Have you ever watched a frog or a lobster boil in water? Me neither. I can’t afford them. But I have seen it on TV, which is like reality, only fake. But fakeness aside I recently watched a woman nearly panic filling out a form. At the UPS Store. Looking for a checkbox or some way to not get on a mailing list. You see she worked in the direct mailing industry. She was so worried that she might get on someone’s list and start getting a flood of mail. The staff tried to re-assure her that the form was for recording who she was in case they needed to contact her to let her know her package was accidentally dropped into a vat of acid and the package was destroyed. No dice. She knew that she was going to get huge amounts of mail because of the UPS store.

Part of the work I do for one client is in the email industry. I don’t worry about spam because the protection the email server offers me is so excellent. It comes in periodically, but I move the message into a spam sniffer and the computer gets smarter and the spammers have to work harder to get around the growing technology that makes the email safer to read, and more useful to read. I’ve grown care free when it comes to giving out my email address because I know that real email will reach me while fake email will flounder in the pits of some trash folder for less than 24 hours and then magically disappear.

The problem with both positions is problematic: we can develop a paranoia as humans and we can also get a little too naive. I need to be slightly more careful with my email address, and people like this woman need to relax and realize that junk mail is not going to end her life, though some tree somewhere gave up its life for the envelope and the paper inside.

As financial managers we need to regularly be watching our finances so that we can be aware of what is going on, we need to plan so that we can grow our resources, and we need to not be checking our bank accounts online every 5 minutes. If you know your direct deposit is going to come in on Friday, check it Friday afternoon to make sure its gone through, but don’t babysit your bank’s site looking for the cash to come in… even if you really need the cash to come in. But don’t just ignore the account Friday - confirm that the transactions are all in place.

Your financial life is not a lobster, but you want to make sure its not in hot water… or leaking like this dingy I’m in right now. Where’s the caulk?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Foundations, Funny Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.