Reliving prom a little with my daughter

Posted on 17th March 2012 in Business, Entertainment/Fun, Friends/Family, Internet, Life, Money/Finances, Opinion, Shopping

Guest post written by Donna Reins

I realize that I’m way past the age to care about prom dress shopping, but I like to put myself in my prom-going shoes to help my daughter some. Prom is a much bigger deal now than it was back when I was in high school. I guess that I shouldn’t be that surprised about it because there are so many things that are made specifically about prom and TV and movies make it into a much bigger deal than back in my day. It gets me a little excited too so I’m having a lot of fun helping her pick out all kinds of prom stuff.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of research to help her pick out some prom trends for this year and when I was doing that I saw some bankrupt alternatives online. I hadn’t been looking for them, but I thought that I could really use them with all of my credit card debt, so I’m going to check them out.

I’ve already seen all types of gorgeous dresses, but I’m really supportive of a cocktail length dress and awesome shoes instead of a floor length gown. I think that the shorter dresses tend to cost a little less anyway.

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Have Banks All Lost Their Minds?

Posted on 12th March 2012 in Business, Life, Money/Finances, Opinion

The mason jar that I keep on my dresser for collecting all the loose change at night was pretty full. Since I had to go to the bank today to cash a check, I decided to take the jar with me and have the bank exchange it out for dollar bills.

Before leaving the house, I looked through all the loose change for any wheat pennies and any other unusually old coins. I found 6 wheat pennies and set them aside. Then I carried the jar out to the truck and away we went.

When I got to the bank the teller was not happy at all to take my jar of loose change. She made no effort her hide her disgust with having to handle my coins for me. First of all, she asked me why I hadn’t sorted and rolled all the coins. I told I though the bank had a machine to do that. She said, “No – not at the branches.”

She went into a back room and came back out with a large ziploc type of bag. Opening the bag, she turned my mason jar upside down and dumped all the coins in it. Then she asked me for a deposit slip for my account. I was surprised that she asked for that – I wanted cash back for my coins. Again, with great disdain, she said, “No – we don’t do that at the branches.”

Unless I wanted to drive all the way downtown to the main office with my jar of coins, my only choice to be rid of the loose change was to give them my coins with a deposit slip, and wait for them to send the bag of coins to the home office where someone would dump them into a coin sorting machine, add up the total value of the coins, and then credit my account with a deposit. And that it would take 3-5 business days for the deposit to be credited to my account for me to be able to withdraw that money.

I’m sorry, folks. This is just crazy to me. Its not a lot of money and its not an urgent matter to me. But my coins are legal tender and I took them to my bank where I have done business for over 14 years. You would think that the least they could do is exchange coins for dollar bills and not take your money for 3 – 5 business days before you can get it back.

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Servers

Posted on 8th March 2012 in Business, Technology/Gadgets, work

It seems as if the whole world comes to a screeching halt when the Server that allows you access to the World Wide Web has stopped working. I’m so grateful for our IT folks at work that are in charge of all the computers that keep the place running and alive. I’ve tried a couple times to get some of their home numbers so that I could call and ask for their assistance if I needed it for my home computer, they just laugh it off and keep doing what they do to keep us in the Clouds.

 

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Audio conference services

Posted on 1st March 2012 in Business, Internet, Life, Opinion, Technology/Gadgets

Audio conferencing services are a great way to help more people be able to work from their homes. There are many jobs now that rely heavily on computers, the Internet, and audio conferencing for the majority of their work day. I think that it’s a wonderful option to be able to do that, and I wish that more companies offered that option to more of their employees.

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It takes all types

Posted on 22nd February 2012 in Business, Friends/Family, Life

Sometimes when you live in a small town you don’t think about the careers that could be pursued in a big city.  In a way, living in a small town is like living in a bubble. Life is slower, simpler in a small town.  So when you leave that small town to go on some kind of trip, either business or pleasure sometimes you get a glimpse into the “real world” and it can be eye-opening. For example, my nephew Shawn has been going to college at Princeton, and he didn’t come home from college for the winter break because he was invited to go spend the break with his room-mate’s family.

The father of the family is in the chemical investment banking business. To be perfectly honest, I never would have dreamed that there was such a business, and I can only imagine what they do there.  Dave (Shawn’s room-mate) is already planning on entering the business and going into the chemical mergers and acquisitions department in an advisory position.  Being a very hands-on kind of guy, that sounds to me like a lot of paper-work for a job, and that is not something I would be interested in doing myself; I like getting out in the elements and getting my hands dirty. But someone like Shawn, who is a lot more studious and serious, that sounds like something he could do if it interested him.  I’m always wondering if Shawn is going to end up getting a job offer from a friendship forged there at school. After all, they say it isn’t what you know that counts, it is who you know. And going to an ivy league college like that greatly increases your chances of meeting a very influential person that could act as a catalyst in making a major change in your employment future.

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