Category Silly Stuff

No Tipping Down Under!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Today’s tip … head down under for a holiday!

This is a departure from my usual subject matter, but I’m just back from a fantastic holiday in Brisbane, Australia. It was great because of the people I got to share the adventure with. And because Brisbane is such an amazing place. This city delivered lots of surprises. One such surprise was the most amazing transit system. Those Brisbane City Cats & Kitty Cats that zip up & down the meandering Brisbane River are an unbelievable treat. And you can go anywhere in southeast Queensland for 50 cents! Hey, I’m frugal, what can I say! That 50c fare had me smiling every time I tapped onto a bus, train, or river boat! And, for a change, I was not the designated holiday driver. I got to be a real tourist this trip! LOL

There was one other enjoyable thing that I didn’t even realise had any significance ’til I got back home. This was something simple. A thing that added a little extra joy to every dining experience down under. There is no tipping there!

I grew up in a country that only hinted at the occasional requirement for a small, token tip. And even that would require some very exceptional service. And maybe slight inebriation on the part of the tipper! For me, tipping was not the norm way back then. It was a bit of a culture shock when I first came to Canada. But after decades of living here, I am totally conditioned to providing the obligatory tip. Even when the food or service is pretty awful. In Australia, tipping is not the norm. And I think the Aussies might have it right!

For starters, the minimum wage in Oz is over $24 an hour. Servers get paid a reasonable wage, without having to generate some high-energy Hollywood charm to “earn” a decent tip. The Aussie system might be especially appreciated by servers who provide great service on days when the chef is having an off-day. Their paycheque is not negatively impacted by someone else screwing things up! Whilst there, I spoke with some people who have had experience in the service industry in both Canada & down under. While it’s too small a sample group to be of any value to make generalisations, they were unanimous in their preference for the Australian way of doing things. Especially the higher basic wage.

As a consumer, I learned something new about all this too. I had no idea there was so much subliminal stress involved in eating out in North America! I’m calling it subliminal because, day to day, I didn’t even notice it. Until I was subjected to the tip-free process down under. When it comes to paying the bill, you don’t even need to do any math in Oz. There are no tip calculations to consider!
My first meal out in Australia was a bit of a disaster. Not because of the quality of the meal, that was great. But because I was trying to tip a confused server. The machine didn’t prompt me for a tip & I had no idea how to handle that! 😜
I finally managed to get the tip into the machine, but I never mention tipping again for the rest of my stay.

Not having to tip means no there is no weighing up whether service was good or bad. If it was terrible, sure, you might complain. If it was amazing, you might flag the server’s efforts to the manager. But if it falls into that very broad band of acceptability, you just enjoy the parting exchange with another human being. The slightly horrible process of one human being sitting in judgement of another, while the amount of the tip is considered, is eliminated. And how about those times when the service is good, but the food is terrible? Should we reduce the tip? That’s punishing the server for the quality of the food & that wasn’t their responsibility. No fair, eh? In Australia, all that goes away.

The machines don’t arrive with the suggestion that tipping starts at 15% either! Wasn’t 10% a good tip way back when I first came to Canada? In Oz, they just show the final amount that you see on your bill. And this is for a dining in experience. Not having a tip suggested at a take-away (take-out!) counter was even better! And I never found myself having to supress a surge of anger towards any machine having the audacity to suggest that 20% was just a mediocre starting tip! All in all, finishing up the dining experience & paying for a meal is just a slightly nicer & better experience in Australia, compared to here.

While the consumer (me!) certainly benefits from the Aussie system, it feels like the bigger advantage of their non-tipping culture might be for the service staff. For starters, they are paid a decent wage. Canadian minimum wage levels are lower than the Australian rates. Canada doesn’t have any of the super-low hourly rates that apply to servers in some US states, but wages are still lower here than in Australia. Potentially, at the end of every meal, there are some slightly judgemental things that surround the whole tipping culture in North America. It may be subtle & almost insignificant, but they are there nonetheless. With worse potential for abuse are things like the tip-out practice. This requires servers to share their tips with other members of staff. So the chef that did a lousy job preparing the food still gets a cut of the tip from the server who provided great service. Even when the poor quality of the chef’s work triggered a tip reduction. In some places, I’m told the tip-out is calculated on the amount of the table bill. Even when the server gets no tip! So a server who provides great service, but delivers poorly prepared food might get no tip. And they have to pay a tip-out fee to the chef or other staff members who may have done the lousy job that encouraged the customer not to tip. Is this for real? The server could actually be financially penalised for the poor quality of someone else’s work!?! This feels like a really bad system to me. Dining out is supposed to be a pleasant & relaxing experience. Thinking about all this stuff is anything but! I really don’t know how the average server in Canada feels about all this, but I really enjoyed the Aussie experience as a consumer. And Aussie service staff seem to like it too.

I’m not sure if we can change anything for the better up here, but if there are there any Canadian restaurants that are boosting pay & prohibiting tipping, please let me know where. I’d certainly be willing to pay a little more to dine in that kind of environment. Assuming the chef wasn’t screwing up the food every time! LOL

It’ll be back to boring investing type stuff next time but, despite the horrendously long journey & the awful jet lag, I highly recommend a visit to Brisbane. It is a wonderful city, in an amazing country, with really nice people, & great weather. While I would probably try to avoid the heat of the Queensland summer (🥵), it’s definitely a worthwhile bucket-list destination & experience at other times of the year!

If you want to learn more about saving & investing from the ground up, I’d like to suggest that you check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.

Dreams of Being Rich!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 1 Comment
Wake up!

Okay, this is just one of those dreams I can’t make sense of. No, not the dream of being rich, but an actual dream I had last night. One that I can’t make sense of. I’m not making this up, I really had this dream last night & I think you’ll be tickled with the kicker at the end of the story.

I like to read my way to sleep but I happened to listen to an audio book last night. It’s a book on a high-yielding, income-fund investing strategy. This is an investing approach that I don’t really buy into. But that’s why I need to learn more about it, I could be wrong. It might work for a chunk of a retiree’s portfolio, so maybe I’ll want to use it down the road. I was pausing the book periodically, to jump over to the browser on my phone. I compared the total returns of some of the recommended funds against those of one of the Canadian banks. And that’s about when I fell asleep …

Now I’m at my dream-desk. I had a list of four funds that I wanted to compare & I was reviewing these on screen when I was introduced to a new employee. Next thing you know, I’m sharing a sheet of paper with the new guy. It started out with the ticker symbols of the four funds on it, but now it is a list of four of my brilliant suggestions for design improvements on a reflow oven. A reflow oven is a big, industrial version of the oven you might find in sub sandwich restaurant. You know the kind with the flat conveyor belt? It toasts those open-faced sandwiches.

Anyhoo, an industrial reflow oven solders electronic components onto printed circuit boards. It’s one of the machines that helps manufacture the electronics inside your phone, TV, laptop, & so on. This machine has been part of my day job for decades already. I probably know more about reflow ovens than I do about investing in high-yielding funds! I’m talking about my brilliant ideas with the new guy & I invite him to join me at a meeting I’ve scheduled to share these suggestions with the engineering department.

Next thing I’m sitting in the meeting room opening up my laptop. The new guy is sitting to my left & … wait for it … Warren Buffett is sitting to my right. I’m not kidding, I dreamed of Mr. Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha himself! We’re all waiting for the design engineer to show up for the meeting. As I open my laptop, I glance out the window. I don’t know why I’m not surprised that the office window is looking out over the park in the small Irish town I grew up in!

The design engineer finally shows up. A tall, smiling man. With his shaven head, he looked more like a martial artist than any design engineer I’d ever worked with. He is 6″ 8″ tall & I have to look up, a lot, as I shake his hand. His name is Do, but pronounced dough! I introduce him to the new guy, whose name I couldn’t drag back from dreamland, but Mr. Buffett needed no introduction. I guess we were used to working together! LOL

I fired up my laptop & was about to review the list of the four items with the group, but then the recollection fades.

Bummer!

After a solid eight hours of sleep, I woke up. Exhausted. I took my morning coffee out to the balcony, in the dark, & tried to gather as many threads of the dream as I could. But, try as I might, I could not remember if The Oracle had passed judgement on the four ticker symbols on my list. I finally gave up & carried on with my daily ritual. I usually play the day’s Wordle® game as I enjoy my coffee.

You won’t believe the word that proved to be today’s solution to the Wordle® puzzle!

And I’m not telling you the answer!
Go to The New York Times Wordle® website & play it yourself.

And then tell me that isn’t just weirdly, wonderfully, mystical … or something.
I don’t know if I’m supposed to buy these funds when the markets open. Or run away screaming!

Okay, if you don’t play the game, just search for Wordle® #337 online for the answer.

Investing is so Exciting, eh!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Going to the Moon?

When I assumed control of my own portfolio during the pandemic, nobody told me how exciting it was going to be. Buying & selling stocks & ETFs, watching the numbers go up & down, checking out colourful little charts & graphs, it’s all great fun. Way more fun than getting fake coins for completing a crossword puzzle app on my phone. I must have missed my game time though, because I bought some crypto. Now I could carry on watching fake coins on an app, just like before. But without having all the pressure of figuring out which letters I needed to make a word. Crypto wasn’t that much fun though. I didn’t get the idea behind this game. So I sold them & bought these other stocks where you can win dividend coins. Every now & then, these coins just tumble in out of nowhere. Even when you have no idea what you’re doing. It’s great!

Investing is a fun game. I’m still learning & I don’t know all the rules yet. Is it better to own single stock warriors or little ETF armies? What does it mean when the numbers turn red? Am I trying to get the squiggly line to go up or down? Are we supposed to make mountain shapes with the lines? I think the overall objective of the game is to beat “the Market”. The Market is like the evil empire & if you beat the market, you get treasure.

That should be easy, no!

Why?

Because social media & 24 hour stock market channels provide an endless supply of expert advice now. And it’s free. What other game do you play that has it’s own TV channels? It’d be crazy not to take advantage of all that free wisdom, right? Though I must admit, they’re messing with my head a bit. One says buy this, the other says not. Next week, they both reverse what they said last week. Is this some clever gaming strategy? It takes a while to get used to a new game. To understand all the tricks & sly moves that get you ahead. But I have noticed that if you buy anything that a rich & famous person buys, you usually get a great result. Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to buy the right armour & weapons stocks before the famous guy does. That’s a good strategy, right?

It’s the same with all these games though. Kids learn much faster & play much better than us slightly older folk. Kids were getting rich buying these funny game company stocks. And that silly fake-money coin. While I was still trying to work out what to do with those dividend coins. I also didn’t know what bonds were. Was that like some kind of protective potion that you could drink when your stock warriors were under attack? Experts say older people should have a lot of bonds.

Anyway, I was too busy learning about how to attack the market with my stock icons, so I was late to the game buying a few bond ETFs. I know I should have spent more time looking into the powers of the bond potion but, so far, they blow. I’ll just park them in the corner for now & worry about them later. Though most of my stock icons are pretty boring too. All the exciting icons are with the high-flying gamers. This year however, they seem to be flying below my boring stocks. I’m guessing this is another strategy I haven’t figured out yet. Maybe they fly below to look for weak spots in the underbelly of my stodgy stocks? I might pick up a few of those high-flyers now. I don’t know what else to do with those dividend coins.

Back when I had advisors, the market would usually beat me. Except, sometimes, when I lost money. In years when I lost coins, they’d tell me that we (meaning the advisor & me) didn’t lose as much as the market. And that this was a very good thing. It was, I agreed. When the market was up, I didn’t think it was quite so good when the market beat “us”. But I learned that was normal & that we weren’t trying to beat the market. I’m good with that too. But I can’t believe I used to pay advisors to do all this fun stuff for me. They were having all the fun playing the game & I was paying them to play for me. It’s almost like paying someone to go out & have a nice dinner for you. And on you!

Now I have all the fun myself. I’m pretty sure I won’t beat the market either. But it costs me nothing extra to play now. And I can try to not lose as much as the market when things are down. Though I know I’ll miss those fireside consolation chats I had with my advisors when things sucked. Gaming solo can be lonely.

If I lose all my coins, I’m truly shagged. But I gotta say … so far … it’s been a whole lotta fun using a little money learning how to play the game.

Let’s see if I’m still enjoying the game as much by the time the next heroic bull emerges to battle the market.

Game on! 😜

The Authoritarian State of Canada

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Protest Weather!?!

I have no idea how Canadians can feel like they’re losing their freedom. If wearing a mask is all it takes to make us feel like we’re living in some kind of authoritarian regime, we’ve got it pretty good. While I was hesitant to sign up for a vaccine in the beginning, I stopped worrying about it as the ranks of the vaccinated grew, mostly without any adverse consequences. Being as fat as I am, from that point forward, I was vying to be first in line for the next jab. I can still see some folk worrying about having to get a vaccine though. I’m of a mind that if some people don’t want it, they shouldn’t get it. If the majority, moral or otherwise, want restrictions imposed because of that, I’m really not sure how we handle that to satisfy everyone. We probably can’t.

Most of us wouldn’t want to send our kids to school without all the regular childhood vaccinations. Nor without all the other kids being vaccinated too. There are a lot of things in life like that. I don’t have the freedom to smoke in restaurants any more. But I doubt I’ll be starting a freedom movement because of that.

Now my purpose isn’t to waffle on about the rights & wrongs of people having the right to protest. Nor is it about the rights & wrongs of either sides’ opinions, I’m sure there are some great arguments to be made on both sides. Most of us have already picked our side & we’ll probably stick with our choice. I’m curious though as to why anyone would want to go out in -18°C temperatures to protest something that’s going away soon anyway. We’re all fed up with this covid bullshit & I’m way overdue for a trip back to Ireland. I certainly don’t want to pay an extra three hundred bucks for tests to get out & back again. I’m equally pissed that I didn’t get a winter break to the sun the past few years. With another $300 in test costs added to that holiday.
(Nice first world problems to have, eh!)

But the reality is that some version of normal is coming back soon anyway. Most people know that they’ll survive covid just fine & we all desperately want to get back to normal. Now that we’re over (hopefully) the hump of the fatalities, we can be reassured by the graph trending down & we’ll return to being statistically oblivious again. We’re a pretty shitty species, eh? But we probably have to be this way. We’ll lump the reduced number of covid deaths in with those from the flu, heart disease, cancer & accidents, & we’ll all get on with our lives again. It’s the way it’s always been. And if for no other reason than us telling ourselves we have no other choice, it’ll be the same this time around. So why spend time protesting stuff that’s about to change anyway?

You can’t help but wonder if we’ve all missed an opportunity to learn how to do this whole pandemic thing better. Instead of protesting & blocking streets, we should all be pulling in the same direction. If all that protest time, money & energy went into supporting our healthcare system, would we have been better off? If all the protesters volunteered their time & money to supporting the healthcare system, would that have helped remove the concerns about the stress brought on by the peaking of hospital cases? Would that, in turn, help remove the last of the lockdowns & restrictions sooner? And isn’t that what the protesters want at the end of the day? Stop whining about the problem & figure out how to be part of the solution instead.

Look, I really have no idea how realistic it is to have us all pulling in the same direction. I also have no idea how we can do pandemics better. And we probably should learn how to do it much better, for when we’re faced with a far deadlier & uglier bug than omicron. But I’m guessing that wasting our time on this kind of protest doesn’t contribute a whole lot. Besides, our politicians couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, so I’m not too worried about them getting sophisticated enough to take away my freedom!

At the end of the day, I’m still worried about covid killing me. Despite that, I’ve had enough with some of the restrictions too. Just not enough to have me thinking that my freedom is at risk.

With or without masks, we’re still the true north, strong & free.
Be nice & polite to each other out there, Canucks! 🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦

Christmas Cat

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
See the Cat?

In our house, I’m always the first one up on Christmas morning. I clatter & bang around the kitchen until someone else gets up & starts yelling at me for waking them up too early. The ensuing “conversation” usually wakes everyone else up. Mission accomplished! It is only this Christmas that I realise that I might not be the normal one.

I thought every other household was up at 5am on Christmas morning. I was sure that all kids (of all ages!) wanted to be out ripping open their gifts. Doesn’t matter if all we’re getting is socks & underwear, it’s exciting to see what we got, no? But this year, I learned something new. It’s not true. I’m back in the city & I can see many more houses & apartment buildings now. Most households are still dark. Hours after I’m up. Waiting. With the cat!

At least the cat shares my enthusiasm. She’s right in there amongst the brightly coloured bags & ribbons. I’m being patient this year. And quiet. Though maybe it’s time for another cup of coffee now. A louder one!

Whatever the light that lights your way, I hope it shines brighter this holiday. And if you are one of those early risers, at least you know you’re not alone! 😜

Merry Christmas to all! 🎄☃️