Out of the Ordinary

I wanted to make a tech related blog, but felt like going in a little different direction with this post. I've been thinking a lot about life in general, especially with the way the job market is right now. I saw on the news the other day about how a small town school in my state had an opening for a custodian. At the time of the news story, they had received over 800 applications. 800 for a custodian! I am by no means trying to belittle that job, but that's just unreal to me. Especially since the school was in a small town.

Then I started to realize how fortunate I really am to have a job. You will never hear me say I'm not thankful that the Lord gave me the job I have now, my house, my family, and everything else that we have. But, I don't think (OK I know), I didn't realize just how truly blessed I am. The company I work for is going through a pretty major downsizing, so I'm just playing it by ear right now, but hey I'm still employed at the moment. The bad thing is, there is so much speculation and new rumors everyday. You just wish you knew one way or the other. I started searching around on the internet for jobs in my field and became quickly depressed. It really is slim pickings.

However, over the last few days I have felt at peace with it. I know that whatever happens, the Lord will take care of us, just like he always has. I will leave you with this story:

Shortly after my wife and I got married, I was working in a $7/hr job. I had to have emergency appendix surgery (the surgeon told me later that I had less than 2 hours before it burst). The infection was bad enough that I had to heal from the inside out. The job I was working in was a heavy lifting type job, so the doctor told me I wouldn't be working for at least a month. I became scared real quickly. Short Term Disability takes a few weeks to kick in, $7/hr is not much, then take 60% of that and I knew we were going to be in trouble, financially.

A few weeks went by and the bills were coming due. We were going to be short, and no matter how we looked at the finances, there was just no way we were going to be able to pay them. We kept trying and trying to move stuff around, nothing. We finally just said God your going to have to help us somehow. Help us see something that we're not seeing now.

Then we got a knock on the door (it happened to be a Sunday morning), and lo and behold there was the Pastor of our church (Just so happens the pastor is my Grandpa, and hes a good one too!). He handed me an envelope and said they had taken up an offering to help us during this time. I couldn't believe it, and when we took the money back inside the house, we checked the amount. There was exactly the right amount, to the penny, of what we needed to pay our bills. To me and my wife, that was awesome. Something we still talk about to this day.

So, every time I start to get nervous about my current job, I'm reminded of that time in my life. The Lord will protect us, the Lord will provide. Its the trust and putting our faith into his hands that us humans have such a hard time with. Its amazing what God can do for us, if we will just let him!

World of PTC

PTC (Paid To Click) are growing in popularity pretty rapidly. These sites will pay you to click on their ads. Most sites will offer up to .02 cents per ad (For the Free/Standard account). Doesn't seem like much does it? If you can refer some of your friends to use your referral link, you can get a percentage of their clicks. Of course the more referrals, the more money (Referrals are big in PTCs).

How do you tell which is legit and which isn't? One easy way is to see how much they say they will pay you to click their links. The old adage of "if it sounds to good to be true, it probably isn't", can be applied to PTC websites. The legit ones are not here to make you rich overnight. It is however a nice way to get a little money here and there. There are people with some pretty wild success stories, or those that have massive amounts of active referrals, that may make some pretty good amounts of money. But, just like the commercials, in size 2 font no less, "Results not typical".

Also, if you have to pay to join, no matter how great it sounds, be very cautious. I always wondered why they don't let you join for free, then as you make some money, they could take some of your profits out for their cut. I would be more interested in joining something like that, then having to pay to learn the so-called 'secret'.


Good Luck! If you sign up to any of these listed on my site, drop me a line with any questions.  I'll do my best to answer them.