Strong Language
Irish Times – Cents & Nonsense
Getting back to the bare essentials
Trappings of wealth are being stripped away by a shaky world economy and irresponsible personal spending, writes Margaret E. Ward WHEN I was a child, my mother would dress my little brother for Mass each Sunday. He was the only boy, born unexpectedly when she was 41, and on the Sabbath she trussed him up [...]
Risky business
Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. WHEN I was a girl, my mother told me that good things came in small packages. As the most vertically challenged in my class until I was about 12, this was not of great comfort [...]
TDs’ tasty investments
IF GILLIAN McKeith of Channel 4s’ You Are What You Eat programme were an investment guru rather than a nutritionist, what would she say about our TDs’ investment appetites? The Dáil Register of Members’ Interests is a bit like the big table McKeith piles high with food regularly eaten by her participants: chips, burgers, fish [...]
Bet on a bottoming dollar
EVERYTHING MUST go! Fifty per cent off. Sale, sale, sale. These slogans are familiar to the thousands of Irish shoppers who regularly swarm like bees to America’s great shopping cities – New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco. It’s no wonder they travel Stateside. What’s better than watching greenbacks spill from your wallet to pay [...]
Mystery tours
Scene: A group of people waits patiently outside the ornate iron gates of the big Government building. Music plays softly in the background: “Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour . . . the magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away.” A small man wearing a bright green shirt and ginger beard [...]
The year of the ‘R’ word
Rats. That’s right, rats! A new development has gone up behind my home. The builders who park near by say that the hedge of the local park is “alive with rats”. Disgusting. Can’t you just see them all squirming around and squealing with delight? I’m talking about the rats, not the builders. Buildings go up, [...]
The mother of all workplace myths
Do women know what they’re risking when they have children or are they blinded by the myth of equality? It wasn’t her imagination. They were looking at her differently. You’d think she had six heads or something. Siobhán had worked like a dog for the past 15 years. She had received top honours at university [...]
Cover yourself
Nobody likes to see people excluded or left out. It’s not nice. Frustrating people unnecessarily and insulting their honesty and integrity are also bad manners, writes Margaret E. Ward Yet this, it seems, is exactly how insurance companies make their money, as you’ll hear in this tale of three policies. As a concept, insurance is [...]
A sensible steer
I’d like you to meet someone. Her name is Gracie. She has been a really good, reliable friend over the years. We’ve had some wonderful adventures together. The downside is that Gracie is really old and inefficient. But she is a classic – a white 1972 Mercedes Benz 280 SE (see below) with a tan [...]
Poor service
Let’s ponder the term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or, as I like to call it, Crummy Service. If you’re not asleep after hearing that friendly phrase, I’ll continue, writes Margaret E. Ward CRM is a very broad term that describes the way some companies manage and analyse customers to improve brand loyalty and to increase [...]
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