Smellin' Money

We get business and banking trade magazines at work, which are circulated throughout the office. Titles including Nashville Business Journal, Nashville Post, ABA Bank Marketing Magazine and Independent Banker routinely land on my desk and I actually read them. Sometimes they are a little beyond my scope of work or interest, but there is almost always something in each magazine to catch my eye.

Oftentimes, the articles I enjoy are about using social media to promote business, new businesses opening, customer relationship management or successful bank marketing campaigns from around the country. I always scan the photos and mentally critique the men in them. Once in a great while, the critique is along the line of “Dang, he’s hot. That beautifully tailored suit really brings out his gray hair. Oh, crap, he’s wearing a wedding ring.” Unfortunately, it’s more like “Eww.... did this guy not know he was having his picture taken for this article? What’s with the clown hair?”  Yes, I know ... I probably shouldn’t be reading a business magazine like it’s the match.com listings, but hey, I’m single and drowning in a sea of couples. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Just as New Yorkers were reported to read the obituaries looking for apartment openings and I read them in search of new job openings, this is just a natural, less morbid extension of the process.

In my overactive inner life, if and when I see a photo of a hot businessman or banker in a nicely tailored suit and it’s not mentioned that he’s married, I would drop him a brief, professional note commenting on his brilliant quote in the article, we begin corresponding, and soon, we live happily ever after. It could happen! I had a coworker once who met her handsome and amazing husband when he was an expert witness in a case she was trying. My cousin made a wish on her birthday cake and that very same night her wish was granted when she literally bumped into the handsome Scotsman who would become her husband! See! Real life examples of happily ever after. Unfortunately, in six years of reading the magazines at work, I’ve not yet seen one banker or businessman I found attractive enough to take out my pen and get busy, so I can’t even execute the first step of my fantastical plan. But it doesn’t stop me from hoping.

Today, there was something in the ABA Bank Marketing Magazine that caught my eye. Two things actually. One was  an article by Robert Hall on relationships in our increasingly technology driven world that fosters fewer reasons to leave the house (I need the book -- “This Land of Strangers”). The other was a brief article about a new cologne. Yes, cologne. In a banking magazine. It’s a cologne called Money, comes in His and Her versions, packed in a box with shredded US currency. It claims to smell like freshly minted cash. So, it’s possible to look like money, smell like money and really and truly be SO MONEY! Even the website name is inspiring ... www.liquidmoney.com.

I want this. I need this. I couldn’t wait to get home and check how much money it takes to smell like money (just $42.50! Subtle hint ... my birthday is in one month). This could kickstart the other fantasy that runs through my head ... the one where I meet my personalized version of Prince Charming Mr. Right in the seat next to me on an airplane, while standing in line at a coffee shop or when reaching for the perfect avocado in the produce department of the local grocery store. This fantasy is the reason I rarely leave the house without makeup. One never knows. I already told you about two real life instances of which I am personally acquainted.

Smelling like Money!!! Maybe that’s the golden ticket to attracting a guy who at least owns a nice suit, but more likely, I will attract the panhandler on the street who is in desperate need of money. But which version do I get? If and when I remember to bother to spritz on cologne, it’s Armani for Men, because most women’s fragrances smell too powdery or flowery and make me gag. There is no point grossing myself out with cologne, as there are enough reeking ladies running around the ‘Ville handling the task for me.

I checked the list of “resellers” on the Money website, hoping to test drive “The Fragrance of Success” which includes “the distinct note of fresh, crisp bills” (Her Money) or “the unique aroma of newly-printed bills” (His Money). Sadly, the only Tennessee reseller is, of all places, “The Cowboy Store” in some town called Huntingdon that I’ve never heard of before. Interestingly, many of the reseller names contain the words “Western” and “Cowboy” with Oklahoma and Texas having the most resellers. The smell of money will be heavy in the air over the oil well states. Strangely, the giant state of California has only two resellers, and Massachusetts and New York have none. Asia is listed with just one reseller in the entire region. Europe has one in Lithuania and England has just a website listed. Perhaps the answer is to boost my own money by becoming a reseller in one of the unrepresented areas  ... Hmmmm.

Bottom Feeding

On Sunday, as I was driving to WalMart, the store I love to hate -- but the only place in Clarksville selling my favorite flavor of ramen and therefore a necessary undertaking -- I noticed a person on the side of the road in front of Pier 1, holding a double stacked sign about Borders Bookstore’s closing sale -- with savings of 50% to 70%. It is more accurate to say this person was wielding the sign like a giant shield and hiding behind it, as if anticipating a barrage of incoming firepower, or more likely afraid of being seen by someone they knew in the traffic at the intersection. I’m not sure holding a sign outside a mall entrance would be my favorite job either. But it’s a job, right? And lately they are pretty hard to come by, I don’t care what the highly-paid big economists declare about economic recovery. I have seen nothing of the sort.

National economy aside, the point is I was headed somewhere else, saw the sign, and changed course into the mall at the next entrance. The sign holder accomplished his or her purpose. Marketing objective fulfilled.

I hadn’t been to Borders in months, so I felt a little guilty showing up for the closing sale. The place was more packed with shoppers than I ever saw it in regular times. It brought tears to my eyes.  I figured many of us were occasional shoppers bottom feeding off the going out of business sale. It made me sad, because if this many people shopped there on a regular basis, maybe they wouldn’t be closing. Then, to make myself feel better,  I rationalized my own presence -- it’s not my fault a single hard cover book costs the equivalent of my weekly grocery budget and the only time books feel affordable is at a half-off sale. If things weren't so expensive or if I made more money maybe I could afford to be something more lofty than a bottom feeder.

Instead of strolling the grocery section of WalMart for my weekly supply of $1 frozen microwave dinners for lunch, granola bars for breakfast, and tomato paste to finish off my spaghetti sauce already in progress, I spent over an hour browsing the racks at Borders. Even the bookcases and fixtures were for sale. I fantasized about having one of the really tall wall units with the rolling ladder, and how that might FINALLY provide enough room for all my books. It was a lovely reverie, but then I woke up and remembered where I live, the height of my ceilings and size of my rooms, the reality that I really do plan to move someday, and that $600 for a rolling wooden ladder is NOT the wisest alternate use of September’s mortgage payment and I should send it to Bank of America as planned, thus keeping the book collection dry for another month, though still “organized” in piles on far too many horizontal surfaces.

In my wanderings, I picked up books -- eight, to be precise, at saving of 50% and 60% depending upon genre -- plus a blank journal, an installment in the graphic novel series I’ve been reading for the past year, two magazines (70% off) and a new pair of reading glasses in the strength recommended by the eye doctor at my recent $300 eye exam (including 6 months worth of contact lenses) which is unfortunately not covered by my $200 a month health coverage. About halfway through my hunting and gathering of books with titles as varied as  “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Religions (Fourth Edition);” “Becoming a Life Change Artist: 7 Creative Skills to Reinvent Yourself at Any Stage of Life;” and “Crazy Aunt Purl’s Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair: True Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split;” and somewhere in the law book section strategically located next to the books about sex, the figure $100 popped into my head. I don’t know where it came from, or how it landed in my cranium, but after it arrived there I thought, “Ok, this little side trip is going to be the equivalent of the month’s grocery budget.” Maybe that's when I should have visited the financial management section.

Standing there at the intersection of books about legal defense and wills and “Secrets of a Call Girl” and the Illustrated Kama Sutra, I considered the sum of $100 and what it represented -- the number of hours at my desk ... the slightly more than two tanks of gas to get me to that desk and everywhere else for a two week period  ... three months derby league dues plus a six-pack of pricey beer ... a third of the current cost of a round-trip plane ticket home. And then I said “screw it,” yes, out loud ... followed by a silent “I have a VISA card, what’s another $100 owed on top of the seven grand piled up in the three-and-a-half years since my divorce?” It’s that sort of thinking that got me back into credit card debt in the first place. But I kept shopping, grabbing a novel featuring a Jack Russell Terrier (half Moose!) and two books based in New England -- a novel set in colonial Andover, and “The Gardner Heist -- The true story of the world’s largest unsolved art theft;” a craft book about recycling wool sweaters into new creations .... another graphic novel, this one from the biography section. On the way to the register, I grabbed a copy of Cesar Milan’s magazine and one on Gothic Style and Beauty.  No, I am not going goth .... it just amused me there was an entire glossy, full-color magazine about goth style and the challenges it can present in the workplace. The topic matter interested me as much as the expense undertaken for color ... I mean, really ... most of the pages are black! But hey, the red lipstick and tattoo ink really pop in the photos. I was proud of myself for completely avoiding the Self Help section, where I have already 'invested' far too much money on books telling me all the new and modern ways in which I am defective.

My total at the register? $100.01. Seriously. Almost dead on the money of my random price, save for one cent. I would actually have been under the amount if not for standing in line waiting and eyeballing those reading glasses at half-off. And then it was off to Walmart to stock up on that ramen I’ll be eating for a good long time, thanks to my spontaneous shopping trip, because even though it was on the credit card, I'll pay extra when I send in the payment. (At least that's what I tell myself now.) Bottom feeding at the bookstore means bottom feeding in the nutrition chain. But my soul will be nourished for a while with all these new books.