Friday, Dec. 4, 1998: The stock market is back up a bit today with the news that unemployment in the U.S. remains low in spite of the poor economy in Japan.

Your guess is as good as mine as to whether we're headed into a recession. The market is up; the market is down. The rest of the world is in a recession. Investors are nervous (witness fluctuations since October), and some retailers are worried about a slow Christmas.

I don't want to see a recession, but there are up sides to everything. If we get one, at least it'll clear out some of the dead wood that's been accumulating in the business world of late.

I refer especially to the service industry, mainly because I've had a lot of recent experience in that part of our economy.

Had some landscaping work done. People came out and did estimates and offered to charge me an enormous amount of money for six or eight hours' work at most. Called another company, waited two weeks until someone could fit me into the schedule for an estimate, and it came out double the first one, though in fairness they were offering to do a little more thorough job.

I called the first landscaper and left a message saying I was ready to have the work done. Please give me a call. They didn't.

Time was getting short. This kind of work needs to be done in late summer or early fall, and it was a matter of necessity. I didn't have time to do it myself, so I called the second company. They sent me a contract in the mail. A contract... to plant grass!

I filled out the contract, complete with a lot of information I didn't really like to give out. When you're desperate, you do what you gotta. About a week later, they called to say that they would call me shortly and schedule the work. "Time's getting short," I said. "We'll get to you as quickly as we can," they said.

They never called. My wife called me at work one day and asked if I knew anything about why there was a man in our back yard. "What's he doing?" I asked. "Going back and forth pushing some kind of tiller or something." "He's aerating. Leave him alone."

I wondered when someone would come to scatter seed, but I guess he must have scattered it the first time out, because a few days later grass started growing. It would have been nice to know, so I could have been watering all along. About a week later another guy showed up to do the front yard. Why not all at once? I'll never know.

Had some siding put on, too. A crew came out and slapped it up in two days. They left scraps and cigarette butts all over the yard (the landscapers left butts everywhere too), and it took a few days to get them back out to correct some problems. There was one problem they still haven't corrected, but all in all it was a reasonable job for a reasonable price.

The floor crew did a great job, though I had to pull teeth to get them out before Thanksgiving. Time was short, of course, because I had been through three other companies that didn't call back, didn't show up for appointments, couldn't find information to do accurate estimates, kept putting me off.

The company that did come through for me charged for the estimate, and required full payment in advance. You can bet I was grinding my teeth when I signed that credit card slip. But the job had to be done by Thanksgiving.

It was, with one day to spare.

My advice, if you're planning work at your house and you have the money all ready to spend, is to salt that money away and wait for leaner times. If the project is time-critical, you're out of luck.

Recessions are kind of like forest fires. They're not pleasant, but they do get rid of the dead wood.

One other recent experience: I refinanced my house in July, first payment due Aug. 22. Before time came to send the first payment, I got a letter saying the loan had been sold to another company. Send payments to this address... use this account number. Did that.

At the same time and from the same company I arranged a second mortgage to pay for all this work I'm having done. When I got my first statement for the second mortgage, it showed the small payment I had made, and it showed a larger payment. I looked closer and saw that the larger payment was exactly the same as my mortgage payment.

They had applied the mortgage payment to the second mortgage.

Long story short: I've spent a great deal of time on the phone and writing letters since then, and cannot convince this company that they hold my mortgage. I'm not in the computer. I haven't been able to make a payment yet.

This may sound like a good thing. It's not. When they finally get their act together, I'll have to pay all the retroactive mortgage. That's not a problem, but I fear it won't come about until after the first of the year, and I'll have to pay a lot higher income tax this year because of that.

I also may have to pay my property taxes, and wait for who knows how long to get reimbursed from my escrow account.

See what I mean? It just could be that times are too good. One of the good things about the free enterprise system is that if you're incompetent or lazy, you don't make it.