Apostilled, Screwed and Eschewed

You gotta fight for your right to party

Ever suck in your breath at a place like Costco or the DMV or an airport and think — oh no, there are just too many people here?

Costco especially freaks me out.

I got there early for Gumpy’s birthday weekend provisions. Got one of those ten pound bags of potatoes.

But we carve out our space and it’s good. With the van, we can still find spots where it feels like we are the only people in the world. Our family is small, our tribe not much bigger.

Even online, amongst millions of users, the algorithm knows we need to feel seen, so it tucks us in and makes us cozy serving up people we follow, content we like.

But sometimes, you need to assert yourself, push back, leave the cozy corner, fight the system and claim what’s yours.

While Costco will take your credit card, the DMV wants a picture and airports want everything including a full body scan — lately I’ve been hitting new levels where Kong is rolling tons of barrels at me and I’m ‘a-jumpin’ like mad to reach Princess Peach.

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Take Apostille. Rhymes with Bastille, but rather than where the revolution began, it’s where bureaucracy ends. I’m still fighting the paper war that started when my parents died last year, and I just hit the Apostille wall.

For my mom, I promised myself I’d apply for Austrian Citizenship. My mom is a Holocaust survivor; at 12 she was forced to flee Vienna. A few years ago, Austria extended citizenship to descendants of survivors as part of a reparations push. This fight is for her legacy, plus Vienna has wonderful coffee shops full of Sacher-Torte, which wouldn’t be the worst place to spend some time should things go sideways here.

But Austria doesn’t make it easy. Apostille ties to the French for making a note, and then in 1961, an international convention in The Hague made it a byzantine legal document.

More than a document, it’s a whole structure and process to verify other official documents are officially the documents they claim to be. Notary squared.

It’s silly circular. For example, I had to request an official copy of my birth certificate from LA County. Once I got that very official piece of paper, I had to flip it back into the mail, this time to California’s Department of State with more forms and checks. It came back last week. They added another official piece of paper offset-stapled to my birth certificate with a stamp covering both docs like so:

Turducken: a chicken cooked in a duck cooked in a turkey.

Austria also wants to make sure I’m not a thug. So, I got fingerprinted at the post office — chicken. The next day, I got an email back from the FBI with my official rap sheet¹ — duck. Then I had to print it, yeet it back in the mail with another bunch of forms bound for the US State Department to get … Apostilled. Turkey.

Apostille = Turducken.

That was a month ago. Once (if?) I get all the Apostilles back, I submit the lot to the Austrian Consulate who sends them off to Vienna for more reviewing and processing, so it is still very much unknown if I will ever eat Sacher-Torte again.

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Incentives differ in corporate America, so while you won’t find government bureaucracy — it’s just as maddening to deal with when you’re a one-man shop. It’s David versus Goliath and big tech is no exception.

Here, I’m spoiled. Working so long for the biggest software company in the world gave me an outsized view of my importance, my influence. The same company that unabashedly acquired and then killed Skype, the most beloved app in history.

I was part of that, and I must make amends.

So while I fight for Austria to recognize me, I fight for the little guy (my small-biz clients) against the tyranny of big tech. Hoboy big tech doesn’t care about you.

My latest client got screwed twice by big tech: first Yahoo and then Google.

Yahoo² repeatedly implodes jettisoning off its small business product line to a company that doesn’t care? I got you. Google dumps its domain biz like it’s shaking off a flea, orphaning your website? I got you.

I can unscrew a lot. But there’s one thing I can’t fix and that’s social media.

Saloons used to give lunch away to anyone down to be a day drinker. But the drink was watered down and the price was high and the food was salty — so now you need another drink, and another… That free drink is social media. You’re not paying, you’re the product. Sometimes that’s ok, build a big following, get real leads but, because it’s free, you have zero recourse when the platform changes under your feet or your account disappears.

For my friends who write or read on Substack — don’t get complacent downing the drinks here either. Enjoy the maraschino cherry and little umbrella while that sweet VC money funds pretty sites for your writing, newsletter emails and of course a new endless scroll.

But backup your data and hold on tight, because change is coming — 2026 might be payback time.

Check out the first Substack friend I ever made, the indubitable 🅟🅐🅤🅛 🅜🅐🅒🅚🅞 who writes DEPLATFORMABLE about how to manage the ever-shifting tides of the newsletter business (and other entertaining reads).

For all things social — the best you can do is secure your account — use all the auth factors, because if you get hacked you’ll find no one but a bad bot to talk to.

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How about some Linda Ronstadt to go with the Beastie Boys?

I’ve been cheated, been escheated …

Another word I’d never heard of: Escheated. Like Apostille, it has French roots meaning to ‘fall back’ and it ties to Medieval law where, when a landholder died without an heir, the property fell back or was escheated to the state.

If I’m doing Austria for my mom, fighting big tech screwing my clients, this last one’s for my dad. While I’ve been trying to close down his trust this year, my dad left us a treasure hunt, and it’s taken awhile to sort it all out.

This is the last thing I have to do — and thanks to escheatment — it doesn’t look like I’ll make it by the end of the year.

In my dad’s safe deposit box, underneath twenty pounds of Bicentennial quarters, were a stack of papers and folders and envelopes. There were passports from Austria with Nazi stamps, US Army discharge papers from WWII, as well as a couple of US Savings Bonds.

The Bonds were 30 year and had only recently matured in 2023. I sent those straight in — with forms and death certificates — to the US treasury. Still waiting to hear back — coming up on two months now, but that process was relatively straightforward.

Underneath those, at the very bottom of the box, in a tattered manilla envelope with some cryptic scribbles from my dad, I found these:

Another one, from 1968 for 10 shares, is blue.

My dad bought these when I was 3, nearly 60 years ago. Were they worth anything? Where to start? My dad never mentioned them to me.

But my dad was a diligent and conservative investor, and so I started poking around. Unlike the savings bonds, where fortunately the US Government is still in business, this real estate investment trust - MREIT - is not.

Congress created REITs in 1960. Up until then — not unlike Medieval times — you or me couldn’t own commercial property, just business and wealthy families. REITs were created as a companion investment instrument to mutual funds and overall they’ve done alright, even outperforming the S&P 500 in some windows.

MREIT was one of the first. I figure my uncle, who lived in NYC where MREIT was incorporated, talked my dad into buying the shares. He was much more risk tolerant than my dad. MREIT didn’t do so great, especially with the real-estate market collapse in the 70s. So in the 80s they were acquired by a holding company called InterGroup (INTG). My dad’s 25 shares of MREIT became 25 shares of INTG.

INTG never did the the best either, executing three, 3-for-2 stock splits to reduce the price of their stock and look good to investors. At some point in the 90s, Intergroup hired a transfer agent to convert old paper certificates like my dad’s into modern book-entry shares. We had long since moved, and my dad never saw that letter. At that point my dad’s original 25 shares were worth 84 and change due to the splits.

I sent the orange and blue certificates off to the transfer agent with more paper and forms hoping they’d send me real shares or cash them out, but no, they wrote me back saying they had no record of them, blah blah blah, and then at the end — at the bottom of page 2 — this:

… may we suggest that you contact the Unclaimed Property Division in the State of residence to determine if the assets were escheated.

Honestly, I was done at that point but that word caught my eye. No one’s escheating me.

Lo, the State of California holds over $13 BILLION dollars of unclaimed property and every year another $600 MILLION comes in. 33 million people nationwide have money waiting for them. Lotta people right? Lotta money.

I found a couple hundred bucks lying around in California’s escheatment fund for me and my kids. My dad’s — 876 dollars and 43 cents. 84 shares of INTG today would be more like $2,500, but I’ll take it. Find yours.

Like Medieval lords, the state makes out like a bandit here, pocketing millions in interest from unclaimed funds. The state has six months to process my claim and make some more money off it, but I’m sure I’ll get it eventually.

We’re going down to LA next month to clear out my dad’s storage locker, and after that we’ll party and buy some Canter’s Matzo Ball soup in his memory.

1. The post office sent my fingerprints electronically to the FBI which sent back (very quickly via e-mail) my official rap sheet. It’s blank. Good thing, because if crimes, no citizenship.

2. If Yahoo hadn’t rejected taken Microsoft’s $44B acquisition offer in 2008, things would have turned out differently. Not necessarily better, but differently.