As you may have guessed from yesterday’s post, I am at this very moment trying to tear myself away from life as I know it and suspend operations for a while. 

True, the world will not stop while I do. Ned and Ted and Len and Edna and Clarissa and Elizabeth and Otto will still need things immediately. The Flute Reamer Division will still have those transition issues. Bob may need a speech or two. The IR department will still worry about its upcoming presentation in Bophutswana. But all that will have to go on without me, I most dearly hope. 

Yes, I will have my BlackBerry. I will do my best to look at it only twice a day. The rest of the time it will be in a drawer. I find this better than imagining the thousands of idiotic e-mails and perhaps 10 important ones that will be piling up during the interregnum.

And yes, a few people will know where I am, my assistant Beverly being the most important. It will be up to her to figure out what’s worth bothering me for. She is aware of Bing’s Law, which, as you may remember, states that every minute of work on a vacation requires one full hour for the re-establishment of proper mental equilibrium. Thus, a ten minute conference call demands a full 10 hours of recovery time. Longer than that? You do the math.

I will, of course, have my little laptop with me, so who knows. Maybe I’ll drop you a line now and then. In any event, I’ll see you all after the 4th. Don’t work too hard while I’m away, okay?

1. Send a memo to Bob, asking him if it’s okay for you to take two whole weeks together, and informing him of the date and perhaps asking whether it fits with his vacation plans. This will not only serve the function of informing him of your potential non-presence and coordinating it with his own, but also remind him that he, too, will be taking some time off and that others might be entitled to some also. 

2. Inform your colleagues and, if you are a manager of some sort, your reportees that you will be away, telling them when, and making sure that your functions are covered during your absence. If any important subordinates were planning to take the same time, and it would destroy your peace of mind while you are away if they did so, simply tell them that they’re out of luck. Establishing a bona fide vacation is a war. There are going to be casualties, one of which should not be your vacation. 

3. Make sure you have your passport up to date, if you are traveling abroad. Once you ascertain that all is in order, make sure to drop the fact that you have done so to Bob, employing a breezy and informative style that let’s him know that your vacation is proceeding according to plan and that you’re happy about it and hope he shares that happiness, seeing how he’s so tuned in to other people’s feelings and all. 

4. Make sure that your electronics work at the location to which you are going. Cell phones are not as important as BlackBerrys. This is not because you will be doing e-mails all the time or that you wish to be reachable 24-7, but because by doing half an hour of messaging first thing in the morning and at the end of the day, you will be avoiding the nightmare of returning to 8,756 e-mails in your inbox, some of which were marked URGENT! even though you put up an away message. After you have done this, by the way, you may observe to Bob in an offhand way how incredible it is that BlackBerrys work in the mountains of Wyoming. 

5. Get any shots that you require if you are going to places like Belize, which has bugs as big as footballs, and jungles that sport diseases that haven’t been invented in humans yet. Don’t forget to complain that those inoculations hurt within earshot of Bob. 

6. One week before your vacation, take a look at your schedule. People will have stuffed it with things to do for the two weeks you are planning to be away. There is no logical reason why this happens, but it does. “What’s this meeting with Beanie and Cecil doing on my calendar?” you may ask the person who put it there. “I’m going to be away, as I told you sixteen times already.” To which they will reply, “You’re going away? Really?” In all cases, set about clearing your time and delegating the important stuff to other people. 

7. If you are a manager, a few days before your departure call in each of your key people and once again inquire what they are planning to do during your absence. At least one will mention that he or she was planning to be away, in spite of the fact that you have ensured that nobody was going to be doing so. There is no logical reason why this happens, but it does. Be kind to this person, because they are likely to be a future boss and you have to be careful how you treat people when they’re on the way up, because they may be the ones who are treating you on the way down. But do make sure that your ducks are in order for your time away, which means that they are all present and accounted for. Don’t forget to complain to Bob about how hard it is to do this. 

8.  Wednesday before your last Friday, Bob will inform you of an important meeting/project that will have to be done “next week.” This is a critical moment. Fools and wimps will in a trembling voice remind Bob of their vacation plans, but promise to be “reachable” when necessary. Do not do this. Executive amnesia is a form of authoritarian terrorism that must be fought. “Bob,” you may say as calmly and inoffensively as possible, “As I told you several times, I’m out next week and the week after.” Bob will look confused and hurt. He may even lightly question your loyalty or dedication. That’s all right. A display of spine is seldom out of place in what we do. Of course, if the corporation is being sold, or you are about to be named to a big new position, all bets may be off. Organizations can spoil the best of plans and often do. But 99.99% of the time, the ability to disregard other people’s needs is pure executive brain flatulence. Manage it. 

9. On Friday morning, as you begin the process of packing up to leave, a host, a myriad, a phalanx of problems, challenges and effluvia will fly up and hit you in the face. In some cases, this will be just bad luck and you will have to work your head off to get rid of them. Sometimes it will be other people’s anxieties surfacing in the knowledge that you are actually not going to be there, a notion that is making them freak out. You may soothe them by telling them quietly that you will be on BlackBerry now and then, but that if they bother you with little stuff you will rip off their noses when you return. Make sure your desk is clear. Leave an away message on your e-mail. Say goodbye to your colleagues and thank them for covering your butt while you’re away. Then wait for the inevitable phone call. 

10. At 5:45 in the evening of the day you are leaving the office for the last time in the next couple of weeks, Bob will call. It will be about nothing. You will laugh and scratch for a while. He will mention that he’s looking forward to the weekend. You will say NOTHING about your vacation, but allow how you can’t wait to get out of the office either. Then, as you are wrapping up this pleasant conversation, Bob will say, “So, I’ll see you Monday, then.” Breathe. Let the silence grow between you on the phone line. “Bob,” you may then say, but that is all. Nine times out of ten, that will be enough. “Oh, right,” Bob will reply after some time, very sad, very hurt, a tiny puppy being abandoned by its owner, “You’re flaking out for a couple of weeks.” To which you may say, “Right.” He will then wish you bon voyage, and probably tell you all about his vacation plans. The one time out of ten that he gives you a hard time? What can I say. Do what you have to do. The guy’s a madman. But even madmen need limits, maybe more than other people, even. 

Now… breaking your desire to stay in touch while you’re away? That’s another story.

There have been several kerfluffles around my office recently, all revolving around the same issue: What do you tell your boss and when? This would seem to be a simple question, but it’s not. First, it depends on the boss. Some guys (and in that category I, as always, include women guys) want to know nothing until it rears up and bites them in the butt, and then you should have told them. Others want to know what color tie or scarf you’re planning to wear next Thursday. And the target moves. On Monday, Chet may want to know everything. On Tuesday, you can’t rouse him from his slumber.

So what’s a poor employee to do? Take this quiz and see how sensitive you are. How you score may determine whether or not you have a future. 

1. You have a big party coming up and you’re trying to decide what canapes to serve. Do you tell the boss? 

a. No, that’s ridiculous. 

b. Of course! She likes to know every little detail! 

c. Not really, except I make sure to have those little empanadas she likes so much. 

2. You’re going on vacation next month. Do you tell the boss?

a. No. My life is my own! 

b. Of course. He likes to know every detail. 

c. I’m going to check the dates to make sure it coincides with his vacation as much as possible, but in the end I’m going to do what I have to do, making sure that he and his assistant know what my plans are. 

3. You’re going to have a meeting with a bunch of people about something that may or may not happen sometime in the future. Do you tell the boss? 

a. No! I’ll tell him about it when he needs to know. 

b. Of course. I don’t floss without telling him everything. 

c. Yeah, I’ll shoot him an e-mail, just an FYI. Some people are attending who may mention it to him and then he’ll feel like he’s out of the loop. He hates that. 

4. Your division is about to make a big deal with another company. It’s going to be announced next Tuesday. Do you tell the boss? 

a. I’ll tell her Tuesday morning. You know, give her a “heads-up.” 

b. I’ll tell her about the whole thing right now, before we even talk to Law and Public Relations. She’s going to want to go over this thing from top to bottom! 

c. I’ll get all the moving pieces started, and then dial her in, probably on Friday. That will give her the weekend to go over the paper and think about what we might have missed.

5. You’re getting a divorce. Your life is a shambles. Do you tell the boss?

a. Definitely! He’ll feel really sorry for me!

b. I’ll mope around until he asks me what’s wrong. Then I’ll tell him everything. For a LONG time. 

c. I’ll mention it. Since it’s not about him, he’ll have limited interest in it, but he ought to know in case I flake out a little bit in the coming months.

SCORING: Score yourself 1 point for every a. answer, which is a low score because you’re a really stinky communicator and a bad employee. Score yourself 2 points for every b. answer, because while you’re a suckup, you’re erring on the right side by reaching out and trying to make your boss aware of things. You’re likely to be a pretty big pain in the a**, though. Keep that in mind. Score yourself 3 points for every c. answer, because you’re clearly trying to address the issue with subtlety and modulation. You may not get it right every time, but you’re trying to play it a situation at a time and neither tell too much or too little. So good for you. 

As always, the higher you score, the higher your score. Give yourself a point for trying. Trying counts.

My Friday post about the digital transition seems to have flushed a bunch of anti-TV folks out of their weedy, book-lined dens. This has stimulated my urge to defend perhaps the oldest friend I have in the world. This isn’t the first time. I live in a community where people at parties talk about how much they like that new program that’s on the air now: Friends. “Did you see Friends the other night?” they will inquire. To which I reply, “No, I’ve been awake for the last couple of years.” Equally daunting is the type who admits shamefacedly, “I do catch an episode of Antique Road Show now and then. Can’t help it. Guilty pleasure.” Worst of all, in my opinion, are the people who strip their children of social awareness and all chance of popularity by denying them the American right to watch the programming of their choice. “We do allow little Tiffany the occasional Sesame Street. But only when I’m hyperstressed,” one mother told me not long ago. 

Did you know that in spite of the Internet, in spite of Hulu, in spite of YouTube and ITunes and all that jazz, the average time spent watching television in this nation is slightly on the rise? Horrors?! No way. Television is our common language, our history, our heritage. Of course most of it stinks. It always has. You think that when the common groundling went to the theater in Shakespeare’s day all that was on the stage was Shakespeare? Do most books remind you of Hemmingway or Sedaris? How about music? Lots of Mozarts and Mathers around? A medium can’t be defined by its worst examples. You have to look to the best. And during my lifetime, the great unifying cultural events have always taken place inand around the television set. Let’s look at them briefly. I’m afraid it has to be brief, because the TV has destroyed my attention span. What were we talking about again? Oh, yes. Shows that have rocked my world. You may remember some or none:  

• Wonderama: A variety show featuring Terrytoons, early cartoons that may now be found on YouTube. They’re terrible. We all loved them. 
• Winky Dink: An early atrocity in which children were encouraged to draw with crayons on the television set. 
• Soupy Sales: A very funny schtick meister who played with puppets. He came to ruin, at least for a while, when he instructed his audience to go to their parents’ wallets, remove the pictures of either George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, I can’t remember, and mail them in. Kids did so. Parents were upset. 
• The Rifleman: Not as popular as Gunsmoke, the story of a single dad who set things right with a really cool gun. 
• Have Gun Will Travel: A vigilante in black. Used to watch it with my dad. 
• 77 Sunset Strip: The coolest show of its day; three private eyes in slick, Sinatra-era LA. A character named Cookie had a lot of hair, that he combed into a modified ducktail. So did we. 
• Mannix: One of the many Quinn Martin productions that neatly divided themselves into acts, usually with an epilogue. Usually about a detective or other law-enforcement type. After a lot of talk and sneaking around, always ended with a very brief action sequence in an underground parking lot. 
• MTM: As hard as it may be to believe, America used to gather — all generations — on Saturday night, to watch the CBS lineup that included The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart, some other stuff I can’t recall. We weren’t always sober, but we thought it was pretty funny stuff. 
• Masterpiece Theater: I particularly liked the one about Henry the Eighth, who is now disporting himself once again on Showtime. Also terrific was the grand guignol excess of I, Claudius. Derek Jacobi made a stammer and a limp look like the trappings of power. 
• Fawlty Towers: The ultimate extension of the Monty Python spirit that for a brief time graced us. 
• Seinfeld: Still crazy after all these years in syndication. 
• CSI: I watch a lot of procedurals. Everybody underestimates not only the intricate plotting over huge story arcs, but also the differences between examples of the genre, which may be our most potent one at this point in time, including the great Law & Order franchise and a host of others. 

That’s just a very short list. These days I catch most of the shows I’ve liked whenever I can. I also love House, which is one of the best television programs not only of our day but of any other, and do admit to catching the reality make-over program, What Not To Wear, whenever I fly on JetBlue. I don’t watch Gossip Girl, of course, which is only an indication of how out of it I’m starting to get. And I will always decline to give a flying photon about Jon & Kate, even if he did cheat on her on her birthday. 

I also read books, by the way, and do a number of non-digital activities. Personally, I think blogs rot your brain a whole lot worse than anything else, except perhaps for aggregators.

Today we all become digital. Thanks to Congress, which passed a law mandating this transition a few years ago, all analog life in these United States will cease and everything will be transformed from waves and particles into bits and bytes. Anybody who doesn’t have a converter to make him or herself into a digital entity will simply disappear off the face of the earth.

We’ve had plenty of warning time on this. In fact, the transition was supposed to take place over the winter, but it was clear that millions of Luddites, the clueless elderly and the occasional disassociated feeb had failed to heed the clarion call of progress and were in danger of fritzing out when the moment arrived. Mr. Obama quite rightly put off the moment until today, when fewer people are necessary to keep things running, this being the summer.

The move to digital was considered necessary by the massive Internet and telecommunications powerhouses like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Verizon (VZ) and even Yahoo (YHOO), which wants to take all the bandwidth associated with formerly analog commerce and exploit it in  some way they have yet to explain. Their lobbies were bigger than anybody else’s, and better furnished, too. So the eventual outcome of the debate was never in doubt.

For most Americans, the transition will go smoothly. Those who have heeded Klaatu will have either already purchased a personal digital converter to be implanted in the soft tissue behind their ears or made some arrangement with their local cable company to rent one. Those who have not? It’s been nice knowing you.

I got a real start this morning when I turned on my BlackBerry and glanced down my daily bloggery. The third headline at PaidContent.org made my heart seize up in my chest. “Google’s Schmidt rips Bing,” it said.

“Good Lord,” I said. “What have I done now.”

The idea that Mr. Schmidt was mad at me curdled my blood. You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. And you don’t mess around with Goog (GOOG).

I haven’t read the story yet, so I’m still in the dark about what I might have done to get ripped in this fashion. I’m a faithful Googler. I spend hours a night cruising YouTube for tiny tidbits of video arcana. Some of my friends even work for the place. And I’ve never said a bad thing about Sergey, Larry or Eric. I’ve heard they’re all very nice guys, and that Google is a terrific place in which to work. They let you bring your dogs to the office, I think. And some significant percentage of your time can be spent investigating your own mental vapors. I like that. Of course, I’ve been doing that for years, but it’s nice to see it’s been institutionalized someplace finally.

So I fail to see why Google is mad at me. Perhaps you can enlighten me. As far as I’m concerned, they’re okay. I’m okay. Can’t we all just get along?

Comscore, which measures these things, put out a press release today that indicates that my brother, Bing the Search Engine, is off to a pretty good start. This, I have to feel, is at least in part due to the tremendous public relations push that I gave Baby Bing on the day it was born. Here’s what Comscore had to say, in part:  

Bing Off to a Good Start in First Week of Search Activity…

RESTON, VA, June 9, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a preliminary study of the performance of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, during the first week of its public launch. The results of the analysis show a substantial improvement in Microsoft’s position in the search market in the days following Bing’s introduction…

The data shows that last year, average daily Microsoft (MSFT) searcher penetration (!) was 13.8% of the home/work/university marketplace. This year it was up to 15.5%, a 1.7 point change. Similarly, last year the Company’s share of search results pages was 9.1%; this year, after my little buddy reared its bald little head, it was up to 11.1% market share. That’s two points of growth, however you do the math.

“These initial data suggest that Microsoft Bing has generated early interest, resulting in a spike in search engagement and an immediate term improvement to Microsoft’s position in the search market,” said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president. “… it appears that it is off to a good start.”

I am also happy to report that I, Bing, have also shown gratifying results too, as reported by Bingscore, which I operate to generate data of use to me. In my executive summary of June information, I note that fully 2.4% of those now on the site are new visitors who arrived here out of confusion with the Other Bing. That’s okay. They are welcome here bigtime. We Bings take growth where we can find it.

I’m still waiting for that box of stogies, though. I wonder if Microsoft sent them UPS Ground. That’s as slow as dial up, you know.

A lot of you were pretty tough on Ryan, the trader who will probably work like a galley slave until either retires at the age of 40 or keels over at 50. I may have even jumped to some conclusions myself. It’s amazing, on the other hand, what a little knowledge about the reality of a situation can do to moderate the whole judgmental thing. This most wise and tough-minded comment on the subject comes from Cliff Tan of Sarasota, Florida. “I can’t speak for “Ryan” because I have never been a trader,” he writes, “but I’ve worked around enough of them that perhaps this post will reduce some of the heat and shed a little more light.”

“Ryan’s” workday is not really a matter of individual choice for him, as many respondents seem to think. As a trader he simply must be at his desk early enough to prepare for the trading day ahead and will finish whenever the market finishes. He sounds like he’s on the mortgage desk so maybe the first deals in New York get started around 7am and is really going by 8am. Getting there by 6:30am might actually be cutting it close. In other markets (e.g., foreign exchange) I knew traders who were at their desk by the time “Ryan” boarded his train.

And you need to get a couple of hours’ jump on the markets because there’s a lot to read. All the overnight news/events that might affect trading that day, of course. But also – if you’re part of a global book that gets passed into your timezone – you need to know any special events that occurred as part of overnight trading. Your salespeople might have some special deals that need to be done that day, and you need to think about how to execute that. Your investment bankers might have a new structure for which you are expected to provide trading support, and you need to have a razor-sharp idea of how much this stuff they’re peddling is really worth.

And once the trading day really gets started, how are you going to leave? Because usually except for lunch you are on the “dealer” (interactive chat) with your counterparts at other banks, your salespeople call over with new stuff they need to do for their clients (either they’re told or they’ve cajoled somebody to trade an existing position for some reason), you’re on the phone with some of the bigger clients talking about the markets and giving them your thoughts about what they want to do, you need to read the news and events that occur during your day, you might be talking to the “quants” who maintain the pricing models which help determine the right values (you think) of the various credit tranches you’re trading, you might even have a model or two of your own you need to tweak, occasionally you will read some research coming out of your own credit research team or from another bank which someone has forwarded to you. Oh, and you need to make sure you pass the right information to the middle and back offices so your trades are recorded correctly (which determines your P/L, profit/loss, which determines your year-end bonus), and that you pass your book onto the next timezone accurately…

I’m with Bing in that there seems to be quite a bit of Jerry-Springer like quality in some of the posts here. I’m reasonably certain work-life balance has come up before in the “Ryan” household and while I can certainly understand how some fathers throw away their families in the name of work, I think the ethos and common sense of an earlier generation – that you don’t snap to judgment about how another man is raising his children, e.g. – might be far more appropriate.

Good stuff, huh? Thanks, Cliff. Although it’s pretty depressing, frankly. Thank goodness that there’s a ton of work going on in the Human Resources profession on what’s called work life initiatives. If you Bing! (or of course Google (GOOG)) the phrase “work life initiatives,” all kinds of gooey stuff about workshops and seminars and white papers pops up, exploring the upside of, say, a mandatory four day work week, or how a person can be at their post for twelve or fourteen hours a day and, you know, still have a family, friends, and non work-related bad habits. How? By establishing a proper work life balance, of course.

For executives, this can be a godsend, as is made clear by a really funny post from Tim, who is in Tokyo, which is only fitting. Japan invented this problem. Perhaps they’ll be on the cutting edge of solving it, at least for the very top salarymen. Tim writes: 

I used to work for Merrill (MER) in Tokyo and they had the fabled work life balance initiative, which means that us grunts got to continue working weekends and sometimes 24 hours straight, while the managers flew around to run marathons or take care of their soccer clubs or other pursuits like taking university courses. Overall there was work life balance but somewhat skewed, we worked like dogs and the mangers had a nice life. No wonder the place self destructed.

Personally, I kind of like that balance. As a manager, I mean. You work. I have a life. Nothing wrong with that.

It’s clear I’m in the wrong business. With everything else that’s going on in the world, any stroll past a magazine stand will tell you that the majority of public interest continues to focus on Jon & Kate. Why to any of bother to focus on anything else? That’s where the money is, clearly.

Yet one day, as impossible as it may seem, the fascinating situation surrounding two of television’s hottest reality stars will be over. Jon & Kate will have exploded into a ball of flaming chicken fat. Their kids will, I am sure, all be tabloid material of their own. And the great, suppurating maw of popular entertainment will be in need of new heros willing to let it all hang out for Mother.

I mean to get into the action next time around. So I’ve studied the situation, both as a professional and as a consumer of anything that will engage my dwindling attention span. And having looked deeply into the landscape, I believe I have come up with the quintessential next steps in the march of time. Two programs I think could really make it and push the envelope until it squeals. I’m looking for investors. Tell me which one you want to get in on.

1. Married Until We Got To Them picks up where  Jon & Kate leaves off, takes what was wildly popular about that program and jettisons the rest. Gone are the kids. Gone is everything but the weekly update on how two people are going about the business of tearing their marriage apart with infidelity, betrayal, violence, drunkeness and, if it’s on cable, as much nudity as possible, all financed by the willing couple’s weekly stipend from the production company. In later weeks, an added element could be introduced — other miscreant pairs prepared to strip themselves bare (sometimes literally) for the notoriety and money. Couples could compete for a prize awarded to the one that can fall apart fastest. Or possibly even engage in interesting new configurations, depending on the daypart in which the program airs.

To date, all reality programs have provided a framework for the display of human frailty, a plot contrivance of some sort. This program completely dispenses with that and simply cuts to the chase. Cheap to produce. Almost writes itself. Hard to see how it could fail.

Second, and possibly even more interesting, is a show I’m calling So You’re Too Fat To Dance? A mix of several genres, this one puts it all together for pure, guilty pleasure. Contestants join the show when still very adipose,  pleasant people who really can’t dance very well at all. They try, but they for the most part fail to accomplish the complicated choreography outlined for them by the show’s panel of showbiz sadists. Over the 16 weeks, contestants are put through a grueling regime of diet and exercise in which they lose tons of weight very quickly, putting their health at risk while at the same time making themselves far more flexible, pliant and capable of graceful dives, sweeps and fancy footwork.  By the end of the series, we have a few people who punished themselves enough to make the grade and dance off with the prize, and probably a lot more who fell by the wayside, panting. Part make-over, part weight loss, part exercise in pure humiliation, I think this show will have it all.

That’s only the first two that I’m currently working on, although a third is taking shape in my mind, something about a worldwide hunt for the money stolen by Bernie Madoff, kind of a cross between The Amazing Race and Treasure Hunt with Stubby Kaye.

Clearly, however, the upside here is huge. With the ascension of a couple who has nothing to offer but their misery, a new barrier has apparently been broken down. When a new door like that opens, it doesn’t take a genius to know that opportunity may well lie on the other side of the transom. Those interested in an investment that’s certainly as solid as any other may drop me a line.

We all have to work for a living. The question is how much. On the short end of the scale there are immensely successful and wealthy business executives who consider being available by BlackBerry and cell to be work. “He’s traveling,” their assistants will say, or, if they’re on the west coast, “I don’t have him right now. Can he get back to you?”  I think of Stan O’Neal, the former head of Merrill Lynch, out on the golf course jotting jocular notes to himself on his scorecard while Rome burned. 

On the other end of the labor vector are the salarymen of Japan. They rise before dawn, squeeze themselves into their suits, train cars and subways, hit their tiny desks for whatever circumscribed thing it is they do for fourteen or fifteen hours, take the night train home, snoozing on the long ride back to their crowded suburb, grab some fish and noodles before hitting the hay,  rise again a few hours later to start the whole thing over again. They live that way for decades, and then they retire, unless they die of karoshi, which mean “death from overwork.” It’s a word that exists only in Japanese. So far.

I was having a chat with this guy I know. I’ll call him Ryan. He’s a trader at a big financial institution. It was about 7:00 in the evening, and we found ourselves elbow-to-elbow at a local watering hole. We knew each other from someplace neither of us could remember. But that slight association required us to talk a little.

Ryan’s moving out to the suburbs this month after years in the City. His wife wants more room. His kids need a yard. There are two of them, which represents $50,000 per year in tuition, and that’s before they hit grade school. After that, it’s more. In Connecticut, the schools are free. Plus, when you own a house, all you pay is your mortgage, as opposed to his former co-op, where they tack on a monthly maintenance fee of nearly $2000 on top of your mortgage. So he’s moving. I asked him if he was looking forward to it.

“We have a lot more space,” he said. I noticed he was sort of unshaven and there were bags under his eyes.  “That’s what I’ll be thinking about when I’m on the 4:30 train.”

“You get to leave work at 4:30?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “4:30 AM.” This kind of floored me. I pictured Ryan pulling on his socks in the dead of night, his two kids placidly drooling into their pillows, his wife trying to stay asleep while he rummaged about in the dark before dawn, day after day.

“What train do you take home?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The 6:20 usually.” I looked at him. I didn’t know what to say. “I’m a trader,” he said, as if it explained something to me. “I have to be at my desk at 6:30 AM. Also a few months ago they laid off a whole bunch of people during the big crunch. Then all the refinancing action started happening and we were short staffed. There are a lot of people around at my office at, like, 1:00 in the morning.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw Ryan, sleeping on the train going in, sleeping on the train going home. Dragging his butt to a late dinner when his kids had already gone to bed. Hauling his tired body up the stairs for five hours of sleep before the alarm rang again at 3:30, so early it woke the birds before their time.

“I’ve been doing something like this for years,” he added. Then he looked at his watch. “I gotta go,” he said. “I have six minutes to make my train.” And he went, rushing to sit with all the other busy business people. Among them these days are many Japanese, most of them, I believe, headed for Crestwood and Scarsdale. They remain in the States for a few years and then are shipped back to the home office, which wants to make sure they don’t get too soft over here.

Silicon Alley Insider is reportingthat very soon Twitter will be able to deliver the precise geographical location of every twit who’s tweeting. It makes sense. Many people tweet from implements that have some GPS feature built in. It’s not hard to see how the right software could deliver precise whereabouts of each individual twitterer. This information might not be evident to recipients of the precious information that Lenny is about to take a shower. But Twitter Central will know. 

I don’t know about you, but that seems to me to be one less reason to tweet. I think this places me well outside the digital mainstream. Most people on the leading edge of personal communications don’t appear to care. We already have cell phones that can tell anybody with the proper equipment where we are and we don’t think much of it. Now there will be a private company with high book value and absolutely no earnings that will be able to market our locations as well. 

Proof of this attitudinal shift may be seen in the jolly tone of Dan Frommer’s report in the Alley. He writes: 

Twitter has already built a great service to track what people are saying in real-time. But knowing where they’re saying it could be even more valuable. So as Twitter continues to build out its product, adding location data to tweets will be an important move.

The good news is that Twitter seems to be moving in that direction. For instance, the company has recently hired a new member for its platform team with a background in location services: Ryan Sarver, who most recently worked at Boston-based Skyhook Wireless. That’s the company whose wi-fi-based location service powers Apple’s iPod touch and helps out on the iPhone, among other gadgets.

  Funny, isn’t it? One man’s paranoid nightmare is another man’s exciting new development.

Yesterday I offered what I believe was a surprisingly mature, incredibly modulated response to the Microsoft (MSFT) announcement that it was appropriating my brand with its new search engine: Bing.  In response to my moderate outrage, the internet lit up like a roman candle. Quite a few fine outlets either simply re-ran my news release or had their own thoughts on the subject. Here are some of my favorites: 

The Big Money, which got picked up on Reuters… 

… Wired 

… TechCrunch

… The Daily Beast

… and even the august Wall Street Journal. 

If you read the comments that attend these postings, it’s clear that some people got it and some really didn’t. A bunch of technoids compared me with Spike Lee, who sued Spike TV when it changed its name from whatever it used to be. Others scolded me for forgetting to mention Bing Crosby, although they might have been kidding. One group that DID get it, I’m a little sorry to say, is the gang over at Microsoft Search. They replied to my polite onslaught as follows: 

A Letter to Bing

Dear Bing (the Author),

We couldn’t help sit up and take notice of your offer of services from one Bing to another.  We were moderately surprised and mildly excited. As you might have guessed, today is quite a big day for us.  Even so, we dropped everything when we saw your press release this morning.  After an emergency meeting (three people were invited, all declined), we’ve decided to take you up on your offer.  We’re not certain what exactly this would involve. We’re not certain it would pay much (nothing, actually) but we look forward to starting a dialogue and hope we can work together soon.  Let’s do lunch. In the meantime we are sending you a case of moderately priced cigars.

 Your pals,

Bing.com

It’s clear I’ve got them on the ropes.

Today Microsoft announced it would be launching a new search engine that will compete with Yahoo and Google in the vast hunt for search bucks. In an incredible act of branding sagacity, they announced that the name of the new search engine will be: Bing. 

In response to this, today I have issued the following news release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BING VS. BING

LONG-TIME FORTUNE COLUMNIST AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR STANLEY BING CONDEMNS “BRAND INTRUSION” BY NEW MICROSOFT SEARCH ENGINE, ALSO TO BE NAMED “BING”

OFFERS SERVICES TO NEW ENTITY FOR “ANY REASONABLE OFFER”

NEW YORK, MAY 28, 2009 – Stanley Bing, FORTUNE Magazine columnist and best-selling author, today expressed “moderate outrage” at the branding of the new search engine to be offered by Microsoft, also to be called Bing. At the same time, Bing the Author took the unusual step of offering an initial olive branch to Bing the Search Engine, proposing that the two powerful brands merge into one for which Mr. Bing could be the logo, corporate symbol and spokesman, to the extent that it fits in with his other duties. 

“This is an unprecedented case of brand intrusion by one of the most powerful and wealthy corporations in the world,” said Bing the Author, as opposed to Bing the Search Engine, which, unlike Mr. Bing himself, cannot be called for comment because it is not a person. “At the same time, I believe I can propose a solution to this problem that with work to the benefit of both Bings, me and the other one,” he added. 

Mr. Bing (the Author) issued these statements in reaction to the announcement, made today by Microsoft at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif, that the software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. This huge campaign will be conducted by JWT, the massive advertising agency, and is viewed by many to be an attack on the market position of Google, long the search engine leader. Little notice has been taken to date, however, of the serious implications for Mr. Bing or, for that matter, any other Bings, which Mr. Bing made clear he doesn’t care about. 

“For nearly 25 years, I have jealously guarded the value of my brand,” Bing (the original) continued. “For several years, it was threatened by the enormous reputation of Rudolf Bing, the fictional presence of Chandler Bing and the high-profile persona of Stephen Bing. This, however, is the worst challenge the Bing Brand has faced to date, particularly in regards to my search engine optimization positioning.”

In conjunction with these statements, Mr. Bing has offered to open discussions with Bing the Search Engine and its representatives to iron out differences and challenges to each respective brand. “I think we’re a lot more powerful together than we are apart,” he added. “At least I’m pretty sure I am.” 

Bing (Stanley) indicated that the shape and specific nature of the merged branding opportunities have yet to be hammered out, but that he is available from the second week in June onward, for the most part, and would be willing to consider “any reasonable offer” for his services, or simply to provide no services, if that’s what seems best. 

Mr. Bing began his column in FORTUNE in 1995. Prior to that, he was at Esquire Magazine for 11 years, where he built a considerable following. He is also the author of numerous books and is the host of a popular Web destination on CNNMoney.com and writes regularly for Huffingtonpost.com. He has been cultivating the Bing brand since 1983. 

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. It has been establishing the Bing brand for about seventeen minutes.

Contact:  Stanley Bing
                   bingblog@gmail.com 

I will only add that I absolutely no intention of initiating any form of legal action against Bing (the Search Engine) unless he/it feels it would be mutually beneficial for us to do so. And that I do look forward to being massively well-optimized on my new friend.

Hi, David.

I read in a magazine someplace that you were interested in saving the New York Times. I think it’s a terrific idea. Something about setting up a non-profit foundation that would run it, so the pressures of the business would not impinge on Journalism being done there. I can’t think of a better idea. It’s clear the newspaper business is in some kind of trouble, with Craig’s List snatching all its classifieds and the citizen journalists getting things wrong so they don’t have to.

I have one other idea for you. It came to me when I was reading the Thompson/Reuters news rundown this morning. Here is the item I read in its entirety:

According to the AP, Unions that represent mailers and printers at The Boston Globe have agreed to concessions they hope will keep the newspaper, owned by The New York Times, publishing. The Boston Mailers Union voted 107-95 to approve $5 million in cuts, while the Boston Printing Pressman’s Union accepted $2.2 million in concessions.

That was really interesting to me. The Boston Globe, which I believe is owned by the New York Times Co., can only stay in business if the working people who help to distribute the newspaper give back a total of $7.2 million. I know that’s a lot of money to a pressman or mailer, particularly when it’s expressed in personal terms. But in the vast scheme of things, I was honestly quite surprised at the small scale of the problem that could wreck the business system to the extent that the newspaper might go under if it wasn’t solved.

So, Mr. Geffen, I guess I’m just suggesting that as you contemplate laying down hundreds of millions of dollars to set up a foundation to save Journalism – a truly laudable goal that just might be necessary to the preservation of our democracy – is it possible that some little wafer of that largesse might be applied to what appears to be a very small part of the much larger problem?

And to my readers: Yeah, that’s right, you guys. I’m talking about NOT sticking it to the Unions. You wanna make something of it?

It’s been a little while since I talked about the horrors of contemporary air travel.  Either I’ve become so desensitized to the situation or it’s gotten better in the last year or so, I don’t know. Either way, my head hasn’t flown off my shoulders in quite some time. Which made my experience of JetBlue the other day all the more rich and surprising.

I’ll just tell it to you as it happened. You can judge whether I’m over-reacting. I do sometimes.

My wife and I were in the exit row of the 5:59 JetBlue flight out of JFK to San Francisco. Because I love her, I took the middle seat and she had the aisle. The flight was on time. Everything was moving very smoothly. The general air of JetBlue jolly, democratic collegiality prevailed. All our bags were neatly stowed. I had placed my wife’s wheely bag, which is perfectly sized to go into the overhead compartment wheels first, and my backpack, which contained my beloved MacBook, up there, and neatly inserted her folded topcoat and my favorite sport jacket on top of our stuff.

As always, there is always one butthead who appears just as the doors are closing and requires immediate assistance for seating and stowage. Indeed, here he came, and with him, following close by, a very neat, very tidy, very trim gate agent with the passenger’s wheely bag in tow. The late arrival went back to his seat in the rear of the plane. The flight attendant began to look for an overhead compartment to put his bag. He selected ours, which was already rather full not only with our possessions but those of several others. The flight attendant opened the compartment door and immedately began violently jamming the new bag into a space that he perceived existed somewhere in the interstitial zone between everybody’s luggage.

“Excuse me,” I said to him, as he repeatedly mashed the bag into the imaginary space, “are you squashing our coats up there?”

“It is company policy that rolling bags take precedence,” he snapped. “You can put your coats on the floor.” I thought this was rather severe. If I had wanted to put my coat on the floor I would have already done so. Also, I have a thing about officious people with a tiny bit of power being mean to me. Call it an occupational hazard.

“Also,” I said as he banged and slammed the new bag into our stuff, “I have a computer up there, so please be gentle.” By now he had taken our coats out and tossed them onto our laps. Then he removed my wife’s wheely bag, which was superbly positioned, in order to fit in his load. That done, he once again began jamming and cramming my wife’s bag into the space that now no longer really could accomodate it.

“This doesn’t fit,” he said. At that point he took out my bag and deposited it into my lap. So all our luggage and carry-ons were now out of the position we had established for them. My wife is a patient woman, a fact she has proven time and again by continuing to favor me with her presence.

“I’ve been on a hundred JetBlue flights with that bag,” she said calmly, “and it fits perfectly if you put it in wheels first.” He was now violently mashing it handle first into the spot. At that point, I believe he bumped my wife. She says no, because she is a non-violent type and likes to avoid confrontation, but I’m pretty sure I saw her leap a bit out of her seat and say, “Oh!”

Several things then happend simultaneously. She took out a little notebook and pen — as the increasingly desperate re-loading of the compartment continued — and I leaned forward in my seat in order to see his name badge. She then wrote down his name in block letters: PATRICK. And he, having finally completed his task, looked down and saw her do it.

“May I see your boarding pass, please?” he said, and it wasn’t a request.

“Of course,” said my wife. I wondered if she still had it. Sometimes we all toss our passes once we’re on the plane. She hunted about for it. For a while it looked like she was going to have to get her bag down again, but then yes, there it was, in her purse on her lap. “May I ask why you want to see my boarding pass?” she mildly inquired.

“Well!” said PATRICK, “you are writing down MY name and I would like to see the name of the person who is writing down MY name.” He then regarded the boarding pass closely and I thought rather ominously. He then reluctantly handed it back, and then went up to the cockpit, where he gave us the evil eye until the doors of the plane were closing, at which point he left. At some point, I got up and put my bag and our jackets back in the place that was left for them.

I still wonder what PATRICK would have done if my wife had been unable to unearth her boarding pass from our mass of scrambled belongings.

I will say that the on-board flight crew seemed especially nice to us for the entire flight. Perhaps they were afraid of these two obvious troublemakers. Or perhaps they knew this gate agent. Don’t you know the character of the people you work with every day, particularly the scary ones?

I wish I could think of something to say about the recession right now.

I wish I could find an observation to make about the realities of the new economy.

I wish I had the power to offer some interesting strategies for dealing with the difficult operating environment in which we find ourselves.

I wish I could impart some wisdom on current trends in the commercial marketplace.

But I can’t. Half my floor is empty today. A few minutes ago, I sent an e-mail to my department that generated a veritable forest of OUT OF OFFICE replies. In the executive wing, many seem to have wandered off into pleasant digital space. On the west coast, a lot of folks seem to be “working from home.” Here in New York, the sun is shining very brightly, and there is a heavy, humid heat in the air that whispers one delicious word, and that word is BEACH.

I have no plans to go to the beach. I have no plans to go to the shore. I have no plans to do much of anything except go home. I will not be reading interesting business analysis on the plane. I will not be thinking about excellence or debt or equity, except perhaps the sweat equity it will take to put my lawn to rights when I get there.

I am hereby shutting down the part of my brain that thinks about things more than three days out. I hope you have the power to do the same, whether you have the permission to do so or not.  Go ahead. Switch it off.

Have a great long weekend, my friends. Sometime during that three days take a few moments to remember why we earned that extra lazy Monday. Go to a parade if you can find one. We don’t do enough parades.

I’ll talk with you Tuesday, God willing. Whatever we’ve all got going on will be waiting for us then, of that I am sure. Let it wait, okay?

I just thought, on my out of the office again, that I would point out that now the Star has a cover on Jon & Kate, outlining their odd marriage, which I can’t tell you about, because I will not read it, and this for two reasons.

1. I have decided to read nothing about Jon & Kate.

2. I am too busy.

This week my company had its big sales presentation. We go out there about the same time each year and try to move a few billion dollars worth of product. It’s going pretty well. Two observations:

1. People are jamming the restaurants all around Manhattan. It’s very hard to get a table.

2. Everybody is just as drunk as they always were in the best of times.

I take this to be another sign of economic regeneration. And now I’ve got to take off again. Another day. Another presentation. Another couple hundred million dollars. Wish us luck, ladies and gentlemen. As we go, so goes the whole shooting match, I think.

Look, I’m not that old. I’m certainly not out of touch. I watch TV. I read newspapers. I cruise the internet like a hungry shark, eating informational tidbits as I go, each and every day.

But sometimes when I go to the newsstand I look at the enormous rack of magazines and I think, “Who are these people?”

Both People and Us Weekly, for instance, feature dramatic developments into the lives of a couple named Jon and Kate.  I have no idea who these people are.

In People, for instance, there’s a big picture of this blond woman with very professional hair staring dolefully out at us next to a huge headline, WE MIGHT SPLIT UP. “Jon & Kate, A Marriage In Crisis” says the box above it. Then there are a bunch of bullets below the headline. But who the frig ARE they? And why don’t I know? 

In US Weekly, contrariwise, it turns out that Kate has her own bodyguard because Jon threatened to hire a P.I. when she got close to somebody named Steve Neild! Who is Steve Neild? Should I know? Why? Apparently, Kate is a mom of eight and she refused to touch her bleeding son during a press event? Really? Why would she do that? Did she do that? When? What kind of press event?

Have I been spending too much time with Madoff and Geithner and Bernanke and Thain and that whole crowd? Am I out of the culture? Have I lost my mojo? While I’m thinking about TARPs and bailouts and payoffs and pyramids and consumer confidence, have I lost sight of the important issues that are moving our society? Should I be watching more TV? A different kind of TV?

What else don’t I know about? Fill me in! Hurry!

NEW YORK, May 18 – Stanley Bing said on Monday that he plans to sell an undesignated amount of stock in his formerly privately held BingCo., and also plans a note sale to help repay funds he has borrowed from various sources. He also announced that he was taking a $872 million charge against earnings. The notes are being designed by his friend Stu right now, according to Bing, and will be very attractive.

The charge reflects losses on quite a few assets, mostly due to bad investments made after consultation with the best advisors in the business world.

These losses have been a drag on BingCo.’s cash position, which has declined since June ‘08.  The New York-based content company also announced the slashing of weekly dividends to children and pets, and an elimination of bonuses to all employees, of which there really aren’t any. At the same time, BingCo. management hopes the message will resound with Wall Street, which has shown virtually no interest in the Company since it went public some 18 months ago.

“We have no idea what it is the company does,” said Reed Barfinger of Barfinger & McGuffin, a firm that makes itself available for quotes to reporters who call it. “This lack of clarity used to be a huge asset, particularly in the online content world, but now people want at least an ounce or two of steak along with their sizzle.”

This could spell potential trouble for BingCo. In pre-market trading, the company’s shares fell about 2 percent to $0.14. Their 52-week high is $0.15, set last July 23.

BingCo. Executive Chairman and Chief Everything Officer Stanley Bing said in a statement that he will use the proceeds from the sale of shares and notes to pay back the $23,000 loan he received from CitiBank to finance the construction of a paved driveway at company headquarters.

Bing did not specify the size of the debt offering but said it would not be backed by the federal government, to which he also expects to owe some money very shortly in the form of a quarterly estimate.

Bing was among the institutions that recently underwent a “stress tests” of their ability to handle a deep recession, and was among those found to be quizzical. 

BingCo. does not give guidance. The company did however indicate it expects to be alive at the end of the year, mostly by accumulating more debt in order to pay the debt that comes with responsibilities and consequences.

We had a run up last week. For the last couple of days, we’re running down. There was good news among the bad and people were talking about sunlight for a while. This week, the credit markets are getting nervous again and we’re not so sure. Plus, it’s drizzling. Doesn’t May seem colder than usual? Does this mean there’s no more global warming? Or is this just a pause before we all quite literally melt down?

Are we recovering? Are we sliding back? Is the upswing over? Are we just taking a breather? Unemployment is still bad but not growing quite so fast as it was a few months ago. But Wal-Mart’s revenue ticked down a little. Does that mean people ran out of money in April? Will it be the same in May? How about June? Worse? Better?

See, now would be the time for those professionals with a totally disinterested position in the markets, if any such there be, to employ their skills to tell us what’s going on. Is this all emotional? Are there some metrics we should be employing to get a little bit of visibility into the future? Forget the future, how about right now? Is there an analyst, an economist, a professor, government regulator, seer, dowser or astrologer out there who can actually tell anybody what’s going on?

In the meantime, who should we be listening to? Paul Krugman? Nostradamus? Susan Boyle?

Okay, fans of the “who’s rich and who isn’t” debate, consider this young New York City couple:

They are in their mid-20s. Both have jobs. She makes $42,000 per year. He recently got a promotion at his firm, where he sells advertising, and now earns about $70,000. For you big fans of math, this puts their gross household income at $112,000. 

On that income, they live in a small walk-up apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. The neighborhood is very nice, treelined streets, good shoping nearby, museums, parks. Their building has mice, but they haven’t seen one in their apartment yet.  Last night, however, Gregor Samsa made a visit. Big, juicy bug about an inch long, and fat. Fell right out of a hole in the brick wall behind the non-working fireplace.  They now would like to move but really can’t because there aren’t any places around that offer a one-bedroom within their budgets unless they want to move to a rougher neighborhood or a space somewhere in the outer boroughs. That’s their choice, of course, and some of you would be quick to point out. They could, after all, choose to live someplace they don’t want to. But it wouldn’t make them happier. So they don’t.

They have no disposable income beyond that which they spend on occasional forays to burger joints that have a special deal for beer on trivia nights. He has three pairs of pants and two sport jackets. She has a fondness for shoes that finds expression once every three or four months, and is still paying off a youthful accumulation of credit card debt. He has saved a little bit for the future, but not much.

Are they rich? Not by the current working definition. But they do make a lot more, as a couple, than most people, certainly most people their age.

By way of comparison, my father, who was a professor at Columbia University and did some consulting on the side, never earned more than $50,000 in any given year. My mom was a social worker who started at $6000 per annum. When they moved to the suburbs of New York more than a generation ago, they bought a very nice house for $34,500. They traveled quite a bit and never saved more than a couple hundred dollars a year, but everything they wanted to do, they did.

Were they rich? They definitely lived better than most of the so-called rich that I know on a whole lot less money.

I met a guy last night at a bar who pays his ex-wife $1000 per day in support. He will have to do so for the rest of their lives. That’s his deal. This leaves him about the same amount to live on, which after taxes comes to about $240,000 per year. No wonder he’s nervous. By our current standards, he’s $10,000 away from wealth.  

Maybe it’s not how much you make, after all. Maybe it’s all about how much you manage to keep.

Debate continues to swirl around President Obama’s idea of what it means to be rich. Married couples who occupy the top 2% of the populace are now in that lucky position, since they earn about $250,000. Among the honors that attend this status is the right to pay more income taxes. Since that group for the most part already pays about 50% of its annual take in federal, state and local tithings, you can imagine the outcry.

On the one side are the populists who chide them. “Selfish rich people who make over $250,000 per year,” they say. “The world is starving. You sit atop the heap. And still you complain! Fie! Cough it up, mean and selfish rich people!” 

On the other side are the affluent few, sitting on their tuffets of green. “Really!” they reply, stirring their expensive martinis and downing tasty petit fours, “You wouldn’t believe how far my puny hundreds of thousands goes these days!” 

It’s easy to see who’s in the right here. No matter how they cough and whine, those who earn two and a half large are by any estimation swimming in it. Just look at how many things they can enjoy that we cannot.

For this purpose we will take a look at the Forbisher family of New York, NY, although we could most certainly find their counterparts in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami and Boston, not to mention all their outlying suburbs, and many places in the midwest frequented by the plump and shiny.  

The Forbisher Family consists of Bob and MaryAnn, and their children, Ned, Fred and Teddy, as well as a turtle named Mr. Bean and a bichon frisee/chihuahua mix named Eduardo. Together, they brought in a massive $254, 540 in calendar 2008. On that income they most certainly should enjoy all the lifestyle benefits that go along with their status as top-tier rich people. And so they do! 

On any given day, for instance, they can be assured they will have food. This immediately places them above a majority of the world’s population, and already classifies them as rich by many in less fortunate circumstances. The same must be said for the clothing they wear, which is ridiculously expensive but which they purchase anyway, proving they are rich. 

Ned, Fred and Teddy go to private school, like all super-wealthy entitled kids do these days, particularly but not exclusively in urban settings for a variety of reasons. They get a deal here, because Teddy is only in Kindergarten, so his tuition and extras only come to $15,000. Ned and Fred, on the other hand, top out at $35,000 each, bringing the cost of eduction for the Forbisher clan to almost $100,000. They are also, like rich people do, planning to go to college, which must be saved for, but they’re not worried because they’re so rich. 

Like all those who earn more than just about everybody else, the Forbishers live in a swanky apartment. On their income, they were able to afford either one tenth of a four bedroom apartment, or half a roomy three-bedroom apartment, but instead they chose to be frugal, as rich people sometimes are, and spent only $1.2 million on a perfectly serviceable two bedroom apartment that is worth $825,000 in the current market.

Living the life of the elegant class to which they belong, the Forbishers drive a fabulous car that would be the envy of many, in this case a 2005 Toyota Camry with 87,000 miles on it. One can only assume that they have chosen such a modest vehicle in order not to shame their less affluent neighbors.  Rich people sometimes do that.

For some reason that is unclear to us at the present writing, the family last vacationed in 2007, a short trip to a theme park in Orlando, Florida, at school break time, which Mr. Forbisher was heard by friends to describe as “a nightmare that will never be repeated.” It hasn’t been. Several years ago, they rented a modest house in the Hamptons, but inexplicably that luxury, too, has yet to be repeated. And while like many rich people Mr. Forbisher looks at magazines that feature amazing yachts, he has apparently so far failed to purchase one.

Instead, both he and Ms. Forbisher can be seen heading off to work each morning, she on the Fifth Avenue bus and he on the Lexington Avenue subway. We must assume that this is voluntary, since as rich people they don’t have to work too hard and never have to worry about money.

And so, while the rest of us working middle-class people scrape and save and work our fingers to the bone, rich people like these go about their cushy, indolent lives. Worst of all, perhaps, is the fact that on their stated income of more than $250,000, the Forbishers last year paid only $110,000 in taxes! Isn’t that shameful? Thank goodness that in the days to come we can all look forward to them paying their fair share.

The sky is blue. The trees are green. The birdies is on the wing. And the majority of our banks have flunked their stress tests. Does that make them sad? Nope. Are we worried? Not at all. Because while they are stressed, they are not stressed as badly as we might have feared. Two facts leap out. First, while 10 of 19 of our fiduciary institutions require some form of additional cash to keep from fainting, all they need, in aggregate, is a measly $75 billion.

Compared to the numbers we’ve been seeing lately in bailouts and fearful predictionary bloviage, why, that’s a mere bag of shells! And it turns out they don’t even want the money! “No thank you, Uncle Tim,” they are saying. “We’re gonna be okay after all.” Can you imagine?  

Best of all, it turns out that even if you take the very worst-case scenario, potential losses in this formerly fetid corner of our financial sector would reach only $599 billion. Not a T? Only a B? Ha! We sneeze at such numbers. 

Speaking of sneezing, it also turns out that we’re all probably not going to die of swine flu, at least this week. 

The fact is, there’s just so much darned good news around that I think we should all open our hermetically sealed windows right now, lean out over whatever avenue we work on, and no, not jump, just breathe in that nice spring air, which appears to be not quite as badly loaded with toxic hydrocarbons as we had feared. 

Who knows? We may have a panic gap here all of a sudden. What should we freak out about next, do you think? Should we look back once again to ascertain which was the worst in our lifetime, so that we can use that knowledge of the past, as economists do, to prognosticate the future? 

To examine this issue scientifically, I visited a cool new website that helps those trying to determine hierarchies of just about anything, scientifically, you know. My assessment of the worst panic of our collective time can be found here.  See if you agree.

Debt: What you buy things with. 

Cash: Employed to buy debt. 

Profit: What’s left after Generally Accepted Accounting Principles takes the rest. 

Revenue: What you see in 120 days. 

Interest: What they used to give along with the toaster. 

Free Market: see Unregulated Market. 

Unregulated Market: See Ponzi Scheme

Ponzi Scheme: The manipulation of markets by experts who use other people’s money to get rich. 

EBITDA: See OIBIDA

OIBIDA: Yet another acronym. 

Cash Flow: The actual amount of money an enterprise has on hand. Generally disregarded by Wall Street analysts in favor of Earnings Per Share (EPS). 

EPS: Cash that is left after the business does anything worthwhile. The figure is distorted by all sorts of one-time expenses, accounting tropes, write-downs, restructuring charges and other non-cash items. 

Capitalism: The manipulation of markets by experts who use other people’s money to get rich.

Now come on, you guys. It’s your turn. Got any terms you’d care to offer?

It’s quite possible that the light that we are seeing at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train. True, at the parties I went to over the weekend a certain number of people were unemployed. This was in Northern California, which has been hit pretty hard in the tech sector and in real estate as well. But people were of pretty good cheer. Of course, they were drunk, but that doesn’t necessarily impart automatic merriness. I’ve known a ton of grouchy drunks in my time. No, there was definitely a little bit of hope in the air. 

I think that may be because it’s starting to look like the nasty creepazoids who prognosticated the death of all human life on the planet will be disappointed in the end. The game is now to figure out who will get through this thing, because when we’re all safely on shore the survivors will find a world in which they are faced with significantly less competition. There will be more meat, more vegetables, more space at the campfire. Here’s my guess at who will be there: 

A number of hearty newspapers: Yeah, there won’t be quite as many as there were before. But the ones who stick around will still control about half of all local advertising. 

A bunch of lean, tough car companies: And boy, are they going to need to get their brands back on track. How? With advertising, ladies and gentlemen. Therefore…  

Mass media: Targeting schmargeting.  Who do you think those monsters are going to require in order to get back in touch with all the folks who once again want soap, cars and increasing amounts of pharmaceuticals? And beer! Don’t forget about beer! 

Lots of new Madoffs: Things will look better. This will bring out the oldest couple in human history: the gullible and those who will prey on them.  

A bunch of shiny new philanthropists: The markets will soar. New people will get rich. And for a time, while the shame of having been selfish idiots clings to the marketplace, there will be those who try to help others who have yet to rise from whatever tragedy has befallen them. Most of them will probably be the biggest bad guys from the days of yore, a thought that never left my mind when I attended the Milken Conference in LA last week.

Tons of stinky HMOs: You can’t kill those things. 

A small, gnarly band of Republicans: Wow, are those guys angry. Right now, they’re down. But when things improve and unfettered exploitation of the market is once again in vogue, they’ll come roaring back into the spotlight armed to the teeth and looking for liberals. 

Book stores: Will there be as many of them? No. Will there still be some? Yes there will. What about the Kindle? The Kindle! Aieee! Look. The majority of people I know who have Kindles are in publishing. They go around with their Kindles and talk about the end of their own business. Talk about boring! 

Regulation: Somewhere in our collective memory, the majority of us will harbor some vague memory that it’s bad when the FDA, SEC, FEMA and other regulators in Washington are run by former executives and lobbyists of the industries they are supposed to be overseeing, apparatchiks who are in fact enemies of the agencies they are supposed to be managing. 

Florida: I’m as worried about climate change as the next person, but I still think that Miami will be above water. Also New York. 

Other: If you can’t imagine a world without it, it’s probably going to be here, smaller, leaner, more sinewy, and better equipped to make the grade going forward. So relax. 

You will also note that Twitter is not on this list.

1. Ebola: We were all going to die of it. 

2. Bird Flu: We were all going to die of it. 

3. Y2K: Our computers were all going to die of it. 

4. Global Warming: We’re still going to die of it, but it ’s a more long term thing so only a few people are still on it. As a panic, it’s SO yesterday. 

5. Japan will take over the world: Until their economy went blooey. 

6. China will take over the world: Still a working paranoid concept, but again, collective ADD has moved on. 

7. Mad cow disease: We were all going to die of it as our brains leaked out of our ears. 

8. AIDS: Anybody who ate in an upscale restaurant would probably get it. 

9. Russsia would bury us: They said they would! 

10. Nuclear War: The jury is still out on that one.

11. The recession will last for 10 years: As soon as we get over this swine flu thing, that could well be back, given the number of shorts who stand to profit by it. 

Look, I gotta go. The day is young out here in California. We still have time for three or four mini-panics before our first martini. Have a calm weekend, huh?

They’re killing pigs in Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of them. Is there any indication that killing all those pigs will stop swine flu? No. At this writing there has yet to be a reported case of it there, by the way.

They closed a school in Chicago because one kid there came down with the sniffles. Also absentees were up a little bit higher than normal. You can just see the administration of the establishment sitting around and discussing the insurance implications of an apparent lack of attention to the matter. There is no punishment for joining a panic. There is harsh retribution for refusing to do so.

For a while in our corporation I have been among those who really didn’t want to see a mass e-mail go out to all our employees telling them all the good things we’re doing to avoid the ostensible pandemic. I’ve seen such memos from others. It informs the corporate body that everything is being done to sanitize their phones. It instructs people on how to wash their hands. It tells them that if they sneeze, they should try not to do it on other people. And if they are sick, they are to stay home.

The subliminal message, of course, is that they shouldn’t panic. I always love that message. A guy stands in the middle of a mass evacuation as Godzilla comes in from the seashore, snagging electrical wires as he goes, and screams over the trampling mob, “DON’T PANIC!!”… thereby ensuring its immediate onset. 

So that’s where we are today. The World Health Organization is screaming DON’T PANIC! and governments around the world are yelling DON’T PANIC! and corporations, schools and churches are bound to do the same.

If I hear somebody tell me not to panic one more time, I may just panic. I feel kind of guilty I haven’t done so already.

In fact, my assistant sneezed about twenty minutes ago. Do I look all right to you?

Word comes today that GM (GM) has offered the Government a majority stake in the Company as part of its restructuring plan.  This was both expected and widely reported. What is less well known, however, is the creation of a new line of GM cars that has been designed, in large part, to sell the concept of Federal ownership to lawmakers. This blog has been leaked a highly confidential draft of this plan, and it is my pleasure to share the bare outlines with you today. New cars now being prepped for the assembly line of the new General Motors include:

The Senator: Heavy in the beam, with a brilliant white canopy, this limousine sucks up gas and oil like a tank but is expected to come with a lot of attractive perks and, if well-maintained, a long life-span.

The Congressman: Long and low-to-the-ground, this slightly cheesy but attractive sedan has a tendency to blow a lot of exhaust and is clearly meant to be traded in for a new model every couple of years.

The House Republican: A lot tougher than it appears given its light weight and manoeuverability, and capable of converting from a conservative brougham into a revolutionary coupe in the wink of an eye.

The Lobbyist: Small, fast, and very expensive, this car is designed to outlive many of its owners.

The Timmy Gee: This classy, two-door vehicle comes only in gray and is equipped with a set of well-disguised flame throwers that extinguish any extraneous life forms in their path when fully activated. Most reliable when fully garaged in an affluent suburb.

The SEC Cruiser: An SUV that only operates in rescue mode, and even then only when jump started by another more powerful vehicle.

The Barackmobile: The ultimate luxury car in the GM line. How it will operate is still shrouded in mystery, but the firm has put all its hopes into it and believes that, in the end, it just might be the answer to its current difficulties.

1. Economics is a bunch of bushwah. Now we know it. Economists are obviously not only behind the curve on what has occured, they are in many cases the cause of it. It is not a science. It is not even an art. At best, it’s a craft, like pottery. As things improve, we can expect a bunch to begin operating pretty much as usual, though. Why shouldn’t they? It’s a living.

2. Wherever there’s money around, there will be crooks. Many of these crooks are well-dressed. Often they are at the top of whatever game they are bilking. Next time this all happens, people will once again be surprised that the guy who ran the exchange is the person who also managed the Ponzi scheme.

3. The Law is a ass. I believe it was Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist who said it, but recognition of the unique aspect of the legal profession goes back to Shakespeare and beyond. Virtually all of the regulators and legislators who were supposed to be monitoring the finance industry were certainly lawyers, as were the lawmakers who were asleep at the switch until they could be assured of airtime on cable on the subject.

4. In God We Trust. All others pay cash. Every panic in history has been precipitated by the same stupid sequence of events. In Rome, for instance, a huge panic not that dissimilar to ours happened when some rich bankers underwrote a bunch of ships that were sent to the east. The ships foundered. The banks had over-extended themselves. They ran out of cash. People freaked out. In 1837, following another crash a few decades earlier, the banks once again forgot about the whole debt/equity thing and doled out huge amounts of money in western real estate. The market went bust. The banks went boom. The economy went into the tank for 10 years. A few years ago, my own corporation almost went belly up after its Financial Services Division lent a bunch of dough to a sleazy real estate outfit in New Orleans that just didn’t pay us back. Now we have this, and everybody asks, “How could all these smart people lend out so much stupid money?” Because that’s what they do to MAKE stupid money, Sparky. As soon as nobody is looking they’ll do so again.

5. The rich are not like other people. They’re not smarter. They’re not happier. They just know how the game is played and, for the most part, what to do to stay there. Sometimes everybody forgets that the whole thing is designed to keep the powerful in power and the rich in their McMansions, and the People are sold the idea that everybody can have their Baby Benz. And for a while, everybody sort of gets high on the idea that capitalism is a populist enterprise. It’s not. It’s for just a few lucky souls and manipulative hedgers and, really, the rest of us should really just buckle down behind our plows and keep our pennies in that coffee can by the window ledge. We’ll forget that, of course, as soon as the markets simmer down. Then the Ralph Kramden side of us will once again emerge from the closet where it’s been whimpering for the last 18 months, and we’ll all be back in the hunt for the next mystery appetizer.

6. The press is the running dog of the system. Of course there are exceptions. But in general the media covers the winners and puts a nice shine on their helmets. What you read is what they get. Now that there are fewer reporters than ever, and more blogspit in the machine, everything will only get worse in this regard. Right now, even at the height of our troubles, the food chain goes from security analyst and quote monkey straight to the wires and blogs and directly to you. And you read it and think whatever occupies your brain pan for the most recent five minutes.

7. Be careful who you insult while they’re on their way down. They will either rise up one last time, like Carrie’s dirt-encrusted fist from the grave, and pull you down with them, or they will meet you as they are on the way back up and chew your head off now that they can. Those in need of proof on this subject need only consider two short words: John Thain.

8. Nothing lasts forever. Not good times, and not bad times, either. And nobody knows when whatever train we’re on will arrive at the next station. Not nobody. Anybody who tells you they do is smoking something. You can either ask for some of what they’ve got or ignore them entirely, depending on how you’re feeling or what day of the week it might happen to be.

9. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Even when nobody else is picking up the check. Later on, when that starts again? Even moreso.

You’ll have to excuse me, but I’m very upset. I just got the morning mail, and there, dropped on my desk, was that letter I’ve been expecting. It was postmarked Washington, D.C., with a return address from Mr. Timothy Geithner. I knew immediately what it was. It was the results from my stress test.

“Greetings!” it began. “We have just concluded the battery of exercises that quantified your financial status, the totality of which make up the document commonly known as your ’stress test.’ We are sorry to inform you that your grade on the aforementioned examination rounded up to a 61 on a scale of 100. As you may know, that is a failing grade in any school and it is our duty to therefore inform you that remedial action will need to be taken.”

At that point I sat down on my least comfortable chair and thought about things. This was scary. I had failed my stress test! What would happen now?

“It is clear from the results of your test,” the letter continued, “that you still suffer from a variety of conditions that, if they continue, will in fact stress your economic and personal infrastructure to the breaking point, to wit:

• You still owe quite a bit of money on your home;
• Your family-related costs are out of control;
• Your income is stagnant, with a potential downside of 10%-20% year-over-year in ‘09;
• Your dog continues to cost as much as a Scion XB annually, expense that continues to escalate and shows no signs of amelioration in the near term.
• Your tax position would choke a moose;
• You continue to spend money as if you had more.

“For these and other reasons, you have failed to achieve a passing grade. Please report to…” and then it gave an address in Washington, and a date, and so on and so forth, your obedient humble servant, etc., etc., signed T. Geithner.

So that’s it. On May 12, I have to see Mr. Geithner and receive the counseling session that is mandatory for all those who have failed to pass muster. And then I will receive my punishment for having disgraced myself in such a fiduciary fashion. I wonder… should I take it in cash or certified check?

I was perusing today’s gallery of top performing Fortune 500 stocks on CNNMoney.  Some are well-known, like Wal-Mart (WMT), McDonald’s (MCD) and the repository of their activity, Waste Management (WMI). Others, like C.H. Robinson Worldwide (CHRW), which is a logistics provider, are less intuitive.  But scanning the 24 bear baiters, I realized they all had one thing in common.

I don’t own any of them.

Not W.R. Berkley (WRB), the insurance holding company, not Darden Restaurants (DRI), which brings families together over steaming plates of shrimp and/or fettucine alfredo at the Red Lobster or the Olive Garden. Not a share of either. Not even Pulte Homes (PHM), which builds, obviously, homes. I could have bought some at some point, I suppose. But I didn’t.

There are two ways to look at this. One is that I’m stupid and should have somebody providing me with sound, reliable investment guidance. While this is quite possibly true, I believe it ignores the real, underlying phenomenon at work here, one that is backed up with ample evidence.

These 24 companies are doing well for the simple reason that I am not invested in them. That’s the cause that has produced this happy effect in each and every one of them.

Let’s look at the record. In the early 1990s, I invested in a number of tech companies that had been doing very well indeed. Immediately thereafter, they all went into the tank. I’m not talking weeks later. I’m talking hours later. Like, I bought a stock and that afternoon it lost 10% of its value. The next day another 15%.  By the end of that week, down 55% and falling. My broker, as they will, usually told me to hang on until the next upturn, which then did not arrive, ever. On several occasions, the upturn did come, though, but only after I sold the stock. And I’m not talking about weeks after, either. Again, hours. Like, I would sell and within minutes the security would experience a significant and inexplicable bounce.

But it wasn’t inexplicable to me. It was me. I did it.

About 10 years ago, I decided it would be smart to stop messing around with high-risk, fast-growth companies and go with conservative, blue-chip firms that had produced value year in and year out. You know the companies. I’m not going to mention them. I don’t want to hurt them. They employ many nice people and I have nothing against them. True, I lost money with every single one. But that’s not their fault. I’m sure they wondered why their stocks were down. Now they know. It was me. Many are still languishing at fractions of the value at which I bought them. That’s because  I still hold them. The ones I sold at a loss are doing better now.

Most recently, I purchased Google (GOOG) at $700. You know how that’s doing. Analysts are still a bit flummoxed as to why this great company is now trading at a less dramatic multiple than before. Some ascribe the decline to the challenged advertising market. Others cite the economy. It’s none of those things. I think we can now be relatively confident about the true reason. It’s me.

So as I look at this list of companies that are facing the recession and achieving uncommon success, I come to one conclusion. As tempting as a call to my broker would be, I will refrain. I have incredible destructive power within my grasp, and I have to use it judiciously. This recovery that’s in the wind is a delicate thing and I’m not one of those guys who’s looking for ways to kill it.

Today Yahoo (YHOO) reported its earnings, which beat street estimates. As far as earnings go, they were pretty typical of today, actually better than some. They had earnings, for example. More than people thought they would, actually. 

On the other hand, profits were down from last year as revenue fell in the first quarter. Of course it did. Whose didn’t? As quarters go, the first was a stinker. Nobody has anything very good to say about it. I guess the best thing is that it’s over, and that the second quarter doesn’t seem to be quite so bad. Like, we’re still a very sick person, but the guy at the foot of the bed isn’t chanting in Latin anymore, at least right now. Maybe he’s just on a smoke break, but that’s something.

The thing that caught my eye was the way the company linked its earnings news to an announcement. Again, this is nothing new. Companies often tie their earnings calls into exciting new developments that just might keep analysts entertained and delighted while they’re peering at their GAAP situation.  So to delight Wall Street, the firm also announced that they would be cutting 5% of its workforce.

It’s a pretty dramatic example of why companies do these kinds of things. They make a choice. They can think about their employees, who are beaten about the head and ears every day with bad news and already are quivering like jellyfish about their jobs. If they do, they accomplish their headcount reductions swiftly and quietly, and then go about their business — because the real reason for the cutbacks has nothing to do with bellicose statements but is an actual attempt to control margins. Or they can listen to the PR people who are listening to the Finance and IR guys and make ostentatious displays of sanguinary intent to show their general seriosity to the Street. 

“We have bad news and good news,” they state in their statement. “The bad news is that we’re pretty much in the same boat as everybody else. The good news is that we’re going to be firing more people.”

I don’t know who this stuff plays to. It must play to somebody, because a lot of people are doing it. I can tell you one thing. It doesn’t play with me. When the bullet with my name on it is dispatched, I want it right in the back of the head, preferably while I’m at an expensive lunch being paid for by somebody else. Any pertinent announcements can be made when I’m no longer around to hear them.

With new times come new job-related ailments. As the Federal government looks at a wide variety of new regulatory initiatives, it’s possible that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should be investigating the real dangers that afflict us as we go about our daily duties. A partial list of contemporary disorders would have to include the following:

Bluetooth Ache: Occurs when the subject’s aural cavity grows completely around the electronic earpiece. May result in erroneous involuntary incarceration or institutionalization when subject is apprehended while seemingly talking to him or herself.

Personal Zoning Outage: With decline in available headcount, individual travel — sometimes in Coach class! — has led to a group of business people whose time away from the office in strange locations and indifferent lodging now exceeds 100 days per year.  Individuals have complained of cramping, dizziness after only three cocktails, and complete and utter confusion upon waking in darkened hotel rooms. Athlete’s Foot acquired in alien exercise facilities has also been reported.

The Shorts: Most intelligent money now having left the Market, the field has been ceded to those whose entire economic world view is based on wagering against things. Entire companies are now suffering from the condition, as perfectly good operations are devalued and their operating atmosphere poisoned by negative ions.  The only existing treatment right now seems to be the elapsing of time until the effects have worn off; many entities will die before the air clears.

Plasticosis: A painful condition in which an executive’s formerly robust and reliable expense account first molders and then withers altogether, producing hunger, sadness and, in some cases, career death. In severe cases, this may lead to the associated disorder known as…

Oenophile Dysfunction: Very common in Northern California, this debilitating disease afflicts those whose minds were previously occupied with incessant thoughts of wine and, to a lesser extent, single malt scotch. With corporate largesse at at all time low, sufferers are now condemned to order mid-shelf wines by the glass.

Water on the Options: Also knows as Black-Scholes Disease. Once mighty stock options have now been under water for so long that they are in danger of being soaked beyond recognition. Affected employees are still dragging them around as if they were worth something.

Earning Disabilities: Flat is the new up. Up is the new flat. Earnings Per Share have been reported, but not found. When the situation will be ameliorated is anybody’s guess.

Titular Stenosis: Until recently, titles automatically grew and ripened as a matter of course, turning associates into managers, managers into directors, directors into vice presidents and so on. That process is no longer assured, and titles often remain in pupal stage for years at a time.

TARPal Funnel Syndrome:  This tragic condition affects mostly financial institutions. It is characterized by a severe backup of accreted Federal funding, which finds its way through the front door and then is never seen again except in the form of retention bonuses for senior officers who are not actually retained.

Penal Implants: A growing number of formerly respected business people are now headed for incarceration. This leads to a host of related complaints that range from the acute to the chronic, depending on the nature of the scheme for which they are being punished since people started enforcing the laws that pertain to rich people. 

The China Syndrome: Suddenly, Americans are forced to operate on a playing field that is no longer tilted in their favor. Unable to market poisonous toys and toothpastes, laboring under onerous clean-air and clean-water regulations, trembling in the shadow of a free press, those who rely on our economic system are beginning to feel a certain malaise, attended by significant anxiety and feelings of insecurity and depression. 

Sources at OSHA refuse to confirm reports that they are reviewing these and other maladies.  Until some action is taken, however, the prognosis for all of us who work in this polluted environment is not particularly good.  Insurance companies, quite naturally, are taking a dim view of these developments and plan to be unavailable for comment until the recession is over or the world comes to an end, whichever comes first.

I’ve been thinking a lot since yesterday about United Airlines’ plan to charge plus-sized people more for their flights from now on. It upset me so much that I went out and had a 2000 calorie dinner.

I’m not fat, you know, but I do have big bones. What if some anorexic flight attendant decides that the line between fat and burly no longer exists? I don’t need two seats, unless they shrink their size again. And who’s saying they won’t? I remember when you could sit in a coach seat and recline it a bit and be almost comfortable. Now there’s a deathmatch fight for any available armrest, the space allotted to you is a vertical coffin, and the angle of recline is about 5 degrees or a quarter of an inch. Even that is too much, since the way they’re spaced front-to-back has shrunk, too. Last month there was a guy in the seat in front of me eating a large bag of salami practically in my lap. He didn’t even offer me any.

At the same time, relatively slender people have rights, too. I was riding on a Southwest flight not long ago. I had purchased the Business Select option, where for $15 dollars or so you can board earlier than the rest of the crowd. So I got on and selected the front row, aisle seat. Another guy got on and took the window. Right as the door was closing, some behemoth, maybe 6′3″, 320 pounds puffed onto the plane, looked at us and said, “Is this seat taken?” He then plopped his 1/6th of a ton between us and fell promptly asleep. It was not a comfortable flight. He snored, too.

The bottom line on our bottoms is this: As a nation, we’re getting fatter even as the space assigned to us on airplanes is getting smaller and smaller — as their margins shrink too. What is to be done? We’re not going to be getting thinner, I don’t think. Airplanes aren’t going to be getting any more widebodied to deal with our wide bodies, either.

Here’s my suggestion: Coach-level service, larger seats, 150% pricing. That is, create a section of the airplane that has bigger seats, but not as nice as Business or First, serve no food, offer no amenities, kill the footrests, even. All you’re offering is more butt space as your butt heads into space. Some have to be there. Others may choose to be. The price is way less than Business but way more than coach. It’s a middle ground that recognizes the Airlines’ need to make a profit, large people’s need to fly, and the normal-sized individual’s right to some level of comfort in this world.

Premium Coach is a step in the right direction. But it’s not quite good enough, not for folks with really big bones.

People have been telling me that I should cheer up. So I went online today and don’t you know, I found three great reasons to do so. 

First there’s the stunning news that JPMorgan Chase is going to earn $2.1 billion in the first quarter. I seem to remember all kinds of bad news coming out of that firm only five minutes ago, with bad bonuses and big, steaming bailouts and now here they are back on their feet again and doing fine. Can total recovery of the entire finance sector be far behind? 

Then there’s the unexpectedly terrific news that initial jobless claims careened downward by 53,000 over last month’s number, bringing those who were decruited during that time to only about 610,000. That’s way less than everybody expected. I bet that means the total number of jobless now filing for unemployment to dip below 6,000,000 really soon! While that may upset a lot of the nice people on Wall Street who feast on the concept of managing headcount, a few less jobless sucking hose water might actually help the economy, right? 

Finally, there’s the news that Martha Stewart’s new contract gives her a bump from $900,000 per year to a base of $2,000,000. She also got a retention bonus of $3 million. I think that’s a very encouraging sign. The last time Martha was doing well, so were we. Think about that for a minute. 

There are a lot of idiots out there who see every glass as half empty. Me, I’m the kind of idiot who sees it as half full. In this case, it’s full of a nice, frosty mojito served with Martha’s very own mulled mint. Bottoms up!

1. I am sick of… 

a. Rotten bankers
b. Stinking pirates
c. Posturing bureaucrats
d. Winter

2. I can certainly do without any additional advice or comments from… 

a. Economists
b. Regulators without entertaining facial hair
c. Former heads of corporations who are now in the tank
d. My mother

3. I’m very bored with…

a. Paul Krugman
b. Drunken celebrities
c. Sober celebrities, unless they’re naked
d. Artisan cheese

4. A day without ___________ is a day without sunshine. 

a. Glen Beck
b. Barney Frank
c. Another fabulous Chapter 11
d. 8 oz. of vodka

5. Please wake me when…

a. There’s some good news for me personally. 
b. Wall Street melts down into a small pile of phlegm. No, wait! It already has!  

c. There’s something to watch on TV.
d. All of the above.

Score yourself however you like.

I’m sitting in Oakland Airport waiting to board my plane. It’s Tuesday morning. I’m trying to think while I write this, but I can’t. Know why? Because there’s a television, bolted to the ceiling, nattering about some frickin’ nonsense in which I have absolutely no interest. To my left is a guy talking to somebody on his cell phone. To my right is a girl playing a game on her cell phone. I don’t know what game it is. All I know is that it goes beep beep beep while she’s at it. Her face shows the preternatural calm of a sheep munching on a clot of loam in the middle of an open field. 

On the way here, I stopped to get gas. On top of the gas pump, there was a TV. On the TV, there was a commercial. It was a commercial for the commercial potential of televisions on top of gas pumps. There was no way to escape it, because the automatic clip thing on the pump handle had been removed. So I had to pump gas and watch a commercial about how people like to watch commercials while they’re pumping gas. 

When I get to the office, I will ride an elevator up to my floor. In the elevator, there will be a television. On the television, there will be news. I don’t know about you, but the way things are going, I actually spend a fair amount of time these days avoiding the news, since very often the news you see during the day consists of people blasting hot lava over the news. Exclusive! Breaking! On stories that are neither exclusive nor breaking. A guy pouring oil on the public from the top of the Tower of Babel is not exclusive or breaking. Britt’s saucy new video isn’t either. But there it is. In your face. When I went to Vegas last month, they had narrated video in the elevators there, too, except that it wasn’t news, it was a commercial for the lobster in butter sauce they serve at the buffet. I didn’t want that, either. 

They’re boarding. In a few minutes, they will tell us to turn off our electronic implements and we will settle into the last quiet place in the western world: airspace. It’s a short flight, so there will be no movie. I hope it’s not too boring. Of course, they do have a very respectable in-flight magazine with a lot of interesting ads.

Today come reports that the gloom and doom peddlers are still at it, looking a gift market in the mouth. The S&P is showing a heartbeat lately. But wait a minute, they say. We’re not out of this yet. This is merely a pleasant meadow we’re skipping through on the way to the next abyss.

As always, they have numbers to back up whatever it is they’re dispensing. That should not surprise us. Economist types always have numbers. They had plenty of numbers while they were running the market up. Now they have all kinds of numbers while they’re trying like hell to drive it down.

The current crop of numbers pertains to retail sales. Sure, the banks look like they may be doing better… but retail sales have fallen and apparently can’t get up. Retail sales drive the economy. So of course the market’s dead cat bounce is a mere bagatelle, an island in the midst of troubled waters that is itself sinking into the Sargasso Sea of despond.

I’m going to use a little economics now on those who continue to cry the blues. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be stupid-smart to get it.

Fact 1: The banks are doing better. Part of this is that they’re not giving away feckless money anymore, at least for now. But another big factor is that America, which was on a spending spree for a long time, has taken a deep breath and started saving more. Remember when all of Punditry opined that we need to save more? Well, we are. Good for us, right? You might think so. Instead, they’re all creepy about it, because…

Fact 2: Since people are saving more… guess what. They are spending less! Duh. Since they are spending less, retail is down from the nosebleed heights of the last several years. We’re still spending, of course. Wal-Mart (WMT) is still up, although perhaps not as much as was expected by the expectorators. But we’re not spending like drunken sailors anymore. We’ve come ashore.

Conclusion: If savings is up, spending is down. Wow! What an insight!

I’m going to tell you a little story and then take off for the weekend. I know a guy who works in a company that has a small debt problem. They have debt and debt is not popular these days. So he talks to a trader friend of his and asks, “Why is our stock so low?” And the trader says, “Well, you have this debt problem that will pop up in 2012 and you have to solve it immediately.” And my friend says, “Well, what if we issued some bonds now? That would solve the debt problem.” And the traders says, “No, that would solve it, of course, but then everybody would criticize you for doing it at this time.”

Moral of the story? You just can’t win with some people. Knowing that, my feeling is that it might now make sense, as the showers of April turn to the flowers of May, to stop listening to certain gusts of the idiot wind and take a nice walk with more pleasant company.

Dear God… you know I’m trying to keep my mood up. Just yesterday I announced that the time had come for a new sense of optimism, that the sprouting of the crocuses (croci?) should be attended by an appropriate reawakening of hope.

Yesterday afternoon in New York City, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped into the high 30s. People at the office just looked at each other and shook their heads. In the elevator, folks coming in from lunch shivered, chuckled darkly, and said, “Wow. Aren’t you sick of this?” I don’t think they were just talking about the weather.

Today the sun must have risen, but you’d never know it. The sky is dark and unfriendly. The analysts continue to issue company-killing reports filled with bleak assumptions and the odd occasional misplacement of a decimal point or two. And fifteen minutes ago, it started snowing. Yep. A nice, juicy mixture of snow and sleet. People throughout my floor simply stood by the windows, looking very, very sad. “I’m so ready for spring,” said somebody to nobody in particular. All we could do was sigh.

We’re trying to turn the corner, Lord. But between Your perpetual winter and the harbingers of daily gloom on our computer screens, it gets tough sometimes. I know you’re busy with a lot of problems in the universe. But would a little warmth and sunshine on our sector be too much to ask? Or at least could you turn a couple of security analysts into pillars of salt? That would be something!

Okay, I hear you. You’re sick of the bad vibes. You want to get your collective head out of the community toilet. Stuff you’re tired of hearing about: bailouts, stinky hedge fund shenanigans, executive compensation, retention bonuses for guys who weren’t retained, criminal excesses by shady Wall Street buttheads, economic prognostications offered by those who didn’t prognosticate anything when it needed to be prognosticated.

You’re ready to move on. The innate optimism of the American spirit is beginning to bubble bigtime within your breast. Enough of this gloom and doom! It’s time to have a burger, down a couple of brewskies, hit the new ground running.

You’re not stupid, of course. You see the unemployment rate. You see the sales figures for the first quarter. You know that if you look, there is dismal swamp as far as the eye can see. But maybe not. Not for those who see just beyond that grim horizon. Over that rim, there is dawn, the kind of light that only those who look can perceive.

Proof of this fact comes in a new poll from CBS News and the New York Times. The Times reports that:

“… the number of people who said they thought the country was headed in the right direction jumped from 15 percent in mid-January, just before Mr. Obama took office, to 39 percent today, while the number who said it was headed in the wrong direction dropped to 53 percent from 79 percent. That is the highest percentage of Americans who said the country was headed in the right direction since 42 percent said so in February 2005…”

This tiny new embryo of optimism is fragile. A vast majority of people are still worried about their jobs and are cutting expenses back as much as possible. That’s just common sense.

But you know how it is. One of our national characteristics is a certain kind of creative Attention Deficit Disorder. We can’t stay any one way for very long. And we’ve been in the dumps for quite some time now.

Disregarding stupidity and evil for a moment, a huge element of what got us here is pure psychology and decay in attitude. Repair that, ladies and gentleman, and the rest will surely follow. And you know. Even if it doesn’t, getting there just might be a whole lot more fun.

Oh, goody! Look at my package… so big and shiny! The New York Times and Wall Street Journal just put me in the top 50 big earners of the year in their annual blockbuster overviews of executive compensation.  They say I made more than $50 million last year! Hooray!

Except wait a minute. Hm. I’m looking at my bank account and it doesn’t look so hot. If I’m so rich, how come I don’t have a whole lot more money? Not that I’m poor or anything. But there’s no question I’m going to have to keep working if I want to keep all the moving pieces in place.

How the frig did they calculate my number? Let’s see…

Well, first there’s my actual salary. $200,000 isn’t chump change. I’m not complaining. But I haven’t had a raise in that department in three years, because they “took care of me” on all the other front. And how! What generosity!

Except, you know, then there’s the whole thing about my bonus, which is less than half of what it was last year.  That’s okay. I get why.  Business was terrible. Of course, it was terrible for everybody. And our stock was down. Of course, so was everybody’s. And I didn’t give out a bunch of sub-prime mortgage loans. Nor did we get any government bailouts. But there you have it.  It is, as they say, what it is.

So far it all adds up to about $7 million. I know it sounds like a lot. And it is! I know it is. But it’s not more than $50 million, is it? I mean, my background is in Marketing, but even I know there’s a decimal point missing there somewhere.

I guess they must be counting the stock I received at its face value. I wonder why. True, when it was issued to me it was worth about $20 million. That was at the beginning of ‘08. It doesn’t fully vest for another three or four years. That means two things are true. 1) They’re worthless to me now, even if they retained their value, and 2) They’re worth a lot less than the number they put into the chart even if I could sell them, which I can’t, not for a really long time. So that’s $20 million they say I have that I don’t have.

Now, a bunch of stock DID vest last January, so that’s in there. Except it’s valued at what it was worth then. That not what it’s worth anymore, not by a long shot. What’s interesting is that I had to pay taxes on the original amount, and they didn’t withhold enough back then, you know how that is. So I owe additional tax on a fictional amount of money that I can’t cash in because the stock is really too low to sell.

And then there’s my stock options. I’m looking at their calculations and they say my options are worth $30 million. Right now, they’re worth nothing, even if they were vested, which of course they’re not.

I find that vaguely mysterious. Who made up these rules? Mr. Black? Mr. Scholes? I can understand that if I exercised some of them, and got the cash, that would be income… but right now all they are is paper. If they ever go above water, every shareholder of the corporation will be dancing in the aisles. But that could take years. 

So let’s add it up. The papers say I made more than $50 million. I’m looking at a little more than $7 million, before taxes. And everybody hates me.

There’s only one solution for it, I think. I gotta get fired. That won’t take too much doing, the way things are going! I guess that proves there’s a silver lining to every dark cloud, huh? In the meantime, I wonder where I’m having lunch… Thank God I still have my plastic. As things stand, I really need it.

On April 1, Tim Geithner, speaking from the big G20 love fest, told Katie Couric that he would certainly consider replacing the CEOs of any bailed-out entity that the administration felt wasn’t performing up to snuff. I don’t think there’s anybody out there who doesn’t think that’s a good idea. You take the money. You do the job. If you don’t, so long Charley, right? Right. 

This will undoubtedly leave a huge CEO gap in a number of large institutions. In many cases, the government will probably try to fill the void with an executive who has been on the corporate scene before, as they did at General Motors. There’s certainly a rationale for that. The anointed one knows the company in question. He has some experience in the trenches. At the same time, isn’t that individual likely to be as much part of the problem as the solution? The Who said it: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Is that what we’re really after?

I submit that there are many qualified individuals from outside each of these banks, car companies, insurance behemoths and other corporate states that are now at least partially owned by We, the People. I believe I am one of them. 

Following are my qualifications to be a New Bailout CEO: 

• I have many nice suits and would not need government help to acquire any before ascending to my new post; 
• I have lost some hair over the years and now am required, on bad days, to do a moderate comb-over; 
• I don’t really understand a lot about the economy, relying on others for their wisdom, and would therefore not put up any resistance to virtually any plan that Mr. Geithner, Mr. Ratner or Mr. Ed, for that matter, might have in mind; 
• I can read a Teleprompter very well, and will not go off-point, ever, no matter what; 
• I can still button my jacket when I sit down, which is more than I can say about a lot of these guys; 
• I believe that Business can come back and am willing to say so; 
• I have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, which is clearly a qualification for haute executive status; 
• I am a big fan of Mr. Obama and all his guys; 
• I don’t mind taking a Town Car to appointments and have been doing so for many years, and would by no means insist on a stretch limo like some of these other bozos; 
• I fly commercial all the time and would promise to continue to do so; 
• I’m good at a cocktail party; 
• I like to delegate the important stuff. 

Of course, the compensation would have to make sense. I know the limits, which have been well-publicized. But what’s the upside?

Our President is having a bit of a tough time at the economic summit in Europe right now.  He’s talking stimulus while Germany and France, those solid allies in a crisis, are hammering him with the demand for extensive regulation of hedge funds and other financial institutions, particularly those that operate in their sphere. As in, you know, multi-national corporations. Like the kind that recognize no national borders. That are, in a sense, countries unto themselves. Corporate nation states, in other words. They want to regulate them. 

How dare they! Obnoxious Europeans! Where do they get off telling American business entities what to do? Our guy should just tell them to shove off! Allez oop! Auf wiedersehn! 

On the other hand. Una momento, s’il vous plait? 

While it is obnoxious to have these pissant little countries telling us what to do, you have to wonder, if you take a minute between your call from London and your teleconference with Berlin right before you get on the plane for Tokyo, whether there might be a micro-pfennig of reason in what they’re talking about. I mean, we’re big capitalists all of us, for sure, since every other economic system that’s been tried has failed, unlike ours, right? Um. Well, let’s leave that be for a second. Anyway, we don’t like government of any kind sticking its big nez into Business. That’s bad Business. We don’t like it when Timmy the Gee tries to do it, and we CERTAINLY aren’t going to like it if a bunch of foreigners start poking their weltanschauungs into our operations. 

At the same time, come on, ladies and gentlemen. The large companies that caused the worldwide collapse of global capitalism, at least at this horrendous point in time, recognize no national boundaries. They have gleaned the benefits of a wide world market, reaping vast harvests wherever they went, except possibly in countries that do not pay their bills or that insist on paying them in vodka. When our corporations plied the seas like responsible merchant vessels that was one thing. But it’s pretty obvious that quite a few of them, particularly the ones that shape the markets themselves, have been operating more like a cross between cruise ships registered in Liberia and privateers that recognize no national laws but those of the sea on which they float. 

It just may be that, you know, if we want to operate in the world theater, we might have to obey some of the world’s laws and regulations. Just possibly, is what I’m saying. Unless we can get out of it in some way. Good luck, Mr. Obama. Win one for the team, will ya?

1970: Chevy Corvair owned by my friend Stillman finally gives out with about 250,000 miles on it. With tremendous respect, we take it to the parking lot of Shea Stadium, take off the wheels and put it up on blocks, saying farewell to what was, in truth, the Galapagos tortoise of automobiles.  It did very little, but what it did it did incomparably.

1978: Pontiac V8. Bench seats. Very comfortable. Solid body, sounded like a tank when you closed the doors. More room than a suite at the Holiday Inn. Went from 0 to 60 in about seven seconds in spite of the fact that it weighed a ton. Got about 12 miles per gallon, 16 on the highway. Never gave me a moment’s trouble. Sold it for exactly what I paid for it brand new: $2400. No car like it has ever been made anywhere but in Detroit.

1982: I find myself in Los Angeles for a few days and decide to rent a Cadillac Eldorado. Big mother of a car. Drives like an big old boat; you can feel the body floating along on the chassis like a fat man in a swimming pool.  After a decade of Toyotas, it feels like I’ve come home from a pup tent to an enormous, comfortable house that anticipates my every need. When I am forced to give the car back, I almost weep.  

2000: I am looking for a car that expresses my inner child. After a few test drives in assorted BMWs, Lexi and such, I am passed on the highway by a T-top Camaro doing about 110. I check it out. 345 horses. Goes from 0 to 60 in only about a half a second less than a Porsche. The interior is a bit cheesy, true, but hugely capacious compared to the itsy-bitsy Mustang, which makes me feel claustrophobic, and there’s Schwarzeneggerian muscle under the hood. Comes in at about $30,000, about fifty grand less than its closest competitor in terms of power and comfort. In the end, I find the T-top a little wearing and wish I’d gotten a convertible. But what a car! I miss it even now.

Everybody’s mad at General Motors (GM).  And of course it’s obvious they’ve messed things up entirely. Stupid GM! So many mistakes. Perhaps a quick Chapter 11 is the only way to go here, I don’t know. I do know one thing, however. GM makes good cars. Have you seen the new 2010 Camaro?

I could lose 1000 banks as long as mine doesn’t fail.  Every hedge fund in the world could go under as far as I’m concerned. But we’d better be pretty careful about our good old American car business. I mean, if they go, can the cheeseburger be far behind?

Dear Uncle Larry and Aunt Bea,

It’s been a hard weekend, which is the only excuse I have for not answering your e-mail sooner. I’m sure the May 9th date will work out fine for the barbecue. I don’t have anything planned for that week, or the week before. Or the week after, for that matter, although I do have a couple of interviews for excellent management positions in a number of very attractive companies, none of which have anything to do with cars I’m happy to say. I’ve just about had enough of the automobile business, I can tell you that!

You’re right, though. That phone call from Mr. Ratner was a little tough to take. I remember Steve when he was a young reporter for the New York Times, and now he’s, like, the big boss of everybody I know. It’s kind of creepy, if you ask me. You’re sitting there with a nice plate of ham and eggs on a weekend morning and there’s this fellow on the telephone telling you that you’ve been fired. It was weird. Kind of a take-it-or-leave-it thing. Like, either I leave or the company doesn’t get the $16 billion. Talk about a no-brainer. Not that I didn’t think about it for a few minutes.

My first reaction was to run through all the good friends and allies I’ve built up in the company and the industry after all my years of service, and wonder what kind of push-back they were going to make on my behalf. That didn’t take long. Then I said okay. Mr. Ratner was very nice about it, by the way. I didn’t envy him the job. You can just imagine the conversation he had with Mr. Obama when they decided to take me out. “Have Tim do it,” says Mr. Ratner. “No,” says Mr. Obama, “Tim’s very busy” and so forth.

I think it’s very nice of you, Larry, to offer me such a key slot in your furniture store. I’m thinking it over very seriously, of course. I don’t know a lot about that business. But you know what they say. Management is management whatever kind of business you’re in. The capabilities you pick up in one industry are easily transferred to others once you master the basics of their operations. And my years at GM have certainly allowed me to develop a world-class skill set.

One thing is for sure. I’m going to need something. I asked Mr. Ratner what kind of severance package I could expect after all my years of service. I think he was about to answer when his cell phone must have given out. I’ll be getting back to them about that later, but I have a bad feeling about it for some reason.

Anyhow, say hello to the cousins and give an extra biscuit to Fluffy for me. And keep that fold out couch ready for me. I might need it!

Luv ya,

Rick

We’re not going to recover as a economy if there are so many shorts in the market. The whole system is now basically being run by people who are betting against the rest of us. This means that every time hope begins to bubble up and good, solid, honest, positive investors start seeing a little bit of light at the end of the funnel of doom, the shorts run in and lay a tiny little turd in the punchbowl. They’re bummers. 

I kind of reached my limit the other day when the market was feeling good about itself and Mr. Tim Geithner, who had suddenly mutated from Goat of the Month to My Hero status. Amazing how fast those things turn these days, isn’t it?

Anyway, the Dow was up, like, 400 points, and I called up our investor relations guy and said, hey, this is pretty great, huh? And he said, well, yes it is, for sure, but a lot of the analysts out there just think it’s a dead cat bounce. And I said, “huh?” and he explained to me what a dead cat bounce was. Apparently, it’s a phrase of some longevity, even though honestly I never heard it before. You can tell what it means. Like, you think the cat is alive and well and jumping around, but in actually the cat is dead and even a dead cat bounces, and that’s what the market is doing when people invest in their belief that some companies might be worth more than 10% of their 2008 value. 

The thing is, there’s no upside for the dead cat people if the cat is still alive. And they’re the ones who are driving the Street around the bend right now. How are we supposed to do better if the only financial upside for so many people is if we do worse? 

There are plenty of other things that the shorts could be doing. They could be salting the fields of farmers trying to grow next year’s wheat crop, or releasing toxic nuclear waste into the ocean. I suggest they get busy with these kinds of activities and get out of our collective economic face.

1. 59 yo-yos, purchased over a lifetime on the principle that they would accrue in value and eventually be collector’s items, as indeed they are, in the sense that they seem to be of interest only to the person who collected them. Current value: $157 dollars. 

2. Large portfolio of comic books circa 1966 – 2006, assembled after I found out that my mother had thrown away all my Silver Age Marvel comics. Collection includes many vintage R. Crumbs, entire run of Spawn, Preacher, and many other underground titles. Current value estimated, by me, to be far from the $5 million projected, by me, while the process of investment was underway. 

3. 50 shares of Google (GOOG) purchased for a stagnant IRA of mine at approximately $700 per share not all that long ago, when we all had nowhere to go but up. Yesterday’s share price: $324. 

4. Assorted shares of other “blue-chip” firms purchased 1995-2000, when I decided to “go conservative” in the market. Current decline in value: 90%. 

5. A number of stock options now valued by ridiculous accounting rules to be worth something. Actual value in foreseeable future given the state of the economy and tremulous state of Wall Street: $0.00. 

6. Several contracts that provide “guaranteed” income from firms that now no longer exist. Black-Scholls value of these worthless contracts: $14,530,423.34. 

7. One co-op in New York City. Present estimate of market value: Will accept any reasonable offer. 

8. One twelve-year-old cocker spaniel, selectively incontinent, likes chocolate. Current value: Priceless.

Just a note this morning to ask a certain party to get off my blog. I don’t do this very often. Most spam I just delete. But I’m now into double digits on this thing and I figure the time has come to give somebody a kick in the butt about it.

Before I do, I will recall one of the great moldy oldies of our common spamtastic past. Do you all remember the Nigerian 419 scam, which started, I believe, well before the Internet but has continued for some reason in the new era, in spite of all the writing that’s been done about it, my own included? I suppose it’s proof that there will always be credulous people in the world. In that appeal to global stupidity, somebody e-mails you and tells you that she or he is the tearful relative of a former member of the Nigerian military/government/royal family and that, due to uncertain conditions in the nation or the execution of their loved one, they are now sitting on a huge amount of money which they would like you to come to Nigeria and take out of the bank, at which point you will get a hefty piece of the pie. Incredibly, people have done this. But there’s now quite a bit of awareness about the scam, so maybe a few potential idiots have been saved.

So now I’m going to send up a flare. About three times a week now, I get the following comment, which is immediately sent to spam:

 I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

The message is then signed by a name: Ruth, Marvin, Pete, whatever, and is always then followed with some lame internet link that has something to do with finance. Interestingly, the link is never the same. So I don’t really get it. But you know what? I don’t want to.

The first time I got this form of spam, I was kind of flattered, until I saw the link and realized it was a creepy ruse to get people to contact the nefarious denizens of those web destinations. Now I know. Nobody “recently came across my blog.” Nobody “has been reading along.”  It’s just another bunch of scuzzy losers trying to get over on people.

So get lost, Ruth, Betty, Bob and Ingrid. Unless, of course, you have $111 million dollars in an African bank you’d like to withdraw. Then I think I could help!

When is enough of a good thing way too much? When you’re flying American (AMR). Somewhere along the line somebody must have done a focus group or something, because it’s apparent that the airline believes that fulsome, frank communications with passengers is of fabulous benefit to everybody. The effort is obviously well-intentioned. But the outcome is perhaps not.

I first noticed this a few years ago, when I would be sitting and waiting for a mysterious amount of time on the tarmac and then Chuck Yeager would come on the public address system with something like, “First of all, I’d like to thank you all for your patience…” This immediately drained whatever patience I was trying to cultivate. I hate being thanked for my patience. “… but there’s an amber light here in the cockpit that we’re checking out.”

That was bad. There are a lot of reasons for amber lights, none of them particularly encouraging. Did I need to know about the amber light? Maybe. Did I want to fly in a plane that sported one, even briefly? Again, not too sure. I did know that the announcement did very little to help my frame of mind, but I guess they were just trying to be responsible and blah blah blah.

The trend has continued to develop, with ever-increasing levels of frankness being employed to win our admiration and regard. Which is fine. Unless, you know, it freaks us out entirely.

It’s my perception, which may be completely off base (but I don’t think so) that American Airlines hasn’t put a new plane into domestic service in quite some time.  A little while back, they fooled me for a while with some new seating arrangements, but then I realized the snazzy new electric chairs had been installed into the same old Boeings. What American does instead, and it is very much to its credit, is to swarm over every airplane before it is permitted to leave the ground, fixing, checking, making sure that it is truly airworthy. This means a lot of late departures and safe arrivals. Still, I sometimes think they should post all take-off and landing times with a big fat asterisk.

Anyhow, yesterday I was scheduled to depart at 1:50 from San Francisco. The plane was slow to board. It is my belief, based on years of experience, that even the most infinitesimal delay at any point in the chain usually results in hours and hours of snafus and fubars, very often ending in the scrubbing of the flight and total decomposition of my day/week.  So my hair-trigger gut was telling me a) we had a problem and b) there was, therefore, a 68.4% chance that we would never take off at all, when Chuck Yeager came on the intercom.

“Well,” he said, “we were all ready to go, but it appears that the brakes on the left side of the plane need to be replaced.” He then went on about how that was really not a very big deal at all and that it might take less than half an hour and so on and so forth, but I didn’t hear a thing, all I could get into my mind was the image of a plane landing at Kennedy Airport in New York and careening into Jamaica Bay when its brakes gave out.

“This is too much information for me,” I said to the dead-heading flight attendant in the next seat.

“Well,” he said, “I guess they’re just trying to be honest.”

I get that. Honesty is a virtue. In this case, however, something seems out of whack. Next time I would suggest something like, “There’s a bit of weather in New York, and we’re going to make sure that we have clear skies for your landing there. Kick back and have a free drink on us.”

I like that much better. Not that such obfuscation is always called for. How different the world would look now if some honest broker had announced, “Well, we were doing fine until about a month ago, when it became obvious that our insurance was underwritten by a host of bad mortgage loans…”

You guys aren’t going to like this, but you know who I feel sorry for? Edward Liddy. That’s right. He’s the guy the government appointed to run AIG after Hank Greenberg and his gang set it up to crash and burn. Today Greenberg popped up on television like a vicious Mini-Me to pile on the dead bunny.

Greenberg left in a scandal in 2005 after setting up the business unit that got AIG into all of its trouble. You know that operation. The Financial Products group that came up with all those cute derivatives backed with now-toxic instruments. And here he is this morning, jabbering away like a wise elder statesman. Pfui.

This was only slightly worse than the drubbing that Mr. Liddy took at the hands of the suddenly irate congressmen in Washington on Wednesday. Many of our senior legislators had good points to make, no question about it. The situation is dire, and certainly subject to Federal review, as it was years ago when the SEC was supposed to be regulating the industry. Most of the politicians acquitted themselves well. But at times the hectoring got out of hand, to the point where you might have thought, if you were a cynical type of person, that these members of Congress were trying to come up with the quintessential sound bite that would land them on the evening news. Sure enough, at the end of the day, it was the showboat from Massachusetts whose “have you no shame!” diatribe did get the most airtime. I guess he knows his business, too.

Of course, Edward Liddy isn’t blameless. He obviously made some very bad decisions. But he is only the last in a series of managers – both at AIG and elsewhere – who has done so. It’s pretty evident noxious stuff has been going on everywhere for years. The culture of compensation of which he was a part is so deeply ingrained in corporate culture now that even Tim Geithner, the guy who is supposed to oversee the bailouts, didn’t pop up a huge red flag when he first heard about AIG’s contractual obligations to its disgraced lunkheads. 

Worst of all, for the poor doofus on the stand, is the thought that you’ve got to know is running through his head as everybody is saying nasty things about his mother: “I’m doing all this for one dollar a year.” 

Man. I would do it for less than five. As long as it came with a guaranteed bonus.