Even though both Brenda and I have two very different career paths we are following in our third quarter transition, they tend to cross often. She works a few days a week in the kitchen creating the products we take vending on weekends and I write daily for dozens of ghostwriting clients. We look to the weekends as our fun time although to others our fun seems to be a lot of work.
I think it really depends on your perspective. We work hard all week to get the break we enjoy when we go vending. I know, vending is hard work but for some reason both Brenda and I don’t see it like that. We sort of see our weekends as the opposite. The vending part is the fun part because we get to interact with various people who taste Brenda’s unique products. Vending actually puts us out there so that we can meet new people and socialize in a very different way. We all know that sharing food is a great way to get to know someone else. It is a huge socializing activity. I think what we’ve somehow stumbled upon in our vending activities is a way to interact with people in a different way through offering taste samples of our products. A fine example occurred today while on site at the Oliver Indoor Flea Market in Oliver, BC. We were invited to visit a couple of our customers to socialize on their deck once the weather improves. We’ve already taken up a couple of offers of overnight stays with other vendors and find that our personal approach to what we are doing while vending has opened many doors. If I had to pin it down to something specific, I would have to say that it has to do with our attitude. We vend for fun. Sure, we want to pay our way and cover associated costs but generally speaking, we don’t have pressure to make each vending date one that has to make us some money. We vend because we enjoy doing something together that we find fun to do. Are we unusual? Not really. Many of the other vendors we have gotten to know in Oliver are pretty much the same as us. They enjoy hanging out together, laughing, joking and just becoming closer friends. Yes, the sales figures at the end of each vending day have an impact but they are not as important as the interaction with others in the same venue that we get along with. To give you an idea, there are approximately a half dozen or so of us vendors in the one room in the Oliver Indoor Flea Market who have built a kind of friendship. We all take turns each weekend on who is going to bring a group lunch to share with the rest of us. It cycles back to what I said about sharing our taste samples with customers to get to know them better. Brenda and I look forward to the hour and 45-minute drive to Oliver each Saturday and Sunday morning because we know a couple of things. We will be spending those days with people we like, getting to know more new people who visit the market, and we will be doing this together. It’s that time when our career paths cross but we turn it into a fun couple of days vending. So you could say that our third quarter transition includes a healthy serving of fun. With such a huge portion of fun we have been able to either push away or eliminate the stresses that used to dominate our lives. In a way, we have turned a negative into a positive and are running with it. I know for a fact both Brenda and I are really happen where we are now in our lives and it would never have happened if we didn’t turn vending into an opportunity to have fun and meet others.
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AuthorMy name is George Elliott. I have been in the Media Industry since 1978. I spent 23 years in Broadcasting and worked in a total of six different radio stations located in southern British Columbia Canada during my career. In 2000 I switched gears and moved into the Print Media Industry at a small town, local weekly newspaper. In 2004 I bought the paper and operated it with my wife, Brenda until July 2016 when we closed it. I launched a freelance web content and article writing business from my home in January 2014. Archives
April 2021
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