As you may have divined from the tenor of the past week or so, I’m ready for my vacation. Where I’m going may not be bloggable or, likewise, I may not be in a blogolicious state of mind.
All of which goes to say that I am, unless, you know, the spirit strikes me and the technology avails, putting an Out To Lunch sign on the blog for ten days or so. Here are some things you can do here, though, while I’m hors de combat:

1. Go on vacation yourself, wisely using the time I am away to recreate yourself as thoroughly as I hope to do the same;

2. Lob in your own comments to this page (or one prior to this on the same subject, as many of you have) about your vacation, lack of vacation, or feelings about the whole issue of vacating in general;

3. Delve into the Ask Bing portion of the site and send me your queries to read on my return. When I get back, I will luxuriate in them and share them with our readers;

4. Go into the portions of this site dedicated to those who are interested in Crazy Bosses or Bulls**t Jobs. The galleries are there, as are quizzes, games and, of course, loads of war stories from folks just like you, with appropriate comments from others who agree, disagree or deride them. Go! Join! We need ya!

5. Immediately click on the portion of the navigation bar that says Bing’s Books and buy a couple. They’re all good. None are bad. Get some now.

6. You may also browse over to Bing In Fortune and read my columns from the magazine. What fun, right? You bet.

I will be back, of course, before either of us knows it.

That’s the good news, right? Right?

Aloha!

USA Today has just about the happiest article I’ve read in a business section for quite some time. ‘Dark side to leverage’ slows buyouts, says the headline.

I love it. Even if it is 20 years late.

“The fear is that dealmakers could face tougher times,” says Adam Shell, the writer of the piece, going on to quote New York money manager Michael Holland, who says, “The perceived wisdom is it won’t be so easy for private-equity firms to fund their deals with silly money.”

Bad news, then, for deal vampires who suck up loose entities and spit them out as consolidated parts of crazy new corporate monsters. Good news for people who work inside organizations who need to be part of a big deal about as much as they need a goiter.

Let’s say it here. There are two classes in business, or at least two. Okay, maybe there are a lot more than two, but I’m going to talk about two, and here they are:

1. People who work inside a business to create value for investors by producing something: a product, a service, a new idea, or managing people who do.

2. People who make money pushing money around, or helping people who do.

The interests of these two groups do not often converge below the level of ultra-senior management in Group 1, who tend to hang with Group 2 dudes and eventually become them.

Deals, particularly those which are financed by “silly money,” are almost always bad for middle management, that’s for sure, because the “synergies,” “economies of scale,” and other means of defenestrating human life almost always come out of the hides of people who manage people while themselves being managed by bigger people — that is, my friends and yours.

Think of the implications! Companies looking for acquisitions may have to use REAL money to buy them! In order to justify that kind of expenditure, they’ll need a genuine rationale for doing the deal, not just that it’s, you know, cool, and will make all the lawyers, investment bankers and deal jockeys a bundle. What a bummer for them. What are they going to use their MBAs for?

But for we who labor within? How sweet it could be! Some deals may not even get done! Consolidation may slow! People may end up being able to spend more than two years at each iteration of their company! There will be way fewer scary, lengthy meetings over holiday weekends!

We can all go to lunch and know where our cheese is when we return!

Vacation time should be spent far away from kids, pets, and famliy members. Vacation time is for people to get away from their responsibilities. Any emergencies that come up will all of a sudden take care of themselves.

Posted By Yadgyu, Harkeyville, TX : June 27, 2007 5:48 pm

I’m going to spend a long weekend sifting through the public rolls of our county tax assessor Web site, looking up the value of my talent-less, unmotivated senior managers’ homes. This usually crushes my will to live for a good long while.

Posted By Kenny, Madison, WI : June 27, 2007 4:38 pm

I haven’t taken a full week off in 6 years and I’M NOT PROUD OF THAT. Between e-mails, voice mails, crazy clients, I really feel trapped. I miss the days of white out, of when there was one word processor in the whole office, when people took lunch and gave you more than 5 minutes to respond to anything they’ve sent you before calling or e-mailing you to yell at you for being non-responsive. We’re going to try to get away this month. Taking the famous drive everyone I know has taken from San Fran down to LA (or San Diego). I really hope we do this…or I might slice my wrists with fax paper.

Posted By Fern, Fair Lawn, NJ : June 27, 2007 3:53 pm

We are snow-birds who winter (make that most of fall and winter, plus some of spring) in Arizona, then go to Montana for May-September. We road-trip a bit while in Big Sky Country, but most of our time is spent at our home up here and helping my husband’s Mom with her lake house nearby. We will have a real–overseas–vacation in October, joining a “geezer’s tour group” going to Scotland and Ireland. Erin Go Bragh (sp?) and all that good stuff!

Posted By Linda Granzow, Polson MT (for now) : June 27, 2007 3:40 pm

I was having a vacation of my life in London and was staying in one hotel manchester thistle.

Posted By Shawn : June 27, 2007 3:33 pm

Taking a mental vacation to ponder the number of coup d’estats that have occurred while the king/dictator/boss was on vacation

Posted By T, Itsasecret, NC : June 27, 2007 2:20 pm

For some strange reason families expect you to use your vacation time to visit them, which can be utterly annoying, and they use their time to return the “favor”. So next month I am sacrificing a week of my time normally used to restore my sanity, and spending it visiting my parents while my brother and his brood will be ever-present. My wife and I are overjoyed to no end. I can smell the gunpowder and dry wood already…

Posted By Jon C., Portland, Oregon : June 27, 2007 12:14 pm

In August I’m taking the wife and three kids (ages 5, 3 and 1) up to the Santa Cruz mountains in California. It’s a beautiful place along California’s central coast.

Posted By Matt M., Chino Hills, CA : June 27, 2007 10:54 am

I’m not taking a vacation this year. I’m quitting my job in one year and I get paid for my unused vacation days, which means I’ll have a fairly large final paycheck. Any time I need some time off, I use my sick time (which I don’t get paid for when I leave). At this moment, I have 144 hours of sick time saved up. Maybe I’ll “catch pneumonia” and head to Disneyland.

Posted By Robert, Elko, NV : June 26, 2007 11:03 pm

Hi. This is Bing. I’m going to Hawaii on Saturday. Perhaps I should have mentioned that. Maybe I’ll tell you more later. I’ve never been there and I’m looking forward to it a lot. I do feel that pre-vacation anxiety, though. Will I be missed? Will I not be missed? Will I come back to feel the world changed? Uncoupling from the corporate mindset isn’t easy or we wouldn’t have to go thousands of miles away to do it.

Posted By thebingblog : June 27, 2007 12:33 pm

Disneyland? Disneyworld? Paris? Rome? Gettysburg? Topeka? Seattle? Palmetto? Palm Springs? Palm Beach? Boston? Chicago? The largest ball of string in the world?

Are you getting away this summer? Where are you going? Please tell me, in whatever detail you want.

And if you’re not being permitted to go anywhere? Let me hear about that, too.

Come on. There’s a link right below that says Add A Comment. Knock yourself out.

I’ll publish you.

If you’d like to hear a few minutes of my actual, non-virtual voice on a subject of some mutual interest to us all, go to the front page of this site under the heading Crazy Bosses, right at the top of the page. There you will see a link that says Listen to Bing discuss crazy bosses on Denver’s KBCO. Or I guess you could just click it right here. How about that?

Through the magic of digital technology, you will find me at the other end of that link, talking about whatever seems to have come out of my mouth (it was live) with the witty and engaging Bret Saunders, who runs the morning show there. Bret is somewhat unusual among radio hosts in that 1) He read the book he’s talking to the author about; 2) He has opinions about it and a bunch of questions on his mind; and 3) He’s not mean. This combo is more unusual than you might think. So… thanks, Bret!

Today we roll out the newest in our series of Ask Bings. The previous group is still available on the lower righthand corner of the home page for those who are nursing the same problems they were a few weeks ago. I sympathize, by the way. My problems don’t seem to go away, either.

Shooting me questions this time was a guy who works for what he calls an “ultra-wimp,” who not surprisingly is to be found in academia. My dad worked in that dry and flinty bureaucratic soil, and I can tell you that brand of limp manipulator can be particularly thorny and vicious. Another question comes from a fellow who wants to leave one bulls**t job for another, more prestigious one. Again, a reasonable request, and achievable if one deploys the right strategy. A third inquiry finds a young woman who is dealing with that most ubiquitous of crazy bosses, a mean little bully who exploits her work and denies her the respect she deserves. They just don’t seem to go away, these guys, do they? Until, you know, they do. That’s the good news.

There are some other cries for help, including one person who is wrestling with that most hairy of issues for any working person: how to get a raise. We could spend a long time on that one, and maybe I will one day. There are many schools of thought on the subject, most of which go at it rationally. Since like many core business issues it is not, in my opinion, a totally rational one, I tend to veer to another approach, some of which is touched on in today’s Q&A.

A note to all of you who take the time and trouble to write in to this portion of the Bing website: I read every one of your letters and always marvel at how essentially the same major torments and uncertainties play themselves out in an infinite variety of ways. Each job has its very specific cultural milieu, its own cast of leading and supporting characters, its own pains and gains. Each boss is both the same as every boss and completely different than any others. Thank God. As long as the world stays the way it is, I will never go out of business.

So keep writing. I’ll keep thinking about the things that bother you. It’s certainly better than obsessing about my own situation all the time.

1. Eat. In any good airport, there are many places where you can enjoy a burger, a sandwich, even some decent sushi. Take some time while you eat. If you look around you, you will see many people munching on things while doing sudoku. In fact, if you’re not doing sudoku, it may seem to you that you are the only person not doing so. It’s possible that those of us who are not into non-stop sudoku are missing something. If, for example, I was into sudoku right at this moment, I wouldn’t need to continue this list at all. I could simply stop right here and do sudoku for the next two hours, get on the plane, do sudoku for another six hours, and be home, where I could continue the sudoku game I left behind when I headed out on Friday.
2. Drink. There is no shortage of bars in your average airport. What you drink often depends on what time you are flying, and what time it is at the place to which you are going. When I went to Japan a few years ago, our plane departed at 8:00 AM or so. The lounge was full of Japanese people drinking scotch and smoking. While this seemed unthinkable to me, and I like a good tumbler of scotch as much as the next fellow, it actually was natural to travelers who were returning home to a part of the world where it was then 9:00 o’clock in the evening. Right now, if I chose to be on New York time, I could have a flagon of something strong and brown. Except, you know, I just had waffles.
3. Browse the bookstore. Airport bookstores are fabulous, jammed with all sorts of books, even mine. Those that do NOT have mine in a prominent position, however, need to be instructed to do so. Please refer to the book section of this site to bone up on the books that need to be in the airport bookstore. If they are not there, please go to the person behind the counter and complain. Thanks in advance for your cooperation. After that, you may delve through all the best-sellers, classics and vast trove of business paraphenalia, and then get that new sudoku book you’ve been looking for.
4. Purchase a piece of electronics. My favorite place to waste an expensive half hour is the store that you’re sure to find that’s dedicated to all sorts of cables, charging units, and portable DVD players. Just about every time I get to any airport, I realize I have left my cell phone charger someplace else. The newest gizmo I like is made by Eveready, I think. It’s a little tube where you can put one battery. On the top, there is a tiny input where you may insert a variety of connection cables whose tips fit a host of phones and BlackBerrys. I just realize I left that at home. I’m going to get another one now.
5. Look at magazines. Hi. I’m back. After purchasing a new charging unit (and almost but not quite a $350 portable DVD player), I stopped by the Hudson’s and got Scientific American, Popular Science, Wired, The Economist, and a magazine completely dedicated to sudoku. I’m all set!
6. Fall asleep. Jeez. What time is it? Last thing I remember I was trying to finish a sudoku puzzle in my new magazine.
7. Sit staring blankly into space. It’s very restful here in the waiting area. Look at that guy walking by with a suitcase the size of a steamer trunk. I bet he expects to carry that on. People do that now. It’s so horrendous to check your stuff that everybody expects to be able to stuff these enormous, wall-sized pieces of luggage into the tiny overhead storage bins.
8. Try to get an upgrade. Damn. Nothing yet. I don’t even have an aisle seat. If it doesn’t come through soon, I’m going to have to buy food for the flight.
9. Buy food for the flight. If I were going out of Oakland, I’d go for the stuffed turkey dinner. Do I trust the sushi to be good two hours from now? Should I spring for the wrap on the plane?
10. Find a hot zone, a wall plug and a patch of floor. Got ‘em! Piece of cake! Only 97 minutes to go! Now what to do… hmm… Ah! I know!

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle features a story that should brighten the day of anybody who has to look across a conference table at something they’d rather not on a regular basis. It’s a contest that was held in Petaluma, California, to determine the ugliest dog in the world.

Consensus seems to have been reached that a long tongue hanging out of one’s mouth is a determining factor in the race for the crown. Click on the link to see the winner, whose pink appendage is just about as long as his entire head.

The picture reminds me that I owe a phone call to my friend John, who runs Human Resources at a major corporation downtown. I haven’t seen him that way since we both did Houston a couple of years ago. I miss you, John!

Hi there. It’s Friday afternoon and I thought I would offer a few suggestions to those of you who have told your bosses that you are “working from home” today:

1. DO NOT leave your cell phone back in the living room when you step out to the diner for a couple of hours.
2. DO take your BlackBerry and cell phone when you go to the bathroom.
3. DO schedule a few short conference calls with anybody who works for you, since they are probably at the office cursing your name. This will show them you are fully engaged in the business of the day, which, of course, you are!
4. DO NOT start a complex e-mail chain with your boss too early in the day, since they often result in incoming telephone action that will raise the question of where you actually are in the physical (i.e. non-virtual) sense. NOTE: Even if you have received permission to “work from home” don’t remind your boss that you have done so. Reminding him or her of your status may impair your ability to do so again next week.
5. DO NOT start drinking any earlier than usual. Not even beer.
6. DO send out that lengthy e-mail with several Excel attachments that people have been waiting for since last Tuesday. This will serve two purposes: 1) demonstrate that you are active and on the field, in spite of all appearances; 2) stop anybody from replying to you on any issue while they chew over a spreadsheet they have no desire to deal with on a Friday during July or August.
7. DO NOT leave your Elvis Costello album playing in the background while you talk with colleagues, even if they are junior to you. Word will get around.
8. DO NOT answer the phone during your nap. Allow the ring to wake you. Splash some cold water on your face. Then return the call and apologize for having been “caught up” in something else while it was ringing. You may not fool anybody but it will be worth the attempt.
9. DO attempt to call your boss at 6 p.m., when you know he has gone for the day. You will appear on his call sheet first thing Monday morning as any industrious corporate citizen should.
10. DO NOT conduct any sort of business in your underwear. People will know. I don’t know how, but they will.

I’m pretty new at this blogging thing and it’s clear to me, even as a newbie, that some blogs get noticed and some just sort of lie there on their backs, peeing like babies on a changing table into the brisk digital wind.

The ones that really punch through are those that employ tags that pop up later on the important search engines like Google, Yahoo, and AOL.  You know about tags. Look at the top of this page and you’ll see a bunch of them.

If you choose your tags right, everybody pretty much in perpetuity who searches for that word or phrase just might end up being directed to the entity that generated the tag that contained it. Hence this posting, in which I will now attempt to drive traffic to this site by indiscriminately tagging a host of words that might serve that purpose.  Linking doesn’t hurt either. But it’s not as good as tagging. So I’ll do both.

A friend of mine who also has a blog notices that when she posted an item about a gluten-free diet, for instance, she was suddenly hit by a bunch of people who are interested in the subject. Diets in general get a lot of action every day on the web, as does anybody who has anything to do with food, including Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Emeril, like that.

Food is very closely aligned to health, of course, since we are what we eat. That’s why topics like heart disease, diabetes, Addison’s Disease (which struck President John F. Kennedy, who was rumored to have been involved with Marilyn Monroe), arthritis, Alzheimers, among many ailments, are of interest to people, who look up the subject on a variety of sites like the always-excellent Wikipedia and those more specialized.

Of course, the tags that have the highest potential are the ones that involve the celebrity names in just about every field that people want to know about, from the Dalai Lama, who dominates the spirituality game right now (along with his friends and competitive acolytes Steven Seagal and Richard Gere), to Oprah (both as an entertainer and as a force for good), all the way to the celebu-tarts who get more column inches than the War in Iraq (or Operation Iraqi Freedom as it’s still known known by the Multi-National Force and some of the media). You know who I’m talking about, right? Paris! Britney! Lindsay! People go for this sort of thing to sizzling hot aggregator-gossips like tmz and eOnline, where Ted Casablanca continues to report without fear or favor. 

There are so many more! Elvis! Shakespeare! Arnold! Al Gore! Warren Buffett! Barry Bonds! Hitler! Stalin! Bono!

That’s enough for now. If you found your way to this site because you followed any of these tags here — welcome! Take a look around! Hope you find us sticky!

Good morning, fellow wage slaves.  Before we address any issues of the day, if indeed there are any, and we sincerely hope there are not, I’d like to thank you for something.

I don’t know if you know this, but around here it’s the bloggers who are responsible for the publication of our comments. So I read every one. Sometimes they hurt. One guy recently told me that a little bit of me goes a long way. Ouch. Believe me, that’s not the first time I’ve heard that, and not always in a professional setting. In fact, quite a few of my relationships over the years have ended that way.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. It’s clear to me from the comments that await “moderation” when I wake up some days that quite a few of you have been going back into the archive and reading earlier postings. Like today I woke up and some fellow was berating me for making fun of the Toyota Prius. He was angry because he had read an item I posted a while ago, when gas prices hit an all-time high. Of course, like most of you who yell at me about something, he’s probably right. The Prius is a great car, a responsible car, and we all should have hybrids eventually, no question. But not to make fun of Prius owners is like missing the chance to poke fun at fans of granola or half-caf latte with soy milk. 

But I digress. I’ve also read comments both good and bad recently about stuff I wrote a while ago on Paris Hilton (you all thought I had my head up my butt) and our dog Julie, who got sick back in May I think it was (many of you have dogs you love more than life itself), among others.

I assure you everything you say, depending on its content, aggravates, intrigues and even when it needles me, makes me happy that you’re out there and bored enough with what you’re supposed to be doing to spend some time here instead.

Now let’s get out there and waste a couple of hours answering e-mail!

I had a terrific idea while honking on the phone with my pal Harry yesterday. He was talking about mounting an Internet startup that could be transformed within a year or so from a cool idea into a cash bonanza of $500 million when it was purchased by a larger online company, and I thought to myself, hey, I could do one of those.

Once I got the idea into my head, I couldn’t seem to get it out of there. So I figure it’s a good one, right?

Here’s the twist. I’m going to let the first smart person to snatch it up have it for only $100 million, if they move immediately. The way the market is going right now? That’s chicken feed.

Here are some of the big assets my new project will bring to the table from Day One:

•  A very fluid concept and operating principle: Right now, I’m wide open. I’m thinking it’s some kind of widget by which people can mash up their wiki. There will definitely be streaming and searching, possibly with a business bent of some kind. Within months, we’ll have established a community of people who are getting tired of the same-old stuff they’re moshing at already, and flock to us. Every one of those community members is a potential customer of a range of products pretty much for life, which I’m thinking should be very interesting to marketers looking for a slice of the Gen-Zero pie;  

•  No overhead: right now there are no employees, no office space, no serious operating expenses beyond those involved with the legal establishment of the entity and the papers involved with its sale to you;

• Nobody knows about it yet. Every venture capitalist in the industry is looking for the next big cultural phenomenon to sweep the digital landscape. More importantly, VCs and hedge fund managers are also looking hard for ways to spend the appalling amount of money they have in hand. This would give some lucky and sagacious investment steward the chance to plump down a nice but not scary chunk of green for a start-up that has quite literally nothing but upside.

Clearly, this is a very protean idea, but it’s hard to see how it could fail if we take it a step at a time with the right people, the right overall concept, the right marketing and public relations. While I believe I could be important to the effort, I would be willing to step aside and let a new team of talented young folks take my baby to the next level. I’m not greedy. Any eight-figure payout would do.

Once Upon A Time, there was a Consultant who worked for a Japanese Corporation. Now, this Consultant and the Japanese Corporation were well suited to each other, for each could talk and talk and talk about an issue until they were ready for a drink because their throats were so easily parched. Then, after this drink, which often took place at lunchtime, they were all prepared for another bout of talking and talking and talking and at no point did they come to a moment when any deciding was necessary.

And so they went on this way for years, the Consultant and the Japanese Corporation, sometimes repairing to a golf course for further discussion on matters that pertained to preceding and subsequent discussions.

One day the Consultant woke up in his home back in the United States, in a city not far from Chicago, and he looked at himself in the mirror and did not like what he saw particularly. This was not an altogether new thing, but worse than usual.

“Goodness,” said the Consultant to his reflection. ”Tomorrow I have to pack my bags and fly for seventeen hours to go to Japan again. While I am there I will eat and drink and golf and attend many meetings, some of them with the Chairman himself. And in spite of all my preparation and good ideas and suggestions for the Japanese Corporation, nothing will be done except the arrangement of further discussion, study and consideration. I’ve been at this for almost a decade and it has always been thus.” As he said this, the Consultant nicked himself shaving, something he almost never did, since he was a very meticulous and careful person. This upset him so much that he forgot all about the important ethical question that had confounded him for a moment, and he spent the next thirty minutes making sure the shaving nick didn’t show, since he had an important meeting that morning with an American Corporation that paid him a lot of money to cut expenses.

When he arrived in Japan a day or so later, he was immediately whisked to the corporate headquarters of his client, where a series of meetings had been set up for his attendance. The flight had been long and he was in a foul mood, since even consultants like to feel like they are effecting something other than the billing of hours upon occasion. After a full morning of discussion and conversation in which plans were made for further discussion and conversation, the Consultant requested a meeting with the Chairman of the Japanese Corporation.

That very afternoon, the Consultant was escorted to a limousine which took him to a golf cart which conveyed him to the 7th Hole of an exclusive golf club at which the Chairman of the Japanese Corporation was attempting to three-putt a par five. They greeted each other, the Consultant and the Chairman of the Japanese Corporation, with all the requisite bowing and expressions of mutual regard. The Consultant then spoke.

“I don’t want to disturb your play, my friend, so I will come to the point without the usual pleasantries that have always been a treasured part of our relationship.” The Chairman nodded with some surprise and the Consultant continued. “I have had the honor of serving your corporation for nearly ten years and during all that time not one action has been taken as a result of my efforts on your behalf. All that my work has produced has been a succession of meetings that have generated little more than subsequent meetings. While much of this has been gratifying to me, I feel I can take your money no longer if that is indeed the limit of my actual value to your enterprise.”

“I see,” said the Chairman of the Japanese Corporation. “All right.”

The next day the Japanese Corporation hired another consultant. The Consultant went back to the United States feeling much better about himself. The following week he met a fellow from Shanghai at a poker game in Chicago who he now advises on matters that should come to fruition by the year 2015.

Moral: If your consultant is unhappy with what you’re doing it may be time to get a new consultant.

The New York Times reports that growth of online retailing has slowed. While this may be cause for gnashing of teeth and flogging of jejune security analysts and their ilk, who have for some time been trumpeting the end of life on shopping earth as we know it, I for one want to be among the first to hoist a flagon and offer a lusty “Huzzah.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of buying things online. I shop at Amazon just about every week and not just for books new and old, but also for housewares, electronics and a whole bunch of other stuff. Everything I order arrives on time, in good shape, exactly as I wanted it. I love those guys. Long may they wave.

I also love EBay. You may know if you’ve read my stuff in Fortune, that I am and will always be an EBay addict. Last year I bid on and won more than 50 vintage guitars when a mere twenty or thirty might have sufficed. Most recently, I’ve been into watches. Love my EBay. May the road rise up to meet them as they go.

There’s so much more out there to click on and adore. Alibris for books. Crate & Barrel for the home. I bank online. I pay my bills online. Hey, I even shop for food online at FreshDirect. Fabulous produce. So I’m no cringing Luddite creeping down the desolate Main Street of my city, looking for a place to buy a vinyl 45 and a second-hand cardigan from a consignment shop. I’m as digital as baby-faced investment bankers who don’t know who Clapton is.

But me, when I hear that growth in online retailing will moderate to less than 10 percent annual sales growth by 2011, I say right on, hurrah, say hey and attaboy. And I will tell you why.

As much as I admire online bookstores, and find them incomparable in some respects, I like bookstores, too. Last month I visited one of the truly great ones in these United States — Stacey’s in downtown San Francisco. Outstanding selection of everything, graphic novels, magazines you never get anywhere else, hard-to-find literature and, of course, a full selection of Bing. Comfy chairs to read in. They host author’s appearances that are attended by way more than the traditional guy with a pint of muscatel in a crinkled brown paper bag. It’s a world in there. I have a friend who manages the place. I asked her how they were doing. “You know,” she said. “Getting along. It’s hard to compete.” I hope Stacey’s is able to hang in there until things kind of balance out between online and brick-and-mortar. I would hate to live in a world where the virtual annihilates the real. I don’t think you want to live there either.

Don’t you want to be able to hop in your car, drive to a store, try something on and buy it? When you want a camera, don’t you want to touch it before you plop down that $500? Sure there’s a lot of fun in ordering something and then waiting for it like a kid who just sent in his or her box tops. But what about that impulse buy? Isn’t that a rush, too?

Every now and then I pass by an empty Tower Music. They’re gone now. Dead and buried. In their place I generally expect to find one of two kinds of mercantile establishments, the only places that seem to be thriving right now: a bank or a super drugstore. This depresses me. I remember enjoying a good browse in my local Tower, the smell of it, the feeling of finding an actual CD that I could hold in my hands and curse while trying to strip off its shrink wrapping. I don’t think this makes me a bewigged old-timer. There has to be room for both, don’t you think?

In the Panglossian end of the day, what we just might have will be the best of all possible worlds – a lively marketplace, some online and some brick-and-mortar, with the digital driving traffic to the thing people want the most: a real, human interaction that results in the purchase of something they can take home and eat, read, plug in, watch or listen to.

So keep on growing, online retailers! Good luck to you! All the best! But forgive me if news indicates that your march across all civilized nations is reaching manageable levels, that there may be some actual, physical business entities standing when the day is done.

And hey – you pundits who always predict that one medium is about to extinguish all others? Next time shut up, why don’t you?

On this quiet, restful Sunday, I look over the comments you have made over the last week or so, and I notice how many of you continue to wade into the discussions on Crazy Bosses and Bulls**t Jobs. It’s amazing the range of occupations you have offered to add to the latter category. And, thank goodness, your rolling torrent of objectionable superiors never seems to end.

I’m happy I’ve been able to offer a haven for people like you and me to discourse on these weighty issues. I would like to remind you, as you do so, that there are actual books offered on this site that address these issues at length, with wit, seriousness and savoir faire. They are, of course, my very own Crazy Bosses and 100 Bulls**t Jobs and How To Get Them.

Go ahead. Click on the links. What do you think pays for all this nonsense?

Thanks, friends. I’ll be back tomorrow with more tales from the crypt.

Yesterday I had a few harsh words to offer on the subject of Father’s Day. A few of you took me to task about it, and it set me to thinking. And I guess I’d better set something straight.

I have nothing against fathers. It’s the day I can’t stand. I’ve never been much for scheduled affection and merriment. I have a hard time with New Year’s Eve, for instance. I mean, I like to get drunk as much as the next person. I just don’t like to be told hey, tonight you have to get completely wasted and have a good time. Something in me rebels.

I don’t think I’m alone with this. I have noticed that all the really big mergers and acquisitions I’ve been a part of have taken place over long holiday weekends when executives, investment bankers and lawyers are supposed to be at home “relaxing” with their families. This is not a coincidence. Can’t be. It’s happened too often. Moguls in particular have a really hard time with mandated periods of rest and reflection. They’re okay when they set the schedule themselves. But to have it thrust upon them? No sir. They don’t like it.

In my pique over the compulsory and commercialized aspects of this particular minor holiday, however, I may have led some of you to believe that I am somehow lacking in respect and admiration for dad himself. Nothing could be further from the truth. My esteem for fathers is based on my conviction that doing what it takes to make the grade doesn’t come naturally to us.

It’s hard to earn a living, for instance. If you left it to many of us, we’d be okay with a mattress, a box spring, a big, flat-screen TV and a refrigerator full of Chinese food. You can’t raise a kid like that, let alone keep a wife interested, so over time we modulate our sense of what a home is supposed to look like.

When the baby comes, it’s a big adjustment. I remember, when it was my turn to do so, being up at the terrifying hour of 3:30 AM, rolling a stroller back and forth and singing “It’s A Small World After All” over and over again to my little girl, who was wide awake, perfectly affable, as long as the singing and rolling continued. When it stopped, drama ensued. I now remember those nights as being some of the sweetest in my life.

Having a baby is like being subjected to classic brainwashing techniques. Every couple of hours they wake you, march you around, interrogate you. Just as you’ve fallen back asleep, exhausted and disoriented, they wake you again, march you around, interrogate you. You’re not really sure what they want from you because you don’t speak their language. That goes on until you identify with your captors and are ready to sing their anthem. Then they let you go out and do propaganda for them.

Then there’s the fact that men aren’t always bred to endure great, heaping dollops of emotion. Suddenly, there they are, all the deep, resonant, powerful feelings that we’ve generally kept bottled up inside us for as many manly years it’s taken us to toughen up. We’ve always had them. We’ve always managed them. Now we have to let them out. Most of us get sort of good at it after a while. But still.

A lot of us also have to master our habit, bred into us from birth, to take charge of everything, control everything, turn the little dudes into some impersonation of our better selves. This is hard for a lot of guys, particularly those who are obsessed with team sports.

Not to mention the whole aspect of having to know what to do about things. Kids come to you and asks you for your opinion on stuff quite a bit. All of sudden you’re supposed to be a source of information on science, for instance. This takes study. Other topics are even more difficult to master.

Throughout the years, we’re also supposed to set an example, to be upright, forthright. We’re not supposed to come home reeking of gin. We’re not supposed to yell or be cruel to small animals. For most of us, most of the time, this is achievable.

At last, after we’ve transformed ourselves from plain old men into fathers, and come to like it, there they go out the door, plunging into the deep river of their own lives. They don’t need to be rolled to sleep at dawn anymore. They don’t need to know why the sky is blue. When they have questions, they are often the very same ones that you have asked yourself over the course of a lifetime and still can’t quite answer.

In short, it’s all kind of strange to us, the whole pageant, and somewhat against the general grain of what it means to be a male human being the rest of the time. It is also, in the end, the best thing that we did during our short stay on the planet.

So forgive me, guys, for being too crabby about the small, well-earned day that’s been reserved for us. We deserve it. We’ve earned it.

Have a good one.

I’m not saying I don’t appreciate it. I do. Brunch at Denny’s will be nice. I’m not bitter or anything. But don’t tell me that Father’s Day is a big deal, because it’s not.

Okay, the newspapers and greeting card companies and the stores that want to sell us things sort of make a big noise to pump it up for a couple of days beforehand. According to USA Today, our loved ones spend between $48.32 and $70.11 on average for sporting goods, tools and appliances, special outings on the day itself, hedge clippers, consumer electronics, computer gear, stuff like that. I guess the tie is out, having received such bad publicity for the last 25 years or so. That’s a good thing. An iPod is better than some lame clothes, for sure, particularly business attire. But don’t try to sell me on the day itself. Because according to my calculations it comes in behind just about every other important day on the calendar.

I mean honest, thanks very much, but you think we don’t know it’s just a make-good for Mother’s Day, which is a huge national spasm of love and affection, and preceded the establishment of our day, by Richard Nixon in 1972, by nearly sixty years!? According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother’s Day is the #1 day for people to dine out in the United States. Not so with Father’s Day. We dine, fine. But #1 we’re not.

Holidays that kick Father’s Day in the butt, along with the aforementioned Mother’s Day, include: Memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day (Indigenous People’s Day in Berkeley, California), Christmas, New Year’s, President’s Day, Independence Day, and the day the next Harry Potter novel is released. That’s only a partial list. If you’re religiously observant, I’m sure there are ten or twelve that come to mind in addition.

Perhaps that’s as it should be. We’re men. We can take it. And when Sunday comes, it’ll be all right. The pleasures of the day itself are considerable.

Just do us a favor, dudes in control of the big machine: Don’t try to sell this nice little invention to us in a big fat box with a red ribbon on top. We’re not buying it.

I will, of course, take that cool little flash drive you knew I wanted and say thanks, guys. I love you, too.

News today comes from the Associated Press that, after two generations in which its signature semi-foodstuff, the Twinkie, was filled with vanilla creme, Hostess will revert to the original taste for the squishy center of the indestructible edible, and inject the whisper of banana.

“The company was finally persuaded to make the flavor part of its lineup for good after Hostess offered it for four weeks last year for the release of the movie ‘King Kong’,” the AP reports. “Total Twinkie sales jumped 20 percent during the promotion.”

I’m sorry my mother and father never saved an original Twinkie from the 1930s. The treat was filled with the now-returning Kong-happy goodness until World War II, when the war in the East limited the supply of bananas. From that time forth, the sad and somehow slightly diminished Twinkie center was relegated to the sweet vanilla puddinglike substance we all know so well. I’m sure if they had secreted one away on some shelf somewhere, it would still be around in my family archives right now, just as plump, “fresh” and tasty as it was three generations ago. Twinkies have real staying power.

Hostess’s success in re-introducing something unique and great shows the power of cross-marketing in our impression-saturated culture. The thought process goes like this:

1. I want to see a movie most weekends.
2. This weekend, I’d like to see that third remake of King Kong.
3. When I was a kid I liked King Kong.
4. I remember when I was a kid and liked King Kong I also used to like Twinkies.
5. Gee, look. Twinkies is associated somehow with King Kong right now.
6. They have a new creamy center that has a taste King Kong would love.
7. I like King Kong. King Kong would like the new Twinkie. I might like it too.
8. I gotta go out and see the movie with one of them new Twinkies.
9. Wow, that was good. In fact, the Twinkie was better than the movie.
10. I’m going out to tell my friends about that new Twinkie.

See? It’s pretty easy. But you’ve got to get it right. A crossover, for instance, between Cartier and the new Fantastic Four movie, which features Marvel’s Silver Surfer, might be less successful, because it misunderstands the specific psychographics and demographics of the target audience of each consumable.

Marketing marches on, however. And in this case we all are the beneficiaries.

Early readers of this blog may recall that, upon its inception, we offered, among many other features designed for your amusement and pleasure, a small contest for who had the most noteworthy cubicle. Well, millions and millions of submissions and weeks of painstaking adjudication by a team of international experts later, we have selected the one cubicle that rose above the rest. And a bright and shining example it is. A lovely, semi-private place covered from top to bottom, side to side, with tin foil.

The owner of this truly remarkable workspace is Nancy Hwang, associate director of the Job Board at mediabistro.com, an essential online destination for people who either have a great job in the media, want a great job in the media, or want to read about other people who have a great job in the media and feel consumed with bitterness and jealousy. This makes the site a must read for ambitious, upwardly-mobile careerists in virtually every aspect of the global media circus, from old platformers in publishing to the coolest of digital/interactive space cadets.

As for me, I couldn’t have been more pleased to find, in the end, that it was a mediabistro person who rose to the top of the heap, since I have been friendly with quite a few of them in the past and they have been quite kind in promoting and publicizing my books. I only point this out in a spirit of transparency, however, since Ms. Hwang’s achievement has nothing to do with logrolling and everything to do with her creativity, drive and pleasant eccentricity.

I took a few moments to chat with the lucky winner via e-mail this afternoon, and found her — where else? — at the site of her triumph:

Q: Do you like your cubicle?
A: Absolutely.

Q: Why is it covered in tin foil?
A: Because I am a big fan of leftovers.

Q: Have you always had the tin foil? Or is that a new development?
A: My co-workers thought I needed to work on my tan.

Q: What brand of tin foil do you favor?
A: Any cheap house brand variety.

Q: Will you always have tin foil? Or are you thinking of branching out to, say, wax paper or Saran Wrap?
A: Thumb tacks. The clear ones.

Q: Do you all have cubicles there, or do some of the big muckety-mucks have offices with doors?
A: We all have cubicles, even our CEO. But she gets to sit by the window and has an electric pencil sharpener.

Q: Do you like working in a cubicle?
A: Ask me after I lay out the thumb tacks.

Q: What kind of self-promoting statement would you like to make for readers of this site that might help you in your future career?
A: I sell recruitment ad space to media companies. Because we’re a niche site, and because unemployment is at its lowest in many years, niche job boards blow the Monsters out of the water. This is why you should advertise your editorial, marketing, sales, production, and design jobs with me.

Q: Now that you’ve won the Cubicle Contest, what are you going to do?
A: Foil my bedroom.

In recognition of her significant achievement, Nancy will be awarded a very large box of clear thumb tacks, as soon as she tells me what kind she actually likes.

By the way, if any of you out there have a cubicle that’s odd, entertaining, or otherwise worthy of note, please don’t hesitate to send in your pictures, either to me here or to my e-mail, stanleybing@aol.com.

I’ll be looking for them!

1. If Paris Hilton had been a short, fat, bald, male mogul with glasses too big for his head, would she be going through all this?

2. Why can’t Paris Hilton wear her blue contact lenses in prison? Why did one outlet, when reporting on that fact, offer the amusing headline, “Don’t It Make My Blue Eyes Brown”? Is that funny? Or just mean? Can we tell the difference anymore?

3. Why are people happy over the fact that Paris Hilton would be denied the use of her hair extensions in prison? Didn’t we all like her with her hair extensions? Do you want to be seen without your hair extensions?

4. Why did people at a recent awards show laugh and hoot at Paris Hilton, who was in attendance, when host Sarah Silverman made fun of her? Why did most people, including the media, express giggly satisfaction when the camera then focused on her impassive face, trembling on the verge of tears? Would we all have been even more pleased if she had run sobbing from the room then? Or was it better that we had to wait a couple more days for that?

5. Does anybody really doubt that Paris Hilton is on some kind of medication that helps her maintain the weird, Mona Lisa smile that has become her trademark? Are people aware of what it’s like to stop medication like that cold turkey?

6. Does anybody really doubt that, when freed by the Sheriff and confined to her home, Paris Hilton truly believed, for some reason, that she would be permitted to attend the hearing by telephone? Was it really necessary to send policemen to drag her out into the sunlight, throw her in a vehicle and drag her down to the court with hundreds of vicious paparazzi, helicopters, etc., in attendance? Why were there so many photographers there? How did they know to be there at exactly the right time? Or are they just there ALL the time?

7. What’s with this judge? Doesn’t he seem like he’s on a jihad of some kind? If you were in trouble, would you want to be confronted with somebody so implacable, cruel, jealous of his power, obviously emotional, who appears to take your situation very personally and is determined to see you punished to the full extent of the law? If you or one of your friends screw up, do you want to be punished to the full extent of the law? Is anybody in this whole society, come to think of it, punished to the full extent of the law? Why is everybody so pleased with this guy?

8. And why is everybody so mad at the Sheriff who got Paris Hilton temporarily sprung? Because he’s standing in the way of justice? Or because, in treating Paris Hilton like a young, sick celebrity in need of certain kinds of help, he’s being, like, a total party pooper?

9. Is this really about equal treatment under the law? Or is it possibly about some kind of ritual punishment? For what?

10. Aren’t we all having way too much fun with this? And why?

Okay, now Apple (AAPL) has announced the launch date of its newest gizmotic marvel, the iPhone. As always with anything new, there are those who intend to embrace the little thing immediately, and those who sit at the feet of the grand idea and yell imprecations up at it. I guess it will all come out in the wash on June 29, when we go to the store and find out that the thing is already sold out, that we have to wait to get it for a month or three. Then and only then, when we can’t have it, we will truly see how much we really want it.

I remember, not too long ago, when Sony (SNE) introduced Playstation 3. The day before the launch, I was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York and saw a long line of what appeared to be homeless people, raggy and baggy and smelling of rain, huddled around the block under umbrellas, tents, makeshift lean-to’s. Turns out it wasn’t a food line, or a collection of undocumented aliens applying for amnesty. It was just folks waiting for Sony on Madison Avenue to open the next day, and the chance that they might be one of the lucky ones, the first on their block to embrace the soul of the new machine.

Two young friends of mine waited in that orderly mob for an entire day back then. The store opened, and they began the slow, snaky trudge up to the front, where the glistening object awaited. As they got near the door, a big black limo with Jersey plates rolled up to the curb. A functionary in a black suit, white shirt, big flashy cufflinks got out, as a shadowy Don waited in the darkness of the long back seat. “I’ll give you each two grand for your place in line,” said the natty foot soldier. They took the money.

Now you can get a Playstation 3 in any Best Buy (BBY). And I don’t want one. I mean, I want it a little. The kind of way you want a new car sometime in the future, when the need and the mood strike. But have to have it? No.

This brings us back to the iPhone. There’s a launch date. I’ve seen an ad and boy, it looks so cool. You turn it on its side and the screen orientation changes automatically. You touch it and it does all kinds of neat stuff. Web. Photos. And in the end? It’s a phone. I could use a new phone. I’ve wanted one for a while. But how much do I really and truly WANT?

Not enough yet. There are some negatives I’m aware of. The phone is tied to one carrier and it’s not mine. I’m loyal to my carrier. I’ve read some nasty spoilsports who say it’s a better everything-else-machine than it is an actual, you know, phone. That depressed me. I don’t like it when people harsh my growing glow.

But it’s early. There are several weeks. If Apple plays its marketing plan right, if the frequency and reach of its advertising is perfect, if I receive enough positive impressions and adequate word of mouth… who knows?

I will know it when it starts. It will move from mild interest to a slow, nagging burn that lodges itself in my gizzard and never departs. After a time, it will be the first or second thing I think about when I get out of bed in the morning. When I see an ad or hear about it, I will feel something missing in myself, a hole that, unlike other gaps in my karma, can be filled with a simple purchase. I will start being stimulated by pictures of the thing. So shiny. So sweet. Ooh. And then, as we get close to June 29th, I will begin to work out strategies for getting the obscure object of my desire. I will pull strings. I will call friends at Apple. If I don’t have any friends at Apple, I will attempt to make some very quickly. My mind will plot and whirl and spin and not be satisfied until I get what I crave.

I hope things work out that way. I love to want things. And to get the things I want when I want them. That’s important, too. If my engine of desire does manage to lock in, strong and hot, at some point between now and June 29, I truly do hope that I manage to acquire my gizmo right then, on that date, or sometime very shortly thereafter.

There’s something about seeing your true love on mass display in a store window, easily accessible to all, that takes the tang out of the act of possession, don’t you think?

I want to take a second to thank all of you who have posted comments on this site since it started about a month or so ago. I’m really enjoying the lusty, somewhat ill-tempered (why is the online space so GROUCHY?) back-and-forth that’s going on about the whole question of what is bulls**t and what is not, about what jobs qualify as bulls**t jobs, and of course how many of you are now writing in to tell about your bosses. Both blogs — Crazy Bosses and Bulls**t Jobs — are growing every day, jam packed with the kind of stuff that you can’t make up because it’s too grotesque, amazing and, in a demented way, uplifting.

I read your postings. Now and then, I’ll continue to pull one or two out and just run them because they’re so good. In the months to come, there’ll be other new stuff to look at, too. But before the day gets away from us I thought I’d just say keep it coming. Unless you’re a really big senior manager, there’s nothing more boring than a one-way conversation.

Yesterday Scooter Libby was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for his role in the Valerie Plame scandal. Essentially, the court system seems to have found that in spite of Libby’s long record as an attorney, in spite of his key position in the corporate infrastructure of the White House, in spite of the long list of names implicated in the leak of Plame’s name to one of the Administration’s favorite running dogs in the media, it is, in the end, the middle manager who gets the short end of the stick.

Once again, as I have in the past, I am not alleging any impropriety by anybody who might see such allegation as a legal matter that needs adjudication. I have no inside knowledge of the situation. I’m sure the Courts are right, and only Mr. Libby deserves to be locked up for this breach of national security. Those who have read a lot about the situation, and studied it carefully, might not concur, but me? I’m a big fan of the system. Always have been. Glad it worked out for the best, as always.

Still, those of us who take orders for a living have to feel a little bit anxious. I don’t know if anybody has made this observation yet, but in my view, strictly as a faceless bureaucrat who sees himself as a cog in a well-functioning organizational machine, the chance of me going out on a limb and initiating an action on my own like the one Mr. Libby is going to jail for… is nil.

Let me put that another way. People like me, who work inside a reporting structure that we understand and respect, who defer to much more public and powerful figures, may think for ourselves, but we never act for ourselves. We confer. We listen. Hard. And in the end, we execute the decisions that are extruded from the collective will and mind of the group and its leaders.

So excuse us if the incarceration of a functionary makes us a little trembly. We like to think that when we take a scary action in the name of our corporation, we will be protected in some way from the wrath that might follow. As any student of government, businesses or Shakespeare might tell you, however, loyalty flows only one way in the big game.

Up.

John Markoff in today’s NY Times relates how Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) are getting together to make sure that the next time they both introduce operating systems they are “relevant in an increasingly Web-centered world.”

I find this vaguely threatening. Not the part about the two behemoths dancing, I’m way over that. Anybody who worries about consolidation at this point is missing the boat. Every industry – advertising, media, transportation, music, fast food - is agglutinizing, finding operating synergies and economies of scale and blah de blah blah and so forth. Those who do not work on this sized canvas must now swallow their own tongues and die.

No, I’m more concerned about another trend that I’d like to stop right now. I hasten to add that I’ve been incredibly unsuccessful in the past about this. Back in the late 1980s, I tried to stop the fax machine, which I felt would destroy procrastination as we then knew it. And so it did. Later, I foresaw the danger of ubiquitous accessibility represented by e-mail, cell phones and, of course, the BlackBerry. All in vain. The earth turns. Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. Man gotta be reachable on the beach in Costa Alegre.

But now what they’re talking about is taking all our operating systems, all our applications and all our data and putting it up on some motherlode hard drive somewhere. Our tools and work product will then be wirelessly downloaded to us from Mother wherever we are. No more Windows. No more OS X. Just little mini-applications that do what we want to do. No more big hard drives on our desktops and laptops. All storage can be done with Mother. No more iPods, because all existing music will be located somewhere in Mother’s capacious bosom and streamed to us from the nipple of the Web.

As Mr. Horse used to say in Ren and Stimpy, “No sir. I don’t like it.”

I like Word. It’s a good program. It’s been nice to me. It’s got a lot of functions, a lot of fonts and I’m as loyal to it as I am to American automobiles.

I like Photoshop. In fact, I like all those big, fat, monolithic digital photography programs that help me edit my pictures. I also like to save my pix in really big files, so they print well. Mother hates really big files. She wants things neat and transmittable over the ether. Not everything should be itty-bitty and easily downloadable!

I don’t want my storage to be elsewhere. I want it here, in my home, and no place else. Last time I looked, part of being a grown-up is not having to ask Mommy every time I want a byte. Empowerment! That’s the ticket.

And you know what? I like OS X, whether it’s Tiger, or Leopard, or Budgerigar. It’s a calm, unified place to go, where everything works as it’s supposed to and nothing ever crashes in my face. I don’t want a collection of convenient little mini-bots. In fact, if I never see another bot it will be too soon for me.

I am me. I am I. I am not going to go quietly into the vast, seductive digital collective mindspace that awaits. How about you?

Yo, Captain Chenowith of American Airlines. I’m not sure I’m spelling your name right, but here’s to you, Bud. All of us who sat on the ground at Kennedy Airport in NY with you last night for four hours send you a big Whazzup. We like you. We wanted to tell you that because so far all of the communication between you and us has been one way, you to us. This note is to set that right. So here it is:

We know it wasn’t your fault that five seconds after we pulled away from the gate the Port Authority of New York shut down half the runways at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark for reasons supposedly having to do with weather. If there was some kind of weather, we sure didn’t see it. It was a lovely afternoon and then, after a while, night. But anyhow. You told us what was going on. You asked for our understanding and patience. Usually, when people thank me for my patience I find I immediately don’t have any. But somehow, you really seemed to be asking, so I felt, hey, I’ll live up to Captain Chenowith’s standard. I’ll be calm. I’ll sound like Chuck Yeager. I’ll be cool.

Day morphed into night. The hours went by. Every twenty minutes or so, you told us what was going on. My favorite part was when you admitted that if you asked the control tower for another estimate of departure time, they would get huffy on you and move us to the back of the line. We always knew those flight controllers were like that.

We also liked it when you expressed some slight annoyance, albeit tinged with realism and resignation, that all the international flights were getting off the ground while we were sitting and festering. That didn’t seem fair to us either.

The hours passed like minutes at first, and then like hours, and then like days, and still we sat, and every twenty minutes or so there you were, telling us what was up, not a voice of apology or cold authority either, but a fellow sufferer who wanted to kiss the sky as much as we did.

And then, as the moon rose high over the tarmac, you came on and told us what we suspected might be true… that the Company has a new policy (presumably born in the forge of the Jet Blue debacle) that no group of passengers may be imprisoned in a metal tube for more than four hours. “This is not our decision,” you said, “and it’s not one I necessarily agree with, but there it is.” At that moment, I saw you in my minds eye in your comfy cockpit, yearning to take a hard left, hit the runway and get airborne. But you play by the rules, and so we did too.

As always, it took a dog’s age for the staff at Kennedy to figure out how to get people off the plane, but eventually they did find us a gate. And before we left we heard from you one more time, asking us not to take out our frustration and resentment on the gate staff who would be there to help us. Personally, I was thinking of yelling at somebody in a uniform first chance I got. You pulled me down off that ledge.

There are a lot of people who do their jobs by the book. Many do the technical side and think that’s all they need to do — surgeons come to mind. But dealing with people is often an important part of what we do. And it’s nice to see somebody who does it so well.

Fly safe, Captain. As we wait on the tarmac this morning, rebooked, ready to at last head to our common destination, we say thanks!

We who are about to fly, salute you!