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,