I received my property tax receipt yesterday along with a note:

Just a reminder that this parcel is delinquent for 2006.

WHAT! I’ve always thought that I was on top of all our bills. The key here, though, is BILLS. I didn’t actually get a bill for this property last year when I received all of the other tax bills. If I don’t have a bill for something, how can I know to pay it?

We bought the property last year, and the bill was sent to the previous owner. Now most local folks would probably forward tax bills to the new owners because that’s what us good guys do. But we bought the property as a foreclosure. The maga-bank who sold the property doesn’t waste time with details like, I don’t know, TAXES. They just tossed the paperwork.

Now I owe $75 in interest, and state law absolutely positively does not waive payments. Unless you’re the governor, I think. On one hand, I’m really frustrated. I would have paid those taxes one year ago. Where was the title company lady’s obsessive highlighter on the line item TAXES?

But on the other hand, I’m also thankful that one of the Treasurer’s secretaries took the time to write me a note. Otherwise, I NEVER would have known until the horrible day when I would receive this deadly note:

Your property’s up for auction due to dilenquent taxes.

Seriously, you only get one notice of taxes each year, and you only get one warning that you’re about to lose your property for unpaid taxes. Wouldn’t you think that maybe, just maybe, this year’s tax bill would have included a mention of unpaid taxes from the past?

So I’m writing a huge check right now and hand-delivering since 2007 taxes are due TODAY, and fees gets jacked up a notch tomorrow for late payments like mine. Thank goodness I mailed my taxes early this month and was warned! And even more thankfully, I’m glad property tax payments don’t make it to credit scores.

This morning, I didn’t have time to write my post because I had to meet the insulation installers across town. As I watched them stuff insulation into every crack and corner and saw insulation blowing around in the attic as though it were a giant snowglobe, all I could think of was

Asbestos! Vermiculite! Lung cancer! Poison! Death!

(dun dun dun)

Now I KNOW that modern companies don’t blow that stuff into our houses any more; it’s been banned for years. Yet I can’t help but wonder what IS being put into our houses and lives that we don’t know the safety of. We trust others to make the judgment call for us–usually the business itself. Of course, being interested in business and money ourselves, you and I kind of know what most businesses usually focus on–the money. How can we know who to rely on?

It’s like everything in our lives is marked “low fat”. Sometimes I feel like I’m STILL trying to convince some people that low fat doesn’t mean (1) no sugar, (2) low calorie, or (3) chalk full of nutrients. Yet the candy isle is filled with reminders of low fat content. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see “low sugar” on a hunk of cheese? So we have this idea that it’s okay if the label says its okay, and marketers and businesses know this fact and they use it against us.

The silence… the deadly silence… of American industry has been shown in Libby, Montana where asbestos was mined. From the research and personal stories I’ve had over the years, I gathered that miners were encouraged to wear breathing masks, but the masks got so clogged that the men quit. These same men were sent to company doctors when they started to hack, and when these men came home from work, wives would shake the clothes out on the porch, sending the asbestos into the air. The stuff did wonders for gardens, too (hmm, wonders), so the company often donated to community members. NOW that the town is all getting sick and losing citizens, the EPA has an entire directory that educates newcomers to the superfund of Libby. Funny thing, though, do you think anyone actually thinks of moving there any more??

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what industry REALLY tells us.

It seams like most people have a horror story they are willing to share about financial services of some sort. It could be a bank, a credit card company, or online services such as paypal. Beyond that, many more people have had bad experiences with their customer support. Which kind of makes you wonder what their end goal is. Seth Godin has been having some problems with paypal freezing his account for having a successful project.

If you do get to talk to an actual person, they are usually a gatekeeper with limited abilities beyond answering simple questions. Then you will often be transfered to another person who asks you the same questions and also has limited decision making powers.

With paypal for example if your account is frozen you will have to go through a large hassle in order to free it back up. The idea is they are doing it to stop scammers and conmen. Naturally with any data there is a balance somewhere between security and usability. Any company must make trade-offs between the two, but alienating customers as a result is never a good plan.

As Seth puts it

The question I’d be asking is, “Do people who go through process and manage to prove that they are not criminals end up doing more business with us as a result of the way we treated them?” If the answer is no, you’re probably doing it wrong.

If you would like to read more about his ideas on customer support lines as well as learn about his story, check out “Thanks for calling, please go away.“

The essays by Paul Graham often come up in my family. Graham made millions when his team sold their programming work, Viaweb, to Yahoo for millions. But the knowledge Graham shares goes beyond programming.

He’s got a lot of social wisdom. My favorite is his article, Why Nerds are Unpopular.

Here’s an excerpt:

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They’re like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.