TheBanyanTree: Social Viability

[Monique Colver]

This morning one of my bookkeepers (I have five, all lovely people I've
never met in person) asked me who I went to the prom with. This was an odd
question since I never went to the prom. But I recently set up a client's
online banking and told her to go in and reconcile the account, and when
logging in they asked that as a security confirmation, as if knowing who I
went to the prom with would prove beyond a doubt that the person accessing
the site was indeed me, or authorized by me.

I yelled out to the next office, where my husband was, "Who'd I go to the
prom with?"

"What?" he responded with. He tries to be helpful, but sometimes he doesn't
understand the questions. I repeated it. It's not as if he would know, since
at the time of my prom he hadn't been born yet, but I like to throw out
these questions anyway. He found it such a fascinating question he wandered
over to my office and said, "Is someone questioning your social viability?"

I love how he comes up with these terms. Social viability. He's studying
psychology, and I'm sure in the upcoming months and years he'll come up with
many useful phrases.

My bookkeeper was still waiting and my husband didn't have a clue, so I told
her to enter his name. That didn't work, but then it asked who my first pet
was. Since I always use the name of my current pet because it's easier to
remember, that one worked just fine and she was able to go in to the
client's account and wire one million dollars to my offshore account.

This is why I'm not socially viable. I say these things and sometimes people
aren't sure if I'm serious or not. I'm not.

Monique