Nov 17, 2009: This was an interesting, if somewhat puzzling encounter. It was 13 years ago as I write this, but I still remember the meeting which prompted this follow-up letter of thanks and remuneration. I thought this was a sales call. Three men, who I thought were from Kodak, presented me and 2 others with a lengthy series of scenarios involving image management software. I recall little of the details of these various and exhaustive scenarios except that none of them seemed relevant to our work. I did not mean to be rude but the surprise nature of the meeting caught me off guard, so maybe I was a little blunt in repeatedly responding to their comments with "Not really useful here." The meeting lasted over an hour, and when it ended I and the others might well have forgotten it ever occurred but for this follow-up letter that arrived a couple of weeks later. Included with this thank you note for my "participation in the study" was a check for $50. Only then did I realize that this session was not a sales call but more of a focus group conducted by the Taylor Research & Consulting Group. Had I understood this I may have had a better attitude about it. I received no introduction to this meeting, having been summoned in to the proceedings as I happened to pass the nearly-empty room, and when I sat down it looked every bit like a typical sales call, this time from folks at Kodak who I thought wanted to sell us some software.

The surprise payment of $50 reminded me of an incident years earlier at Tower Records. Working the cash register one night I swiped a customer's Visa card through the credit card machine and instead of the usual approval code I saw a message saying to call a toll-free number. I called that number and found myself talking to someone at Visa who asked me if I had a pair of scissors handy. I said yes, and she instructed me to please cut the credit card in half, this while the hapless customer stood 3 feet away and watched. Evidently this person was way overdue on his card payments, and Visa wanted the card destroyed, and I did that.

To my surprise the conversation with the woman at Visa continued. She asked for my name and mailing address so that Visa could send me a check for $75 -- a bounty for taking one of their rogue credit cards out of commission. I never knew that cashiers could get bonuses like this for cutting up customers' credit cards, but I mentioned it to others who worked there and a few said it had happened to them, too. One woman claimed that her mother came to the store one day with 5 credit cards of hers that she knew were bad. She tried to use each of the cards while their daughter worked the cash register. One after another the message came up to call the toll-free number, and one after another the woman received a $75 stipend for cutting up her mother's bad credit cards. I am not sure I believe that story, or if it was even meant to be told as fact rather than fancy.