As you may have guessed from yesterday’s post, I am at this very moment trying to tear myself away from life as I know it and suspend operations for a while. 

True, the world will not stop while I do. Ned and Ted and Len and Edna and Clarissa and Elizabeth and Otto will still need things immediately. The Flute Reamer Division will still have those transition issues. Bob may need a speech or two. The IR department will still worry about its upcoming presentation in Bophutswana. But all that will have to go on without me, I most dearly hope. 

Yes, I will have my BlackBerry. I will do my best to look at it only twice a day. The rest of the time it will be in a drawer. I find this better than imagining the thousands of idiotic e-mails and perhaps 10 important ones that will be piling up during the interregnum.

And yes, a few people will know where I am, my assistant Beverly being the most important. It will be up to her to figure out what’s worth bothering me for. She is aware of Bing’s Law, which, as you may remember, states that every minute of work on a vacation requires one full hour for the re-establishment of proper mental equilibrium. Thus, a ten minute conference call demands a full 10 hours of recovery time. Longer than that? You do the math.

I will, of course, have my little laptop with me, so who knows. Maybe I’ll drop you a line now and then. In any event, I’ll see you all after the 4th. Don’t work too hard while I’m away, okay?

1. Send a memo to Bob, asking him if it’s okay for you to take two whole weeks together, and informing him of the date and perhaps asking whether it fits with his vacation plans. This will not only serve the function of informing him of your potential non-presence and coordinating it with his own, but also remind him that he, too, will be taking some time off and that others might be entitled to some also. 

2. Inform your colleagues and, if you are a manager of some sort, your reportees that you will be away, telling them when, and making sure that your functions are covered during your absence. If any important subordinates were planning to take the same time, and it would destroy your peace of mind while you are away if they did so, simply tell them that they’re out of luck. Establishing a bona fide vacation is a war. There are going to be casualties, one of which should not be your vacation. 

3. Make sure you have your passport up to date, if you are traveling abroad. Once you ascertain that all is in order, make sure to drop the fact that you have done so to Bob, employing a breezy and informative style that let’s him know that your vacation is proceeding according to plan and that you’re happy about it and hope he shares that happiness, seeing how he’s so tuned in to other people’s feelings and all. 

4. Make sure that your electronics work at the location to which you are going. Cell phones are not as important as BlackBerrys. This is not because you will be doing e-mails all the time or that you wish to be reachable 24-7, but because by doing half an hour of messaging first thing in the morning and at the end of the day, you will be avoiding the nightmare of returning to 8,756 e-mails in your inbox, some of which were marked URGENT! even though you put up an away message. After you have done this, by the way, you may observe to Bob in an offhand way how incredible it is that BlackBerrys work in the mountains of Wyoming. 

5. Get any shots that you require if you are going to places like Belize, which has bugs as big as footballs, and jungles that sport diseases that haven’t been invented in humans yet. Don’t forget to complain that those inoculations hurt within earshot of Bob. 

6. One week before your vacation, take a look at your schedule. People will have stuffed it with things to do for the two weeks you are planning to be away. There is no logical reason why this happens, but it does. “What’s this meeting with Beanie and Cecil doing on my calendar?” you may ask the person who put it there. “I’m going to be away, as I told you sixteen times already.” To which they will reply, “You’re going away? Really?” In all cases, set about clearing your time and delegating the important stuff to other people. 

7. If you are a manager, a few days before your departure call in each of your key people and once again inquire what they are planning to do during your absence. At least one will mention that he or she was planning to be away, in spite of the fact that you have ensured that nobody was going to be doing so. There is no logical reason why this happens, but it does. Be kind to this person, because they are likely to be a future boss and you have to be careful how you treat people when they’re on the way up, because they may be the ones who are treating you on the way down. But do make sure that your ducks are in order for your time away, which means that they are all present and accounted for. Don’t forget to complain to Bob about how hard it is to do this. 

8.  Wednesday before your last Friday, Bob will inform you of an important meeting/project that will have to be done “next week.” This is a critical moment. Fools and wimps will in a trembling voice remind Bob of their vacation plans, but promise to be “reachable” when necessary. Do not do this. Executive amnesia is a form of authoritarian terrorism that must be fought. “Bob,” you may say as calmly and inoffensively as possible, “As I told you several times, I’m out next week and the week after.” Bob will look confused and hurt. He may even lightly question your loyalty or dedication. That’s all right. A display of spine is seldom out of place in what we do. Of course, if the corporation is being sold, or you are about to be named to a big new position, all bets may be off. Organizations can spoil the best of plans and often do. But 99.99% of the time, the ability to disregard other people’s needs is pure executive brain flatulence. Manage it. 

9. On Friday morning, as you begin the process of packing up to leave, a host, a myriad, a phalanx of problems, challenges and effluvia will fly up and hit you in the face. In some cases, this will be just bad luck and you will have to work your head off to get rid of them. Sometimes it will be other people’s anxieties surfacing in the knowledge that you are actually not going to be there, a notion that is making them freak out. You may soothe them by telling them quietly that you will be on BlackBerry now and then, but that if they bother you with little stuff you will rip off their noses when you return. Make sure your desk is clear. Leave an away message on your e-mail. Say goodbye to your colleagues and thank them for covering your butt while you’re away. Then wait for the inevitable phone call. 

10. At 5:45 in the evening of the day you are leaving the office for the last time in the next couple of weeks, Bob will call. It will be about nothing. You will laugh and scratch for a while. He will mention that he’s looking forward to the weekend. You will say NOTHING about your vacation, but allow how you can’t wait to get out of the office either. Then, as you are wrapping up this pleasant conversation, Bob will say, “So, I’ll see you Monday, then.” Breathe. Let the silence grow between you on the phone line. “Bob,” you may then say, but that is all. Nine times out of ten, that will be enough. “Oh, right,” Bob will reply after some time, very sad, very hurt, a tiny puppy being abandoned by its owner, “You’re flaking out for a couple of weeks.” To which you may say, “Right.” He will then wish you bon voyage, and probably tell you all about his vacation plans. The one time out of ten that he gives you a hard time? What can I say. Do what you have to do. The guy’s a madman. But even madmen need limits, maybe more than other people, even. 

Now… breaking your desire to stay in touch while you’re away? That’s another story.

My Friday post about the digital transition seems to have flushed a bunch of anti-TV folks out of their weedy, book-lined dens. This has stimulated my urge to defend perhaps the oldest friend I have in the world. This isn’t the first time. I live in a community where people at parties talk about how much they like that new program that’s on the air now: Friends. “Did you see Friends the other night?” they will inquire. To which I reply, “No, I’ve been awake for the last couple of years.” Equally daunting is the type who admits shamefacedly, “I do catch an episode of Antique Road Show now and then. Can’t help it. Guilty pleasure.” Worst of all, in my opinion, are the people who strip their children of social awareness and all chance of popularity by denying them the American right to watch the programming of their choice. “We do allow little Tiffany the occasional Sesame Street. But only when I’m hyperstressed,” one mother told me not long ago. 

Did you know that in spite of the Internet, in spite of Hulu, in spite of YouTube and ITunes and all that jazz, the average time spent watching television in this nation is slightly on the rise? Horrors?! No way. Television is our common language, our history, our heritage. Of course most of it stinks. It always has. You think that when the common groundling went to the theater in Shakespeare’s day all that was on the stage was Shakespeare? Do most books remind you of Hemmingway or Sedaris? How about music? Lots of Mozarts and Mathers around? A medium can’t be defined by its worst examples. You have to look to the best. And during my lifetime, the great unifying cultural events have always taken place inand around the television set. Let’s look at them briefly. I’m afraid it has to be brief, because the TV has destroyed my attention span. What were we talking about again? Oh, yes. Shows that have rocked my world. You may remember some or none:  

• Wonderama: A variety show featuring Terrytoons, early cartoons that may now be found on YouTube. They’re terrible. We all loved them. 
• Winky Dink: An early atrocity in which children were encouraged to draw with crayons on the television set. 
• Soupy Sales: A very funny schtick meister who played with puppets. He came to ruin, at least for a while, when he instructed his audience to go to their parents’ wallets, remove the pictures of either George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, I can’t remember, and mail them in. Kids did so. Parents were upset. 
• The Rifleman: Not as popular as Gunsmoke, the story of a single dad who set things right with a really cool gun. 
• Have Gun Will Travel: A vigilante in black. Used to watch it with my dad. 
• 77 Sunset Strip: The coolest show of its day; three private eyes in slick, Sinatra-era LA. A character named Cookie had a lot of hair, that he combed into a modified ducktail. So did we. 
• Mannix: One of the many Quinn Martin productions that neatly divided themselves into acts, usually with an epilogue. Usually about a detective or other law-enforcement type. After a lot of talk and sneaking around, always ended with a very brief action sequence in an underground parking lot. 
• MTM: As hard as it may be to believe, America used to gather — all generations — on Saturday night, to watch the CBS lineup that included The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart, some other stuff I can’t recall. We weren’t always sober, but we thought it was pretty funny stuff. 
• Masterpiece Theater: I particularly liked the one about Henry the Eighth, who is now disporting himself once again on Showtime. Also terrific was the grand guignol excess of I, Claudius. Derek Jacobi made a stammer and a limp look like the trappings of power. 
• Fawlty Towers: The ultimate extension of the Monty Python spirit that for a brief time graced us. 
• Seinfeld: Still crazy after all these years in syndication. 
• CSI: I watch a lot of procedurals. Everybody underestimates not only the intricate plotting over huge story arcs, but also the differences between examples of the genre, which may be our most potent one at this point in time, including the great Law & Order franchise and a host of others. 

That’s just a very short list. These days I catch most of the shows I’ve liked whenever I can. I also love House, which is one of the best television programs not only of our day but of any other, and do admit to catching the reality make-over program, What Not To Wear, whenever I fly on JetBlue. I don’t watch Gossip Girl, of course, which is only an indication of how out of it I’m starting to get. And I will always decline to give a flying photon about Jon & Kate, even if he did cheat on her on her birthday. 

I also read books, by the way, and do a number of non-digital activities. Personally, I think blogs rot your brain a whole lot worse than anything else, except perhaps for aggregators.

A lot of you were pretty tough on Ryan, the trader who will probably work like a galley slave until either retires at the age of 40 or keels over at 50. I may have even jumped to some conclusions myself. It’s amazing, on the other hand, what a little knowledge about the reality of a situation can do to moderate the whole judgmental thing. This most wise and tough-minded comment on the subject comes from Cliff Tan of Sarasota, Florida. “I can’t speak for “Ryan” because I have never been a trader,” he writes, “but I’ve worked around enough of them that perhaps this post will reduce some of the heat and shed a little more light.”

“Ryan’s” workday is not really a matter of individual choice for him, as many respondents seem to think. As a trader he simply must be at his desk early enough to prepare for the trading day ahead and will finish whenever the market finishes. He sounds like he’s on the mortgage desk so maybe the first deals in New York get started around 7am and is really going by 8am. Getting there by 6:30am might actually be cutting it close. In other markets (e.g., foreign exchange) I knew traders who were at their desk by the time “Ryan” boarded his train.

And you need to get a couple of hours’ jump on the markets because there’s a lot to read. All the overnight news/events that might affect trading that day, of course. But also – if you’re part of a global book that gets passed into your timezone – you need to know any special events that occurred as part of overnight trading. Your salespeople might have some special deals that need to be done that day, and you need to think about how to execute that. Your investment bankers might have a new structure for which you are expected to provide trading support, and you need to have a razor-sharp idea of how much this stuff they’re peddling is really worth.

And once the trading day really gets started, how are you going to leave? Because usually except for lunch you are on the “dealer” (interactive chat) with your counterparts at other banks, your salespeople call over with new stuff they need to do for their clients (either they’re told or they’ve cajoled somebody to trade an existing position for some reason), you’re on the phone with some of the bigger clients talking about the markets and giving them your thoughts about what they want to do, you need to read the news and events that occur during your day, you might be talking to the “quants” who maintain the pricing models which help determine the right values (you think) of the various credit tranches you’re trading, you might even have a model or two of your own you need to tweak, occasionally you will read some research coming out of your own credit research team or from another bank which someone has forwarded to you. Oh, and you need to make sure you pass the right information to the middle and back offices so your trades are recorded correctly (which determines your P/L, profit/loss, which determines your year-end bonus), and that you pass your book onto the next timezone accurately…

I’m with Bing in that there seems to be quite a bit of Jerry-Springer like quality in some of the posts here. I’m reasonably certain work-life balance has come up before in the “Ryan” household and while I can certainly understand how some fathers throw away their families in the name of work, I think the ethos and common sense of an earlier generation – that you don’t snap to judgment about how another man is raising his children, e.g. – might be far more appropriate.

Good stuff, huh? Thanks, Cliff. Although it’s pretty depressing, frankly. Thank goodness that there’s a ton of work going on in the Human Resources profession on what’s called work life initiatives. If you Bing! (or of course Google (GOOG)) the phrase “work life initiatives,” all kinds of gooey stuff about workshops and seminars and white papers pops up, exploring the upside of, say, a mandatory four day work week, or how a person can be at their post for twelve or fourteen hours a day and, you know, still have a family, friends, and non work-related bad habits. How? By establishing a proper work life balance, of course.

For executives, this can be a godsend, as is made clear by a really funny post from Tim, who is in Tokyo, which is only fitting. Japan invented this problem. Perhaps they’ll be on the cutting edge of solving it, at least for the very top salarymen. Tim writes: 

I used to work for Merrill (MER) in Tokyo and they had the fabled work life balance initiative, which means that us grunts got to continue working weekends and sometimes 24 hours straight, while the managers flew around to run marathons or take care of their soccer clubs or other pursuits like taking university courses. Overall there was work life balance but somewhat skewed, we worked like dogs and the mangers had a nice life. No wonder the place self destructed.

Personally, I kind of like that balance. As a manager, I mean. You work. I have a life. Nothing wrong with that.

It’s clear I’m in the wrong business. With everything else that’s going on in the world, any stroll past a magazine stand will tell you that the majority of public interest continues to focus on Jon & Kate. Why to any of bother to focus on anything else? That’s where the money is, clearly.

Yet one day, as impossible as it may seem, the fascinating situation surrounding two of television’s hottest reality stars will be over. Jon & Kate will have exploded into a ball of flaming chicken fat. Their kids will, I am sure, all be tabloid material of their own. And the great, suppurating maw of popular entertainment will be in need of new heros willing to let it all hang out for Mother.

I mean to get into the action next time around. So I’ve studied the situation, both as a professional and as a consumer of anything that will engage my dwindling attention span. And having looked deeply into the landscape, I believe I have come up with the quintessential next steps in the march of time. Two programs I think could really make it and push the envelope until it squeals. I’m looking for investors. Tell me which one you want to get in on.

1. Married Until We Got To Them picks up where  Jon & Kate leaves off, takes what was wildly popular about that program and jettisons the rest. Gone are the kids. Gone is everything but the weekly update on how two people are going about the business of tearing their marriage apart with infidelity, betrayal, violence, drunkeness and, if it’s on cable, as much nudity as possible, all financed by the willing couple’s weekly stipend from the production company. In later weeks, an added element could be introduced — other miscreant pairs prepared to strip themselves bare (sometimes literally) for the notoriety and money. Couples could compete for a prize awarded to the one that can fall apart fastest. Or possibly even engage in interesting new configurations, depending on the daypart in which the program airs.

To date, all reality programs have provided a framework for the display of human frailty, a plot contrivance of some sort. This program completely dispenses with that and simply cuts to the chase. Cheap to produce. Almost writes itself. Hard to see how it could fail.

Second, and possibly even more interesting, is a show I’m calling So You’re Too Fat To Dance? A mix of several genres, this one puts it all together for pure, guilty pleasure. Contestants join the show when still very adipose,  pleasant people who really can’t dance very well at all. They try, but they for the most part fail to accomplish the complicated choreography outlined for them by the show’s panel of showbiz sadists. Over the 16 weeks, contestants are put through a grueling regime of diet and exercise in which they lose tons of weight very quickly, putting their health at risk while at the same time making themselves far more flexible, pliant and capable of graceful dives, sweeps and fancy footwork.  By the end of the series, we have a few people who punished themselves enough to make the grade and dance off with the prize, and probably a lot more who fell by the wayside, panting. Part make-over, part weight loss, part exercise in pure humiliation, I think this show will have it all.

That’s only the first two that I’m currently working on, although a third is taking shape in my mind, something about a worldwide hunt for the money stolen by Bernie Madoff, kind of a cross between The Amazing Race and Treasure Hunt with Stubby Kaye.

Clearly, however, the upside here is huge. With the ascension of a couple who has nothing to offer but their misery, a new barrier has apparently been broken down. When a new door like that opens, it doesn’t take a genius to know that opportunity may well lie on the other side of the transom. Those interested in an investment that’s certainly as solid as any other may drop me a line.

Today Microsoft announced it would be launching a new search engine that will compete with Yahoo and Google in the vast hunt for search bucks. In an incredible act of branding sagacity, they announced that the name of the new search engine will be: Bing. 

In response to this, today I have issued the following news release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BING VS. BING

LONG-TIME FORTUNE COLUMNIST AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR STANLEY BING CONDEMNS “BRAND INTRUSION” BY NEW MICROSOFT SEARCH ENGINE, ALSO TO BE NAMED “BING”

OFFERS SERVICES TO NEW ENTITY FOR “ANY REASONABLE OFFER”

NEW YORK, MAY 28, 2009 – Stanley Bing, FORTUNE Magazine columnist and best-selling author, today expressed “moderate outrage” at the branding of the new search engine to be offered by Microsoft, also to be called Bing. At the same time, Bing the Author took the unusual step of offering an initial olive branch to Bing the Search Engine, proposing that the two powerful brands merge into one for which Mr. Bing could be the logo, corporate symbol and spokesman, to the extent that it fits in with his other duties. 

“This is an unprecedented case of brand intrusion by one of the most powerful and wealthy corporations in the world,” said Bing the Author, as opposed to Bing the Search Engine, which, unlike Mr. Bing himself, cannot be called for comment because it is not a person. “At the same time, I believe I can propose a solution to this problem that with work to the benefit of both Bings, me and the other one,” he added. 

Mr. Bing (the Author) issued these statements in reaction to the announcement, made today by Microsoft at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif, that the software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. This huge campaign will be conducted by JWT, the massive advertising agency, and is viewed by many to be an attack on the market position of Google, long the search engine leader. Little notice has been taken to date, however, of the serious implications for Mr. Bing or, for that matter, any other Bings, which Mr. Bing made clear he doesn’t care about. 

“For nearly 25 years, I have jealously guarded the value of my brand,” Bing (the original) continued. “For several years, it was threatened by the enormous reputation of Rudolf Bing, the fictional presence of Chandler Bing and the high-profile persona of Stephen Bing. This, however, is the worst challenge the Bing Brand has faced to date, particularly in regards to my search engine optimization positioning.”

In conjunction with these statements, Mr. Bing has offered to open discussions with Bing the Search Engine and its representatives to iron out differences and challenges to each respective brand. “I think we’re a lot more powerful together than we are apart,” he added. “At least I’m pretty sure I am.” 

Bing (Stanley) indicated that the shape and specific nature of the merged branding opportunities have yet to be hammered out, but that he is available from the second week in June onward, for the most part, and would be willing to consider “any reasonable offer” for his services, or simply to provide no services, if that’s what seems best. 

Mr. Bing began his column in FORTUNE in 1995. Prior to that, he was at Esquire Magazine for 11 years, where he built a considerable following. He is also the author of numerous books and is the host of a popular Web destination on CNNMoney.com and writes regularly for Huffingtonpost.com. He has been cultivating the Bing brand since 1983. 

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. It has been establishing the Bing brand for about seventeen minutes.

Contact:  Stanley Bing
                   bingblog@gmail.com 

I will only add that I absolutely no intention of initiating any form of legal action against Bing (the Search Engine) unless he/it feels it would be mutually beneficial for us to do so. And that I do look forward to being massively well-optimized on my new friend.

I wish I could think of something to say about the recession right now.

I wish I could find an observation to make about the realities of the new economy.

I wish I had the power to offer some interesting strategies for dealing with the difficult operating environment in which we find ourselves.

I wish I could impart some wisdom on current trends in the commercial marketplace.

But I can’t. Half my floor is empty today. A few minutes ago, I sent an e-mail to my department that generated a veritable forest of OUT OF OFFICE replies. In the executive wing, many seem to have wandered off into pleasant digital space. On the west coast, a lot of folks seem to be “working from home.” Here in New York, the sun is shining very brightly, and there is a heavy, humid heat in the air that whispers one delicious word, and that word is BEACH.

I have no plans to go to the beach. I have no plans to go to the shore. I have no plans to do much of anything except go home. I will not be reading interesting business analysis on the plane. I will not be thinking about excellence or debt or equity, except perhaps the sweat equity it will take to put my lawn to rights when I get there.

I am hereby shutting down the part of my brain that thinks about things more than three days out. I hope you have the power to do the same, whether you have the permission to do so or not.  Go ahead. Switch it off.

Have a great long weekend, my friends. Sometime during that three days take a few moments to remember why we earned that extra lazy Monday. Go to a parade if you can find one. We don’t do enough parades.

I’ll talk with you Tuesday, God willing. Whatever we’ve all got going on will be waiting for us then, of that I am sure. Let it wait, okay?

I just thought, on my out of the office again, that I would point out that now the Star has a cover on Jon & Kate, outlining their odd marriage, which I can’t tell you about, because I will not read it, and this for two reasons.

1. I have decided to read nothing about Jon & Kate.

2. I am too busy.

This week my company had its big sales presentation. We go out there about the same time each year and try to move a few billion dollars worth of product. It’s going pretty well. Two observations:

1. People are jamming the restaurants all around Manhattan. It’s very hard to get a table.

2. Everybody is just as drunk as they always were in the best of times.

I take this to be another sign of economic regeneration. And now I’ve got to take off again. Another day. Another presentation. Another couple hundred million dollars. Wish us luck, ladies and gentlemen. As we go, so goes the whole shooting match, I think.

We had a run up last week. For the last couple of days, we’re running down. There was good news among the bad and people were talking about sunlight for a while. This week, the credit markets are getting nervous again and we’re not so sure. Plus, it’s drizzling. Doesn’t May seem colder than usual? Does this mean there’s no more global warming? Or is this just a pause before we all quite literally melt down?

Are we recovering? Are we sliding back? Is the upswing over? Are we just taking a breather? Unemployment is still bad but not growing quite so fast as it was a few months ago. But Wal-Mart’s revenue ticked down a little. Does that mean people ran out of money in April? Will it be the same in May? How about June? Worse? Better?

See, now would be the time for those professionals with a totally disinterested position in the markets, if any such there be, to employ their skills to tell us what’s going on. Is this all emotional? Are there some metrics we should be employing to get a little bit of visibility into the future? Forget the future, how about right now? Is there an analyst, an economist, a professor, government regulator, seer, dowser or astrologer out there who can actually tell anybody what’s going on?

In the meantime, who should we be listening to? Paul Krugman? Nostradamus? Susan Boyle?

1. Economics is a bunch of bushwah. Now we know it. Economists are obviously not only behind the curve on what has occured, they are in many cases the cause of it. It is not a science. It is not even an art. At best, it’s a craft, like pottery. As things improve, we can expect a bunch to begin operating pretty much as usual, though. Why shouldn’t they? It’s a living.

2. Wherever there’s money around, there will be crooks. Many of these crooks are well-dressed. Often they are at the top of whatever game they are bilking. Next time this all happens, people will once again be surprised that the guy who ran the exchange is the person who also managed the Ponzi scheme.

3. The Law is a ass. I believe it was Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist who said it, but recognition of the unique aspect of the legal profession goes back to Shakespeare and beyond. Virtually all of the regulators and legislators who were supposed to be monitoring the finance industry were certainly lawyers, as were the lawmakers who were asleep at the switch until they could be assured of airtime on cable on the subject.

4. In God We Trust. All others pay cash. Every panic in history has been precipitated by the same stupid sequence of events. In Rome, for instance, a huge panic not that dissimilar to ours happened when some rich bankers underwrote a bunch of ships that were sent to the east. The ships foundered. The banks had over-extended themselves. They ran out of cash. People freaked out. In 1837, following another crash a few decades earlier, the banks once again forgot about the whole debt/equity thing and doled out huge amounts of money in western real estate. The market went bust. The banks went boom. The economy went into the tank for 10 years. A few years ago, my own corporation almost went belly up after its Financial Services Division lent a bunch of dough to a sleazy real estate outfit in New Orleans that just didn’t pay us back. Now we have this, and everybody asks, “How could all these smart people lend out so much stupid money?” Because that’s what they do to MAKE stupid money, Sparky. As soon as nobody is looking they’ll do so again.

5. The rich are not like other people. They’re not smarter. They’re not happier. They just know how the game is played and, for the most part, what to do to stay there. Sometimes everybody forgets that the whole thing is designed to keep the powerful in power and the rich in their McMansions, and the People are sold the idea that everybody can have their Baby Benz. And for a while, everybody sort of gets high on the idea that capitalism is a populist enterprise. It’s not. It’s for just a few lucky souls and manipulative hedgers and, really, the rest of us should really just buckle down behind our plows and keep our pennies in that coffee can by the window ledge. We’ll forget that, of course, as soon as the markets simmer down. Then the Ralph Kramden side of us will once again emerge from the closet where it’s been whimpering for the last 18 months, and we’ll all be back in the hunt for the next mystery appetizer.

6. The press is the running dog of the system. Of course there are exceptions. But in general the media covers the winners and puts a nice shine on their helmets. What you read is what they get. Now that there are fewer reporters than ever, and more blogspit in the machine, everything will only get worse in this regard. Right now, even at the height of our troubles, the food chain goes from security analyst and quote monkey straight to the wires and blogs and directly to you. And you read it and think whatever occupies your brain pan for the most recent five minutes.

7. Be careful who you insult while they’re on their way down. They will either rise up one last time, like Carrie’s dirt-encrusted fist from the grave, and pull you down with them, or they will meet you as they are on the way back up and chew your head off now that they can. Those in need of proof on this subject need only consider two short words: John Thain.

8. Nothing lasts forever. Not good times, and not bad times, either. And nobody knows when whatever train we’re on will arrive at the next station. Not nobody. Anybody who tells you they do is smoking something. You can either ask for some of what they’ve got or ignore them entirely, depending on how you’re feeling or what day of the week it might happen to be.

9. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Even when nobody else is picking up the check. Later on, when that starts again? Even moreso.

1. I am sick of… 

a. Rotten bankers
b. Stinking pirates
c. Posturing bureaucrats
d. Winter

2. I can certainly do without any additional advice or comments from… 

a. Economists
b. Regulators without entertaining facial hair
c. Former heads of corporations who are now in the tank
d. My mother

3. I’m very bored with…

a. Paul Krugman
b. Drunken celebrities
c. Sober celebrities, unless they’re naked
d. Artisan cheese

4. A day without ___________ is a day without sunshine. 

a. Glen Beck
b. Barney Frank
c. Another fabulous Chapter 11
d. 8 oz. of vodka

5. Please wake me when…

a. There’s some good news for me personally. 
b. Wall Street melts down into a small pile of phlegm. No, wait! It already has!  

c. There’s something to watch on TV.
d. All of the above.

Score yourself however you like.

Oh, goody! Look at my package… so big and shiny! The New York Times and Wall Street Journal just put me in the top 50 big earners of the year in their annual blockbuster overviews of executive compensation.  They say I made more than $50 million last year! Hooray!

Except wait a minute. Hm. I’m looking at my bank account and it doesn’t look so hot. If I’m so rich, how come I don’t have a whole lot more money? Not that I’m poor or anything. But there’s no question I’m going to have to keep working if I want to keep all the moving pieces in place.

How the frig did they calculate my number? Let’s see…

Well, first there’s my actual salary. $200,000 isn’t chump change. I’m not complaining. But I haven’t had a raise in that department in three years, because they “took care of me” on all the other front. And how! What generosity!

Except, you know, then there’s the whole thing about my bonus, which is less than half of what it was last year.  That’s okay. I get why.  Business was terrible. Of course, it was terrible for everybody. And our stock was down. Of course, so was everybody’s. And I didn’t give out a bunch of sub-prime mortgage loans. Nor did we get any government bailouts. But there you have it.  It is, as they say, what it is.

So far it all adds up to about $7 million. I know it sounds like a lot. And it is! I know it is. But it’s not more than $50 million, is it? I mean, my background is in Marketing, but even I know there’s a decimal point missing there somewhere.

I guess they must be counting the stock I received at its face value. I wonder why. True, when it was issued to me it was worth about $20 million. That was at the beginning of ‘08. It doesn’t fully vest for another three or four years. That means two things are true. 1) They’re worthless to me now, even if they retained their value, and 2) They’re worth a lot less than the number they put into the chart even if I could sell them, which I can’t, not for a really long time. So that’s $20 million they say I have that I don’t have.

Now, a bunch of stock DID vest last January, so that’s in there. Except it’s valued at what it was worth then. That not what it’s worth anymore, not by a long shot. What’s interesting is that I had to pay taxes on the original amount, and they didn’t withhold enough back then, you know how that is. So I owe additional tax on a fictional amount of money that I can’t cash in because the stock is really too low to sell.

And then there’s my stock options. I’m looking at their calculations and they say my options are worth $30 million. Right now, they’re worth nothing, even if they were vested, which of course they’re not.

I find that vaguely mysterious. Who made up these rules? Mr. Black? Mr. Scholes? I can understand that if I exercised some of them, and got the cash, that would be income… but right now all they are is paper. If they ever go above water, every shareholder of the corporation will be dancing in the aisles. But that could take years. 

So let’s add it up. The papers say I made more than $50 million. I’m looking at a little more than $7 million, before taxes. And everybody hates me.

There’s only one solution for it, I think. I gotta get fired. That won’t take too much doing, the way things are going! I guess that proves there’s a silver lining to every dark cloud, huh? In the meantime, I wonder where I’m having lunch… Thank God I still have my plastic. As things stand, I really need it.

When is enough of a good thing way too much? When you’re flying American (AMR). Somewhere along the line somebody must have done a focus group or something, because it’s apparent that the airline believes that fulsome, frank communications with passengers is of fabulous benefit to everybody. The effort is obviously well-intentioned. But the outcome is perhaps not.

I first noticed this a few years ago, when I would be sitting and waiting for a mysterious amount of time on the tarmac and then Chuck Yeager would come on the public address system with something like, “First of all, I’d like to thank you all for your patience…” This immediately drained whatever patience I was trying to cultivate. I hate being thanked for my patience. “… but there’s an amber light here in the cockpit that we’re checking out.”

That was bad. There are a lot of reasons for amber lights, none of them particularly encouraging. Did I need to know about the amber light? Maybe. Did I want to fly in a plane that sported one, even briefly? Again, not too sure. I did know that the announcement did very little to help my frame of mind, but I guess they were just trying to be responsible and blah blah blah.

The trend has continued to develop, with ever-increasing levels of frankness being employed to win our admiration and regard. Which is fine. Unless, you know, it freaks us out entirely.

It’s my perception, which may be completely off base (but I don’t think so) that American Airlines hasn’t put a new plane into domestic service in quite some time.  A little while back, they fooled me for a while with some new seating arrangements, but then I realized the snazzy new electric chairs had been installed into the same old Boeings. What American does instead, and it is very much to its credit, is to swarm over every airplane before it is permitted to leave the ground, fixing, checking, making sure that it is truly airworthy. This means a lot of late departures and safe arrivals. Still, I sometimes think they should post all take-off and landing times with a big fat asterisk.

Anyhow, yesterday I was scheduled to depart at 1:50 from San Francisco. The plane was slow to board. It is my belief, based on years of experience, that even the most infinitesimal delay at any point in the chain usually results in hours and hours of snafus and fubars, very often ending in the scrubbing of the flight and total decomposition of my day/week.  So my hair-trigger gut was telling me a) we had a problem and b) there was, therefore, a 68.4% chance that we would never take off at all, when Chuck Yeager came on the intercom.

“Well,” he said, “we were all ready to go, but it appears that the brakes on the left side of the plane need to be replaced.” He then went on about how that was really not a very big deal at all and that it might take less than half an hour and so on and so forth, but I didn’t hear a thing, all I could get into my mind was the image of a plane landing at Kennedy Airport in New York and careening into Jamaica Bay when its brakes gave out.

“This is too much information for me,” I said to the dead-heading flight attendant in the next seat.

“Well,” he said, “I guess they’re just trying to be honest.”

I get that. Honesty is a virtue. In this case, however, something seems out of whack. Next time I would suggest something like, “There’s a bit of weather in New York, and we’re going to make sure that we have clear skies for your landing there. Kick back and have a free drink on us.”

I like that much better. Not that such obfuscation is always called for. How different the world would look now if some honest broker had announced, “Well, we were doing fine until about a month ago, when it became obvious that our insurance was underwritten by a host of bad mortgage loans…”

The ongoing AIG mess provides us with an interesting sidelight today – the use of an excuse that is no longer acceptable in the unwired global universe in which we now live. The unacceptable excuse is still unfortunately in wide use among public relations professionals who represent disgraced or beleaguered executives. Here it is, from today’s New York Times: 

Since November, A.I.G.’s financial products unit has been led by Gerry Pasciucco, a former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley who was brought in by Mr. Liddy with instructions to wind down the unit. Company executives said they faced a need to keep skilled professionals in the business unit, which traded trillions of dollars worth of financial derivatives, because it would take great expertise to shut down the business in an orderly manner and without causing more turmoil.

Christina Pretto, a spokeswoman for A.I.G., said Mr. Pasciucco was traveling on Monday and was unavailable. But she said that since his arrival, the company had reduced the volume of its financial positions by more than 25 percent, starting with the “complex and difficult-to-manage positions.”

Now, Mr. Pasciucco, the AIG executive running the bonus-hungry unit of that clueless insurance company, may be in Timbuktu, or in Katmandu, or simply in a Ramada Inn in Fresno, but I assure you that no matter how far he has travelled, how distant his locale, how remote his whereabouts, he can be reached by cell phone or BlackBerry. Be he at the bottom of the ocean! Or perched atop a Himalayan peak! He can be found.

The contemporary business climate in which we now suffer presents us with many complexities, many indignities. One of them is, unfortunately, the ubiquity of digital communications. This has many benefits, and an equal number of personal liabilities. One of them is the demise of certain excuses that used to make life more tolerable. Included are such now out-of-date chestnuts as “I’ll read that when I receive it tomorrow morning and get you an answer on it by noontime,” which was killed by the fax machine, and “I can’t get there until Tuesday so let’s postpone the meeting until then,” which was laid low by teleconference technology. And now, I’m afraid, spokespeople of executives who wish to hide from the media, the government or their estranged spouses must now come up with a replacement for “He’s traveling right now and cannot be reached.”

How about, “Hello? I can’t hear you! I’m going into a tunnel!”

Aren’t you bored with career strategies? Don’t you feel sometimes, when you’re looking at business magazines or books or listening to drivel from guys who supposedly know everything, that everybody is simply reinventing the same wheel over and over again?

You’re right. The problem is that business people often need to hear the same things over and over again. It’s not because we’re stupid. Probably.

The good thing in this case is that the story is about me. I know I’m not stupid. I mean, I think I do. And yet…

Anyway, here it is: I had a problem earlier this week closing a certain situation that required resolution so that I could sleep. It wasn’t a huge thing. It was just something that I wanted done that had certain financial implications for me personally. So what did I do? I started sending e-mails.

My first e-mail went to a guy who I’d dealt with on this issue throughout the process. As happens sometimes these days, I got a message back that there was no person at the corporate e-mail address. Woooo. Spooky. Dude no longer existed. Bye bye, bro.

So I bethought myself and went down one notch on his corporate ladder, found the second person I knew in that location and e-mailed her. Nothing. That was Monday. By Tuesday, there was still nothing. I was reminded of an old song, reprised by one of my favorite groups when I was a kid. It was called Nothing. Here’s how it went:

Monday nothing
Tuesday nothing
Wednesday and Thursday nothing
Friday for a change a little more nothing
Saturday and Sunday nothing

It’s an existential song that pretty much summed up the matter as far as I was concerned. Last night I went to bed thinking that the entire deal was in the dumpster. It made me sad. During my 3:30 AM anxiety hour, I spent at least fifteen minutes obsessing about it before falling back asleep thanks to extreme boredom with myself.

This morning I went nuts. I did something I haven’t done on this kind of situation for quite some time. I abandoned the e-mail protocol and picked up a phone. Got the woman on the third ring. Turns out she’d been sick for two days. Apologized for being very busy after that. No problemo. Everything is copacetic.

This tedious conclusion is exactly what I was seeking and I could have short-circuited the whole process if I had simply talked to the person when I first had an inkling that something was awry. Sounds idiotically simple, does it not? But do you know how many people are festering right now because their corporate culture mandates exclusive use of digital communications? He’s not answering his BlackBerry! I left him six e-mails! Aieee!

I’m going to kick it up a notch from here on in. I’ve got a bone to pick with Fredricks, who owes me a nice little memo to remove my personal responsibility on a certain subject. I’ve e-mailed him about it; no response. It’s easy to ignore an e-mail. I’ve also left him two voice mails. No reply – it’s almost equally easy to duck that kind of incoming also. But it’s hard to ignore a guy who’s standing in your doorway, and the guy is quite literally right down the hall.

According to a new survey conducted in late January by Charles Schwab, 85% of all independent advisors believe that the recession will be over in a couple of years. Two or so, they think. Perhaps a little more. Or less.

Some believe that it will be over by the end of this year, but not many.

Others think it’s going to be bad until late 2011, although they are in the minority, or they were in late January.

Most think it’s going to be two years. Or thereabouts. Which is probably what they’re saying when they’re advising people who presumably listen to them.

Who are these people? That’s what I’d like to know.

Because according to my personal survey, conducted with the inside of my brain pan six seconds ago, 97.2 percent of non-stupid people have stopped listening to anybody’s advice, particularly that of those who offer any.

72.3% of all respondents have stopped believing that the Market is driven by any metrics at all. 82% of those have come to the conclusion that a bunch of scared lunatics have taken control of the machinery of capitalism and that there’s no sense to what these losers may do on any given day.

Interestingly, 83.4% of all intelligent people have decided that numbers themselves are weird little creatures that are about as meaningful as a plate of chocolate pudding and just as solid. Of those, 71.3% figure there is no way that anybody knows anything in a world where Warren Buffett had the worst year of his career.

And speaking personally? 100% of me wants to slap somebody when they offer a view on what other people should be doing with their money.

I know what I’m going to do with mine right now. I’m going to have a turkey sandwich. After that, I’m not making any predictions for the rest of the day, other than declaring that there’s a 100% likelihood that I’m going to be ignoring any putative punditry until 2012. Perhaps a little sooner. Or later.

This week we passed by a certain milestone for a modest little community like ours. We posted our 10,000th comment. It came from Laurel, of Santa Barbara, California, whose observation on that day was typical of the kind of thing that has made this blogspace such an addictive experience for me. Here is our 10,000th comment, rich with personal anecdote and interesting observation from someplace that is Not Here:

I live in a tourist town, santa barbara, ca. I have been watching the stores close for a few years now and the staff in the remaining ones becoming more harried. I see the workers taking on so much more and thankful to boot, that they still have a job. They are tired though. I also could swear I see new workers in the grocery store and banks, and they appear to be more qualified. Maybe I am imagining this, that employers are merging, hiring and keeping only the best. I don’t know what to think of this but everyone is nicer to each other.

Small business owners have usually sunk all that they have in their business and watching them lose everything, their hopes and dreams, everything, is reason enough to spend whatever it takes. So, if people are saving just in case, think again and spend a little, tip more, and drop the “were doomed” attitude and see what Bing sees; we can, we will, and we are going to make it.

on a personal note, i lost my job in epidemiology, but found out i could make the same teaching high school science and demand is high for females teaching math, statistics and physics. i recently had a legal matter, so i had to refinance for cash. The refinancing rate actually saved me more money then I lost. (I thought of Bing’s article when i calculated the new mortgage rate and realized my luck.)

Thanks Bing, you made my life a little better by pointing out to look for the cracks of light!

Thank you, Laurel. And thanks to all of you, first time commenters, long-time bloviators, story-tellers, complainers, philosophers, cranks and wisenheimers, for making this space what it is, whatever it is. You’ve given me your thoughts on airline travel, recession, depression, incessant solicitations from Chase, the triumphs of Apple and, sometimes, Microsoft, Bernanke, Paulson, Madoff and other great symbols of high finance up to and including Mike the Headless Chicken and Alan Greenspan.

Right now it’s pretty unclear what the future holds. I hope, frankly, that it starts surprising us in a completely different way pretty soon. But either way, if it does or if it doesn’t, I’ll keep showing up if you do. And who knows. I may have a few surprises coming soon myself.

And Laurel? Send me an email to bingblog@gmail.com with your info. I’ll send you something nice.

Everywhere you look: gloom. But maybe not.

Gloom, of course, isn’t hard to spot. The other day I looked outside my office window, which fortunately, the way things are going some days, is hermetically sealed and made out of extremely strong plate glass. Outside on the sidewalk, on the other side of the avenue, was a long, long line of people that grew as the morning progressed. By 10 AM, it was tripled – three parallel lines – which of course meant that the line had gone around the block three times. It was, in short, a swarm.

A small group of people had formed at one of our windows and was watching the throng. “What is that?” I asked. “Job fair at the Hilton,” said Jeremy, who makes it his business to know everything.  ”They’re taking resumes.” I looked back at the triple line that snaked around and around and around a whole city block in this big, busy city. Just about everybody on the line was dressed for business. Ties. Suits. Serious black skirts. It was very, very cold out that day, but they waited. The line did not move. In fact, it didn’t thin out until dusk, as the street lights began to come on.

Several weeks ago, I popped up to Fifth Avenue to get a shirt at Brooks Brothers. At certain times of the year they’re quite reasonable, if you think a $60 business shirt is reasonable. I sort of do. There was only one problem. Brooks Brothers, at the corner of 53rd and Fifth, was gone. I stood there on the street like a dog who was absolutely sure he was in the correct spot at which he had buried a juicy bone, except it wasn’t there.

A rent-a-cop was standing right by the place where Brooks Brothers, the spine upon which many a serious (if slightly lumpy) business career has been built, had once stood. Paper covered the windows. The logo that had once stood over the revolving doors had been torn away, leaving an ugly stub. “It’s gone?” I asked the guard. “Gone,” he said. ”Last week.” 

“As in… gone?” I said. “Like… not refurbishing? Not opening again later?”

“That is right,” said the guard, and we exchanged one of those looks that say, “Buckle up, pal, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Flip now to yesterday. I’m walking down Sixth Avenue and at the corner of 49th, or maybe it was 50th, what do you think I see? A store that has been empty for a while with a big new window that says, in big, bold, classy letters, “Brooks Brothers. Coming soon. Opening Summer 2009.”

They say that the closing of one door often signifies the opening of another. A lot of doors are closing these days. But if you look long and hard enough, maybe, just maybe, there’s a crack of light here and there beginning to shine through?

So we have our stimulus package. I don’t think anybody truly understands where the benefits will truly be felt most immediately, but if the thing creates even half the number of jobs that the president thinks it will that will be a good thing.

When a victim is lying bleeding on a sidewalk, it’s time for the triage people to step in, with less concern for how that individual is going to provide profitable income for the rehab facility later. I think all those who are prognosticating all sorts of gloom and doom as a result of this particular triage effort should shut up. They had their turn. They got us here. Thanks a million. Now get out of town and stay there.

Speaking of millions, I would like to take a brief moment to congratulate each of the 700 people at Merrill Lynch whose bonuses topped out at more than $1,000,000. I’m pretty sure that each of you received more last year, but are also relieved to get even that small percentage of what you might have earned had a bunch of variables beyond your control been more upsidey.

If the economy had not gone into the tank, for instance, you would have hit the number you’d achieved many times in the past.

Likewise, if Wall Street hadn’t been infested with squirrels and gutless wieners, many of your prognostications would have paid off much more profitably for your investors and the pool you’re sipping from now would have been much bigger, I’m sure.

If all the deadbeats who believed the housing loan sales weasels in the last decade or so had made good on their sub-prime mortgages and not been forced into foreclosure, you’d have hit a totally different kind of nut, wouldn’t you.

And if there wasn’t so much nasty media attention on your sector, there’s no question your comp committee would have been more likely to disgorge the kind of sums to which you’ve been accustomed over the years.

Still, I’m pleased for you. Sure, it’s only, like, $565,453 after taxes and much of it is spoken for already. But it’s something. Put a little in the bank. Then go out and spend a big chunk of it, okay? We all have to do our parts to fuel this recovery, no matter how badly we’re hurting right now.

Experts seem relatively unified, if such a thing is possible, on the issue of direct economic stimulus to every taxpayer. They’re against it. If all the various monies now being set aside were used, the check for each of us would come to nearly 10 grand, apparently. But the economists don’t think it’s a good idea.

The problem is that given all the bad news, past and future, most of us, it is feared, would simply do what the big banks have done with their bailouts: tuck them away for a rainier day. They were supposed to take their money and fork it over to people who wanted to borrow it. Ha! they said. We’re keeping it warm and dry, except for the cash we’re earmarked for bonuses. Smart bankers. They care about the economy. They know that if you give an executive hundreds of millions of dollars they will spend a bunch of it, and that will stimulate everybody.

Us smaller fry, it is thought, would take the $10,000 from Uncle Sam and put it in one of those teetering institutions, rather than putting it back into the economy where it is so desperately needed. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday, people aren’t spending enough, inventories are rising, the system is going stagnant and we’re all doomed. Or perhaps that was Sunday. It doesn’t matter. The gist is clear. We’re all very selfish and if we got a bailout of any kind we wouldn’t be responsible citizens and spend it right away.

Well I, for one, would like to assure the government that, should I receive $10,000 as a part of the national recovery effort, I would spend every penny of it. Possible areas of expenditure include:

• Blind auctions for certain educational and religious institutions
• New shocks for old Volvo
• Vacations (domestic)
• Cost of maintaining elderly cocker spaniel
• Expenses associated with under-compensated semi-adult children
• Heat, electricity, gas, etc.
• Grass-fed beef
• Wine

This is of course just a cursory list. I’m sure I could generate a whole bunch more if I really thought about it. Just sitting here I’m probably spending money on something I don’t even know about. In fact, 10 grand might not do it. Give me 20 and I’ll really show ‘em something.

How about you. Are you willing to take the pledge? Write your Congressman. Tell him or her that you are committed to spending whatever they give us. If all of us come together in one giant shout, perhaps we’ll get the job done to the benefit of us all.  Have you seen the price of dinner and movie these days?

The storm clouds have gathered. Hell, it’s raining. But that doesn’t mean we have to be stupid. So I’ve decided to avoid, deride and abjure the following group of bad actors that right now are circling in the mist: 

First, the Executioners. There are those, mostly from Wharton, for some reason, who believe that every problem in the business universe can be solved by firing people. While this does solve some problems immediately after we leave fat city, it begins to pale as a strategy well before those who are addicted to it decide to put down their quick fix. I’m going to keep a keen eye out for these types and see if I can leave them at the station after the rest of us have departed for better climes. 

Next, Revisionistas. These are the guys who are working real hard to avoid accepting the blame for what has happened, and are spending most of the time repositioning themselves and their cadre. We know who’s to blame. Everybody. But in the end? I’m going to regard these losers as I would a bunch of teenagers caught with a bag of weed. It’s usually the guy who protests his innocence the loudest who’s the dealer. 

Rear Admirals: Of course there are those who were very happy in the last iteration of our economy. They’ll be out in force trying to kill the new one. Did you know that Franklin D. Roosevelt was responsible for the Great Depression of the 1930s? Neither did I. But these guys do. Know why? Because if Roosevelt was a bad guy, the fellow who’s being compared to him right now must be too, right? Look, friends. If there’s one thing we know, it’s this: over the past decade or two, we’ve been spun. Let’s not get twirled by the same spin doctors again, now that for the most part the only spinning they should be doing is down the drain. 

Insecurity Analysts: Bozos to the left of us! Bozos to the right of us! And still we fight on. The job of an analyst is to look at a specific company and run models. Their models are fraudulent, stuck together with bad glue and yet they continue to analyze, because they are analysts, and that’s what they do. Inherent in their deal is that they look at each company they cover as if it existed in a bubble. Why? Because their job is to analyze  and so on and blah blah blah. If they won’t shut up, it doesn’t mean we have to listen. If I never hear another learned opinion from one of these guys it will be too soon. 

Economists: See above. 

Ostriches: They live all around us, their butts in the air, their heads in the sand. A lot of the time they’re in charge of budgets, but they can also be in any cornice of the corporation. And while doing business as usual is a good thing, a nice look around at the operating environment doesn’t hurt, either. Ostriches are scared, impatient and likely to run for the horizon at the slightest perturbation. They make me nervous. Nervous is bad. 

Weasels: In spite of all appearances, there are those who always believe, perhaps as a demented part of the American dream, that every horrible eventuality carries with it the seeds of tremendous opportunity. Perhaps it does, for Warren Buffet. For the rest of us, this not a time for greed and getting over on our fellow citizens. I partially blame business magazines, many of which now sport huge cover stories about how 2009 is going to be A GREAT YEAR FOR YOU! It’s not. My goal is to live through it. I’m not looking for a huge upside, and I’ve got a real gimlet eye for anybody offering me one. 

Rastas: Don’t worry. Be happy. Ridiculous, right? On the other hand… We’ve already got the dreads. 

It’s the last day I’ll be spending at the office this year. Always a funny feeling. Another year is gone. A new calendar must be cracked open. I feel like I should clean up, but there’s really nothing to get rid of. One day I guess I’ll leave this place for real, and perhaps it will feel a little bit like this, only moreso. This time around, I’m luckier than some. I get to come back and see how things work out for another cycle.

I won’t say a lot about 2008. I suppose there were many good things about it, although it’s hard to remember them now, what with all the Spitzers and Blagojeviches and Madoffs and Greenspans and Paulsons and Bernankes and assorted Wall Street miscreants, the bailouts and the purges and the blown hedges and wilted WaMus and all that. The list of losers grows so long that it’s hard to remember who we were mad at last month, last week, yesterday.

You kind of want to hope that 2009 will be different, and maybe it will be. We’ll have a new president. The markets will have to return to some kind of normalcy after a long period of disease. Like, creditors will have to start giving people credit again at some point, right? The debt folks will have to do what they do for a living, more responsibly, we hope. Car makers will have to figure out a way to sell some cars, which probably means somebody will start advertising again. Life will find a way.

The general feeling I get is that we’re all pretty glad to get out of 2008 with at least a portion of our skins on. Nobody I know is sad to see the old year go. That twinkle in the common eye might not be tears of sadness or rage. It might be a glimmer of hope.

Thanks to all of you who come here to browse, get excited, feel outrage or occasional amusement. I love to read what you write. I am very happy to publish the lot of you, as long as you keep it relatively clean and marginally on-point. One thing I do know about the year to come. I look forward to hanging with all of you as we chew over – and occasionally spit out – the events of this world as they unfold.

Now I guess I’ll just lock up and get out of here. I’ll see you when I see you, guys.

Christmas, they say, comes but once a year and while this is good news for our wallets, it’s probably a bit of a bummer for the snail-mail guys. For it’s during this season that all kinds of business people haul out their paper envelopes, cards and stamps and set the air a-humming with jolly wishes. There seem to be fewer such this year, which is either a sign of the market conditions in which we live, where every little financial outlay, even postage, must be scrutinzed, or evidence that I’m less popular than I used to be. 

Most evident in their absence are the lengthy, one-size-fits-all newsletters that people used to send, updating friends, family and assorted associates about the interesting doings of their clan. “Betsy has left the coven and is now celebrating her “solstice” with us, and little Harry recently was awarded the lead in his middle-school production of Annie!” Perhaps folks are using e-mail for that kind of thing now.

Still, there’s a cornucopia of good stuff to enjoy.

There are the cards from colleagues that are, as always, very much appreciated. In vogue this year are pictures of kids, puppies and kitties. A fair number of holiday salutations share portraits of the offspring and assorted family mammals with absolutely no evidence of adult life at all. In this economy, the message seems to be: “You may not be interested in me personally at all, but here are my dependents. Aren’t they cute? Some go to private schools or are headed for an expensive college education. The point is, I’m a human being that has a real existence outside of my professional function. Please don’t fire me.” Or maybe that’s just my imagination.

Second on the stack are the lovely missives from people who either a) do not sign their cards but leave the printed message as sufficient to contain their best wishes or b) sign it quite illegibly and bear no informative return address. These I keep in a very special place in my credenza, for re-use next year.

There are, of course, the law, consulting or insurance firms who do a mass holiday mailing, with each member of the organization scrawling their weeny name in a corner of an acceptably deracinated card that conveys all non-denominational jollies of the season. One just came from the out-of-house counsel we just fired. Here’s another from the management consulting firm that engineered a bunch of our industry’s recent layoffs! So toasty.

I particularly enjoyed the tiny calendar in its faux-leather holder sent to me by my broker. The fact that we’re still talking to each other means my 2008 was not as bad as some others.

But the one that most expressed the merry vibrations of this particular holiday season came from the air conditioning guy who installed the AC machines in my apartment not long ago. I’m going to call him Sidney Roth, although that is not his name. On one sheet of very simple letterhead almost Dickensian in its stark functionality, the following holiday message in 16-point Times Roman is sent to all his clients:

To: All Non-Contract Service Accounts

Effective January 1, 2009, all services will be terminated.

Our new policy for services will be “Payment upon completion of service” (COD).

Our field technicians will receive the applicable service charges while at your residence once your call is completed.

A formal invoice indicating your payment will be mailed the work day following the service visit.

As always, we appreciate your patronage.

Sidney Roth Company Services Dept.

I imagine that last bit – the part about how they appreciate our patronage? - was added by some thoughtful assistant to provide a softer touch. It doesn’t seem all that sincere in the context. What I get from the mailing is a very clear image of a working man, sitting behind his scarred and battered desk, looking at a bunch of invoices that are 91 days past due. All his clients owe him a ton of money. And nobody is paying, not at least until they see how things look come January 1. “The hell with this,” he says to himself. “No more free lunch.”

Of all the holiday communications I’ve received this year, this one feels the most appropriate. Holiday schmoliday. Gotta get paid, right?

I’ve read a lot about the whole Bernie Madoff thing now, and questions still remain. I’ll leave most of them to the forensic accountants and the gumshoes now on the trail of who knew what, when. I do have one very simple one I’d like to offer anybody within the sound of my voice. 

Where’s the money? 

I know this seems like a rudimentary issue, and one I’m sure a lot of people are investigating right now. But I’ve attended a number of meetings, parties and private conversations over the last week or so that Madoff has been front page news, and I have yet to get a clear answer. 

Where’s the money? If the location has been revealed anywhere in video, print or online, I’ve missed it. 

Is it possible that he and his family spent it? I don’t think so. Even the greediest jerk in the world would have a hard time unloading $50 billion on sundries like houses, cars, boats, planes, even. If you spent like a manic chicken for decades, it’s hard to see how you would put out more than, say, $5 billion. I’ve made a list of things I would get if I had Madoff’s war chest and I’m afraid I can’t even get to that single digit number. 

Did he give it to charity? No, he seems to have preyed on charities as well as on the gullible wealthy. Yeshiva even gave him an honorary degree while he allegedly was fleecing them. 

Did he share it with cohorts? Perhaps. Maybe there’s something to that. Maybe we’ll find out that some of those who were ostensibly gulled were in fact themselves intermediaries who profited from the credulous losers who helped to erect this particular pyramid out of golden bricks and platinum straw. Still, $50 billion? That’s a lot of vigorish to spread around without leaving some footprint in the dust. 

So… where’s the money? 

Do any of you know? I’m really asking. Perhaps if it’s just lying around somewhere, we could go and pick up some of it. And if the guy still has any, don’t you think it would be appropriate to get it back? A whole bunch of people are missing it pretty badly, particularly at this festive time of year.

I had a dream last night. More of a nightmare, actually. I woke up trembling and very cold, even though the room itself was quite warm. I thought perhaps if I told you about it, the sense of unease I still carry with me without dissipate somewhat. 

I was in a strange room, having slept there because I could not find my way home. I thought maybe I had had too much to drink the night before and fallen asleep on an alien bed. When I awoke, it was bright day, and I was hyper-aware that time was a-wasting. I had a powerful sense that I needed to get in touch with the office or something terrible would happen. 

This is no surprise, I think. Something terrible is happening pretty much every day now, and not in dreamland, either. 

I got dressed and went looking for my BlackBerry and cell phone. They were both dead. I realized I was in an unfamiliar place and there might be a huge issue finding chargers for my electronic devices. I saw on a table in the living room of the place a jumble of chargers. I started looking through them. Each held promise, but when I got to the service end of it that was meant to interface with my phone or BlackBerry, it was the wrong type. I tried one. Then I tried another. None of the chargers fit. Somewhere in there somebody came to the door of the apartment. It was a guy from High School I haven’t seen in a long time and had no desire to see now, particularly in this desperate situation with the chargers and everything. He started to talk to me about insurance. I left him in the hall and continued looking. 

Finally I realized there was still a tiny bit of charge in my BlackBerry, because it was ringing. I answered it, even though I hate to use those things as a phone. They always remind me of Maxwell Smart talking to 99 with a shoe in his ear. 

“Hello?” I said into the dying BlackBerry. 

“You need help,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. “We’re all worried about you.” 

Then I woke up.  I wonder what it means. 

I’m glad I told you about it, even though I don’t feel much better. In fact, I now realize that my cell phone is downstairs and it’s getting kind of late. I wonder if I charged it last night. I fear I didn’t. See you later.

We cede our territory today to TJ Knowles of San Diego, whose comment on yesterday’s post carries the double benefit of being interesting and extremely cogent, and also obviating the need for me to write anything today. Since the weather is fine and I don’t feel much like looking at the financial news, or considering anything appropriately bleak, I want to thank TJ and turn over the conch to him for a little while. Here’s what he says:

On Monday I took my Toyota Matrix (best car I’ve ever had – except for my 1930 Model A) to a guy who is one of the most intelligent, practical and highly skilled men I have ever known. He works as a handyman, but his experience and expertise as a mechanic, expert welder, and all-around construction problem-solver are a constant amazement to me.

He completed some major brake work and electrical repair, gave me great advice and sent me on my way with an invoice that would have been triple at any Dealer service.

During our conversation, he said he was concerned about the economy and his workload.

It occurred to me – and I told him, that he was mistaken – that he was sitting in the catbird seat and would thrive in this dismal economy because he actually KNOWS HOW TO DO THINGS. And the things he knows how to do are a staple in today’s world.

In some ways, the cliff-diving our economy has been doing is a blessing – we are getting the big wake-up call to see that we have become a nation of consumers – not producers. We have invented 200 names for money, and none of them is worth a tinker’s dam now.

We are clever manipulators of information, which translates into zippo-nada-zero in a world in which Substance now rises from the ashes like the mythical Phoenix, devouring the pathetic, paper-pushing and ethernet-laced house of cards we have been referring to for years as an “unstoppable” economy.

It is still a real world. Tools, hard work, physical labor and a laborer’s pride will be the honorable watchwords of the day.

I watch Ken as he struggles with my car’s serpentine belt that fights him for control.

Ken will win.

Thanks, TJ. From your lips to God’s ears.

Look, I don’t want to be a pill and rain on the whole gloom thing we’re all experiencing. There’s no doubt it’s real. I look at the numbers the same as you do. Revenue is down. Unemployment is up. We’re circling the drain, definitely, I’m not arguing with anybody about that. It’s the worst black hole since all those black and white pictures were taking during the depths of the century just past. 

But it’s got to be one of the weirdest recession/depressions on record. I just spent the same weekend you did. Turkey. Ham. Leftovers. And, of course, shopping. So I’m wondering if you saw the same thing I did. As in: Crowds. Lines. People clawing at stuff on racks as if their lives depended on it. Hoards of greedy Americans shoving lunchtime carbs into their faces so they wouldn’t have to break stride in mid-spend. 

So I have to ask: What’s up? 

Started Friday, after a Thanksgiving filled with good cheer, grog and incessant radio and television spots screaming about unprecedented buying opportunities. I asked myself: Who are these numbskulls who get up at dawn to purchase a flat screen TV? Who would stand online at 3 a.m. to get a ticket so they can come back later and get a Wii for a couple bucks off? 

The new day dawned early. “Let’s go to Best Buy,” said my son over breakfast. “Really?” I said. 

We were there by 10. As we rolled into the parking lot, I said to him, “You know, this recession is hitting everybody right now. Even me.” Perhaps he was wearing those tiny earphones I got him for his birthday, because he didn’t answer. The lot was full. Like, totally. I had to park in the overflow area.

In the store, the scene was nuts. Huge crowds around the gaming systems, the HDTVs, the computers, the DVDs. Lines at the register. We went over to the area in which we had an interest: car audio. He has a new/old clunker whose main deficiency, it seems, is in the quality of its sound system. 

There was a massive megadeal posted on the wall. A fabulous complete set-up for just $600. The car itself is worth about that, maybe a buck or two less. “Do you have any super-mega-awesome-once-in-a-lifetime Black Friday deals?” I asked the clerk, who was younger than the car in question. He looked at the deal posted on the wall and ripped it down. “That deal ended a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “But we can work something out.” He did some figures on the back of an envelope. “We can do a mid-range system for… $875, plus tax. That includes installation.” 

I noted that the price seemed to be a simple total of the hardware necessary, plus about $300 for installation. “What happened to the meta-mooga-humongous deals for Black Friday?” I asked. “They’re not store-wide,” he said. We left, fighting our way through the mob of frenzied consumers toward fresh air and light. 

So obviously, there was no panic about the recession at Best Buy. True, there were absolutely NO people in their installation area, so maybe they’ll be sorry later they didn’t moderate their prices a bit on the car stereo question. Maybe they’re getting the overflow from other places that have gone under. But who are all these people forking over piles of green? Aren’t they aware that the economy is in the sump? 

Throughout the weekend, the same story proliferated. Target was full. At Costco, you couldn’t get a seat at the hot dog stand. I had to knock over an old lady to get to a 50-pound bag of frozen shrimp.

So I’m open to suggestion. What do YOU think is going on here?

I flew from here to there last night. As sometimes happens in Business, I ran into somebody who is in business. We swapped a few observations for a while. After some time, I felt so appalled that I was forced to feign sleep. I think it was over St. Louis.

I should have known I was in some trouble when we were still on the ground in Los Angeles. The chief flight attendant had just announced that turkey wraps were available for $10 each to people in Coach. “Boy,” he said. “Why don’t they just charge an extra $10 for the ticket and give the things away for free?” I didn’t know and told him so. “These guys who run the airlines are so stupid at that kind of little stuff. What makes you think we can trust them to service and fly airplanes with all these people on them?”

This violated the first rule of in-flight discourse: No talk about anything related to airplane malfunctions.

It developed that we had both been in the same business at one point. I asked him what he did now. “I sold my business a little while back for a small fortune,” he said, indulging in the kind of bragging you get used to after a while. Not. “Now I’m an investor.”

“You must be taking it on the chin,” I said, possibly to get back at him for being so forthcoming about all that “small fortune” stuff. He allowed that he had been hurt, but was still investing. We then discussed a variety of issues relating to a number of business sectors. By the time we got over Nebraska, it was clear that this guy knew absolutely nothing. I’m not talking about insight here. I’m talking about events. Facts. Things that are happening. Mergers that took place and rocked the world. Companies that were no longer in business. Guys who had died. I’m not going to go into all of it. It was when he expressed surprise that you could download movies and watch them on your computer that I tuned him out.

Perhaps he’s smart and informed in other things. He seemed up on politics. He did seem knowledgeable about Warren Buffett’s less successful investments. He was reading an intelligent book, I saw, over which he fell asleep two or three times. Perhaps he’s just one of those people who do nothing but watch CNBC and read soft economics and analysts’ reports from firms that are now receiving bailouts. Maybe he knows a lot about cheese futures or something.

A few years ago there was a big debate about “Who owns the corporation” and all the wizards who know nothing at a very high level came to an agreement: It was the shareholders who owned the company. Not the employees who make the product, who work over years to build the value of the operation and live and die by its fate. Not the customers who use the stuff they make. No, it was guys like this one, who have a little bit of the enterprise and can unload it at any time without feeling a pinch.

Look at the paper. This is where that kind of thinking has led us.

At this point I believe that Wall Street and our entire stockholder-centric culture is killing American business. What’s good for investors is not always good for the companies and the workers who have to live in the system, not just feed off it after paying a small price for admission. Is it possible, that at some time in the future, the welfare of the companies we serve could be divorced from the fear, the greed, the feral hysteria of the securities marketplace?

When I was a much greener geek, I wrote for the Ziff Davis magazines. The book was called PC Computing, and I really loved doing it. There was a smell of everything new in the air back then, and a sense of amazement at what computers could do, an expanding consciousness that all kinds of stuff that used to be boring was suddenly exciting and cool. The greatest magazine in the field was not the one I was working for, however. It was its sister publication: PC Magazine.

PC Magazine ruled. It had John Dvorak, who extruded two terrific, high-energy columns in each issue, and a bunch of other guys who pretty much defined the interface between nerdy and awesome. And it was fat. Some issues were so fat they had to split them into two.

The PC business was exploding, and this was its bible.

Many of you may be too young to remember that there were once many, many beautiful charting programs, for instance, all of which have been replaced by the infinitely less lovely and more tedious PowerPoint. There was Harvard Graphics, and Persuasion, and many others. They came in big boxes with dozens of big floppy disks holding huge amounts of programming data you had to install over a period of hours. There were a lot of word processing programs, too, not just Word or Word Perfect, and a nice selection of spreadsheets. All we have now is Excel. It’s good. We use it. But some of the fun is gone.

Back then Macs were mostly for schools and spiky people. Real computer lovers were totally PC. We swapped cards in and out of the machine. We were unafraid of opening the box. We tweaked our software and knew which cables went to which arcane interface. It was the closest I ever got to feeling like one of the jocks with whom I went to high school, the guys who slicked their hair back and knew their way around a transmission.

Yesterday it was announced that the paper edition of PC Magazine would cease publication, and that the product would now be totally online. I’m sure they’ll do fine. It’s probably the right business decision. But it made me sad. Not because the magazine itself has been important to me recently, because it hasn’t. I own Apples now. PCs bore me completely. I haven’t installed a new video card in years.

But the idea of never holding that big fat paper dream machine in my hand again is a little hard to fathom. What’s next? No more General Motors?

One of my very hostile but articulate readers, Mike from Spokane, gives me both barrels between the eyes this morning. I think Mike thinks I won’t publish it, because I’m a panty-waist business type swilling gin at breakfast. Here’s what he says:

Bing…with all due respect (as you recently stated to me), you have no idea what you’re frigging talking about. You, and corporate America, are so far removed from the realities of Main Street America, that you continue to confuse your personal financial comfort concerns with those of middle America.

I fully expect that you will delete all posts contrary to your limited and self-serving view, but at least you (or one of your corporate lackeys) will have to read statements that reflect what most of America regards as self-evident…that expanding and supporting corporate greed through taxpayer handouts for incompetence is no path out of the mess we’re in. Not much satisfaction from this end, but at least you, or one of your timorous syncophants, will know that your world has finally sunk below used car salesmen in terms of universal public esteem.

Finally, fearing being one step from flinging fries at the local ‘In&Out’ joint may play well while swilling $20 cocktails in some high-end Manhattan watering hole, but it is a daily reality for millions of Americans who invested billions in now collapsed 401K plans.

Mike, it’s always a pleasure to hear from you. But sometimes it’s hard to see things clearly with so much blood in your eye. I sent my corporate lackeys and timorous sycophants out of the room. This is between you and me.

First of all, this ”corporate America” that’s on a different plane that “Main Street America” is a myth. I have worked in theaters, as a cab driver, in small companies, large corporations and mega-watt global behemoths, and they are all the same. They are people working for a living. And in one and all, it’s the most dysfunctional that run the place. Whatever the gig, we work, we try to enjoy our jobs, and we go home. Guess where our homes are? Main Street.

Secondly, I come from Illinois. So I don’t want to hear a lot of pompous, self-aggrandizing bushwah about middle America, either. We all live here. We are all Americans. None of us are more American than any others. We are all equally American. Let’s move on.

I understand that you need to see people like me, because I sometimes wear a tie and work in an office, as rich, shallow mofos who deserve to be pilloried, in order to keep on feeling that righteous anger of yours. But in my opinion you’d do better to see all of us (except the very rich and unsuccessful putzes who whipped up this soggy mess) as citizens of the same troubled system. Everybody I know is very nervous about their jobs. Nobody I know has a pension. We worry about our stock price, and our families, and our friends, and what the hell is going to happen to us if the big companies that provide so many people with jobs aren’t helped out right now.

We don’t sympathize with the idiots who have gotten us all into such trouble. And we certainly don’t want THEM to benefit from any assistance that is given to these failing auto makers, banks, insurance companies, whatever. We just don’t want the entire ship to sink, taking the lives of all on board, because the captain and his crew are dolts, numbskulls and screw-ups, or because politicians, responding to the anger of their constituents, continue to follow instead of lead.

Take the miscreants out behind the barn! Line them up against the wall! Pepper them with heat-seeking projectiles! But when you’re done with that satisfying exercise, let’s try to save the American auto industry, the banks where we keep our money, and probably the mortgages of all those people who believed they could buy a home with no money down because a greedy guy in a suit told them they could.

Personally, at this point I’m not a big believer in the “free market” approach. It seems to benefit the guys in charge of the marketplace. And that’s not us. And by “us” I mean we, the people. And by the way: MY 401K blows, too.

Thanks for writing, Mike. Say hi to Spokane.

Good morning and welcome to another rollicking week in the world of free enterprise.

I have a question for you this morning. Yesterday I gassed up my car and found that, for the first time in a while, the tab came in at under $25. I have become accustomed to the habit of not looking at the price on the pump when I make my occasional visits, any more than I watch the Dow every day now. There no point in rubbing one’s nose in the gravity of our situation, don’t you think? At any rate, I looked at the pump and it said that the price of a gallon of gasoline was $2.21. 

Wow, I thought. That’s cheap.

And then I wondered. I mean, we’re so conditioned to the price of things spiraling ever-upward that eventually we become totally desensitized to the reality of things. Is $2.21 per gallon really cheap? I just paid $13.34 for some cereal, milk and a banana at Oakland International Airport. Was that cheap? The cab I will take to get from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan will cost me $60. Is THAT cheap? 

In the case of gasoline prices, it’s clear to me that the market is totally jobbed, and we are hosed. When the economy is flush, the “law of supply and demand” that governs “rational markets” hoists the price of gas to heights that are so ridiculous they don’t bear scrutiny. When the economy tanks, whoops, lookie here, the “law of supply and demand” suddenly drives the price of a barrel of oil downward for exactly as long as it will take for us to regenerate our situation. Somewhere, I am convinced, there’s a bunch of guys in a room somewhere (with a hard line to conference rooms around the world) playing canasta and toying with the price of a gallon of gas. 

At any rate, I have a question before I board: When the price of a gallon of oil was below $57 the last time, or hovering near that number, what were we paying for gas at that time. Was it in fact $2.21 or thereabouts? Or was it some other rational number? Like, was it way higher because they were squeezing us around Katrina at that time? Was it lower, because nobody realized at that point just how deeply we could be gouged and still keep our SUV’s? Is there somebody keeping score on this thing?

Word comes from an official at the Bank of America that the decompression that we’re in right now will end in the fourth quarter of 2009.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait that long.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the prediction, though. I was in a staff meeting last week and a financial type iterated the same supposition. I asked him whether, since he had a handle on the whole prognostication gambit, he could arrange for the turnaround to happen a bit earlier. He said no.

But my question remains. If a consensus of opinion is now building on the issue of resurgence timing, why shouldn’t some of us stake out a bullish position at this juncture. I’m positing that the voices now being heard are from the more conservative members of the sector, who are gently and tentatively sending out feelers, as groundhogs do on their given day, for signs of spring. Is it possible that some of the more bold among us, who have not been shy for the last ten years or so, motivate themselves to do what they do best?

On any given day, there are indeed signs of regeneration in the metrics supplied by the vast river of information extruded from the Internet. I’ll admit to you, today doesn’t look so hot. All the more reason for those who make predictions for a living to step up to the bar and take some control of the situation.

Let me be the first to put my toe in the water. The current systemic breakdown of international corporate capitalism and its associated markets in credit, debt and consumer goods will begin showing signs of improvement by the first quarter of 2009. By early summer, with oil prices quite low, vast segments of the economy will be kick-started into moderate growth. The worst of the mortgage meltdown will be past by that time, and consumer confidence will be beginning to grow. Europe now in free fall, the dollar will be stronger against the Euro and the credit markets will start humming into action again. By early third quarter ‘09, signs of Greed will once again appear on Wall Street, with the expected, simultaneous reduction in Fear.

Once Fear is replaced by Greed, as you know, we are truly back in business. The tipping point of that metric will occur on July 23rd, 2009. It will be all uphill from there.

Sounds as good as any other prediction you’ve read lately, right? Let’s get behind it!

Just a note to say so long for a couple of days. I’m taking off for Rome this afternoon to speak at a large conference of project managers.  It’s a bit weird, I know. But a few years ago, I wrote a book called Rome, Inc.: The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation. A very nice gentleman in Rome who is associated with the conference thought it might be an interesting spin for the assembled multitudes now gathering, and asked me if I would like to come and speak. How many times does one have the opportunity to do this kind of thing? I’ll tell you. Not many. So here I go.

The thesis of the book is that Rome was the first corporate entity in history. It began as a mom-and-pop enterprise. Two brothers ran it. They hated each other and one eventually killed the other. Sounds like the garment business, doesn’t it? After that, the new company engaged in an aggressive push for expansion, both through friendly and unfriendly acquisitions, eventually rising to the position of #1 in its chosen marketplace. At that point, it devolved into a CEO-centric organization ill-suited to manage its ill-considered expansion into new venues, and was eventually brought down by its own size and incompetence, and by a group of hostile start-ups that ate its lunch.

There are many lessons that may be learned from Rome by those of us who work for similar organizations, as well as by the larger eco-system of which we are all an increasingly nervous part. The similarities between that corporate organization and ours are interesting, if not disquieting.

But frankly, I’ve had enough disquiet for a while. I think I’ll have some pasta instead. The good news is that due to the incipient collapse of our own global empire, the value of the dollar seems to be a bit better against the euro than it has been for quite some time. So I’ll only have to put two coins in the fountain when I make a wish.

Ciao for now.

A few of today’s headlines:

• Mortgage applications are up 17%.
• New home sales are up 2.7%.
• Existing home sales jumped.
• Americans are saving more.
• Durable goods orders are up.
• A $50 billion bailout for distressed home buyers is near.
• Oil prices are under $70 per barrel, at least for now.
• Amy Winehouse is the hottest Halloween costume.
• Last night I went to a very expensive restaurant downtown and it was so full you couldn’t get a space at the bar.
• I still can’t afford a two-bedroom apartment.
• The dollar is up against the Euro.
• It’s not raining today.

I’m not saying that everything is hunky dory. Nor am I implying that any peachy keenness is at hand. But it’s hard to see the upside of looking only at the bleakest scenarios, even if that is the way to become a popular quote monkey in this environment. It’s possible, if you choose to do so, to look beyond the trees that are burning and see the big, green forest still standing, if that’s the way you want to roll.

I know. It’s counter-intuitive. Stupid, even. But as a working stance, it’s just as credible as any other. In an environment where nobody knows what’s up, down or sideways, where positions are increasingly arbitrary, the act of choosing one’s point of view becomes a statement in itself.  What’s yours?

Just a little note after reading some of the news during the weekend. I’ve made a decision in regards to this election. I haven’t announced my endorsement yet, of course. But I do know one thing very clearly. 

I don’t care about Joe. 

Now, this is not to say I don’t care about ALL Joes. I still like Joe Moscowitz, who runs our Purchasing function. I’m okay about Joe Biden, too. Nothing wrong there, as far as I’m concerned. Good luck to him. And I don’t mind a cup of Joe now and then. But these generic Joes who are assuming such a high profile in the media at this point are really getting on my nerves. 

This goes for Joe Sixpack, first of all. It’s unclear to me whether Joe Sixpack got that name because he always HAS a sixpack that he’s willing to share with friends, which is sort of okay, or that he has recently drunk an entire sixpack or is about to, in which case I’m not quite sure. Either way, I don’t care about his opinions, other than which brand of brewsky he’s hauling around. My policy on this issue has always been rock solid: while some sixpacks appeal to me more than others, I’ll drink anything as long as it’s cold. I guess if Joe Sixpack has a view on this issue, I’ll listen to it. But on subjects like the economy or the War in Iraq, I’m less interested. In fact, I’m not. 

More recently, we’ve had a lot about Joe the Plumber. I thought for a while that this was some person named Joe Plummer, and I’m still sort of unclear about it. If my name was either Joe Plumber or Joe Plummer, I’d be annoyed at this point about all the jokes that were being told at my expense. The fact that the actual Joe the Plumber is bemused and confused by all the attention doesn’t mitigate the profound lack of interest I have in him, those who are covering him, and those who continue to observe him as if he’s some sort of scientific subject worthy of scrutiny. He’s not. I mean, maybe he was for about six minutes, but those minutes are over and if I never see another YouTube video on the guy it will be too soon. 

What’s next? Joe Mama? 

All this Joe stuff is preternaturally weird, as far as I’m concerned. It’s like, we’re on the Titanic, and there’s a huge iceberg in the mist up ahead, and all the guys in the radio room want to do is listen to Jazz on the shortwave from Luxembourg. Why don’t we all pay attention to the boat for a while?

I walked home last night from the office. All along the route, I passed the places I used to stop in for a drink. It’s been a month now since I had a nice, frosty martini, so cold that the ice chips float to the top and the sides of the glass bead up with condensation… or a brawny glass of Johnny Walker Black, sinuous and golden in a big bottomed glass… or even a festive balloon or two of rich, big-shouldered, blood-red Zin, oaky and spicy and redolent of cinnamon and chocolate…

I walked by these places but did not go in. I figure the time to start drinking again is when I don’t feel the inexorable pull to the cozy dimness that lies beyond their inviting portals. In other words, when I don’t need a drink is precisely the moment when I’ll feel okay having one.

When I reported my intentions a month ago, one very astute commentor told me two things that would happen. Both of them have indeed transpired. First, he informed me that people would be churlish about my decision to quit drinking for a while. This has indeed turned out to be true. Two nights ago, for instance, I went to a corporate event with my boss, one that was preceded, as they almost always are, at that hour, by cocktails. He got his usual. I got a cranberry and soda with lime. Odious thing. My drink of choice at the moment. The following conversation transpired:

“What’s up with you?” 

“Nothing. It’s been a month since I had a drink. I figured I’ve had a drink every day for the last 30 years. I can take a break.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

He was peering at me as if seeing me in a slightly different way all of a sudden. In business, you never want anybody to see you a slightly different way unless you’ve planned the change of image beforehand. So I added, “We can still be friends, you know.” He took a thoughtful sip of his drink and regarded me narrowly over the rim of his glass. “Maybe!” he said at last.

It was a joke, of course. We’re still friends. But he’s right, too. Everything is a lot harder without liquor.  This brings me to the second part of my correspondent’s prediction: that stuff would look a whole lot weirder when you’re the only totally sober one in the room.  A few weeks ago, I went to a formal dinner. I won’t tell you who was there because one of them could be reading this. Very high nabob percentage. Lots of wattage in the room. Virtually no oxygen remaining for people with normal-sized heads.

By 10 p.m., everybody but me had sopped up a full flagon of wine. There was hugging among individuals who by no means would have hugged had they not be very well oiled. There was some singing by voices rarely raised in anything but anger. One graybeard leaned over and told me a personal tale so odiferously raunchy that I am praying he never recalls the person with whom he shared it. And I sat amid it all like the albatross at the wedding feast. Nobody but me cared that I wasn’t drunk. But I cared. Deeply. And yet I stayed the course.

Since then, I have realized that my current dry spell has made certain things impossible. I can no longer have dinners with boring or annoying people, for instance. This is a significant liability in business, perhaps a crippling one. I have to see if I can moderate this position, for professional reasons. If I can’t, it’s clear that I will have to either leave business or start drinking again. Boondoggles, sales functions and other social/business events, too, are pretty much out of the question. It’s not that I require a drink, that’s not it. It’s that the entire purpose of the thing is to get hammered and feel a whole bunch of stuff about the people you’re hanging with — love, jealousy, loyalty, hatred, inappropriate amusement. It’s a total bummer to be in a room with a bunch of swirling people and feel absolutely nothing. It’s a group experience and you’re not part of the group, because the glue that holds the human souls together in that space is everybody’s common and shared inebriation.

I’ll be back pretty soon, I guess. Right now, it’s more a matter of pride for me, a test of my will, than any physical requirement to maintain and abstain. But I’ll be honest with you: this isn’t an easy time to walk around in this condition. Look at the news. We may all be getting to a point where walking around sober is a lot more dangerous than the alternative.

I don’t have a lot of time this morning, and I’m getting pretty sick of all attempts to complexify this question, so I’ll lay it out for you right here.

Who’s to blame for this incredible mess? It’s really clear.

No, it’s not Wall Street. Wall Street is there to work within whatever rules there are to make people who invest in stocks and other instruments (and pay their broker fees) as much money as possible, with billions left over for Itself.

No, it’s not Greedy People. Captialism is all about rewarding the greedy. If Greedy were a crime, they’d have to set aside Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas to hold all the felons.

No, it’s not the Banks who pressured the Feds to change the rules, jobbed the system and did whatever they could to build double-digit growth into a machine set up to operate in the low single digits. They were playing by the rules they were allowed to set up for themselves, and, more importantly, by the demented rules of the Street.

And no, it’s not the fat cats who profited, or the weasels who sold the same bridge over and over again, or even the realtors who squeezed every last bit of juice out of the blood orange that was offered to them. These are all shallow, self-interested, slightly sleazy, ambitious, avaricious, mendacious forces that are DESIGNED to do what they did: Get away with whatever they could. Make the most money. Figure out rationalizations to make it all sound good. So you can’t blame the intellectual courtesans in academia, the press or the research departments of now defunct institutions who helped them do that either, no matter how tempting it is to do so.

It’s the guys who were supposed to watch this sorry bunch and prevent them from taking over the funny farm. They’re the ones to blame. How simple do I have to make it?

Guy #1’s job is to eat as many pies as he can before he dies. Guy #2 is hired to make sure that everybody gets his or her fair share and plays by the apple-pie rules. If Guy #1 and his pals get all the pies, he’s just doing his job. It’s Guy #2 who isn’t.

So I’m looking at Guy #2, who changed all the rules when Guy #1 asked him to. Who didn’t enforce the few, tattered rules that remained. Who, over the course of the last couple of decades, never learned the most simple two-letter word in the English language, one that translates pretty well into virtually any global tongue. That word is NO.

The system is built to reward the fast, the greedy, the sharp, the amoral. In a totally free market, it is they, unencumbered by restraint, who do what’s necessary to reach their objectives. That’s why we have laws and regulations and people to manage them — not to destroy freedom, but to make it possible in a world that is not set up to truly establish it.

I blame Guy #2. Isn’t it time we took him out behind the barn?

Sure enough, everybody and his aunt Mary is lining up to take a piece of the bailout. I applaud their efforts. Why should only the fattest of the fat cats get the meat and potatoes? Yes, they need it more than most, because it’s hardest on the best fed when the supper plate is empty. But still. Fair is fair. 

I’m sure you have your own list. Here’s mine: 

I would like some help with my two mortgages. It was hard enough to sustain one, but this second one is sort of killing me. I can make it. But it won’t be easy. If we’re sweeping up a bunch of ill-considered obligations into the cooking pot, I’d like Uncle Sam to consider mine. They’re no more idiotic than many, and smarter than most. 

I’d like the lease on my car to be bought out, or at least reduced. At the time I selected the two-year option on that bright red, eight-cylinder, genuine leather interior turbo-charged Deutche monster, the $800 per month seemed achievable. I suppose it still is, but it’s darned inconvenient. I’d much rather it was lower, which would make it easier for me to pay off my other debts. Is it possible that those of us who have leased or purchased too much car for our wallet can be offered some assistance at this juncture? I know there’s spirited debate on who’s going to get what right now between Democrats and Republicans. Would one of the two parties, during this election year, like my vote? 

Then there’s my American Express bill. I’ll be hanged if I know how, but my balance has crept up to an amazing sum. More than $10,000! I suppose that paying the minimum for almost a year while living the dream may have something to do with it. Cameras. Computers. IPods. Vacations, now and then. Pretty soon you’ve got a whopping big nut to crack and eat. I’ll be honest with you, it scared me to look at it when I finally took a peek online last week. If I have to clear that debt, I’ll be cash poor for quite some time, unless I borrow more. That would be inadvisable, I think. 

It’s also my view, taken from a purely selfish perspective, which I don’t think is inappropriate given the circumstances, that credit card debt should in one form or another be included in this package. If it isn’t, think of the consequences! People would have to stop buying on time. Many, many honest, hardworking Americans just like me would perhaps default on their loans. The entire credit structure of our society, and the mercantile system upon which it is built, would falter! Do we want to risk that? 

There’s much more I could come up with if I really thought about it, I’m sure. So please, gentlemen. When you’re coming up with your list of those who receive the plums from this very large pie, don’t forget the working person. We were pretty stupid, too, you know.

God forgive me for the thoughts I’m having this morning.

I’m just wondering how they feel today, all the analysts and brokers from the financial institutions who are now being punished for the profligacy, stupidity, greed and wishful thinking of their masters. How they feel as they dust off their resumes and try to put the pieces back together in a world flooded with needy drifters just like them.

Do they feel like all my friends in years past who were downsized as a direct result of the kind of advice the Street gave to a variety of senior managers facing the issue of forced, quarter-to-quarter growth?

Do they feel like my pals at our former cable division, which was divested, in an act of completely moronic short-sightedness, when people like them decided that businesses who throw off cash flow but lower earnings per share were not worth keeping?

Do they feel sort of like the folks subsequently laid off from the corporation when, without that cash flow, it could no longer make the payroll it had once been able to support?

Do they feel like the employees of all the little firms that were reorganized, consolidated, de-consolidated or re-consolidated, given the whims and abstruse calculations of the geniuses who analyzed these things for the firms that are now sinking?

Do they feel like my buddies, Brewster and Armstrong and Molina and Frankovitch and all the others, who had to take early retirement when their business units were merged with other business units that were then spun off to juice the stock for a couple days, just to impress these guys?

Do they feel like the homeowners who are looking for short term rentals now, after the banks that are melting down could no longer carry their freight?

When I think of the just plain dumb stuff that Wall Street and its assorted salesmen, analysts, enabling bankers and callow spin-meisters have visited upon working companies over the years, it makes me want to choke. The arrogance. The willingness to see hundreds, thousands, lose their jobs as a result of their pronouncements and manipulations. Masters of Business all, they have been taught to see corporations not as places that employ people and provide a product or service, but as numbers on a balance sheet, a balance sheet that serves only one group: Investors.

Well, now the investors are taking it on the chin. A bunch of companies are feeling it too. And of course all those poor Street people are now reaping the payback from what their entire economic world-view has wrought.

They’ll be back, of course. God forgive me if until then I succumb to occasional grim smile at the current proceedings.

I had a little health scare last weekend. I had purchased a bottle of Russian vodka for what seemed to me like a very good price. Big bottle. Fancy label with a lot of Cyrillic writing on it. Eighteen bucks. Quite a good deal, I thought. After all, it was imported! 

Stuff tasted like battery acid. Didn’t stop me, though. I’ve always prided myself on the ability to drink just about anything. When I was a kid in college we made beer out of a kit. Mixed it up, put it in the basement to mature. One night, we had a party, ran out of booze at about midnight, so we went downstairs and brought up the “beer,” which had been aging for about two weeks, and drank all of it. Everybody got sick but me. I’m a horse. 

At any rate, the Russian vodka was consumed along with a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs and an arugula salad. I’m sure it was the salad that did it to me, but possibly the vodka didn’t help. At 1 AM I awoke to find I was either dying or wanted to. It took me three days to straighten out and I missed a day of work. I’ll spare you the details. A word of advice, though. If business, family history and stress have issued you a hinky gut, it’s probably best not to pour a cheap corrosive on it. Make it the expensive stuff. 

So the bottom line is that I’ve decided that any person willing to drink that kind of junk as long as it’s cold, regardless of the taste or the effect it might have on his system, probably should take a couple of months off the fun train. It’s been a few years since I didn’t drink. I’ve always told myself it would be no big deal to stop if I wanted to. I’m not a sot or anything. I just like a drink or two every single day, no matter what.

A life in business makes it easy. And it’s never hurt either me or my act, in fact I’m pretty sure it’s helped me. My first corporate culture was inhabited by a bunch of crazy rummies. I loved them and they loved me. My current milieu – along with the rest of the business world – is a lot more sober, but we still get our licks in. It’s part of how we function, keep the whole thing amusing and possible. How do you sit across the table from a banker at dinner without a glass of wine in your hand? 

Also, you know, I love booze. I watch a Western, I want to drink a shot of rye along with Mr. Eastwood. When Bogart is in the absolute pit of despair in Casablanca, I want to share that consolation martini with him. Wine. Beer. Brandy. Gin, even, although I’ve left that part of my stable of beverage behind long ago. Gin will kill you. It’s the crystal meth of alcohols. 

All this goes to say that drinking has been a hobby and entertainment of mine for a long time, and now I’ve given it up. I don’t know if or when I’ll ever start again, but I’m serious about it. I know it’s not going to be easy – not so much physically, but socially. For instance, I live for part of the time in Northern California. This means I will have to talk about wine for hours on end without drinking any. When I go out for drinks after work with Bob and Fred and Chet and Betty, I’ll have to order club soda? It’s weird. Do-able, you know. But still… weird. 

I stayed last night at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. I realized that this was the first time, perhaps ever, that I would be there without having one of their intensely fabulous martinis, and I’ve been coming here for a couple of decades. It was okay, though. I had a few pangs of desire, which I squelched. I’ve given up other things, you know. Smokes. Coffee, even, for a while. I know how to quit stuff.

I had dinner in my room and not in the bar. Watched a movie. Went to sleep. Woke a little while ago. My stomach didn’t hurt. Sometimes boring is better, huh? I may have to work out a solution to the tedium issue going forward, though. I will clearly have to eliminate the things I did in my life that were possibly only when I was drinking, which I suppose will involve yet more work for my subordinates.

I was at a meeting yesterday, one of those painful presentations where a guy comes in, does twenty minutes of PowerPoint, and nearly turns his entire career to suet. That is neither here nor there. I mean, those things happen all the time. This time, it was Badnick’s turn.

What was interesting to me is that in the middle of the debacle, I heard a small snap. It was the sound of a straw breaking a camel’s back. During the meeting, I realized that a certain word has now been so overused, so over-extended, so bled of any meaning, freshness or appropriateness, that it must now be retired.

That word is Leverage.

I believe I first noticed its widespread acceptance perhaps twenty years ago, at a point in history when debt became more meaningful than equity in the construction of business deals. Suddenly, everybody was Leveraging everything. The word was still used, however, in conjunction with its original meaning — something having to do with a little bit of debt moving a mountain of equity, I think. It was always vague. Something to do with small moving big. Archimedes and all that.

Thus Leverage joined Excellence, Quality and Impactful as annoying words with which one was expected to deal on a daily basis, at least for a time. And now that time has come.

I stopped counting when Badnick had utilized the word 35 times in 15 minutes. “We’re going to be leveraging the headcount to achieve maximum leverage over the marketplace by leveraging our leverage where it has the most impactful impact,” he said, or something very much like it.

At this stage of the game, revenue is leveraged, employees are leveraged, positioning is leveraged, in fact I believe there is nothing that is not being leveraged or incapable of leverage-ness. I’m half expecting somebody to tell me that they’re leveraging their toast to maximize their breakfast positioning. Half the time, people aren’t even aware they’re doing it. It’s crazy. Let’s stop.

Next up? Tipping point.

I’m going to interrupt the discussion on our putative merger/acquisition scenario to pause for a moment and reflect on the magic and mystery that is Labor Day. That’s because within minutes I will have completed my last real work of the summer and will “step away” to be “traveling” until Tuesday morning. I have already stopped thinking seriously for the week, even about Canada.

Labor Day! A holiday in celebration of the American worker, and of the organized labor movement that transformed the way we do business. Shorter hours. Better working conditions. Minimum wages. All these things were mere pipe dreams before unions arrived to give powerless workers a voice at the table. When I was a young man, I was making $87.50 a week. They could pay me that because I was doing something I loved. Then I joined a union. Suddenly, I was making an amazing amount of money — $175 a week! And when I got sick a few years later, the union paid my medical bills. All of them. I won’t bore you with the details, but if they hadn’t done that I would still be paying that bill off.

In the earlier part of the century just past, my grandmother worked for a place called the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. She was a seamstress. They had no unions, of course. One day she asked to go to the bathroom and her supervisor told her to shut up and keep working, so she quit. A few weeks later, there was a fire and a whole bunch of the girls she had worked with died. It’s a famous story. You can look it up. After that, she was what they called a Union Maid all the way. You can sort of see why.

Organized Labor has always had its detractors. On the left, the Communist Party hated Unions, and railed against them. I believe it was because Unions were seen as a way workers could exist within the Capitalist system, and a barrier to true revolution. In the ranks of Capitalist management, opinion was and remains much the same. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick shot down striking workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, back in the day, and now both have very nice museums in their names. You can’t do that anymore, not that anybody would want to. Much. There’s still no love lost between management and the organizations that represent the labor force, though.

This is ironic, in a way, because nobody is more assiduous in celebrating this holiday than the senior ranks of the great corporate institutions. The bigger the senior officer, in fact, the more likely they are to take the holiday very seriously indeed, even going so far to extend it a couple of days on both ends.

Perhaps we should all do the same. Have a good one, working people.

Yesterday we laid the groundwork for a major, strategic acquisition of a very attractive, synergistic and complementary property that is geographically contiguous, has plenty of upside and, for the most part, speaks the same language.

In that regard it is worth noting that up-front costs could be largely offset by an almost immediate divestiture of what is basically an independent, free-standing entity within the acquired corporation: Quebec. While not trading at a very high multiple, its sale or spin-off could generate significant equity and rid the new corporate entity of lingering legacy and cultural issues. There are many potential suitors for what is clearly a very attractive property, the most obvious being France, which is still smarting from its loss in the French and Indian Wars and has a high-profile CEO in search of global profile. Other tactical post-merger actions to rationalize high upfront costs abound, but will be discussed at a later date.

I would like also to offer at this juncture, before proceeding further, my thanks to those of you who weighed in so far with your thoughts and alternative suggestions. Some were patently facetious, while others drifted into issues pertaining to execution that must await subsequent installments of this strategic plan.

As always in the pursuit of any focused acquisition discussion, alternate scenarios do suggest themselves. Most notable has been the notion of setting our sights not on our neighbor to the north, but our amigo to the south. In that regard, I hasten to state that, in my opinion, the acquisition of Canada does not preclude the development of plans pertaining to equally intriguing possibilities involving Mexico, the former proprietor of vast segments of our current asset base, including Texas, California and most of the Southwest. In my view, however, one must put the cart before the caballo. Large global corporations get themselves into trouble when they overextend their holdings, as any study of Rome, Britain and Time-Warner (TWX) will tell you. This is not to say that a hemisphere-wide master strategy might not lie somewhere down the road. Right now, however, let us keep our eye on that which can be achieved in the near and intermediate term.

We have already looked at some of the global issues facing the current incarnation the corporation, which is now more than 230 years old and still functioning rather well for a mature organization. Day-to-day leadership of the entity has floundered recently, but as we all know it is difficult to sustain the quality of management over time, and on the bright side we can state with some assurance that the underlying power structure is still rather robust, and the class that operates it firmly entrenched in power regardless of who is sitting in the corner office.

Still, recalcitrant issues exist that would almost instantaneously be addressed by the proposed transaction. On a somewhat more granular level, then, let’s look at just a few:

• Need to expand customer base/sales territories: The U.S. frontier is a thing of the past. Even the depths of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana are crawling with identical strip malls and high-end boutiques. Look at a map. There’s a lot of Canada up there, most of it in desperate need of consolidation and branding. It is, quite literally, as big as all outdoors; similarly, there are many, many small to midsized urban centers in need of large glass boxes and roads leading to them. The existing corporation has the capital and the know-how to get the job done. All we need is the land and the customer base to justify the expansion, which in our view would be almost instantaneously accretive;
• Limited natural resources: Once again, the acquisition offers an immediately solution to this problem. Oil is, quite literally, seeping out of the ground up there, and there is a wealth of other minerals, lumber and, of course, wind;
• Stagnation of culture: Perhaps most disturbing about current trends within the existing corporation is a “been-there, done-that” mentality and a certain calcification of the spirit of adventure, unlimited opportunity and entrepeneurial drive that made us great not only in our own estimation but in the mind of the world as well. This corporation is viewed now — internally and externally — as increasingly insular, hostile to new recruits to the enterprise, and set in its ways. Canada is, in this sense, far more congenial to some of the core cultural issues that once defined us. They have cowboys, for instance; real ones that actually have something to do more with cows that with guitars and funny hats. There are innumerable other existing synergies that speak to the ease with which integration of the acquired party could be effected, including consistencies in language, cuisine and even pop music, where Canadian artists routinely pass themselves off as American without fear of reprisal.

There are other operating gaps in the corporate fabric that this acquistion would address. Lest the benefits be perceived as purely opportunistic or lopsided, however, it must be recognized that the acquiree would benefit from the deal as well. For its part, the acquisition target needs capital, infrastructure and some sense of what to do with the enormous acreage at its disposal with which, frankly, it’s done very little for the several hundred years of its existence. This lag could quite naturally be laid at the feet of its original stewards — the French and British — but the entity has been essentially on its own as a free-standing corporation for quite some time and there’s really no excuse for all that wasted space.

With so many compelling arguments in favor of the potential acquisition, we must at the same time allow that there are also powerful contradictory trends and considerations that must be addressed as well. Before we arrive at a discussion of conceptual execution strategies, then, it is incumbant upon us to do so. 

Next: Roadblocks and other barriers to entry.

A few years ago, I noticed that people, particularly very important people, had stopped going to the bathroom. Instead, they had “stepped away.” This concept of “stepping away” grew in a very short time to include bagging the second half of the day entirely. As in, “Mr. Woosley seems to have stepped away for a little bit,” when in fact Woosley is on the jitney headed to a time-share in Bordeaux Beach.

A euphemism is defined by my friend Wikipedia as ”a substitution of an agreeable or less offensive expression in place of one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant to the listener.” We do that all the time in our increasingly less profitable world. Perhaps it has something to do with things being tough. When times are good, we may not need the choice alternative expression for things quite so much. We can just let people go, because that’s a relatively rare occurance, rather than “downsizing,” “right-sizing,” “rationalizing the cost base,” or even “decruiting” them with moderately extreme prejudice.

Wiki also notes that some euphemisms are intended to be funny. In that vein, today’s euphemism comes to us from the end of our very short, very unlazy summer. God, how I envy school-children and their teachers! But that’s another matter. We select this euphemism because of its currency and the fact that I only recently noticed it in widespread usage. Here’s what kicked me off: Last Monday I called my associate, Farquhar. “He’s traveling this week,” said his assistant, Maggie.

“Traveling? Where?” I inquired. To where? Katmandu? I believe at this point even they get a BlackBerry signal.

Maggie seemed uncomfortable. “He’s… traveling… to different places, you know, but he’s reachable in an emergency. Is this an emergency?”

What’s an emergency in business? I mean, there are some, but is the need to iron out a situation an emergency? It could be, if it’s not ironed out, but it’s not yet, right? It depends. If he’s sitting at a phone in LA working his email, then I don’t mind rousting him, but if he’s meeting with the Dalai Lama to hammer out an endorsement deal…

“… because he’s, y’know… traveling,” she concluded in a slightly pained tone. Clearly, this was the entire burden of the message she was authorized to communicate.

“… is he… on vacation?” I inquired. I was beginning to get it. We are now at the point where people have to apologize for having a life.

“You could take it that way,” said Maggie. So I left Farquhar alone. A man needs his time off.

So that’s our euphemism of the day. “Vacation” has been replaced with “traveling.” Because, I supposed, traveling is a legitimate business occupation, while vacating is not.

Got any others? I’m open to your incoming interface.

As a bureaucrat, I am constantly looking for other people to do my work. I say this only half facetiously. Once you get into an office with a name on the door, when you have a door, a huge part of the job is to scope out, interview, hire and train a cadre of good people who will allow you as a manager to make the only two things that count: decisions and money.

So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to meeting this guy I’ll call Gutman. He had been touted to me as the answer to a problem that I have to solve in the next couple of months. About three weeks ago, the phone rang.

“Good news,” said Niela, the woman in HR who sets up such things. “Gutman is coming in on the 22nd. He’s working his schedule around to make sure he can get here. Lives in Atlanta, you know. But excited about coming up here to talk with you.”

Good, I thought. Guy’s got a nice resume. Seems very qualified. A grown up, too, which is not all-too common these days. You’d be amazed how many guys pop out of business school covered with afterbirth and expect a seven figure deal and a corner office. This fellow has some chops, I thought. Could be the answer. A week later, the phone rang.

“A little wrinkle,” said Niela. “Gutman wants us to pay for his airfare up here. And to put him up for a night, since he won’t be able to make the round trip in one day.”

“That’s reasonable,” I said. But a little tickle announced itself in the back of my stomach. I hate that tickle. It means a part of my perception mechanism that I can’t quite control has slipped into gear. I began to very slightly dread meeting this Gutman. But I said to myself, wait a minute, isn’t that assertiveness that exact kind of thing you’re looking for in a manager? That ability to articulate his needs and get the job done to his benefit? Isn’t that precisely the quality, as obnoxious as it may sometimes be, that differentiates a leader from those who are led?

A week ago or thereabouts, the phone rang again.

“What is it, Niela,” I said.

“Gutman says that since his interview is on a Friday, and he has other appointments in New York, it will be difficult for him to get back to Atlanta before Sunday night. So he’d like us to handle his hotel for the weekend, plus the airfare, you know…” She paused.

“And?” I said. This was beginning to be interesting.

“And he wants us to pay for his wife to accompany him on the trip.”

This was fairly astounding. Was it possible that I had stumbled on a potential CEO? Who wants such people around, even in prototype?

“Cancel Gutman,” I said to Niela. And that’s what we did. This Friday, my calendar looks blessedly clear, except for a couple of benign meetings with my gang.

I still have my little problem that needs to solved, of course. I just haven’t acquired any new ones.

Hi. We’re back.

Actually, I was back a few days ago. Bob and the gang had a staff meeting on the west coast last Thursday, and I perceived it was inadvisable for me to remain incommuncato.

It’s hard to come back. Your attention wanders at first. But one comment made by somebody at some point in the day caught my ear, wormed its way in, and provides, I think, a nice bass note to attend my return.

We were talking about the Market and how crazy things are starting to look just about every day. It’s like one of those friends you had in college, the kind you grew out of. Big mood swings. Very dramatic. One day way high, the sky’s the limit, anything is possible. The next, down in the dumps, too bad, so sad, me feel like me wanna die. After a while you get bored with such people. They take too much energy to keep around. They fall in love with something or somebody every couple of months, then lose interest in them just as fast. They come to stay and eat all your food, then complain about the quality of your cooking. You try over the years to shake them off, distance yourself from them. But they just won’t really go away. And over the years, as you all get older, they get nuttier and nuttier and nuttier until there’s really no explaining to your kids how you ever were friends with Uncle Morty in the first place, but there he is at the table every Thanksgiving, or calling you at 3:00 in the morning because he got himself into some kind of trouble again. Wall Street is like that.

So Farraday is sitting at one end of the big conference table and we’re all bitchin’ about the state of things, and he says, “It’s crazy. Bed Bath & Beyond’s market cap is bigger than GM’s.” This seems incredible to me, so I just file it away and then find I’m spending the weekend thinking about it. This morning I checked it, and it’s true. Bed Bath & Beyond’s market cap is a little under $8 billion. GM’s is a little over $6 billion.

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong at all with BB&B. I like it very much. Well, actually, I like the Bed and Bath part. It’s often the Beyond part that weirds me out a little. There are only so many salad spinners and scented candles you can buy. But it’s a good store. Nothing wrong with it at all… I’ll probably be there this coming weekend, looking for a new duvet cover.

But how could the Market value a great, crucial behemoth like General Motors less than a place that sells sheets, towels and George Foreman grills?

Okay, all you dedicated rationalists. It’s time for you to dive in and tell me how this all makes perfect sense, which I’m sure it does. And that, in the end, may be the most frightening thing of all.

Okay, I’m on Day One of about ten days off I’m going to try to take. I had the temerity to go out in the morning, have breakfast, do a little shopping. Got back. Thirty-eight message on my BlackBerry. That’s WITH the away-message on my e-mail. That’s okay. That’s what BBs are for. Don’t have to go to the office. Don’t have to get involved. Read the BB once a day. Keep the Gorgs away, know what I mean? Sure you do. 

About 30 messages into the drill, here it comes. “Bob wants you to reschedule the meeting scheduled for the 22nd,” it says. It’s from Bob’s assistant. You don’t need to know who Bob is. He’s a guy. We had a meeting that involved about sixteen people scheduled for the 22nd, when I’m well back, with time to spare to help make the meeting work out okay. “Bob wants to see if you can reschedule the meeting for the 14th,” the message goes on. Except, you know, I’m not really back until the 18th, which means that I have to either cut my vacation short or get involved in a lot of hooey while I’m supposed to be vacating. 

Bob knows very well that I am Out. And also that, in moving the meeting that required quite a bit of organizational effort, he is pulling me back In. Bob doesn’t care, though. He has very good reasons to move the meeting. And so he’s seeing if he can move it. It’s not personal. It’s business. 

But Bing’s Law is simple: Every minute of interruption on vacation requires an hour for the re-establishment of peace of mind. I am already mentally back in the game. It will already take me 1.2 hours to regain the Zone. And that’s before any adjudication. 

I call Oliver, who works for me, and tell him to take care of it. I will not cut my vacation short. Oliver is well-practiced and sage enough to handle whatever it turns out to be. I am now basically okay again, although after the delegation interaction it took me three hours and a nap to get over this incident and reclaim my position in vacationland.  

For the next week or two, I will check in with you guys now and then, mostly – unless something of interest to me intervenes – post on the question of how many friggin times my mind is going to be invaded during what is supposed to be my time off. 

Until then, have a good one, ladies and gentlemen. I’m gone. Until I’m not, of course.

Yes, once again it’s time for me to answer some of the interesting and weird questions that all the interesting and weird people who drop in on this space offer me now and then. Today there’s a guy whose company makes him work holidays and weekends for no extra money. This coming weekend, he has a couple of weddings he wants to attend, he’s already paid for the transit and the tux, and his boss won’t assure him that he’ll have the right to go. What do you do when you work in a Stalinist environment like that? I have a couple of ideas.

Beyond that, a reader asks which is more important: great sex or great money? What do you think?

Actual news organizations that report real news today confirmed a trend that was noticed here several weeks ago, after a trip I made to Los Angeles: People are driving less. Back then, before gasoline prices swooped to the rock-bottom $4/gallon mark, there was widespread concern that there was no ceiling on the cost of travel, and the roads were noticeably more empty than in times past. I was there last week again and I also noticed that once we were no longer flirting with the $5 atrocity, folks were creeping back onto the roads and traffic was getting lousy again. Incredible, isn’t it, that what we can get used to?

That said, we’re all in agreement that people driving less is a good thing. It shows we’re all realistic, preparing for the future, getting down to the nitty gritty, making hard choices when the going gets tough and so forth.

What is less well recognized is that in response to the economy and the general state of things as they are or might be, Americans are doing a number of things less as they strive to manage the heck out of a challenging situation. For example:

• People are eating less. This is partially because food is more expensive but also because, as a nation, we are physically fat. Even those of us who are not fat are likely to have little tummies where our washboards should be. Even fast food restaurants are serving healthier food that is, in its very nature, much easier to eat less of. The trend toward reduction in food consumption, begun on both coasts in the 1990s, is working its way inward to the nation’s gigantic midsection, where production of chicken-fried steak has showed its first CAGR decline since, well, ever. California’s recent law — the first of its kind in the nation — that outlaws trans-fats in restaurants is yet another step in the national effort to make food less tasty and appealing.
• People are smoking less. Of course, those who do smoke are smoking for the rest of us. But they won’t be around very long. The rest of us are having difficulty finding a place where we might take up smoking even if we wanted to.
• People are drinking less. There are times when I am sitting at a restaurant with a bunch of fellow business people and not one of us is drinking. True, it’s at breakfast, but I remember the 80s. Lunch is much the same. At most business luncheons the act of ordering a drink makes people look at you like you should be sucking on a bottle of muscatel in a brown paper bag. At dinner it’s a little better, but nobody comes into the office in the morning radiating gin from every pore anymore. It’s hard to see how this is helping the economy any, but it certainly fits in any omnibus of stuff that’s on the decline to no good effect.
• People are investing less. That’s because many have less to invest. Those who DO invest are earning less from their investments, which gives them less to invest going forward. This is called a “vicious circle,” and we’re in it, although it’s far less vicious for those who refuse to be in the circle at all and put their money in something other than financial instruments, like a mattress or a coffee can.  
• People are singing and dancing less.  For obvious reasons.
• People are breathing less. The air is getting worse. Al Gore was right. We’re melting, melting! And boy, is it hot a lot of the time. This makes breathing far more difficult and anything that’s more difficult than it should be is done less, obviously.
• People are reading less, writing less, advertising their products less, using social networks less, ordering from the prix fixe menu less often, shorting perfectly decent stocks less, laughing all the way to the bank far less…

There’s other things, too, I’m sure. The list is possibly endless. Feel free to offer your own. I’ll be happy to see them, more or less, at least until doing less is something we start doing less of.

Just a little story from the dark edge of the continent.

I was staying for the past few days at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. It’s a really nice place. A few years ago, it had gone kind of tatty, but they implemented a big revamp not long ago and did a terrific job. Sometimes when they buff a joint up after a long period of escalating decrepitude, they excise its character, history and whatever charm the old edifice had left. Sometimes, also, they fix up the lobby and leave the upstairs rooms still haunted by the ghosts of dead guys who were murdered in their bathtubs.

I stayed at one of those places a few weeks ago. In the lobby were pictures of all the great movie stars who were feted there, back in the day when you could fit all of the motion picture industry into one ballroom. How glam those pictures were! Clark Gable! Betty Grable! Tyrone Power! The Duke! All drunk off their butts, happy to be clustered like the pleiades around their glittering tables. My room upstairs, on the other hand, smelled of cheap cigars and the tired feet of washed-up private eyes hired to spy on the naughty couple down the hall.

The Hilton today is no such thing. Downstairs and up the walls are bedecked with pictures of the gang that loved to hang there when glamour walked hand-in-hand with talent and success. My favorite is in the Men’s Room on the Lobby Floor. Frank, Dean and Peter Lawford, walking down the strip near the Golden Nugget, lean and happy, skinny little ties over their cool, flat tummies. Opposite this shot, Bogart stares out, slightly petulant, a just-read letter in his elegant hand, from a picture by Hurrell, circa 1935. Near the ballroom, where so many grand events were held when there were such things, Louis Armstrong, Tony Curtis and his then-wife Janet Leigh, Marilyn, James Dean… all shot pretty much right where you are standing as you look at them and wonder where all that, whatever it was, has gone.

On the ground level, Trader Vic’s, long a sort-of tikki joke with cheesy drinks and flaming stuff on sticks, once dark and cramped under a low ceiling, has also been knocked open to the pool and sky, keeping what was cool and worthy of retro admiration, jettisoning the ironic eau de decomp that had collected around the old tropes over the years. Quite a scene there on Saturday night. The aqua lights of the gigantic swimming pool glow, illuminating the crisp, white cabanas and suites that ring its vast, watery depths. After a couple of Scorpion bowls, people can get kind of noisy. Good sushi. Very short skirts are apparently back, and stingy-brim hats and stubble for the guys.

There’s no center in LA, and until you get it, you think that’s a bummer. What it really means is that, like a giant beehive, every little cell in the honeycomb is just as potentially hot as the next. So improbably, where you are right then is just possibly where you ought to be. And the Hilton, right now, is no exception, particularly if you don’t mind the slight sensation that the specter of Norma Desmond just brushed by your elbow. 

The rooms, too, are kind of marvellous. Mine was, at any rate. Not fussy. Clean and open, with a little patio you could lie out on to observe the action at the pool and bar down below.

I say all this to make a point as clearly as I possibly can: in the world of business, it really doesn’t get any better. Did I mention I was there on business? Well, I was. And anybody who cannot appreciate an experience like this one in the line of duty should probably be shot, or perhaps be put away. Yeah, that’s right. Anybody who can’t be happy at the Beverly Hilton should be put in a mental institution.

So I was sitting on my little patio taking an hour in which I attempted to entertain not one phone call or a single message on my BlackBerry. The sun was hot. The breeze was cool. The sound of happy people splashing rose from the azure pool several floors below. On the patio above me, suddenly, came a voice. An ugly voice. Harsh. Grating. Aggrieved.

“I told SAM…” it said, “But SAM doesn’t LISTEN… to ANYBODY!… And I am SICK… of HIM!… and I am SICK… of YOU… and everybody NOT LISTENING TO ME!” I don’t know if I am capable of capturing the rhythm of the thing. Tremendous anger, righteous indignation, dripping with bitterness, and the feeling of having sustained a powerful wrong that had been visisted on him by countless enemies both seen and, more heinous, CLOSE BY… The complaints — for the one-way discourse was made up of nothing but complaints — were almost wrenched out of a spirit so tortured it could barely formuate complete sentences.

It went on like this for quite some time. After a while, I took my towel and went inside. I had a meeting to go to anyhow.

The next morning at 7AM, I was awakened by what at first I thought was the squawking of a giant crow. As my head cleared, I realized this was unlikely. Crows do not nest in the upper floors of urban hotels. The only birds I saw there, in fact, were tiny sparrows and the plastic owls they put on the rooftops to scare away other predators. Crows, maybe, come to think of it.

At any rate, this squawking — enraged, deliberate, desperately unhappy – was coming through two layers of heavy curtain and a hermetically-sealed sliding glass door.

“I don’t want to SEE you EVER AGAIN!…” it was saying. “And if you see ME… or any member of my FAMILY!… I WANT YOU TO TURN AROUND!… AND GET THE F**K OUTTA THERE! I’m the one with the MONEY… and PEOPLE… are GOING… to LISTEN TO ME!!”

It went on. I opened the doors and stepped out on the patio to hear as much as I could of the torrent of invective pouring from the opulent space above me. All I saw was the back of a tiny, extremely bronzed bald pate bobbing up and down, and one edge of a small table at which the unnamed mogul in question was sitting. On the table was a glass of orange juice and a glass of prune juice.

I’ve been thinking since then about the number of people I know who are very rich, very successful, and what that access to power and affluence has had upon their characters. And I’m very slowly coming to a conclusion. Yes, we all know that money does not buy happiness. Of course, that’s ridiculous. Of course it does. We know it does. We also know that lack of money very often buys misery. As my dad used to tell me, “Rich or poor, it’s good to have money.”

But thinking about the miserable loser on the floor above me, I find myself wondering whether there is a tipping point, where the accumulation of too much power, too much money, actually produces in their recipient the exact opposite of all that money is supposed to buy. That perhaps it’s lonely at the top because the person you have become when you get there isn’t fit for human consumption. That maybe it’s better to be in the middle of things, because that where people are clustering together for warmth and still having a little bit of fun.

I’m home now, by the way, and it’s good to be back. Maybe too much of a good thing is just that.