There are a number of things on my mind this morning.

Thing no. 1: I recently received the invitation to my 60th college reunion in May of next year. I remember when I graduated, in 1964, and how old the 50th reunion class attendees looked that year, and how we are ten years older than they were. I also recently stumbled upon the class photo taken at our 40th reunion. I looked at the hundreds of folks in that photo and thought that they looked pretty old. We are now 20 years beyond the time that picture was taken. Do we look 20 years older? (Rhetorical question)

Thing no. 2: I had my annual physical exam last week, and everything looks pretty much OK. That’s good – at least nothing from my recent COVID experience showed up anywhere in all of the many, many statistics that I now get from the Johns Hopkins network. And there is something that really fascinates me. I have a “health” folder where I keep info I receive, and I saw that for the last four years, my weight has only varied by one pound. I don’t understand how that is even possible – it’s not that I try one way or the other, and I never step on a scale. I think the highest I have ever weighed is less than ten pounds higher than now – it happened two times. First, when I graduated from high school 63 years ago. Second, when I went on a strictly vegetarian diet for ten years, ending about 15 years ago, and my weight when up and all my indices went the wrong way. I also remember about 45 years ago, when I weighed almost 15 pounds less than I do today. I could eat as much as I wanted, and I stayed very very thin. I didn’t know why, until my then doctor figured out that I had picked up some sort of parasitic infection on a trip to the Amazon. Those were the days.

All right – neither of things are very important to you, or probably even of interest. So, let’s move on.

Thing no 3: We had a house guest this week. The son of friends, born in Israel, now 40 years old and living in Dallas. We had only met him twice before (we think). He and his family stayed with us when he was 7 years old (the last time he was in Washington), and we saw him on an Israel trip in 1999 when he was 16. He has changed a lot since 1999.

He now has his own cybersecurity firm, working with clients around the country and, I guess, to some extent internationally. He and I had an interesting talk last night (over 3 hours) about a bunch of things, including what a cybersecurity company does and how it does it. Not that I understood a lot of what he told me, although I tried to make it look like I understood everything, and think I succeeded.

But that’s not what I want to focus on right now. Nor do I want to talk about all the solutions to the problems in the Middle East that we came up with – I’ll save that for another day.

Arthur, quit wandering all over the place. Focus!

Our guest (I wish I could use his name, but it’s against my policy; should I make up a name? Nah.) told me that he has hired a number of “interns” (I am not sure how to define that – didn’t ask him), young folks in their early 20s, to help him investigate problems clients are having after being hacked or how their systems need to be modified so that they won’t be hacked. He said that, to a person, these young interns are very bright, and very able to gather data that is necessary to figure out the next steps. But, he says, once they gather the data, they don’t know what to do with it. They can’t figure out what the next steps are. That, he says, is because to process this data and make it useful, you need to know things about the client company, and that means they need to learn more about the company, where it has been and where it wants to go , and means communicating with company officials, asking them questions and listening to their answers. The interns, he said, have no idea how to do this. They do not know how to communicate – they don’t know how to develop or ask the questions, who to contact or talk to, and so forth. They obtain the basic data, and then they are paralyzed.

The day after he told me that, I went to a session of my Thursday morning breakfast group, where the presenter (a friend of mine) talked about his work running the “year in Washington” program of a major university. Bright kids (mainly undergraduates), he said, and interested in making the most of their year in Washington, which was a combination of class work and interning in government or non-profit offices. They needed to be taught, he said, how to communicate. How to talk to and relate to others in an office situation, how to write simple letters and memos, etc. The very same things.

Then, after that session, I drove home with another friend, who is active in an “increase the vote” type effort, and who is working with various young volunteers, whom he knows only through Zoom. He, too, said these were bright and interesting young people, but he said that they too don’t seem to know what to do, how to take initiative, and that he finds that he needs to continue to give them precise instructions. He didn’t think this would be as true in past years.

So, three consistent voices. And to what do they attribute this? Over reliance and dependence on technology exacerbated by the isolation of the pandemic years, so that the current younger generation (this is Gen-Z, right?) have not had the type of in person, oral or even one on one written communication skills that past generations take for granted.

Whew! I finally got out what I wanted to say. Good for me.