Overdrawn or Not? Earning Interest in Relationships
Last weekend I was at a home and garden show in Des Moines working hard to earn some extra cash and build an independent business idea. I had a friend come with me to help out and by the end of the day we were both exhausted. We tried to settle out our credit card machine and discovered that we were...once again... experiencing technical difficulty.
My friend pulled out her cell and we looked up the number for technical support, all the while hoping desperately that our earnings from the day were not about to disappear into a virtual abyss. After 20 min of listening to the music and commercials that come with being on hold we finally gave up. We hypothesized bitterly that maybe the one person on duty was just too busy helping all the millions of other people whose crappy credit card machines had also decided to malfunction at the most inopportune of times.
We hauled ourselves out to the car in a snowy parking lot telling each other it would be fine and we would just try calling again tomorrow. This was a new machine for me and a new company I was dealing with. So far I was not impressed.
Pulling out of the parking lot it was immediately evident that driving conditions on our commute back to our little town in Southern Iowa were going to be precarious at best. I managed to miss our exit because the majority of my attention was focused on not crashing...and that stupid credit card machine.
After the second attempt to catch the exit..and yet another turn in the wrong direction I did not have the heart to fight my home with such slushy sloppy road conditions. I pulled into a Target parking lot ready to do a power shop for overnight supplies and in the meantime called my own personal support person to report my problem.
There was no on hold music. The problem was reported. He praised my choice to stay over instead of risking the drive. Approximately one minute later I received a text informing me that a hotel room had been booked at the Days Inn 2 miles down the road. 30 seconds after that, an address was texted for me to program into the GPS that was also provided by my handsome personal support person who had known since earlier on in our relationship that it would come in handy to a directionally challenged girl like me.
When I arrived at the hotel the front desk person was expecting us. There was nothing to sign and nothing to say except thank you. My support person had called ahead to make sure the reservation he made on hotels.com was going to show up in their computer system before I arrived.
I turned to my friend and explained something about my personal support guy. He wasn't perfect but boy did he ever make a lot of deposits into the relationship account with me. At that moment I couldn't have felt more lucky. I didn't care that he was sloppy and that his apartment was a wreck. I could forgive crass language and the way he changes the channel when I'm in the middle of watching something on tv. I found it easy to be patient with a man that talks in circles and finishes a story 20 minutes after he starts it.
He has been making deposits long enough and often enough that if it was him who had to play me terrible on hold music until he could help me out I wouldn't have been very upset at all. I would have assumed that I was still a priority (like they tell you before they continue to play on hold music) but calls were being answered in the order they came in.
All relationships are like bank accounts. We deposit, we withdraw, we overdraw, and we receive overdraft fees. However, if we're smart we invest in our relationship in a way that earns us some interest. For him, the hotel reservation was going to yield some high interest returns later.
I'm not sure about the credit card merchant people. They are currently overdrawn. Hopefully they will be provided an opportunity to invest and make a deposit in the near future.
My friend pulled out her cell and we looked up the number for technical support, all the while hoping desperately that our earnings from the day were not about to disappear into a virtual abyss. After 20 min of listening to the music and commercials that come with being on hold we finally gave up. We hypothesized bitterly that maybe the one person on duty was just too busy helping all the millions of other people whose crappy credit card machines had also decided to malfunction at the most inopportune of times.
We hauled ourselves out to the car in a snowy parking lot telling each other it would be fine and we would just try calling again tomorrow. This was a new machine for me and a new company I was dealing with. So far I was not impressed.
Pulling out of the parking lot it was immediately evident that driving conditions on our commute back to our little town in Southern Iowa were going to be precarious at best. I managed to miss our exit because the majority of my attention was focused on not crashing...and that stupid credit card machine.
After the second attempt to catch the exit..and yet another turn in the wrong direction I did not have the heart to fight my home with such slushy sloppy road conditions. I pulled into a Target parking lot ready to do a power shop for overnight supplies and in the meantime called my own personal support person to report my problem.
There was no on hold music. The problem was reported. He praised my choice to stay over instead of risking the drive. Approximately one minute later I received a text informing me that a hotel room had been booked at the Days Inn 2 miles down the road. 30 seconds after that, an address was texted for me to program into the GPS that was also provided by my handsome personal support person who had known since earlier on in our relationship that it would come in handy to a directionally challenged girl like me.
When I arrived at the hotel the front desk person was expecting us. There was nothing to sign and nothing to say except thank you. My support person had called ahead to make sure the reservation he made on hotels.com was going to show up in their computer system before I arrived.
I turned to my friend and explained something about my personal support guy. He wasn't perfect but boy did he ever make a lot of deposits into the relationship account with me. At that moment I couldn't have felt more lucky. I didn't care that he was sloppy and that his apartment was a wreck. I could forgive crass language and the way he changes the channel when I'm in the middle of watching something on tv. I found it easy to be patient with a man that talks in circles and finishes a story 20 minutes after he starts it.
He has been making deposits long enough and often enough that if it was him who had to play me terrible on hold music until he could help me out I wouldn't have been very upset at all. I would have assumed that I was still a priority (like they tell you before they continue to play on hold music) but calls were being answered in the order they came in.
All relationships are like bank accounts. We deposit, we withdraw, we overdraw, and we receive overdraft fees. However, if we're smart we invest in our relationship in a way that earns us some interest. For him, the hotel reservation was going to yield some high interest returns later.
I'm not sure about the credit card merchant people. They are currently overdrawn. Hopefully they will be provided an opportunity to invest and make a deposit in the near future.
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