A few years ago, (well, to be truthful quite a few years ago), I was a young and bushy-headed fellow in a $150 suit, new to corporate life and amazed at its intricacies and freebees. About three or four weeks after I joined Planet Mambo, the holiday season descended on us and the cycle of parties celebrating the end of the year began.

The first of these took place at the old Park Sheraton Hotel on 55th and 7th Avenue in Manhattan. It was a place with a lot of history. The Jackie Gleason show, The Honeymooners, was filmed there, for instance, and I believe Albert Anastasia, one of the key players in Murder Inc., was killed in a barber’s chair there in the late 1950s. By the time my old corporation (which is now as dead as both Anastasia and Murder Inc.) had its party there, the place had gone somewhat to seed. But the ballroom downstairs was pretty and lit for maximum warmth, and there were plenty of noisy people and — a  new concept to me — free scotch.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to think for a minute, particularly those of you who have suckled at the plastic corporate mammary for a while, the effect on a young man of all that free booze. It was Johnny Walker Red I favored back then. It was long before the days of snooty, peaty single-malt snobbykins. Red was fine with me. And here there were, bottles and bottles of it, and all of it… free! Free! I seized a tumbler and told the bartender to fill it up. Then I did it again. Around that time, platters of little fried things began making the rounds. I inhaled a bunch of those, too.

An hour into the bash, I have to relate, I believe I was as happy as I have ever been in my life. What a world! Free stuff everywhere! Drunken friends at every turn — for were these not my friends? Ah, how I loved them, each and every one, these smiling, yelling, sweating folks I had known for lo these many weeks. My buds! My pals!

Somewhere in there, I spotted the EVP of Marketing, whom I liked a lot and was only 12 levels above me on the food chain (as was just about everybody there but the guy who delivered the mail), talking in a dignified fashion to somebody in a gray suit.

“Burt!” I said, tearing across the room and throwing a friendly arm around his shoulder. “How’s it goin’, man? Isn’t this a great friggin’ party?”

“Stan,” said Burt, looking at me with a mixture of pity and fondness that I will never forget. “This is Al Potrazibi, the Chief Financial Officer from corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh.”

“Hi, Al!” I yelled in his face. “How’s it goin’?”

“Fine,” said the cadaver standing before me. There then ensued a cold, weird silence that I now recognize as the sound of a career thumping to a halt as a gigantic mental filing cabinet is receiving a terminal entry.

“Well!” I said, drooling only slightly onto my shirtfront. “See you guys!”

I remember this incident now because 1) I survived it and 2) there was no reason I should have. The thing that saved me, in the end, was 1) Burt was a really good guy who had been known, in other venues, to tear off  his own chunk of fun now and then and 2) our corporation was divested not long after and the death-eaters from Pittsburgh lost sway.

This, of course, is only one of the many times I have disgraced myself in the line of duty at this time of year. I am not the only one. I have seen lawyers dancing with their ties around their heads. I have seen two accountants punching each other like enraged girls over their respective interpretations of some arcane aspect of GAAP. I have heard the head of ethics compliance going at it with his assistant in an empty office right next to the Boardroom. They were married, of course, although not to each other.

My point here is that in virtually each and every case, none of these people was helped by making a jerk out of themselves at the holiday party. People remember. A successful career is an act of self-mythology. You create a persona for Business. You groom and care for it over the years. They put you in a suit or outfit of some standardized kind to help make it easier on you. And then the holiday time comes and you blow it all up by showing your true self under the influence of a variety of uncontrolled substances. Take care. Beware. There will be free scotch, if you play things right, for a long, long time.

I will leave you with Bing’s Law on this subject: Always remain one drink behind.

Beyond that? Do not get naked. Do not put anything on your head. Do not fall down or throw up. Keep in mind that the party is not a break from business; it is, in fact, some of the most important business that you will do all year, not because you have an agenda at it, because that’s just plain dorky, but because it is in places where people get the right to appear informal that some of the nicest and most enduring relationships can be forged.

That long ago night, by the way? I ended up back at home on the floor of the bathroom, calling Ralph on the big white phone. Haven’t done that in a great long while, you know? And I’ll tell you what. I don’t miss it.

My prior post referred to an object of my desire — what I referred to as a “towering G5″. I had no idea when I mentioned this thing that a tsunami of you guys would leap on me the way a pack of dogs attack a wounded chipmunk, instructing me with great condescension that Mac stopped making those years ago.

Big deal. I work in a giant corporation and my entire floor is packed with G5s, and they rock. I understand that Mac now makes Mac Pros that are packed with Intel power. Here’s what they look like. They come in a big tower and I want one. It would go nicely with the Macbook Pro 12″ and 17″ laptops, the Mac Mini, the iMac and the Apple-TV that are sitting at home waiting for me right now. I say this to quiet the ill-tempered, swaggeringly pompous Macophiles who continually accuse me of not being sufficiently Mac when I occasionally poke a little hole the the slightly wormy side of the AAPL.

Sorry I got the model number wrong, or the processor designation incorrect, or the format of the digital copranshy defibrilated. No matter what you say, my point stands tall: I’m not getting an iPhone until I can use it on the network of my choice! And I DO like every single XBox I’ve played on! And that doesn’t mean I don’t want to get a Wii at some point, either. My old Super Nintendo was the best gaming system ever, maybe, except for… now get this… my old Windows PC! Yeah! I liked playing on that, too! It was WAY better than any Mac I’ve ever played on, okay? Even the G5s at my office!

Thanks for listening. Oh, and you guys who occasionally send me comments wasting your time to tell me what a waste of time reading my blog is? Bring it on! You can waste my time telling me that I’m wasting your time anytime.

Yesterday I had the temerity to take a short and somewhat gentle poke at Apple (AAPL), noting that their exclusivity to one particular network made it impossible for me to acquire the apple of the collective I — the iPhone.

A teeny-weeny storm ensued.

What happened is what usually happens around here. First the angry Apple (AAPL) fans come in, calling me names and contending that I know nothing about Marketing. Of course I know nothing about Marketing. After 25 years in business, it’s my contention that Marketing is like Economics. Everybody knows a lot about it and nobody knows anything about it. In the end, we are all equally intelligent and stupid on the subject.

For proof on this, I will point to the most superbly marketed item on the planet, the iPhone, which Apple (AAPL) rolled out with extraordinary perfection, except for the fact that it was priced wrong. So much for expertise in this area.

After the waves of invective hit me, a big number of you waded in to defend my honor and, not coincidentally, pile onto Apple (AAPL) a little bit. Some of you reminded cranky commentors that this is a site that, in between rants about one current indignity or another, indulges in satire now and then. Others forgave my ignorance and then launched into extensive technical discussions on the nature of cellular transmission and delivery. Those were very interesting. Thank you.

It is clear, as one constant reader noted, that all you have to do is talk about Apple (AAPL) to get your blog read. This is because people care intensely about Apple (AAPL). They love their Macs. They despise/love the CEO. They identify with the company as a scrappy David going up against the Phillistine Gates. They hate its critics. They defend its battlements. Others feel the exact opposite. And nobody has no opinion. Good for you, Apple (AAPL)! Passion sells. And we’re buying.

This holiday season, I have no doubt that all the Apple (AAPL) worshippers will be lining up to acquire. iMacs. Macbooks. Towering G5s. Flat screen monitors that irradiate your brain. All of them produced by the genius mind of one great corporation.

On the night before XMas, however, I won’t be home abed. I’ll be sneaking out to the nearest big box electronics store to pick up something else that starts with an X. It’s called an XBox. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. It’s surfaced as the game platform of choice for just about anybody who loves to suffuse their cerebrum with electronic cheese. I think it should go very nicely next to my AppleTV. I’m keeping quiet about it here, of course, because I don’t believe it’s made by Apple (AAPL) at all, but by some other corporation entirely (MSFT).

Gee… I hope I haven’t enraged all you Wii-heads now (NTDOY.PK).  

The Founding Fathers — if one may use that somewhat sexist phrase in this enlightened, post-Enlightenment age — crafted ten amendments to the Constitution that together form our treasured Bill of Rights. It is clear, however, that the Founders never saw the need for a new perceived entitlement that is now firmly entrenched in the hearts and minds of our citizenry. This, then, is the new Right… call it 10A: The Right To Choose.

We used to sit down every night in front of the TV and choose one of three networks. Now we have hundreds, almost all of them superfluous. An improvement? Maybe. Last night I fell asleep in front of The Mold Network. Who knew watching lichen form on a log could be so interesting? One thing’s for sure, though. I was very excited to have the chance to choose it. Made me feel, you know… important.

Better still, I time-shifted the program with my new DVR. That meant not only that I could choose the program I wanted, but I could choose to watch it when I wanted to. Boy, that felt good, viewing that lichen forming on the log a full hour later than when it was originally scheduled. I like being able to choose the time as well, not just the content. I consider it my right, you know. As a consumer and an American.

I choose the music I play on my Ipod. I choose the videos I like on YouTube. I choose from six kinds of apples I buy in one of six supermarkets in my general neighborhood. I exercise my rights under Amendment 10A every chance I get. This makes me feel empowered. This makes me feel good as an American.

Up until now, however, I could choose my cellular network but I could not have complete freedom of choice about the cellphone I utilized to hop into it. Now all that has changed, and I can feel my heart beginning to burst into song. Or maybe it’s the second helping of bacon I had at breakfast. No! It’s song, definitely.

I’ll tell you the reason why. News comes in USA TODAY this morning that Verizon (VZ), the #2 cellphone network provider in the U.S., has decided to open the floodgates of history and allow people complete freedom of choice about the phones they may use as Verizon subscribers. Hurrah for you, Verizon. You have made the world our oyster, and removed one giant disincentive to be a part of the Verizon cosmos. If a phone doesn’t work on the Verizon network, it’s probably because that phone was designed to be exclusive to some other.

Which brings us to the fabulous, fantastic, must-have gizmo of the new century — Apple’s iPhone (AAPL), which only functions within the alternative universe of AT&T.  I have nothing against that network. I’m sure it’s a fine one, festooned with pretty green trees and blue skies. I just don’t belong to it. And so I can never have an iPhone. And this makes me sad. More than that! I makes me mad. As an American.

A company I love is denying me of my right under Amendment 10A of our Constitution to choose something. Come on, Apple! Let freedom ring! With the ringtone of my choice, that is!

I say “dudes,” dudes, because I have noticed that, far from fading away, the use of surfer lingo in middle-aged business executives is flourishing. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a guy in a $2000 pinstripe, $500 wing tips and one hair artfully arranged on his shiny head say, “Dude, awesome weekend.”

My favorite comment of the day comes from M. Smith of Colber, Georgia (unless she’s M. Smith Colber, of Georgia), who reminds us that, behind all the headlines, all the business manuals, all the economic analyses of this supposedly rational sub-strata of society, organizational life continues in its eternal dance of madness and complaint.  She writes:

Wow, are you sure you’re not in Georgia? My boss takes the cake on bullying. I have gone home crying so many times that it is pityful. My boss can take you into her office and make you feel like dirt and then come out smiling and telling everyone that you are the best thing ever. She is insane. She picks on people for stupid little things that don’t even matter. She is a principal and she has 3 spies or like I call them (pawns) that run around and get all the dirt they can on people and run back and tell her just to get things started. There noses are so brown they look chocolate covered. She would never believe anyone over them, even people who have worked there for 30 years. She has a new lil spy now who she is treating like gold for this year. Just wait till next year and she will be in the same boat as everyone else. I’m just glad I found the articles on corporate psychopaths and now I know how to deal with her.

I’d be interested to know how M. plans to “deal with her.” And I’m hoping that our ongoing discussion of Crazy Bosses, and the requisite purchase of my book on the subject, helps smooth her way.

Beyond that, I’ll just say so long for now. I’ve got a lot on tap today. A subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of ours has a product coming out of China that may have a few wrinkles to iron out. I can’t be more revealing than that, except to say that I have every confidence that our Chinese suppliers have operated with nothing but the most rigorous integrity in the matter.

Have a good day, dudes!

Visitors to the Fortune website today will be treated to the brand-spanking new look and feel of the premier business destination on the planet. It’s clean. It’s sharp. It’s as fast as approval on a low-cost ARM.

No, wait a minute. At this point, it’s faster. A lot of people worked long and hard behind the scenes to make this elegance and simplicity a reality. Think one of those James Bond movies where a huge team of people swarms an underground complex, each with a white jumpsuit and digital clipboard. It was sort of like that.

To kick off the launch of this beautiful new baby, I’ve answered a passel of questions from you guys which will be featured in the Ask Bing section for the next couple of days. Keep those queries coming, by the way. I love to hear about your problems. They perk me up when I’m low.

Finally for this rainy, crispy autumn day in New York, I’ll just say Welcome Back to whatever it is you do after the enforced four-day retreat into family life. It’s interesting how much worse Sunday night is than Monday morning. Right now, I’m at my desk, the mail is done. It’s halfway to lunchtime. What was I up at 3 AM about, chewing on the inside of my cheek?

Don’t you have that Sunday anxiety meltdown thing? And if not, tell me… why not? Like, how do you keep your mellow from being harshed on a daily/weekly basis? Without booze, I mean.

It’s 6:00 AM, and all the world’s asleep, except it’s not, of course. The American Airlines terminal is alive with bustling humanity headed to and fro. There are lines out front and lines at Security. The magazine stores are humming. The smell of coffee and greasy things frying nicely fills the air. We are headed out.

These days, people greet each other at this time of year with vague, unspecific salutations. “Happy Holiday,” seems to predominate from Halloween onwards. This is Thanksgiving, an event with an actual name, but the whole season seems to be mutating into one long festival of food and drink and somewhat enforced gaiety. “Happy Holidays,” says the attendant at the check-in counter. “Have a good Thanksgiving,” I reply. I don’t want this day to go the way of Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and turn into a President’s Day with no particular significance.

Today we set down our implements, whatever they may be, unplug our minds from the vast network that is our collective brain, and head off to plug back in to other places, places of the heart, if we are very lucky, or, if life has swept us elsewhere, to places where a certain kind of welcome may be offered.

I wish all of you the best. I hope you enjoy the people you are with, do not find cause to fight with Uncle Bob about his refusal to quit smoking in the house, or mom because she cheesed out on the turkey this year and served meatloaf, or your spouse because he or she had too much to eat or drink and slept the afternoon away, or the kids because they once again refused to be cordial at the table, or mom and dad because they’re the same as they ever was.

And my heart in particular goes out to those of you now reading this who are oppressed on this holiday, imprisoned in your offices and forced to work by management that was incapable of planning things so that its workers could take these precious four days off. It’s an old story. All of us in business have endured this gulag of bad timing. We see it coming through a long way off, as travelers to Siberia must have seen the frozen tundra up ahead and known it was their destination.

Three weeks out, somebody says, “Hey, we’re planning the launch of Project X for December 1.” And everybody looks at each other and thinks, “Well. There goes another long weekend.” In this way I have seen New Year’s Eves, Memorial Days, Labor Days and countless Thanksgivings and Christmases spoiled by the workaholic Scrooges who march to their own despotic timetables not of their own making.

Wherever you are, you who labor while we rest and feast, we take a moment to raise that that turkey leg in a silent salute of tribute.

Me, I plan to take the rest of this weekend off. I’m one of the lucky ones, and I appreciate it. I may even let my BlackBerry run down.

Safe travels, everybody. Even if you’re not going anywhere.

Word comes in today’s USA Today that Thanksgiving, once a non-religious holiday in the United States, has finally morphed into one in which we collectively worship at the central shrine in our culture: Wal-Mart (WMT).

That’s right, new studies of our consumer behavior show that as soon as the first round of turkey is tucked away, an increasing number of us are going online to shop at our favorite stores, and some of us are even leaving the couch for a while to get the Xmas season started early.

In recognition of this fact, stores are now moving their Black Friday promotions to Thanksgiving Thursday, so that people can get busy dumping their wallets into the collective maw of our mercantile establishment.

And so the time we must spend with our families, fruitlessly not working or shopping, once again shrinks to a size even more miniscule than it was before. Already many of our holidays have become excuses to buy new cars or bulk up on consumer goods offered for that day only at fabulous prices. Now Thanksgiving is wide open too!

Ka-Ching! Now… On To Christmas!

Over the weekend I was annoyed to get one of those idiot chain emails from somebody who has me on their list for some reason – a person I do not know, a status I intend to maintain. It’s bad enough when you get one of these things on your office email and can see immediately what’s going on. But when you’re reading a chain email on a Blackberry? You have to scroll down until your thumb gets tired, passing by long fields of addresses and then more addresses and still more Fw:s until you get to the core email, which turns out to be a stupid piece of nonsense like this one:

Dear Friends: Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates sharing his fortune. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (If you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.

Regards. Charles S Bailey General Manager
Field Operations,
1-800-842-2332 Ext.. 1085 or 904-1085 or RNX 292-1085

Thought this was a scam myself, But two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on. Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I received a check for $24,800.00. You need to respond before the beta testing is over. If anyone can afford this, Bill gates is the man. It’s all marketing expense to him. Please forward this to as many people as possible. You are bound to get at least $10, 000.00.

The email was a lot longer than this, and it clearly had the desired effect because before it got to me it was sent by bulk to no fewer than a hundred different dweebs in four separate forwardings. So now I have all THEIR email addresses and they have mine. Is that a good thing? I don’t think so.

I’m as interested in $245 from Microsoft (MSFT) as the next guy, of course, but it only took one Google (GOOG) to ascertain that this is an urban legend/scam that’s been around for ten years, maybe more, and always with the same exact text that made it around this past weekend. There was no article in USA Today. Bill Gates is not giving away any money, not to us, at any rate.

Perhaps the inclusion of AOL in this idiocy should have been a tipoff of some kind. Who, writing at this time, would include that particular portal in an enterprise of this sort? Nah. They’d goof on Facebook or MySpace or Schlump or some other next-gen destination.

The bottom line is this, guys: Don’t send me any bogus chain emails from here on in, okay? I have other things on my mind. And I’m still waiting for that $80,000,000 check that former king of Nigeria is sending me. That should arrive any day now. I sent them all my banking information. I wonder what’s taking so long?

Good morning, campers! It’s a bright and crispy morning in Manhattan and the leaves are changing to all kinds of festive colors. You can almost feel the holiday gridlock in the air. The stores are festooning. The stack of party invitations grows daily. There’s so much to be thankful for. I’m gonna keep this cheese ball rolling.

Today I am grateful that many of you agreed with me about the nature of “Thank you for your patience,” finding it to be a thinly veiled threat to mental equalibrium. Also, quite a few of you saw the new Bing video on this subject that was posted yesterday on Fortune.com and may even still be up for all I know. I am also thankful that the management of this blog is expanding its video capability to provide poor, working blogsters such as myself with a new platform and potential big bucks in the new media sector. Just kidding, management dudes! It’s not about the money! Honest!

I am extremely appreciative of the fact that it is Friday. These days I spend a fair amount of Saturday simply staring into space and eating every two to three hours. I am looking forward to doing that again tomorrow, and maybe even part of Sunday before I start obsessively chewing the inside of my lip again.

I am thankful, as always, for the fact that I do not have a fish tank. I tried to maintain one for a long time and all it did was drive home the inevitability of decay and death. Now that I do not have a fish tank, I don’t have to think about that kind of stuff ever. What a relief!

I am grateful that 2007 is almost over. I can’t say this has been an easy year. For proof of that fact, I direct you to everything I have written since this blog started last spring. It hasn’t been a bad year. Just difficult. I’m thinking 2008 is going to be somewhat better in that regard. No inflation, as we had feared in ‘07. No deflation. No stagflation. No recession. No depression. Just good hearty times and an ever-expanding market. And hey — let’s add a couple of inches to the polar ice caps, huh? Won’t our endangered species be happy about that!

I’m still thankful for clone monkeys. In fact, I’m thinking of hiring a few. It would be an improvement to the social environment around here, particularly in Finance.

I am thankful, in large part because of your comments, for my health insurance. A lot of you scolded me for complaining about it, and you’re right. For the record, I underestimated its cost in a prior posting here. I forgot I’m charged twice a month for my contribution, meaning that my payroll deductions on an annual basis come to about $10,000 per year. But I’m still grateful! Really!

And of course I’m thankful for all you guys. Hey. Ah loves ya.

Have a nice weekend. And y’all come back on Monday, you hear?

I was thinking this morning that I complain about too much. Like, I was going to sound off right here about one of my recent powerful pet peeves — when airline personnel say “Thank you for your patience.” I hate that. I hate being thanked for my patience when I’m all out of it. I don’t really think it’s a genuine thank-you anyhow. I think it’s more like, “Thanks for not getting into our face about the fact that we’ve been on the tarmac for two hours and will probably be on it for another two before we take off” or just “Shut up if you feel like complaining.” Last week I was thanked for my patience so many times before take-off, and then again upon landing, that I thought I was going to pop an aneurism.

But I’m not going to complain about that this morning. Because I woke up a few hours ago and realized that it had arrived. That Holiday spirit. I can feel it bubbling up in my heart and suffusing my entire body. And it feels good.

First up is Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays, because it centers around food and doesn’t have too much religious baggage. I like the menu a lot. And I generally enjoy the feeling of being thankful, don’t you? So let’s all take a minute in this runup to what feels like an early turkey-day and consider what we feel grateful for right now.

I feel grateful this morning, for example, that the front page of the New York Times has a story about clone monkeys. The content of the story is important, of course, but just the headline made me feel glad to be alive. Clone monkeys. What a great world we live in.

I’m thankful that all the banks that have declared write-downs are still doing okay. At least they look okay. Nobody’s jumping out of windows there, at least. And I went to the bank yesterday and they still seemed to have plenty of money they were giving out to people who wanted it. That’s a good thing.

I’m thankful for the fact that we’re not at war with Iran yet. I don’t really think going to war with another nation is an altogether good thing, at least, you know, not right now. So I feel positive that those who seem to want a war with Iran don’t appear to be getting much traction yet.

That’s just the short list right now. I’m going to keep on being thankful for about a week or so, before I guess it all collapses and I start whining and grouching around again. I’m not promising there won’t be interruptions in my mood, of course. But I’m going to try to sustain this.

Can you help?

The New York Times reports this morning that Wal-Mart (WMT) has extended an improved and less-expensive health plan to its workers in recent years, responding to some extent to image problems and, presumably, to the need to sustain a more stable and appreciative workforce.  That’s nice. I love Wal-Mart. And of course I’d love it if they would advertise on this page. So hey, guys from Wal-Mart. If you’re reading this? Consider this space, huh?

This news came at the exact time I was filling out my corporate health care registration online. I guess I have a good plan. It’s not an HMO, at any rate, although I guess I could choose one from my buffet of options. I wouldn’t, though. A few years ago, one of the first HMOs, the Harvard Community Health Plan, very nearly succeeded in killing me. I won’t go into the details, because they’re boring. I understand where they were coming from. A CAT-Scan is an expensive test for them. And if nothing had been wrong with me, it would have been a completely unnecessary expense.

So I have a thing against HMOs. I know there are probably very good ones. If you know of any, please let me know. I like happy stories, too. Of course, if you have any nightmares to relate, bring ‘em on. I’d love to hear from you, either way. How you guys over at Kaiser doing?

Anyhow, this morning, when I was done with my health care election forms I toted up the damage, and it seems that next year I’ll be spending about $6,000 on insurance for me and my family. I didn’t make $6,000 a year until I was about 30. That seems like a lot to me. On the other hand, I put a ding in my Chrysler last month that cost me $1,250 to fix, and it wasn’t even all that noticeable. A friend of mine had to pay $2,600 for a procedure recently that, while necessary, was highly unpleasant. On himself, I mean. Not his car. So the dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to, for sure.

I still have quibbles. As costly as my health care insurance is, I’m always amazed at how little they pay for. They have two ways of dodging costs. First, they pay a hilarious, Eisenhower-era rate for stuff that costs real-world dollars. A visit to a specialist in any major city, for example, costs about $300, at least. My insurance would be likely to pay, what, maybe $115.50 for that, which is what I pay my daughter’s dog-walker in an average week. Dentist reimbursements are even more risible. A crown in New York costs as much as one for the Queen in England. Last year, I had to eat nearly a thousand dollars on one, after I was “paid back” by my insurance. That’s tough to swallow.

The second way they avoid paying a lot of the time is that they don’t pay you a lot of the time. They “lose” paper. They “misplace” forms. They are unavailable for comment for weeks at a time. People handling your case change from Mrs. White to Mr. Gray to Ms. Pink and so forth. You have to be preternaturally patient. One bill last year, I had to send in documentation three separate times. Then I got a mailing saying that all the paperwork was now in, and that I had already been paid. Except I hadn’t. I hadn’t? Really? Could I prove that? Eventually, thanks to my excellent assistant, I did get a check… for 1/3 of the amount I had spent on the service.

At any rate, the hell with it. I’m glad I have insurance, and I feel bad for those who do not. So hats off, once again, to Wal-Mart and to all the fine corporations who take the time to think about and invest in our wellness.

Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutamus!

Hidey ho, neighbors. It’s Monday morning and I’m back in New York with several thoughts in my head. One: Domestic Coach class really stinks. I mean, low-cost seating is one thing, but I don’t expect a piece of cheese to be wedged in my headrest.And yes, there WAS cheese. Old cheese. Seat hadn’t been vacuumed for weeks. My ancestors came over on a boat from Europe about a hundred years ago. The part of the boat they were on must have pretty much felt like I did before I got my very late, unexpected upgrade to the last seat in Business yesterday. Come on, dudes. Guys who fly on their own dime are people too. Attention must be paid! Thanks.

Two: Be it ever so mired in tension, politics and tedium, there’s no place like your office. As you know, I’ve been away for a bit. I got back to find a desktop (the real one) full of mail and my computer crashed from some incident that happened over the last few days. I rebooted and threw away a bunch of analog paper. It’s amazing how — now that everything of value is done electronically — there is not one single piece of snail mail that’s anything but useless. What a pile of mung! Note to Chase Bank: Stop sending me solicitations! I have enough credit cards! Haven’t you guys gotten tired of supplying credit to people? Save a tree!

Anyhow, here we are. In a few minutes, I’ll have some coffee. If I’m very lucky, nothing at all will happen in the next several hours before lunch. All of this while a beehive of activity goes on around me. Know why I can crank my yanker this way? Because I’m the boss.

This brings me to my request of you today. That’s right. Because my brain is almost utterly empty at this moment, I thought I would shift the work to you and ask you to do something. Know why I am allowed to gather wool in this particular fashion? Right again. Because… I’m the boss.

In case you haven’t noticed, bosses get away with a huge raft of behavior that normal people can’t. The bigger the boss, the greater latitude the individual has for work stoppage, labor shifting, on-the-job snoozage, feeding on company time, vague perambulation, digital invisibility, inexplicable vacuity, manipulation of time as a solid/liquid object that retains the properties of both a particle and a wave, that kind of thing.

I’m doing some research on the subject and would like anybody within the sound of my voice to consider the matter and then send along something bosses actually do to 1) have more fun, 2) do less “work” and 3) enjoy the “work” they do more, than the average person. I want real stories about real people. Bosses, send in your tactics and strategems. Employees, report on the ones you’ve personally experienced or even heard about. How does being a boss replicate the experience of actually being a retired person? Lots of golf? Mentoring the young? Sleeping during the day? Think about it. And lemme know.

Oh, and one last thing, vis-a-vis a certain recent controversy in this space: I write this blog. Nobody else does. There are no interns. There are no mini-Bings. What there are, of course, are people who are doing all the things I should be doing while I write this blog. Thanks to them. And to you guys, of course.

And hey, don’t get me wrong. If you want to toss a Bing Blog over the transom for my use, please feel free to do so, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of today’s real assignment. I’ll use it if I feel like it and ignore it if I don’t. I’ll take the credit if I like it and forget to say thank you. After a while, I’ll convince myself I actually thought it up in the first place. Know why I can do all these things?

Correctamundo!

Hello. I’m back. I took a plane from London to New York to San Francisco yesterday afternoon after a huge tour of one of our important new product lines and two important meetings, one of them even sober. I landed at 10 AM London time, which was 4 AM New York time, which was 1 AM SF time. So I was wide awake in London, dead asleep in New York and tired as hell in San Francisco. I think I may have slept a bit on at least one of the planes. That Ambien is a wonderful thing.

I was bumped to First from Business on the first leg. I’d like to congratulate American Airlines on its new 777. The compartment I was in was basically the size of my first apartment in Manhattan. And I’m looking forward to my post-flight stint in detox.

I’m glad it’s Friday, and I’m glad I’m back, as nice as London is, and it really is. I took a walk in Hyde Park yesterday morning/evening/night and the leaves were turning all kinds of crispy yellows and reds and browns, and a battalion of guys on horseback in cool uniforms trotted by playing eminently marshall music and it was all pretty perfect. Almost a dream, which could be explicable by the fact that 1/3 of my brain was in a deep coma.

Of course, when I woke up this morning I had 35 email messages and it was only 7 AM here. So I’m going to do that now.

As we begin our weekend, I’m going to keep one of your comments in the forefront of my mind. It comes from Joe from Columbus, Ohio, who writes in with an excellent point. “Didn’t you just write a “sky is falling” column?” he sniped after my upbeat appeal of yesterday morning. “You crack me up.” I laughed when I read that.

You’re right, Joe. I’m exactly the same as the market. Up one day, full of hope and beanery. Down the next, gloom and doom and apocalypse. And badly in need of a mental vacation.

See you all on Monday.

Hi there. I’m sitting in the Admiral’s Club at London Heathrow, which may, as they say, be the busiest airport in the world but is most certainly the most hectic, confusing, and exhausting to negotiate. They have two x-ray lines: one for the normal stuff, another reserved just for shoes. Weird. I’m sure there’s a good reason for it. Like, there’s a guy looking at the machine who is specifically trained to evaluate footwear and nothing else. I wonder what he does for kicks.

Anyhow, I read a really stupid thing the other day and it made me think how close we all are to crushing ourselves in a real honest-to-God panic the way those soccer maniacs do to each other every couple of years. One person gets spooked, then another, and pretty soon people are trampling over each other like lemmings eager to hurl themselves over the nearest cliff. I hope I’m wrong. But it’s starting to look that way, and as usual a lot of the biggest and most determined lemmings either work or feed on Wall Street.

I was reading about the bank failure in Second Life over the summer, which coinciding with the subprime meltdown in real life. People trading in Lindens suddenly got a feeling that they were going to have trouble converting them back into dollars or something and there was a run on the make-believe financial institution that held their virtual lucre and pretty soon they had to close the so-called bank. What a mess.

Imaginary people trading in fictional currency whip themselves up into a state in which they create a situation in which they lose actual money. One is temped to sneeze at such fatuosity, except I think it’s really possible that the same thing is now going on in what we laughingly call the “real” world.

First there was debt that undermined the momentary health of some financial institutions, entities so large that they take multi-billion dollar write downs the way we would endure the loss of a $20 bill from our pockets. Then the industry that created the problem started talking about whether we were actually in a recession, when in fact the figures show that really, we’re not.

Once analysts, the media, gossipy brokers, boozy bankers and nervous investors start that story rolling, they need to follow it up with more reports, speculation, gossip and wind. So they did, in short order. Pretty soon the word “stagflation” started bouncing around.

This morning I looked at the front page of the Financial Times and yeah, now we’re not talking about recession, as we were last week, or depression, the concern of a few days ago, but inflation, the greatest bugaboo of all. “Stocks tumble as inflation fears grow” the headline screams. It’s only noon here and I already need a drink.

You know what? I have a reasonable, sane suggestion for the FT, the analysts, boozy brokers, et. al. Here it is: Shut… up. Please. I’m begging you. Let me put it another way. Go home, all of you. And don’t talk to anybody or write anything at all for the next three or four days. You don’t know anything anyhow, so it should be easy.

Look at it this way: It’s nearly Friday. You’ve had a busy week, moving the markets down, scaring everybody with all the horrendous words that make people run on banks, sell stocks, start stashing cash under their mattresses. Inflation. Stagflation. Recession. Depression. Recession. All of the above! Aieeee!

Take tomorrow off. Go pet your dog or something. You guys are going to create all the things that you’re frothing about if you’re not careful. And it won’t be Linden dollars this time.

Sometimes silence is golden. And last time I looked, gold was good in any currency.

You’re just a click away from another batch of answers to questions you’ve tossed over my transom in the last weeks (and to tell you the truth, months). I’ve got hundreds of pages of your questions and darn it, I intend to answer them all before I dematerialize from the form I now occupy and reformulate in a different time/space dimension sometime in late 2011. Today’s are a good sampling. I hope you enjoy them.

Me, I’m headed off on another insane, frenetic, inhuman whirlwind tour of one of our business locations. Get this. Tonight at 9, I head off for London. I’ve got my passport this time. We land around 9 AM, Greenwich mean time. Why they’re always on mean time there I have no idea. Usually we’re not like that except on Mondays and the occasional earnings day.

Anyhow, myself and young McTavish will then repair to our hotel, where we will freshen up and await our first meeting. In this case, “freshen up” means to collapse into a pulsating ball of hair and gristle while our bodies attempt to ascertain in which time zone they are attempting to exist.

At 2 PM local time, we have our meeting somewhere. At 5 or 6 PM, which is around noon in our regular universe, we will have a bunch of drinks and go to dinner with some other dudes, or in this case blokes, at about 8 PM. Dinner should be over by 11 PM local time, at which point we will go back to our respective hotel rooms and faint. We’ll be up at 2:00 in the morning New York time to have breakfast and take a tour of London operations. At 4 PM at Heathrow, I’ll head back home, landing when it’s 3:30 AM on the Thames. By then, it will almost be Friday. Friday!

I’ll try to blog at ya while all that’s going on. If I don’t, have a ripping good week, mates.

I want to thank all you guys for a terrific day yesterday. As one of you pointed out, I got up on the wrong side of the bed and felt the end of the world was at hand. Some of you agreed with me. Others didn’t. Still others were very jolly about the whole thing and WELCOMED the end of the world. I like that attitude. A special hats-off shout-out to the fellow who commented to a prior post and nominated Dracula as one of his favorite saints. Fangs very much.

But seriously, today is another day and the sun is bright and shining in the newly-minted sky. Actually, it’s raining here in New York and quite chilly, but you know what I mean. You can’t live your life in full awareness of Armageddon every day, right? Interest rates are coming down! Hedge funds and their managers are getting knocked around like whack-a-moles at a carnival. The truffles just came in to my favorite expense account restaurant. Life is good.

Maybe best of all is how America is snapping to, joining the rest of the world in its vital, highly-competitive, can-do, anything-goes spirit on the global playing field. In that vein, I would like to offer the first annual Mr. Cool Poisoned Toothpaste Award for Competitive Global Business Ethics to the banks and other lending institutions who are now foreclosing on the homes of defaulting debtors.

They win this soon-to-be coveted prize not so much for the foreclosures themselves, but for all the extra fees they are piling onto the future occupants of Chapter 11 who committed themselves to ARMs and are now falling down on their promise to pay the piper now that the piper has raised the interest rate on their mortgage.

In an article headlined “Borrowers Face Dubious Charges In Foreclosures” the fearsome Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times writes:

“The amounts can be significant. Late fees accounted for 11.5 percent of servicing revenues in 2006 at Ocwen Financial, a big servicing company. At Countrywide, $285 million came from late fees last year, up 20 percent from 2005. Late fees accounted for 7.5 percent of Countrywide’s servicing revenue last year. But these are not the only charges borrowers face. Others include $145 in something called “demand fees,” $137 in overnight delivery fees, fax fees of $50 and payoff statement charges of $60. Property inspection fees can be levied every month or so, and fees can be imposed every two months to cover assessments of a home’s worth.”

There’s much more. I highly recommend a thorough read of this one. It makes you feel that this great nation of ours can compete with anybody on the world stage, at least in certain things.

So buck up, everybody! There is no fate but what we make, right? And we’re making it every day. Have a good one.

I’m an upbeat person, really I am. I mean, sometimes I hide behind a mask of skepticism, even cynicism when I have nothing intelligent to offer. But most of the time you’ll see me strolling in a snappy, optimistic manner down the streets and hallways of life, a smile on my lips, a whistle in my heart, or vice versa.

But lately? I don’t know. This year isn’t wrapping up very well. In fact, I’ll be honest with you. I’m scared. I feel like I’m in one of those video games I used to play when I was on a PC platform, the kind in which you have to run very fast over a lake of fire to get to a safe zone on the other side. In my mind, that area of relative comfort has a banner over it that says 2008.  Everything else before that is just, well… fire and brimstone.

Do I need to elucidate? Okay.

First, there’s the debt crisis. We haven’t seen the end of it. Yesterday, as his company declared an $8-$11 billion writedown, Charles Prince exited his job at the top of Citigroup (C), only the most recent, and certainly not the last of the big ticket dudes whose future resides mostly on a lovely beach somewhere. If mild, entitled boredom was a serious ailment, I’d be worried about them.

But these mega-billion writedowns are just the beginning, I think. What happens when all those people default on their loans and the financial institutions that issued them are now the proud owners of a pile of devalued real estate they can’t unload? No. There will be more writedowns, I think. And the stock market will get the willies. And boom, there go our 401K’s. And our stock portfolios. And the value of our homes. And…

Oil is going to reach $100 a barrel real soon. That means… well, you know what that means. It’s good news for Brazil, apparently, because it’s invested heavily in biofuels and is energy self-sufficient. But we’re not. Of course, they’re busy hacking down the rain forest, which is their prerogative, because they own it, right?

That’s certainly not going to help the situation with global warming, which is coming up the ramp into the global arena like a monster truck. A friend of mine took a cruise to Alaska recently. They have glaciers there, you know. He remarked on their loveliness to the Captain of the vessel, who was staring looking out over the water with firm resolve, as men of his station are required to do.

“Yeah,” said the Captian. “Where we are right now? Used to be glacier.” My friend inquired where, you know, the glacier proper was at this time. “About a mile ahead of us,” said the Captain. “And it’s receding fast.”

And the dollar? Forget about it. We are now a tourist destination for the rest of the world, the way Italy and France used to be when their currencies made any American traveler rich by local comparisons. I’m thinking of sinking all my money into Euros. They’re prettier, too. The thing is? I’m paid in dollars. My savings? They’re in dollars…. which are able to buy fewer and fewer Euros. So there’s that.

These are just the tip of the ever-shrinking iceberg, of course. Can you think of any other looming disasters? Lob them in. I’m eager to hear them.

Or maybe I’m full of it. It’s been known to happen. Maybe the debt crisis is over! Maybe George W. Bush and his sniveling toadies in the pseudo-scientific community are right and there IS no global warming! Maybe the dollar is zooming on back! Maybe 2008 will be the best year ever!

What do you think?  I mean… really.

Happy Friday, everybody. I’m running out to go to a meeting about a meeting we’re setting up to discuss a meeting we’re having in December about upcoming meetings in ‘08. But before I do, I thought I would send out a call.

Hey, Scott! You! The one whose iPod was stolen by the neighborhood children! The guy to whom I promised my old, Gen-1 iPod! You never got in touch with me so I could send you your prize. You think I was kidding? It’s sitting right here, waiting to go to you, jammed with all kinds of funky tunes. Hit the comment box at the bottom of this column. I WILL send you your iPod. I feel bad you don’t have it already. Come on. What’s the matter with you? You win something every day?

And you, Ed from Syracuse! I took some abuse when I awarded you a special, back-up iPod. People thought I should have given it to the sick kid in Bosnia or the guy whose wife had post-partum depression or something. But no, I gave it to you because of your lame, amusing story about your dead mother. Now where are you, when I’m fully prepared to give you one of my old Shuffles?

You’d be amazed at the number of things I have to worry about, from the sublime to the ridiculous. And yet more than once, recently, I have awakened at 3:00 AM with the nagging feeling that something remains undone, and after a few moments realized that what I’m obsessing about is this stupid, unfinished business of the unrewarded iPods.

So come on, Scott and Ed from Syracuse! Put me out of my misery and write to me. I won’t publish your addresses, if that’s what you’re worried about. So get with it. If you don’t, I’ll have to run the whole ferschlugginer contest again and find two new applicants who want my obsolescent technology.

Today is the day after All Hallow’s Eve, more properly known to those who observe the event as All Saint’s Day. It’s a holiday more honored in the breach than the observance by most people. But I thought it would give me an ever-so-slender hook by which I could suggest those whom I hold in reverence in this great and terrible Oz we all inhabit. In short? Here are a few of the saints who occupy my celestial cosmology:

Attila the Hun (Pictured above):  Also known as the Scourge of God, was actually a dynamic take-over artist and excellent senior manager, all things considered. He got his bad reputation because, in his case, history was sort of written by the losers, the guys he rolled over on his way to history. He represents an executive who was as nasty as he needed to be within the corporate culture of his time, and proves that you can’t believe everything you read in the papers about yourself.

Augustus, Emperor of Rome: For his ability to be a vicious warrior on the one hand and a thoughtful, constructive bureaucrat on the other. He also had a sense of humor, although his jokes don’t travel very well over the centuries. “Do you think you are handing a penny to an elephant?” seems to have been one of his bon mots that survived the passage of time, Lord knows why. Anyhow, a great builder, great statesman, funny guy, great at a party.

Nicolo Machiavelli: He had approximately my job in his corporation, did a lot of freelance writing, and made a name for himself. His level-headed and unsentimental pragmatism pretty much defines how mean people thrive in business, and even if you don’t want to be one of them, this is precious information. See my book on the subject.

Benjamin Franklin, Renaissance Man of the Revolution: Great business people redefine themselves continually throughout their lives. Look at Bill Gates (MSFT). Started as a geek, transformed into a mighty behemoth, now he’s a philanthropist. Ben Franklin was a writer, inventor, stateman, ladies man, rock star. Every decade of his life, a new Franklin pops up. As we all live longer, hopefully, this kind of fluidity will be become ever more necessary, lest we all get bored to death by the time we’re 90.

Howard Hughes, Entrepreneur and Madman: Perhaps more than any other business person, was able to turn his mental illness into an asset. Endlessly fascinating source of deeply kooky behavior, peppered with huge achievements. Rumored to have been killed by his own senior staff, a fate evocative to every chief executive, I think.  

Tom Peters, Author: This guy has it all for me. First, he wrote In Search of Excellence, a huge business best-seller that everybody had to buy but nobody had to read. I’ve been trying to do that for 20 years, with incomplete success. Second, he’s got it down as a public speaker for big bucks. I saw him talk with a tray of slides in 1985. Saw him again 15 years later. Same talk. Same slides. Even bigger paycheck. The guy has my respect.

Steve Jobs, Genius: When I go up to a mountaintop to think, I come back with poison ivy. This guy returns with an idea in his head that represents the exact thing everybody wants at any given moment. What’s next, Steve (AAPL)? Whatever it is, I’m on line for it right now, rebate or not!

I have a lot more, of course. But that should do for now. Perhaps you pray at a different shrine, worship a whole other set of saints. If so, lay ‘em on me. As long as Bill O’Reilly, Henry Ford (F) or Josef Stalin are not among them, I’ll be happy to consider their application to my pantheon.