As we must all do our part to heal the partisan divide, this California family’s spring break was a road trip through Texas. We spent a week enjoying barbecue and swimming holes from the Metroplex to the Alamo. And at every opportunity, we stopped at Buc-ee’s, gas station superstores with mountains of freshly made barbecue sandwiches and fudge alongside America’s largest (and apparently cleanest) bathrooms. It was at Buc-ees that 13-year-old Zev learned a valuable lesson. Against my advice and counsel, he used his own money to buy a half-pound of fudge. Regret and a trip to the large, clean bathroom followed hard upon. I also insisted on some history and marched my three teen boys through the 1960s via stops at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (i.e., the Book Depository), LBJ’s birth place, and the LBJ Presidential Library at UT Austin. By the end, they were as sick of the 60s as your average Fox News viewer.
There was some respite from political history at the LBJ Library where a traveling exhibit on the history of American music had set up shop. Zev’s response to the exhibit was to head to the gift shop to buy a harmonica. (I reminded him of his errant fudge impulse. When that didn’t work, I told him we had one at home. But germophobe Zev said he’d seen his brother use it.) So for the rest of the road trip, the family had the pleasure of listening to harmonica learning-by-doing from the backseat. Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Within a few days, he sounded like a mini Bob Dylan. We’d think of songs featuring harmonica, put them on, and in seconds Zev would be playing along like he’d been blowing harp for years.
When we returned to our home state, bereft of Buc-ee’s, we went out to dinner with his aunt, uncle, and cousins. As we sat down at the table, Zev – harp in hand – launched into a pitch-perfect version of Piano Man, drawing looks from surrounding patrons. Impressed but wary of being ejected from a favorite spot, his tactful uncle replied: “Great job, Zev. We were talking about that song today. We were saying how odd it was that in a song called Piano Man, the harmonica player won’t shut up.” And with that, for the first time in a week, Zev put his harmonica away.
Just as you’d expect Piano Man to be all about piano, you’d expect colleges ostensibly preparing students for jobs to deploy the same software used in those jobs. But they don’t. Because while 85-90% of private and public sector employers utilize Microsoft Office (i.e., Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook), the vast majority of colleges and students are on Google Docs (i.e., Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail).