Padma's next career move

 

 

I have my books, Padma has her cookbooks. Trouble is there are only so many cookbooks she can read before she gets bored, and so she has applied for a casual position at the local Business College. In fact, she's been there before, literally! — see below:

 

Padma is on the far left (but, thankfully, not politically)

 

Of course, these days even the lowest position has a most detailed Job Description. This one could've just read, "Do whatever needs doing, and don't forget to switch on the kettle in time for morning tea", but that wouldn't have sounded important enough. Here it is, chapter and verse:

 

 

Anyway, Padma sent off her application:

 

Dear Larissa, I read of this position at your Batemans Bay College on facebook and wish to apply. Having read the Position Description on your website, I am positive I meet all your requirements. For your information, I completed a business course at your College in 2007 - see attached newspaper cuttings. Kindly read through my online c.v. at nelligennet.com/cvpadma.html, and if you believe as much as I do that I could make a valuable contribution to your office, please contact me via email or phone. I am ready to come to your office at any time convenient to you. I am also ready to start work at any time, as I have my own transport and can work any hours required. Yours sincerely Padma Goerman

 

Something may come of it or nothing may come of it. If something comes of it, it will give me lots of quiet time to read my books; if nothing comes of it, Padma can always read her cookbooks again.

 

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Dressed for another day at the Stock Exchange

 

 

Given the far more volatile state of the stock market these days, I've decided to spend a little more time watching the share price gyrations and buying in low and selling out high whenever the opportunity of a quick profit presents itself.

There seems to be no rhyme nor reason in the way the market moves, but more times than not, if it's going to be a down-day, it'll start with a sharp fall in the morning, then a bit of a lull at lunchtime when everyone has gone to the wine bar, and then a very gradual recovery in the afternoon, before dipping down again towards the four o'clock close. And the opposite is true on any up-day, and any other day when the market behaves in a seemingly irrational way - which is every day!

In other words, there's no way of telling what's going to happen from one day to the next, and it's more important to know about your own pain threshold than any economic data or the state of the world.

Of course, there's always an outlier such as Trump who, whenever he and his cohort want to make millions, make some stupid earthshaking announcement, buy in low, then say the exact opposite and sell out high. I was going to buy up big after spreading the word that the world is coming to an end, but the Global Warming brigade had beat me to it.

It's ten past four in the afternoon, the Sydney Stock Exchange shut its doors, and I've taken off my cufflinks. BHP reached an intra-day high of $55.33, which is about the same as New York's close this morning at $55.25. At the end of today, it closed lower at $54.75, but that's still 73 cents up on yesterday. I did four trades: on one trade I pressed the SELL instead of the BUY button which cost me a couple of thousand, but the other three made a profit of fourteen-and-a-half thousand, leaving me comfortably ahead. LESSON LEARNT: PRESS THE RIGHT BUTTON!

 

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The day has started well ...

 

 

The day has started well, with BHP hitting $55.20 straight out of the box! I had placed a SELL-order at precisely $55.20 just before the market opened and made a nice little profit, even though the shares continued to rise to $55.33 before retreating to their current $55.05.

I don't trade often or much but sometimes when the market is getting a bit too hot, I take a bit off the table. And the good thing is that all that profit is tax-free since the trading takes place inside my SMSF which is now in pension phase and therefore tax-free — well, until Labor can think of something else to get their hands on all that untaxed money.

For the life of me I can't believe that people who have even only a slightly above-average amount of intelligence and even only a slightly above-average amount of money could leave it in one of those industry superfunds where they're being charged exorbitant fees even when the money is not being worked with or, worse still, is being worked into the ground. Of course, they frighten people into believing that it's all too difficult and "leave it to the experts". What experts? Are those so-called "experts" eighty years old as I am and have seen it all before as I have?

 

SuperHelp

 

All I pay in fees is around $1,200 a year for my friends at SuperHelp to crunch the numbers at the end of the year, and to lodge the SMSF's tax refund, and then to mail me yet another fat refund of franking credits.

I see that BHP has dropped below $54.90. Maybe I buy back in again as soon as they get down to around $54.70. That would end the day well!

 

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Life in the country

 

 

Life in the country has its limitations when you live with people whose only original idea is to install a second refrigerator in the garage. And so I get my inspirations from the internet and from people on the internet with whom I have often lengthy conversations, sometimes in a language other than English just in case another job offer comes along that requires me to be somewhere on the other side of the globe by the beginning of next week.

Fat chance of that to happen — I almost added "anytime soon" but I hate that phrase too much to ever hear myself using it and, in any case, even "anytime soon" is too late now (I also hate the phrase "going forward" because, ever since I moved to the country, I've been going backward).

But as I was saying before my train of thought suddenly left me behind at the station, life in the country has its limitations. For one thing, there isn't anyone to talk to, by which I mean there isn't anyone to talk to on subjects other than the weather and the price of cattle and whether the council is going to fix those potholes in the road.

In my more than thirty years of living in the country, I met only one man with whom I could have a conversation on just about anything. He was a self-taught man who, after enough years in the public service to secure himself a modest pension, had moved to the country to live his dream. Thirty years later, and the dream had disappeared in a cloud of constant work to maintain his hundred-acre property when all his mind wanted was some intellectual challenges and his body just wanted some rest.

We met totally by chance, at first outside the post office where we were both collecting our mail, and started talking for hours on the footpath until we had a better idea and invited each other to each other's home. He enjoyed to talk to someone who wasn't interested in the weather but in the dismal state of the world and our place in it.

We developed a mutual respect for each other, he for me having done so much, and I for him sticking it out for so long, and all for the sake of his family who enjoyed their rural living but left it to him do all the work.

He died, almost four years ago to the day, with his dream unrealised and the song still inside him, and I am left still missing our conversations.

 

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Call me the Mozart of the Insurance Industry

 

Taken when our office staff visited the company's head office in Hamburg - see here.
Click on image to enlarge

 

A former colleague sent me this group photo of the staff of the Braunschweig branch of the Hamburg-Bremer Feuer-Versicherungs-Gesellschaft where I served my articled years. The photo was taken in 1963. I was a non-conformist even then as evidenced by my crossed legs. Or was it a full bladder?

I had just finished my articles but at 17 was still younger by at least a year than anyone else who was just starting theirs. That's what happens when your parents are poor and don't waste time with higher education.

I'll never forget a fellow-articled clerk, Lothar, whose parents were rich which had allowed him to obtain his "Abitur". He hated me since he finished his articles the same year as me but five years older than me, a mere Volksschüler. Call me the Mozart of the Insurance Industry!

(Another fellow-articled clerk who also graduated with me and had also been a five-year-older "Abiturient", Detlef Trute, didn't hate me but only himself because all that extra education hadn't stopped him from having an affair with an already qualified lady-insurance assessor whom he got pregnant, saddling him with wife and kid before he had even started his career. Strange how all those memories come back after sixty years.)

Of course, you recognise me in the photo above, don't you? I'm the one with the undernourished, unmarried, and "uneducated" look about him (a tip: I am NOT the one with the handbag!)

 

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