Category: What Would You Do?

In January of this year, I finally bought a “new to me” new car. For three years I had driven my grandmother’s ’89 Buick Century, tape over all of the broken tail-lights and transmission threatening to give out. I had meant to buy a VW TDI (Biodiesel) but I couldn’t seem to allow myself to…

“Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor.” — C. S. Forester Day after day, the Waterwood, Texas infomercial seems to run in continuous loop on one of the televisions at my gym. This is where Erik Estrada (aka Ponch from CHiPs) hawks home sites for a developer by enticing buyers to come take a…

So I’m having a peaceful Saturday, and a friend, let’s call her Peitho, calls me up to tell me that Southwest is having a special on Las Vegas flights through its fare notifier service called Ding. Fares from Oakland to Las Vegas were selling for $25 each way. The offer would last for the next…

When you go out for dinner do you review the details when the server brings the check or do you assume it is right? Do you do a quick “ballpark glance” or do you look at each item one at a time and do the math? A few weeks ago I went out for a…

This has always been a really tough one for me: I’m walking down the street, minding my own business, and someone (usually looking really roughed up) asks for money. It’s a conundrum for me: clearly, lack of money is a serious problem for this individual, and I can spare a few bucks. On the other…

“Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is yours.” — Orison Swett Marden In this week’s What Would You Do series, we ponder if pay for performance is a child appropriate reward system. The question was brought to light when Dana Rudolph at…

Many who work in a high-rise building have to put up with a strange thing in elevators called the Captivate screen. It’s essentially a mini-monitor that posts short news clips, sports scores, stock quotes, trivia facts and polls. Oh yeah, and there’s lots of advertising. I found one recent poll outrageously funny. Captivate Network asked…

We’re getting closer and closer to the 2007 tax deadline. As I was doing my own tax return I got to thinking — what sort of change would I need to make to a prior year’s return that would warrant filing an amended return? In looking at the IRS FAQ It states: If you did…

In this week’s What Would You Do series, we ask how you would compensate a person for a life incorrectly spent in prison. Recently on NPR, Kathy Lohr interviewed two men who had been wrongly imprisoned for much of their adult lives. She writes, “Calvin Johnson was falsely convicted of rape and received a life…