By Shari Storm
I loved The 23 Adult Truths that made its way around the internet a few weeks ago. I took a try at compiling 23 Credit Union Truths. I hope you enjoy.
1. Nobody ever reads your newsletter. That is, unless it has an error. Then everyone reads it.
2. ALM stands for Accountants Love Marketing.
3. Why does thinking look so much like not-doing-work?
4. Webinars are the spawn of the devil.
5. The higher up the org chart you go, the fewer vendor decisions you make but the more sales calls you get.
6. A business continuity plan never survives contact with a crisis.
7. Blackberries have made our mandatory five consecutive days impossible.
8. For your entire career, you are only allotted one use of the red exclamation mark for the priority of an email. Use it wisely.
9. You can spend $2 million pleading with your members to change their behavior. Charge a $2 fee and they change overnight. In other words, $2 can often accomplish what $2 million cannot.
10. I’ve often read sentences like this: “I found it!” she cried. I’ve never, in my entire life, heard a person use the word ‘cried’ as a synonym for ‘said’. It’s a word that exists only on paper.
11. There ought to be a name for that person who sends you an email and then beats the email to your office and asks you if you’ve read it yet.
12. Why can a sound wake you up but not a smell?
13. There are some meetings, that when cancelled, make you feel like you just found a twenty dollar bill on the street.
14. If you are going to send a nasty email or IM about someone, you have an 88% chance of sending it to them by mistake.
15. While it may be true that what gets measured gets done, it is also true that what is fun gets done before that.
16. I sometimes long for days when life was simpler and my copy machine just made copies.
17. Someone should do a study on why a whole group of people will periodically show up to work in the same color. Then someone should do a study about why one person is always compelled to say, “Looks like you got the memo.”
18. Why do emails still have a cc: line? 65% of the people we work with have no idea what a carbon copy is.
19. Some people need to step away from the listservs.
20. Face it, we are never going to get our members to understand the difference between a pin and pen transaction, let alone care about it.
21. Yesterday I had to print an email and the “think before you print” tag line made the email print on two pages, rather than one. Now that’s irony.
22. Can we just make effect and affect the same word and get on with it?
23. Mark Twain would have been perfect on Twitter. Of course, he never would have written The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, had he been on Twitter.
Shari Storm is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Verity Federal Credit Union and is the author of the book “Motherhood is the New MBA”, available here:
That Credit Union Blog 
Truth is always funny- I loved it.
business Continuity:
“Planning is everything, the plan is nothing” – Dwight Eisenhower
Shari – thanks for the laughs this morning. I especially like #1…
One more: Those “Other Duties as Assigned” in your job description include some things that you never ever imagined you would do in your career.
Hilarious, Shari! And I’m just going to add that my favorite meeting to be cancelled – ALCO (and how ironic is it that my auto-correct keeps changing ALCO to alcohol? Hmmm…) Thanks for the laugh!
I knew your position immediately when I began to read your article. Loving it. Must forward to my CEO and Graphic Artist!
Great list Shari!
I love it. Especially agree with #7. And I’m laughing, I’m often a part of the ‘wear what everyone else is wearing group’, and someone always does ask about the memo…
Ah! This is just what I needed!! Thanks for sharing, Shari…it was hilarious 🙂
Love it – especially the one about some people needing to step away from Listservs!