Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

About six months after moving to Nashville we traded my trusty commuter Honda for a barely-used Avalon for my wife. We got a great deal; an African American female soldier who had been in Iraq over a year decided to sell the car rather than make payments for it to sit in the parking lot at Ft. Campbell. One of the things we liked about it was that she had trimmed it out nicely with rims and a smoked license plate cover. Nothing we would ever spend money to do, but sharp looking, especially the rims. We noticed the first few weeks we had it that young guys, especially African American kids, would actually back-up when stopped in traffic to look at the car. They were shocked to find a middle aged, gray-haired white woman behind the wheel. And one day, so was Metro... Heading home from meeting me for lunch, my wife was pulled over in Hermitage. She was in a stretch of Lebanon Road known as the "Bonnas" where at the time there was some daytime drug activity. Note the ...

I'm posing a question here. I'm not being critical or making a point, other than to say that I have a question. I've noticed in our 25 year old daughter and in co-workers of a similar vintage a generational value of authenticity. "Being real" is short-hand for baring your soul or expressing unvarnished, uncensored feelings to others regardless of how they receive that information. Combined with the growing ubiquitous presence of social media, you can now gain and lose friends with lightening speed by saying what you really feel. At the risk of self-identifying as being old school, I find this noteworthy from both a generational and geographic perspective. I was not only raised in the south, but raised southern. My dad is from Kentucky and my mom is from Mississippi. Dad is from a tiny town in the western part of the state, and mom was raised by a school teacher and a minister. The southern value of that day was propriety and discretion above all else. I...

If you're receiving strange letters from Blue Cross Blue Shield to justify FSA purchases you're not alone. The rules on FSA purchases have tightened, and we informed everyone at Open Enrollment that you might be required to submit receipts or other backup to justify purchases on your FSA card. That's normal. What's not normal is that some of you are being asked to submit backup for every single swipe of an FSA card, including co-pays for prescription drugs and in-network doctor visits. That's not right and we've addressed it. But it has been good for a laugh... Some of you have been asked by BCBS to submit an Explanation of Benefits (EOB) to justify your in-network FSA swipes. Those EOBs come from...BCBS! Their FSA unit has been asking some of you to send back to them forms that they themselves generate. Even better, one lady was told not to send it back in...just read it over the phone! And my favorite is the 1¢ solution. There was a penny difference be...