Month: July 2007

The big kitty – post 450

10 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

You remember the old myth that when you move house you should put butter on the cat’s paws? Here’s a tip – this can lead to experiences you were not exactly expecting. My jaw is on the ground right now, I do not joke.

The Big Kitty LOVES butter or margarine to the point that if you take the container out of the fridge she can hear it from anywhere in the house, and she appears like magic.

You cannot leave bread buttered around here. If you turn away, when you turn back she’ll be licking the butter off the bread. You need eyes in the back of your head, ya’all.

So the other day I made myself a tasty sandwich snack and I mistakenly left the margarine container out on the counter. While I was in here reading blogs and doing stuff, I heard some funny noises out there in the kitchen. I just figured those kitties were chasing each other around. As they do.

When I eventually made my way into the kitchen, I found the big kitty had knocked the margarine container onto the ground, at which point the lid came off. What happened next I cannot be sure as I wasn’t there and no video camera was recording, but there was margarine *everywhere*. On the floor, on the cupboards, on the dishwasher, and there were these buttery kitty paw prints that went from room to room. And, the big kitty was wearing what can only be described as butter socks. Only they went way up past her knees. More like butter stockings, really.

I cleaned up the mess (do not ask how long this took) and threw the margarine out. When The Other Half got home he was looking for the butter and came in to ask me for it, at which point, I lied. Because I was busy! I was in the middle of stuff and I didn’t want to get into the whole sordid buttery tale. And I knew she’d be in trouble. So I said I didn’t know where it was and he should use cream cheese instead. He turned the fridge upside down looking for the butter and I came out just as he was replacing the last items in there.. at which point I broke down laughing and had to tell the truth.

Now, today, he asked me to make him a cake. Now that big kitty is really in for trouble. It said grease and flour the cake tin, which I did.. I left it on one counter while I got on with making the cake. I turned around to find that big kitty attacking that cake tin with gusto and her little pink tongue.. it’s so cute, there’s little tongue marks all over the place..

I’ll be in trouble too, because instead of making his cake I couldn’t resist coming in here to blog about it.. ;)

We get our car tomorrow.. ;)

cooking, kitties, what not to do

The Spider Intuition – what I carry with me.

14 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

humpdayhmmbutton1x2
The most important thing I carry with me –

One day years ago as I was driving to work, I suddenly had this thought. “There’s a spider in this car”. Ok, yep, sure, whatever. I laughed it off. “There’s a spider in this car.” said the thought, again. Patiently, but somewhat more urgent. I began to wonder if perhaps I was going crazy. “There’s a spider in this car”. Well, my gearstick is a large redback set into resin, so yes, you’re right. There is a spider in this car. “There is a spider in this car”. I thought we just established that?

It was then that I spotted movement above my head, and looked up to see this enormous huntsman spider at least as big as my hand run across the top of windshield directly above me. On the inside. I pulled over to the side of the road as fast as I could and jumped out of the car, screaming and shouting. As you do, if you’re like me with a spider fear.

In the midst of my crazy scared chills down my spine dance by the side of the road, I became aware that I was not quite alone. I saw a pair of feet appear out of the corner of my eye. When I looked up, I saw a policeman was standing next to me. He had a very large grin, and his hand on his weapon resting in the holster on his belt. “Do I need to shoot it?” he said. “It looked pretty big from where I was sitting. Well done on the pull over, by the way, I was worried you were going to slam your foot on the brake in the middle of the road”.

It turned out he did not need to shoot it, but he did attack it with a half empty coca-cola bottle that a friend of mine left in the back seat. By that time his partner had got out of the car too, and he and I were doubled over laughing as this spider ran all over the car avoiding the blows from the coke bottle while the original policeman read the spider his “rights” (you have the right to remain still while I squash you) in between telling us to stop laughing or he would make us kill it and he was laughing so much it was making it hard to outwit the spider.. meanwhile this spider was doing some crazy maneuvers in order to avoid death.

The policemen had seen it sitting above my head some kilometers back, and had been debating whether or not they should pull me over. That may give you some idea of the size of the creature. If not, I have a photo of a similar spider you could look at but I won’t publish it here knowing how scary many people find spiders. Email me, I’ll send you the link. The policeman eventually managed to kill it and I thanked them many times for their help and sense of humor before going on my way.

So, as the day went on, I tried to figure out – how had that little voice known? The spider was sitting above my head. I never saw it, the whole time I was in the car. It was not until I was driving home and I saw the sun glinting on a spider web trail that I understood – my brain had seen that web, and knew a spider must not be far off.

While you’re concentrating on the big picture, your subconscious is taking in many things in order to show you that big picture. My subconscious knew that web had not been there yesterday. My subconscious knows a million little things which it then adds up and if there’s something I’m missing, it chooses to communicate that to me. Yours does, too. This process is lightning fast and we’re not aware of it happening. We use it every day to survive without truly knowing that is what it is.

A book I read some time later expanded greatly on this concept. The book is by Gavin De Becker and it is called The Gift Of Fear. I highly recommend you grab a copy of this book because it will teach you how to listen to your intuition, not just in dangerous situations but in all situations. There’s also a lot of other good info in the book which will calm your spirit and teach you survival signals you can use, and how the media make us fear things we should not fear. He also has written a book that I believe is absolutely vital if you are a parent – Protecting The Gift.

“Intuition is the journey from A to Z without stopping at any other letter along the way. It is knowing without knowing why.” Quote from The Gift Of Fear

My intuition is the most important thing I carry with me. I take it everywhere I go.

The second most important thing I carry with me –

is the ability to be my own best friend. I don’t need to travel with an entourage. I don’t need the constant validation of others to validate myself. I like me. I think others would like me, if I gave them a chance to get close enough to know me. I rarely do that in real life. But even if they did not like me, it would not bother me. There’s a lot of people I don’t like, there’s no law saying everyone must be liked. You guys here probably are the ones who know me best, other than The Other Half and Sephy. I don’t think my parents know me as well as ya’all do.

The third most important thing I carry with me –

I can amuse myself, anywhere, anytime. As Thomas Harris wrote of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs –

Dr. Lecter amused himself — he has extensive internal resources and can entertain himself for years at a time….He was free in his head.

My thoughts are incredibly precious to me. You’ve no idea what goes on in my head, but if you could get in there and listen you would probably be rolling on the floor laughing. I usually am, in my head, at least. It’s like a really good episode of Seinfeld crossed with Jane Austen crossed with all the other authors on my bookshelf. I have a lot of fun right here in my own skull. That is one reason why drugs never appealed to me – why would I want to escape something so great as the insanity in my own head?

The fourth most important thing I carry with me –

I find and appreciate beauty anyplace I look. Whether it is a really gorgeous piece of fabric, or a stunning sunset, or even just the every day, I look for beauty in it. I waste as little time on the unimportant as possible. I have so little time here that I do not want to spend one minute watching the evening news or pandering to people I cannot stand.

The fifth most important thing I carry with me –

The tips I have been given from so many different sources. Like I said the other day about the Oprah tip –

Years and years ago she did a show on travelling and security and little tips. One of the things mentioned was going to the toilet in an airport, and it’s actually changed the way I view using public toilets anywhere. As in – I always walk to the very last cubicle. People are lazy in general, they will usually use the first ones they reach, so the last cubicle usually is cleaner and has more toilet paper. So even some seemingly silly advice like that can make for lifelong habits that can be of benefit. She was right, especially in Australia where not every woman watches Oprah. I bet in the US it meant the last toilet was the most used! ;)

Some of the really important tips have come to me from books, and many of them library books that I don’t own. So I can’t always give the proper attribution or name where they came from. I was going to try and list some of them here but I’m blank now. I’ll have to post them as they come to me. ;)

As far as literally carrying things with me –

The older I get, the less I want to carry. If I can get out of the house without my handbag and mobile phone, I will do so anytime. I prefer it that way. It might have something to do with me sometimes forgetting to pick those things up when I’m out. So far I haven’t lost anything but it is wiser for The Other Half to be in charge of important things like money, cards you use to get money and keys.

Aussie Police really do have a fantastic sense of humor, which is why I am so sad I cannot listen to them on the radio scanner anymore – they’ve gone digital. ;( I miss you Policemen!

Hump Day Hmmm, life lessons, spider

Please bear with us – technical difficulties

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

If you are viewing this with Firefox, it will all look fine. That’s because Firefox rocks. If you are viewing this with Internet explorer, you will see one entire sidebar missing which is now at the bottom of the site somewhere. That’s because Internet Explorer is pure evil.

Let me not get into my.. hmm, how can I word this.. prejudiced view of people who use Internet Explorer. I’m not racist or sexist or any other ist, except for *browserist*. ;) It’s wrong of me to think like that, it is unfair and I know I’m a browser snob but I can’t help it! I just don’t know how anyone could use Internet Explorer when Firefox exists. I know a lot of people end up using it by default and switch over when they know more about the interwebs.

I know a lot of workplaces make people use Internet Explorer but damnit, people, RISE UP and fight such stupidities! It’s pure discrimination in the work place, forcing you to use one kind of browser. In my opinion, this is just as bad as saying “you have to be heterosexual to work here”. But they’re saying “you have to use an evil piece of software to work here, and compromise everything you know to be right and good in the world”.

And no offence intended to you if you’re using it by choice. But if you are, this site will look pretty bad until Sephy and I figure out how to fix this. May I recommend..

Mozilla Firefox – get it here.

blog template, internet, work

The Only Thing Stopping You..

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

butterfly
My Grandfather started a business in his shed many years ago, not long after the 2nd World War. By the time I was 13, it had built into a successful business with 5 stores. My Dad was the general manager. Of course I spent a lot of spare time at the stores, and in school holidays would go to work with my Mum, who was the courier for the company and took stock from the central warehouse to the stores.

Coming up to Christmas that year, I begged to be allowed to work in one of the stores. I *said* I would wrap Christmas presents, but I had a secret hidden desire that nobody knew about. My parents finally agreed to me working in the main branch, where my Dad was, so he could keep an eye on me. On the very first day, he had a meeting and left the store shortly after it opened. By the time he got back, I had sold $500 worth of small appliances. I’d written down each item I sold on a little piece of card. There were 28 of them. Dad hit the roof! I was supposed to be wrapping presents, not selling things.

I knew then that I was born to be a salesperson, and this was just second nature to me, and I explained it to him, and the next day there was no more talk of wrapping things, I got out there on the floor and sold stuff all day. A passion was born, and I was hooked.

I learned a lot from my Dad. He was the best salesperson I ever knew, but he was also one with plenty of bad habits, all of which I picked up. The good did outweigh the bad and I survived for years on what he’d taught me, working in several of the family’s stores. There was no mention of training, because I was doing just fine.

There came a point where I had to go out on my own. If you can sell, you can work pretty much anywhere, but I was drawn to the same things the rest of my family was. Electronics. I went out into the real world to discover that the place my parents had owned was unique in terms of looking after your staff, being as loyal to them as they were to you. In the real world, someone would have a knife in your back while smiling to your face.

I’ve done a lot of training over the years now. You can approach training from several angles but the two most common are – this is a waste of my time and I’m not going to get anything out of this so I’m going in with closed ears – or – I’m willing to listen and try new things out to see if they work for me. I always chose the second path. I have seen many people choose the first and I always find it hilarious when they get left behind because everyone else in the store is trying the new stuff and it WORKS.

One thing salespeople hate to do is “ask for the sale”. It’s something I have struggled with all my life and it really is ridiculous. Imagine for a moment that you were the customer, and I was serving you. You wanted a washing machine. During the time we spend together, I would ask you a number of questions. It’s sort of like a funnel. We salespeople ask all the questions, we listen to the answers, and then we think about what product is best going to suit you – and that is what pops out at the end of the funnel.

So by the time we get to asking for the sale, I probably would have asked things like –

– How often do you wash?
– What kind of washing machine do you have now?
– Have you been happy with that machine?
– What do you most like about that machine?
– Would you prefer a front or top load machine?

All those, and probably a bunch more. So a salesperson will have been asking questions for a good 15 minutes, then they show you the options you have. At the end of all that, many salespeople are too scared to ask the most important question, which is essentially do you want one? Though you have to find the right way of wording it.

I struggled against it like a fish trapped in a net. I would just rather not ask. I felt like if someone appreciated my service they would buy from me. Until one day I went to a training session and finally understood it when someone explained that I’d already asked them a lot of questions, what is the harm of one more? I just had to find a way of asking the question that I was comfortable with. And I did, and my sales figures went up and up.

Sometimes it is about someone presenting it to you in the right way.

Sales is a bit like sport, many people compare it to that and they are right to do so. You can not improve unless you are willing to try new things, experiment. And one of the things so important to a sports team is to think positive. Imagine if you went out onto the field thinking “I can’t win this game”. Imagine if when you lost you took it very personally and that negative self talk starts up in your head. “I’m no good at this game. I lost last week, and I’ll lose this week. I’ll always lose. I’m a loser”. You’re defeated before you even walk out onto the field.

This quote from Arthur Golden’s “Memoirs of a Geisha” explains my philosophy on negative thoughts in your head..

“I made up my mind to be like the fisherman who hour after hour scoops out fish with his net. Whenever thoughts of the Chairman drifted up from within me, I would scoop them out, and scoop them out again, and again, until none of them were left.”

You have to scoop those negative thoughts out, or else you end up dwelling on them. But you have to replace them with something, too. My preference is to replace them with a positive thought.

So, in light of this, each day from now on I will be posting a “thought for today” as well as my usual blog post. They might come from the cards I use here, they might be quotes from books or other places. I hope you might find them useful. If any of them really speak to you or you feel like you want to work on that thought, it might be an idea to write them down and put them in front of your computer screen.

If you have any thoughts to put forward, just email them to me.. ;)

family, work

Australia : Land of hippies and flakes?

9 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

One of my favorite Aromatherapy tricks involves putting a few drops of peppermint oil into the morning shower, once the hot water is hot. I buy my peppermint oil from Coles, it’s about $5AUD. My American friend Sephy had never *heard* of Aromatherapy. How is that possible, I wondered? Until I suggested to him to purchase some peppermint oil, which seems to be an almost impossible thing to get in his country. That’s bizarre. If you’re American and reading this, can you mention where you might be able to get these products other than online?

Here in Australia, you can buy pure essential oils at every supermarket I have ever been to. You can buy them in *most* chemists and health food stores. You can buy “fragrant” oils (note, not necessarily pure essential oils and there is a difference) at almost every $2 store and bargain shop. Incense you can also buy almost everywhere. We also have a lot of products on our shelves which incorporate Aromatherapy. Shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, body lotions, etc.

Some of the products I love to use in the shower that involve Aromatherapy are the Aveda products. These came to me as a surprise during a hotel stay a couple of years ago.

Aromatherapy is quite a complex and diverse field and I’ve been studying it for a few years now. I found a few great online resources if you’re interested in knowing more

– Aromaweb – Lots of great articles, worth a read.
– A world of Aromatherapy – has a good oils a-z section which gives quick info on the oils and what they do
– Essential Aura Aromatics – has a lot more detailed info on each oil.

Does the availability of Aromatherapy oils all over the place mean Australia is a land of hippies and flakes? Or does it mean that Aromatherapy is a valuable thing that works? What do you think? :)

aromatherapy, Aussie Culture, health, shopping, Snoskred hearts

I left out a link!

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Well yesterday I was in a bit of a rush, because my parents called me and said be ready in an hour, and I hadn’t even got out of bed. I didn’t want to leave without wrapping up the week, so I rushed in here, blogged in record time, and ran to get ready. It was only after I got back that I realised, I left out a link I was meaning to put in. So, I’ll post it next week.

Of course when I got to my parents, after rushing, they were still in their PJ’s watching tv. I sat there for an hour and a half waiting for them to get ready! GRRR!

Yesterday we went for a drive in Dad’s car, which I have to say was quite the experience. First, the ride is incredibly comfortable. It’s like driving around in a really comfortable lounge chair. You barely feel any bumps.

Dad chose to be the car sentry while we went shopping. I can see this is going to be an issue! He’s crazy about his car and not once did he leave it for more than a minute.

It turns heads, this car. Everywhere we went, people were looking at it. We pulled up next to this maybe 14 year old kid at the traffic lights and you could see his face light up and the excitement at having spotted this car – of which there were only 200 ever made. But on the other hand, the fear that someone might damage it is really annoying. I sense the Ute will be going a lot of places and the car will be brought out for only special occasions. It’s a shame.

I now have the fear I’m going to feel the same way about our new car. I have to work on this.. I don’t want to feel like we can’t take it anywhere or park it anywhere or leave it alone while we go and do things..

cars, weekly wrap up

Weekly Wrap Up 08/07/07

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

It’s been another busy week here on the blog. I’ve been back to commenting – not the commenting challenge, just on blogs from my google reader and also other blogs I’ve stumbled upon. Traffic went back to normal as a result – just under 800 visitors.

Funny Search Terms This Week –

outrages pussys (WTF? when does anyone have the time for this activity? ;) )
aeroplane crash-what do you need to survive (FYI, they ended up at this post coincidentally about plane crashes and how to survive them. Hmm, those search engines are brilliant, no?)
cheesy song lyrics (yeah they came to the right place I guess!)
give the meaning of the word gastronomist (Homework! Snoskred is educational as well..)
what are the conflicting attitudes to life in a dead poets soci (And more homework!)
50’s female on beach shots (Ohhhkay)
boeing love may come and go but email is forever (boeing? this saying makes no sense!)
jal stewardess naked (back to this old chestnut, can I say THERE WILL BE NO NAKED AIRLINE ATTENDANTS ON THIS BLOG ANYTIME SOON!)
titless wonder (AGAIN?)

Here on the blog –

We bought a new car – looked at ways negativity can mess with your head – spoke about Karma for the Hump Day Hmm – made a commitment not to spam via MyBlogLog – suffered a heart break and discrimination thereby learning to stumble

Coming Up –

For this week’s Hump Day Hmmm, Next week’s topic is courtesy of ME! :) how cool is that?

“The things you carry with you”

It might be advice, it might be quotes, past experiences or thoughts, it might be what you literally carry with you. Even some seemingly silly advice like that can make for lifelong habits, for better or worse…

So ya’all should get in on that one.. share the stuff that has changed you along the way. What made me think of it was actually Oprah. Years and years ago she did a show on travelling and security and little tips. One of the things mentioned was going to the toilet in an airport, and it’s actually changed the way I view using public toilets anywhere. As in –

I always walk to the very last cubicle (people are lazy in general, they will usually use the first ones, so the last usually is cleaner and has more toilet paper)

So even some seemingly silly advice like that can make for lifelong habits. She was right, especially in Australia where not every woman watches Oprah. I bet in the US it meant the last toilet was the most used! ;) So you might want to grab that little nugget and carry it with you. I’ll have more nuggets for you on Wednesday. ;) I still have a post or two that didn’t get a chance to get posted, and I hope next week is more calm so I can do that. However, with a new car arriving, what are the chances of that? ;)

Now I’m off to a big shopping centre, where I hope to find leggins. We were going to take Dad’s new car, but it’s raining now. Not sure if it’ll get out of the garage.. ;) Be good ya’all!

weekly wrap up

Please don’t read my mind, I tell the truth to me.

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I’m actually pretty exhausted because I got up early this morning and went off to pick up a ute from 100kms away, then I came home and did a lot of housework. I managed to do all my wiping over jobs in one afternoon! I really feel like taking a nap. This will be a good thing because it means I’m too tired to engage in verbal slanging matches, or eyeball gouging out. ;) I may not be back online tonight but I’ll try to drop back and let you know how it goes. If I don’t fall asleep upon my arrival home.

I now know why guys want utes. Honestly, driving that thing was the most fun I’ve had in ages. I can’t find the cowboy whoo hoo song which accurately describes what it was like to drive it, but this song might give you a clue. It’s a great film clip too. Fun for the whole family! I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while.

Oh, our new car has arrived at the dealer, but we can’t pick it up till next week. I saw it today. It’s beautiful.. ;) Neither The Other Half or I have said anything, it’s going to be a complete surprise..

bitches, cars

Heartbreak leads me to Stumble..

9 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I’ve been a busy bee the last 24 hours or so. I’ve been using my StumbleUpon toolbar to “stumble” all the blogs listed under “Blogs I read daily via Google Reader” and “Australian Blogs Community” in my sidebar. So if you’re in there, you’ve been stumbled my friends. ;)

The reason I have been keeping myself busy is.. I had a major disappointment yesterday.

You may recall back in May, I wrote about my heart being broken when a house in the place I want to live turned out to be too small. I don’t usually like to make the same mistake twice, but yesterday I did it without even realizing it. Last Tuesday when we went looking at houses we’d seen this one that looked like it might work for us. It was very close to the beach in a quite peaceful area. I called the real estate lady and asked if we could arrange to look at it, and we made it for Monday next week.

I was pretty excited because it looked big enough to fit all our stuff in, and it was solid brick – many of the homes where we want to live are weatherboard or generally beach shacks you couldn’t live in during a winter. Sephy fired up Google Earth for me and he sent me a photo which had me daydreaming of beach walks every day taking my camera with me.

house1

The house is somewhere in this pic. ;)

By the time the other half got home from work, I’d already mentally packed all our stuff and moved in to the place. He had received a phone call from the real estate lady saying she had been in contact with the owners and they’d had a bad experience with cats and they wouldn’t accept us as tenants, so there was no point even looking at the house.

I was completely shocked. The next thing I know my eyes started to water all on their own and I was bawling. It sounds stupid to you guys I guess, but there is such a strong urge in me to go and live near that bay. After the tears, I started to get angry. Our cats have never done any kind of damage to a house. They have cat towers, they are desexed, they don’t pee on the carpet, they are well looked after. The worst they might have done is fur up a curtain, but that comes out in the wash.

Even worse – the current tenants clearly had young kids. So if I’d had kids instead of cats, it would be fine. I don’t have human babies, I have feline ones, so I can’t live there. It seems to me this is discrimination, and completely unfair. If they said to a couple with kids, sorry you have kids, you can’t live here, imagine the outcry!

Funnily enough it happened almost exactly two months after the last time.

“There’s nothing like work for getting over a disappointment” from Memoirs of a Geisha. I have to say, it really works. :) I’m feeling a lot better already. And it benefits all you guys in my sidebar as well because you might see some traffic from Stumbleupon now.. I hope you do. ;)

house hunt, mistakes I made, move to the beach

Karma. Or why it’s bad to be bad.

9 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

butterfly
In my work life, I’ve had to work for people who weren’t related to me from time to time. Working in family businesses does a couple of things for you.

– You tend to work a lot harder overall, because you’ve got a personal stake in the outcome
– You generally trust the people you’re working with because they are family
– You get out of the habit of watching your back because you feel (right or wrong) that your family has it covered for you.

I started out working for family when I was 13. That continued until I was 20, when the family business was sold. A manager who was not related to me was put in. I soon found he was a smarmy evil person only interested in career advancement. I was sent into the head office for 6 weeks, then sent back to my old store where he was now the manager. My first Saturday working for him, he sent me home to get changed. At head office, the staff were all told to wear jeans and a t-shirt for weekend trading, to make the customers feel more at home. He did not believe in this view. I returned dressed like I was about to take over the Presidency of the USA. And I took my time about it, because he’d made me very angry.

Working for him was not very much fun. He was the biggest ass kisser I ever met to anyone above him but the staff below he treated like dirt. He forgot the rule of do what you’re told.. He was fired soon after I told head office about the Saturday thing – several months later during a training session. I actually was kind of joking about it, but I’d made very good friends with the main boss and he had sent out a memo about this Saturday thing stating the dress code, and he was NOT happy with this manager going against his express wishes.

The second boss I had who wasn’t family didn’t know who I was when he hired me. My Dad had actually given *his* Dad a start in the industry. After sitting down and filling out the paperwork, I thanked him for hiring me even though I was the daughter of… The look on his face was horror. He said “Excuse me” and ran off to call his Dad right away. When he came back he had clearly been told that he couldn’t fire me having just hired me, so he was all nice again. He’d already made the decision to keep me on a couple of weeks then get rid of me. Two weeks later, I was politely shown the door. Two months later, his store figures were terrible, and he was replaced by head office with a new person not related to him in any way. He ended up going back to his Dad’s store with his tail between his legs.

What he didn’t know was, I was always loyal to my employer, just like I was loyal to any family employer. I think that was the major concern – I had several family members working for opposition stores. Whether he thought I was going to “steal” information or something, I don’t know but he misjudged me completely and karma bit him in the ass for acting like an asshole, not just to me but to many other people.

I wasn’t out of work for long. The next place I went to was a mobile phone store. I’d always sold mobile phones and had in fact won many awards from Telstra (our major phone company) for being mystery shopped in the past. The store I went to work for was a Telstra store. There’s about 200 of them in this country, they’re everywhere. This one was owned by a family business but they also had several other Telstra stores around the country, so I was in a store with a manager.

Managers can be excellent, or not. This one seemed to think every day was time for him to take time off without ever telling anyone where he was going. He’d open the store in the morning and then go out for coffee and a cigarette. That generally took an hour, putting him back in the store around 10am, where he would get on the phone and sound intelligent for all of 15 minutes, at which point he would duck out for morning tea coffee and a cigarette. This event usually lasted between 1-2 hours, at which point it was time for lunch. Lunch led into afternoon tea. He’d return to the store about 5pm for closing and general staff chit chat. By the end of the day he would have spent maybe 2 hours in the store, if we were lucky.

I worked pretty hard there, and the deal was you worked for three months full time on probation without being paid your commission. When they ended your probation, you were back paid all the commission. I had racked up a princely sum (especially for mobile phone sales, where you get maybe $5 per phone) which was enough to put a deposit on a house. Over $10,000.

The day came for the ending of the probation, and I was told that things weren’t working out, and they would not be employing me further. I felt like I had been hit with a truck. What was worse, was the guy LIED, saying he’d discussed issues with me. He’d barely discussed the *weather* with me, ever. He was never in the store long enough! I was so angry. He told me I was no good at my job blah blah blah. I left completely shattered.

However I did get a nice new shiny job earning a lot more $$$ working for Telstra who at the time were an excellent employer. He did not fare so well. The family behind the business decided to sell all their stores except the one he was in. They moved their head office into that store. That guy can’t even go to the toilet without it being noted now. No all day long coffee breaks, no long lunches, and he has to actually work!

Some months later a very good friend of mine at Telstra went to work for the same company. I warned him and told him what happened to me, in fact I begged him not to go there. He was a fantastic salesperson and worth much more than they would pay him. After three months, he was also told seeya later, he got in touch with me, we found out this was actually something they did to a LOT of people in order to make more money. My friend reported them, last I heard they were being investigated for several things. I should have sued to get that commission. He did get his, after taking them to court.

I do believe that Karma does come back to bite people in the rear eventually. Sometimes it might not be in this lifetime. I’ve not been a perfect person in my life and I have seen the Karma due to me actually come to me in some of the things I have been through.

I really wish that more of us explained the concept of Karma to our kids, because maybe there would be a little less unpleasantness, a little less bullying, a little less of the things that go on in school. Many of the people who were unpleasant to me in school have seen that Karma come back to them and I am sure if they knew then what they know now.. they would have chosen a different path. I would have chosen differently myself.

Hump Day Hmmm, life lessons, work