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Let's say you live in Connecticut and are a huge fan of the pro golf and women's tennis circuits. Then you're probably happy that the state is home to the Greater Hartford Open and, in New Haven, the Pilot Pen Tournament, each of which attracts some of the world's top players. But then you look at the calendar for next year and discover that - unbelievably - both somehow are scheduled for the same week, meaning they'll compete for attendance and news media attention. (The cities are 33 miles apart.) Ditto for 2005. What's more, the prospects for changing the dates for either event are virtually nil.
In Ireland, the "television event of the summer" literally drowned in its own hype when a ship carrying contestants around the rocky coastline for the eight-week reality series "Cabin Fever," unexpectedly ran aground and sank earlier this month. Everyone aboard had to be winched to safety by a rescue helicopter. The footage undoubtedly would have been sensational, but no cameras were rolling at the time.
Get with it, job hunters: An e-mail address is now the "coordinate" of choice. So don't forget to include one on your résumé.
A surprising number of applicants still commit that oversight. A recent survey of more than 150,000 résumés, found that 27 percent lacked the job candidate's e-mail address.
And leaving it off greatly reduces a candidate's prospects of landing a job, says Brad Fredericks, partner at ResumeDoctor.com, the consulting firm that conducted the poll.
"E-mail has become one of the primary communication tools of recruiters," according to Mr. Fredericks. "Forgetting to put an e-mail address on a résumé is as bad as forgetting to list your phone number."
Also noted was recruiters' frustration when candidates don't regularly check their e-mail accounts.
"The e-mail address is only as good as the frequency [with which] a potential candidate checks it," says Kevin Sapp, a recruiter at Adecco, one the nation's largest staffing firms, which participated in the survey. "It serves no purpose to have an e-mail address and not review the messages at least daily."
Now there's a better way to avoid those dinner-hour telemarketing calls than just taking the phone off the hook.
Online registration for the Federal Trade Commission's National "Do Not Call" Registry was made available last week at www.donotcall.gov.
Telephone registration is also now available to people living in states west of the Mississippi River. To register, call toll-free, 1-888-382-1222. The FTC Nationwide telephone registration will be available in coming days.
The free registry will allow consumers to reduce the number of telemarketing calls they receive at home. Registration is good for five years, at which point it must be renewed. Most of the 27 states that have active do not call lists will transfer numbers on their lists to the national registry.
Telemarketers will be required to access the registry every three months to "scrub" their calling lists beginning in September 2003. Consumers who place their phone numbers on the registry before the end of August should see a decrease in calls after Oct. 1, 2003.
A few businesses, including banks, long-distance providers, and airlines are exempt from the rule, which, if violated, can result in an $11,000 fine for each call.
If you're planning a trip this Independence Day, you are far from alone. The American Automobile Association (AAA) estimates, on the basis of a telephone survey of 1,300 adults, that 37.4 million Americans will be traveling 50 or more miles from home this weekend. That's a 2 percent increase over last year and the highest number in almost a decade. The vast majority of vacationers - 32.6 million - will go by road, and another 4.3 million by air, the AAA projects. The most popular destinations this holiday weekend, by percentage:
1. Towns, rural areas 22%
2. Oceans and beaches 19
3. Lakes 17
4. Cities 15
5. National, state parks 9
6. Mountains 7
7. Theme/amusement parks 4
- Business Wire
