上班族必備軟實力

[Trick or treat.]
Halloween is a holiday with very old traditions. In the old days, kids would carry bags and walk around their neighborhoods dressed like monsters and ghosts. They would knock on doors and when the door opened, they would yell, “Trick or treat!” and the person inside would put some candy in the bags. “Trick or treat” didn’t mean anything, it was just what you were supposed to say. Kids would never play tricks on people.
   

[“Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.”]
In America, after getting married, the happy couple often takes a short vacation. It’s called a honeymoon.

[There is something to be said for the wisdom of the ages.]
Many old wives’ tales that are sort of true, even if they are not exactly correct. These are modern myths. They try to explain things that we do not understand. Many of these come from the days when many Americans were settlers in a wild, new world and just trying to survive. Many people never went to school and they only had these tales to guide them in life.
One old wives’ tale states that lightning never strikes the same place twice. There is no reason for this to be true except for the fact that the Earth is so big that the odds of lightning hitting the same place twice within a time span that anyone would notice are so small that you can get away with thinking that it would never hit any one place multiple times. The lightning rod on the top of Taipei 101 must get hit often. (Many times a day, the Internet said.)
“Bounty is the quicker picker upper.” That one was going around the television before there was an Internet. They even had videos that showed the paper towels ‘actually’ soaking up spills. There were many gullible people who believed it. Many paper towels were sold.
 

[Richard has lived in Taipei for 18 years, but has never been to New York.]

New York City so nice, they had to name it twice. The city is America’s city. Washington D.C. might be the nation’s capitol, but New York is where everything happens.
Sometimes it seems like New York is America’s only city. If you are not from New York then you are not from anywhere, but if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Anyplace else is Palookaville.
Most of our favorite movies and TV shows were filmed in New York. Sometimes it is like some kind of dream land. It is TV land.

[Richard is from Oklahoma and a real party animal.]
There’s plenty of ways to have fun in the USA.
For a weekday, you might go out to dinner and go shopping. Some people celebrate Wednesdays as the mid point of the week or ‘hump day’ the day you are over the hump on the way to the weekend. Since many people work, there is only for them a narrow prime time window in which to operate. You hardly have time to catch a movie without getting home late and then you will be dragging at work the next day.
On Friday you will have a chance to stay out late. Many people make the most of it. They go to drink in dark rooms with bright lights and loud music. By 2 A.M. there will be a lot of people eating a late night breakfast at any restaurant that is still open that late. People eat pancakes and sausage while drinking orange juice and cup after cup of hot coffee.

In America, a signature is a proof of identity. It is a necessity of daily life. A signature is as unique as fingerprints. Handwriting experts can tell if a signature is genuine or not. It takes a very skilled forger to get anything by them.
 
Signatures are written in cursive. This is the style of writing where the letters of a word are all connected. This was a time saver, in that you could write words without lifting your pen off the paper. Hardly anybody writes cursive anymore. It is hard to write and it is hard to read. We type, we text, we print, but we don’t write cursive. The signature is one of the last vestiges of this endangered form of expression. Who needs it if you can text.
 

[Richard had many amazing adventures this summer.]
In the summertime, school kids in America don’t have much to study or work on. For most, there are three months with no school and no work. The weather is warm, the days are long, and time is free. It is time to read, travel, and play.
Most students don’t go to summer school, and when they return to school to start a new year, they have to accomplish the most frequently assigned essay in school history. It is called, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”. So, after three months of frolicking, swimming, and goofing off, the student has to stand up in front of the class and make up stuff about their most recent summer.

[In order to form a more perfect union...]
“Our constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.” That is what one U.S. president said as he was pardoning a previous U.S. president so that he would not face the consequences of his illegal actions. It seemed a little bit contradictory at the time.
 

[Richard grew up in the city of Tulsa in the state of Oklahoma, but has lived in Taiwan for the last 18 years.]
Taiwan is in the Far East. We call it the Far East because it is far far to the east, but not too far. If it was too far to the east, then it would be in danger of becoming the Near West. The Far East is so far away that the culture, language, and religions are mostly different from those in the USA.
I have been in Taiwan long enough to start seeing my hometown as a foreign land. My old Tulsa neighborhood is basically the same as when I was there, but there are enough little differences that it has become oddly strange, and strangely odd. I’m used to Taiwan, which is my home now.

[Richard is an American in Taipei and is pleased with the service.]
We tip in America. This is where you give extra money to wait staff, hotel workers, taxi drivers, and others. It is a way to reward good service.
Fifteen percent is the common tip for restraunts. A quick way to figure the tip amount is to take the total cost and divide by 10. (That’s just moving the decimal point over one spot.) Then add half of that amount, and there you have 15 percent, and you didn’t need to use any trigonometry. Taxi drivers require a little bit more.