men got closer to the people and things they liked. It wasn't long before his friend got a job as a waiter in a local restaurant.
"This is just how things happen," said the boss. "A waiter makes a thousand and ten pounds in a year, and the waitresses over four hundred pounds."
The chef thought about his math. Four hundred pounds in a year is a lot of money.
"You don't have to do that much," said the boss, "Just stay at the bar with your back to the wall."
The food was always good.
"I'm always looking for someone who wants to serve food and drink. But you mustn't be interested in serving drinks to anyone other than your customers," said the boss. "The barman must be able to distinguish between people who know what they want and those who don't."
"I can tell a lot about people," said the guy who worked at the bar.
"I'm sure you can," said the boss. "That's why you're such a good barman."
The chef found out that it was okay to serve his former colleagues at the fish factory if they wanted a beer or a glass of wine, but it was still better to be on the other side of the bar from them.
"Is that why the boss has a rule that you have to be able to tell a lot about people?"
"That's just an example," said the boss. "The basic rule is that you must be able to distinguish between people who know what they want and those who don't. Then you have to be able to follow the customers' orders."
The chef thought about his math. People got a thousand pounds from one thousand and ten pounds, so they each needed to pay 100 crowns.
"How much do I get paid for it?"
"You don't get paid any money. The food and drink are on the house."
"That's nothing."
"It doesn't seem like a lot but if you do the math it adds up."
The chef did the math and found out that it was ten per cent of the total income. That was still not much.
"It's not the kind of income you can save money on. The best thing about the job is that you can't save any money."
When the chef turned fifty, the chef realized that it was time to go. He left the bar.
A year later he heard that he was on some kind of public registry because his employer didn't want any trouble. A year after that, he heard that he had been found dead, hanging on a meat hook in the walk-in cooler. That was one of the few ways to quickly kill someone.
"That man at the bar was a killer," said the chef.
It turned out that the boss had a large stable of waiters. And there was nothing illegal about what he did. He was just a smart guy who had found a way to improve sales at the bar by exploiting the customers' greed. It was obvious that everyone who worked there was happy. Because of the way that the boss had them divided up, he could make a lot of money with very little effort.
This is a book about money and it is going to teach you a lot about how people respond to money. The stories in this book have to do with money as they relate to the needs and desires of individuals. We'll talk about how people use money to satisfy their cravings and to get what they want from their relationships with others. This is a book that could start anywhere, but I chose to start at the workplace because in many ways the workplace is like life itself, but with more people involved.
"Business is not an exact science," said Oscarsson in his book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Economics.
In many ways, the people in the bar reminded me of the people I have come across at work. I've come across plenty of managers who are like the guy in the restaurant who wanted to have someone serve drinks. They know how to keep people on their toes by threatening them with punishment if things don't go well, and they can keep the workers in their place by giving them little reason to complain. The workers are kept busy at all times of the day or night with work that offers few benefits or opportunities for advancement. And those few who rise to positions of leadership are more eager to take care of themselves than to do the most for the organization.
While working at Sushi Train, it became clear to me that a job like that is just as important for the manager as it is for the people who work there. I've seen many cases where a manager is like the restaurant owner who only knows how to make money by exploiting his workers. And managers can do that with plenty of workers because most managers don't want to be leaders. In fact, they want to be treated just like the workers, or even worse.
While I was working at the fish factory, I learned that an employer can use something called emotional bullying to make workers behave in ways that increase the profits of the company. And many bosses think that they are doing their employees a favor because they think that it will make them more loyal to the organization. That was the main reason why I left.
In many cases it is hard to understand how people can stand being a part of such an organization and to have so little control over the life they lead. It makes me think about our parents and the kind of life they had to live back in the 1950s. As I learned more about it, I came to understand why many people still consider those years to have been a dark age.
The people in the bar were like the employees who had to follow someone's orders or else they would lose their jobs. Their days were filled with work that was never finished and that could never be finished. Everything in their lives was done to make the boss happy. If they stopped giving the boss money, it was as if they were trying to be the boss themselves.
When I was working at the bar, I learned that some people use shame, blame, guilt, and fear to control the lives of others. They do this to get what they want from others, and to make people give them what they need in exchange for giving them what they want. Those with an interest in power and control find it easy to use others this way. It's like what Oscarsson says about business: It's not an exact science.
If a boss doesn't know how to get workers to do what he wants them to do, and if he doesn't know how to get customers to give him what he wants, he might use the threat of punishment as a way to get things done.
"Workers need to be exploited if they are to work. If they are to work harder, they must have their wages lowered. If they need their wages increased, they must be exploited a little more."
In the end, it is not just bosses who have this kind of relationship with the people who work for them. Workers who work for other people often find it easy to be used this way. Workers can be exploited by the people who pay them wages or the people who own the businesses where they work. And those who pay them sometimes put all kinds of conditions on the money that they spend.
You could spend your money in one of several ways, and in some cases your money wouldn't really make a difference to the outcome of your life. If you got too many emails to respond to, or too many orders to fill, your boss might threaten to cut your pay. Or your kids might just get sick or be badly behaved because you don't have enough money to pay attention to them.
Of course, it is possible that your boss will pay you a decent wage. But even that might not make it possible for you to survive with your family because of the stress that the boss puts on you.
You might wonder whether your boss can push you around in ways that will hurt your ability to do your job. But it is easy to be persuaded that you are working for someone else who is somehow more important than you are. And if you don't get the job done the way your boss wants it done, you will find out that it's easy to justify doing things that will hurt you. You will find yourself taking the boss's side, and even using his methods on other people. You will learn to defend yourself by making excuses for doing things that go against what you think is right.
Some people even get so used to being bullied and manipulated that they think that being pushed around is their own fault. And this happens even though they never signed on for the job to begin with. Those who get used to being pushed around don't think that they can do anything to change things for the better. When things don't go the way that they expected, some people try to take revenge. But even that can feel out of control and that makes it easy to get angry and to say things that you didn't mean.
And if people don't do their jobs, there is always a reason that can be attributed to the person who wants them to go along with things. Sometimes this can be easy to deal with, but other times it can be difficult. That is when you feel like an outsider in your own life, or like a person in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This book is about the ways in which we can end up feeling pushed around by those who are supposed to be helping us. We need
