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?