Wallace again arrived during the monsoon season. Anything is better than twenty below, and remember, I spent a winter on the Canadian prairies back in university, so I know exactly what I’m talking about. A few years later I worked fourteen years for one of the top-rated Canadian telecom companies. I quit when I calculated I was not one penny ahead of the day I started. I had full choice between the two countries and I chose the USA hands down. I am no slouch when it comes to these matters. I can calculate the 30-year discount on a Series E Savings Bond. Can you? I did everything by the rulebook, investing 20% of my take home pay, topping up my pension plan, investing in blue chips, about the only thing I did not do was fall into the trap of buying residential real estate. Home mortgages are like bad religion.
After Canadian taxes, inflation and conversion back to US dollars, I was working all day to pay the bills. What looked like $30.00 per hour on paper was $12.05 in real money. At least I realized it and got out early enough to start over. The typical Canadian I worked with did not, often working twenty-five or thirty years for a lousy $3,100 per month pension (the average union or government retirement amount in Canada). They cannot live on that. They are going to get older and sicker; the property taxes alone will take food off the table. They won’t even get old age security as Ottawa will rate them as high-income. Mark my words.
Another Canadian myth is that after retirement, you can triple your income by contracting back as a consultant. Ha! Unless in the top 5% of management that made real decisions by the time you were thirty, time to rethink your strategy. If you are over 45 right now, as an experiment try applying for a job. Any job at all, you smart ass. All quality has been exported and what remains is so watered-down nobody wants overpaid “experts” any more, particularly not rusty old coots with smug attitudes. Unless you speak Chinese (like I do), the people at your gold watch ceremony are secretly glad you are finally on your way out the damn door to make room for new blood.
While the life expectancy in Canada is 72 years, that does not apply to people who worked all their lives. Their widows maybe, but the workers themselves generally die off within eight months of the last paycheck. This fact is so rarely discussed on CBC (Canadian national television), I suspect it is censored. Where are these droves of contented retired union workers relaxing in the sunshine? Probably in Mexico where the famous “free Canadian medical” doesn’t pay, but at least the kids can’t move back home. No idiotic anchor baby clauses in the Mexican immigration laws.
I’ll repeat myself to say that it will be another year or two yet, but the wisdom of this hideaway in Florida will be obvious to all. Meanwhile cheer up, the middle-age “good citizen” ax has not fallen yet, and probably won’t for another 18 months. How about some trivia? What is “sweet-hearting”? It is a problem experienced by stores with check-out scanners. The clerk “sweet-hearts” a favorite customer. This is done in a variety of ways, the most usual are
- running an item past the scanner too fast to read
- stacking an expensive item over a cheap item during scan
- keying in the wrong quantity of identical items
And you thought only management could steal money. Anyway, expect to see advanced smart security cams shortly. These cameras can spot suspicious activity, including too much perspiration on a forehead.
Author's note 2015-05-25: Sure enough, there is an article in this dates ID magazine that pinpoints the mood a person is in by the distribution of body head. Detected by infrared scanners, the system has already revealed race does not matter to the effect of emotions and pain.
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