, not because of the work, because of the people. And I would love not to feel that way. I love to feel where people are getting back on track. The greed, the hunger, the passion for things, the desire to do things and make a difference in something that benefits more than just yourself and more than just your friends and more than just your peers.

[00:27:11] And not something that's based on spurious stats either. You don't know the word spurious. Please look it up. I would love to see, before I leave this mortal coil, I would love to see someone who is an effective communicator. I would love to see somebody who hates text messages. I would love to see somebody who hates work but is a hard worker.

[00:27:34] But most importantly, most critically importantly, I would love to see someone who can say, Honestly, my parents were this and they told me to be better than them. And I'm going to. They just had the energy, passion, the desire to be more. That's all I'm looking for. And then they're open. They're a sponge.

[00:27:59] They're willing to receive that feedback from other people trying to help them get to that level. And not like in my case coming up where I had people like city councilmen suppressing me, lying to me. I've gone through it and I don't want to see others go through that. I want to see them succeed, which is what it should be. It hasn't been, but it's what it should be.