Abe wisely skipped a gun duel. He wasn’t perfect. Want to enhance your personal trustworthiness? Give yourself a secret to keep. Do something good (or bad, but the good route works for more people) and don’t tell anybody about it. If you can perform the secret with style, so much the better… Mom’s The Word […]

Don’t forget your worries in your old kit bag We carry far too much guilt in our baggage. Why we cart it along is a mystery to me but we do so questioning it is fair game. I’m thinking that this phenomenon of “pretending we could do much better than we have” is just another […]

Nowhere Man I was in my early 40’s before I realized I was me. Living in a motel in Penticton, British Columbia, I had just started reading a book by Shad Helmstetter called Self Talk. In the jumble of letters I was forcing into my mind I came across a phrase where Shad says “and […]

The first few years I was a manager I had no clue what I was doing. Like a lot of managers. I had fooled my way into management to begin with (like a lot of managers) and just naturally assumed a hierarchical dork attitude (like a lot of managers) until one day an old chef […]

  Mmm. Nice ring! May I polish it for you…? He used me! Automatically eyebrows will be raised and apprehension seeded, ready to reap sometime soon. Being used. Yuck! In the past I felt dirty or somehow less of a person if the news was revealed that I had once again been used. Now I […]

Wait! Come back Time! I’ll save you! Time clocks are a big mistake. Here’s why: In 2007 I purchased a technologically advanced  swipe card time clock system for our medium size manufacturing plant which employed around one hundred and fifty people. At the time it seemed like a good idea as we were experiencing many […]

Yes, here we go. Broken leg, 42 Smith Street, January 24 at 4:13 pm You have an enemy bent on your inevitable destruction. Okay, it’s not just you. All of us have the same adversary but that doesn’t diminish the fact that this powerful foe lives in your neighborhood. And if it weren’t bad enough […]

Hello, I’m Captain Nutso I’ve been acting weird lately. Actually, if you were to ask almost anyone who knows me, they would add that it has been longer than just lately that I’ve been acting weird. Most of what is causing me to behave a little different is that I’m enduring some challenging circumstances and […]

You Must Pay for 15 Steps in Advance I can be so friggin wrong at times I wonder why you’re even reading this blog. Never-the-less, I reserve the right to change my mind as experience permits. In a post a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I felt about quitting. And now I’m […]

In 2003 my wife Kathy and I had been operating Barney’s Motel in  Brandon, Manitoba for two years and were badly in need of some good employees who were  willing to work cheap.  Utilizing long term classified ad campaigns in our local newspaper, I attracted some outstanding candidates just by employing humorous  advertising and wanted […]

  I wish I didn’t have so much concrete in my head If there is a warranty on me someone should apply for it. There are times when I feel like I’m operating at less than 50% capacity and others when I think I can’t give even one more ounce of energy. Perhaps after 53 […]

Clean my boot on the way out, would you? Now Barry, don’t take this the wrong way because it’s not personal. My mind swooned and a wicked reality yanked my wobbly life force free of its moorings as those familiar words ram jammed my possibility pipe. THIS…IS…NOT…PERSONAL. But just the same you are fired, Fired, […]

Take Me To Your Cleaners! I’ve been a dupe most of my life. Wide eyed and naive, I stumbled through existence believing almost everything people told me. One day I finally figured out that life is a bell curve and depending on where I’ve situated my beliefs in it, that’s the pain or gain heading […]

In 2003 my wife Kathy and I were owners in a small motel in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada and after struggling for 3 years to renovate the property and turn the business around, we lost 65% of our enterprise to a fire. This was a devastating time in our lives but history has since showed me […]

One hour ago I received a phone call from  John R, a Sheriff with The Saskatchewan Government. Draw! if you have enough lead in your pencil… Sheriff John is seriously interested in getting some payback for the creditors of my last business failure and he asked me some hard questions about how I plan to […]

November 2004 My wife Kathy and I were managing the world famous Barney’s Motel in Brandon, Manitoba. We were saddled with business problems which were seemingly insurmountable and frustration was beginning to overwhelm us. What follows is an article I wrote and forwarded to hotelonline.com: Nothing up my sleeve Rolling in The D’Oh! A few […]

Time is one weird mother. Hard to understand, impossible to actually see and real easy to waste – that’s time for you. Throughout my whole life, not one person ever sat me down to explain how time works. Time was just something that IS. Nothing to it, really. “Without a sense of urgency, desire loses […]