Retiring later? Check mail soon (Page A-1, September 26, 1999)
Dear Recipient: Check your mailbox three months before your birthday. You’ll be getting a letter telling you about the money you can expect in the future.

No, you didn’t win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.
Your four-page Social Security Statement will be one of 125 million sent out starting Friday in the largest personalized mass mailing ever undertaken by the U.S. government.

Coaches also help put skills to work on job, in life
(Living section, October 20, 1999)
It starts with a nagging feeling deep inside your gut. Maybe your family life is great, your job is going well, and you feel healthier than ever, but something’s missing. Or maybe you’ve worked for years toward the next step in your career but can’t seem to make that move and don’t know why.

People with these kinds of everyday but all-consuming problems used to turn to self-help books and sometimes even psychological experts. But today, more and more are hiring private coaches.

Coaching certainly is not new, as any athlete knows. But the ways it’s being used today are new, and those ways are multiplying.
“Coaching is not rocket science. It’s really about taking action,” said Cheryl Richardson, past president of the International Coach Federation, which talked about trends of the trade during its annual conference last weekend in Central Florida. “Coaching will become the therapy of the future.”

Computer whizzes have pick of jobs (Business section, April 25, 1999)
Java. C++. Visual Basic. Unix. COBOL. Oracle. MCSE. Microsoft Windows NT.

People with those terms on their resumes are the most sought-after workers in the world right now, because they speak the language of high technology. Actually, they write it, develop it and upgrade it.

Folks who specialize in information technology – computer software and operating systems, as opposed to hardware – have their pick of an estimated 346,000 vacancies nationwide, according to a study last year by the Information Technology Association and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

High-tech meccas such as California’s Silicon Valley, northeast Washington state and greater Boston are clamoring to hire these information technology – “IT” – professionals.

That makes the competition even more fierce in smaller job markets such as Central Florida’s, where by one estimate the number of high-tech companies has grown 50 percent during the past three years.

They lurk at work. If you sneeze, they are pleased. Better beware of GERMS. (Living section, June 9, 1999)
The guy at the next desk can’t seem to stop sneezing. He has wiped out his box of tissues and is reaching for yours. You offer to help him with his work so he can go home early and try to fight off this bug. His phone starts ringing just as he hits the down side of “Ahh-CHOOO!” so you pick it up.

Ooops.

You might have just helped yourself to a dose of the flu.

Doctors say you can’t be sure how long the germs of a cold or a flu will last on workplace equipment. It might be one hour or 24 hours or three days, depending on the type of bug and the environment.

Just in case, you have to be cautious.

People who study contagious illnesses see the potential for germs everywhere: on a faucet handle, a computer keyboard, a pen, a salad bar utensil – any object you might touch.

“It could be anything, and you go sit down and eat a meal afterward, or rub your eye, and you’ve been exposed,” said Bill Toth, an epidemiologist with the Orange County Health Department.

The first step toward staying healthy is to be aware of what could be lurking in your workplace.

“Use your imagination – it’s all around you,” said Dr. Mark Frobb, a Canadian physician who heads the scientific advisory committee for a skin product that kills germs. “Say, for example, you shook my hand, my hand was infected and then you picked a bit of lettuce from lunch from your teeth.”

Is there anything you can do to protect yourself? You bet. The best method is something you’ve heard about countless times from your mother: Wash your hands.

Life on the front lines of a rodent rebellion (Living, October 9, 1999)
Thunk! The noise jolted me out of bed at 3 a.m., and I ran to the living room to find my youngest cat hurling herself against a sliding-glass door. The other two cats joined us, and I took their cue, standing statue-still and staring out into the screened patio, letting my eyes focus in the moonlight. Then, a foot away, I saw the tiny pair of eyes staring back at us.

It had been two weeks since the day I learned we were not alone. I was driving out of our Apopka subdivision when I spotted The Sign, one of those notices people put up for garage sales and open houses. This one was different. I could make out only two of the hand-lettered words: rodent problem.

Something made me back up the car for a closer look. Maybe it was the fact that we had decided the night before to sell our house and move. Now, reading the sign and its plea for residents to meet at City Hall that night, I knew we had one more chore to add to our list to get the house ready for sale: Get rid of the mice.

Antique star power: A long day’s journey into disappointment
(Homes section, July 17, 1999)
This was our Super Bowl, our pilgrimage to Jerusalem, our retirement trip around the U.S.A. in a Winnebago. We had been planning the journey for months, ever since we had read that Chubb’s Antiques Roadshow was coming to Florida.
But when it came right down to it, nothing could prepare us for what we would go through. Not Cheez-Whiz, not a set of cellular telephones, not even a cup of coffee from an unwashed guy in yellow-glass spectacles. If we had known then what we know now…
But let’s start at the beginning.

Medical jobs remain hot (Living section, August 11, 1999)
When Joel Schmidt heard he would be losing his job with the closing of a Philadelphia hospital, the registered nurse launched a national employment search and vowed to land in a place where that wouldn’t happen to him again.

He narrowed his choices to two metropolitan areas that seemed to have the highest concentration of medical jobs: Orlando and Las Vegas. Central Florida’s wholesomeness charmed him, and he moved here almost two years ago.

So Schmidt found it ironic to be mingling with health-care workers lasat week at a job fair for employees displaced by the closing of Princeton Hospital in Orlando. But this time he wasn’t one of the job seekers – he was with one of the 38 employers who were there to recruit talent.
Despite Princeton’s closing, the employment outlook for health-care workers in Central Florida ids pretty sunny, Schmidt and others in the industry say. Like the rest of the nation, the Orlando area is especially hurting for nurses to work in its hospital intensive-care areas, they say, but there are jobs available in almost any health-care discipline.

Jobs, jobs everywhere: Employers launch an all-out crusade to attract workers (Living section, October 6, 1999)
What would entice you to think about switching jobs?
Would you answer an ad on a sky banner, a billboard, a bumper sticker or the side of a city bus? Would you respond to a national TV commercial or a flier in your mailbox? Would you sign up for an Internet service that auctions off your talents, or one that sets you up with a recruiter?
Employers engaged in a full-scale war for your talent in a tight labor market are hoping you say “yes, yes, yes!” to all of those tactics and more.

You can’t avoid being bombarded by employment ads these days. There aren’t enough workers to fill all the jobs available, so employers are trying everything but hand-to-hand combat to steal you away from your current job.

“This is a long way from people standing on the side of the road with ‘Will work for food’ signs, isn’t it?” said Ann Robbins, senior vice president of the Maitland office of Right Management, an international human resources consulting firm.