host

Ahahhh !!!! You've found me out!

I currently apportion my time (for the past seven years):

Business Hours: Trader-In-Securities filing a schedule "C" tax return as a sole proprietor, since 1998

Evenings: Waiter at a fine dining establishment, employed for 5 years at same establishment. Professional waitstaff, ten years plus seniority not unusual, low staff turnover, 16 waiter 'floor plan". (95 percent of income is via credit card "on the books", gratutities from clientele.)

Previously employed as waitstaff member in smallish fine dining venue on upper West side, NYC, for 2 years.

Full-time securities trader @home in my living room 1998 - 1999....

Spend much time in my wife's company as she was a critical care nurse suddenly stricken, 5 years ago with an ischemic stroke causing right side paralysis and severe speech aphasia, speech impairment and total paralysis of her right arm are persistant.

1990 to 1997: Co-owner and general manager in partnership with previous wife, of an 18 employees, small business, service to the consurmer and small er commercial account segment, ninety percent of revenue source from third party payers, insurance carriers. Responsible for successfully managing all facets of day to day operations, from employee supervision and relations, to a heavy emphasis on face to face customer service, and negotiations with their insurers.

I know "the drill" of signing over personal assets as a condition for obtaining six figure business expansion loans, and the value of a good accountant and a tax lawyer...and dealing with all the regulatory BS from government, from the EPA to OSHA, and the EEOC....

Prior to that, 13 years experience in dealing with union employees in a specialty metals manufacturing environment in a supervisory role, direct and as a supervisor of production foremen from a production planning and inventory control responsibility.

Began "career" in manufacturing with three year period as a production worker and union shop steward, after several years as a full time college student.
I was such a "pain in the ass" to management as a union rep. that they offered me a management position. I made that transition and found myself driving strikebreakers through union picket lines (my former union brothers...)during a labor strike, so that they would not be injured when they tried to go home at the end of their workday.

I "live it", Ustwo....in front of a computer screen, all day, watching the elite rape the retail trader and investor in "the market", and then off, into the evening, to serve "the rich", close up, and immerse myself in a kitchen totally staffed with hardworking illegal aliens.

Have you ever observed a man worth $2300 million dining with his wife and another couple who are using a "coupon", good for a custom, chef cooked , "anyway you want it", dinner, won at a charity benefit, and then respond to a request from the billionaire, for catsup?

If I was a more successful securities trader, I could remove myself from "the real world", but I wouldn't trade the insight that I gain in "real time", for anything.

I am the son of a former marine and labor relations attorney, employed by management through all of his career. He did time studies in an intensely hot brass casting shop for the first five years after he earned an accounting degre via the "GI bill", and then did five years nights in law school with four young children and a complaining wife along the way.

He knew how hard unionized manufacturing workers labored. He once saved a foreman's life, in his own office, after the slightly built man brought a large, offending worker to my father to be disciplined in the personnel office wher e he was working on the 3-11 shift to gain labor relations experience. The worker picked the paper weight up off my father's desk and began pounding the foreman in the head with it. My father got between them and the worker bit through his wool suit jacket and sunk his teeth into myy father's arm, resulting in a nasty infection.

My father's family came from nothing, he was the first to graduate from college. He always respected labor and still regards himself as one of them.

I think I see "both sides" and I think I know as much as anyone can about "the real" America, from my past and current perspective. I can tell you that the wealthiest are some of the nicest and most thoughtful people, and soem of them are the most self centered, obnoxious, and alarmingly oblivious.

It is easy to tell which customers remember their own days, waiting, tables, and which don't.

I work alongside an M.E. who has been working his career "day job" for thirteen years while waiting tables 5 nights per week. He has a nice house and has taken his wife and kids to Paris, and now he's waiting impatiently for his wife can finish her nursing degree courses so he can "stand down".