Sunday, March 1, 2009

A Bloated Wallet in this Economy

It's inevitable. Pretty soon, I'll have to buckle down and get a murse.

No, it isn't that I'm making that much money in my new job. It's the influx of cards I've received because of said métier.

Each week I get a new card in the mail. It started slowly with the ID card for work and the health insurance cards, one for medical the other for dental. Pretty standard. The following week yet another letter came in the post. This time it was a prescription drug card. Clearly not finished commandeering control of my wallet, I received a card for my flex spending account from the greedy-for-wallet-space insurance company.

There are only so many slots in my wallet. Most were already snuggly filled before taking on this job and its accompanying legion of plastic.

You can learn a lot about someone based on what they keep in their wallet. Probably more so based on what someone keeps in their purse, especially so if it's a man with a purse.

My wallet is robustly filled, but not to the point of overflowing or not being able to close. There are the bank cards; four total--2 credit, 2 debit. It's all about balance. Then the requisite driver's license is shrouded behind plastic in a hole barely big enough to hold it or enable me to get it out with any level of ease. My car insurance card, flimsy but it still takes up space.

In the middle I keep some business cards in the event I run into a cute girl who has neither a phone nor a pen to take down my number. (A guy can dream.)

The plastic sleeves intended for pictures house a decade old picture of my sister, a ticket stub from a Cubs/Diamondbacks game I went to several years ago and the third picture slot holds dust. I'd like to think I'm saving this spot for a girlfriend's picture, but based on recent endeavors in online dating, it may continue to be my dust receptacle.

Attention identity thieves and muggers: Since I carry so many insurance cards and outdated crap, I don't have the strength to carry any tangible form of money. You'll be lucky to find more than three dollars in my wallet at a given time. Currently, there is $0 and a receipt from getting my hair cut. So, if you want a dollar off your next trim, by all means take my wallet. Otherwise, you just inherited back problems. Joke's on you sucker.