The DU Lounge

Every day when I'm in Paris or Brussels, I see groups of tourists (not just American, also Japanese, whatever) walking past great scenes like Paris monuments, or the Grande Place in Brussels, and to a last person, they all have their faces buried in the cell phones. Unbelievable!!

20 years ago, my younger daughter was in her last year of undergrad in D.C., age 18, and looking to get a summer job to raise some money for later travel. She somehow found a German lawyer working in DC who was desperate for some help translating legal documents so that he didn't have to stay up until 2 A.M. doing it himself every night. She "auditioned" with a document or two, and he was so happy with her work that he paid her $25 an hour (not bad twenty years ago), and offered her a full-time job when she graduated (she passed, but thanked him for the decent pay while she was there).

If she had had her nose buried in her cell phone while texting the whole time, it's a fair bet she wouldn't have gotten that job, either.