Making a Statement

So I get a lot of brokerage statements at the beginning of each month. There’s the one on which the commissions are all about $8. There’s the one on which the commissions are all about $48. There’s the one I don’t use much — a discounter but not a deep discounter — where the commissions are typically about $120.

All these statements are easy to read and review.

And then there are the ones I get from my full-service broker, at which the commissions are typically $150 or $250 for trades I could do just as well for $8, but I am Godfather to my broker’s kids. And for more than a year now, these statements — to save paper? to drive us nuts? — have been printed as follows: Page 1 comes first, then page 2, upside down on the back of page 1, then page 3 like page 1, then page 4 on the back of page 3 and upside down. And so on. The pages have holes punched in them at the top, though I can never recall being sent a full-service, $200-a-trade binder, and I guess the idea is to flip through the pages not from right to left, as one would flip through a book, but as you would page through a wall calendar — paging up rather than to the left.

But let me tell you: It’s incredibly annoying.

And don’t I feel better for getting this off my chest?

If only Seinfeld weren’t going off the air, he could do virtually an entire episode on this all-important theme.