Shamrock Financial Corporation

August 5, 2010

by Dean Harrington

After a digest of industry related updates let’s take a few thoughts from the other side of my brain:

• My assistant thinks I jump around from topic to topic too much. Last week she sat me down and suggested I have ADHD. I told her I think rates are heading lower; I need to get to the gym; and the best count for a hit-in-run is 2-1. She mentioned something about Ritalin but I told her I drink red wine, not white wine.
• Let me get this straight: there’s so much telemarketing going on that we need federal legislation aimed to virtually eliminate it, yet the loss of telemarketing jobs is said to be minimal and of little consequence to unemployment?
• I love when people preach don’t believe everything you read on the Internet; like the Internet is a singular destination. It’s kind of like answering: “a store” when someone asks where you bought a particular shirt. Next time you are asked how you got somewhere just say transportation. The Internet is more than just an Internet. It has newspapers, universities, public service web sites etc.
• Years ago we had to tell a girl in our office that she couldn’t get paid to just stand around and look beautiful. She disagreed and we parted ways. A few months ago I stumbled on the show Deal or No Deal™ and guess what? There she is opening up the cases. Guess we were dead wrong about not getting paid to stand around and look beautiful. Good for her.
• Line of the week comes from my four year old while driving to the store: Dad, if I don’t ask for a toy can I get one? I got her one just on her ability to craft such an effective question.
• All these prescription drug commercials make me awfully skeptical. Don’t these advertisers know we can’t actually write our own prescriptions, that we didn’t go to medical school? I swear these companies would try to sell heart and liver transplants if they could fit them in the bottle.
• File this under the why bother category: Gave up wine for a week or so to see what impact it would have on my weight and lost ounces! So if I keep this up until Labor Day, I’ll be divorced, my kids will have disowned me and the people I work with will curse my very existence.. but I’ll be down a pound, maybe two. Hand me a corkscrew.
• On this very day several years ago I was holding my young daughter during a graveside military service for an uncle of ours who had passed away. When the 21 gun salute began she leaned over and whispered loudly (always funny when kids do that): Is this the part where they take Uncle Dick out of the box and shoot him?
• Owning a home isn’t a right but making the mortgage payment is.

Dean can be reached at dean.harrington@shamrockfinancial.com .