slamboard

In a lot of ways, I hated tree planting. I spent a season performing this job in Nova Scotia when I was still in high school and I lived the cliché of planting trees in Ontario after my first year of college. This is a job that is almost always paid based on production. I made about half the amount that was printed on the poster that lured me there. I have many interesting stories from those few months. None of them fit well in this business blog.

There is a line in a BareNakedLadies song about not planting trees. The song is called Never is Enough. In a lot of ways, I hate BNL, but that’s a different story.

Sugar Land, Texas is a nice place to live, according to Forbes and CNN. It is the headquarters for Imperial Sugar. This company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2001. It has since managed to turn itself around partly through smart business decision, downsizing and effective implementation of new technologies. Having a Texas politician in the White House may have been beneficial as well.

Another large sugar company is Flo-Sun, Inc. Its owners, the Fanjul brothers, make huge donations to politicians both Red and Blue. Their reward, in the form of their share of protective tariffs and price floors, equals approximately $65 million annually.

NAFTA may mean that Mexico will be able to step up sugar exports. I can only assume that lobbyists for the US sugar industry have the ear of government and that they are looking for ways to prevent that from happening.

This post is an example of me starting out with an assumption and then not finding any really interesting facts to support it. I find it interesting that the Fanjul brothers belong to two groups of people that are pointed to as being special interest groups that buy politicians. They are owners of a huge agribusiness and they are also Cuban Americans. They get to have two interests served for the price of one. It’s no wonder they are so generous.

In the USA, there are some pundits who hold outsourcing as a major pet peeve. They are voicing a popular opinion. Americans don’t like to see skilled work being sold to the lowest bidder outside their borders.

Big business feels some pressure to apease this peeve as much as possible. Yesterday I noticed a transcription company that employs people both domestically and in the Philippines. They offer their clients a choice of employing a blend of both. I have to wonder if some large clients have a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy with regard to outsourcing.

The Fair Trade Coffee Roaster that I became involved with had an amazing mural in its cafe. It came into existence when a Mexican artist who was a part of a coffee producing cooperative in Chiapas made an inquiry about English lessons. JustUs! Coffee is based in a quaint university town and they made the offer of providing the artist with travel and accommodation and arranging his language instruction, etc., in exchange for a commissioned work of art.

Larry’s Beans is a coffee company that recognized the value of the music that was being made by some of the farmers that supplied them with coffee. Larry went down to Nicaragua with some recording equipment and he is now selling CDs back in the US with all the proceeds going back the the Nicaraguan coffee producers.

I checked out their store and the CDs are out of stock, but they have lots of coffee as well as books and t-shirts.

Calabash Music is a fair trade music company. They have lots of free music on the website to help you whet your appetite. One of my favorite genres is soukous.

I have transcribed depositions before. One of the reasons that I was not very productive was the fact that I would become interested in the actual context and back story instead of just typing the words in as quickly as possible. The main reason that I would never choose transcription as a vocation is the fact that I just don’t type very fast. I would encourage any fast typists who would prefer to work at home to look into transcription. Most of the time the content is boring enough that you won’t become over engaged, although we all tend to have emotional responses when we listen to someone lie.

The largest source of work by a wide margin is health care. Most employers prefer to hire trained and certified medical transcriptionists.

Legal transcription is a pretty big business as well. Licensed court reporters outsource a lot of verbatim transcription that they review and edit themselves before submitting certified documents. General transcription can include creating transcripts of television and radio shows, typing authors notes and even creating transcripts of podcasts.

I just happened upon a really cool blog. The website Payscale.com features a blog called Salary Stories. I was trying to use the Google to find an apples and oranges comparison of earnings for medical transcription and legal transcription. I haven’t found what I was looking for in that regard, but PayScale.com does have quite a lot of data related to salaries.

I also found this really cool interview of Matt Harding on the Salary Stories blog:

I have been playing musical chairs for months. We have a small home business employing a handful of people. I am not a highly skilled IT worker so I don’t get to sit at this nice work station with the comfy chair and the high desk between 8 and 3. I know how much difference ergonomics makes to your productivity and even your health. Formaspace designs the Workbenches at places like IBM, Hewlett Packard and even Harley Davidson. The jobs that warrant specially designed and manufactured workbenches from this company are things like technical design, electronics assembly, packaging and laboratory work. While many of the items available from Formaspace.com are very specialized, they also have a great basic work table line. You can get a rugged mobile table in a range of sizes right up to 12′X5′ and they can hold from 1000 to 5000 lbs. I have a lot of experience in manufacturing and packaging and I think getting the height of workspaces right is very important for productivity and health.

I have been told that I am pretty good at getting a job. I think that I and everyone reading this should take that with a grain of salt. She is also the person that regularly tells me that I am handsome.

I was reading an article in Forbes about many of the really bad mistakes that people make with cover letters, resumes and interviews. I guess that I haven’t made very many of them. The best advice I can give is to always spell check. If you can, get someone smarter than you to look over any application or correspondence.

I got an interview with Michelin once for a job that I am thankful now to have not gotten. I had filled in a standard application and I had aced their aptitude test. In the interview one gentleman queried me about the fact that I had checked the yes box with reference to criminal convictions. The surprise must have shown on my face. I am sure I am not the first person that they had interviewed with a check beside yes, but I may have been the first person who had done so by accident. That was embarrassing. I am pretty sure that they both believed me, but it was an example of the mistakes that I can make.

I often get distracted by issues that have nothing to do with me personally. This is an example of one such story. I was actually doing a web search to verify the term discard as being applied to library books slated for donation or destruction. This was research in relation to my childhood exposure to novels. My aunt was a librarian and we occasionally got a box of discards from her.

This is an interesting post. I was writing as I did my research and I wrote all of this quoted text before I found an entirely different side to the story…

Earlier this year a librarian at a state run university in California became upset by the school’s plan to destroy 200,000 books to make room for a Starbucks. He created a website with the goal of communicating the situation and his opinion to a wide audience.

I am not surprised that an institution would plan such an action. These are books that have been in boxes for years and nobody has borrowed any of them for ten years. It makes sense to me to use the space that they are taking up for something that the students and staff will enjoy and something that generates revenue for the school and probably some employment for students.

If the assertion that they made no effort to donate the books is true, it is unfortunate. People with stronger views might think that it is shameful.

There is only one detail of the story that I find shameful. The school used a law to censor this librarian. It is against the law to publish the name of the school without permission. They threatened the librarian with criminal proceedings. He took down his website.

Here is a link to the floor descriptions for the library. There is no actual mention of Starbucks.

The librarian’s name is Bruce Emerton and I am not sure if the books still exist.

The source for an alternate viewpoint placed a comment in one of the blogs that has been repeating and amplifying Bruce Emerton’s alarm. The comment came right after a comment from Bruce himself that included his contact information and a link to a petition that is no longer there.

The other viewpoints are at MacManX.com and come from Bruce’s coworkers who dispute what Mr. Emerton says point by point. The most compelling part of their argument is the fact that the university is paying $70,000 per year to store the books in question. They assert that while they are in storage during the library expansion, normal procedures related to discarding books are ongoing.

I have to wonder how many people find this story and form an opinion based on only one side.

Taking a course in an effort to improve your Business English can result in a tremendous return on your investment.

The Presidents of two countries recently had a very terse moment that is, in hindsight, being chalked up to language difficulties. That may be spin, but it’s interesting to think about how different the exchange would have been if both men had been able to effectively communicate in English.

Executive Language Training offers courses that are designed to suit the individual needs of business professionals. I am trained in teaching English as a foreign language. All my practical training was with young students who were ostensibly there to learn English, but they were in vacation mode to varying degrees. I wish I had been given the chance to teach some businessmen the finer points of this difficult language.

I can imagine that some business men wish to broaden their language skills while others might want to refine them. I was acquainted with a business man during the weeks that I took my teaching course. He had heavily accented English and he used some unnecessary verb forms, but I overheard him on his mobile phone dictating a business letter and his skill in composing a written correspondence rivaled mine. A customized course from Executive Language Training would not waste his time teaching him stuff that he already knows. I actually remember a great deal of emphasis being placed on assessing student ’s knowledge when I was taking my course. It’s obviously inefficient to review skills and information that a student already has down pat.

I just used a phrase that many EFL students would be unfamiliar with; down pat and other idioms need to be explained to students of language, they are not things that can be intuitively understood. Businessmen for whom English is a first language may habitually interject idioms that come from sports or other interests and a non native speaker is placed at a disadvantage if he has not been taught any of these phrases…

Let’s hit it out of the park, baby!!!, Whoo!!!