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The Art of Conditional Pre-Tipping

Getting good service can be a difficult problem in our indecent, modern, world.  One way of guaranteeing good service is to provide a cash tip to the person assisting you.  In restaurants and in service bays where you are well-known, tipping helps get you good service; but what do you do with the incidental worker you may only see one time, like a moving company team, or a repairman?  How can you make sure they’ll get the job done to your satisfaction within your time requirement window?  Conditional Pre-Tipping is one method I use to ensure excellent, one-off, service.

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Should Bad Credit Ruin Your Ability to Get a Job?

Should the sins of your financial past be carried over to negatively affect your future employment status as a job applicant? TransUnion and Experian believe your bad money management skills directly speak to your trustworthiness as an employee and they want employers to pay them to smoke out your bad behavior.

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Tempering Teenage Angst

Teenagers easily get bored.  To fill that idle time they can study, play or work.  Sometimes that idle time turns into crime in the streets and the best way to use teen energy is to put it to work in the marketplace so they become vested and productive movers in the community.  There’s no better cure for teen angst than working for your daily bread.

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Nipping the Dead Weight

How do you get rid of the rotten worker without reams of documentation and yearning?  Is there a quick and safe way to nip the dead weight from drowning your company?

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The Great Depression Depression

Gordon Davidescu wrote this article.

In theory, it was all supposed to go a certain way. I was supposed to have everything in my apartment packed and either shipped, sold, or eliminated in other ways. I was supposed to stay with a friend on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a little while until I found my own place to live, and then I was going to live there. That is how it was supposed to go, but that is not at all how it went; life has had other plans for me thusfar.

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Demystifying Writing: No Myths, Muses or Sirens

Writers should have no Muses, honor no myths, and follow no Sirens.

The job of the author is just that:  A job. 

There is a necessary pedantic dreariness to the writing process that must be honored and consumed on a daily basis. 

In a recent comments stream on another blog post, I said this about the book writing process:

You just have to sit down and do it and get it done. There’s no inspiration involved. No big thoughts. Just words on a page. There is too much danger of never writing another word if the process is too
romanticized. That’s what’s so great about writing four blogs — I need to come up with something good fast even if I don’t feel like it — that training comes in really handy while trying to pound out a book on a
hard deadline.

If we hope to be authors, we must hone that craft — notice I said “craft” and not “art” — all day every day with formal, public, writing that is open to feedback, criticism, and future indexing by the search engines.

Only that forced guarantee of “published” writing will keep us cogent, on point, and forever improving —  because the future, and the history, we make each day requires hard judgments against our best intentions.

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The Nature of Part Time

What is the nature of a part time job?

It is to be a swing person that can work in a finger snap? Or is the nature of part time to be willing to work the shifts no one else wants?

As a youngster, I was involved in radio a lot and I loved the live medium.

I was a part timer that worked the weekends and the weekend overnights.  If someone took ill during the week, I had to sit in the chair and take over with less than an hour’s notice.

Wherever I was in the city, when the radio called, I had to go.  That dedication to work meant I missed a lot of weekend opportunities to spend time with friends and to have any sort of a social life.

Being on the radio raised no peer chits.  In fact, there was a certain resentment among my friends and associates that I was “too young” to be on the radio, and that I should be working as a waiter in a restaurant like them.

The moment of clarity about working on the radio hit me an hour after I had four wisdom teeth removed.  I was pumped up with codeine and not feeling good.  I could not speak.  I could barely open my swollen mouth.

The phone rang.

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The Definition of Bad Taste

One of the worst feelings is when you do someone a favor — like getting them a paying gig — and they then betray you by complaining on their blog about the very work you got them.

That sort of behavior is: The Definition of Bad Taste.

If you don’t like the job or appreciate the favor, that’s fine, but keep it to yourself. 

No one wants to read about ungrateful complaining on a public blog. 

Whine to your friends and bad-mouth — if you must — those who do you favors… out of earshot and eyeshot!

A former beloved professor of mine in graduate school was found of saying this about that sort of betrayer:  “I will do nothing to hurt you; but I will also do nothing to help you.”

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Til Sick Days Do Us Part

This week I have been dealing with my mortality. Is being in good health an inalienable right or not?
I found it pressing to learn in America many people are not allowed paid Sick Days even if they are full time employees. If you get sick on the job, you go to the job and you do the job.

The reality, for a surprising percentage of the U.S. population, is more like the 19th century. Nearly half of all full-time private sector workers in the U.S. get no paid sick days. None. If one of those workers woke up with excruciating pains in his or her chest and had to be rushed to a hospital — well, no pay for that day.

For many of these workers, the cost of an illness could be the loss of their job.
The situation is ridiculous for those in the lowest quarter of U.S. wage earners. Nearly 80 percent of those workers — the very ones who can least afford to lose a day’s pay — get no paid sick days at all.

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The Tar Pit Recommendation

Writing a letter of recommendation is usually an ordinary experience, but there are times when writing such a letter can become a tar pit of emotion and psychic distress. You feel suspended in amber as you search for the right phrase to recommend a person who deserves no recognition. Are you required — by moral pitch or professional bitumen — to write a letter of recommendation even if that person did not live up to your expectation or the requirements of the task?

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