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Category Archives: Business

Used backhoe loader

by Mary Anne

Have you ever the saying “the difference between a man and a boy is the price of his toy?” Every time my hubby and I drive past a construction site he gets just as excited as a little six year old boy playing with construction toys in a sandbox. He exclaims “look at that backhoe” or “look at that dump truck” or “look at the size of that bull dozer.”

I’m never quite sure whether to feign interest or tell him I’m too busy trying to drive the car to be looking at the construction equipment. I’m sure he misses running his landscaping company that we used to run a few years back before we moved. He wanted to bring all of his equipment with him, but I insisted that we would not be self-employed after we moved. So he sold the business. He wanted to sell it lock, stock and barrel all together as a turn-key business but ended up selling it piecemeal. One of his employees bought the used backhoe loader and the used bull dozer from him. His father co-signed the bank papers for him to be able to buy them from us. Instead of listing the used compact tractor for sale he did convince me that he was going to need that down here to help do the landscaping work on the three acres of land we bought down here. He did list four of the used trucks for sale in the Uncle Henry’s magazine and ended up selling three of them that way, and he decided to give the fourth one to his daughter.

At least once a week, though, he teases me that he is going to go out and spend a couple of thousand dollars on some kind of construction equipment that we don’t need. I always tell him to buy himself a new wife while he is at it!


Software library

by Mary Anne

Have you ever wanted to start a software library at home? CD Earth is an Internet company that has been set up to help consumers build up a software library without breaking their piggy bank.  CDEarth is a club that consumers join in order to build up their software library. Once a consumer joins the club the club member receives four CDs to evaluate. Two of the CDs are free to keep. The other two CDs the club member either returns or keeps. If the club member decides to keep all four CDs, then the club member has to pay $14.99 plus shipping and handling for each of the two “non-free” CDs. After that, about every seven to eight weeks the club member receives two more CDs to evaluate and either keep or return. Again, if the club member keeps them then the club member pays the $14.99 plus shipping and handling for each CD that is kept.

The club member can cancel membership at any time. There is a variety of software to choose from several different interest areas – children’s software, business software, family interest software, games, creative, and graphics.  The family interest group includes a software program with 10,001 recipes in it!  I’d be interested in that!


Equal pay for equal work – my take on the wage gap problem

by Mary Anne

Women have come a long way in their struggle for equality with men.  But generally speaking, women still do not earn as much money in the job market as men do.  Women earn only about 77 cents for every dollar that men earn.

I find this news very discouraging; I feel that women should earn the same amount of money if they are doing the same work as their male counterparts.

When I first entered the job market umpteen years ago, I found that the company that I worked for systematically paid the male employees more money than they paid the female employees – for the exact same job.  When I inquired why that was so, the reply was that “men had families to support and needed the money more than the females did.”

The logic behind that assumption was that the men that worked there were married, with children, and that the wives stayed home to take care of the children.  And the assumption continued that the women that worked there were young and single and only had to worry about supporting themselves.  So the company felt that they were paying their employees based on their employees needs, rather than on their level of production.

I have always felt that if I am producing at the same level as another person, I should be paid the same as that other person, regardless of marital/family status.  I ended up going to work for a large, unionized corporation, where the union contract prevented that type of wage gap discrimination.  For me, that was the best option for me to be treated more fairly.


That’s not Texas!

by Mary Anne

When Michael called last week to let us know that he had landed a job with some Toronto contractors and one of them had taken him in to let him rent his basement apartment I was completely shocked. Last I had heard, he was on his way to Texas, because that is where he said that he had heard all of the good construction jobs were! He said that he was busier than a one-armed paper-hanger working on a lot of Toronto home additions and Toronto renovations that he was probably going to be staying there for at least six months or more.

When I asked him if his compass had broken, or if his GPS unit had been hacked, he just laughed. He said that he did, in fact, go to Texas and traveled all over the state looking for work and simply could not find any work at all. And apparently he had run into some trouble that ended up in a fist fight with some local men at a nightclub and decided that it was in his best interest to get out of town. So he went back to his folk’s home in North Carolina for a few weeks and then was given some job leads in Toronto, so off he went!


Running a cleaning business

by Mary Anne

My sister used to clean houses in the past to make a little bit of extra money, and she was really good at that.  She had quite a few customers.  She hasn’t done that for several years now, but she is still getting phone calls from people asking her to come clean their house!
Where we live, more and more families are two-income families, which leaves them little time to clean house.  The demand for cleaning services is on the increase, and I think that this would be a good opportunity for her to make some money running a business that she already is familiar with!


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