Analog Technology To The Rescue

In Antarctica, it is late summer, but here, it is tax season, and we here at the Rookery ran into a little quandary. Emp. Peng. owned stock in a company that got bought out in 2007, so the new owners bought back all the stock as part of the purchase agreement. On the bright side, we got most of the credit card debt paid off. On the slightly dimmer side, the buyback triggered a lovely little thing called Capital Gains, but no one seemed to have records of the stock's purchase price 12 years ago. That is a rather vital bit of information when trying to calculate how much the capital gains were and thus how much capital gains tax we would be hit with.

We are of the internet generation, and we are accustomed to being one Google search away from anything and everything we might ever want to know, and a lot we would prefer not to know. There are plenty of orifices on the internet, but we found a hole. No one seemed to have information on what this particular stock was selling for on January 30, 1996. Now, there are plenty of places where one can look up historical price quotes on stocks, but none of them had information on this now-defunct stock. One site promised to be able to find stock prices for any stock, defunct or not, but they wanted $15 per lookup. Emp. Peng. even tried going the offline route and calling the corporate investor relations, but since the corporation was bought out and the investor relations folks were for the new corporate owners, they were somewhat less than helpful. We spent the better part of a week trying to hunt down a single elusive tidbit of information in this digital age.

Tip o' the beak to SuperDad, who, when alerted to our plight, suggested that we just look it up in the Wall Street Journal at our local public library's newspaper archives. After a week of mining the internet, we found the pertinent information in roughly a minute and a half in analog format. We probably could have shaved at least a minute and 20 seconds off that time if either one of us could have remembered how the blazes to work a microfiche reader. I am still fighting the urge to kick myself.

In a delicious bit of timing, our analog salvation comes 4 days after the cell phone companies started turning off their analog phone networks. The coincidence would have been even more tasty had the company whose buyout triggered this whole fiasco been one of those cell phone companies. It is a cell phone carrier, but won't be starting to cut off its analog network for another 5 weeks.