Thursday night. Time for some thoughts.

There's a lot to be said for good, honest work.

At Marcy's grandfather's birthday party recently, his daughters both thanked him for the work ethic he taught them. It was a great moment. I've seen that work ethic come out in the stories he's told me about his times working in the can factory in Fairport (which was THE place to work back in the day.) You can't help but admire the guys that worked there in long, sweaty hours ... guys getting maimed in the cutting and clamping machines. Those jobs exist in other places today, many with the same risks. I've never held a high-risk factory job that helps Americans live their lives. I respect the folks that do.

The hardest constant work in any of many jobs was running the weed whacker during those two summers landscaping. It made me realize there are many muscles in your body that don't get as much action as they should.

I don't want to belittle the work I did on the redesign of the Greece Post. That was certainly the epitome of a mental and creative workout. And it was constant, for many months, 10 hours a day for five, sometimes six days a week. A week before the newspaper launched, I broke up with my ex-girlfriend. And we lived together at the time. So yes, my head was having a hard time, but I knew my head pretty well at that point. My body, during landscaping, I did not know. It surprised me every day with a new way to feel pain.

In my Baahston apartment, much of the current job hunt has taken shape. So much of what I do is directly tied to computers now, and that filters all the way down into how I have to communicate with possible future employers. You have to do it a certain way, too, or else you're not looked at. The levels of human interaction seem to be fading with the years, and this process is no different.

That's left me with some time to consider the irony of HR departments and headhunters' logical progression into fully online systems. The communication jobs out there require more and more work on the computer, which means less time spent with humans. I think the customer-service professionals, the communication professionals, and anyone else working with the public aren't being offered experience to hone their people skills. I think the market is no longer a place to learn people skills. You got 'em, or you don't.

Maybe it's not as bad as I think. There are jobs for every personality type and background. It's evident communications professionals are getting better, faster at what they do. I just wonder if one day people won't know what it was like to say something without entering a password first.

That's industry. Just like we're looking for better, cheaper, faster ways to improve the ways in which we communicate, the American Can Co. needed better, cheaper, faster ways to make a can. The American Can Co., though, has been long closed. Its remaining vestige overlooks downtown Fairport and commands a spectacular view up and down the Erie Canal. The village grew up around it, and the area itself is beautiful thanks to innovative reimaginings of its older buildings. They have been converted into clever boutiques and niche shops. People left the can co. but they're still in town (at least a lot of them are). They're retired, mostly. And from the looks of property values they're not doing too bad.

I'd like to think it was all that hard work that made them so well off. That's what will keep me going, anyway.