Older People Are Still Valuable Because We Can Still Learn A New Job And We Come To Work With A Lifetime Of Experience That Can Not Be Learned In School

Raoul Eiseman
8 min readAug 16, 2020

I was in San Francisco as the Business Planning Manager for the District and was with the District Personnel Manager visiting the Jewelry Store for my company and he said to me in a serious and not joking tone “You are very familiar with how to use computers and all those functions for a person of your old age.” I laughed because at the time I was 42 and he was an up and comer about 20 something and his perception of me was funny. My reply was when you become my “old age” of 42 you will realize that you are not old and that your brain works just as well as it did when younger. I’m not sure he understood the entire picture I had presented because he was so young and perceptions of people go both ways for young and old.

Now I am 74 and recently learned that the website Medium will pay you for stories you write based on how many people read your article when you become a member so I wrote a story and published it without a headline and discovered every article needs a headline and I made what I thought was my first mistake. I looked for my first story and they had put it on the front page at the bottom under “Reading list” and I thought what a great mistake to make because they put you on the front page without the title and highlight the first sentence, but the first sentence on my first story was very boring so I left it there for a week and in watching number of people reading it was zero every day. So I learned to edit and put a headline in and published it button and went excitedly to the front page and there was the headline. As the days went on zero yesterday and zero today on the front page and I thought to myself this is the story of my life where I make a stupid mistake, but fate saves me. After a few days of zero after my new headline was front page, I came to the conclusion it must be a crummy headline and I was also afraid that they would move my zero read headline off the front page so I needed to give it a bang to get everyone’s attention before I lose the gift of fate on the front.

Discouraged, but not giving up I wrote another story and wanted to use the video of Notre-Dame bells ringing the family had made while on a trip to Paris several years ago before the fire and we are proud to have that as a momento and I wanted to share it with the world. Now I had to learn how to post my video to Medium…