In Search of the Perfect Investment

Summer begins with “disasters.” People check their brains out on Memorial Day and re-discover them around Labor Day.

Reporting gets ignored. They forget to tell you things – like the $117,000 cash distribution that StepStone Capital Partners made into my Smith Barney account, which is now “run” by Morgan Stanley.

And then there’s all the techie stuff that goes awry.

I use Microsoft Outlook for email. Last night my 2 gigabyte Outlook.pst file — the file containing all my contacts, emails, appointments, tasks — blew up. Literally. Fours hours later, at around 3:30 AM, I’d cobbled something together. Some of my life is back on track.

Lesson: Don’t rely on Microsoft to fix its own products.

The mantra for summer is:

1. Backup. Backup. Backup. Only backup good stuff. Don’t backup bad files. Which means making backups to different places at different times. Last night I found plenty of backups of bad stuff.

2. Expect the worst and the best. There’s not always a difference.

3. There are a million opportunities out there. Most them are awful, or don’t suit you, or you don’t understand (who knew for Fitbit?)

4. Researching the opportunities is fun and frustrating. Researching what you going to do next is a good summer activity.

5. Check. Check. Check.  Check you don’t fall down stairs or stub your toes on furniture and break three toes. (It just happened to a friend. She’s hobbling around in a cast.)

6. Coax your suppliers. Remember the world is run by children and technology. The children are “at the beach.” The technology is buggy. All of it is buggy. Read the weekend’s BusinessWeek cover story. Click here.

7. Flattery and patience still work. Even idiots like to be told how intelligent they are. More so.

8. Go for a run. Play tennis. Take a long weekend. Meditate beneath a tree on some glorious, distant lake. Away from the madding crowds.

9. And for God’s sake, don’t click on emails that say “Claim your $50 bonus from Amazon.” I did. Dumb me. I think it cost me my two gigabyte Outlook.pst and a decent night’s sleep. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

Enjoy Chris Rock. He’s my favorite comedian.

Some Chris Rocks:

 + I was born a suspect. I can walk down any street in America and women will clutch their purses tighter, hold onto their mace, lock their car doors. If I look up into the windows of the apartments I pass, I can see old ladies on the phone. They’ve already dialed 9-1- and are just waiting for me to do something wrong.

+  The only thing I know about Africa is that it’s far, far away. About a thirty-five hour flight. The boat ride’s so long, there are still slaves on their way here.

+ We got so much food in America we’re allergic to food. Allergic to food! Hungry people ain’t allergic to s**t. You think anyone in Rwanda’s got lactose intolerance?

+ Bush lied to me. They all lied to me. “We gotta go to Iraq because they’re the most dangerous country on Earth, they’re the most dangerous regime in the world.” If they so dangerous, how come it only took two weeks to take over the whole country? S**t. Man, you couldn’t take over Baltimore in two weeks.

+ You don’t pay taxes. They take taxes.

+ A man is only as faithful as his options.

+ Every town has the same two malls: the one white people go to and the one white people used to go to.

+ A black C student can’t do shit with his life. A black C student can’t be a manager at Burger King, meanwhile a white C student just happens to be the President of the United States.

+ Gay people got a right to be as miserable as everybody else.

+ I don’t get high, but sometimes I wish I did. That way, when I messed up in life I would have an excuse. But right now there’s no rehab for stupidity.

Harry Newton who’s having a wonderful day paying bills and checking into such conundrums as “Why does it take JPMorgan Chase four days to send a wire?” “Why did t take StepStone two weeks to tell me about my $117,000 distribution?” “Why Morgan Stanley still hasn’t told me about it? — More than two weeks later” “And what happened to all yesterday’s emails?” (Thank you Microsoft.)

The best thing about summer’s madness is that it’s funny, in hindsight. There’s a white woman on the west coast who pretended to be a black woman and ran the Spokane NAACP. Why? No one seems to quite know. Certainly not her. But it sure made funny TV last night on Jon Stewart and Larry Willmore, who follows Jon Stewart on Comedy Central and is getting better every night.

The world is “interesting.” When I first dated, my dates would often tell me I was “interesting.” That was their polite way of saying they weren’t interested. Hence, time to end the date, go home and read a good book. No sense in pushing a string.