Happy new years everyone. It seems like here there is a lot of fees are going up when it comes to provincial stuff such as income taxes and even various things like pubic transportation getting more expensive. Of course this has a lot of people saying how that isn’t good for the economy and such. One thing that this made me think of is the public transportation price and how I remember a quote before of someone saying compared to a car you are getting a bargain for what you pay. Therefore the small increase shouldn’t matter much.

It made me think because if you are trying to lure people into using it more from a financial point of view isn’t it better to make it a lot cheaper as opposed to just a little? I know the argument is usually that people are willing to pay so many dollars for another thing anyways so you would think they shouldn’t be apprehensive if you price it similar except a bit cheaper. I personally think that only really works if what you offer is in a sense exactly the same thing. Example, people that run a barber shop where if everyone else is charging $10 per cut then realistically you can say you can undercut it by just a little. However, saying like because people are willing to pay $12 to watch one movie in the theatres means that people should be contempt to pay $10 to order one movie on their TV as it is a bargain in comparison doesn’t work the same I think.

I would be inclined to say there you would need to make it a lot cheaper as it is not the same. Either way guess people will have to adapt to the increases since these are more of an essential service of sort as opposed a non essential.

There was a very interesting piece of news today in regards to a local bus driver that got fired as a result of a blog that he maintained. The situation basically was that the person was a newly hired as a bus driver and was currently within his 6 month probationary period. As it turns out, he thought that it would be a great idea to blog about his experiences about his new job to friends and family members. A point of note, this was a career change for him from a freelance writer.

People here know that during the past month or so snow has been horrible here and as a result the transit system was put to its knees in many ways. The person then blogged about his opinion of the situation such as how he thought there was a lot of disorganization in the company. As it turns out, the transit company found that offensive and therefore they fired him on that basis.

As it turns out, since he was in a 6 months probationary period the company could fire him for any reason similar to most other companies too. Interesting enough, if he had waited 6 months after and then wrote the post it would have been a semi different story. So that should make you think about the digital medium and sharing your thoughts if you are a newly hired person.

I found this interesting too as there are actually companies nowadays that promote blogging as a way to get further exposure for a company and our transit system here actually has a public blog. Makes you wonder why they didn’t just find a way to work with his abilities in that sense instead.