Standing Book Bids

I buy and sell books on Amazon.com. It's very very easy. As a buyer, you are just a few clicks and a few days away from getting exactly what you want at your doorstep. As a seller, it takes a little bit more work (you have to log the books, print out invoices, and mail them to get the max amount of money), but it is still surprisingly easy.

But the way the current system is in place, sellers definitely do more work than buyers. What if this were reversed? What if Amazon encouraged buyers to choose a price that they would 100% buy a book at (similar to a fixed stock buy) and it fell on the sellers to peruse these potential buyers to see if the price was what they were hoping to get for their product?

If a buyer isn't in a hurry to get something, he/she might put out a lowball bid, say 20% of the asking price. It might take anywhere from a few days to a few years to find a seller willing to sell at that price, but it would be an equally balanced equation like the system that is in place right now.

As a seller, I've got tons of books unsold right now. When I was logging them, I would have been more than happy to consider offers on them. As it stands right now, I've already put in the work for the current system. So I wait.

How to Fire an Employee

So it happened.  I finally got fired.  I've been alive for 35 years, have had over a dozen different jobs, and I finally know what it's like to hear those words "You're fired."  And I've had all day to think about it, too, because I got fired from a midnight baker's job.  Yep, got the news at 3:45am.

First of all, I deserved it.  I'm not complaining about my sentence.  My former boss was a good guy.  I just wasn't up to the task of waking my ass up at 12:30am to get to work by 1am.  Justice has been served.

Maybe there's just no way to make this easy.  Maybe it shouldn't be easy.  I've had all day to think about this, so allow me a moment to share with you some of my revelations.

First, I looked at the syntax.  "You're fired" is a passive statement.  Technically speaking, the whole phrase is "You're fired by me."  So if this is passive, then why the hell does it feel so active?  As a boss, I can't imagine getting all revved up and saying "I fire you!"  That just doesn't work for some reason.  As for the present progressive "I'm firing you," that just doesn't make any sense unless the employee in question seriously does not know his ass from his elbow.  I mean, it happens.

So then I looked at corporate culture.  They hire an outside consultant to do the dirty work of appraising employees and firing them.  Not that this has happened to me, but I've seen Office Space.  This seems worse than being told to your face.

 I suppose there are some creative ways to do it.  My boss back in college told me the following story: "So I met this old-time business owner.  He told me that the way you fire someone is to give them a hefty raise for two weeks.  At the end of the two weeks, you send them packing.  After that, they'll never get a job asking for the wages they had at the moment you fired them."  Pretty wicked old man.

So in short, while an employer can get creative, I think the best way remains to fire someone to his face using the passive voice (which sounds active).  It's tense for a few moments, but then it's over.  The way I see it, my former boss did both of us a really big favor sticking to what's tried and true.

Book Juggling

Have you ever borrowed something - a book, movie, nice outfit - and really talked it up to another person who then asks to borrow this thing from you?  It's very uncomfortable for the original borrower to even consider a double borrow, much less do it.  After all, the person doesn't *own* the thing.

However, there is one item which should be easy to borrow from another individual: the library book.  If two people are both card-carrying members from the same library or library system, there's no reason why one person couldn't borrow a book from another, thus cutting out the library.

Just today, I let a roommate borrow a book that I had checked out.  Sure, I could've said no, but we live in the same house.  Plus, he had just let me borrow his stack of Neil Gaiman comic books.  So I found myself handing over a book that only I am accountable for, as far as the library is concerned.

I wouldn't have had to worry at all if I had done a little book juggling.  It saves time and money and hassle.  Shouldn't this be an option?