The Good, the Bad, and the Gullible

I was a nervous kid.  I was brainy, not athletic at all, lacking in self-confidence, and wary of new situations.  I believe this was in part due to genetic disposition – anxiety is somewhat of a family trait - and perhaps in larger part due to the circumstances of my youth, which were legitimately stressful in many respects.  None of this matters now, apart from enhancing the insights produced by my navel-gazing experiences in my old age.

 I bought the lie – 1:

I studied very hard in school, and was rewarded with excellent grades.  I was consistently the last to be picked for the gym class basketball team, but consistently the first to be picked for the classroom spelling bee team.  My parents, both wonderful and well-intentioned people, counseled me from a young age: do well in school, and you’ll be able to get a scholarship to a great college.  In reality, neither of my parents had attended college, and they had absolutely no idea of how the admissions process, much less the financial aid process actually worked. They truly believed that hard work would simply lead to financial reward. This was, after all, America, the land of opportunity; and in their own experience running a small business, the maxim had held true.

When college application time approached, I did my own research at the local library (there was no internet in those prehistoric times, and my high school’s guidance department was wholly incompetent – so I’d set out on my own.)  Based largely on its glossy, eye-catching marketing materials, I chose a college.  One college, in faraway Boston.  I applied there (and only there,) and was accepted.  The deal was done.  The “scholarship” I’d worked so hard for, the elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, failed to materialize.  My mother, by then widowed, to her enormous credit found a way to finance my education.  At age 17, I drove, solo, 250 miles to Boston, to check out my chosen school.  I fell in love with the city, and in fact I’m still here – well, in the general area.  The rest, as they say, is history.

 I bought the lie – 2:

As college graduation approached, I began interviewing for jobs.  Four years culminating in a double major, magna cum laude, had failed to instill a burning passion for any particular field that didn’t require years of additional schooling, and I’d had it… I was done; I wanted out.  I wanted a job, in the “real world” (read: not academia,) ideally one that would allow me to stay in Boston along with many of my friends - a selection criterion just about as random and foolish as choosing a college based on the pictures in its brochure.  I found a job fairly quickly, an entry-level professional position with a large company.  I loved it.  I’d met my goal.

There was a formal training program.  I aced it.  Among the many company executives called upon to share their wisdom with us in these training sessions was one old guy whose name I no longer recall.  Someone had asked a question about salary and advancement opportunities.  His answer was to the effect that ‘we may not offer the biggest paycheck on the block, but here at our company, you’ll have job security.  We’ve never had a layoff here, even during the depression.  He pounded his fist on the table in emphasis with that last statement. I was reminded of Nikita Khrushchev banging his fist at the UN. We sat, wide-eyed, silently pledging our allegiance.  It was 1981.

A decade later, when the first laid-off secretary emerged, bawling, from what came to be known as the slaughterhouse (in reality, a cramped conference room unfortunately located in a rather public spot,) I realized then and there – I’d bought the lie (or rather, the one-time truth that had morphed with the corporate culture into fantasy, as the rules of the game had changed beneath our feet.)

 I bought the lie – 3:

I was recently reminded of disillusionments past (the preceding are but two of countless examples.)  Some say that history repeats. 

 

My daughter, a high school senior, is at the tail end of the college application process.  She has worked extremely hard in school, and has an impressive resume of achievements to show for her efforts.  She applied to 9 – nine! – schools.  I’m told that’s fairly normal these days.  She’s been accepted at six and wait-listed at three.  Not bad!  This should be a joyous time, filled with the excitement of choosing among many great opportunities; but it’s not.   Unfortunately we’re discovering, too late, how badly the college application and financing system is flawed.

Since she was an infant, we’ve been dutifully saving for our daughter’s education.  We’ve amassed a tidy sum.  We are frugal people by nature.  We don’t live large.  It turns out, that’s a big mistake in this twisted, redistributionist, regress-to-the-mean society.  If you’ve got it, baby, you’d best spend it now, or they’ll take it from you tomorrow to subsidize someone else. If colleges don’t do it, the government will.

It’s like this:  Most of the so-called ‘prestigious schools’ to which my daughter applied have adopted some version of the same lofty-sounding credo: “no student will be unable to attend xxxx U. because of unaffordability.”  Doesn’t that sound grand?  Altruistic, even?  Here’s the translation:  “We don’t award any merit-based scholarships; and ‘affordability’ will be determined by one of two incredibly intrusive algorithms using labyrinthine rules that would rival those of the IRS in complexity.”

Further translated: you may be at the top of your graduating class, with a trunkful of awards, varsity letters, a Nobel Prize and invitations to lunch with the president; but if your parents have made the mistake of saving and investing in anticipation of this day, you’re going to pay the full freight.  Your choice, in practical terms, will be between paying double or triple the price paid by your likely future roommate to attend a top-tier school, and probably incurring debt that your parents have tried so hard to shield you from; or taking advantage of the merit-based awards you’ve received – which have been generous – from schools that weren’t your top choices.

Meanwhile – and here’s the galling part - your equally (academically) qualified friends are getting "need based" money left and right, and will be able to attend their choice of  top-flight schools because their parents have gone the spend-it all, get-multiple-divorces, take-lavish-vacations, save-hardly-anything approach. They live in huge McMansions (not counted in determining "need" by virtue of being “primary residences” – a loophole you could drive a Rolls through) while we live in a modest house and have chosen instead to invest over the years, apart from the college fund, for our own eventual retirement (putting similar dollars in a different category.) And it's folks like us who are expected to subsidize the masses of less academically qualified but needier, or equally academically qualified but less thrifty families out there by paying the wildly inflated sticker price. We're talking $250K out of pocket over four years, minimum.  Per kid.

To be clear: I don’t oppose the concept of need-based financial aid. My problem is with schools that have adopted exclusively need-based programs.  My wife grew up poor, and would not have been able to attend our alma mater if not for the aid she received.  That said, my wife was also her high school class valedictorian.  Her academic qualifications were rock-solid. And that is my point – she worked hard to earn the privilege of attending college.  For colleges today to turn a blind eye to a broad swath of highly qualified students in favor of subsidizing only those who demonstrate having met the schools’ peculiar and distorted definition of “need” is just wrong.
         
I realize this post is unlikely to generate any sympathy.  White people problems.  Sure.   But if you try and view this through our lens, the system is badly broken, and patently unfair - and not just to the poor.

The hard lesson for my daughter:  don’t buy the lie. 

And yet, we as parents, as a society, still wish to somehow instill within our young people a belief in the inherent value of hard work.  If that belief is to continue to have any relevance, we have got to move away from this steady progression toward “leveling every playing field,” no matter how well-intentioned, and restore some semblance of a meritocracy.
 

A Taxing Situation

"My advice for those who die / Declare the pennies on your eyes / 'Cause I'm the taxman..." ---George Harrison

The days are getting noticeably longer.  This is psychologically a good thing, I think, for most of us. It’s also, rather paradoxically, an anxiety trigger – among countless others – for me.  The winter has almost passed, and with it my chance to hibernate, to get some much needed sleep, and to catch up on long-deferred reading, research, minor home repairs and such.

Yet somehow, time has passed and I’ve gotten very little sleep, nor have I made significant progress on much of anything worthwhile.  You see, taxes have consumed me for the past month and a half.  This year, for various reasons, our tax situation is much more complex than usual, and the calculation process has been brutal.  The “fiscal cliff” deliberations that resulted in delaying IRS approval of half of the forms I need didn’t help matters.  I’ve been pecking away at our tax calculations for several weekends, and I’m still not done. 

Setting aside the endless political debate centered around tax policy - how MUCH one should pay in taxes, how to determine one’s theoretical “fair share,” and whether we’ve become a nation of “47 percenters” or "99 percenters" (I swear, I’m not going there) – there is so much that could be done to improve the nightmare that is tax preparation. 

Here’s something I’ve wondered about for years: other than (illegal) under-the-table, “shadow economy” transactions which aren’t reported anyway, virtually everything that is reportable as regular income has already been reported to the government in the form of W-2s, 1099s, K-1s and the like, before we ever fire up our copies of TurboTax Deluxe. With the recent addition of mandatory cost basis reporting, many types of capital gains are, or will soon be, in this category as well.  

So why is the onus on us, the taxpayers, to apply the government’s convoluted rules to calculate what we owe?  Why, instead, doesn’t the government just send us a bill or a check, as the case may be, based on all the information they’ve already amassed?  They own the rules; they have what I imagine to be a big, honking pile of mainframe computers capable of calculating such arcane annoyances as the Alternative Minimum Tax and capital loss carry-forwards for the whole freakin’ population, in about a day and a half!  

We could then make appropriate adjustments for our charitable deductions, write-offs, and whatnot, assuming that any of these survive the axe of “tax reform” in the coming months, and, depending on the situation, just cash the check, pay the adjusted bill, and move on.  The states can and should follow the same process (or better yet, abolish their state income taxes... but that's another blog rant.)

Think about it… when you make a purchase, whether small, like a meal, or large, like a car… does the merchant require you to use your own, purchased software to calculate the netted-out bill?   Hell no… the McCashier presses the little button with the photo of a Big Mac on it, then the fries-photo button, then the dollar-sign button, and your total, including tax, is tabulated.  You pay, and your change comes swirling down into the little chrome SARS pit of a germ bucket for retrieval. Or, in the case of the car, the “Finance manager” sits you down in his tiny, shared office that, curiously, reeks of cigarette smoke despite being in a “non-smoking” building; offers you some bad coffee, and flogs you with an imaginary rubber hose in an attempt to get you to buy a ten year warranty and rust preventative.  Depending on your own fortitude, the extra charges either are or are not added to the invoice, but in any case you are, in the end, presented with a bill, and in exchange for your check, you’re handed the keys. 

OK, so the retail purchase experience isn’t always pleasurable; but on the scale of “discomfort as compared with a colonoscopy procedure” it’s much less of an imposition than calculating income taxes.  

 

Midweek Update

I don’t know what it is about this week.  For some reason, every time I glance at a news source, I see absurdity and irony.  And sadness too, yes, plenty of that; but in the spirit of reporting the Happy News, I’ll skip over those parts.

So, here in Boston we have – rather, had, until this week, a low-buck bus company called Fung Wah.  This company has been in the news with increasing frequency for at least the past year.  None of the news has been good.  It seems they were able to offer standard Boston-to-New York runs for a mere $15 because they kept their costs low.  Very low.  The buses have crashed, broken down, failed inspections, you name it, repeatedly for as long as I can recall. 

Everybody loves a bargain.  Earlier this week, the company’s extreme thrift caught up with it when it was discovered that three quarters of the buses in the fleet had cracked frames.  They had repeatedly failed safety inspections, yet were still on the road. Now the Department of Transportation has stepped in and grounded the entire fleet. 

But wait, there’s more: 

It seems a Fung Wah bus broke down near Hartford, CT.  The company called in a tow service, which hooked the bus to a giant tow truck and drove away.  Only problem was, they hadn’t properly attached the hook.  They managed to tow the bus into the middle of the highway, whereupon its bumper broke off, leaving the bus sitting there, blocking traffic, without lights, while the tow truck drove away, towing a bumper.

The geniuses in the cab were unaware that the bus wasn’t still behind their truck until they were stopped by police, three exits further down the road.  Upon pulling them over, the police observed that they were somewhat incoherent.  It turned out that both crew members were suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. 

You just can’t make this stuff up.

In other news this week, a $5 million class action suit was filed against Anheuser-Busch, alleging that they have been watering down Budweiser beer.  Is that even possible?  Perhaps the tested containers had been confused with bottled water that had somehow been tainted with trace amounts of beer?  I just can’t wrap my brain around this.

A few days ago, I endured a seemingly endless radio news story about the proper nomenclature for addressing a retired pope.  The official verdict seems to have settled on “"pope emeritus Benedict XVI" or "Roman Pontiff emeritus Benedict XVI."  Or, to his close friends, “His Holiness.”   I find all of these rather ponderous and difficult to remember.  How about something more intuitive, like The Holy Diddler?

Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, has come out full force against Yahoo employees “working at home.”  Yes, the head of a technology company has banned a practice that virtually all other technology companies tout as the ultimate workplace perk – and from which several have profited handsomely.  I can’t quite figure this one out.  The primary reason cited was the notion that employees will benefit from being “physically together.” 

That would be the approx. 14,000 people that Yahoo employs worldwide.  Yahoo had better plan for one hell of a big addition to their building in Sunnyvale. 

I’m not suggesting that “working at home” is a universally good thing.  Clearly it would not work well in some industries, or with some employees (read: those likely to run up billable hours in the hot tub) but c’mon, a freakin’ technology company?  This is akin to Starbucks subjecting its employees to random bloodstream-caffeine tests, and firing those who have consumed the evil bean.  It runs just a bit counter to the corporate mission.

Having celebrated New Years’ Day with a partial sigh of relief for having survived, sort of, the “Fiscal Cliff,” we now face The Sequester.  I’ve given up on trying to follow the particulars.  The perpetual brinksmanship in Washington has led me to lose interest.  I have Brinksmanship Fatigue. 

The paradox here is that there are (presumably) real financial ramifications that may directly affect me, indeed, affect all of us; but I have become detached.  It’s like watching the Poker Channel on an old, black-and-white TV with bad reception and rabbit ears, while stoned and wearing someone else’s eyeglasses.  They’re playing for real stakes, using my money, but it’s so far away, so surreal that I just can’t bring myself to care.  So go ahead and duke it out, Elected Drama Queens, just let me know how badly I’ve been screwed when you’re done.  This time.

All for now.  I'll be in touch, so you stay in touch.  Or however that goes.  Good luck, and good night.

 

Bring Your Own What?

The “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon has caught on like wildfire in the business world.  Wikipedia defines BYOD as “the policy of permitting employees to bring personally owned mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and smart phones) to their place of work and use those devices to access privileged company information and applications.”  Everything I’ve read about BYOD seems to indicate that it’s wildly popular among employees, especially the “Millennials.”  It’s considered a privilege, a convenience, a morale booster, a perk that’s essential to a company’s ability to successfully compete for top talent.
 

I don’t get it.

Earlier this week, I had an opportunity to attend a forum that was hosted by the CIO of a major American company.  This company has, for years, handed out BlackBerry smartphones to the subset of its employees who were viewed as having a need for frequent off-hours contact, whether in the form of voice calls, e-mail, or access to corporate applications.  Thousands of these devices are deployed.  Some, of course, see more frequent use than others.  All, supposedly, represent some legitimate business need that is being fulfilled by the employee who is tethered 24/7 (or some subset thereof) to the office.

The CIO went on to describe this company’s relatively new BYOD program.  As is the case elsewhere (everywhere, it would seem,) the program is gaining new participants every day.  A large percentage of Blackberry-holders has elected to turn in company-owned phones in exchange for being set up with BYOD access via their personally-owned iPhones or Android devices.  The CIO concluded his discussion of the BYOD topic by musing aloud about what he might be able to do to entice the remaining BlackBerry-holders to jump ship.  I could easily have told him: PAY FOR THE DAMNED VOICE/DATA PLANS! 

This company, and according to recent surveys I have seen, a majority of others with a BYOD policy, contributes nothing toward the cost of owning and maintaining the device that the employee is willingly “bringing.”

Let’s break this down:

Behind Door #1 is a company-owned, company-paid-for Blackberry.  It costs the individual user nothing – nada – zilch.  All he/she has to do in order to realize the “benefit” of working while on personal time is to carry the thing around.  Not a bad deal, save perhaps for the obligation to safeguard it and to actually be productive by using it once in awhile.  If it gets damaged, the company replaces it.  Simple.  Free.

Behind Door #2 is the employee’s own iPhone (or whatever.)  He or she is already paying for voice and data access (which, for those living in a cave, is not cheap, and often comes with a volume cap – think “family share plan” voice minutes - beyond which the cost becomes prohibitive.) In exchange, the device owner enjoys the privilege of having exclusive personal use of the thing (and for playing ‘Words with Friends’ on airplanes, viewing porn on the beach, whatever.)  If the employee drops the phone, leaves it on a bus, or otherwise damages or loses it, he/she alone is responsible for the cost of replacing it.

Layer on BYOD, and a few things happen:  to the extent that the phone owner uses the device for work, those minutes and gigabytes get chewed up - the employer gets a freebie.  Additionally, there’s a contract involved (naturally) which, among other restrictions, prohibits the phone owner from lending the phone to anyone – even a family member – lest proprietary corporate data be exposed.

I ask you – which is the better deal?

Would your answer be the same if the comparison were between having a company car, all expenses paid, versus being allowed the “privilege” of using your own car for traveling on company business, without even so much as a mileage allowance? 

I didn’t think so.  So I’m back to not getting it.

There’s unquestionably a perceived cachet associated with being a BYOD participant. This reminds me of the early 1990s, when pagers were all the rage.  Pagers functioned, in essence, like a very long leash.  Paging was one-way – you couldn’t respond with any effective communication.  Instead, the thing went off while you were (in a restaurant, at a ballgame, driving, wherever) and you had to, as quickly as possible, find the nearest pay phone and make contact with the Very Important Person who was summoning you.  Cell phones were nearly non-existent; when they arrived on the scene, demand for pagers died, for obvious reasons.

I never wanted one of those things.  Cachet?  Seriously?  They struck me more like long-range house arrest ankle bracelets.  But they were seen by many as status symbols, nonetheless.  I believe they somehow engendered feelings of self-importance on the part of their users  - “Oops, excuse me, gotta run, I’m being paged {read: I am so very important that I must now drop you, dinner companion, like a hot potato, and go find a phone so as to take care of a very, very important matter.}”  

I “get” that many – perhaps most – people these days are in love with their phones.  I don’t get why, but I get that they are. Phones are status symbols now.  Etiquette has, predictably, taken a blow in deference to the elevated social standing that they impart (Excuse me, dinner partner, redux.)  No doubt this is a big factor in understanding the siren call of BYOD.

In pure economic terms, setting aside the question of “who pays,” it is more costly to operate two devices as opposed to one.  So in the aggregate, there’s an economic argument to be made in favor of BYOD.  It’s also less convenient to tote around two devices rather than one.  As implemented by most companies that have done so, however, the programs are tilted heavily in favor of the company and against the employee. 

There are a few enlightened firms out there that do offer a stipend or some other consideration that helps to defray some portion of the phone owner’s costs, but they are in the minority.  It seems only fair that, to the extent that it can be calculated, a proportionate share of the costs associated with using privately-owned equipment for business purposes should be borne by the business.  In my view, this should be the norm.  However, as long as employees continue flocking to buy-and-bring-your-own programs, the status quo is unlikely to change.  

ZIP!

I recently learned that an old friend – I’ll call him “Joe” - will be retiring.  Joe has spent his entire career at our company – 42 years.  That number astounds me (although, other, smaller numbers have astounded me in years past, only to find that they eventually seemed much smaller when I surpassed them.)
 
Joe was one of the very first people I met when I joined this company, fresh out of college.  He was the Assistant Manager of our department.  As a newbie insurance underwriter, I reported to a supervisor, who reported to Joe.  He was, and is, a great guy.

Joe knew his stuff.  We all respected him, and he, in turn, had our backs.  Although I may not have realized it, years later when I became a manager, Joe was among the early influencers who helped to shape my own style.  He stood up for his people, and we would have jumped in front of a bus for him.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Joe came from humble beginnings, a solid blue-collar family of first-generation Italian-Americans.  He speaks with a fairly thick Boston accent.  With no disrespect intended (quite the opposite,) he reminds me a bit of Boston mayor Tom Menino (known, affectionately or derisively, depending on who does the knowing, as “Mumbles” for his accented, occasionally slurred speaking style.)  Tom Menino has been, and continues to be wildly popular among his constituents, and for good reason – he knows how to get things done, knows every inch of his city, and does what he believes is best – always – for his people. 

Back in the day, Joe seemed to know everyone in our company – no small statement, considering that we worked at the headquarters of a Fortune 500 corporation.  If you needed to get something done – to cut through the red tape, go to the source, and just get it done – Joe always knew how, and could usually call in a favor if necessary to grease the skids. 
 
A friend and I went to Joe’s house, many years ago, to hash out an idea: we were going to lay plans to start a risk management consulting company.  By that point in our careers, we had amassed some industry credentials and relevant experience; and we were, after all, in the middle of the booming, Reagan-era 1980s.  Anything seemed possible. 

Our plan never got off the ground.  The usual reasons – inertia, fear of the unknown, lack of time to commit, the siren call of the “safe” corporate pay package – prevailed.   I don’t remember any of the details of our so-called plan, but what I do recall vividly about our visit to Joe’s house was his three young children.  They stood out to me as some of the most polite, well-mannered, respectful kids I’d ever encountered.  They came into the room, excused themselves, and offered us something to drink.  At that point in my life, I hadn’t had much experience with children, but even I knew that they were remarkably well raised.  They were special.  Joe, it turned out, had a pretty good life outside of work.

At work, as years went by, the story unfolded differently.  Joe’s career seemed to hit a plateau at a certain point.  I knew from our conversations that for him, the thrill was definitely gone.  Younger, less experienced, sharply dressed, fast-talking, MBA-wielding “suits” had taken the reins.  There had been a change of the guard at the top, and the corporate culture followed suit.  “Lean and mean” were valued.  Loyal and competent, not so much.  Joe, and many others like him, lost ground.  Some were shown the door.    

I had, by then, moved around a bit, and no longer worked at headquarters; so my own personal experience was, thankfully, somewhat distanced from the carnage.  But we felt the ripple effects in the hinterlands nonetheless.  The entire company was changing, evolving, shedding its skin and reinventing itself, repeatedly, like a snake.

Years passed, then decades.  Joe soldiered on.  I’m sure he had opportunities to move on to greener pastures, but for reasons that I think I understand – his family, including his elderly parents who had moved into the in-law apartment in the beautiful, new house that Joe and his wife had built along the way; the “golden handcuffs” of a pension plan, 401(K) and generous (though ever less so) benefits  – he stayed.

Now, after 42 years, Joe’s moment has come.  He has much to look forward to: spending time with his wife and children, now successful adults; and with the grandchildren he adores.  A Disney trip is in the offing.  I hope, for his sake, that there will be many more.

I spoke with Joe the other day.  I asked him about his retirement party, which I didn’t want to miss.  His answer saddened, but didn’t really surprise me.  He doesn’t want one; he just wants to fade away.  It turns out that his departure, though voluntary, has left a sour taste, for reasons I’m sure he would not want me to detail here.  This is not the way a 42 year relationship should end; but, equally true, it’s par for the course these days, in the parallel universe we call corporate America.

One could take away any of a number of lessons from Joe’s story.  I choose these: 

·         Family comes first.  Always.  By the yardstick that is his family, Joe is a rich and successful man, with every reason to reflect with great pride on the last four decades. 

·         Companies, Republican platform planks to the contrary notwithstanding, are not people.  Loyalty to a company may or may not be rewarded; the outcome is random, not unlike, say, that of loyalty to a sofa.

·         Loyalty to people, especially people who, for whatever reason, rely on you, is likely to be richly rewarding.  You may shape their lives in ways you will never know.  They just might jump in front of a bus for you.

Footnote:  The title of this post, “ZIP!” is meaningless to all but three people – Joe, me, and one other friend who may or may not remember its origin.  I hope that one day, Joe will come across my blog, and I want him to recognize himself. 

Advice to the G.O.P.

Here’s a link to Peggy Noonan’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal about, well, ostensibly about the many failures of the Republican Party, but, sadly in keeping with Ms. Noonan’s recent pattern of commentary, also about what she perceives as the inherent evil that is our President, Barack Obama.  The column does feature a worthwhile, if somewhat sardonic anecdote about golfer Phil Mickelson:

http://on.wsj.com/V5W5Pm

My take on this subject (lost among the hundreds of comments tagged to Ms. Noonan’s column at wsj.com):

The first half of Ms. Noonan’s column was the best she's written in some time. I was actually lulled into thinking the entire column would be free of her usual vitriolic, personal attacks on our President. Sadly, I was wrong. Nonetheless, she makes several excellent observations about the many points of failure within the current Republican party.

Listen up: if the Republicans truly want to become relevant again, they need to focus on the inherent truths in the first half of Peggy's column. They do look like "ants on a sugar cube." Here's how they can fix that:

Move away, far away from the DOA positions they embrace on "social issues." Safe, legal abortions are here to stay. The matter is settled. Deal with it and shut up about it. Americans are overwhelmingly fed up with the epidemic of gun violence that is unique to our sick, gun-worshipping culture. Stricter gun control laws WILL be enacted. Quit hiding behind the second amendment, which any thinking person understands has nothing to do with civilians owning AK-47's to hunt down Bambi in the woods. Grow a pair and be willing to stand up to the increasingly delusional NRA, and point out exactly where they are wrong. Get your nose out of people's bedrooms and accept the fact that Gay Marriage is, and should be, a simple fact of life. Move on.

Instead, Republicans, get back to the very basic "small government" principles that are supposed to constitute the essence of your party. Focus on fiscal issues, which really are your strength, and on which you will find widespread support from an overwhelming number of tired, spent, taxed-to-death hard-working Americans. Expose the long-term dangers of our ballooning national debt in terms that the average outside-the-beltway, apolicital non-wonk can actually understand and internalize. Put forth alternatives that will work (as opposed to your current, self-destructive, obstructionist and asinine ostrich act, in which "no tax increases under any circumstances" is the answer to every question.) Acknowledge that our current interventionist foreign policies are not only unwise, but unaffordable, and that the decade-old wars against ephemeral enemies have played a big part in arriving at this place of fiscal distress. Resolve to change course.

Do these things, Republicans, and you'll win the next election in a landslide - provided you float a candidate who understands the reality of real Americans enough to know better than to proffer a $10,000 bet during a debate.

The Typing Pool

Anyone who has watched Mad Men has seen a depiction of a corporate office that more closely resembles the environment in which I began my career than that of any current-day workplace.  This is perfectly logical, as the 1960’s were, in fact, chronologically closer to the 1980’s than the 1980’s were to the present day. 

Envision, if you will, the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.  Subtract the in-office liquor cabinets and trysts, the pointy push-up bras and other 60’s fashion items, and the blatant racism/sexism/homophobia.  Keep the smoking, the rotary dial phones, the wide-open, cubicle-free “bullpen,” the occasionally drunken executives and employees (who imbibed at local watering holes, not infrequently involving three hour Friday “luncheons”) and the more subtle end of the sexism spectrum; et voila, you are picturing my first job.

In those heady days preceding adoption of the personal computer and e-mail in the workplace, “typing” (the term “keyboarding” hadn’t yet been coined) was a specialized skill, generally possessed only by female clerical (sorry, office support) personnel.  My work as a newly-minted professional involved a great deal of correspondence, which I wrote the old-fashioned way, putting pen to paper.  The most informal memos went out the door in that form – in envelopes, addressed in longhand cursive.  Everything else went to the Typing Pool.

Our Typing Pool consisted of five or six women who had worked for the company as typists, probably, on average, 20-30 years each.  During times when the workload wasn’t sufficient to keep them all busy, they would read magazines or knit at their desks. This was considered perfectly acceptable. They typed, and that was all.  Such was corporate life in pre-Lean-Six-Sigma days.

As is typically the case with any team, some of the typists were, well, better than others.  We, as their captive clients, had no control over which typist handled our work.  It was the luck of the draw.

Kathy was the best. Her work was fast and accurate. Helen was… well, Helen had issues.  An older woman with a severe hearing impairment that made communication extraordinarily difficult, she had a few, shall we say, personal hygiene challenges (picture a lipstick-cheeked Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest” who smelled bad) in addition to being a shitty typist. Manuscripts that went to Helen typically came back bearing globs of liquid “White Out,” clumsy attempts at masking the small subset of mistakes that she was actually able to identify on her own.  They may as well have gone into a black hole.

Alternatives to using the Typing Pool were few.  None were sanctioned.  On rare occasions, when I really, truly needed to get something typed up quickly and accurately without risking losing my work to the black hole, I had two options: ask a personal favor of our manager’s secretary (sorry, administrative assistant) who happened to be a crack typist; or, as a last resort, find an empty desk that was equipped with an IBM Selectric typewriter (the kind with the little round letter-ball; they were state-of-the-art machines, and there were a few around for various specialized purposes) and – slowly, clumsily, carefully – type it myself.

The foregoing is an historical account, to the best of my recollection. Only the names have been changed. The story that follows is fictional.  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The year was 2013.  At Sharon’s company, and across corporate America, constant evolutionary change had long been the norm.  This year was no exception.  The deck chairs had been rearranged yet again, this time fairly significantly, and Sharon hadn’t fared particularly well.  Her team had been disbanded, the scope of her authority curtailed.  Worse, it seemed to Sharon and her colleagues that the trigger had been pulled prematurely.  Projects were on the drawing boards, but were not yet shovel-ready.  It appeared that senior management hadn’t quite figured out what to do with these folks, and many others like them, in the interim. 

They considered taking up knitting.

Fortunately, or so it seemed, a short-term assignment came along.  The band of misfits would be busy for awhile.  It wasn’t exactly challenging or intrinsically satisfying work.  The main task was data entry – or, as it would have been called thirty years ago, “typing.”

For weeks, Sharon and her co-workers sat at their desks, copying information from printed spreadsheets into a truly god-awful, poorly designed application.  Working, as they did, in the software development industry, they recognized bad design in a heartbeat: to create a new record, they had to first create a fully-populated “shell” containing hundreds of subordinate records, then delete the ones that were not desired.

In English: imagine walking into a supermarket to buy a loaf of bread.  But the only way to accomplish that is to remove every loaf of bread from the store shelves, load up several grocery carts with all of the loaves, wheel each of the carts to the checkout line, one at a time, then, finally, select the particular loaf that you want from the cart in which it resides, and hand it to the cashier. Having done all that, you must then bring your newly purchased bread out to your car, put it in the trunk, turn around and go back into the store, and repeat the entire procedure to obtain a quart of milk.  The process was just about that inefficient, slow, and frustrating.

As a result, the short-term assignment that had originally been estimated to last a few days dragged on for weeks. The performance of the application was so poor that minutes would pass between transactions.  Sharon and the rest of the crew found themselves staring at the little “please wait” spinning-beach-ball icon, really, most of the time. Their minds wandered.  They exchanged instant messages to pass the time:  “Thank God for my iPod.”  “Shoot me now.  No, really.”  “I’ve lost the ability to blink.”

Eventually, the wheels of corporate bureaucracy began moving again.  Sharon was able to move forward with a project assignment that, while nowhere near as challenging or satisfying as her old job, at least provided her with an opportunity to think.  Her colleagues, similarly, landed on their feet in various roles, still cogs on the giant, impersonal corporate wheel, albeit positioned differently.  The Neo-Typing Pool was no more.

In 2013, virtually anyone with an ‘office job’ has access to technology and tools that would have made Don Draper’s head spin, even when sober.  Yet it has always been, and remains true that people are the ultimate determinants of the success or failure of an enterprise.  The socially acceptable, yet at times tremendously counterproductive and even harmful office behavior of the 1960s’ Mad Men; the unabashedly rife-with-waste and, by today’s standards, highly manual processes of my 1980s office job; and the demoralizing underutilization of our fictional friend Sharon in the supposedly enlightened, “lean,” highly competitive, hurry-up-and-wait world of 2013 – all share the basic fact that there is clearly, always, room for improvement.  The best of us will continue striving to bring that about, despite circumstances that may render our efforts difficult, thankless, and sometimes futile.

And one day, sooner or later, we will move on.