'20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't Get' - A Response

I recently read the most fantastic article by Jason Nazar on Forbes about young people and their attitude to business. The no-nonsense style of the article was a change from the molly-coddled, spoon-fed and watered-down approach of treating young people in the 21^st century, especially by career professionals (Huffington Post recently argued, rather mockingly, that always being told we are special is ultimately making us unhappy). While I wouldn’t personally like to work under Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, Nazar’s example of the most valuable boss, being told off for my future mistakes before I make them could be useful. Business is not about Miss Honey telling us what to do and giving us a big cuddle if we don’t succeed, it’s about pro-activity and initiative. I imagine it’s also about having a thick skin too.

Nazar talks about the emergence of social media in the business world and its longevity, or lack thereof. Although many would be offended at his suggestion that ‘social media is not a career’, his point is clear. Social Media is unreliable and may disappear as quickly as it arrived. Reports suggest that Twitter has already reached the top of its graph and is now on the decline and even Instagram feels the need to introduce advertising to prevent social media mortality being a reality. As Nazar states, Social Media is a tool for marketing that should be adapted to other business, rather than be the business itself. Social Media is simple, it is isolated and above all, it is unreliable. Business may not be reliable either, but it involves interaction with people and the formation of business relationships that can’t be acquired from posting on a Facebook page a few times a day.

Would we ask to go home if this happened?
Image: WeBlogCartoons

His comment, ‘Stop hiding behind your computer. Business gets done on the phone and in person.  It should be your first instinct’ is of particular relevance to my generation. We don’t pick up the phone anymore and many don’t even bother with email. In order to contact the Graduate Recruiters for the Big 4, it seems as though my comrades simply head to the Facebook page and add a comment to the long list of obvious and unnecessary questions before them. The way I see it, hiding behind our computers is making us anonymous, uninteresting and ridding us of all initiative. Asking questions has its time and place, but working something out for yourself is invaluable.

While I don’t agree with everything Nazar says, such as his rejection of tweet reading, the overall essence of his article appears to be a comment on laziness. Lack of networking, hiding behind social media and sending blanket emails; it is all easy. Picking up the phone, meeting business professionals and taking responsibility for our own mistakes may be tough, but it is rewarding. The Co-Founder of Docstoc has certainly persuaded me of one thing, there’s a lot more to business than sitting in front of a computer.

I urge you to read the original article, ’20 Things20-Year-Olds Don’t Get’ on Forbes.

The French Can’t Drive

After four years of driving in the UK, I decided that it was time my little car got to take a holiday and come with me to the wine region of Bordeaux in the south of France for 6 months. I had been warned about French drivers by my Father (coincidentally an advanced driving instructor) who taught me how to drive. Under his strict ruling, I had to complete at least 50 hours of lessons before sitting my test and failing was not even an option. However, despite all the warnings, I could never have been prepared for driving in France. Quite simply, the French don’t know how to drive.

Right-hand Drive. My brother, who drives through Europe on a weekly basis these days, had kindly informed me of toll roads requiring payment (on the left hand side) so I invested in an automatic Télépéage before I even reached the border, but I hadn’t quite realised the same would go for car parks. I have since discovered two methods of reaching a machine on the wrong side of the car; “the jump-out-and-run-around” as well as the “extreme-lean”. Neither is particularly comfortable. I believe it is Napoleon I have to blame for this, you should have stayed on the left!

French Kissing. It would appear that the French adopt their attitude to kissing to their cars as well. When a Frenchman is driving, he indubitably feels the need to roll along bumper to bumper without a care in the world. ‘Bumper kissing’, as I now refer to it, is an obligatory stage of parallel parking too. Don’t forget to kiss both the car in front and the car behind when you squeeze into the space! Personally, I actually care if my number plate is bent in half when I return to my car. The French don’t seem to.

Parking: French Style

Speed Limits. This is more of a gripe aimed at the people who decide the speed limits on French roads. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody except me, sticks to them. Perhaps it is a suggestion that the speed limits are too slow, or perhaps it is too easy to get away with it, but it is infuriating when I am driving along at a legal pace and the person behind me wants to go faster, and he shows it by extreme bumper kissing me. 

Traffic Lights. Before now, my experience of driving has been limited to country roads in the UK. You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when I arrived in Bordeaux and I discovered that the amber light was in fact an indication to speed up, not to slow down as I am used to. As a result, I witness cars running red lights on a daily basis, and I gasp each and every time. The worst occasion was a crash that I witnessed between two cars because one ignored the red light. Frenchies- amber means stop. 

Not speed up...

Beeping. I live on a busy street, a street that lots of impatient commuters use to get to work in the morning. If someone wants to parallel park in the road and needs to hold you up for 1 minute while they do so; let them. Some of us are trying to sleep and your constant beeping is only stressing everybody out. They will take longer to park, and I will wake up from my magical dream about how the French have all suddenly become wonderful drivers… 

So I suppose for now, I shall just have to embrace French culture and learn to drive like them. One thing, please don’t tell my Father…

The Things the French Got Wrong

Image: Waldo

My self-prescribed mission was to embrace French culture as far as is possible while in Bordeaux. My assignment thus far has been fairly successful; I buy bread most days from the Boulangerie, I spend 5 minutes kissing all my colleagues every morning and I’ve completely forgotten how to drive smoothly. However, as much as I am enjoying temporarily denying my true nationality, there are some things that I miss about Blighty…

QWERTY Keyboards. I fully accept that other countries should use other keyboards to fit with their languages. Accents are common in French, so therefore putting an é on the keyboard makes sense. However, banishing a full stop from its place causing it to be impossible to find is frustrating and being rid of a £ sign when constantly needing to write prices in English is infuriating. Needless to say, within a week, Amazon.fr was my new friend and the AZERTY keyboard was exiled to the shelving unit.  

Strikes. I know that we’re not entirely innocent of this at home, but the French take it to the extreme. The news must be checked daily to ensure that public transport is all running smoothly and an extra 20 minutes must always be left just in case. I found it particularly amusing when I was in Paris 2 years ago and there were large strikes over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. In England, it’s currently 65. I kept my mouth shut…

Sundays. It may be unfair to say that the French get Sundays wrong, perhaps it is fairer to suggest that they simply haven’t updated their Sunday system along with the rest of us yet. If you wake up on a Sunday morning without anything in the fridge, you have two choices; no food or restaurant food. Shops still believe in a full day off in the south west, however, it may be interesting to note that the wineries are all open…

The Internet. The only one of my list that has actually been less of a nuisance and more of an annoyance. Our internet provider was genuinely proud of the fact that they take less than two weeks (10 days specifically) to deliver the box after we purchased the internet. When I, and the Austrian girl I was with, explained that our internet at home is installed immediately, I think they got a little bit offended…

As much as I have now become a regular user of the phrase, ‘this would never happen in England’, I imagine that the moment I step off the plane and step into a long queue back home, I shall utter the words, ‘this would never happen in France…’ 

Happy 1st Blog Birthday

I cannot really believe that my dear little Notebook has made it to one year. From controversial posts about the first year of University being a waste of time, to more amusing thoughts on drunkenness, and even arguments that I feel strongly about such as commenters attacking writers, somehow the posts are still coming.

I have certainly learnt one thing: I am inspired by everything around me. This means that I haven’t really got a focus. However, it doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore  Even though a lot of my posts are about my life in France on Erasmus and the various things that have gone wrong (such as cake-making), I have recently been writing about other things too. I was interested by an original marketing campaign on YouTube by Heineken and even a social networking cartoon a few weeks ago took my fancy- and it was great to see that they took yours too as they were popular posts. Perhaps a variation isn’t such a bad thing, it is how BuzzFeed works after all.

The one thing I am sure about, is that I still love it. Writing is a lot of fun, choosing what to write about is an interesting challenge and working out how personal to make my posts is an exciting dilemma (maybe I went too far here…and here…).

I never knew that I would make it to birthday number 1, but I’m glad I did. I’m 60 posts down and I’ve still got lots to say. If you keep reading, I will definitely keep writing. Actually, I’ll probably keep writing anyway. 

Living With Strangers

So as part of my attempts to slip seamlessly into the French way of life on my year abroad, I opted to live with French (or at least ‘non-English’) people as part of a, ‘colocation’. I have now lived with 3 different French people, an Austrian girl and a Slovakian fondly known as the, ‘Slovak’ and I have learnt quite a lot about living with people you don’t know much about…

It’s what English people do. The wonderfully useful thing about living with people from different cultures is that you can be as strange as you want to be, and simply blame it on your culture. Want to eat supper at 5pm? ‘It’s normal at home’. Want to take a shower for half an hour? ‘What, you don’t do that in your country?!’

Unfortunate awkwardness. I had the amusing, yet rather frightening situation of a flatmate wanting to be more than just friends. Discovering that I could lock my bedroom door was certainly a delightful relief but I was a little nervous about the atmosphere in the flat afterwards. Luckily, it all turned out fine as he soon met a Brazilian girl who was far more exotic and the off-putting glances stopped.

Flatshare fridge- good idea or bad idea?

Meal times. As a group of four who didn’t know each other very well, we tended to be fairly antisocial when it came to food. Although there is nothing wrong with an episode of badly streamed Masterchef providing the only entertainment of the meal, the problem lies in the cooking. Lack of communication often finds four people wanting to use the oven at the same time. And we only have 2 baking trays.

Communication barriers. A group of people who all speak different languages is a wonderful experience as a mixture of Frenglish and Franglais can provide for many amusing moments. My mentioning that decoration in the loo would be nice subsequently led to Slovak investing in an enormous One Direction poster. Also, many a laugh can be had upon hearing a Frenchman utter the word, 'beach'.