By ANN BELSER, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Chances are, in any company that employs two people, one of them is disgruntled.

So, take that and extrapolate it to a company with hundreds or thousands of workers, then throw in the Internet and what do you get?

If there is anything we as Americans can do well, it's panic.

A call for a dusting of snow from the National Weather Service that has the most remote chance (in the neighborhood of 1 in 1,000) of being a significant snowfall becomes the storm of the century on television news, prompting a run on milk and toilet paper.

We all know the table, the desk, even the credenza where the goodies are piled in the office.

Rosa buys pies every Thursday.

R.J. brings in roasted peanuts.

Teresa finally finished selling chocolate for her son's band trip to Orlando.

And even though Arlene retired last year, she still sends in baked goods.

First there was the cooking gear that she sells outright for the Pampered Chef.
For that she smashed the handle of a chopper, cutting onions into smaller and smaller pieces, like the star of an infomercial. She showed how a cutting board had a built-in measuring cup, just for those onions.

It was 2 p.m. on a recent Thursday outside of one of Pittsburgh's busiest business hotels, and the cabs parked there hadn't had a customer in the last hour and 20 minutes.
Charles Chuckee knew exactly how long it had been because that was how long he had been sitting in his cab waiting for a fare. The guy in the cab in front of him had given up and driven away.

Even as unemployment numbers continue to creep up, the jobless numbers don't tell the whole story of how companies are trying to cut back on payroll expenses.
Increasingly, workers are being asked -- or told -- to go without pay for days or weeks as employers institute unpaid furloughs.

They aren't the top Internet search terms overall, but comScore Inc., which analyzes online marketing behavior for companies, notes that the increase of searches related to the economic downturn is significant.

Last summer, if Steve McGavran's sons were in the car, he could buy gasoline from only Exxon.The gas station wasn't giving anything away. The McGavran boys -- Max, 6, and Jack, 8, of Lenexa, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City -- were playing a stock market game and had included Exxon Mobile Corp. in their pretend portfolio.

During the Great Depression, miners from Pittsburgh worked a reopened mine in Buttermilk Hollow, Pa., to help the needy. One hundred unemployed men mined an estimated 25 tons a day, using only hand tools, over a three-week period. The coal was dumped into a common bin and redistributed by hand and by truck.

It's all about dollar cost averaging.That's when you invest the same amount, week after week or month after month for years, buying fewer shares when the market is high, more when it is low. Over time, there will be an average investment price for your money that has taken advantage of market lows.