Personal Dork Assistant

Perks

The rich uncles have all their financial advisers and investment accounts to handle the money rolling in. Mom's in more of a retirement-mode, but she has enough to piggy-back on their uber-VIP status and go along for the ride. Come holiday time or special occasions, the various insurance, banking, and brokerage managers always make sure to send along a little something to their favorite customers. One day uncle gave me a stack of something, a present from the insurance company for mom's business. Well, it must've been a heck of a policy because the insurance company gave Mom 36,000NTD's worth of 7-11 gift certificates as a new-account present.

On the one hand, the gift certificates, in 100NTD denominations, sure made for a phat 紅包. On the other hand, all that money, just to spend in convenience stores? Mom wasn't going to get much use out of them, and I was picturing a Supersize Me kind of future, except I'd be killing myself with microwave bentos and tea eggs instead of Mickie-D fast food. Thankfully we read the fine print on the back more carefully and it turned out that the GCs were good across the Uni-President Group's mighty franchising empire in Taiwan, from Starbucks and Mister Donut, all the way up to Muji and Hankyu department stores. So that actually makes the certificates quite a viable spending option, although it does make you realize how much you're under the thumb of the mighty corporation as an ordinary consumer. For now, let's charge those Starbucks and 7-11 iCash pre-paid cards and go to town.