So I got this cold call from some sort of stock broker. He wanted to pitch me a stock and see if I was interested. Not having anything better to do I said ok and he emailed me a prospectus then said he'd call me back in a couple of days. When I get home I take a look at the material and the stock is for AFLAC. Well, not being interested in a company that uses a talking duck, I immediately tossed the email away.

The guy calls me back a couple of days later and asks eagerly if I read the documentation and want to buy stock. I regretfully said no, I wasn't interested. When asked why, I hesitated to say "because I don't want to invest in a boring company." So he jumps in and claims I obviously have no reason and am blowing him off. So I try to explain to him that as a child dreaming of investing in the stock market, AFLAC was not the kind of company I had in mind.

"How could you call a company with double-digit growth each of the last ten years boring?" Well duh, they're not a tech company. "Thank god!" he says, sounding like he's been burned buying too many tech stocks before the market crashed. Well, I say, I'd buy stocks from a company I believe in and support. "Example?" Apple Computer. "Are you kidding? Look at their stock price now! How much income did they make last year?" Not sure, but I think about 6 billion. "Yeah right, try again."

Ok, the conversation was rapidly getting nowhere. He obviously couldn't grasp that I wasn't looking to become rich playing the stock market. He was starting to get a bit abusive, insinuating that I was making fun of him and in turn making fun of me, enough so that *I* was starting to get mad. So we ended the conversation a bit abruptly with him saying some sort of rote goodbye and hanging up. Meanwhile I'm thinking that this guy leads a pretty stressed life...

Yesterday Simon (my manager, it's hard to think of him as a manager since he's the tech lead for the project, which in Oracle means that you have some managerial-like duties like recommendations and some approvals, but you don't have hire/fire/raise/promotion authority) told me that I'm to get 1500 stock options.

Hmm, I didn't expect to get any stock options as I haven't been doing all that well at work in the last year. It's really nice and all but since only like half the people get stock options and I think that everyone else in our group is better than me, it makes me feel a bit bad and undeserving. But it is just play money in any case.

Back when our stock price was sky high and we got stock options, getting for the most part the same amount as the previous year when the stock was much lower, Pick had to explain to us how Oracle was really giving you more stock options than last year since the cost to Oracle was higher, even though we'd be much less likely to see a tripling of value like with the previous year's stock options.

So once again we're getting about the same number of stock options, only now the stock price is much less. So is that supposed to make us feel better or worse compared to last year?...

So my parents got mad at my brother Christopher's summer plans. He got a campus job that even allowed him to take off a couple of a week for Gen Con and he enrolled in summer classes (three of them) at UC Davis. But, being the frugal people that they are, they objected to getting him insurance for the summer and paying for the classes (which I had already paid for but since I'm family it's all part of the Borg gestalt I guess).

What I'm really mad about is the way mom and dad crush their kids this way. They complain constantly about us not taking any initiative or doing this or that, yet when we *do* try to do that extra thing to make them happy they invariably find a fault with it and shoot it down. The kid is not doing well at school, he wants to learn more and work to get some spending money. Heck, they should be supporting him unconditionally.

Now, I don't blame my parents for the way I turned out. I'm more responsible for myself than they are. But, I do regret that they weren't all that nurturing and supporting and I don't want to see Chris turn out like Steph and I. Not that we turned out that badly, but I think I'm a social mess and have lots of hangups.