Monica Speaks

Monica:

Skip comes in early every morning, puts on a pot of coffee, goes into his office and starts looking at the overnight stock exchanges. He reads the Wall Street Journal front page to back. Almost every day Max shows up later. Usually he has been across the street at Filo’s coffee shop. I don’t know why he goes over there to drink coffee when Skip has a pot on here, but he does. Skip takes a lot more interest in their investments than Max does. I think Max realizes that Skip keeps on top of the markets and just lets him do it. We meet regularly with the financial advisor. When we get done Skip will always go to his office and review everything. Max will always follow me up to my desk and ask me if I understood it all. If I just tell him yes, he will leave me alone. If I tell him that I didn’t understand everything, he has to get into this big discussion about what he doesn’t understand and start asking me questions that I can’t answer. Kind of like he is convinced that if I can just see how much he doesn’t understand, it will help me understand it all better. I just say that I understand it, even if I don’t.

I don’t really have much to do with the financials, other than the running of the agency, and for that I get a budget that I have to stay within. As for the rest of the investments, I just collect the documents and sort them out so that they can go to the financial advisor before the meeting. I keep them all in a file cabinet in Skip’s office. He feels like if they are in his office he is the CEO or something. Every once in a while Max will go over there and start sorting through everything in the hopes that he will get some sort of financial epiphany.

They also have a lawyer who comes in regularly. Honestly, I think that she is keeping an eye on me, and you know what? That doesn’t bother me. Hopefully she will catch anything that might get past me, and that can’t hurt. When you are sitting on top of a two-hundred-twenty-million-dollar Powerball empire, some checks and balances are a good thing. Anyway, she is a very nice person and I think that she likes the guys almost as much as I do. So we get along pretty well.