Asha Anujeeva » Business and Office

Wal-Mart to stop using plastic bags?

Anu — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:27:32 +0000

I was shopping at my local Wal-Mart and heard some of the employees talking about how pretty soon Wal-Mart will be requiring their customers to bring their own bags! I wonder how well the customers are going to be taking that! Personally, I’m glad – I have several canvas shopping tote bags that I bought a long time ago that I would like to use for my weekly groceries. Even though I bring most of my empty Wal-Mart shopping bags back to the Wal-Mart for recycling, I really would prefer to not have to deal with them. Although they DO make good little trash can liners!

Algae turned into fuel

Anu — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:13:02 +0000

According to an article dated May 29, 2008 in the LA Times, there is a company that is planning to use algae to start producing a crude oil that can be used to make gasoline and diesel fuel. The production of the fuel uses carbon dioxide, which would help to clean up our greenhouse gases problem. It can be refined in existing refineries and be used by the existing cars and trucks on the road. It plans to reach full commercial scale in five years. The company that is planning to do this is called Sapphire Energy.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful, getting oil from algae instead of fossil fuels!

Personality profiles

Anu — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:12:21 +0000

Many companies are sending their employees to enrichment programs and seminars, in the hopes that the employees will become more satisfied with their jobs and more productive.

More employers are using personality profiles now to help their employees develop their career path. One such personality profile program is called DiSC, which is sold by Resources Unlimited. They are an authorized Inscape Publishing Distributor of the Online Disc Classic 2.0 Profile. This program consists of 28 questions and only takes about ten to fifteen minutes to complete, and the results are delivered immediately. This program can be used to help build team work, improve salesmanship, and improve management skills.

Life would be so much easier

Anu — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:36:54 +0000

Have you ever wished that your employer would provide a company uniform for employees to wear at the companies expense? And by that I don’t mean a vest to wear, I mean an entire outfit, shirt, shoes, pants, the whole nine yards. Life would be so much easier if I could simply obtain a work outfit from http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/categories/Scrubs/Scrubs-for-Women/ and have the company reimburse for the expense. Scrubs are both modest and comfortable to wear. If everyone wore a uniform to work, you would never be having to suffer the bad taste of the person who wears their skirts or shorts way too short and their shirts way too low in the neck.

I know that a lot of people would object, saying that they want the freedom to choose what they wear, to be able to express their individuality, but I think it would be a great benefit for people to not have to spend a lot of money on work clothes. It would be even better if the company had a uniform laundry service. My uncle used to work as an automobile mechanic in a well known shop and his company provided the mechanics with work clothes and even had them laundered. I think that would be a wonderful benefit to have, don’t you?

Supermarkets of the future

Anu — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:28:03 +0000

My cousin sent me the link to a BBC website that was talking about a new store in Germany called “The Future Store.” He included the note “I thought you might get a kick out of this.” So I clicked on the link and watched a video made for a tv news show where the reporter was going around the store and explaining how new technology was being used at this store.

It really was very interesting; the customers use their cell phones to scan the bar code of the product they are buying when they take it off of the shelf before they put it in their cart. The meat counter has microchips in the meat packages to advise the store that the meat package has been removed, so the store can keep track of when they need to re-stock. When the customer is finished shopping, they press a button on their phone, which produces a “master bar code” which they use to scan at a self-service checkout counter. Really all quite interesting. The biggest question I have about the process is regarding how the store expects to keep the customers “honest” and reduce the risk of shop-lifting? I’d be curious to learn about that part of the equation!

New eyeglasses for little money

Anu — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:30:07 +0000

In this economy, most of the people that I know are trying to save money everywhere they can. For quite a long time now, I’ve been hearing about being able to buy eyeglasses for as low as $6.95 a pair at the Zenni Optical website.

My biggest concern about buying glasses over the Internet is getting them to fit on my face once they arrive. I have a very short temple, for one thing. I don’t know how that issue (if it even IS an issue!) would be taken care of in the case of buying glasses over the Internet.

I’ve been hearing that they have been discussed on popular radio shows, and that they were mentioned in an article that was discussing ways to save money on eye care in the New York Times newspaper as a good place to get cheap back-up glasses. I checked out their website and found that they had over 200 pairs of glasses for $6.95! And I actually did see a couple of good looking pairs of $6.95 glasses that I would consider buying. I like the shape and the color; they are very much like what I already wear. Pretty soon it will be time for me to get a new pair of glasses, so I will be checking them out for sure!

Wednesday is “Hump Day”

Anu — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:30:13 +0000

I like Wednesdays, my co-workers call Wednesday “Hump Day.” At first I thought that they were being vulgar, but when they explained that it meant that the work week is half-way over on Wednesday, that is “over the hump and downhill from here” then I realized that it was not a bad thing at all. So, now I like Wednesdays, because then I can start to look forward to the weekend!

Pinching pennies

Anu — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:53:35 +0000

As the economy appears to be at a standstill, I’m considering getting some online free auto policy quotes. I’ve been loyal to my discount auto insurance company for many years, but I keep seeing so many commercials and advertisements that encourage me to switch to a different company, I think I’ll spend some time trying to find a more affordable car insurance plan.

I know that one way to save money on auto insurance is to raise the deductible, but that is not a step that I want to take. With my luck, I’d probably raise the deductible and then within the week I’d have some crazy thing happen and end up paying something extra out of pocket!

One way that I know I can save money on the insurance is to drop the collision coverage on the car that gets stored in the winter. Just drop it during the storage time, and keep the comprehensive. As long as the car is in the storage barn it’s not going to be colliding with anything!

In Speech recognition

Anu — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 22:00:31 +0000

I just recently had surgery on my left hand which makes it difficult to type. I do a lot of typing and I knew that it would be really hard for me to continue with my blogging so I decided to try some speech recognition programs. The first speech recognition program that I tried was a free trial period for something called E. speech something like that and it was not user friendly and it was a terrible program. I ended up uninstalling it after a couple of hours of struggling then I decided to go onto face book and asked my friends if they’ve had any recommendations for a good speech recognition program.

While I was waiting to hear from them about that I found out that there are some speech recognition programs already built into Microsoft word on Windows XP and Windows 7. I have Windows XP so I was really excited to find out about that. I installed it and am giving it a try. This is my first dictation and so far I have only found one error where I am saying the word blogging and instead it is typing blocking so I need to figure out how to fix that particular problem. other than that so far it looks like it’s doing a really great job!

Bill pay

Anu — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:37:36 +0000

I really love to use the Internet to pay my bills online. I love to set up the autopay feature on my credit cards so that the minimum payment is always paid so that I don’t incur any late fees. Of course, I send in more money than the minimum payment, but I set it up that way just to cover my backside just in case.

One thing that annoys me is when I try to set up autopay with a company and they require that you download a form, fill it out and mail it in with a voided check. If I wanted to do all of that, I wouldn’t be trying to sign up for autopay in the first place! So I arrange with my bank’s BillPay service to send those payments in for me. There is more than one way to skin a cat!