One of the quickest ways to throw yourself into financial turmoil, is to seal a deal with a handshake. I'm not implying that handshakes are bad, I'm just insisting that they need to be backed with a bona fide contract. Even when conducting business with friends, family, or trusted coworkers, a great deal of discomfort and confusion can be avoided by spelling out the rules of a deal and by putting your signatures to it. The bigger the deal is, the more critical a contract is. When dealing with large amounts of money, a professional lawyer should be consulted also.

I had a situation once, which involved having a coworker install new wood siding on my garage. I thought it would be a fairly simple arrangement. We agreed on a price, and a completion date. He was to be paid when the job was finished. The problem arose when I came home one day to see the new siding on my garage. What had happened was that the garage wasn't level, and rather than leveling the siding with the environment, my carpenter friend applied the siding in accordance with the structural lines of the garage. I'm not kidding when I say that the garage looked like a ship in the process of sinking.

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Because we had simply agreed to a siding installation, my friend insisted that he had fulfilled his part of the bargain. I bit down hard on my pride and cut him a check, then I stripped the siding off of the garage and reinstalled it myself. In retrospect, a contract would have specified that the work would be done correctly and in a "workmanlike manner." I have not made any business agreements without signed, written terms, since that one hard earned lesson.

It happens all the time. One Comcast customer was dumped for using too much web service on a plan he purchased because it was "unlimited." The company told him the word referred to the fact he could be on his computer as much as he wanted, not that he could view as many pages and videos as he wanted. And then Comcast tried selling him a more expensive plan. Infuriated, he fought back, launching a fiery blog and a cutting YouTube protest to tell the world he'd been ripped off. And a consumer advocate was born.

In July, Sprint put a cap on its previously "unlimited" data card usage, following Verizon and AT&T. Now, 5 gigabytes is all you get unless you want corporate monkeys to shut off your supply. Americans aren't the only ones to suffer the bait-and-switch defended by dense legalese and bent logic in the Terms of Service contract: U.K.'s Vodafone puts similar caps on its "unlimited" mobile phone plan, as does Canada's TELUS.

On February 29, the loss of a $40 billion contract by Boeing Co. was reported by Peter Cohan on BloggingStocks. Since that time, debate has been quietly rumbling in various spots around the Internet regarding the placement of that contract. Initially, it was expected that Boeing Co. would receive the order but it has instead been awarded to Northrup Grumman and EADS, parent of Airbus, which detractors say puts an unacceptable amount of control and revenue of an American military contract into the hands of a European corporation.

The contact is for the building of refueling tankers which refuel fighter jets while in flight. I have found estimates which claim that the contract value could reach as high as $100 billion dollars, but $40 billion is the media reported estimate. It appears that even though corporate administration of the contract would be taken overseas, at least some of the work would still be performed in America. Additionally, we should consider that major components of these and other military aircraft already originate from foreign manufacturers.

Hard-line protectionists and the union ilk are clamoring for congressional reversal and investigation of the contract assignment, while straight line capitalists and globalists claim that business is business and that all is fair in contract negotiation. So far, I have found no indication that the matter shall be treated by our government as anything other than an ordinary manufacturing contract.

My personal opinion is that it's just a contract, and the United States Air Force has the right to purchase aircraft from whomever they deem fit to provide them in a timely and cost effective manner. Perhaps the matter could be given a cursory review by Congress just to make sure that everything is square, but basically, if there's not an overt reason to suspect some manner of undue manipulation, let's just drop it and let them build some tankers.

What say you?