It is my understanding that by the time we get to Web 4.0 everything we do will be up in the cloud. All our writing, our spreadsheets, our photos, our videos, all up in the cloud, wherever that is. I guess it will be like heaven. Nobody knows where that is, either, even those who believe in it.

You may be more evolved than I am on this subject, but that idea makes me a little bit nervous. Perhaps it’s all the DID YOU BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER TODAY warnings I’ve received during the course of my digital life. Maybe it’s just my innate mistrust of things I can’t actually put my hands on and see. Me, I like to have it all on these neat little hard drives they make now, with a terabyte of storage for a couple hundred bucks. Give me a brick over a cloud any day.  I know I’m in the minority, though. It’s all headed for the cloud and ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.

So this morning I got to the office, and there was no cloud. In fact, there was no internet. No web. No e-mail. No shared documents. No access to you guys. Nothing. Just what we used to call a dead terminal. We used to like our dead terminals. We wrote on them, played games on them, ran numbers on them. Now you might as well try to work with a loaf of bread. A computer not connected to the great giant brain stem is nothing more than a doorstop.

I called IT. They were going crazy. I called HR, because that’s what you do around here when something malfunctions. Ambrose, the head of the department, was beside himself. Seems that a PowerPoint presentation he had to make to senior management was up in the cloud, too, safe and sound, naturally, but he couldn’t get to it. “We’re going to have to go to Plan B,” he said with a foreboding so dire I didn’t dare ask him what Plan B was.

We all had coffee. Walked around a little. An hour or so passed, and then suddenly the cloud was back. Connectivity was restored. We were all functioning business people again. I called Ambrose, who was very relieved. I heard clicking in the background and the sound of a printer churning out a hard copy behind him. “What was it?” I asked him.

“Mouse ate through a cable in midtown,” he said.

“A mouse?” I said.

“Apparently,” he said. “Incredible, huh?”

Yep. Incredible. One mouse brought down the entire communications function of a gigantic corporation. Not a hacker. Not the end of the world, brought to you by the Mayans and Roland Emmerich. Just one… small… rodent.

You know what they say, I’m sure. The best laid plans of women and men often go a-mouse. Well, maybe they didn’t say it exactly like that. But I’m sticking to my brick for the foreseeable future. I figure it would take one hell of a mouse to put that out of commission.

China is growing triple digits as we politely chug along toward greater mediocrity. Sarah Palin is topping the charts.  Winter is coming in. My 401(k) is still under water. War in the east is widening. Bonuses will hit record highs on Wall Street this year. Do all these things bother me? Sure they do. But not as much as the guys who run the stores at the airport.

I don’t like to think of myself as a peevish person. But I do have peeves.  And my peeves define me.

You go to the airport store. There’s at least one in every terminal. They have every stupid magazine in the world, so you look at them for a while. Brad is turning to Jen because of Angelina. Kate is courageously putting her life back together after Jon screwed it up, or vice versa. Rob Pattinson… something. There’s medicine and some books and gum, lots of gum, very expensive gum, and stuffed animals and shot glasses and tee-shirts celebrating Burbank or St. Louis (the Gateway to America!) and lousy headphones and all that stuff like that there. And eventually you come up with something you didn’t really need, two magazines, some mints, a little ferret that rolls over and over on the ground when you turn it on, an oinking pig that changes direction when it bumps into a wall… and then you go to the checkout… and the person behind the counter says, “Did you find everything you wanted?” Which is fine. You could interpret it as a caring question. Like, they’re really worried that I might not have found that copy of Digital Coin Collector I was looking for. So I say “Yes, thanks.” And that’s when it happens.

“Water?” says the lady. “Some candy?”

Okay, I don’t know why this rubs me the wrong way so badly. But after years of traveling, during which this scenario developed and took shape and heft and national proportions, I’ve gotten really sick of it. Perhaps you can help me with it. It doesn’t seem so egregious, looking at it on the screen here. “Batteries?”

For a while, my tactic was simply to stare at the cashier with a bored expression and say nothing. Not no. Not yes. Just… nothing. As I would any comment not worthy of reply. They don’t get it, though. “Some magazines?” they will inquire if all I got was Tic Tacs. “Some Tic Tacs?” they will say when all I got was a magazine.

Lately, I’ve tried a small push-back, just to keep myself sane. “No thanks,” I’ll reply. “Why? Would YOU like some candy?”  Doesn’t stop them. Nothing does. They are indefatigable.

One time, at LAX, after paying $28.50 for a bunch of swill I didn’t really need (a copy of Car & Driver, a paperback I’d never read, a bottle of Coke Zero, some arcane gum whose packaging interested me), I got really peeved when the cashier asked me if I wanted a sports drink too. “Why do you guys all do this?” I asked the lady, perhaps a bit too sharply. She looked at me, very crestfallen, as if I had called attention to a physical defect over which she had no control. “We are required to,” was all she said. Afterwards, I felt bad. Why am I ragging on this poor employee who is only carrying out the instructions of her master?

Something too close to home, maybe, huh.

Those who were enjoying a weekend of high sports drama or familial bliss might have missed another media obituary this past Sunday – David Carr’s persuasive au revoir to business journalism in the New York Times.

Carr cites several “technical reasons underlying the collapse — and that’s what it is — of business journalism.” It’s hard to argue with him, not to mention dangerous. You don’t want a guy like Carr mad at you. Still, you’ve got to hope he’s being a bit pessimistic in order to make his point, and that there’s still some life in the game if somebody can figure out a new way to do it.

Carr suggests that the beat itself has lost its mojo, because its subject — essentially the aggrandizement of Business and its practitioners — has disappeared. We’re not interested in big, glossy spreads of the superpeople who run the economy and its constituent parts.  We don’t want to see one more big piece on how great this or that financial wizard might be… because we’re not in the wizard business anymore.

Yet the need for stories that concern the making and spending of money have never been more important. The collapse of this discipline as a popular art form will spell disaster in the short and long term. Short term — we won’t know what’s really going on even more than usual. Long term — same, only bigger. So what should those who cover Business be writing about, and not? Here are some early suggestions:

NO: The Financial Sector. I’m bored with it. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be coverage. But about 80% of all stuff right now is about Wall Street, banks, financial institutions, rich farts getting bonuses, and so forth. Been there. Done that.  Unless a guy is running around in front of the stock exchange with his or her pants on fire, I’m not as interested as I should be anymore.

YES: People in other areas of enterprise who are making news in one way or another. There must be some other fields of endeavor where people make something other than decisions and big money. I mean… aren’t there?

NO: Prognostications from economists and security analysts. With the winnowing-away of huge swaths of reporters and editors, a lot of newspapers, magazines and websites now confine themselves almost exclusively to reporting on the reports of those whose job it is to issue reports. Sometimes these guys are right. Sometimes they’re wrong. They’re seldom very interesting to read about. But it fills space, particularly the more outlandish and opinionated ones.

YES: Bovine methane emissions and attempts to either reduce or monetize them.

NO: Davos. The Allen Conference. Any other story that features the usual stiffs wearing blue jeans and white water rafting. That includes Bono.

YES: Auto workers who are still employed. How science is making our lives better. Malls that are sinking into the swamps on which they were built. Stem-cell startups in weird locations. Businesses that are actually making money, instead of those that are grooming themselves for a VC run. You know… business.  Remember business?

NO: Global.

YES: Local.

NO: Dead stuff and why it’s dying.

YES: Having fun in Tokyo.

NO: What old guys are thinking.

YES: What young people are doing.

NO: Tech.

YES: Sex.

Business is about life, not death; about freedom, not prison; about struggle, not defeat. Sometimes when the story isn’t going your way, you have to change the story. What was first in importance is now last; what was last is suddenly first.

Maybe it’s time we all started looking at the front end of the elephant for a while. The view is different from up there.

I’m in LA today. Uh-huh. That’s right. The air is a quiet, eerie yellow, and our entire office smells like nicely roasted marshmallows. Plumes of creepy smoke tower into the sky just a few miles from where I’m writing this right now. I have a meeting in about an hour. I plan to make it.

That’s how we function in this particular cornice of the world we call Business. On 9/11, I was with thousands of people in the streets as the world rearranged itself, and I watched the Twin Towers fall on the television in my office, surrounded by colleagues. Then we all went home for the day. And were back on 9/12, because, you know, we had meetings.

I was here for the riots, too. We were sitting in a ground-floor conference room at the Four Seasons Hotel on Doheny. A guy came in and whispered in our CEO’s ear. “We’ve got to clear out of here,” he announced shortly thereafter. “There are riots downtown, and they’re getting close.” We could already smell the burning rubber. “Hey,” said the President of Sales to me as I was collecting my stuff and preparing to head upstairs to relative safety. “A couple of us figure we can get nine holes in at Belair if we really hoof it. Wanna join us?” I declined, with thanks. I don’t play much golf even in the best of conditions. I went up to the roof instead and watched the city burn alongside Harvey Keitel. We didn’t speak. There was nothing much to say. The next day I flew out pretty much on schedule. There were citizens firing guns at departing aircraft, but I had to risk it. I had meetings in New York the following day.

Today kind of feels like that. I could get out of town, I suppose, but I have things to do here and there are no explicit instructions to abandon this area of Los Angeles. True, I’m having a little trouble breathing, and my eyes are smarting. But sometimes you have to suck it up to get the job done. And if I take off now, what next? Am I going to get out of Dodge every time there’s an earthquake, mudslide, flood, fire or man-made disaster?

Follow Stanley Bing on Twitter at twitter.com/thebingblog.

I went to my favorite business restaurant this morning for breakfast. It was relatively full. “Business looks good,” I said to Steve, who runs the room.

“It’s weird,” he said. “Breakfast is good. Lunch is hanging in there okay. It’s hard to justify staying open for dinner when you get six people the whole night.”

I had a cup of coffee. Before long, my companion showed up. Then, after a while, our third guy, her colleague, materialized, too. The 7/8ths rule applied, as it always does at breakfast. Seven parts chitchat. One part business.  It went fine. Just because the recovery is in the flat part of the L doesn’t mean you can’t sell stuff.  It just has to be better, faster and a little bit cheaper right now is all.

The check came. We all looked at it sitting mutely in the middle of the table. “How’s your T&E going?” she said to her buddy across the linen divide, just by way of making conversation, you know. “I’m over,” he said.

“I came in under for the year, but only because I didn’t do anything between January and March for obvious reasons,” she added. Those months coincided with a massive reorganization of her company, a fact known to all of us around the table. ”The worst part of the whole thing is sitting there with somebody you’re taking out, and terrified that they may order an appetizer,” she said.

“I take all my people out to the Hamburger Shack,” he replied with great professional gravity. ”I just tell them, hey, if you want to have lunch, that’s where we’re going. I tried to move to the new panini place across the street for a little while but it kicked me up over the $40 limit.”

“Last week I went out with somebody and I figured what the hell, and we both had appetizers and everything,” she said rather wistfully.

Good Lord, I thought. I picked up the check. It wasn’t that much. Breakfast, you know. One course and you’re out.

1. Don’t do too much.

2. Take it a little easy at first.

3. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

4. Don’t worry. Be happy.

5. Stay hydrated.

6. Only see people you don’t have to.

7. Put off for tomorrow what you should do today.

8. Have a nice piece of fruit.

9. Knock off early.

10.

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.

There have been several kerfluffles around my office recently, all revolving around the same issue: What do you tell your boss and when? This would seem to be a simple question, but it’s not. First, it depends on the boss. Some guys (and in that category I, as always, include women guys) want to know nothing until it rears up and bites them in the butt, and then you should have told them. Others want to know what color tie or scarf you’re planning to wear next Thursday. And the target moves. On Monday, Chet may want to know everything. On Tuesday, you can’t rouse him from his slumber.

So what’s a poor employee to do? Take this quiz and see how sensitive you are. How you score may determine whether or not you have a future. 

1. You have a big party coming up and you’re trying to decide what canapes to serve. Do you tell the boss? 

a. No, that’s ridiculous. 

b. Of course! She likes to know every little detail! 

c. Not really, except I make sure to have those little empanadas she likes so much. 

2. You’re going on vacation next month. Do you tell the boss?

a. No. My life is my own! 

b. Of course. He likes to know every detail. 

c. I’m going to check the dates to make sure it coincides with his vacation as much as possible, but in the end I’m going to do what I have to do, making sure that he and his assistant know what my plans are. 

3. You’re going to have a meeting with a bunch of people about something that may or may not happen sometime in the future. Do you tell the boss? 

a. No! I’ll tell him about it when he needs to know. 

b. Of course. I don’t floss without telling him everything. 

c. Yeah, I’ll shoot him an e-mail, just an FYI. Some people are attending who may mention it to him and then he’ll feel like he’s out of the loop. He hates that. 

4. Your division is about to make a big deal with another company. It’s going to be announced next Tuesday. Do you tell the boss? 

a. I’ll tell her Tuesday morning. You know, give her a “heads-up.” 

b. I’ll tell her about the whole thing right now, before we even talk to Law and Public Relations. She’s going to want to go over this thing from top to bottom! 

c. I’ll get all the moving pieces started, and then dial her in, probably on Friday. That will give her the weekend to go over the paper and think about what we might have missed.

5. You’re getting a divorce. Your life is a shambles. Do you tell the boss?

a. Definitely! He’ll feel really sorry for me!

b. I’ll mope around until he asks me what’s wrong. Then I’ll tell him everything. For a LONG time. 

c. I’ll mention it. Since it’s not about him, he’ll have limited interest in it, but he ought to know in case I flake out a little bit in the coming months.

SCORING: Score yourself 1 point for every a. answer, which is a low score because you’re a really stinky communicator and a bad employee. Score yourself 2 points for every b. answer, because while you’re a suckup, you’re erring on the right side by reaching out and trying to make your boss aware of things. You’re likely to be a pretty big pain in the a**, though. Keep that in mind. Score yourself 3 points for every c. answer, because you’re clearly trying to address the issue with subtlety and modulation. You may not get it right every time, but you’re trying to play it a situation at a time and neither tell too much or too little. So good for you. 

As always, the higher you score, the higher your score. Give yourself a point for trying. Trying counts.

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!”

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.

In a stunning example of science telling us something we already know, a new study finds that bad management may be bad for your heart.

The BCC reports that “A Swedish team found a strong link between poor leadership and the risk of serious heart disease and heart attacks among more than 3,000 employed men.” The study found that people with lousy managers had higher stress, were more likely to smoke and suffer from high blood pressure, particularly when they were yelled at.

“The staff who deemed their senior managers to be the least competent had a 25% higher risk of a serious heart problem. And those working for what was classed as a long time – four years or more – had a 64% higher risk,” the BCC reports, citing the study, which was originally published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, which will clearly be on our mandatory reading list along with “Who Moved My Cheese” from here on in.

We were there first, of course. But it’s always nice to see science catch up with reality a little bit.

Now get back to work, you lazy slugs!!

Wherever you go, there you are. It doesn’t matter how far you fly, how many time zones you traverse, how odd the stated agenda or proposed workflow, the land of business is the same the world over.

The same gentlemen strutting around in suits whose quality bespeaks the wearers’ level of power. The same little shoulder bags filled with orientation material. The same attempt to wring joy from the everyday work that must be done. The same white wine. The same canapes – although in this case I will say that the pistachio puffs were a new experience. The same jitters around speechtime. The same bonhomie afterwards. The same feeling that rises in a room where alcohol and long associations mix. The same sense of content being stuffed into a carapace of form. The same business life, in short.

After a period of ice-cold shivering that always attends a plunge into a new pool, you warm up almost immediately. Ah, you think. This is just swimming again. I know how to do this.

I will report to you that I believe it is FAR more pleasant to have visited Europe after the election of Barack Obama than it is before. There are two headlines that leapt out at me from the newstands covered with Obamamania of one sort or another. One was from a British paper, and simply said: “THANKS, YANKS.” The other was also in English, but looked local. It said: “Welcome back, America.”  During the conference, at which there were but two other Americans among a crowd of some 1500, a number of folks came up to me and congratulated me on our new president. The only one who expressed serious reservations, quite interestingly, I think, was a pleasant, very thin, very gray Russian fellow. Shades of the Cold War. I don’t think they like us very much. Again.

The picture you see at the top of this little report is the hall in which I gave my speech. It’s called the Palazzo Dei Congressi, and it was built by Benito Mussolini in the mid-1930s as part of a great exposition he wanted to hold in 1942 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Fascism. The area is called E.U.R., and it’s a little distance outside of Rome proper and a world away. Wherever else you walk in the Eternal City, the architecture makes you feel more human, more in touch with other people, their appetites, desires, enthusiasms and beliefs. Even when you are dwarfed by the size of things, as one is at St. Peters, for instance, you are seized by an admiration for the things humanity can accomplish over time, and the power of beauty to last beyond the petty cruelties, fads and idiocies of any given era.

In Mussolini’s E.U.R., you feel precisely the opposite. The buildings rear up, huge, white and implacable, and each person scuttling beneath and between them seems meek, tiny, insignificant in the shadow of the State. The plazas stretch out, unarticulated blank spaces spread between gigantic avenues impassable to any pedestrian who dares to disobey the precisely-timed traffic lights. There are enormous museums there that nobody attends - they are simply in too inhospitable and cold a setting. There is something they call “the square Coliseum” and many other government buildings dedicated to Labor, Health, Public Safety.

The night after I spoke, as we walked to the cab stand through the wierd, glowing landscape, a small group of merry Romans found their way into a corner restaurant that was tucked into the ground floor of a towering edifice near the main drag. It had the checked tablecloths, the mandatory bottles of red wine on every table… but it had all the authenticity of a Bennigans at your local super mall.

And then it hit me. This was what the architects that served Il Duce had done, and it was no mean feat. They had created the first urban mall, and pointed the way to a future that is far more representative of the world we know today than the alleys, byways, cathedrals and bistros of the ancient city that gave it birth.

My speech went very well, by the way. I got a bunch of business cards afterwards and intend to stay in touch with quite a few of the nice people I met there. On the way out of town to the airport, we did get into a traffic jam – the first I had experienced since arriving in Rome. It was about a mile of tiny cars lined up impatiently, each filled with a business person or two waiting to get to the office in the area most congenial to what we do - E.U.R.

Macbeth said it. Act 5, Scene 5, I think. “It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Most people think he was talking about Life. We know better. He was obviously talking about e-mail.

Take today, for instance. It’s only 8 AM and here’s what I have:

Some vendor I don’t know is asking me to upgrade a program I don’t own. An industry trade is sending me its daily morning newsletter. A magazine I don’t read is featuring its monthly lineup. The New York Times is sending me Today’s Headlines. Allposters.com tells me that for 48 hours only I can get up to 30% off on some posters I don’t want. Who gets posters? I don’t. Maybe one day a while ago I bought a poster for my kid. Now every day I get an offer about posters. I thought I spammed that. I guess I’ll do it again. Friggin’ Reunion.com won’t get off my back! There’s some guy in the Yukon Territory, I’m not making this up, who keeps searching my name. I don’t know anybody there, but he keeps searching me. And they keep telling me about it. When I try to exit their site, I get an error message! What a pain! I’ll send them to junk mail, too, except haven’t I already done that? Why do they keep coming back? Telecharge is offering me low-priced tickets to a show I don’t want to see… two newsletters I signed up for that have interesting stuff I’m not interested in… another newsletter! And another! News stories from all over. Gossip sites with their daily blab. Sales numbers! Hm. God. It’s rough out there and I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me. More sales numbers. More news stories. Sales numbers. Request for approval on something I’ve already approved. A chain about nothingness on which I’m cc’d. Another of those. A self-congratulatory note masquerading as an attaboy. A blog. Another blog. And another. An ad pimping for an upcoming conference. And another. Who can afford to go to all these conferences in this economic environment? Oh look. Here’s a conference on the technology of conference calls. It’s in Park City, Utah! Gotta go to that, right? An ad from JetBlue. An ad from Restoration Hardware.

Finally I see there’s a draft of a document I need to read. At last! Content! Real, honest-to-God content! Except you know what? The guy’s assistant just dropped the hard copy on my desk fifteen minutes ago. So the purpose of the e-mail is unclear. Do I need an electronic document? In fact, why is any of this here? As far as I’m concerned, twenty years into the medium, legitimate uses for e-mail are limited to:

• making plans for meals, meetings, meetings over meals
• transmission of jokes and funny videos
• news alerts signifying the end of the world, which clearly is at hand
• orders from the boss
• information about upcoming parties
• data

Beyond that, I have a suggestion: We’re clearly into an era of downsizing. How about extending that trend to electronic transactions? I mean, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace, and all that. But does every last syllable of recorded time have to be documented?

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 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.

This securities analyst, who himself works for a firm on the brink of ruin, took the opportunity the other day to bring down my entire sector. It wasn’t hard. He simply wrote up the absolutely worst, most pessimistic doomsday scenario for my industry, and then applied it to every company in it.

He was alone in his assessment of the situation, of course. There are dozens of others who don’t see things that way. But in the current climate, he hit publicity pay dirt. Put together depressed reporters on the verge of losing their jobs, nervous – hell, frightened – investors, and a banking industry that is taking the hose, and you have a scenario when any chicken little is immediately promoted to top rooster in the imploding henhouse of capital.

If you say things will be all right one day and here’s why, nobody is going to listen to you right now. If you say that Armageddon is at hand, everybody runs for the hills and tells the world what they just heard. It’s natural. We’re in that part of the cycle.

Dawn will break one day. It always does. But in the meantime, the red death holds sway over all.

In this interim between good cheer and sanity, I’d like to remind you of the following things that were certainly going to happen in my lifetime so far:

• A nuclear war was going to sweep across the Earth, ending life on the planet as we know it;
• The Russians were going to bury us;
• Overpopulation was going to end life on Earth as we know it;
• All of Southeast Asia was going to fall like a bunch of dominoes to the commies;
• We’re on the Eve of Destruction;
• Japan was going to take over the entire world economy and run everything;
• Y2K was going to melt down every computer on the planet, leading to the end of life on Earth as we know it;
• Microsoft (MSFT) was going to conquer everybody and end capitalism on earth as we know it;
• There will be no more honeybees;
• Global warming will end life on Earth as we know it.
• Nostradamus predicted that life on Earth as we know it will end in about six minutes;
• Life on Earth as we know it will end on 12/12/2012. I’m not sure why. Perhaps you can fill me in on that.
• China is the awakening giant and will run the world very soon;
• Robert Downey, Jr. is done in show business, can’t get insured and will never make another film.

And so forth. Why do we listen to this kind of stuff? Why do we always believe it? If we’re going to make stuff up to conform to our current view of the world, why do the lone, shrill voices of despair always grab the headlines?

And for the record, my business is not going away. We will live to see that security analyst thrust from the bosom of conventional wisdom, exiled to the job of writing and distributing his own newsletter.

Like cans of fruit in the great supermarket of Business, we all have a shelf life… a sell-by date that is stamped somewhere, possibly on the tops of our cans, I don’t know. When that date arrives, it’s time for us to go.

It’s business. It’s not personal.

Still, when they come to get me, I hope that certain forms are honored.

I hope they let me know well in advance that my number is up. This will give me time to think about my departure, to plan for it a little bit, to position the thing with my friends and colleagues. To go is bad enough. To be dragged kicking and screaming out of bed in the middle of the night and thrown off a cliff is much worse. I would hope that my tenure would grant me certain dignity in the means and circumstances of my departure. 

You’d be surprised how often this doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t know why. One guy I know, he worked for his company for 15 years. One day he was called to the corner office. “You’re out,” he was told. He got his stuff and went home. No memo. No nothing. That was that.

So I hope that when the big hand hits midnight there will be just a bit of pomp and circumstance. A lunch, perhaps. Of course there are no gold watches anymore. Why needs them? We all use cell phones to tell the time anyhow. But a gathering of people who are sorry to see me go would not be out of order, I think.

Some sense of decorum, I guess, would be nice. A feeling that sure, my race is run, but it was a good one, and worthy of notice in some way. A stately process, with a beginning, middle and end, not a short, sharp shock.

In that vein, I hope that the number of people who are told of my status beforehand would be very small, and that they be trustworthy people, and not prone to leaking invidious things into the blogosphere, which is often a mean and cruddy place, filled with people who rejoice at other people’s discomforts.

I hope the corporation lies about me a little bit, saying that I am leaving of my own accord, that it was my decision, that perhaps I am suddenly infused with a desire to spend more time with my pet llamas or something like that.

I hope, in the end, I will retain at least some of the friends that I have made along the way. It’s a sorry thing, but most of the relationships we have in this world we work in are contextual. The context removed, suddenly old pals have very little to talk about. Even golf and booze, after a while, are not enough. The good news is that some friendships, improbably and against the odds, do endure.

And of course I hope that I will come through the experience and emerge on the other side with new packaging, in a new supermarket of ideas, with a brand new time stamp on my forehead. Dylan Thomas said that after the first death there is no other. He was wrong, at least where our careers are concerned. You wouldn’t believe the former zombies I see walking around, pumping with new life in a new venue. I always greet them with a smile and word of congratulations.

I hope I receive the same kind of thing down the road sometime, when I need it.

We’re all drinking a lot less for business reasons now, because… well, I don’t really know why. We just are. You go to lunch and a proud phalanx of sparkling water bottles festoons the room, and everybody is munching on salads like giraffes. This is sad for two reasons. First, sobriety is not a congenial condition in which to do serious business, and second, this leaves far more drinking to be done on personal time. As far as I’m concerned, this is ass-backwards. There are solid reasons why the majority of imbibing should be done on company time.

Here, in my view, are the excellent functions alcohol provides within a business context:

1. Grease the wheels: It is a well-known fact that growth rates have plummeted since we all stopped drinking at meals, particularly breakfast and lunch. In the 1980s, many a fine deal was hammered out while we were.
2. Builds friendships that last a lifetime: How many of us are really interested in the stuff that our peers are involved in? My pal builds boats. Do I care about boats? I assure you I don’t. I, on the other hand, collect ancient guitars that once sold in Montgomery-Ward for $2.99. Does he have the slightest interest in that? But put us together with a couple of beers, three or four scotches and a few after dinner drinks and I assure you we love each other, and have for almost 20 years now.
3. Makes golf possible: Think of what that stupid game would be like if we didn’t have booze before, during and after it?
4. Meeting facilitator: Okay, you don’t need a couple of stiff ones to survive a two-hour meeting with PowerPoint. But these all-day things they put us through a couple of times a year at least, or the annual squeeze-fest with 300 senior managers in Boca? Without booze? You sit in those things and the martini in your mind coalesces at about 10 AM and stays there all day, a beacon of hope amid the gloom and forced collegiality.
5. All-purpose topic of conversation: The tedious things that business people talk about! Lord! Interest rates! GAAP. Monetizing prospective revenue streams! Phooey! But when the conversation moves around to wine? Or single malt scotches? Or what booze goes well with mongoosse? Everybody’s an expert in one way or another, and even those who are not can quietly watch the blowhards blow while tending to an aggressive cab with a big nose and huge shoulders.
6. Anesthetic: As we get on in years, or engage in sports no human was ever meant to pursue, our bodies begin to attack us. Shoulders ache from improper employment of a 9-iron. Elbows throb from repetitive tennis activity. Me, I’ve been wracked with some kind of back pain brought on by over-use of my mouse. You could take percodan and blow up like the Hindenburg, like Jerry Lewis did, or blow your mind on other crazy substances now popular in Los Angeles, but a warm glass of gin never met an ailment it couldn’t soothe. A few weeks ago, a small flagon of warm port cured my flu. I report that fact now in hopes it will be picked up by medical authorities and pursued with responsible vigor.
7. Sleeping potion: Right after that, I fell asleep, by the way. True, those who use booze for this purpose are likely to awaken at 3 AM when its effects wear off. This is different than the usual waking at 3 AM, which I do every night anyway. In the latter case, it’s harder to fall back asleep.
8. Excuse: You can’t do it too often, of course. You get a reputation for yourself that can make people doubt your stamina and probity. Unless, of course, it’s a recourse shared by your entire corporate culture. Which is probably why I miss all the guys I came up with at Westinghouse.

Hi, guys! Remember the good old days? On second thought, I bet you don’t!

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

My mailbox is over its size limit again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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