walked with mom for 35 min

I went to mom's for dinner tonight, she had enchiladas, yummy. She has my nieces and my grandmother spending the night, so I went over to play games. I started reading the World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. It's a really interesting book and easy to read. Anyways I was talking about some of it's premises with my nieces. Basically how they need to be careful when they pick their careers because they will be competing against everyone in the whole world. We had a really good conversation about careers and life and how the world works and the things they are studying right now. I love that, exchanging ideas and seeing how they think, having actual conversations, they are getting to the age where you don't talk at them as much as talk with them. The youngest niece is really clever, she has a tricky mind and comes up with brilliant things that are different from everyone else. The oldest niece is a humanitarian, she feels everyone's pain.

One of the things the book talks about, that I thought was different is that there is a call center for some McDonalds now. What happens is someone drives up to a McDonalds and places their order to a call center that might be two states away. The drive through takes a picture of the person taking the order and sends it with the order to the kitchen, then they make it and match up the picture and give the person their order. Then they throw the picture away. They said it increases their productivity by 30% and decreased foods errors to only 2%. Pretty weird. Last time I was at Wal-Mart they put in a self-service checkout that even reads coupons. Pretty soon there won't even be low-level/entry jobs for school kids and retirees to do, except maybe working at call centers. The world is changing so fast, I just hope I can keep up for the next 5 years and then be able to retire.