On the other hand, he can hold down a steady job, and you sell knives in a pyramid scam. There's a lot to be said for the marketability of one's skills.

Ooohhh ouch.

Hooowah! Low blow. I like it.

Someone in Colorado had their bar closed down because of the customers' use of profanity on the premises. The state now owns it. If they don't like your customers there, they will close up the whole shop for just about anything. Profanity was the only thing they could catch the owner and patrons on....at first.
A local coffee shop (I was there nearly every day) also almost got hit with this but the owners agreed to actually having a formal investigation done of their regular customers as to not get their business taken away. I was actually there for that part. People cussed, smoked, and talked politics outside the doors of the place- and were investigated by local law enforcement whilst chatting before or after work at their local hangout.
Colorado has already completely lost it's mind bitch. Fuck Bush.
If they find you doing something illegal on a prime piece of real estate-like cussing in public- the owner might get the place confiscated and given to the state.
It was a couple years back and I'm trying to remember the name of the law they came up with to do all that with- I guess I'll have to get back to it. Here it is, a short article- It was closed down and the owner was investigated and arrested later.

Colorado: State, tavern reach agreement over profanity
Colorado has reached an agreement with a tavern owner who was threatened with the loss of his liquor license for permitting profanity in his establishment. The state will quit threatening tavern owners with that penalty, and the owner of Leonard's Bar II in Colorado Springs will withdraw his civil rights complaint under the plan. Department of Revenue spokeswoman Dorothy Dalquist said July 6 the state decided to stop enforcing the profanity regulation because it is antiquated. A state agent had seized 29 signs, 21 of which included the "f" word, from Leonard Carlo's bar on Aug. 31, citing the now-abandoned 1979 regulation prohibiting profanity in bars. Associated Press

If we couldn't use profanity my office would completely shut down.

In fact, I had trouble typing this without inserting at least four uses of the word "fuckin'."

So if I understand this correctly in Colorado it's conservative authoritarian wackos who don't like profanity and in NYC it's liberal authoritarian wackos who don't like profanity. Is that right?

's just authoritarian wackos

I agree with you - that is bullshit, but don't blame Bush - he had nothing to do with it.

Why do you ask? I respect my mother tongue and use her properly. Incompetence isn't good, and incompetence this elementary is unbecoming an adult human. Don't ask again: this is my answer and it's a good one.

I do not and did not find it so; indeed, apostrophes as used on this side of the pond are among written English's most systematic and logical usages. I had these mastered before I left elementary school. Surely, if I can manage it, without flaws...

I took the liberty of amending your spelling -- and yes, it takes me some memory-scouring and in some extremities the dictionary to remember if it's -ant or -ent -- the -ent is "one-who-does-something" most of the time but not all. (A careful course in phonics early on helps a great deal.) We can blame it on not having an English equivalent of the Academie Francaise. (Diacriticals omitted; this BBS does not cooperate with ASCII-coding them in. Try it only if you'd like to see which surprise page you end up on.)

I simply know those specific usages -- and I do give thought to what are somewhat gray areas, such as pluralizing abbreviations, where one can argue that an apostrophe there is standing in for those letters not included in the abbreviation. This usage has the virtue of not effecting an alteration of the abbreviation. Too, if one is quite uncomfortable with adding the tadpole, abbreviation in uppercase and the pluralizing -s in lower is still an option.

A reason as infamous as its examples are widespread -- they were asleep in fourth-form English class.

Competence is good. More competence is better, and it is hardly unreasonable to expect it.

We do not use a pyramid structure, nor multilevel marketing -- we reckon MLM unethical and reject it.

There is often confusion in plural possessive, when the plural is not formed by the addition of 's', such as: men's or mens' ?

What I was trying to explain Urbane, is that there is a difference between competently using language in its spoken form and having the same degree of competence in written language. One is a natural skill, which the brain is set-up to acquire in the same way we are set up to learn to walk, and the other...isn't. Some people will have more aptitude for the nuances of written language than others. It is a skill which some have learned well, others poorly, some exceptionally... the idea that they are somehow less than you, or less respectful of their spoken tongue than you, because they did not acquire the same nuanced understanding as you did of apostrophe use and the derivation of words, is arrogant.

The language came first... we then invented ways of expressing it that tried to fit it into an entirely different grammatical structure(Latin). Written language is an invention...its structures are the arbitrary decisions of long dead men, in much the same way that the bible is. Fortunately, these days, grammar is now taught in a very different way to linguistics and communication students.

K. I'll get off my horse now about the Latin thing. Its a bugbear of mine.

Not everyone places/ed as much emphasis as you have on producing written language that can hold up to scrutiny. Most people, and I put myself in this latter group, seek merely to make themselves understood. They may, like me, have a feel for the way words run together and how they sound when spoken aloud. They may just wish to present the information, stage by stage, until their point is made. They may...if writing a sign, just want to convey simple information.

Now, I'll laugh with everyone else at the obvious gaffs and as an ex-literacy tutor I have a fairly large store of 'em in my memory. But making judgements about a person from their writing skills, beyond the extent to which they've learned a skill, is not something I would be inclined to do.

Your caring so much about getting the written version of the language right, does not make you better, nor does it make your words weigh more.

Yeah, it don't make him no smarter any.

Wat he said

1.) Do you, or do you not, have the ability as a sales rep to "recruit" other sales reps?
2.) Do you, or do you not, receive a commission when someone you have recruited makes a sale?

I'll give you fair warning, a simple Google search has already answered these questions many times over.


More importantly, I don't really care if it is an MLM, or if you are genuinely successful at it. If so, great. My post was really just a gentle reminder that if you choose to be a dick to other people and make personal insults, you may expect people to do the same to you.

1) Not as a rep -- but as a manager. Reps do not have other reps working under them, nor is Vector Marketing structured that way. There is a "we'll reward you if you bring in somebody who succeeds" program, which kicks in after he succeeds at a certain level, but he's in no way under you. He, like you, is another independent contractor with Vector. You don't manage him unless and until you become his District Manager or something, and he for some reason does not become a manager. There is always the possibility that he could, as Vector is a growing company.

The emphasis, though, is on reps doing the job of moving the excellent product we sell -- we go up against fine brands of kitchen knives like Wusthof, Sabatier, and JA Henckels every day and we outsell all of them in the United States, and only Henckel outgrosses us worldwide. That is the thing we're here to do, and not to recruit a swarm of sub-reps like vampires' chyldes. The money's not in that, but in doing our jobs in people's kitchens, making their lives better than they once were.

2) Managers get their pay according to a rather detailed formula of varying percentages of the sales the reps in their offices make. This does not come out of the reps' commissions but out of the overall profit markup on the product. The formula is weighted to encourage the manager to do his main job, which is to recruit new sales reps and to train them. The manager succeeds when his reps do, and in all cases the rep receives the bulk of the commission, so it's designed to everyone's advantage from the newest new guy to the senior manager that runs the regional Pilot Office to make sure the new guy is trained in the best, most effective techniques of sales and of service, to follow up. This has the effect of the most successful manager being the one who has recruited a large officeful of sales reps, and then devotes all his effort to increasing their skill and keeping them enthused by any ethical means at his disposal. Competitions, awards, bennies, and "bucking them up whenever they are glum," which also happens -- salesmen really only sell when they are enthused.

The Branch and District manager's job is recruitment and training, and we endlessly pursue the best training -- and since what is best gradually evolves either from creativity or changing conditions, it is well to stay current. The managers get a good deal of training and dissemination of current info too. A great many Branch and District managers reduce their personal selling during the primary recruit/training season, which is the summer to give more time to their primary job.

Calling the fact that we have managers a "pyramid scheme" does violence to the definition of pyramid scheme. That we have office managers to recruit and train, and to pipeline orders to headquarters in Olean NY is not a pyramid anything, but the company's information-handling structure, if you want to be rather abstract about it. The flow of information goes both ways; orders in and commissions and recognition -- we do a lot of recognition because we are about nothing if not positive motivation -- out. Calling this structure a pyramid scheme is more the blather of persons allergic to sales and marketing than a factual description. Marketing can be learned, and one expert at it can thrive, but too it does call for a certain personality type -- generally a right-brained individual who is willing to take some risks and who can invent it as he goes along.

I like Vector because it's a no-bullshit outfit. The corporate culture figures there isn't time for it -- what there is time for is ethics. I have invariably been treated properly and according to my deserts.

That's the word from the inside.