I woke up this morning and didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t know what it was, but something was definitely off. Then I logged on and saw what the problem was.

My mailbox is over its size limit again.

“Your mailbox has exceeded one or more size limits set by your administrator,” said the message from my administrator. Oh no, I thought. And I’d been trying so hard.

“Your mailbox size is 523334 KB,” he continued curtly, and rather churlishly, too, in my opinion. ”You will receive a warning when your mailbox reaches 500000 KB.You may not be able to send or receive new mail until you reduce your mailbox size. To make more space available, delete any items that you are no longer using or move them to your personal folder file (.pst). Items in all of your mailbox folders including the Deleted Items and Sent Items folders count against your size limit. You must empty the Deleted Items folder after deleting items or the space will not be freed. See client Help for more information.”

Naturally, this was very disappointing to me. I thought I had the problem solved. Last month, when my system administrator brought this up for the six or seventh time since late 2006, I thought I took the proper steps to get myself in proper shape.

First, I began a program of aggressive daily deletion exercise. Working my way from the bottom of my Sent Mail folder, I carefully weeded out all the stuff that I no longer needed: newsletters, daily and weekly industry data sheets, self-congratulatory attaboys, relics of corporate thanking circles. You know those; forty messages with everybody thanking everybody else for doing their jobs and you’re on the cc list?

Then I went into my deleted items folder and deleted all my deleted items, then deleted the deleted deletions. I could feel myself shrinking by the minute, slicing notches off my digital belt in real-time, and I can tell you it certainly felt good.

Finally, I put my received mail inbox into chronological order and liposucked everything from 2007 into the garbage. After that, of course, I had to deleted the deletions and delete the deleted deletions again. That came pretty naturally. Once you begin a regimen like this, it becomes part of your life, hopefully, and you don’t need to be reminded of your commitment.

That was several weeks ago. Since then, I thought I’d been keeping up with my program. That’s why this morning’s missive from my system administrator was so distressing. I guess it’s harder to stay electronically fit than I thought. You start the day with good intentions, then you get into something with a lawyer, or a journalist, or one of the folks in Accounting, God help me, and pretty soon you’ve got a chain going that plumps you up and leaves your whole situation in terminal shape.

I suppose there are two things I can do, and I’m going to do both. First, I’m going to get back in there and work my inbox as hard as I can, get it as lean and muscular as I possibly can. There are limits, of course. I’ve been around a long time. I’m no kid who nurses twenty or thirty incoming messages a day. I’m a mature business person, with several hundred bite-sized servings coming across my transom every eight or ten hours, along with a few big hanks of steaming beef as well. That’s why I’m also calling Bob, our system adminstrator, and asking him yet one more time to let out my wasteline a little.

Just a tad, Bob! Like, just a couple thousand MB, I’m beggin’ ya! After that, I’ll be good! I promise! You’ll see!  

I have an idea to stimulate the economy. This weekend, let’s all go out and spend some money.

Yes, I know a lot of us don’t have as much to spread around as we used to. But usually, we have something. Ten bucks. Twenty. Those who are more fortunate should bear a greater responsibility. I mean, it’s quite clear that putting your money in the bank isn’t as safe as we once thought it was. And the return for that investment, after taxes? It’s barely worth mentioning.

No, far better, I think, to go down to your local retail store and pump some cash back into our mutual economic system. And while I love the big chain stores for convenience and price, I also believe it may be time for us all to start doing our civic duty by supporting the little stores that are more expensive, less convenient, but whose revenue flows into the pockets of Mr. and Ms. Neighborperson.

I know a town, for instance, that had two little bookstores. One day a major chain moved into the strip mall right next door to Little Bookstore #1. Six months later, Little Bookstore #1 had to close. Boo hoo, right? That’s the way it goes. Guess what happened then. The big chain closed the branch that had put Little Bookstore #1 out of business and applied for a permit to open a bigger, newer branch in town. Guess where? Right. Directly across a parking lot from Little Bookstore #2.

The good news is that this particular community is filled with weirdos that hate big corporations, and so Little Bookstore #2 is doing fine so far. And the big chain, I now read, is having trouble in the face on onslaughts from Amazon. So time will tell.

A few years ago, in this same town, there was a hardware store in the main square. It was a funky place and smelled like wet dog and old mustard. A large super-mega-transactional emporium devoted to home improvement moved in not far away. Today the space that was once occupied by that cramped, antiquated hardware store has a swank men’s clothing store in it. A while back I went in and asked them if they had socks. They did indeed. How much were the socks? $40 a pair. I didn’t get any socks.

Thanks to ITunes (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN), all the music stores are pretty much gone. And there aren’t very many mom-and-pop food stores, either. Those that do exist, however, do tend to offer food that was grown a little closer to home than your average Ring Ding. I hear that can be good for you. In addition to the Ring Dings, of course.

But frankly, I don’t really care where you shop. I don’t really care where I shop. I just plan to try to get out there every day I can and give something back to the system.

This weekend, I think I’ll get some mulch. It’s spring. Who couldn’t use a little mulch? There’s one garden/hardware store not all that far away from us. True, it’s very disorganized there and the employees have been around so long, and are generally so confused and indolent, that you can never find anything. The prices are high. The woman behind the cash register is blind. But it’s been in the same family for generations and there’s a Japanese place next door that we like to go to, owned by a family that I think just got off the boat. If I’m lucky, I’ll get out of the day for under a hundred bucks. That’s sort of what I feel comfortable doing right now. How about you?

Like, if any of you could purchase a couple million American-made cars this weekend, could you please do so? You’d have the thanks of a grateful nation, that’s for sure.

The first story this morning is about Warren Spector, who was fired from Bear Stearns (BSC) last summer in the first inkling of where we all were headed. As CNN Money reports this morning:

The former Bear Stearns co-president was one of the first heads to roll in the credit crisis when he was ousted last August. But being fired could have saved Spector’s fortune. As part of his resignation (a move suggested by then-boss Jimmy Cayne), Spector was forced to vest most of his stock options and restricted stock by December 28, 2007, when the shares closed at $87.35. That amounted to a little more than a million shares, according to the bank’s 2007 proxy statement, which would have been worth about $91.1 million.

Warren Spector gets fired. Ends up with $91 million. Even after taxes you’d have to say that was a nice payday.

Story #2: This morning the cafeteria workers who labor in the neighborhood lunchrooms are demonstrating outside a local building. Their employer has been resisting their demands for higher wages and benefits for quite some time, and they’ve taken their noisy, raucous drumbeat to a number of different locations recently. I walked by them just now. They don’t have a very good flyer. None of the issues are recounted in it. Just a large message in red: FOR OUR FAMILIES.

The corporations whose lunchrooms are served by this Union rear high above the street around here, each home to any number of guys who will get more when they are fired than the entire group now out on the street will earn in six lifetimes.

Of course, everybody suffers in a tough economy. Spector, for instance, was probably forced to leave a lot of long-term compensation on the table. I’m sure that rankles him in the dim hours before morning, when he thinks about what he might need to do in the future. For his family, you know.

This young fellow shows up in my office the other day, all bright-eyed and bushy-haired. Is about to graduate from a fine and sufficiently prestigious college and is in the full flush of panic that afflicts kids these days when they actually attain the freedom they have dreamed of for so long. I guess the days when guys honked around for a couple of years after graduation are gone. Everybody’s got to get on a career track right away. I suppose that’s okay. But I do find it a little disspiriting to look at the shiny, squeaky face of some 22-year-old aspirant as they tell me, “I want to go into Marketing!” 

The truth is, great careers don’t always result just because people have hit the rails from the get-go. Bill Gates started in a garage. Howard Hughes flew planes. Musicians and physicists start young at their chosen profession, but that’s because, frankly, they probably couldn’t do anything else.  I’d like to think that a person should have some time to figure out what they want to do in life, and while they do that they should endure a succession of demeaning jobs. But I could be wrong. I can’t say that I got much out of driving that cab in Boston for a year, except for a bunch of weird stories. 

Anyhow, there’s this hopeful individual sitting in front of me and he’s looking for career advice. He majored in one of the fine arts and plans to abandon that immediately and go into a career of some kind. The question is, what? And what the hell am I supposed to tell him? Let’s look at the options:

Wherever you go, the bottom crustacean on the food chain usually has to sit around getting the lobster immediately above him a cup of coffee. I see kids sitting at desks in the hope that one day they will get to be something that means something to them.  

Here’s my view. God created youth for people to do what they wanted to do. When you get a little bit older, life closes in on you and, caught in a variety of strictures produced by our ambitions, desires and needs, we each take on responsibilities that require us to do a bunch of stuff we don’t wanna. By so doing, we get cars and kids and spouses and computer hardware (AAPL). But if we don’t blow it out for the first five or six years of our tenure as adults, we never get those years back, we crave them later, and we end up stupid and crazy, trying to grab back the amorphous dreams and feeling of freedom that we possessed all too briefly when we were 22. Enter Stan O’Neal golfing while Rome burned. And of course there’s always Eliot Spitzer.

I told the kid to go into Internet content, particularly short-form video. I figure there’s enough crazy smoke around that discipline to keep him young for a good long time. Just ask the folks who work on this site! You guys are having a ton of fun, right? 

On Friday, I offered a little fable full of love and appreciation for the pet that has won my heart: my MacBook Pro. It was an homage to The Nightingale, a story by Hans Christian Anderson, which is a story about an Emperor who falls in love with a mechanical toy bird and spurns the flesh and blood warbler with whom he had enjoyed a long and happy relationship. I thought it was a sweet little fable, pathetic in its own way. I mean, what kind of fool falls in love with his Laptop? Shouldn’t I really get a schnauzer and lighten up on the emotions I’m investing in an inanimate object?

Be that as it may, my story contained some mild complaints about the new plaything in my life — my MacBook Air. I didn’t say anything really nasty about the thing. That would have been impossible. It’s a great little tool and I like it a lot. What I don’t like is:

I didn’t even get into the last bullet in my tiny parable, because I wasn’t sure if that was just me. Over the weekend, nerd that I am, I read a bunch of magazines and web postings on this subject, all of which revealed a host of angry people railing about this very issue and taking Apple (AAPL) to task for launching a new OS without proper testing.

At any rate, what was interesting to me about all this was how ferocious and immediate were the contemptuous, partisan, ill-tempered replys to my tender tale of affection and loyalty. Not all of you, no. Many actually wrote in to say that they wept when the narrator of the tale returned to his first love, the bigger, clunkier but more substantial Laptop.

But the rest of you, wow. You would think that I had stepped on a crack on purpose and broken their mothers back most heartlessly. Why didn’t I get the new migration route!? What am I, a moron? Hey! Didn’t I know that you could plug all kinds of peripherals into the supplied USB port? What kind of schweck was I to criticize this apex of contemporary achievement?! Dolt! Idiot!

This nation is right now embroiled in any number of screwups wrought by people who stayed the course when they should not have, who failed to listen to criticism when it was offered, who placed blind enthusiasm over judgment.  

Hey, people? Nobody is more immersed in the Mac universe than I. In fact, those who are close to me are frankly concerned about my tendency to solve problems by purchasing hardware from Cupertino. But that doesn’t mean I believe that those guys can do no wrong. The fact is, Leopard’s printer drivers blow. And so does the Air’s actual battery life.

There, I said it. You want to make something of it?

Once upon a time there was a Laptop (AAPL) that belonged to a mid-sized wazir of the realm. It was a rather large laptop as laptops go, with a big, roomy heart filled with all kinds of good things, an impressive collection of ports, and big, strong hardware that could stand the test of any situation into which its owner might put it.

The Laptop had served its owner well for many moons and was proud of itself. “There is no function I cannot perform should my master demand it,” it said to itself at times when it was charging, at rest after a long day at the office, on the couch at home, or on the road in a random hotel room somewhere. “Be it spreadsheet or word processing or even photography, I am up to the job.” And then the Laptop slept as its owner did the same.

One day, when the market was doing nothing and American business was slogging through another day of senescence, lethargy and malaise, its owner was watching CNBC at his desk when a commercial came on. It showed a slender, lovely hand inserting a notebook computer into what looked like an 11″x14″ envelope. This Notebook was so thin and light that it only took one little hand to slip it into that small enclosure, and was silver and carried a sexy logo to which the owner had already formed a symbiotic attachment.

“Wow,” said the owner, “Yum yum yum.” And so are major purchasing decisions always made.

And so the owner went to the online store that dispenses happiness for those who seek it in those quarters, and pre-ordered the bright and gleaming Notebook, along with the remote DVD drive that was necessary because the tiny unit did not have one built in. “That is a small compromise to make, given its amazing lightness and elegance,” said the owner to himself. He also acquired all the necessary chargers, since his older ones were not quite right either. “All new hardware requires these kinds of initial investments,” the owner added to himself.

Ironically, it was from the Laptop that the owner ordered all this new gear. “That’s all right,” the sad Laptop told itself as it conveyed the credit card information to the online store. “This is just a little Notebook my master can utilize when he’s making short trips to the coast. Due to its tiny size, it cannot do all the wonderful things of which I am capable!” And the Laptop felt sanguine, as we all do for some reason even when it’s not particularly warranted.

Then one day in the spring the new notebook arrived in a big box with the logo on it, the one for which the owner had already developed a drooling affection. And he opened up the box and there was the wafer-thin, juicy, sexy little Notebook. “Ah!” said the owner in a paroxysm of joy, and he held the thing to his bosom and the music swelled in his imagination and all was right with the world.

That night, the owner put the Laptop on a shelf in his closet. “Oh my,” said the Laptop, looking around at the shelf on which it had been placed next to an IBM (IBM) ThinkPad and an old HP (HP) printer with nothing but serial ports. “This don’t look good.”

Several weeks went by. The owner and the Notebook went everywhere with each other and for a while they were very happy. True, he found the lack of a firewire port very annoying at first, since it made the transfer of data from his other computers — once the soul of simplicity — into a complex wireless process that he detested. And his face fell when he also realized that all of his remote hard drives no longer worked with the new Notebook, making his photos and iTunes folders suddenly difficult to access.

But the Notebook was indeed very light and easy to transport, and people did notice it wherever he went, which made him feel very good about himself (at least for a while, until everybody else started having one). He barely complained when the wireless feature on the new computer had difficulty reading his existing network. After only two nights of cursing and yelling, that problem was solved as well. So he was happy for a while.

Then one day he took the Notebook on a transcontinental flight. For some reason, on this particular journey, he was not upgraded to Business and was therefore consigned to a Coach seat that had no power outlet. “This will be no problem,” he said rather smugly to himself, “since my new Notebook is advertised to have five hours of battery life.” As the plane took off from New York, he took out the silver platter and began working.

After about ten minutes, he saw the battery indicator slip from the original 5:00 hours quite abruptly down to 3:25. “Hm!” he exclaimed to himself. “That can’t be right.” He turned off the wireless feature and dimmed the screen in hopes of extending battery life but within a few moments the indicator had now slipped to 2:20. “Well,” he muttered to nobody in particular, “This bites.”

In the end, the owner got about three hours of use out of the Notebook, perhaps a little less. In the old days, he would simply have swapped out a new battery into his old Laptop, which was now languishing in the closet back in New York. But the new Notebook, as a concession to weight and overall bulk, had a built-in battery that could not be replaced with a fresh one and required a full charge before it could pop into maximum life again. The owner said nothing. But something shifted in his heart.

When he returned to New York, he put the Notebook on his nightstand and plugged it in. “You’re cute,” he said to it, running his hand along its sleek, smooth skin. Then he went to the closet and got the Laptop down. “Hello old friend,” he said to the Laptop.

He opened it up and remembered a few things, like how many tunes he had stored on its capacious hard drive, and how he really didn’t mind the old operating system, which somehow felt a bit more solid and well-baked, and how it was nice to have 30 gigs of photos at his disposal, and how much he appreciated the ability to watch movies and burn DVDs from a dedicated optical drive, not to mention how nice it is to have every port a person might need right at one’s fingertips.

Today, the owner still takes the little Notebook here and there, like when he’s going to Starbucks (SBUX)for a cup of coffee and a few hours on the web, or perhaps when he’s definitely upgraded transcontinentally to a seat that for sure has a power jack. The rest of the time, however, the Laptop is still #1 in his life and will be for quite some time to come… unless he gets really serious about the Big Mother Desktop he’s had his eye on for a while.

But that, my friends, will be another story entirely.

Word comes today that the British billionaire Joseph Lewis is going to take actionto protect his investment in Bear Stearns (BSC), in which he holds a significant share.

Perhaps the most amazing part of this story is that just days before JP Morgan (JPM) struck the deal to acquire Bear Stearns for several thousand cases of two-buck Chuck, Mr. Lewis bought a bunch of the failing bank for $55 per share.

That’s a significant error in somebody’s judgment, and exactly the kind of thing that I have done during my entire investment career, always on the good advice of people who know something about the market. They don’t call me The Cooler for nothing.

Years ago, my company made an investment in a provider of business information services. I thought it was a heck of a company and still do. At that time, the service was owned by a larger corporation, a holding company that looked like a clear winner. I investigated and decided to make a plunge, purchasing what was then for me a significant position — probably about $5,000, I can’t really remember. The day I bought it, it went from $20 to $18, then after a few months drifted down like a wilting rose into a stinking weed to less than $6, where I dumped it for a loss.

This process repeated itself over and over again with each of my investments. For instance, a few years ago I decided to stop gambling with high-risk securities and go for a conservative portfolio that included GE (GE), IBM (IBM), GM (GM) and a host of other long-term stocks representing the spine upon which our nation’s strength is built. How could that fail? And yet, of course, it did fail, fail most spectacularly, as the market went nuts for digital foie gras and gave meat and potatoes a big fat yawn.

Finally, a couple of months ago, I decided that at least a small portion of my puny hoard should go to a company that was destined to fly high for the duration, never splitting, always building value. So I took a small, dormant IRA and put it all in Google (GOOG), which was then trading at $700. Not one analyst at the time said that I should watch my step. Go look up its price right now. You can Google it if you want.

So Good Luck to you, Joseph Lewis. It looks like you’ve got the will, the spunk and the resources to fight the inevitable hand of fate. And who knows? You may succeed. One of us losers has to get lucky some time, I guess.

Until then… any of you have any horror stories to tell?

I’ve been in business for about 5,427 dog years and at no time during my career has there ever been a day when somebody wasn’t worried about what some security analyst was writing about us. This factoid stretches over six iterations of four separate companies, with enough corporate permutations to confuse a particle physicist.

“Bob Weasel of Finster-Koolaid says we’re off on our guidance and won’t make our EBITDA for the quarter!” the CFO will write while forwarding the latest analysis from Weasel, who long ago decided to take a negative turn on our stock because it differentiates him from the other analysts and gets him quotes in the Wall Street Journal.

“What are we going to do about it?” people will cry. And of course there’s nothing you can do about it. Weasel has every right to his take. Its can’t be corrected, either, even if he’s wrong, because Weasel’s opinion is based on a deep understanding of the marketplace, our business sector, and the economy.

Ha!

Weasel and his kind are, as I am sure you know, generally found to be employees of banking institutions. Real banks. Investment banks. Naturally, you know, the research side is (relatively recently) well-separated from the side that actually invests in stuff, but still. Who’s going to argue with Finster-Koolaid? It’s a division of Omnivorous Potentate, the largest investment bank in this brane of the cosmos!

A few years ago, the former CEO of a former form of a former corporate entity that morphed into one of my prior corporate entities appeared at a conference of these geniuses. Granted, Bob was a loser. He had bad affect. Still, the company had a lot going for it. But the security analysts didn’t like Bob’s style. So within 30 minutes of the close of his presentation, our stock went down like Eliot Spitzer. 

People went off to Froggies Tavern early that day, I can tell you. Because those guys ruled. And we drooled, for a long time afterwards. Then a new guy came in that people liked, for whatever reason. And our stock went up. Same company. Actually, slightly worse off, if I remember correctly. Go figure.

So now we look around us and the very same guys who were telling us why we sucked hose water, boy, are they drinking from the other side of the tap. All the great intellects who said people should divest this or that, or that such-and-such would never grow, or that management needed a kick in the kiester… they represent firms that are hawking up huge chunks of lung every day!

Where were these Einsteins when their companies were lending more money than they had to sub-prime borrowers? Were they any less shocked than the rest of us when the piper came to call?

In retrospect, who the hell were they to tell anybody what to invest in, or any corporation what they should or should not do? And why is anybody still listening to any of them?

I just had a root canal. I went in at 9:30 AM and came out at 10:25. Cost me $1,900. It was worth it, particularly since I have dental coverage… I think.

Root canal has come a long way. The X-Ray, for instance, is digital. No film. They shoot, and up on a TV screen pops my tooth, which I broke on a piece of chicken over the weekend.

Don’t ask me how you break your tooth on a piece of chicken. All I know is that I heard a crunch and there was that weird feeling that everything was not okay. I realized I had just eaten the most expensive piece of chicken in history. The Novocaine, if that’s still what they use, was injected via a mechanical needle of some kind that calculates the resistance of your muscles and calibrates itself accordingly. It didn’t hurt. I mean, it didn’t feel good, mind you, but it was not the whole Marathon Man experience that you’d expect.

After a few minutes, they went in there. They were done three songs into Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man, which I selected as the album I wanted pumped into my head via the Bose noise-cancelling headphones they provided to make my stay in the chair more comfortable. It was all over by the end of “There Ain’t No Cure for Love.”

I went into the little office afterwards and they ran my card for $1,900. “We’ll handle your insurance company and they’ll send you a check,” said Ellen, who runs the business end of the place.

“Right,” I thought. And that was that. I have to go back in a couple of weeks for a following up. In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to getting that check for $104 from Aetna.

I’m sure your eyes goggled when you saw it too. JP Morgan (JPM) paid a couple or three hundred million for a company worth incalculably more. It’s stunning. And while one may wonder about the executive competence of those who engineering this catastrophe, those who simply showed up every day to do what was expected of them are now faced with an uncertain fate, one that has afflicted working people since the first Etruscans noticed a large group of Romans heading over the hill, and probably before.

Guys, you were once a nation. Now you are a duchy under a much larger corporate flag. Soon there will be fewer of you, and those of you who survive to wear the new colors will have obeyed certain rules, rules that will not guarantee your success but will enhance your somewhat slender chances. Here are a few suggestions from one who has been through it a few thousand times:

Know the lay of the land. It is possible that the world has moved on so completely that acquisitors no longer even feign collegiality. When I was a kid, when a company took you over they paid a lot of lip service to how great things were going to be for everybody. I know, because I was in the lip service department. “We have two great cultures here and together one plus one will equal four!” That kind of thing. These protestations were often accompanied by word the expenses would be “rationalized,” but such warnings also went hand-in-hand with assurances that resulting merged departments would be “stocked with the best both companies have to offer.” This is hogwash. When Rome wins, Romans take over. So get ready to become one or die as a lowly Briton.

Total merger may not be inevitable, however. Your colony may be permitted to exist under its own name, with its own government loyal to the Czar across the street. This will go better for you, since you can easily transform yourself into part of the transitional team that’s helping to deliver everybody to their individual fate. Either way, as of this morning you will need to eradicate your persona as a Bear guy and begin the transformation into a true Morganian.

Believe nothing you read. Accept no assurances. You are in a fight for your life and must now play by your own rules. Wolves — solitary, smart and predatory — do better than dogs.

How do they dress? What time do they come in to the office? Where do they eat for lunch? Think about these things. If you’re not executed in the first mass action, you may need these kinds of insights.

Who do you know that’s doing well in Rome? You’ve been in the game for a while. There must be somebody. Reach out and touch them. Make yourself known. Let it be perceived that if the new guys need a hand, you’ve got two, and are not encumbered by sentiment, prior loyalty or grief. You are ready to move on and are looking for ways to do it that are congenial to the new world order.

If you have a major project that even a blind man can see will be worthwhile, redouble your efforts. I am certain that, even as it bubbles under the water, the continent of Bear Stearns had things going on that could still make money for somebody. If your little island of productivity is bobbing on top of the water when the victors come around looking for survivors, so much the better for you.

Look for a new boss. Your new boss may be the same as your old boss, by the way. In my experience, your superior officers will be necessary for a while, so don’t assume that every one of them is toasted. But keep your eyes open and your heart empty.

Finally: Wait. Be very patient. And have courage. It is difficult to merge two gigantic entities. Your new masters will need your firm to perform, and will be looking for guys who can keep things going while they decide who shall live and who shall enter the land of decruitment.

Be cool. Calm. Acutely aware of opportunities and pitfalls. When they do move on you all, they will probably begin by offering packages of some kind to those of a certain level whose jobs once meant something to somebody. Those packages can often be negotiated by those willing to be a pain in the infrastructure. Do not leap before you look.

And each morning as you wake up, and remember that your country is no more, also keep in mind that many city states have fallen before yours, that survivors of defunct cultures now populate a host of brave new worlds.

Just ask the guys who used to work for Netscape. Many of them are doing quite well, I hear.

I’m at a restaurant for dinner the other night and at a corner table I see Lefkowitz, this guy I know from LA. He’s got a certain look down cold which I guess we’ll have to call the “LA in NY” look. It consists mostly of a suit and an open-collared shirt.

I hasten to add this is the “Executive LA in NY look” because Internet entrepreneurs and actors from the left coast don’t sport this particular fashion package. They are more the black t-shirt, black slacks with butch belt and unstructured sport coat look, with possibly a pair of $800 prescription sun glasses on a neck cord or chain.

The really successful right-brain types actually do without the sport coat entirely and just show up in what they had lying around on the floor from last night. You have to be in the eight figures to be able to do that bi-coastally.

At any rate, Lefkowitz was in the aforementioned executive garb looking cool and dreamy with his slightly rumpled silk shirt under a perfectly natty suit that never saw a rack. Somewhere between the appetizer and the main course I figure what the hey, I’ll go over and say hi to the guy. I don’t know him very well, but we occasionally are on the same e-mail chain together. Why not log a minute of face time?

So I go over and as I approach I see that his face is covered with about three days of stubble — not a micro-managed mini stubble thing you get with one of those special razors, no, the guy is basically walking around unshaven. It’s not a good look for him. His growth is uneven, and unlike his hair it’s turned kind of white. There’s quite a bit of fuzz on his chin, a couple of patches on his neck, all in all not an attractive sight.

There’s a reason why men shave. It changes the aspect of the entire persona. Sometimes when I’m out and about on a weekend, I’ll see a person I know from the office walking around with a load of stubble. Who’s that guy? I think. Do I know him?

“Hey, Lefkowitz,” I say to him. Does he think he looks good? It’s clear he made a definite decision NOT to shave. It’s a pretty nice restaurant. He’s walking around with at least $3,000 worth of duds on his back.

“Hey, Bing,” he says. We exchange a few pleasantries and I go back to my table.

“What’s up with the grizzled thing?” I ask Forbisher, my dinner companion that evening who, like me, does a fair amount of business in the Los Angeles area now and then.

“Lefkowitz?” he says. “That’s his New York look. Haven’t you noticed? A bunch of the LA guys don’t shave when they’re in New York.”

Now that he mentioned it, I had seen it before. They come here. They’re awesome. They don’t shave. At our lunch places, I’ve seen movie moguls who make billions walking around like my uncle Al after he spent a night at the track. All that’s missing is the Pendleton bathrobe hanging open.

I figure this: it’s a statement of power. It’s trying to convey the message, “You may live here, but we’re not impressed. We rule out there. We rule here. In fact, we’re not even going to shave for you. That’s how much we don’t care about your opinion. You’re nerds in suits and ties and squeaky faces. We’re the cool kids and we can do what we want.”

Fine. I get it now. So here’s what I’m going to do and I suggest you do the same: The next time we’re in LA, we don’t shave either. Also, we don’t bathe. After that, if this nonsense continues, we neglect to comb our hair. See how they like that.

Of course, LA is a competitive town. They may retaliate in kind and, on their next visit here, wear their pyjamas to lunch. In that case, we’ll have to consider an escalation of some sort. Maybe they’d like it if we appeared at The Ivy wearing our underwear on the outside?

Everybody can tell you where he or she was when they first heard about it. When I saw the headline, I thought maybe that somebody at The Onion got a hold of the New York Times front page. Eliot Ness caught with hookers? How could such a thing be possible? It was like Moses being caught with Pharoah’s daughter. Wait. That happened too.

The fact is, none of us should have been all that surprised by it, least of all those of us who work in business. Eliot Spitzer has simply demonstrated once again that those who rise to the top of organizations are very often the most demented, conflicted individuals in any group.

Symptoms of powerful and influential people across all professional spectra include, but are not limited to: 

• Grandiosity: Often displayed in a cavalier belief that one will not be caught doing the things that other people would be punished for;
• Arrogance: Similar to grandiosity, but with a slightly nastier edge and more deleterious effect on other people;
• Cruelty: Bullies abound in senior management of all business entities, including politics, and nobody was more of a bully at his job than Mr. Spitzer. Dramatic bully behavior almost always goes hand in hand with other crazy pathologies, including the desire to be submissive in non-business situations, the way that masochism often accompanies its more sadistic counterpart;
• Addiction: Booze. Drugs. Work. These people do nothing in moderation once they get hooked on their substance of choice. In Spitzer’s case, it was a certain kind of illicit sexual transaction. I’m betting he’s been at it since it didn’t matter.
• Bifurcated personality:  This enables the big dude to prosecute prostitution rings with vigor and a certain moral imperative while at the same time keeping Kristen holding on Line 2.
• Rigidity of Character: Necessary for guys who run military-style organizations, but interestingly coupled with…
• Inconsistency: Says one thing one day then immediately does the exact opposite the next.

The only question that remains for those who work for such people and vote for them when they run is why we continue to be grossed out, shocked and scandalized when the very personality attributes that got them to the top manifest themselves in questionable form.

Word comes this morning that AOL will purchase Bebo, the social networking site, for $850 million. This works out to about $21 per user. I believe also that the founders of the site will leave, each taking with them enough money to choke a horse.

Now, Bebo is a great company and I’m sure is worth every penny that AOL is paying for it, and the strategic benefits to both are very clear. Still, it’s got to give you pause. None of these social networking sites — or YouTube, either, for that matter — is producing the kind of revenue, let alone profit, that would justify the enormous prices for which they have been selling.

This leads to one inexorable conclusion: it is possible to now sell a business for a virtually infinite multiple of cash flow.

I believe that I, Bing, represent just such a business. And smaller investors, with less capacity for debt in this challenging market, could acquire me for a much more reasonable sum.

I am right now developing a prospectus for my friends at Allen & Co. They are unaware of this as yet, but it’s coming along nicely, and if Herb would return my calls I’m sure I could get something started. We could get a fishing expedition going almost immediately after they leak news of the potential deal to a number of their close associates in the media.  A whisper here, a murmur there… and Boom! We’d be off and running.

Lacking that documentation at the moment, the details of the transaction are still a bit murky, but the outlines are clear enough.

Assets of the new BingCo include the growing community surrounding my content, which is clearly monetizeable, with excellent demographics and psychographics, along with unparalleled stickiness. The business itself has very low overhead, consisting of two founders, one being Mr. Bing himself and the other being a public relations professional whose identity he prefers to remain a closely-guarded secret.

Growth potential for the distribution side of this valuable, non-fungible content is enormous, as big as the world wide web, in fact, and includes thousands of sites that will take advertising-supported content for free. Naturally, advertising growth is still a challenging issue, but that’s equally true of all sites that are selling for nine, ten or eleven figures, with most of those figures being a zero.

Liabilities are also few, and consist mostly of the founders’ inability to get anything done after about 7 PM, for a variety of reasons we need not go into here. The company, as yet, is privately held, so there will be no Board or regulatory approvals necessary.

The price of this growing, thriving enterprise has yet to be ascertained, but like all user communities it has nowhere to go but up. At this moment, there is very little revenue, even less profit. All there is is a brand and a number of people who sort of recognize it.

Let’s start the bidding at $25 million. I figure that should provide the F.U. money the principals have been seeking for many years.

1. When I heard that Eliot Spitzer had resigned, I felt…

a) Happy, because one more scoundrel had got what was coming to him.
b) Sad, because this society should be more forgiving of flawed humanity.
c) Disappointed, because I wanted the story to go on for a while!

2. Several tabloid newspapers took a very harsh tone with the moral outrage perpetrated on our civilization by this supposed paradigm of virtue (Mr. Spitzer), while at the same time displaying multiple pictures of sexy women in skimpy bathing suits ostensibly associated with this affair. I find this phenomenon…

a) Disgusting and every bit as hypocritical as Mr. Spitzer.
b) Sad but not very surprising. Isn’t that how they sell papers?
c) Really cool. I’m just sorry that it may be over now. I hope they find client #8 and show all his special friends too!

3.  Which is the worst…

a) Having sex with prostitutes.
b) Lying about secret intelligence in order to justify a war.
c) Over-enforcement of Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.

4. Which political or business leader is the LEAST morally reprehensible?

a) Vlad Putin
b) Vlad the Impaler
c) Eliot Spitzer, although not recently

5. Thomas Jefferson is now known to have had sex with Sally Hemmings, a woman who was not his wife, and she in fact bore him at least one and maybe more children. There is no evidence that public funds were involved, but there might have been. If you were alive during the early 19th Century, and had been made aware of that situation, would you have called for Mr. Jefferson’s resignation?

a) Yes, we should all live under one standard and obey the moral and legal laws.
b) No, Jefferson was pretty terrific and where would America have been without him?
c) Really? Were there pictures?

6. John F. Kennedy was a beloved young President but also known to be something of a sex addict who never passed a closet without shoving a chambermaid into it. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but his liaison with Marilyn Monroe is now pretty well documented, if you believe that kind of thing, as was his constant, incessant philandering.

Actually, he had so much going on in this regard that he made Eliot Spitzer look like Mother Theresa, and by that we mean no disrespect to Mother Theresa at all, it’s just a comparison. At the same time, the news media knew all about this stuff but disregarded it, that being the standard of the day. Should the media at that time have reported on what they knew? And should JFK then been forced to resign?

a) Yes, definitely. What a cad! Why did Jackie even stick around?
b) What, and miss the Bay of Pigs?
c) Man, this is getting better and better!

7. Other great leaders of the 20th Century who had long-standing lovers known to journalists but unknown to the public (and perhaps their spouses) include Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. If they had lived during this time in history, they would undoubtedly have been exposed and held up to public censure. Should they have resigned?

a. Yes. They all should resign. All people in public life who are caught doing illegal, nasty things should resign. It’s pretty simple. Why are you perseverating on this? Shut up!
b. Obviously not. What would our world be like right now if Eisenhower and FDR hadn’t steered us through WW II. Who cares who they were screwing around with?
c. I should get out more.

8. Are there things in your life that you hope nobody ever finds out about, actions you have taken of which you are not proud?

a) No. I always do the right thing and expect others to do the same, within reason.
b) Of course there are. And given the way the media now works, those things make me unsuitable for public office.
c) You mean right now?

9. If you were caught in the spotlight and shown to have a problem with drugs, sex, alcohol, finances, etc., you would…

a) Resign my position and apologize to everybody, forever.
b) Explain myself as best as I could to those whose trust I abused, then try to keep my life together as much as possible, including my family and my job, in that order.
c) Go to rehab. Everybody forgives anybody who goes to rehab. If Spitzer had gone into rehab immediately he would probably still be Governor.

Scoring: You can score if you want. Just don’t get caught.

I want to thank you all for your passionate, thoughtful, sometimes amusing and generally quite tough comments on the status of Elliot Ness/Spitzer. My favorite, somewhere down in the middle, was from one of my regular correspondents who remarked, “Your an idiot.” 

I suppose this situation will play itself out over the next few weeks and months, displacing, for a time, even Britney from the harsh glare of public morality. And in the end, I’m sure everything will work out as it should. At this point, however, I have to say that in spite of all the good reasons not to, even though he is, without question, a horrible hypocrite and whoremaster and all that? I feel sorry for Eliot Spitzer. Not because he deserves it. But because, if I got in trouble, I would hope that I do.

When I was nine years old, my mother and father gave me a beautiful jacket with suede elbow patches. The day after I received it, I lost it at school. I remember, more than 40 years later, the moment I realized that I had no idea where it was. I knew that when I got home, my father would say, “Where’s your new jacket?” And I would have to say, “I don’t know.” I never got it back, by the way. But that’s sort of beside the point. The thing we’re talking about is the eight hours I had to endure before anybody but me knew that the jacket was lost.

First of all, I felt like throwing up the entire time. Then there was the cold, and the chills. The thoughts of suicide. The feeling of rejection by the cosmos. The truth of existence loomed enormous in my sight. The universe does not care. Even the good, when they are flawed, are punished. In fact, the good are more often punished more severely than the bad.

We all do bad things. Even the best among us, those who work their whole lives to be without sin, feel burdened by it. I guess they feel that while they’re pretty much indemnified from prosecution in this sphere, they’re going to catch it in the next. The rest of us? We hurt those we love? We do what we need to do to get money, kicks, sex. Perhaps there are those who do nothing desperate in those pursuits. Let me know when you find one. I’ll avoid them.

Spitzer is ridiculous. To cut such a high profile as a paradigm of virtue? What a hoot! At the same time…I remember my parents finding my dope stash. I remember my girlfriend, Diane, finding out that I wasn’t at my parents over Christmas break, like I had told her. “Oops,” I thought when she called me at Phyllis’s apartment: Busted.

Haven’t you ever been apprehended in some way for one thing or another? Didn’t you want a little mercy at the time? Why does everybody in our culture want to cream the guy that screws up? Don’t you all remember what it was like, when it happened to you on a much, much smaller level? Isn’t there something you’re doing right now, intend to do in the near future, or can recall from the not-too-distant past, that recuses YOU from this discussion?

I’m posting this afternoon to ask you a simple question. Do you think that Eliot Spitzer, now known to the world simply as Client #9, should be forced to resign his position as the Governor of New York State?

Yes, I know he’s a miscreant and a hypocrite and all that. But my opinion is sort of this: If he didn’t use public money, I’m not necessarily looking for him to be tossed over the cliff and into the sea.

I have no particular affection for the guy. I am just interested in the machine that brings people down when they screw up in this culture. Like, when Larry Craig was found rubbing shoe leather with an officer from the Department of Entrapment, a whole bunch of people called for his scalp. After a while, he just said, no, I don’t believe I WILL resign. I found that kind of refreshing.

I mean, lots of people who have been proven guilty of an assortment of high crimes and misdemeanors are still hanging around collecting their checks. I’m not going to mention any names, but many happen to be politicians, actually. Are we shocked that a politician like Spitzer was a habitue of prostitutes? Well, not really, right? Are we amazed at a politician demonstrating the capacity to say one thing and do the exact opposite? Or is Eliot Spitzer being held to a higher standard because he seemed, at one point, to embody one?

Anyhow, what do you think and why. Should he stay or should he go? Let me know your thoughts. I’d be particularly interested in hearing from Clients 1-8.

Do you guys think I’m stupid? When I have problems with a company that has me at its mercy, in which I trust my life, do you suppose I don’t know who is really responsible? Like, if I walk the streets of a city and find them covered with garbage, do you think I blame the men whose responsibility it is to clean as hard as they can from day to night? Don’t you think I know there are too few of them to get the job done?

And if I fly an airplane that has been worked like an old donkey for the past 10 years, do you think I blame the pilots and mechanics for the fact that it throws a warning light every time it lands? What do you take me for? Seriously.

There were two kinds of comments to yesterday’s post that really set me off. The first came from the geniuses who told me I should walk from New York to California. I’m a cordial guy, so I’ll just say that I find those comments to be… what… insincere? I know what you’re saying. You’re telling me to, you know, have extremely personal relations with myself. Believe me, when I’m sitting on the floor of the airport sucking carpet waiting for the next time some guy thanks me for my patience, I wish I could. Because I can’t? I’ll just say… back atcha.

The second are those who think I’m blaming flight attendants, cleaning crews, pilots, gate agents, for the pain that the airlines inflict on we, the prisoners of Zenda. Believe me, I don’t. I know who is to blame. It starts with Ronald Reagan and we can go on from there. But no, I don’t think the working crew is responsible for anything except, at times, a really nasty attitude that you also see in my comments.

If I had to deal with the wretched refuse of our teeming shores every day, I’m not sure I would be any sunnier. I don’t know, however, that I would sport a pin that said “I don’t care what your name is either.” I’m sure the flight attendant had a good reason to wear it. But still.

A particularly hurtful but truthful comment came from Glenn in San Francisco. Here it is. I don’t want anybody to lose it in the shuffle, like a piece of luggage headed for Barbados that was intended for Peru.

As a 20 year flight attendant with AA who used to work flight 18 (the red eye from SFO to JFK) on a regular basis, I understand your continued frustration with American’s many shortcomings. In fact, according to DOT statistics, AA 18 arrives in New York on time (within 15 minutes of scheduled arrival time) less than 40% of the time — totally unacceptable. What your whining tirade fails to acknowledge, however, is that most of your complaints stem from AA cutting costs to stay afloat, without declaring bankruptcy, to satisfy the flying public’s desire for cheap(er) fares while costs beyond the airline’s control are at all-time highs. But what I find truly staggering is your lack of comprehension at what this cost cutting has done to the front line employees at AA. In addition to the mere pay cuts, vacation and sick time cuts, nasty changes in work rules and an overall demoralizing work environment, these cuts have impacted many employees in profound ways.

I do not expect you to feel sorry for me, but I spent my first ten years at AA working my ass off to save for my first house (I found a tear-down in my home town) and then next five years designing and building my new home (while still working my ass off to pay for it — no predatory/sub-prime loans for me – I had a 30 year fixed at 5.75%!). Three-quarters of the way through construction, we took our 35% plus pay cuts and while my payments would have been easily manageable prior to the “restructuring agreement” at AA, I now had to struggle to make the my payments. Ultimately, selling the home I spent 15 years of my life saving for and working on was the only option (additionally, due to the beginning of the real estate downturn, I didn’t even make a profit). I am now back to being a renter with an uncertain future. So please forgive me if I don’t exactly ooze with sympathy at how AA’s cost cutting has so negatively impacted your life — boo hoo.

The real kicker for me, though, is the irony that although the front line employees have suffered (as have our passengers), our senior management has been rewarded handsomely with bonuses in the hundreds of millions of dollars — a scenario that your employer, Fortune magazine, most certainly lauds. It is clear from the last decade or more that big business is primarily about massive personal wealth for it’s “corporate kings.” They don’t care about you – as customer, and they don’t care about me – as employee. They have enormous egos to feed and Hummers to fill up and that’s all that really matters to them. You should really have a better understanding of that.

I do, I hope. Anyhow, Glenn is pretty eloquent if I do not.

Here’s what I think: we all work for organizations. Our organizations work within a system. The system is bigger than we are, but it doesn’t absolve us from personal responsibility. That’s why I love people like Bobbi in Dallas, who made American Airlines (AMR) look so good in spite of all the indignities to which she may have been subjected by her situation, whatever that might be.

And that’s why I don’t like the gate agent in San Francisco, the guy who didn’t allow the pregnant woman, toting a stroller and a tiny baby in a Snuggly, to pre-board one night last spring. Sure, he had his reasons. We each have our reasons. We all live within the belly of our own particular beast. How human we are within that confine is up to each of us.

And, of course, how much any of us might want to do, or is willing to do, to change the system.  I’m open to any suggestion. As long as I don’t have to walk.

Lord knows I complain enough about things. Maybe we all do, but I’m a master at it. I complain about American Airlines (AMR) all the time, since I am their prisoner half a dozen times a month, if you count a round trip as two trips, which it is. It’s possible that it should count as three in certain cases, like last night.

For some reason, they have a hard time with the redeye at San Francisco airport. The “equipment” comes in from New York late, of course, God forbid they should actually have a plane on the ground ready and waiting for people to board, no, they have to use those poor mothers incessantly until their wings fall off, I guess. So the plane comes in and it seems like, you know, a complete surprise to the airline that it needs to be cleaned before it’s boarded again. I’ve taken the 10:30 PM several times and each time there’s a total fire drill as the grouchy American gate agent runs around looking for a phantom cleaning crew. Last night, he thanked us for our patience no fewer than four times. I don’t know about you, but as soon as somebody thanks me for my patience I lose mine.

Anyhow, last night the situation seems to have been that on the incoming flight a service dog had befouled the aircraft and somebody needed to clean up the mess. Nobody appeared willing to do so. They all ran around like maniacs for about half an hour, which made us just late enough into NY Kennedy that we hit the guts of rush hour and it took me 75 minutes to get the ten or so miles into Manhattan. So here’s a note to American:

Hello, American Airlines. Pleased be advised. Every Sunday night at 10:30 PM, a redeye flight leaves from San Francisco Airport. The equipment that is utilized for this regularly-scheduled flight comes in at about 9:30 or perhaps 10:00 PM, depending on weather and other considerations, including the fact that it comes from Kennedy Airport in New York, the worst airport in North America. When this equipment arrives, it will need to be serviced, re-catered and prepared for boarding. In advance knowledge of this, you might have a cleaning and catering crew on hand as a matter of course, rather than not. Thank you for our patience.

There. That felt pretty good.

But I don’t want you to think I only report the aggravations and incomprehensible shortfalls. So I will tell you the story of Bobbi at Washington Reagan Airport. She works for American Airlines, too.

Bobbi is an agent at that airport, which is a very nice one, by the way, quite new and sort of spiffy all over. Last Friday, I had to make a connection — Washington to Dallas, Dallas to SFO. The day before, it had snowed a little in Dallas, which threw the entire system into a tizzy. They can rope a steer down there and shoot a hunting buddy at 600 yards, but they can’t deal with a couple of inches of snow.

Be that as it may, the airport was a nightmare. People had been waiting 48 hours to board their flights, confusion reigned supreme, the food stands were out of food, there was no place to sit. As a business traveler, I can join the premium club for my main airline. It’s really no big deal. They don’t have butlers there or anything. For a few hundred dollars a year, you can have a place to sit, wireless internet, a working cash bar, coffee, a few magazines. It’s nice. I appreciate it.

Mostly, I appreciate the agents there. After a while, you get to know them and vice versa. On the day in question, I was very nervous that I wouldn’t make my Dallas to SFO connection and would not, therefore, get home at all until the next day. Something happens to my heart when I think I’m stranded. I lose the will to live.

Everything was delayed. My own flight out of Reagan was supposed to leave 20 minutes late, but naturally the plane itself, coming in from “snowbound” Dallas, was somewhere over Kentucky. Nobody really knew when it would actually leave. That’s the new thing in the last few years. Planes don’t run on a schedule. Airports are like hospital clinics. Once you’re into the system, you wait. But I couldn’t wait. I knew that if one thing was certain, it was that my connecting flight in Dallas would leave on time… because I probably needed it to be a little late.

Bobbi was behind the desk and went to work on my situation immediately. She noticed there were two Business Class seats in a flight that had been delayed from 11:30 AM. As it happened, a Texas congressman was in the chair next to me. She helped him too. She watched that flight like a hawk. She ascertained that, against all odds, those two seats remained a possibility. She watched her screen. She waited until the exact right minute and then did the absolutely unheard of: calling on some backup assistance from the other beleaguered and valiant colleagues there in the madhouse, she took the congressman and me by the hand and led us to the teeming gate. A few moments later, we were on the plane.

The rain was coming down hard. I never really believe that a plane will take off anymore, not even when its doors are closed and its waiting on the tarmac. But take off we did. And I made my connection. And had a late dinner in San Francisco.

So thank you, Bobbi. Thanks a lot. Thanks to you too, American Airlines. What you take away a lot of the time, you also give.  That’s saying a lot these days, I think.

1. Seeing the sun rise over the smoking city, a pale pink disc hanging in the misty haze above a blessedly-empty bridge.

2. That first cup of fatally-hot Pete’s Coffee standing with rest of the cattle still asleep on our feet.

3. Not talking with anybody until you get there, and even then maybe not for a couple of hours.  In the silence there is a Zen repose. 

4. Being out of electronic communications during the precise time frame in which other people are just getting going on the most aggravating stuff of the day.

5. Checking in early and finding your room is ready for you. Or conversely, if your trip is a brief one to a relatively nearby location, the knowledge that you are not destined to be a prisoner of Hotel Land this time.

6. Being greeted at the meeting as if your showing up mattered.

7. Often being marginally aware of the issues. And there being a boundary for the most part to the portion of the day during which one must be gainfully occupied. Even the busy sales droid comes to the end of the pitch, eventually.  Lunch, of course, may intervene, and is seldom tuna fish. If there is dinner, that’s nice too, since it is rarely at the worst place in town and your hosts are with a person — you — who represents an absolutely unassailable presence on their expense accounts. And if there is no dinner…

8. Being out of electronic communications during the precise time frame in which other people are just getting going on the second-most aggravating stuff of the day.

9. Catching a nap on the plane back. In space, no one can hear you drool.

10. Coming home. And actually looking forward to getting back to your desk.

Those are my 10.  And yours, fellow travelers?

I had an interesting experience the other day. There’s a job open in my department. We have interviewed and interviewed and interviewed and interviewed and… hm? Oh. Sorry. Got caught in a mobius strip there.

At any rate, we were still looking for just the right person when I got a knock on my door. It was Fred, a fellow who has worked for us for a long time, as long as I’ve been here, in fact. Fred’s a good guy and a reliable, creative player at his job function. Never saw him as a manager, though. There are many, many great people like that, who slice through their job functions like hot scimitars through camel flesh, but you just can’t imagine them leading a pack of wolverines into the hunt.

Anyhow, Fred was standing in my doorway and he said, “You found anybody for that manager slot yet?” And I think, oh no, this is going to be a bad deal. I like Fred. I don’t want to hurt Fred’s feelings. But Fred as a manager? Come on.

“May I come in?” said Fred. So of course what am I going to do. “Sure, Fred,” I said.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this job you’re trying to fill and I think I could be pretty good at it,” said Fred. He had a file on his lap and he opened it and referred to some notes. “I think there’s an organizational issue at the center of the problem this job would address,” he continued. I noticed he wasn’t one bit nervous. Usually Fred seems a little nervous to me and this was sort of interesting.

There was, all in all, something new about him all of a sudden.  He was going on in a very rational fashion about the need for central control over a function that so far had enjoyed, at best, what Tom Peters would call “simulaneous loose-tight properties” in that ridiculous way Peters has of saying dumb things that stick in your mind for decades.

But Fred was continuing. “I’ve been here for a long time,” he said. “And I’m finding that thinking about even the possibility of getting this job has energized me in a whole new way. I’m getting all kinds of ideas on how I could do new things to do my own job better, and also how all of us could work together more aggressively to make the most of a really great team we’ve got here.”

Why not? I thought. We had no real answer yet. And if not Fred, who? Hadn’t he in a sense earned the right to try this new thing, even to screw it up if it came to that? Why don’t we ever see the good things that display ourselves too closely to our eyes? Why is a prophet never honored in his own country?

“Okay, Fred,” I said. He stopped and looked at me with very big eyes, eyes gleaming with ambition and hope. “We have a couple more people to see, but I assure you that I’m going to think very seriously about what you’ve said.”

“I have a lot more to tell you about if you want to hear it,” he offered.

“No, Fred,” I said. “I like what you’ve shown me today. Let me just think about things a little.”

Fred rose to his feet with a somewhat timid smile, and a flash of the old fellow I knew popped out. I like him too. Then he left.  

And now I’m thinking. If Fred hadn’t been able to envision himself in the new role, I wouldn’t have seen him that way either. But since he does? I do too. I don’t really know what I’m going to do yet, not at least with the left side of my brain that thinks it’s in control. The right side? I think it’s already made up its very subjective little mind.

In the national debate on health care, which of course is front and center now that we have an election on hand, there is a lot of justified thought being given to the problem of insurance. A lot of Americans have none, and that certainly is a problem that needs a quick and humane solution.

Somewhat less discussed is the fact that even if you have health insurance you still can’t get a doctor. Where have they all gone? Perhaps they’re hiding.

Most of the people I know, thank goodness, have coverage provided by either their company or their spouse. Whether these insurance companies ever actually pay more than lint balls on actual healthcare costs is a matter that we will not discuss here, except to say that I want to congratulate my health care provider for finding a place that will do an MRI for $24.95, the approximate reimbursement they calculate for that test, I believe. This, of course, is better than nothing, and well worth the eighteen month wait for their check.

They also excel at providing a rationale for these kinds of paybacks. Unfortunately, they are printed in such small type that they cannot be read without special glasses I cannot afford because the eyecare part of my coverage believes that glasses still cost $4.99 and you get an extra pair.

Anyhow, that’s not the point. What’s amazing to me is how many people I know don’t really have doctors per se. Most of my friends in California go to one form of mass clinic type thing or another, as in Kaiser or their local emergency care facility associated with a teaching hospital. One friend of mine whose spouse pays in the neighborhood of $12,000 per year for his health care got sick last weekend and went looking for a doctor. No local offices were open.” It’s like trying to find a vet on the weekend,” she said. Considering that the problem involved the bite of a deer tick, time was of the essence. So she had to go to the intake room of a very highly regarded local hospital. Once there, she found some 50 people hawking up phlegm in the lobby of the place. She left. “I’d rather have Lyme disease than TB,” she explained.

The next day I spoke to my daughter, who sounded like she had lost the use of at least 1.5 lungs. “Go to the doctor!” I screamed at her with I hope the proper amount of sympathy. “I don’t have a doctor,” she said. “I don’t even know a doctor. And I never think of getting one until I’m sick, and then it’s too late.”

That’s the thing. You can’t call a doctor if you’re sick. You have to be well and dedicate several weeks, at least, to the effort, at which point you may be granted the right to visit the physician several weeks hence, if you can schedule your illness to fit within that time frame.

A pal of mine was feeling poorly for one reason or another and called a GP whose name had been given to him by his insurance provider. “I’d like to come in,” he said to the all-powerful gorgon who guarded the doctor’s appointment calendar. “How’s three weeks from Thursday?” said the amanuensis.

This may not be a bad thing altogether. I find lately that whenever I do manage to get in to see a doctor, I have exactly the ailment of which he or she is a specialist. That’s not a good thing, no matter what the specialty is.

The bottom line, I think, is that our health care system doesn’t really want you to see a doctor, unless it’s to write out the prescription for the medicine you saw on TV.  We don’t treat sick people. We treat well people. As a business, that makes a whole lot more sense, when you consider which part of the system has the highest margins.

People need something to hope for. As it has become clear that the Internet may be making money for our descendants but not necessarily for people now old enough to shave, those of us who want some big lucre in the here and now are growing increasingly despondent. Hence no huge upside bubble in the market.

When even Warren Buffett announces disappointing earnings and talks about a recession, you know our financial system is in serious need of some feel-good hugs and drugs.

The fact is, there are several huge areas of exponential growth on the horizon that, for wise investors, just might represent the next great wave of stupid money. Let’s look at just a few, in the kind of depth that this format allows:

Robotics: A dedicated issue of Scientific Americantalks about all the great things that are coming here. While it may be slightly discouraging to keep on reading about robots whose functions are limited to making dashboards and vacuuming rumpus rooms, several adjunct professors of august institutions prognosticate machines that are smarter than we are by 2050. Of course, by 2050 we may dumber than ATMs anyway, but there’s no question in my mind that smart investors could pump up a big, translucent profit bubble in this heavily fertilized field.

Nano-Technology: Big money for very small inventions is clearly on the way. Tiny living creatures will be bred in itty-bitty labs for a variety of purposes from dispensing medication via ingestible tablets to the construction of desk chairs that give you a back rub. The future is as yet unclear, but if you simply use the word “nano” either in conversation or in a white paper of any kind, people looking to lose money line up like it’s Starbuck’s at dawn. That’s the kind of credulous enthusiasm the market needs to vault us into the next level, or possibly even to remain on this one.

Greenware: When the next generation takes control in a few years, the true passion for the environment will finally slam into gear. Gen-Y feels about Earth, Wind and Sky the way that their elders felt about Vietnam and Civil Rights – it’s their issue, the thing they care about the most. Any baby boomer who has failed to recycle a cardboard box in front of a 12-year-old knows the level of contempt the younger generation holds for such miscreants. Windmills that generate power… mulch farms… firms that figure out ways to reduce our carbon shoesize… solar solutions to our need for energy… all will be recipients of passionate investment by a society far more enlightened than ours. Those who get on that elevator early will be at the fiduciary penthouse while others are standing around in the lobby waiting for the next available car.

Human genome schmutz: Nobody wants to get old or worse, appear old. And forget about dying. That’s the ultimate bummer. Genetic research has been held back recently by a series of disasters too terrible to mention in this venue, or even look up right now, since we’re very busy. But the three-headed midget sheep problem will be solved by 2014 and recombinant DNA, stem-cell and mitochondrial transmogrification technology will begin making inroads into the problem of aging, extending human life to its ultimate limit and even beyond, particularly for really rich people who are on everybody’s nerves already. Another enormous opportunity for confabulators here.

Electronic wetware: Right now we all have to walk around with little gizmos sticking out of our pockets and our heads, and tote around heavy wallets jammed with plastic. One day all those accoutrements will be surgically implanted. The companies that figure out how to get that done without infecting the entire neural system of the recipient will be in for some big asset appreciation.

Fried chicken: People will always like fried chicken. Since the invention of the chicken, in fact, people have been looking for a better way to fry it. Hey. It’s as good a shot as any, I figure. Even if none of this other stuff pans out, there will always be room for fried chicken, right?

5 AM in San Francisco and I’m already late. Everybody is in full battle gear in New York by now. By the time I get to LA they’ll be thinking about lunch and the first things that are aggravating me will be history to them. Something good about that.

Pitch black out. A tiny, sharp crescent moon presides over a starry sky. The discrepancy between this peaceful scene and the maelstrom I’m about to enter is heart-wrenching.

The Golden Gate Bridge rears up in the darkness, ridiculously picturesque. Across the Bay, the city is still asleep. Deceptive placidity. Under the blanket of early dawn, traders are whacking away at their laptops, talking with Wall Street and Asia, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are sitting at their kitchen tables checking out their net worth.

The West Coast has a pretty good deal. Sure, they have to be up at dawn to impress New York with their industriousness. On the other side, they know that by, say, 3:00 PM, they can put their feet up and think about throwing that Frisbee around, because Mom and Dad back on the right coast are heading home in the snow and ice.

Things to do this week: Not lose heart; keep on trucking; drink with my head, not over it; don’t let the bastards get us down; let a smile be my umbrella;  buy low and sell high;  touch all the bases and make it home.

That’s all for now, sports fans. There’s only just so long you can make your thumbs focus on any single e-mail. If you’d like to start a chain, of course, that’s always all right with me. I’ll be back in the pocket tomorrow. Until then, sayonara from me and my Blackberry (RIMM). May all your meetings this week be short and sweet.