Wow! Twenty-five years.

AOL launched on this day in 1985. I remember their first headwuarters building in Reston and how several of our technical support guys and engineering guys abandoned ship at C3 and took jobs with this exciting new internet service provider. They encouraged me to come with them – and I did go walk through the building, talk to their people and decided against it.

They are not even close to the big company they used to be, but they still have some loyal subscribers. Happy Birthday, AOL.

Usually we look forward to Fridays. But today we were looking forward to Friday for a different reason and looking forward to it with a little dread. My son had an appointment at 12:30 to finally get his cracked tooth pulled by the oral surgeon that my dentist sent us to see.

We got there a few minutes early – I strongly believe in being punctual. And sat in the patient waiting area for 30 long, tortuous minutes before a nurse came to the door and escorted my son back to the treatment room.

I was told to wait in the patient waiting room and that he would be about an hour. Well, they didn’t even have free Wi-Fi in their office, and I’m not one to sit for an hour and just stare at the wall. I don’t care how many thousands of dollars the oral surgeon’s decorator spent on the 4 pictures hanging on the walls of the waiting area. I’m not one to sit for an hour, so I left.

After an hour poking around a wonderful little wine shop, I headed back up to the oral surgeon’s office to collect my son, after they collected a sweet $800 from me for his services.

Although he is not home and sleeping, he will be in pain for another day or two, and we are out over $1,100 for a week’s worth of pain and aggravation, plus three trips downtown and eventually a missing tooth. No one has yet said what might be planned for replacing that tooth with a denture or something to hold that space, nor how much that is going to cost. The adventure continues next week.

This morning I was reading Jeremy Herndon‘s blog and he had posted about vanity license plates. He mentioned that some vanity plates are a way for charities to raise money. I had not thought of that and it seems a relatively painless way to support a worthy cause by buying a decorated tag for your vehicle.

My car needs to have the tags renewed next month, so I think I will head down to the Clerk’s office and see what choices they have for a vanity plate that I can order and help out an organization that could use my support.

The weather has been marvelous here in Tennessee, with temperatures in the 70′s all week, but my girlfriend in Colorado has had three snowstorms already. It seems strange to think that I am walking around in flip flops and a tee shirt, and Cindy is bundled up in a down coat and gloves.

She has oil heat out there and just had their tank filled for the first half of winter. She has to come up with almost $2,000 to pay that bill and this is a terrible time of year to need extra money. I wonder if she knows about emergency cash loans that you can get on the internet?

If I needed to come up with a big chunk of money right now, I would be looking at a short term loan to try to stretch the payments out for a couple of months. Of course, you should never borrow money unless you know you can pay it back. If you can’t pay it back you end up in a worse situation.

The last time I had oil heat, we tried to work with the supplier on a monthly payment program. They would estimate what you would owe for the year and then come up with a payment amount. Then, at the end of the year they would compare what you actually used against what they estimated you would use. And then they would send out a big adjustment bill with the balance due. It sounded like a good idea if the oil company was good at making their original estimate. But if anything unusual happens, like an extra cold winter so you used more oil, or if the price of oil goes up very high right before they fill your tank, then you can end up with a huge adjustment bill at the end of the year, and the oil company will cut you off from more deliveries until you pay that bill in full.

We actually had to switch from oil heat to using a wood stove and a couple of space heaters when they cut us off. It was awful. But we were young and naive and we just found a way to get by until the money came in and things got back on track for us.

When my friend Tracy was in a car wreck, she was hit by a person who did not have insurance. Even though by law you must have insurance to drive a car in this state, the other driver had no insurance and not even a valid driver’s license. So she had to deal with a lawsuit against that driver and it dragged out for a long time. She had to sue for all the damages above and beyond what her insurance covered and she had to pay her lawyer’s expenses during the trial.

I had no idea that having a lawsuit like this would cost so much money out of pocket and take so long to be heard in court. And hers was just a little lawsuit compared to some of the big ones you hear about on the news.

Some people need help getting by during a lawsuit, so a company has figured out a way to front your money during the trial. It’s called legal finance and is a non recourse loan. That means if you unfortunately lose your case you don’t have to pay it back. If you win your case, you pay them back from the proceeds. So you might want to check it out one day.

When I stopped for gas tonight I decided to run into the convenience store and pick up a loaf of sandwich bread on my way home. If all I need is one or two little things, I’d much rather buy them at the c-store so I’m in and out quickly, instead of going to a full size grocery store and having to walk through long aisles and stand in long checkout lines.

Strangely, the cash register drawer was wide open when I stepped up to the checkout counter, and the clerk had stepped away to do something with the money safe at the end of the counter. I thought that might be a little unwise, as I could have easily reached over and taken out a lot of the money and bolted out the door before he even turned around and realized what had happened.

Of course, I’d never do that. But it was probably not a good idea to leave the register open and unattended. Some people aren’t honest and are always on the lookout for an opportunity to pick up easy money.

Have you ever wandered into a convenience store and found all the shelves tagged with a yellow strip of paper? that’s how the store management handles inventory audits. They usually hire an independent auditing company to send in a team of workers who count everything in the store and enter the data into these cool handheld data terminals.

Other companies handle inventory issues with handheld scanners or small computers that look like a Blackberry, but they are used for point of sale or inventory data collection in stores.

My friend Jenna showed me the web site where she buys the MC75 handhelds for her company, www.barcodeplanet.com. They have models that work with all the major cell phone carrier networks.

When I started using Facebook last month I discovered a bunch of people that I used to know as a kid. I even found a lot of people that were good friends with my sisters, and we’ve become reacquainted and better acquainted now that we can send messages back and forth by commenting on our walls.

One of my youngest sister’s friends has been particularly friendly and I’m really enjoying our daily chats. She has been out of work for several months due to a car wreck, and just recently started back to work. So she has had a lot of time on her hands to be online. But the downside is that she has been living on a reduced income and is just now getting a regular paycheck again.

Unfortunately, with another month or so of warm weather to enjoy before winter sets in, her air conditioner stopped working. Of course, it happened on a Friday, so she had to go all weekend without air conditioning or face paying a repair technician double time rates. Since money is tight, she obviously chose to wait until Monday to call the repair man.

When she found out that the repair bill was going to be $500, she was frantic. Thank goodness she learned how to fast cash in minutes by getting a cash advance online. Since she is working again, she knows she will have the money coming in to repay the loan, and she can get enough money to pay the air conditioning repair company.

While cleaning out closets and old dresser drawer, I came across a lot of loose change. I bet it is over $20 worth of assorted coins. Maybe more!

Also, strangely enough, I found several dollar bills that had been torn in half. They were torn almost precisely along a middle fold line, like someone deliberately want exactly half of a dollar bill. I don’t know what the bank’s policy is on accepted torn dollar bills. I suspect they will refuse to take them, especially if I don’t have both halves.

I wonder what on earth someone was doing to this money anyway to waste it by tearing it? How dumb!

My neighbor’s daughter has been working in a call center for an international broadcasting company based here in the Nashville area. She handles incoming telephone calls to answer customer questions about the featured products and help them place their orders.

She used to do this same type of work when they lived in Florida. She had worked for a Miami fulfillment company, which was the warehouse operation of the company’s Miami call center.

When I worked for the database marketing company we had a client in Florida that Michelle worked with as a consultant. She provided the mail list for a Miami direct mail company. Our lists were refined down through several levels of prospect criteria, and we updated our data every month.

Our company pulled data from a variety of sources, including warranty cards and consumer surveys. One of our projects was outsourced to the Philippines, but we had a lot of trouble with quality control. When people don’t speak English as their primary language, they tend to make a lot of mistakes during the data entry from warranty cards while trying to read people’s handwriting. It would have been a lot cheaper to use overseas labor, but the large number of returns for the wrong address or spelling mistakes in the recipient’s names took so long to find and correct, that we ultimately canceled the Philippines data entry and brought the work back to the United States.