Watercooler Stories

WOMEN WANT CLEAN GARAGES

Forget the flowers, cancel the candy -- what mothers really want for Mother's Day, or any other day, is a cleaned and organized garage.

Marc Shuman, president of GarageTek in Syosset, N.Y., says most calls to his firm, which designs and installs garage organization equipment, come from women.

"Women are ignoring the traditional boundary line that says the garage is male turf. If it's a mess -- and frankly that's how guys often leave it -- it's women who resolve to fix the problem," Shuman says in a statement.

"But, each year a growing number of male customers order GarageTek's customized and professionally installed system as a gift to the women in their lives."

IMMIGRANTS LACK ENGLISH SKILLS

The vast majority of immigrants lack even the most basic literacy skills to be successful in the United States.

A report by ETS, the non-profit educational testing and measurement organization, finds nearly 40 percent of all 18- to 64-year-old immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 1990s lacked a high school diploma or GED.

"A national need to address English-language and literacy proficiency deficits of the immigrant population has reached crisis proportions," says study author Andrew Sum of Northeastern University.

According to the U.S. Census, in the 1990s those who either did not speak English at all or who did not speak it well, rose to 8.3 million -- a gain of 71 percent.

SUV TAX CREDITS FOR SOME

The National Association of Tax Professionals says many consumers believe they can get a tax credit just for buying a sport-utility vehicle.

Legislation had been discussed in Congress to offer a tax credit to buyers of hybrid SUVs -- that used less gasoline -- but it never became law.

However, there is a clean fuel tax deduction of up to $2,000 for those who bought hybrid automobiles such as the Toyota Prius, CNN/Money reports.

In addition, there is a deduction for SUV buyers who own small businesses and buy a SUV, weighing more than 6,000 pounds, which is used for business purposes.

ANTI-ICING COATING PASSES TEST

A coating developed by Michigan Technological University, which was tested this winter on the iciest bridge in Wisconsin, might make winter commuting safer.

The pavement is covered with a sheet of anti-icing epoxy covered with an aggregate that looks like kitty litter.

"It acts sort of like a hard sponge," says inventor Russ Alger, of MTU's Keweenaw Research Center. "You put a light amount of de-icing chemical on there, and it keeps coming up to the surface."

When salt trucks apply magnesium chloride to the bridge, it doesn't just sit on top of the concrete, later to be shoved aside by snow plows and washed into the river, it soaks into the overlay and stays put -- which resulted in no accidents on the bridge this winter.