As we enter into this Labor Day Weekend, with so many of us hitting the skies to enjoy this last little lick from the ice cream cone of summer, I thought it would be timely and appropriate to offer what seems to me to be an achievable, realistic draft of a document that has been much discussed by lawmakers and other philosophers: A Traveler’s Bill of Rights:

1. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do while imprisoned within the air travel system can and will be completely ineffective.
2. You have the right to get to the airport very early, only to find that your trip has been cancelled.
3. You have the right to accept the excuse for that cancellation or not, whatever.
4. You have the right to wonder why the airport has been under construction since you were a baby with no visible progress in sight.
5. If you fly for more than 1,000,000 miles per year, you have a right to a special person whose job it is to apologize to you for that fact that nothing can be done.
6. You have the right to remain in the airport for as long as is necessary for the airline to determine what they’re going to do with you.
7. You have the right to leave the airport if you want to, but once you do the airline has the right to cancel your reservation altogether.
8. Come to think of it, you have the right to consider your reservation absolutely conditional on certain criteria that will remain unclear to you.
9. All travelers will have access to a space on the floor of any airport in which they are interned.
10. You have the right to eat any food that you can find, except when you are sequestered overnight, in which case you have the right to eat any food you may have brought with you, or that you can either scrounge or steal from fellow passengers who are older, weaker or more infirm that you.
11. Once on the airplane, all passengers may sit quietly in their seats for an unspecified amount of time without water, food or air, except in First Class.
12. All passengers will have the right to sleep during long periods of inactivity on the tarmac, except in cases where the crew on the flight deck continually makes announcements that convey very little information in order to expunge their own anxiety and guilt.
13. While waiting for your plane to take off, you have the right to wonder whether it’s going to take so long that they will eventually drive you back to the gate and dump you back in the terminal.
14. While waiting to deplane after not taking off for unspecified reasons, you have the right to wonder why there is no gangway crew to let you off for 90 minutes.
15. You have the right to feel no patience whatsoever when you are thanked for said patience during the 14th announcement before takeoff.
16. During any flight that actually leaves the ground, you have the right to wonder how flight attendants can stand it.
17. You have the right to wonder where the occasional empty seat beside you went, and to remember what that was like, and speculate that the incessant cancellations of flights are designed to ensure that there are no such seats in the future.
18. You have a right to a clean restroom for the first 30 minutes of any flight.
19. You have the right to a turkey wrap.
20. You have the right to stay home.

 There may be more. I invite you to suggest your own. Have a happy Labor Day, everybody.

Everyday you hear about new ailments or new diagnoses of old conditions. Recently, for instance, I became aware that an entire group of business executives I know, including myself, were not actually just vague, ill-tempered, incapable of holding a thought for more than five minutes, obsessed with unimportant details, incapable of focusing on incoming stiumuli. Of course, we are all those things, but it’s not because we’re jerks. It’s because we have a combination of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder brought on post Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I certainly have the latter. Like, if you sneak up behind me and say, “Hi,” I will jump a mile in the air and come down swinging.

The only long-term cure for our common complaint seems to be $10 million and a condo in Maui. At this point, I’m sorry to say, that course of treatment seems unlikely for me. So I’ll just have to limp along with the rest of my fellow sufferers in senior management, applying martinis, expensive food and wine and the occasional trip to Cabo or Vegas as a pit stop on the way to health or death, whichever comes first.

The problem with any treatment for a newly-diagosed condition, or an old one, for that matter, is that any medicine at all comes with side effects. The side effects of daily application of martinis, for example, are well known. Expensive food and wine, too, eventually take their toll, as any cardiologist or tailor will tell you. And trips to Cabo and Vegas, while effective, often benefit the true sufferer for about as long as it takes the first crazy phone to ring. 

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been fascinated by the side effects of all the new stuff that marketers want us to put into our bodies.  A few years ago they offered us potato chips with Olestra.  It turned out that Olestra, while having many benefits (including possibly helping to rid the body of dioxin, Mr. Yuschenko) also produced a condition that was featured on perhaps the most famous warning label in history.

I’m not going to say what it was in full, not here, but let’s just say it involved the word “leakage.” This term was featured not only on the package — along with the body part involved — but also, as I recall, in the final murmurs of a television commercial or two, although that may just be in my imagination. Suffice it to say that every party where Olestra potato chips were found was sure to feature people reading its package out loud. This eventually must have affected sales, I’m sure.

There are some side-effects, in short, that make the product terminally unappealing no matter how positive its other aspects may be. Other side effects, on the other hand, are more ambiguous.

This brings me to my favorite television commercials right now. They appeal to people who suffer from what sounds like a very serious and annoying neurological condition called Restless Leg Syndrome. There are a number of new products on the market to treat RLS, and I’m sure they are a godsend to many who have suffered from the interrupted sleep, painful twitching, etc., that attends this ailment, for which there seems to be no cure. While I have many annoying things wrong with me, as I’m sure you do too, RLS is not yet one of them, and I’m thankful for that, and my heart goes out to those people.

Anyhow, whether it’s the station I watch or the time of night at which I’m watching, there seem to be a lot of commercials for people with RLS. The other night, while I was kind of doing something else, and one of these marketing messages was being beamed at the back of my head for the 25th time in a couple of hours (this being cable television), I heard the words, “gambling, sexual or other uncontrollable urges” and then a welter of other warning babble. Hm, I thought. Perhaps I heard wrong.

So I sat down and watched the next three minutes of programming that a cable network gives you between commercials and then up came the next pod and sure enough, it had the same spots as the pod before, as they do, and here came another one for people with RLS. I’m not quoting it exactly, but what I remember went something like, “users should inform their doctor if they feel the urge to gamble, sexual or other uncontrollable urges” while taking the drug. Hey, I thought to myself. Sounds like Vegas.

This morning I went to the web page of one of these medicines, and found this:

There have been reports of patients taking certain medications to treat Parkinson’s disease or RLS… that have reported problems with gambling, compulsive eating, and increased sex drive. It is not possible to reliably estimate how often these behaviors occur to determine which factors may contribute to them. If you or your family members notice that you are developing unusual behaviors, talk to your doctor.

I don’t know what to conclude from all this. It’s just kind of evocative, that’s all. I imagine a perfectly nice person with Restless Legs Syndrome finally finding relief. After a week or so, this quiet, twitchy person suddenly has turned into a gambling, voracious sex machine. He or she goes to the doctor. The doctor says, “You have to give up the drug and stop being a gambling, voracious sex machine and go back to being a twitchy, uncomfortable person who can’t sleep.”

What would you do? And how long do you think it will take them to isolate what’s wrong with the RLS medicine and turn it into something really marketable?

Here is our Quote of the Day, which I will henceforth be offering not every day, mind you, but every day I feel that I come across a quote worthy to be the Quote of the Day.

This Quote of the Day comes from Lorraine from Salt Lake City, Utah, who commented on my inclusion of Business Analyst in our growing collection of bulls**t jobs. This one was offered by a reader in Pennsylvania based, presumably, on his experience with members of that profession. “The Business Analyst is the facilitator of time consuming numbness,” wrote our reader. “As simple as a monkey opening a banana.”

Lorraine took issue with that, and offered our Quote of the Day, “If you don’t need a banana to be peeled, then don’t hire the monkey.”

Thanks, Lorraine, for a truly great observation. Like all terrific zingers like this one, I’m not quite sure what it means, but I plan to offer it in meetings. Like, when somebody has a problem with something I’m doing, or some strategy I’m suggesting, or anything that’s been done by one of my people, I’m going to lean back in my chair, look at them with quizzical interest, and say, “If you don’t need a banana to be peeled, then don’t hire the monkey.” I’m interested in what kind of response that will bring, but I have a feeling it’s going to stop whoever is in my face stone cold.

You try it. Tell me how it plays.

And thanks, Lorraine from Salt Lake City, for offering our Quote of the Day, you win… my eternal gratitude! That’s gotta be worth something!

… to explore a very useful and entertaining website that just happens to feature a bunch of stuff about me, myself and I on its front page today. It’s called Total Picture Radio, and it’s hosted, moderated, blogged and otherwise wrested into energetic life by Peter Clayton, who I enjoyed speaking with very much. You can hear my interview with Peter about crazy boss phenomenon now sweeping the nation, and then, if you choose, peruse the site itself, which features a lot of stuff that’s really about, you know, business and all. In that regard, I’m showing a box of Twinkies here because I thought I might catch your eye with something tasty. That’s marketing for ya, right?

For about a month I’ve been planning to go to London for one day. That’s right. One day. The plan was to fly yesterday, at the end of the day, this for two reasons: 1) the way things are going it’s madness to be out of the office for very long and 2) people fly to Europe in the evening so they can hit the ground in a state of complete dementia, pretend it is daytime in their minds, work like beavers until they are seeing little pink wazirs everywhere, drink and eat like crazy people at what is actually the early part of the day back home, go to sleep in what should be the afternoon, wake in what feels like the dead of night, go to the airport and fly home in time to still log in a couple of hours at the office. Fun, huh? Welcome to Businessland.

At any rate, I was really looking forward to my crazy day. We have several cool operations there and I was really anticipating a good time talking to those folks, seeing what they do, discussing how we at Corporate might be able to help them, and eating prawns. For the record, I don’t much like prawns, but it seems to me that whenever I have been over there people are constantly eating them. Prawns with eggs in the morning. Prawns on crustless bread and butter at noon. Curried prawns with dinner. A couple of prawns before bedtime. Like that.

Anyhow, the day of our trip dawned bright and early as all days do right now, with a peek at the BlackBerry — which is better than a bucket of cold water over the head, believe me — a nice long shower and off to work. Work work work. Lunch at the desk. Back to work. Paper. Phones. More paper. More phones. A couple of face-to-face chinfests. Back to the phones. Yak yak. Buzz buzz. The usual sack of nuts and bolts.

And then? Before I ever knew where the time went, it was 3:30 and time for the Town Car to take me and my associate, whom I will call Young McTavish, to the airport. “Let’s see,” says Young McTavish as we grab our bags and saddle up. “I want to make sure I have my passport in easy reach.”

Then it all went dark. A gooey, swirling sensation took away my sight, my balance. My face grew hot and flushed. My legs felt like strips of undercooked calamari.

“Your… passport,” I choked out. And in my mind bloomed a very clear picture of my passport, safely tucked into a drawer in my night table… in California. I, of course, was in New York.

And that is why I am now writing this to you from my desk back home, at lunchtime. In London, where it is coming on evening, I imagine all the folks that had set up a strenuous day for me and Young McTavish are breathing a long sigh of relief and saying to themselves, “Well, that Bing. What a wanker. But it sure made for a more relaxing day!”

I wish I could tell you that I had forgotten my passport, but that would not be true. Never in my mind did it every occur to me to think about a passport. I’m a business person. I fly all the time. I come and go as I please. Sometimes I fly on the corporate jet, where you don’t even have to go through security nonsense. There develops, over time, a sense of entitlement that deludes you into believing, in a way, that you sort of float above the rest of world. Passport? Hm?

In addition, there’s the fact that we’re always everywhere. In the last month I’ve been in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Hawaii, some other places, too, and I didn’t need anything but a driver’s license for any of those. The fact is, I never really know where I am, or what time zone I’m in, or what day it is, really. I go places. I work. I try to goof off as much as possible. I live on two coasts, with stuff both here and there. So… London? Why not London? It’s not another country! It’s business, right?

And finally, there’s the fact that after a couple of decades doing whatever this is for a living, I am very slowly and inexorably losing my mind. It’s partly stress – the effects of five life-threatening crises a day for a dog’s age. It’s the constant travel and ubiquity of electronic intrusion, too. There are no weekends anymore. No nights. No summer, really.

And so, on the Wednesday before Labor Day, in the city of New York, I am where I was not supposed to be, and have one whole day with no meetings, no lunches, nothing on my calendar at all.

I’m bored!

What do Business Analyst, Strategic Planning Consultant, Chiropractor and Environmental Impact Researcher have in common? You know it! They’re all bulls**t jobs, according to our newest correspondents on the subject.

Go to http://bingjobs.blogs.fortune.com and take a look. Like I said, I’ll be updating that blog with all your tasty bulls**t jobs in the coming weeks, and hopefully you’ll continue to lob in more until the pile is as big and yeasty as all outdoors!

Saparmurat Niyazov 1940 — 2006
President for Life of Turkmenistan

From Wikipedia::

“Niyazov ruled as an authoritarian leader, notorious in the Western world for the cult of personality he established around himself in Turkmenistan… He renamed the town of Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian Sea, Türkmenbaşy, in addition to renaming several schools, airports and even a meteorite after himself and his immediate family… Erika Dailey, a specialist for the Open Society Institute, said the education system under Niyazov indoctrinated and brainwashed young Turkmen through the Ruhnama, a national epic written by Niyazov… Niyazov first placed copies in the nation’s schools and libraries but eventually went as far as to make an exam on its teachings an element of the driving test.

Presidential decrees

As President-for-Life of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov issued many controversial and unusual decrees:

* In April 2001, ballet and opera were banned after Niyazov felt they were “unnecessary … not a part of Turkmen culture”.[15]
* In 2004 it was forbidden for young men to grow long hair or beards.[15]
* In March 2004, 15,000 public health workers were dismissed including nurses, midwives, school health visitors and orderlies and replaced with military conscripts.[16]
* In April 2004 the youth of Turkmenistan were encouraged to chew on bones to preserve their teeth rather than be fitted with gold tooth caps or gold teeth.[17]
* In April 2004 it was ordered that an ice palace be constructed near the capital.[18] (In December 2006 an article in the UK’s Sunday Times revealed the ‘ice palace’ to be an ornate ice skating rink.[19])
* In 2004 all licensed drivers were required to pass a morality test.[20]
* In 2004 it was prohibited for news readers to wear make-up[21]
* In February 2005 all hospitals outside Aşgabat were ordered shut, with the reasoning that the sick should come to the capital for treatment. All rural libraries were ordered closed as well, citing ordinary Turkmen do not read books.[22]
* In November 2005 physicians were ordered to swear an oath to the President, replacing the Hippocratic Oath.[23]
* In December 2005 video games were banned as being too violent for young Turkmen to play.
* In January 2006 one-third of the country’s elderly had their pensions discontinued, while another 200,000 had theirs reduced. Pensions received during the prior two years were ordered paid back to the state.[24] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan strongly denied allegations that the cut in pensions resulted in the deaths of many elderly Turkmen, accusing foreign media outlets of spreading “deliberately perverted” information on the issue.[25]
o (Note: On March 19, 2007 Turkmenistan’s new president Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow has reversed a decision of his predecessor by restoring pensions to more than 100,000 elderly citizens..[26])
* In September 2006 Turkmen teachers who failed to publish praise of the Turkmen leader would remain at a lower payscale or be sacked.[27]
* In October 2006 Turkmenistan claimed to have set free 10,056 prisoners, including 253 foreign nationals from 11 countries on the Night of Omnipotence. Niyazov said, “Let this humane act on the part of the state serve strengthening truly moral values of the Turkmen society. Let the entire world know that there has never been a place for evil and violence on the blessed Turkmen soil.”[28]
* The Turkmen words for bread and the month of April were changed to the name of his late mother, Gurbansoltanedzhe. [29]
* Car radios, lip-synching, and recorded music are all prohibited.[30]
* Video monitors are required in all public places.[30]
* Dogs are restricted from the capital city due to unappealing odour.[31]“

The world has marvelled, shuddered and died under the heel of impressive and in some cases entertaining dictators for millennia. This is the first in a series these very special chief executive officers.

A reader from Michigan writes…

Well, let’s begin with my Boss. She used to be this very Energetic Woman who loved life. A Very Caring, Loving, Hard Working Woman. Then… Boom!!!!! Her whole life, as she knew it was taken from her! You see, she had been married to this legend of a man who was swept away from her in one zap of a second in a horrible car accident. Well, it was so overwhelming to her, she never let herself really grieve. For the first year after the death, she drank. Didn’t become a drunk, just drank her thoughts away. The second year, she ran. Ran all over the Country. Maine. Connecticut, Florida, Cancun. She met all kinds of interesting people. She had many choices but was inclined to stay put in her safe little haven that she made for herself. Let me tell you this: She has lost her zest in life, she has become this non-existent person who contributes NOTHING to this World! She’s become listless, maybe even a little lazy, although that she wouldn’t like to hear that. I believe if someone would give her an assignment, some work (she loves to work), that she couldn’t refuse and it would bring her back to life.

Now Stanleybing, I want you to know that I got up immediately after reading your article in Fortune Magazine, (I was Basking in the sun, at my Pool), I got up and I sat down and wrote to you. Now write back to me.

P.S. This is a True Story. The woman I am talking about… is ME!!

I don’t know about you, but I’d hire this woman. She can hold a drink. She likes to read FORTUNE while sunning at the pool. She has endured a Grief, and come through. Enjoy these and other stories at http://bingbosses.blogs.fortune.com. You’ll be glad you did.

You’re not going to believe this. One of my loyal readers, Ken from New Jersey, pointed out not long ago that the last posting on my Crazy Bosses blog was on May 30. Wow, I thought. That’s weird. Where did all your stories go? Did all your bosses suddenly turn sane? Did you stop caring about the issue?

So I looked at the blog, which may be found, given the somewhat complex and inscrutible architecture of this site, at http://bingbosses.blogs.fortune.com. Sure enough, a layer or two down from all the other interesting material on the subject, the last of your postings was dated May 30. And the one before it, too. And the one before that. And the one before that. Hmm, I thought. That’s odd.

I scrolled down and it became clear to me that basically what happened is that ALL of your stories were set down in that blog, which given the somewhat idiosyncratic and abstruse architecture of this site, had last been updated on May 30th. Then we all moved on to other things, of which there are, of course, many.

Then I figured what the hey, and took a look at another vast and fascinating chronicle, the site dedicated to your Bulls**t Jobs, which, given the subtle and rather delicate organization of this site, may be found amid a welter of other interesting stuff on the subject, at http://bingjobs.blogs.fortune.com. And guess what. The last posting on THAT blog was made in early May. Early May!

So I talked to my editor at The Bing Blog and asked her what could have happened to, like three months of your thoughts, replies, insults and tales of management horror and bulls**t? And she looked and, to make a moderately long story short, thanks to her, and to the fact that nothing really ever dies once it is sequestered on a server, we found them.

Think of Indiana Jones stumbling on a vast chasm filled with treasure. He wasn’t any happier than I was.

Here’s where we stand. I have one huge file full of the stuff you’ve written about your crazy bosses to me, and another, almost as long, where you tell me all about your various bulls**t jobs. I mean, they’re huge. And I love them very much.

I don’t know if you know a lot about my situation, or care, actually, but what the deal is is that I actually have a real, 8 to 6 job that demands some attention, and I also do this and some other stuff as well. My editors at The Bing Blog are pretty much in the same position. Like they also have real business writers to attend to, and breaking news beyond, say, what your boss may expect of you or what happened the last time you were screwed over by your airline. This is just to say that they’re, you know, busy. And unlike me, they don’t always think about me.

Which brings us to me. In the evening, for instance, when my day’s “real” work is supposedly done, I need sufficient time to drink and, of course, eat, and then usually drink again. Occasionally, I see people, some of whom are even friends that will outlive my business career. This, too, eats up valuable time that could be spent loading up my two beloved blogs with your input.

So it’s going to take me a while is what I’m saying. I’ll do them a bit at a time, and post them as I go. Sure there are a lot of them. But as God is my witness it’s not going to lick me. I’m going to go through every page and every posting and when it’s all over, you’ll never go unpublished again. No, nor any of your folk. If I have to delegate a portion of it to somebody else and even pay them — as God is my witness, you’ll never go unpublished again!