Category Archives: 2026 Archive

BUYING A JOB

A while back, a friend, well actually more of an acquaintance, asked me if I had any advice for her on job hunting. I was somewhat surprised as I did not know her very well and I have not held many jobs myself, and none by design. I just fell into the work. After chatting with her I realized why she had asked me. I had linked up a friend of hers with a person I knew to help with a specific problem and that friend of hers had suggested to her that I know everyone on the planet and could connect her with someone who could help.

I was somewhat disappointed that it was not my knowledge she was after but not surprised. I do know a lot of people, many of them not accessible without a connection.

Her story was a sad one. At just over forty she realized her husband had been having an affair. Not a one-night “lapse in judgment” but a full on long-term relationship. He was quite a successful fellow and after getting over the shock and disappointment of the situation she expected that at least there would be a reasonable settlement coming out of the divorce. When they married his well-to-do family had said he would need to have a prenuptial agreement and she had been pleased that he would have nothing to do with that, as he was committed to the relationship. What she did not know is that he had a more sinister plan. From almost the beginning of their marriage he had syphoned off the real wealth he had inherited and had grown and put it into an offshore account. Their visible “assets” which were considerable, all had extensive debt associated with each of them so after liquidation there was virtually nothing left.

So at forty-two she had no income, no assets and had been out of the work force for about two decades as she had been home taking care of their kids, not building a career. At the time they married she had left the study of Architecture to support him in graduate school.

Her goal was for me to link her up with a person who could guide her in how to fast track her way into a job. I knew just the person.

Esme is a friend who has had various senior positions in companies and today sits on many boards. She has an uncanny ability to understand how most kinds of businesses work – the essence of the thing.

After linking them up I thought that would be the end of it but they copied me into their correspondence. One was in Maryland and the other was in London so email was the easiest way for them to manage time zones and Esme’s incredibly orchestrated schedule. So I got to be a voyeur in their conversation.

And why am I rambling on about all of this? Well the essence of Esme’s help at this point in the journey was the notion of “buying a job” and after clearing it with her I am sharing those ideas here, albeit in my own words. I will try to do her thoughts justice.

At the core of it is the notion that every job is acquired based on what the person seeking it has to offer.

The easiest way to buy a job is to get an education – particularly in those fields with big barriers to entry – professions for example. You pay to go to university or college and come out ready to offer that scarce skill set and are paid well for it.
If you have accumulated some wealth or you are prepared to borrow extensively you can buy a job by acquiring a franchise. Whether its fast food, or various services there are lots of opportunities to work notionally for yourself in a franchise but you will pay the price in upfront costs and ongoing work.
For people who don’t have the capital to buy a franchise or did not go to university or college to offer some specific skill set there are lucrative positions that are based on deferred payment. These are for the most part sales positions where you work for nothing until a sale is made and then get a commission. Whether it is real estate, automobiles or big ticket consumer goods there are a lot of positions for those who are good sales people. They are buying the job based on future sales and risking their livelihood based on their ability to get those sales. They are working for free until the transactions happen. It works well for those who know how to hustle, and not so well for people with a more laid back perspective on work.
The majority of the working population however “buys a job” by being willing to accept an hourly wage that is low in exchange for bringing only their day-to-day commitment to a job – no special education, no risk, but limited income and limited upside.

Her advice for this woman, who is personable, communicates well and while she did not complete her education is very well read and knowledgeable about the world, is to never take an hourly paid job. Regardless of the hourly wage their will never be enough hours in the day to really create the upside to have a comfortable life. To really get ahead fast you need something that will pay you for achievement, not just for showing up.

Another fundamental is to be honest about your talents, skill set, experience, and personality then find a field that with some short term training or on the job experience you can set up your own operation and be paid based on the value you add to create the value.

The obvious one that jumped out for both of them was for her to go into residential real estate sales. She is personable, there is only a short course to qualify and the commissions can be huge. But the market is down and with so many who have jumped onto this lucrative train in recent years the conclusion was to not pursue it. Her experience in design and décor was also considered but today everyone and their pet rock thinks they are a designer so this too was not pursued.

So Esme had her drill down on high value items that everyone needs but are not so regulated you need specific training like dentistry or financial management. After exploring her interests at some length and those things she has enjoyed being involved with in the past and are big ticket but not as sexy as selling cars or real estate they came up with…. window & door orders. Every house has aging windows and doors, and while there is a technical side to learn most of these products are sold on the combination of price and design elements – colour, profile, grill choices etc.

As a person who made it to fourth year Architecture she also had some academic bragging rights without actually having completed the program.

According to Esme if she researched the products extensively she will be able to walk into a showroom and bring insight into what is good about that companies product line and what they could do better based on the competition. She will buy her job with industry insight flowing from that research.

For me it was a fascinating exercise as a voyeur. As I write this my friend is talking to people in each of showrooms of the big players in her area as a starting point to learn about the products and understand the points of differentiation and will then chose how to proceed.

What I really liked about watching this process is not just what I learned, but to see a person who had been knocked down, and was somewhat adrift, to then set a goal, which turned into a plan of execution and with that some confidence in the future was seeping into her thinking as well.

I will update this post when she lands a a position and I am pretty confident that wont be too far out in the future.

Django

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

POSTED: MARCH 1, 2026

This week I went back to read The Emperors New Clothes, a story popularized by Hans Christian Andersen in the mid 1800’s from a Spanish folk tale from about five hundred years earlier. It is about an emperor, having been duped into thinking that a couple of con men weavers could make him some magnificent new garments but ones that would be invisible to fools.

Once these garments were “completed” and he was decked out in these new garments of course he was naked but everyone, not wanting to be seen to be fools or not wanting to offend the emperor were afraid to express it. One child however was not in the nuances of making the emperor happy and blurted out that the emperor had no clothes. The more common term today is Speaking Truth to Power. It has become a popular notion today given the fear world leaders seem to have to lost their tongues in calling out the biggest bully in the schoolyard.

So many of us were thrilled when Mark Carney gave his speech at Davos, saying what all leaders were sharing in private but were afraid to say in public. As Canadians we were thrilled …. and terrified. This emperor in question is a fellow who has threatened to take over Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba, and Canada and has checked off the first on his list.

He has seemingly his own private army and is prepared to fight the American people, and is using politics as a tool to build his own wealth and the U.S. Department of Justice as his own vigilante force against his enemies.

Can the Democratic wave of the mid term elections result in a way to stop him? All we can do is hope.

Oh, oh, I can feel a poem (almost a haiku) coming on….

The Emperor has no clothes

Mark Carney told us figuratively,

Stormy Daniels told us literally.

Django

RULES IN THE GAME OF LIFE

POSTED: February 1, 2025

I went to a funeral last week. Now when I say “went”, what I actually did was live stream to my little laptop on my boat sitting in warm waters off Malta, a funeral that was occurring in Toronto where it was cold and in the middle of a multi-day snow storm. And when I say a “funeral”, it was in fact a true celebration of life.

It was a celebration of life not only because the lad was in his mid nineties when he died but that he had lived a life to celebrate. It is one of the three things that really stood out for me with him.

But I am getting a bit ahead of myself here. The background is that I only met him a few times but knew him through one of his sons – a very close friend.

The event was a Baptist Church service and while some good music would be assured because of it, all four of his children were musical and three of them worked with music as part of their daily lives. Is was very heavily music focused session and as funerals go, one of the best I have been to.

One of the things that characterized this man was that he was a “gentle” man. He was not prone to anger, nor being reactionary, instead being able to, if not empathize with the person who was behaving inappropriately, at least not escalate the conflict further. He was the one who would try to talk someone down off the ledge instead of passively watching or worse getting their camera out and challenging the person to jump.

The second big characteristic of this fellow was that he had lived a “complete” life. Now I have buried a number of people in their eighties and nineties who by any measure have lived a long life, but only some of them having lived a complete life. He immigrated to Canada from Jamaica. He and his wife were together for all of their adult lives until she passed a few years ago. They raised four good children to be proud of with an additional number of grandchildren and even great grandchildren. Right up to his passing he was involved every week with one of his kids or grandkids activities as a very active Poppi. He had a long career and was well respected in his field. And through it all, he had his spirituality. From first arriving in Canada, he joined the same church that funeral was held in, and throughout his long life was a very active force in its evolution, eventually becoming a Deacon. But more than the title, he was a model for many based on how he lived his life. As various people spoke of his role in their lives a little twist on the word kept entering my mind and really said it all in his case – Deacon as beacon.

And it is this part – following religious teachings to live a life, that has been creeping into my consciousness all week.

I grew up in a Christian family who went to church on Sunday, on special occasions like Christmas and Easter, baptisms, funerals and weddings. Occasionally, at family dinners grace would be said. Church was compartmentalized into those slots. When growing up I gobbled up the parables and would try to understand the homilies, but my relationship was with the church and not with God. So, when the church did what I thought were fairly nasty things like helping people in Africa and South America but with the religious strings attached, I was out of there. I did not realize at the time that the really nasty things the church I belonged to was doing were occurring right in Canada with the Residential Schools.

But I have always envied those who have a direct one-on-one relationship with a superior being. I am a simple fellow and am awestruck by how vegetation starts again in the spring after a harsh winter, or how blood knows to coagulate when exposed to air. Something designed this. Something infinitely more capable than humans today. I guess I am an agnostic.

I have also been intrigued by the common elements of most of the great religions. I have big issues with some of the major religions who cling to dated elements of differences in the genders, or perpetuate an element of “Us and Them”. But otherwise most of the major religions have codes or lists of DO THIS, DON’T DO THAT, which I find hard to argue against. These are simple rules to live by.

In my seventy-two years however, I keep seeing that it is the application of those codes or lists that is the issue. If everyone lived by them the world would be a much better place – something of a heaven on earth. But we live in a time of selectivity, carefully curating which rules work for us and which ones we find too restrictive. There is an American President today who sees all of the rules as “general policy guidelines” and totally optional when it comes to their use. Even taking out such an extreme example most people will be very adherent to most of the rules but a bit sloppy or interpretive when it comes to some others.

The man who passed last week did not select which rules worked for him. He didn’t reinterpret for his own purpose the rules. He did not take a statistical average of his performance on them where he got five out of five for some and 2 out of five for one, but kept a pretty good average. Instead saw them as binary – you only live by doing the right thing all the time on all fronts. I did not have a conversation with him in his last days, but have little doubt that he passed without regrets, without guilt and with satisfaction that he made peoples lives better and enjoyed his to the full as well.

I am not about to run out and go to church at this point. I am going to reflect on the example this man was however, and try to emulate that in my own life. All the rules all the time. The game starts now.

Django

BORDER WOES

POSTED: JAN 1, 2026

I was coming out of a fresh market recently and ran into an old friend of one of my buddies. I did not know him well and he did not recognize me but I took a lucky shot at his name and he was startled. I don’t often run into people from Canada here in Malta so it is a common quick bond between people who otherwise would be complete strangers.

It turns out he was in Malta as part of a cruise he and his wife and a few other family members were on that stemmed from a fast last-minute booking to cheer up his wife. They had just experienced a terrible event when trying to cross the border going from Canada to Florida.

While they did not have much time to talk as they only had a day in Malta and much to see it was clear he wanted to share this story as it had been so upsetting for them.

They had left Toronto on a relaxing driving trip to Florida and had planned on meeting some of their family members there. In fact, their granddaughter was going to join them for the drive until the last minute when she was invited to a birthday party and decided to come a few days later with her parents, my friend’s son and his wife. At the Windsor -Detroit border they assumed the process would be straightforward as they had their Nexus cards and passports ready and had filled out some additional forms that are now a requirement of U.S. Customs.

But the process was not at all straightforward and turned into a nightmare. After asking him a few questions the U.S. Customs person asked the fellows wife her name and she gave it. He looked at her somewhat askew and asked the question again. And again, she gave her full name including her two middle names. His response was to ask if she was drunk, at which point her husband jumped back into the dialogue and with a stern look told the customs person she had recently suffered from a stroke. But the customs officer responded with “no, I am pretty sure she is drunk” and told her to step out of the car. My friends response was what triggered the next series of events. He asked if the customs officer had gone to the Trump School For Sensitivity Training? They were both removed from the car and despite the requests of a junior Customs official to reconsider what was happening as he believed her and was not comfortable with his superior calling her a drunk and telling him to put her in a more specialized holding facility, they were both taken off to different holding areas to be interviewed while their car was stripped down.

As it turns out, during the early questions when asked what electronic devices they had with them they had said two cell phones and two laptops, but had not realized that when their granddaughter had changed plans at the last minute, she had left her electronic tablet in a little pink knapsack in the back seat.

It was clear to me that he was wrapping up his story as his wife had just finished her shopping, and as she approached he had to tell me the conclusion. She was released, but he was not only detained but actually charged, held overnight and had to go back to Canada the next day and will not be allowed to return to the United States. He also learned there is no obvious way to do a conventional legal appeal of this decision, only through complex diplomatic routes.

They headed off to enjoy more of their one day in Malta, and I sat down with my groceries to digest what I had just learned.

I have crossed a lot of borders. From West Germany through East Germany to Berlin, into the former Soviet Union in Yugoslavia and several times into Russia when moving dissidents by boat. Regular readers will know from my early posts my role as cook on what later became my boat, when working for others who were moving dissidents, journalists and others in the not too distant past.

Our expectations at borders flow from the nature of what the border is. Often in Europe a border is called a Frontier. It is because it is the edge of where all known things end, and beyond is uncharted wilderness. At least that’s the way I have thought of borders that are called frontiers. In these semi hostile contexts at times passports must be given up, and often customs officers are all powerful authorities who can detain you simply because of their response to how you look.

But most borders are friendly places where yes, a passport or perhaps even a visa is needed, some questions answered, and goods declared, but is more akin to a process like presenting a boarding pass on an airplane or offering up a ticket on a train.

We have been sliding into dangerous times in the world, and instead of having a steady hand at the tiller in the U.S. we are faced with additional layers that are indicative of a right wing authoritarian regime. At that border there were a few in authority who knew what was happening to this older couple was an abuse of power and while they did sympathize, they did not take action. I think its time for more people to step up to the little acts of the abuse of power and the breakdown of the rule of law before it is too late. I fear we may have already have passed that point.

Django