Work | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Apr

big two-hearted racetrack

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

This past Thursday I went to a corporate event at F1 Boston in Braintree. The sales team had been meeting there all day; Managed Services was joining them for dinner, drinks, and kart racing, not in that order. We drove on F1′s “City Course”: an uphill slope, two ninety degree turns, a downhill hairpin, and another two ninety degree turns with a straight shot to finish. Over thirty of us were racing, so we were divvied up into qualifying heats.

To drive an F1 kart, you have to forget half of what you know about driving. The karts lack power steering, so they respond only to vigorous turns of the wheel, but they respond quickly. It’s easy to oversteer, especially if you accelerate into a turn, slamming into walls or spinning out. Add to this the nine other racers on the course with you, each with their own agenda. You not only have to drive with skill; you need the killer instinct to pass as well.

There’s something thrilling about whipping down a straightaway at thirty miles an hour, mere inches off the ground. There’s also the joy of a job well done, applying brake and gas in just the right rhythm to squeal around a turn on the inside. But then you realize you haven’t seen another driver for the last two minutes. They’re in a knot at the opposite end of the track, jockeying for position, and you’re fighting your hardest just to keep the kart under control. Then the race ends and you stagger out of the kart, forearms shaking from exertion, and wrestle your too-small helmet off. The other racers are slapping each other on the back, exchanging friendly taunts, or recounting stories of near misses and sudden reversals. It’s as if they were in one race and you, another. And there’s still another qualifier to go, and then the final bracket. You consider shrugging out of your jumpsuit and going upstairs for a drink, but you know you have one more run in you.

I didn’t expect to win any trophies. But I got better with each race, and now I can say it’s something I’ve done.

Sep

up onto the banks of this hard land

Posted by Perich at 9:13 am

Our ancestors were hunters and foragers. The kind of hunger that we call “starving” today (as in “Mom, I’m -”), they lived with every waking hour. They followed herds of animals that were faster, stronger and better armed than they were and they died if they weren’t smarter. For the first ninety thousand years of its existence, the human race knew only one song and that was keep moving.

Fast forward ninety thousand years to this Tuesday, when my email at work was so slow that I couldn’t use it. I would click on a message with a file attachment and count one, two, three, four, five, six before it opened. The message, that is, not the file. Opening a file merited a trip to the water cooler.

“You have eighteen thousand emails in your inbox,” someone said. “Try deleting a few.”

Humans can’t visualize eighteen thousand of something. Hell, we have a hard time with more than seven. We’re descended from a species that never saw a thousand of anything useful. I didn’t intend to have eighteen thousand emails in my inbox. It might have been eighteen hundred or eighteen million.

Apparently my work email doesn’t have a limit on inbox size. Every other company I’ve ever worked for dinged me when my inbox got too big. I used to find this insanely frustrating. Cloud computing!, I would yell at Outlook. Web 2.0! Paperless office! Cheap bandwidth! Agile management! I’d do this at least once a month, angrily archiving and wishing for more storage all the while.

I never realized that the limits were there to help me. If you don’t think of limits as helpful, try searching through eighteen thousand emails.

Limits force me to be lean. I have to be ruthless with my inbox. If it’s older than a month, archive it. If my name isn’t in the “To:” field, ignore it. If I can’t find it, ask the person to reforward it. This reduces the time that Outlook has to spend churning for something.

Limits reduce my processing time. Before, if I wanted to find an old email, I had to search through eighteen thousand. Now, I know an email is either in my inbox or my archive. I can search my inbox in a few seconds. And if more than half of my queries take a few seconds, rather than minutes, that makes me more efficient.

This isn’t accidental. Humans evolved to make the most of limited resources, including the energy available for our brains. A flock of birds takes off from the trees; you want to waste valuable calories counting each of them? Is there that much difference between a flock of two hundred and a flock of one hundred and ninety-seven? It’s a flock. It’s a whole mess of birds. Move on.

Every now and then I think about cutting back. When I’m not at work, I’m writing. When I’m not writing, I’m blogging, either for this little soapbox or for Overthinking It. When I’m not blogging, I’m at jiu-jitsu. When I’m not at jiu-jitsu, I’m piecing together a social life. Sometimes I eat; sometimes I sleep. And sometimes the stress of answering a hundred little bells makes me want to punch the sun out of the sky.

But I do my best work when I’m cornered. When every hour of the day is spoken for, I have to use my time wisely. I’m ruthless with my minutes. I write like I’m hungry and I hustle like I’m broke. Even if my job does pay me a princely salary, I keep moving as if it doesn’t. I fill my days with the stuff that would be a second job or a night shift. I try not to let comfort catch up with me.

Milennia ago, my great-nth grandfather stood somewhere in Africa and wondered if there was a number higher than eighteen thousand. The fact that I’m here means he didn’t waste too much time wondering. I owe it to him to do the same. Ignore the numbers. Pick up the pace. Get lean and stay ruthless. Keep moving.

Aug

let me take you on a journey through carmel city

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

The longer I work in marketing, the less comfortable I am with “eighteen to thirty-five” as a demographic. I wouldn’t want to spend 2 minutes in an elevator with most 20-year-olds, and I have to spend another 5 years in the same demo as them? There’s nothing I have in common with them aside from a lack of kids (though, as my friend Jason pointed out, people of any age without kids have more in common than people of the same age if one of them has a child, and try booking a weekend on the beach if you don’t believe me).

Of course, the beauty of Google knowing everything is that marketers no longer have to rely on broad segments dreamed up by Madison Avenue. Soccer moms, job-hopping millennials, gadget junkies, green fanatics: you no longer need to buy a bucket before you go fishing. That’s one of Internet Inc’s chief strengths: defining segments based on the behavior of your existing customers, rather than deciding “your car appeals to do-it-yourself dads” and spending $2MM of your money to find out we were wrong. So if marketing gets smarter – something I’m trying to prod it to do every day, guys, really – I won’t be in this eighteen-to-thirty-five bucket for long.

This came up, oddly, as part of my rediscovery of the golden age of hip-hop, that magical period between 1986 and 1994 when everyone sampled Motown, conscious styles dominated and lyrical flow was at its peak. As a white kid from the suburbs I was conscious of almost none of it. But that spark lay in the back of my mind until it started burning. I’ve been using Spotify to tear through the tracks I should have listened to back in the day. Tribe Called Quest. Gang Starr. Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth.

This was not the soundtrack to my teenage years. But it could have been. The Main Ingredient dropped in ’94, and at the tender age of 13 I was susceptible to fresh cuts and jams. But someone who is 18 today would have been neonatal back then. If “Carmel City” had any impact on their lives, it would have been purely subconscious. They wouldn’t relate to it in the same way I would have. That, in part, is why the eighteen-to-thirty-five demo doesn’t work.

Also, do you have any idea how jarring it is to be kicking it to The Main Ingredient and be interrupted by a Trace Adkins ad, Spotify? Marketing needs to get its act together.

Jun

ain’t had the blues yet today, but I can feel them coming on

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Those of you following me on Facebook or Twitter know about the hassle I’ve been going through with Comcast lo these past weeks. Months now, if you trace it to the first modem outages in early April.

Throughout this whole ordeal, I’ve been more impressed than I expected by Comcast’s customer service. Every time I’ve got them on the phone, I’ve spoken to someone friendly and full of energy. They’ve sympathized with my repeated frustrations. They’ve not only done whatever they can to get my issues resolved sooner, they’ve offered me other options as well. “If you don’t want to wait for the tech to come out,” one helpful lady suggested, “you can take the modem to the nearest service center and have it replaced.” Which I did, a week ago. But that didn’t really help.

This past Friday, I waited at home for a Comcast tech to come out. The promised window (5pm to 7pm) had nearly elapsed when the buzzer rang. The tech waved at me as he came up the stairs. “You should be all set now,” he said. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that every activity light on my modem was green.

“Wasn’t the modem,” he explained, plugging a diagnostic device into the coaxial cable from my wall. “I got a look at the activity from your unit before I left this morning. See, with models like these, the modem either works or it doesn’t. It won’t cycle in the way you were describing. So I got the ladder off the truck and took a look at the junction box. There were slices in the cable that leads down to your unit.”

“What could have caused that?” I asked (besides my enemies conspiring against me).

“Someone working up there, being careless. Who knows. Anyway, replaced that cable and it’s all better now. You should be getting much faster times upstream and downstream.” He indicated TX and RX speeds on his diagnostic device. “It’s a shame they made you go out to the service center to replace the modem, but I’m sure they’re just trying to be helpful. Normally I wouldn’t go into this much detail, but I feel bad, with the Internet having been on and off a few times.”

He shook my hand and let himself out.

I recounted this story to Sylvia that evening with a sprinkling of admiration. Having led a customer service team when I worked for The Company, I know it’s not easy to get high quality customer service. People don’t always have the energy to devote real care to someone else’s problems, especially when they work the 11pm to 7am shift for a cable service provider whom everyone hates. But every time I’d called, I’d found someone polite, friendly and willing to do whatever was in their power to help me. Plus I had a tech who had gone the extra mile (well, extra thirty feet vertical) to find the root cause of my problem. And from Comcast, no less!

So what did it take to squander that good will? One phone call twelve hours later.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Coldheart! I’m calling from MarketLink on behalf of Comcast, your internet service provider. Before I continue, do I have it correct? Mr. Coldheart?”

“That’s Professor Coldheart.” I glanced across the kitchen, tucking my phone into my shoulder as I did. Sylvia was assembling the brunch fixings we’d bought at the deli next door. I presumed it was a follow-up survey from my tech visit. No problem. I had plenty of nice things to say.

“Thank you, Professor. I see here that you subscribe to Comcast’s Internet service. Are you familiar with the Comcast Triple Play, which offers 120 channels of high-def …”

“That’s the HD cable plus home phone service bundled with the Internet, right?”

“… inition television service, all for … yes. Okay, very good. We can save you fifty percent on what you’re paying for home Internet if you were to bundle your …”

“Let me save you some time,” I said. “I don’t own a TV or a home phone.”

“You don’t own a television?”

“Correct.”

“And you don’t have plans to get one in the future?”

“I do not.” Stringent good breeding kept me civil.

“All right. So I presume you use a cell phone primarily for your calling purposes?”

“You’re speaking to me on my cell phone, yes.”

“All right. Have you considered that, if something should happen to your cell phone, if you should lose it or break it, that it might be worthwhile to have a backup? We can still bundle your home phone plus Internet service, with a landline only costing $19.99 a month for the first three months, then …”

And she kept going. These were the karmic chickens coming come to roost. While I know what it takes to run a world-class customer service team (based on my time at The Company), I also know what it takes to be part of an infuriating telemarketing team (based on my time at Unknown Telecom). This nice lady had a detailed script and was paging through it, one objection at a time, until I either hung up in a rage or gave in. Her suggestions didn’t make sense: no one needs to back up their cell phone to the tune of $19.99 a month, let alone the real cost of Comcast phone service after the come-on price expired. But it wasn’t her job to make sense. It was her job to keep me on the line until I wilted.

The point of a brand is to personalize the giant, anonymous institution that is a corporation. No one can like the army of immigrants, teenagers and slaughterhouse hands that churn a thousand tons of fast food every day. But lots of people like McDonald’s. They have a generally positive attitude toward the golden arches. That attitude translates to the locations, employees and food products which every golden-arched franchise contains. And when your local fast food place disappoints you, you don’t write it off as a cashier having a bad day, or a batch of raw patties, or the inevitable breakdown of a complex supply chain. You pitch a fit. Because how could they treat you that way, after all the love you’ve given them?

Comcast isn’t good because of their friendly customer service. Comcast isn’t bad because of their incessant upselling. Comcast is a conglomeration of wide-ranging offices with competing incentives run by different managers. To ascribe a single will to them is silly.

Still: I almost liked ‘em.

Jun

these are the days when you wish your bed was already made

Posted by Perich at 10:08 am

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

- Arthuer Schopenhauer

Our office shares a floor and a restroom with a rent-a-desk tech center. Coming out of the men’s room the other day, I found a man with professorial wrinkles and a denim shirt smiling at me. “They locked me out,” he said, indicating the door to the tech center.

I was suspicious at first, since HR had sent out an e-mail hours earlier about a laptop being stolen from our neighbors. But this guy looked harmless. A Chicano Noam Chomsky. So I let him into our office and walked him to our front entrance so he could try the other door. He thanked me.

Our office has a glass facade and I sit near the entrance, so I could still see the professor. More importantly, I could hear him: trying the handle of the front door, pounding on the metal shutters that separated the tech center from the hallway, pacing and fretting. I hadn’t even registered the time. When you work for a start-up, 5:30 doesn’t feel late. But apparently our neighbors had locked up for the day and my new friend had left without his keys.

I have never been locked out of my apartment. Whenever I change locations – home to work, restaurant to movie theater, car to store – I pat down my pockets to make sure I have everything with me. Keys, wallet, cell phone. I have backups of every key I need secreted away in clever locations. It would take a concerted effort, with teams of ninjas and monkey pickpockets, to strand me outside my apartment.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to me at a young age that terrified me of being locked out. Sure, being trapped outside sucks. But there are worse fates. And the marginal increased risk of leaving the house without my little ritual might be worth the marginal gains to my blood pressure. Two hours locked outside of my home one night vs. another year of life.

We’re collections of habits masquerading as planners. I wonder what created the habits I follow. Why I can’t leave the house without keys, wallet and cell phone but I’ll sometimes leave credit card bills unpaid through sheer forgetfulness. Why my desktop (on my computer) needs to be tidy but my desktop (actual) is a sprawling pile.

Always knowing where my keys are doesn’t make me smarter or more careful than everyone else. It means I devote my focus and care to particular things. What I want to know is why those are the things I focus on. What set my priorities for me?

After a few minutes, a lady with frizzy hair answered the professor’s knocking. He didn’t look like a laptop thief anyway.

Mar

the world weighs on my shoulders, but what am I to do?

Posted by Perich at 7:37 am

silly
work

On Friday, I came downstairs from my desk to get a seltzer water from the fridge. I noticed three cans of seltzer lying in the crevice between our two refrigerators. Since this isn’t the usual place to store water, my mind reeled.

I looked up above the fridge, where twelve-packs of soda are kept. Within seconds I’d reconstructed a scenario. Someone tried to lift a partly-opened twelve pack from atop the fridge. Not being blessed with my height, they struggled and three cans fell out. They decided to leave the ticking timb bombs lie and go about their day.

Not wanting water to go to waste, I fished them out of the gap and took one of them to the sink. It hissed and bulged as I opened it, but finesse prevented disaster. This left two cans, which I put back in the fridge. We love our seltzer here at Micro.

But! The next person might not know where those seltzers had come from. How best to warn future generations?

“Can I borrow a Post-It note?” I asked Karen, whose desk sat nearest the kitchen. “And a pen?”

I composed a note to warn anyone opening the seltzers to exhibit proper care. Having done my due diligence, I opened the fridge to stick it to the other two cans.

They were gone.

Poking my head out of the break room, I saw John V. heading down the hall, a green can in his hand. I sprinted after him, catching up just as he returned to the Engineering pods. My hand shot up and my jaw went slack as he cracked the tab on a …

Can of 7-Up.

John and the other product development engineers looked at me. I lowered my hand.

“Did you see two seltzer waters in the fridge?” I asked John.

“No,” he said. Then he blinked twice, as if reviewing slides. “I did see two seltzer waters on the counter next to the snacks.”

Oh, right; I hadn’t put them in the fridge yet.

“Thanks,” I said, sprinting back down the hall like that was just a thing I did sometimes.

I stuck the note to the cans, put them back in the fridge, and went back to campaign optimization. It’s a fast-paced job, and I bitch about the hours, but the pay is good.

Feb

every interview, ever

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

(FADE IN ON: any office, any town, any time in the last twenty or next ten years)

(CANDIDATE sits on overstuffed couch in lobby. He/she studies the resume that he/she knows by heart in a buff leather folder. Every few minutes, he/she looks at the company’s awards hanging on the wall.

RECEPTIONIST avoids eye contact.

INTERVIEWER enters from the main office)

INTERVIEWER: Hey! I’m late. Some bullshit about all the work I’m doing.

CANDIDATE: Defensive pleasantries so you don’t feel bad.

INT: Greetings complete! Follow me.

(INT and CAN walk through the office)

INT: I’m going to ask you how hard it was to get here, find parking or get into the building, so that the two minutes between the lobby and the interview room won’t be filled with awkward silence.

CAN: Understood. I gave myself twice as much time as I needed to get here and still managed to get lost. But I ended up arriving fifteen minutes early, which is great because it makes me look studious.

INT: I acknowledge your efforts.

(INT and CAN enter a small, windowless room that no one would choose to work in. On the wall is either a framed Successories poster, a whiteboard, or a framed Successories poster and a whiteboard)

INT: All of our nice conference rooms are full of people doing actual work.

CAN: Hey, I’m just happy someone’s considering me.

(Both sit)

INT: I’m going to talk about the position for a few minutes, partly because it makes me sound knowledgeable, partly because I don’t like the challenge of listening to you, and partly to draw out the suspense.

(CAN nods)

INT: So, I see you have an entry on your resume. Talk about it.

CAN: Sure. I’ve spent more hours than I care to count compressing four years of work experience into one bulleted paragraph of thirty words. I’ll now use about one hundred fifty words to unpack that paragraph again.

INT: Excellent. Tell me something I already know about my company.

CAN: In the fifteen minutes I spent browsing your website this morning, I memorized the talking points your marketing department has come up with to distinguish your company in an overcrowded field. Here are the ones I remember, plus a ham-fisted link to the accomplishments I rambled about earlier.

INT: Okay. Now, you’re applying for a job you have no experience in. Convince me that I’m not taking a gamble.

CAN: You’re taking a huge gamble! I barely understand what this job would entail. But I can leap out of this airplane, use my resume like a parachute, and try to land on the job description like a Ranger diving into Kandahar. You remember all those bullet points on my resume, right?

(INT, who read CAN’s resume for the first time half an hour ago, nods)

INT: I just spaced out for a moment. Here’s a total softball question while I gather myself.

CAN: I’m going to answer this question as if Anubis himself had addressed it to me while staring at my heart on a scale and scratching his chin.

INT: That was more effort than I expected. Here’s a time bomb that I pulled out of a link-bait blog post titled “Ten Hardest Interview Questions.”

CAN: Fortunately, I read that same post last night and spent an hour rehearsing my answer in the mirror.

INT: Interesting. Lie to me about a time that you overcame adversity in the office.

CAN: Watch as I wave this magic wand and turn a shitstorm of evading responsibility into a budding sign of leadership potential.

INT: Wow. That’s some good bullshit.

CAN: Thanks.

INT: Do you have any questions for me? I hear that’s a good way to see if the client’s really interested in the job.

CAN: I only have the one question, since I’d like nothing more than to stagger outside and vomit in panic.

INT: Considering the balance of power between us, I’m going to blather on with the practiced ease of a retired Maine fisherman.

(CAN gulps)

INT: Shall we end this?

CAN: Yes, let’s.

(They get up, exit the conference room, and head toward the door)

INT: I’ve already made up my mind about you, but I’m going to set an arbitrary deadline for you to wait to hear from me.

CAN: All right. I’m going to go outside and either smoke, start smoking if I don’t smoke already, or possibly sneak a quick drink.

INT: While I’m thinking about it: how’d you trick your current boss into letting you come interview? And what’s she going to say when you come back to work in a suit?

CAN: I’ll tell her I was at a funeral … at a doctor’s office.

INT: Fair enough. Good talking to you!

(FIN)

Dec

h.o.v.a., gold bottles and that ace of spades

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Friday wasn’t my first time to the Liberty Hotel, but it was the first time I got to marvel at how the owners have redesigned the interior. Having Sylvia on my arm helped: she has an eye for design and spent a lot of the evening calling out little details. Me, I admired the redesign for its financial sense. The former prison has been converted into a tower ringed with balconies. Each balcony level opens onto private ballrooms or conference rooms and features a bar at one end. And of course, each balcony has a gorgeous view of the tower’s floor-to-ceiling windows, intricate chandeliers and the lobby below. What this means is that you get to rent out the same space three times without anyone being cheated of a lovely evening. Contrast this with, say, the interior of the Luxor in Las Vegas, which has several thousand cubic feet of absolutely wasted space.

We were there for the Micro company party on the third floor balcony. Sylvia and I arrived just as the bar was setting up, so we snagged some drinks and socialized until the serving trays opened up. A variety of gourmet options abounded, including veal meatballs with ricotta cheese, a make-your-own-burrito bar and a wealth of desserts. The CEO gave a 10-second speech and then announced the winner of the baking contest earlier that day. My teammate Stacy’s rotated Rubik’s Cube cake had blown everyone else out of the water in presentation and originality and scored an easy win.

rubiks-cube-cake

Though opulent, the Liberty Hotel isn’t immune to the problems that plague your Best Westerns. Case in point: the hot water heater was out of commission on Saturday morning, resulting in tepid showers for Sylvia and I. The desk clerk asked us if everything was satisfactory when we checked out and, as I’m trying to speak up more about my feelings, I brought it up. He apologized, explained the heater situation, and took about 25% off our bill. Customer service is what separates the great hotels from the legendary ones, so the Liberty gets my vote.

Oct

we don’t punch girls, and we don’t punch a clock

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Today is my last day at Internet Inc. Tomorrow I start work at Micro Machines., a start-up in Boston that manages display advertising through data-intensive platforms.

A few notes:

This is the first job I’ve taken that belonged to the same industry as the job previous. I guess I’m building a career now.
Once again, as with every employer I’ve had since college, I am taking zero time off between jobs. I walk out of one office on Wednesday and into a new one on Thursday.
This is the first job I’m leaving that I’ll really miss. I liked all the people I dealt with. The workload wasn’t that bad. The address and the view were nice. I felt like I was playing at the top of the field.
The money’s good.

So long, Copley Square. Good to know you.

Sep

home is the place I want to be, but I guess I’m already there

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Every fall, the Hancock Tower starts bringing in live musicians to play during the afternoon. It’s someone with an electric keyboard, or a flautist, or a string quartet once we approach the Christmas season. It adds a touch of culture, the kind you’d get in a suburban mall or a clean hotel, to an otherwise utilitarian space. Plus, the lobby and mezzanine of the Hancock feature interesting acoustics. They’re divided by pillars, walls and elevator banks, but sound carries through the open spaces.

Walking to the gym this week, I passed a violinist in the lobby. She had a music stand in front of her while she worked some baroque air. I didn’t stay long enough to place it, but I doubt that I would have recognized it even with another hour. My ear for classical is limited. She had her case and her puffy coat in the corner, resting against a pillar. She must have set them there when she arrived; she’d retrieve them from there when she left. Not that anyone would think she teleported into the lobby out of the phlogiston. But something struck me about those little evidences of her arrival and her imminent departure. It’s like going to an art gallery and seeing a dolly leaning next to Water Lilies. Guy in coveralls with Latex gloves checking his wrist watch.

We don’t think much about music in transactional spaces. You listen to music in your home. You nod your head to the manager’s playlist in a cafe. Even when I’m in the car, I associate the music with being in the car, not with the act of transit. Music belongs to a destination: I’m here, so let’s crank up the stereo. Or it’s something you carry with you to retain that destinational sense of security: the iPod cocoon on the subway. The kind of music you hear in hallways, in food courts, in elevators, is always bland and forgettable. The day I’m browsing in a Target and I hear PJ Harvey’s “50 Foot Queenie,” I will buy a latte just so I have something to spit-take.

A few years back, there was an article in the Washington Post about a world-renowned violinist playing a Stradivarius in the D.C. subway. The article couched this as some sort of experiment: to see if “the masses” could recognize profound art. I saw this article shared several times among my circle. Everyone thought it was really deep, including me. Only one of my friends^* pointed out the obvious: no one noticed this really profound performance because people don’t go to the subway to look for art. People go to the subway to get some place in a hurry. There’s no subway station in D.C. where I’d want to loiter.

(In fairness, the article makes the same point near the bottom)

The lobby of the Hancock Tower – and don’t get me wrong, I love working here – is a transactional space. It’s not a destination. No one goes there just to chill. You’re passing through there on your way to or from an office. Adding music makes the space feel a little more humane. But why bother making it good music? Why bring art to it? No one’s going to linger. No one’s going to be moved. I wonder about these things when I see a Berklee or Longy student, cradling the instrument she’s studied for years, playing to 30-second audiences in the lobby of an office building, standing for three hours with short breaks, then snapping her violin into its case, shrugging into her puffy jacket, and wondering who she talks to about her check.

____________
^*Probably Joel. I can count on him to be irreverent.