Back when I was at Overture, they were partnered with a certain financial firm, Dewey Cheetem and Howe, for employee stock accounts. I had two accounts, one retail that held my option stock, and an Employee Stock Purchase (ESP) account that held my stock from the Employee Stock Purchase Plan. I had always frowned on the incompetence of this firm, partly due to the dimness of the people I'd talked to there, but mostly because they were unable to find my ESP account without the account number. They couldn't find it with my name and SSN.
Fast-forward a few years, and I finally get off my ass and move those stock shares into my primary investment account at, uh, Fidelity. The nice woman at Fidelity calls and says that while the retail account transferred fine, the ESP account came back as being empty. Well, that's not right, they've been sending me statements for years indicating I own stock.
I called Dewey Cheetem and Howe to clear up the misunderstanding, prepared to browbeat some mouthbreathing phone rep like I've encountered in the past (though not starting the conversation that way). Instead, I get a very pleasant and intelligent woman, who notices, after double-checking a few times, that the last two digits of my SSN have been switched on the ESP account. That certainly explains why they couldn't find it in the past.
She says that because I have another account with correct information, fixing it shouldn't be too painful, but we'll see. I've also got this other IRS excitement where the UC pension system's tax ID number on the form they sent me doesn't match what the IRS has on file. I hate dealing with money. I'm good at it, when I do it, but I don't like doing it.
It turns out I'm totally jazzed about Friday night. Performing holds a complex of neat stuff for me: I have to confront and overcome my fear of being in front of people (I think for most of us, stage fright doesn't really go away, but diminishes to a level where it's no longer worth calling it "stage fright", instead becoming part of the energy of the performance). I get to work to give people a good show, to connect with the audience, adapt to them somehow. And I get to show off. I treasure all these things.