填空题
"Why are working mothers so furious all the time" I was asked recently. An answer, not entirely rational, springs to mind. "Personally, I could use a travel agent." It’s a joke, sort of. School vacation is coming up. I’m swamped at work, and trip planning has become a time-consuming hell. A simple family vacation requires innumerable visits to destination websites; a suspicious scouring of rankings and reviews; and, at the heart-stopping final moment, a purchase on a site where prices and availability seem to change by the second.
The yearning for an old-school travel agent is a metaphor for deeper and probably unsolvable problems of domestic life. First, any illusion that mothers might have had about full-time employment as a "lifestyle choice" has, in this economy, been stripped away. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 77 percent of American women with school-age children work; a quarter says they sometimes work from home; a third works on the weekends. Why Women fare better than men in this employment market.
Second, the "service economy" of the boom years has become a nightmare of self-service. Individuals, under increasing pressure to perform at work, have to do for themselves all kinds of things that other people---middlemen, customer-service agents, HR managers, and administrative assistants-- used to do. This has given rise to the most tedious household chore of all. domestic administration, health-insurance forms, 401(k)planning, personal banking, tech support, expenses, gift returns-- these have become existentially (真实存在的) torturing, a maze of entrances and passwords. And on the phone Robot voices that lead nowhere in the direction of human help.
"You’re focused on making the reservation, and the email, and the deadline at work tomorrow," says Ellen Galinsky, president of Families and Work Institute. "We’re supposed to be paying attention to all of it, all the time." Beneath these newer realities of modern life lies an unquestionable truth: American corporate structures and marriages still do not fully accommodate the working mom, which means that women are still in charge of haircuts, doctors’ appointments, and birthday parties. That’s why vacation planning on the Internet, though harmless in itself, feels like the very last straw.