Noticing the dog that didn’t bark
I logged into our joint checking account online the other day and saw that the balance was right around $150.
“That’s odd,” I thought. “It seems high.”
(The balance should have been closer to $40, maybe even a little less.)
I wasn’t home at the time to check Quicken, so I sat and thought.
“What could still be out there for around $100? What hasn’t cleared?”
Then it came to me. I’d written a check (one of the few I still write) for our annual termite protection plan, and that was probably it.
So now I need to give them a call and see if they got our payment. It could be bad if that lapsed, since we’ve had to have the house treated for termites a couple of times. (Subterranean termites are very common here in the desert.)
Sometimes it’s hard to notice things that aren’t happening. In this case, I noticed the problem with the termite bill because our balance was off.
But not all that long ago, I got a bill from the dentist for work that had been done in January or February. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to wonder about the bill, because I just assumed that the dental insurance had paid.
Luckily the dentist’s office was very nice about it (they had been sending the bill to the wrong address) and nothing bad happened due to my greater-than-6-month delay in paying, but that could have turned out differently.
I think I’ll be putting in a little more effort at noticing the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
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