I am particularly amused this morning by a question from a reader who works for a large financial institution. It seems that on payday the company had a small glitch and a bunch of people not on the direct-deposit program didn’t get their checks… for five days. One supervisor, approached by an employee who needed the money to live, gave an interesting piece of advice: Go to the guy responsible for Payroll and ask him to lend you the money. The guy in charge of Payroll is our correspondent. Of course, he’s ticked off. I think he has every right to be, for sure. Unless…

Several other matters of import are discussed. Check it out.

On another front, keep an eye on the debate now ongoing in my prior post on silver linings. You may want to weigh in. What’s better for the world? Gigantic multinational corporations whose brands define consumer activity worldwide? Or local businesses which are are a lot less efficient but do have a certain charm and utility?

Global? Local? Price or service? We may not have any choice, ultimately, in the way that story goes down. But we might as well talk about it while it’s happening, huh?

There are those who see the glass as half empty, and most of them write for financial magazines and newspapers and, I think, get kind of a charge out of scaring people and bumming them out. Maybe they want company.

Others see the glass as half full, and they mostly work for banks or brokerages trying to sell you stocks. Market down? Time to buy more!

Finally, there are the cosmic philosophers who see no glass at all. Who knows. They may be right.

But there are very few who at this point see a big, frosty glass virtually brimming over with delicious nectar. Such people are to be treasured for, in my opinion, they perceive a deeper truth that always lies just beyond sight.

It is often difficult to see the good in any situation, because it is the bad that rises up most insistently to accost us, offend us, frighten us. It’s difficult to see how lucky we are to be on the planet, breathing fresh air and tasting sunshine, when your company has lost 25% percent of its value in the last three months due to some stupidhead on Wall Street who issued sub-prime loans to untrustworthy mendicants.

How hard it is to see the seeds of prosperity, peace and happiness in our current miasma of loss, defalcation and disappointment.

Yet that is what I just enjoyed in the most recent issue of The Economist. The piece in question is called Somewhere over the rainbow, and it outlines, with this magazines customary verve, plain speaking and cheeky insight, the reasons why we all should be optimistic about the road that lies ahead.

I like that. In general, you know, I believe that optimism, even when it is based on bad information, false assumptions or simple goofy hope, is better than pessimism. The words “self-fulfilling prophesy” come to mind. Good vibes produce things of value. Bad vibes don’t. So I appreciate the former, particularly in times like these, when they seem, well, counter-intuitive.

Read the article. Reasons for optimism cited by this comfortingly stodgy publication, include:

• The number of people in the worst kind of poverty actually decreased between 1999 and 2004, reduced by 135 million individuals during that time;
• The population explosion has eased;
• Developing economies are growing faster than the established ones, suggesting the growing viability of the global marketplace;
• In fact, the global rate of economic growth has been sustained and strong just about everywhere, including South Asia and Africa, with smaller economies leading the pack;
• There has actually been a decline since the 1990s in worldwide deaths as a result of war and genocide. There’s still far too much, but the trend is in the right direction;
• All these factors and many more may be harbingers of an impending era of global growth, stronger economies that in turn produce an incentive for peace, and puppies in the spring.

Well, maybe not that last. But sort of. This explosion of goodness seems to be contingent on the continued globalisation of the planet, leading to greater cooperation among nations and less poverty and desperation in general.

This theme is mildly evocative of Davos, which this year brought us a bunch of mega-capitalists talking like backstage talent at Woodstock. There was something cute but kind of creepy about that whole thing. Is the spread of international corporate and state-sponsored capitalism too high a price to pay?

The magazine concludes, “The World Social Forum, a gathering of self-proclaimed progressives who want to turn back trade, growth and globalisation has adopted as its slogan the motto ‘Another world is possible’. In reality, another and better world is painfully and fitfully coming into being.”

Imagine, as John said. It’s easy if you try. Should we try?

In 2008 I believe we mark a very special anniversary: the 250th year that American Airlines has been serving the vermicelli and shrimp appetizer to Business Class passengers. But seriously. I know there has only been heavier-than-air flight for less than that, so those of you prepared to fire off a corrective comment can just stop right there.

It does feel like a long time, though. I recall, once upon a time, that American used to feature the food stylings of a number of chefs from establishments around the nation. Today, it’s kind of odd. They hand out menus with lots of type in them, but they always feature the same food. It’s Groundhog Day in the air.

In a time where nothing is certain, where the markets offer a different buffet of doom every day, it should be kind of nice to have something that never changes, never alters, year and year after year after year after… hm? Oh. Sorry. I got stuck in a loop there.

I have some questions for American I thought I would share with you, because perhaps you might have some answers.

Did somebody at the airline, back in the last century, achieve massive economies of scale by purchasing the largest number of teeny weeny beef filets in history? And do they now reside in an enormous frozen vault somewhere, tiers upon tiers of them, reaching up into the sky, a miniscule percentage defrosted annually for use until the next century dawns? How else are we to explain their ubiquity?

Were market tests done to determine that the vast majority of salad eaters enjoy creamy dill dressing? For a bright and shining moment last month, business passengers were offered a modified Caesar heretofore unknown, but that option seems now to have disappeared. Was there an upheaval among frequent flyers to bring back the creamy dill? If so, why hasn’t it been documented?

Who invented the super-cooked shrimp with rice-noodles that seems to be the annointed appetizer on most transcontinental flights? Is there an executive somewhere whose resposibility it is to say, “No. Enough,” and bring in the prosciutto with reconstituted melon dip as an alternative? When was it decided that resilient shrimp and limp, translucent noodles were not only the amuse bouche of choice for most customers, but of such popularity that they would be on the menu for most of our adult lifetimes?

Is the universe divided between those who select beef and those who opt for pasta? Is there no other road through the infinite regions of space?

Are these things immutable? Perhaps not. A few years ago, American introduced soy beans into its hot nuts mixture. Reaction must have been swift and powerful, since they were rescinded almost immediately thereafter. So change is possible. But is it called for?

Is there a vast business populace out there that, as they check in for their 15th or 20th flight of the year, has puffy little thought balloons above their heads filled with cold shrimp and chewy beef filets? Are there routes out there that offer other fare entirely, dishes that those of us who go between New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco know not of?

I know there are more serious matters questions that face us, ladies and gentlemen. This will never be the Davos Question featured by YouTube for response worldwide. But it isn’t only the big stuff that occupies us, is it? Aren’t the little issues sometimes just as intriguing, worrying away at the corners of our consciousness like termites, burrowing like moths into the fabric of our composure?

If you have any answers, please send them along. If any of you now reading this are associated with the airline, feel free to weigh in. And those of you who don’t fly this particular carrier quite as much as I do, are there similar patterns, concentric mobius strips of repetitive service in which you, when you travel, are forced to inhabit?

What other weird things have you eaten in the course of business lately? And yes, readers in Asia, I AM speaking to you.

The news coming out of Davos, as always, makes me kind of queasy and resentful. The sight of the world’s super-capitalists, including some former communists, cavorting with canapes coming out of their ears is an annual source of amusement and irritation. I’ve been to enough boondoggles. I know what these guys are up to.

Big news today seems to be about a party thrown by the Russians that included moguls ice skating. Serge Brin of Google (GOOG) reportedly came off the ice with red cheeks. In other news, a trader who earned in the neighborhood of 100,000 euros a year seems to be responsible for a $7 billion swindle. He is now on the run. Times have changed. When I made 100,000 euros a year, all I had was signatory authority for a department lunch. Are the grownups still in charge of the candy store? Two things caught my eye emerging from this orgy of schnapps and self-congratulation. The first was a blog in the New York Times that commented on the power of sovereign wealth funds — huge pots of money controlled by States around the globe — representatives of which gave a symposium today to discuss what they’re going to do with their cash to make the world economy sing on key again.”Now the men and one woman in charge of some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, the huge pools of state-controlled cash that have rescued American and European banks from their own mistakes in recent months, took to the Davos stage to defend their intentions,” the Times reported from the scene.Their intentions… hm… the world finance edifice is relying more than ever before on money controlled by politicians, sheiks, party functionaries and government bureaucrats. True, those people are well-aligned with those who control the “free” marketplace, but there’s a big difference between being bailed out by a world financial institution on the one hand or the government of Romania on the other. I’m only using that as an example. Romania is not bailing anybody out at this point, if ever. The apparently opposite trend came from a very upbeat Bill Gates, who introduced the idea of “creative capitalism,” in which that very same global free market system would benefit the poor as well as the rich. Somewhere in the stew they are serving at Davos is a link between the growing importance of state-controlled capital and the creation of an international system by which the markets that are increasingly reliant on that capital come together to make the entire world a better place.Thank God I’m not smart enough to see it.

Yesterday I unearthed a little nugget of American history of which I had no prior knowledge. While working on a posting on busyness, I did what I usually do on a lot of subjects: went over to Wikipedia to see what the collective wiki-mind might have to say about it. I typed in the words, “as busy as a chicken with its head cut off wiki.” Up popped the listing on Mike the Headless Chicken, whose picture once again graces our page. 

At first I thought the whole thing was kind of a gag. I mean, a picture of a chicken walking around with his head cut off is pretty amusing, as was the incredible fact that Mike lived for a year and a half in that condition after, you know, his head was separated from his body. 

Then, later in the day, I went back and read the entire wiki on the incident, which took place in the late 1940s and was, in its own way, the Britney Spears saga of its day… or maybe Anna Nicole Smith. It’s the story of a living creature turned by an accident of fate into an object of tragic fascination… and how much the public is willing to pay for the chance to buy a little piece of that tragedy.

The bare outlines are these: Mike’s owner was instructed by his wife to get a chicken for their dinner. He went out back and found Mike, who at that point was a pretty normal chicken, in the sense that he had his head. The owner then botched that operation, leaving Mike in his compromised state. The fact that he lived through what many poultry had not made him suddenly an object of affection and fascination to his handlers.

They nursed him back to a certain kind of health of sorts. He was never quite the same, but he was unaware of his status as a diminished entity, trying at times to crow and strutting around proudly as if he was a normal bird.

The owners came to love Mike and care for him during his tortured remaining time on the planet. The physical realities of his situation were dire. He had respiratory problems. Eventually, he died much the way Jimi Hendrix did. Before doing so, however, he had become a national sensation earning, in 2005 dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the people who cared for him and marketed his unique ability to appear in his headless state.

Today, in a small city in Colorado, they still have Mike the Headless Chicken Day, sixty years after the decease of the celebrity, and there’s a whole website dedicated to Mike – his life, his career, his untimely passing. 

In an era that has seen the death of hundreds of once-loved brands throughout our culture, and total amnesia of the populace on a wide variety of famous figures and events, Mike the Headless Chicken remains a legendary presence, along with names like James Dean, Judy Garland, and now Heath Ledger, individuals who were doomed by the very thing that made them infinitely fascinating and marketable.

Perhaps, he didn’t have the talent these icons possessed. But he sure had a lot of pluck.

Sometimes my gut absolutely mirrors the Market. Yesterday I was all freaked out. By the end of the day, I felt better. Now I actually smell a little bit of hope in the air. Things are marginally back to normal. The sky did not fall. The sun will come up tomorrow. If every cloud does not yet have a silver lining quite yet, there are patches of blue among the gray. So I think I’ll get back to business and usual and do what I said I was going to do last Friday and offer 10 things you can do if you’re too busy.

1. You can cancel all meetings with aggravating people right now unless they are your boss. It’s amazing how many meetings we create with people we’d rather not see for reasons that, once we are at them, are unclear. I believe many of us whip up activity to prove to ourselves and others how non-fungible we are. A little fungibility never hurt anybody, particularly the terminally busy who are already essential in quite enough areas, thank you. Be less fungible. Share your funge.

2. Never write a long e-mail if a gnomic BlackBerry message will do. It’s incredible how many chunks of work can be tossed over the side with a short electronic piffle like, “OK, let’s do that. Can you handle?” If you’re a big player, that’s called delegation. If you’re not, it’s called passing the buck. Either way, it results in less bussitude.

3. Close your door and tell your assistant that you will only be disturbed by a) your boss or b) somebody who is bringing you a hot pastrami sandwich, and nobody else. Your door has to have meaning if you are not to lose your sanity.

4. Take lunch. You won’t be less busy, but you will FEEL less busy. Let me ask you a question. When you eat lunch at your desk, do you end up with less to do after lunch? I’m betting the answer is no. So if you’re going to be screwed up anyhow, why not enjoy a nice, peaceful hour away from the office? Have somebody join you that presents a legitimate opportunity to use your expense account, if you have one.

5. Don’t go on conference calls unless your boss is on it. Isn’t there somebody junior to you in your area? Somebody ambitious, who still believes they get some kind of juice from being on a big ratpack event? Put them on the call. They can be the ones who sit there and twiddle their thumbs while you’re out generating non-fungibility.

6. Schedule an occasional offsite for yourself. Every city has conventions, gatherings, symposia about new technology and other BS you can glom onto. “Where’s Ambruster?” people will say. “Oh, he’s at the global streaming thing at the Hilton,” will come the answer. Smart Ambruster! To be interested in such an arcane issue!

7. Don’t be so friggin’ reachable. A few years ago, I noticed that everybody in LA starts calling New York at exactly the time when we all want to go to lunch. For a long time, I answered their calls and upset my circadean rhythms. Then I thought, “The heck with them,” although perhaps not precisely in those words. “I’ll return their calls tomorrow morning while they’re in the shower.” The bottom line is, just because your phone rings doesn’t mean you have to answer it. CONTROL, guys. It’s the sense of losing it that makes you lose it.

8. At about 4:15, take a look at your To Do list. Anything on it that can be put off until tomorrow? Hold on! Can’t, like 80% of it be put off until tomorrow? Or even the day after tomorrow? That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. It’s called procrastination. It’s divided into three parts: PRE-crastination is all the things you do before you start your serious PRO-crastination which comes right before a good session of POST-crastination. Then you can do whatever it is. Or not.

9. Schedule a meeting with your boss to “go over things.” Anything you do with your boss supercedes in importance anything else you could be doing. If your boss is going out to play golf, accompanying him or her is actually “working” smarter and harder than constructing that spreadsheet you’re supposed to be showing to the Controller next Tuesday.

10. Work faster. Concentrate harder. Clear your platter aggressively. Then rest. Rest is work, too, particularly for those who take it seriously.

By the way, the picture you see at the top of this posting is of Mike the Headless Chicken, who lived for eighteen months with his head cut off between 1945 and 1947. Proving, I guess that our kind of lifestyle can go on for a while, but in the end does take its toll.

Whenever I feel afraid.
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune
So no one will suspect
I’m afraid.

While shivering in my shoes
I strike a careless pose
And whistle a happy tune
And no one ever knows
I’m afraid.

The result of this deception
Is very strange to tell
For when I fool the people
I fear I fool myself as well!

Just a little song for you this morning, with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, for those willing to follow the links.

Keep whistling.

Without busyness where would business be? Noplace, and that’s the truth. But there is a point where busyness goes beyond the point of productivity and into the blasted plain where crows feed on the eyeballs of those who didn’t make it across to the other side. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do you forget what you were about to say just as you enter somebody’s office? And you know that it wasn’t that old canard about, “Oh well, that probably means it wasn’t important,” no, it was important all right, and it clear left your brain as you were walking the ten steps down the hall?
2. Do you keep lists on your desk that are full of Things To Do, but you have to keep updating them because all the Things To Do that were once at the top are now in the middle, supplanted by More Critical Things To Do that accumulated while you were doing Other Things To Do that weren’t even on the original list?
3. Are you interrupted every time you start to do something by another person’s agenda?
4. Do you eat lunch at your desk just about every day and are forced to talk to people, either on the phone or in person, with tuna fish hanging off the end of your chin?
5. Do you sometimes find yourself running to get to a meeting in your own building?
6. Are you late for things a lot of the time when before you used to be punctual?
7. Are you often shocked to find out what time it is? That the days seem to whiz by and at the end of them nothing really got done to completion?
8. Do you eat Advil three times a day?
9. Do you sometimes begin a sentence and then stand there with your mouth open, looking for the right word?
10. Did you scream at some innocent subordinate today over something so minor it now seems ridiculous? And would you like to do it again right now?
11. How many times does your phone ring while you are trying to concentrate?
12. When you close your door for some privacy, do people constantly knock on it and say, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but this’ll just take a second”?
13. Do you suddenly have difficulty conjuring up the names of people with whom you’ve worked for years if called upon to introduce them to a stranger?
14. Did there come a time in the last three months when you forgot to go to the bathroom and were then sequestered in a room you could not get out of for so long you nearly died?
15. Do you sometimes lose a document on your hard drive? Like, work on it for a while, leave to attend to another matter, return and can’t find it?
16. Is your e-mailbox over its size limit?
17. Do you put yourself to sleep at night thinking about all you have to do the next day, and then wake at 3:00 AM filled with free-floating anxiety?
18. Do you sometimes sit at your desk, thinking about a big, sweaty martini… at 11:00 AM?
19. Do people talk about movies you haven’t seen, candidates whose names are unfamiliar to you, and celebrity sex tapes of which you have no knowledge?
20. Are you developing BlackBerry-related arthritis of the thumb? 

If you answered yes to more than three of these questions… what the heck are you doing reading this? Get back to work!

It struck me, after my tale of the cute little piggies yesterday, how grateful some of you were in your comments for a nice upbeat story in which nobody got hurt. A welcome change from the gloom and doom was the general drift.

When you think about it, this should be no surprise. I think people are sick of all the negative stuff that washes over us every day, from the coming recession which may already be here to the pending inflation that is possibly coming along with it to the massive write downs sweeping throught the banking industry to the fact that more people seem to care about Britney Spears than about the War in Iraq. 

We want to hear some good news now and then, feel that world is a bright and hopeful place, not a bottomless sump pump of murk and schweck.

The good news is that there is good news — so much I can hardly contain it all. Let me give you some in case you need it.

Chairman Bernanke has just indicated that he intends to do whatever he can to stimulate the economy without making the same mistakes as his predecessors. I have no idea how he will do this, but then I’m not expected to. My job and yours is to feel a warm glow about his intentions and then take that jolly mood into our investment decisions. You know how much the fate of the market is determined by emotional factors. This could be just the lift we all need!

Sure, stocks have been taken a beating. But anybody with even a modest little portfolio of bonds is feeling all right. Shouldn’t the gutless conservatives like me who hate to gamble with our savings have a day in the sun now and then?

Think about our political process. It’s going great guns. There hasn’t been so much genuine fervor on both sides of the aisle in years. Young people are energized and enthused and voting their hearts and minds as never before. That’s terrific for our nation. Plus, for those with an eye on local economies, this ferment — not only the candidates but also on the issues — will pump millions of dollars of advertising into the marketplace as voters fight over the wisdom of casino gambling, for instance, as well as who should be the CEO of the world’s most powerful multi-national corporation.

And okay, it’s true that the housing market is in the privy. This has of course stuck a finger in the eye of a lot of dumb entities that loaned money to people who had more dreams than cash to pay for them. Bad? Not completely. First, it’s good when large institutions are punished for greed and stupidity, and their leaders are forced to depart in ignominy. Our entire ethical system is built on the concept of appropriately public disgrace, from the days of colonial Williamsburg, when they put miscreants into the stockade, to today, when TMZ, CNN and Gawker do the job.

Better still, a depressed housing market means that people who DO have a little bit of cash can now afford to move into that dream home whose price was formerly jacked up to ridiculous heights by the idiotic inflation of the market by morons weilding cheap debt. Last year, in my little California community, people were expecting to get $1.5 million dollars for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage with no property. Now these little bungalows sit there with their real estate signs hanging dementedly from one hook for months. Then they go off-sale entirely. When they return, I’ll bet they’re one step closer to people who might actually be able to purchase them with a little more equity.

A few days ago, Apple (AAPL) announced a whole host of new stuff, including tons of movies to be available on demand, a free upgrade of some kind for my Apple TV, and a new skinny-Minnie laptop that sounds super boffo keen. Every year, one of my happiest events is my bi-annual purchase of something I didn’t have before and didn’t know I needed until it was invented. Can’t wait for these, either! Thanks, Uncle Steve!

Beyond that? Consider this: every downside has an upside for somebody. When stocks fall, Warren Buffet does a little dance. For him, because he’s so smart, the moderation of prices represents a chance to invest in companies who are suddenly unappreciated for what they do. I hope he’s looking at mine. Hey! Mr. Buffet! Over here!

Let’s try to keep our heads about ourselves. As a wise man by the name of Chauncey Gardiner once observed, there will be growth in the spring. Until then, bundle up and try to enjoy the cold. I hear it’s good for the circulation.

I just got back from a corporate retreat. Here is where it was.

There were many rocks and pretty cacti there. Like these…

… and quite a few meetings. Most of us have known each other for a long time and are fond of each other. So it’s nice to get away and talk about the business, try to breathe a little and get the focus back on the big picture. Sometimes you lose that perspective. All you see are the same buildings and the same computer screens and the same restaurants and the same problems day after day. You forget there’s a wide world out there that smells of sagebrush and wood smoke, and a sky that’s full of stars at night.

In the evening, fat, silly-looking quail came out and skittered around, cooing. Here’s one now.

I’m sorry if she’s a little blurry. Believe me when I tell you she was going fast. About as fast as we go when we’re about our business, I guess, and just as self-important, too. She made little noises as she went along, just as if she had a cell phone, come to think of it. Of course, she didn’t. Maybe she had bluetooth and I just didn’t catch it.

There were jackrabbits munching at the 14th tee at sunset, not far from my room.

It was so quiet there that I could hear them chewing. They were noisy eaters, but no more so than the gang at Michael’s every day when you get right down to it. That night, a few of the younger guys slipped into town to see the sights. I sat out on my patio and listened to the coyotes howl in the spaces between the shopping malls out beyond my window.

The following day, as I was packing to go home, a small committee of javalinas convened on my back porch. Javalina is the Spanish name for the collared peccary, a rough, spiny-haired pig, about two feet high, with a long snout, a big, juicy nose, soulful brown eyes and tiny little high-heel feet. Here is the guy who took the highest profile:

Three of his colleagues were snoring thoughtfully under the tree.

It was quite warm outside, and the sun filtered through the canopy of green above. That’s them, the three large balls of hair and fat stretched out indolently in the shade. Cozy together, aren’t they? Sorry if our vantage point is a little far away, but I’ve always been afraid of being one of those guys killed while on a business retreat or vacation of some kind. I was once nearly knocked off the side of a mountain by an angry ram and have been a bit skittish around large mammals since then. Yesterday, all I had was my little digital Elph and its zoom is merely okay at best.

I got a very big kick out of this one individual. He decided that I might have food. So he stood proudly in the middle of the patio, soaking up the sun a little, showing off. God knows what he thought he was showing off, he’s a pig, after all, but he seemed to want me to notice how splendid he was, so I did.

I particularly liked his snorting, which was by no means overdone. He would approach, do a little warm-up snuffling, let out a good-sized honk, then move off in a dignified fashion to see if I would change my position on the issue. I had no idea what the issue was, so I couldn’t really satisfy him. I wasn’t about to feed him a $21 bag of designer potato chips. It might not have been good for him anyhow.

After a while he decided to go back to his working group and report on his findings, and then no amount of clucking and whistling would make him get up and resume our conversation. It was okay. He looked so comfortable there with all his pals.

I finished packing and checked out. I was sad to leave there, you know, but only a pig thinks that kind of thing lasts forever.

Our fearless leader is in Saudi Arabia right now, doing a variety of things including, I bet, making sure that the family positioning is well set-up for the days when he is no longer in the best/worst job in the world. His dad does that quite a bit. And, I believe, his brother, too, come to think of it. The whole Bush family is over there all the time, sometimes working for the Carlyle Group, other times just to see the sights, I guess. I don’t know why this is, but I’m sure it’s good for the nation in one way or another.

In that vein, I was pleased to see that while he was sunnin’ and funnin’ with the guys who get all the best tables at the hottest lunch spots over there, he took some time to plead with the powers-that-be in the world’s most oil-rich nation to keep the price of crude down.

“Oil prices are very high, which is tough on our economy,” Bush said, according to AOL. “I would hope, as OPEC considers different production levels, that they understand that if … one of their biggest consumers’ economy suffers, it will mean less purchases, less oil and gas sold.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. If prices go up, people lose their ability to buy more. Demand goes down. This hurts everybody. I don’t know why people haven’t thought of this idea before. Like, in my view, many prices are too high. Why shouldn’t we, the consumer, take a tip from President Bush and politely ask those who control the supply to give us a break?

Just a few years ago, for instance, I remember when the most expensive hamburger you could get in New York City was about $80. Now there are places in midtown where you have to spend up to $400 for a small meat patty. True, it is stuffed with foie gras, but still. That’s a lot of money. I think I’m going to go down there tomorrow and ask them to have a heart. It can’t cost them more than twenty bucks to get that puppy onto the plate. Why make it so prohibitive? Stuff like that is almost impossible to put on my expense account, yet I need to impress clients just as much today as I did yesterday.

The same can be said of so many things we need to get ahead in this business life. Movies in our hotel rooms, for example. Right now I’m at a boondoggle in the middle of nowhere. Dinner is usually over at, like, 10:00 PM. You get back to your room, you want to have a little entertainment, and the movies are $14.99! Everybody knows you can’t expense movies in your room. They are the one line item that kicks right back to you. You could actually pass the acquisition of a camel through the eye of Finance more easily. That’s fifteen dollars right out of my personal pocket, just to see a movie I fall asleep in the middle of. Tomorrow morning I’m going to march right down and tell the hotel management that if they don’t cut the price for this service, I’m going to stop using it and I’m sure others will too.

This gets better and better the more I think about it. Hotel rates. Car services. Shoes, even. The things we need to get ahead in this profession of ours cost a lot, and that’s fair, but enough is enough, right? We stop paying? They stop being able to charge so much.

The only small problem I see is that if I refuse to pay their crazy prices, won’t there be people from other economies that are doing better than ours to take up the slack? Like, today Citibank (C) and Merrill (MER) are both getting infusions of money from places like Korea and Kuwait. They seem to have plenty of money over there, for some reason. That crazy restaurant with the insane burger is filled with business people from all over the globe, sucking off of their multi-national corporations. And when it comes to oil, aren’t there other countries that will pay whatever it costs, where the economies are growing faster and the need for oil is just as great? What do you think the Chinese, for instance, will say about higher oil prices? Will they ask for a cost reduction too?

Anyhow, thanks, Mr. Bush, for trying. And while we’re at it… could you cut my taxes, please?

Tim from Ft. Worth Texas weighed in on a way previous post that I wrote on the subject of airline travel. I really love it when you guys cruise back to see stories in the archive and even more when you comment about them. You know every one is evaluated solely for profanity or egregious nastiness to me personally and then published to the site. Same with this one. But I didn’t want it to get lost in the miasma of time, because it says something important about why the whole experience of flying domestically is so horrendous and headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes things seem arbitrary or non-sensical. Turns out they’re not.

In a lot of flights (not the longer ones I guess 1500 miles or shorter), flight attendants are required to clean the plane before they deplane and go on to next flight. And they don’t get paid for any work they do on the ground unless the door is closed, so, basically flying time. But even boarding, deplaning, cleaning and delays (5 hours or wherever) they don’t get paid for that! Not even a dime! So during delays and all that: Remember this: The crew is not getting paid at all! That’s why pre boarding is an issue as well! There has to be a line, or the company will have crewmembers working even more for free. Gate agents know better than to ask the crew if they want to start pre boarding and work a few minutes more for free… Typically they can have about 3 flights a day maybe 4, and the day can be as long as 15-16 hours, but because a lot of the work they do they don’t get paid, In the end, for a 15 hours work day they got paid for about 6 or 7 hours. As you can see the problem is a lot bigger than just bad employees or rude people. There’s the UNION telling workers to say NO when asked to work for free because management certainly doesn’t [work for free]! Then you have customers that paid a lot of money to fly and have to deal with crap and no right to complain! I really feel for the passengers! But employees are overworked, underpaid, working many hours for free. So it comes back to consumer‘s power: Write to the AIRLINE COMPANY and tell them what you think from your point of view. Do something about it! Fight to get things changed! It will take a lot of people making a lot of noise for something to be done.

So what do you say? It’s pretty clear that the people who work for the airlines are equally victimized by a) their companies and b) the FAA. There are probably other culprits too, don’t you think? Shouldn’t we, as Tim suggests, make a lot of noise?

I can’t hear you!

I fell asleep and I had a dream.

I was in the conference room of my health insurance company. It was full of people, seated in a very organized fashion around a large table. Each had a folder in front of them. There was a very gray person in a gray suit with a gray tie on presiding over the head of the table. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but they were very stern indeed.

“I want to start this meeting by asking Mr. Brown in Dental why a benefit check was sent to the McGreevey family of Sioux St. Marie, Michigan. It popped up on my screen at close of business yesterday.”

“It was a mistake, boss,” said a short, fat man with one hair artfully arranged on his pate. He was sweating.

“Well,” said the figure at the end of the table. He seemed to think about the matter for a minute. Then he took out a large revolver, aimed it at the fat man, and blew the top of his head off. A crew of men in white jumpsuits appeared out of nowhere and hauled off his body. They were followed by a cleaning crew that eradicated all evidence of his existence in a matter of seconds. “Lassiter,” he said, “Make sure Mr. Brown’s relatives don’t file for a workman’s comp claim. This was obviously an accident of his own making.” There were nods around the table.

“All right,” said the figure I had come to think of as Gray. “Report.”

They went around the table.

“I sent out the next round of letters demanding more extraneous information to the Jones family of Pittsburgh,” said the first.

“I informed the Monroes of Atlanta that all of their claims were duplicates of claims already submitted,” said the second. “It’ll take them months to untangle that situation.”

“Well,” said the third, a tall, painfully thin undertaker type in a black suit and tie. He seems inordinately proud of himself. I hated him immediately. “I sent Mr. Bing of New York City his fifth correspondence on the claims he has submitted between June and December of last year, claiming that all forms had been misplaced and demanding re-submission with original bills enclosed.” There was a gasp around the table. “I also requested that he send me some frozen hot chocolate from Serendipity,” he added with a small grin.

There was a pause around the table. Then the whole room erupted in laughter. And I woke up.

Thank goodness it was just a dream, huh? Or… was it?

Today is Thursday. It is also Ask Bing Day. Take a look. The first question is a really juicy one that afflicts just about anybody who works for a living. An ad guy writes in and complains that he has an idiot for a client (see graphic, right). What to do? Listen to the fool who pays the bills and do the wrong thing? Refuse to be a co-numbskull and maybe lose the account?

There are stupid people everywhere mingled in with the intelligent ones. A lot of the time we have to work for the former, report to them, keep their business, make them happy. If you can’t manage a client who has cheese for brains, how are you to keep your bosses in line, let alone your children and spouses?

I’m not in advertising, but I’ve had my share of people who I thought should listen to me instead of marching off a cliff into the ocean. Some of them did and some of them didn’t. Only members of the first group are still around to tell the tale. For while mean people flourish in this world, it’s harder for the operationally dumb. They need our help. And when they don’t take it, well, that’s just a crying shame.

How about you? Seen any stupid clients lately? I’m sure some of you are in banking. You might have a few stories to tell.

So for the first time I can remember, the CES public relations site does not feature a press release saying it was the biggest gathering of all time. There are a lot of interesting items on the site, all of which, I will be honest with you, are very boring to me. I don’t know why. Last year I went to CES and it was hopping, a crazy wild-west show. This year I didn’t go, and a lot of people I know didn’t go, and the news coming out of it was like warmed over mashed potatoes.

I emailed a pal of mine in the tech sector and asked him whether my feeling was right, or whether I was just being like an infant. You know how it is with kids under 3? If they don’t see something, it doesn’t exist. That’s why they like to play peek-a-boo so much. Every time you pop up, it surprises them because they didn’t know you were there at all. So that could be it. I didn’t go. So it didn’t happen. I recognize that possibility.

But my friend the wireless-head verifies my conjecture. “Have long email on this which I will forward. They are saying 140k at the high Tuesday but that was inflated. From feet on street perspective, much easier to navigate less booth babes and fewer announcements. Its like media moved in and big tech left. My guess is we’ve seen the high for ces for a while.”

Gizmodo adds another dimension, rumoring that the show may move out of Vegas when its deals for the space are up in 2011. CES not in Vegas? Would that mean that the porno show would have to move with it? And if it didn’t, what would it do without all those geeks who move from drooling about hardware to drooling about wetware?

My industry has seen the flourishing and death of a number of key conventions. The main industry gathering, for instance, is right now biting the dust due to a) too many conventions anyhow, b) reduced budgets for stupid boondoggles and c) the industry changing so that the convention floor, once filled by the great and mighty, is now populated mostly by Asian corporations that make flash drives. Once, we had to go the event. People fought over the right to take part in its panels. Now you could hear a tumbleweed roll through the aisles.

All businesses have cycles. Today’s shiny toy is tomorrow’s doorstop. The crazy conventions that attend each of our disciplines mirror the biorhythms of the industries they attract. So what’s up, do you think? Is the great eye of hotness moving on?

A fascinating story in today’s New York Times outlines how engineers in Mumbai have succeeded in constructing a $2,500 car.

It’s called the Tata, not because it’s what you may say as you toodle away from the showroom at 30 MPH, but because that’s the name of the guy who runs the company.

My first car was a Ford Maverick, in the color they called “St. Louis Blue.” I could have chosen “Thanks Vermillion” but decided against it. It cost $1,999. My Maverick had an AM radio, manual transmission, manual windows, decent horsepower, capacious trunk. I don’t remember if it had air conditioning. A lot of cars didn’t back then. It was quick and zippy and all that a new automobile should be, including the new car smell. If I had to pass a truck on the highway, it did not complain.

Now let’s look at the Tata Motors new “People’s Car.” It has a rear mounted engine with 30 horsepower. No radio. No power steering. No power windows or AC. One windshield wiper, not two. Wheel bearings strong enough to handle speeds up to 44 MPH. All for $2,500. I assume also that it is tiny and very light, since big heavy cars do not go for that price anymore.

This is clearly the shape of things to come. And that’s, you know, as it should be. If you go to Europe or some places in Northern California, you see people driving what are essentially golf carts on the freeways. Good for them! They are all saving the planet. And you know… we need this planet, don’t we? Even if we have to get around it at 35 miles per hour?

I just hope when we start seeing Tata’s new People’s Car on the highways of America, or tooling around downtown in our streets, the good people who are driving them watch out for the Range Rovers, RAM trucks and GMC monsters bearing down on them, prepared to blow them away in their backdrafts. They won’t find much protection from their hollowed out steering wheel shafts and the teeny-wenny hollow space in front that they call a trunk. Good luck to them is what I say. It’s where we’re all headed, I think. Except by the time American auto makers fabricate something like it, it will probabaly cost three times as much and have a satellite dish on the roof.

Yesterday I crossed a certain threshold. The lease on my Chrysler 300C Hemi eight-cylinder sedan having elapsed, I turned the car back to the dealership and walked away without a vehicle for the first time since I was a teenager. I have no car. I am a city resident and do not need one. I plan to use Zip Cars when I need to. Beyond that, I’m free. My carbon footprint has gone down to single digits, even though it’s still a triple EEE.

One day, though, I’m sure I’ll get a new car. I hope it gets 100 miles per gallon and does not emit bad vibes into the ecosphere and all that. I’d also like it to go from 0 to 60 in about five seconds, though. Have they invented that yet?

I’m a boomer. All the bad qualities of my generation have been well documented, but we’ll all have a lot of time to think about those. We’ll be booming around for quite a long time yet, no matter how many Gen-X dudes are sticking little pins in those tiny dolls of us they keep in their cubicles. Poor Gen-X dudes. For the most part, they haven’t really ever had a chance to run things. And now they’re getting to the point where they can feel the hot breath of all those Gen-Y types on the back of their necks.

According to Wikipedia, Generation Y is anybody born between 1981 and 1995. I see some of them starting to pop up now. I thought I would tell you about one guy in particular, because, well… he’s interesting. Let’s call him Walt.

Unlike his Boomer and Gen-X counterparts who are all digitally zoided out with gizmos and surgically implanted bluetooth suppositories and all that, Walt has no BlackBerry yet. No Bluetooth. He’s got a cell phone, of course. But it’s kind of an old one. He’s not a teenager anymore, so he doesn’t get all excited about the newest mobile phone anymore. He talks very briefly to a variety of friends who are always checking in. Conversations consist of “What’s up,” followed by plans to meet.

He goes on his e-mail maybe once a day. Doesn’t open attachments. Answers one out of four e-mails. It’s not that he’s not interested. It’s just that he’s bored. He’s no gamer, either. His old Nintendo 64  and PlayStation sit gathering dust in a corner. He doesn’t have a digital camera. He’s been given a few by his parents, but those too are somewhere indistinct at this point. He doesn’t watch much TV, although he is into DVDs of old shows he missed because he was born too late. Lately, it’s been the special anniversary issue of Twin Peaks. Also has nothing against older movies, the ones in black and white. He doesn’t download, either. Thinks the whole commercial structure of the movie and music business is squeezing all the creative life out of us.

He reads. Books. So do a lot of his friends.  And he likes Facebook and YouTube, the latter mostly because, in addition to talking cats and girls dancing drunk in their underwear, YouTube now represents the greatest trove of video history in existence. Everything that’s happened in the Arts, in politics, in business… all of it is there if you search for it right. It’s a primary source. Constant use makes people somewhat dissatisfied with secondary ones, maybe.

Anyhow, last week Walt was offered a job you’d think anybody would crave. He was asked to create and manage a new Web magazine for a major cultural institution. Not a bank or anything. A cool place, if one can still call things cool without being hopelessly out-of-it. And he said no. I can’t think of a young person I’ve met across a desk for the last 10 years who would have said no, but this kid said no.

“I don’t want to do another stupid web magazine,” he said to me. “And I don’t want to manage anybody else, either. I want to read and write and work at a job that doesn’t take all my time and get me off the path I’m on right now. I like what I’m doing. I don’t want to be tied to a desk all day doing something for somebody else.” I asked him whether he would write about his thoughts for the thing if they wanted him to, do a blog, you know. And he said, “No offense, but who needs another blog?” Can you imagine? “I’m only 21,” he said, pulling a weird, floppy hat over his unruly hair and heading down the street. “I want to do what I want to do, that’s all.”

Well, I never. I can’t remember hearing that kind of thing from somebody his age, since… High school. And you want to hear something funny? I see they now have hippies in Russia, too. That’s one of them at the top of this blog today, in fact.

Hey, Yuri! Do you know “The Times They Are A-Changin’”?

I watched all the victory speeches last night after the Iowa caucuses were done. Everybody had their own spin on why it was a good night for them, of course, and I’m not going to say much about that. We all know who did well and who didn’t. But one thing stood clear in all the speeches offered to the people of America as a branding statement for this new generation of political products: Everybody hates big bad corporations.

It was weird for me. It wasn’t that long ago that I would listen to people lathering up about big bad corporations and how they needed to be taken down a peg and go Huzzah like the rest of the gang. After 25 years in business, however, I find a different reaction bubbling up in my gut when I hear the rhetoric.

I feel bad for the big bad corporations.

This does not include some big bad corporations, of course. In particular, I have a lifelong jones against any insurance company that has ever covered me for any reason. I believe they are very good at giving compelling reasons of two kinds: 1) Reasons you should spend a lot of money protecting yourself from whatever and 2) Reasons why you can’t be paid any money if whatever happens to you.

This is particularly true of those handling my health coverage, who have historically been absolutely brilliant at requesting more data, informing me of claims that are being processed, misplacing those claims, requiring additional backup, and then telling me why they can’t reimburse me for anything except postage.

I also have a problem with companies that make land mines, or fund huge Green campaigns while turning the icecaps to mush, or fire all their American workers and move to Burkina Faso, but that may just be me. All big bad corporations aren’t on my list of favorite people is what I’m saying.

But then there was all that political speechmaking last night, and everybody on both sides of the aisle just seemed to hate business in general and all those big bad corporations in particular. And part of me wants to say, Yeah! And yet… hm…

I work for a big bad corporation. Most of my friends do too. We’re writers and lawyers and accountants and research people and editors and graphic artists and programmers and marketing and advertising folks and a lot of other things that are neither big nor bad. We do what we do. And if anything happened to our big bad corporations, we’d be SOL.

Isn’t it big bad corporations that employ people? A lot of people? And, except in some very big and bad ones, help to provide that same inadequate health insurance without which all of us would be one bad heartbeat away from total disaster? And even some stinky form of pension, too?

Isn’t it the big bad corporations that can afford to fund research and development, and give us all the cool things that we want to buy? The iPods and laptops and stuff that’s carried on them, the cars and clothes we wear, and to some extent even the food we eat and the liquor we shouldn’t drink? 

When we get to a certain point in life, and want to make more than $23,000 a year, and want to build a family or buy a fast vehicle or a house… who but a big bad corporation can pay us enough to think about such things?

Who builds the buildings we work in and the planes we fly on and the office furniture we sit on and financial instruments that make a lot of all that possible? Who would do all that if the big bad corporations were gone?

I’ll tell you one thing. Your average big bad corporation is not as powerful as you think. Its leaders sit around trying to figure out how they might squeeze another point of margin out of their business, with the cost of labor and materials and energy being so high. They worry about how to grow a little every year, which is what their investors and the Wall Street bears are constantly up their butts about. And every one of them, every single one, is made up of many little offices, many smaller enterprises, and in those many humble spaces large and small are people who rely on the big bad corporation to do well and stay healthy.

A big bad corporation is not a monolith.  And in any one there are only a couple of fat guys in gray suits. The rest of it is guys like you and me.

Yes, they are big. Yes, many of them are very, very bad. They cut our pensions and they squash our spirits and they pour crud into the air and they lie like rugs when they have to. But the sight of all these politicians piling on our big bad corporations kind of made me wince. I mean… is that kind of like the pot calling the kettle beige?

Aren’t these guys vying for control of the biggest and baddest corporation of them all?

I’ve read in a number of places recently that New Year’s resolutions are tedious and passe and pretty much purely the province of journalists, bloggers and the like. I disagree. I believe that, while smirking about them a bit, at some point during the first few days of a new year everybody secretly takes a little internal inventory and makes a couple of very soft, very tender promises to themselves about the year to come. Maybe they don’t tell anybody about it. Maybe they do. I tend to think that the unspoken and unwritten ones are the most serious.

So in that vein, I’ll tell you my New Year’s Resolutions of 2008. I believe that every single one I will be able to keep.

I resolve not to look at my BlackBerry during meals, or certainly not unless it’s really, really necessary and in no event more than four times a meal, mostly when nobody is looking, unless it’s unavoidable.

I resolve not to give any sub-prime loans to anybody. This unfortunately makes it impossible to lend any money to anybody I know, pretty much.

I resolve not to accept an excessive exit package if for some reason I am terminated from my corporate job.  That’s easy to say, of course, so I’ll be specific. I consider any amount more than $100 million in cash and future options that vest in the next three years to be highly questionable.

I will not use my cell phone to tell people where I am. “I’m at the corner of Lexington and 53rd now… okay, now I’m at Park.” That kind of thing. It’s amazing how many public conversations you hear involve discourse of that depth and sagacity. I’m not doing that.

Nor am I getting a little bluetooth thingie to put in my ear. I am by nature dorky enough and don’t need any additional dorkitude to augment mine. So that’s out.

I resolve to eat any macadamia nuts that are in any minibar that is in any hotel room that I inhabit on company business, and attempt to expense them.

I will not use PowerPoint, except in jest.

I will not, during this year, get any drunker than the drunkest person at any table.

I resolve to be kind to my subordinates, whenever possible, and to not lose my temper, except when absolutely unavoidable. If I do get angry, I will try not to yell. If I do yell, I will apologize for it afterward. Unless I really don’t want to.

I resolve to be kind to my bosses, whenever possible, and not to lose my temper, except when absolutely unavoidable. If I do get angry, I will try not to bite my tongue. If I do bite my tongue badly enough, however, I will take off work early and have a drink.

I resolve to attend no meeting that I don’t have to. Further, I will do everything possible to destroy meetings that take place for no reason, even if I am not invited, since things may transpire at those meetings that do not meet with my approval. I will always be punctual to any meeting that I do attend, as long as there is food.

I will upgrade my computer situation at least twice during the year. I’m not sure how. But I need something new every six months or so or I feel like I’m missing something. I will get any gizmo that seems too sexy to resist also. Unclear right now what that might be. But I am resolute.

Finally I resolve to read every single one of the comments that come into this page all year, every day, even the person who keeps sending me insulting comments under my own name, and post all but the most egregious, and even then I may post those if they are relatively clean and funny. I will continue to appreciate all of you for being here, without getting all mushy or anything.

And oh yeah. I’m going to try to look on the sunny side of life a bit more in ‘08.  Of course, some resolutions are easier to keep than others. We’ll see, huh?

 1. You find that your hard drive has been taken away to be copied by Office Services so that your brand new computer can be installed upon your return from the holiday break, complete with all your files and set-up materials. Yes, your hard drive is gone.
 2. On your desk is a note that spells your name wrong and has indecipherable information on it, including strange IP addresses and log-in information that is unfamiliar to you.
 3. On your screen is a message that tells you that you have no boot drive.
 4. You call the help desk and they are shocked to find out that you’re back on January 2. They are sending a man in fifteen minutes!
 5. Charles shows up. He has your boot drive. He tells you that he will be “out of your hair in ten minutes.”
 6. 45 minutes later, Charles is entering information on your sign-in screen. He is still being denied access to the network, which means no email. Charles is a large and handsome man, and occupation of your desk while he is there is neither possible nor advisable.
 7. An hour has passed. You are beginning to wonder why you came in on the Wednesday after New Year’s anyhow.
 8. Charles tells you that “your account was inadvertently eliminated from the system” during the removal of the hard drive and must be re-instated.” You ask Charles whether that means all of your personal and professional data is gone, too. He says no. You do not believe him.
 9. You sit down at your assistant’s desk and begin a blog posting entitled “Ten Things You Don’t Want To Happen on Your First Day Back in 2008.”
 10. And, you know, that’s what you’re doing right now.

Happy New Year, everybody. I’ll let you know how it went if I ever get back online again.