8 years old is proving to be a very, very interesting age. I had just gotten used to the last iteration of Logan, Logan 4.0, and now comes Logan 5.0.
He's got a crush on a little girl at school. Also, for the first time in his life, he's taken an interest in music. That is something I am excited about. However, I'm leery of smothering his interest and turning him off.
The other day he was doing some windmill air-guitar and I told him that was something Pete Townshend used to do. I was astounded when he actually showed interest as I went upstairs and got my Concert for NY DVD out and played 3 Who songs for him.
He loved it all. The angry, windmill style of Pete, the microphone swinging antics of Roger Daltrey. He had to understand the sheer reverence I had for the guys as I described their greatness. I explained the tragedy of Keith Moon and how he was a great, great musician.
He asked how he died, and I used it as an opportunity to explain how drugs ruin people.
Logan is genuinely interested in seeing "This Is It". He's been a Jackson 5 fan for as far back as I can remember. I've played "ABC", "I Want You Back" and "The Love You Save" for him since he was very, very small.
It has also given me some teaching opportunities. I've explained that Michael was performing when he was Logan's age. I've also explained that Michael was a messed up person.
And the "messed up" part is why, with all my might, I am trying not to be a show business parent.
This is the first year Logan has shown an interest in learning an instrument. He can play a few notes on guitar. He's learning to play the recorder at school. Today I'll move my keyboards down into the basement with the electronic drums so he can noodle.
Although he has the beginnings of a spark, I don't want to put it out by putting too much on him.
In the back of my mind, though, nothing could please me more than seeing him take an interest in music.
A few of his friends are forming a band of some sort. I don't want to push Logan too much. He's got access to guitars, a bass, keyboards and drums. I'll just leave them around and give him time to explore.
He finishes baseball and football this weekend. So, that will give me 2 months where he won't have any sports on the schedule.
I think the key to both happiness and success in life is to do what you love. So far, he has shown a passion for sports. Music? I hope one develops, but again, I'm trying not to push too hard.
Music is a much better fit for me to mentor him, since it's something I know a little about. I got a late start in life, trying to teach myself guitar, off and on, until I broke through with the help of the old book "the Beatles Compleat" that was given to me by Stu Kemper.
(It was an obscure book that was nonetheless the rage among the guitar players I knew in school. It actually ended up teaching a bit more than a good collection of Beatle transcriptions because about every other song was transcribed in a different key, usually meant for piano, like Eb.)
16 was too late to ever really be any good at guitar, and my lack of skills, despite years of effort, attest to that.
Logan, on the other hand, has the ability to really accomplish something if he picks it up sometime before his teen years.
Sports? I'm of much less help, other than being willing to take him to/from practice. He already has exceeded my ability to coach him in baseball, and will exceed my ability to coach him in football and basketball, probably in the next couple of years.
I am reminded of a time when he was very little and he said, "Dad, if I'm ever in a band, I'll need a better guitar".
All I could think was, "Boy, were you born in the right house, son."
So, the keyboards go up today and after this weekend, I'll see if I can spend some more time showing him a thing or two on the guitar.
If nothing else, I'd like to see him be able to play songs with me someday, for fun. Best-case, if he could be in a band in High School or College, all the better.
I'll probably see if I can show him the Beatles appearance on Ed Sullivan. Now that he likes girls, he might make the connection between the screams and being the guy on stage with a guitar.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Why Andrew Speaker really is a bad, bad human being... even though it's not as cut and dried as it may appear at first blush
Remember that hysteria about the jet-setting TB slip and fall shyster, Andrew Speaker back in 2007?
It got a lot of publicity. Probably because... oh... the possibility of a person flying around, after they've been told, by the CDC no to fly around, with a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis isn't something that happens every day.
He's back, now, trying to sue the CDC because he feels his privacy rights were violated when they went public about the fact that he was defying their orders and had exposed hundreds, if not thousands of people to a disease that is a global health concern.
The interesting thing about this case is that usually, the media sets up a frenzy and zooms in on a private citizen, and the private citizen doesn't really have a chance to get their story out.
The part that's unusual, here, is that the private citizen did a great job of getting his story out. It's the CDC's side that's under-reported. Partially because the CDC isn't commenting on the case. In fact, other than reporting that he was jetting around despite their request that he not, they really haven't said much, publicly about this case.
In fact, it was the media that broke the identity of this spoiled, horrible little self-absorbed shyster. It wasn't the CDC. They really were trying to protect his identity, yet also balance that against their need to protect the public health.
So, what really happened?
It would appear that Mr. Speaker was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had several tests, and some of them came up negative, but at least one indicated that he had the disease.
He was, unfortunately, also planning on travelling to Greece to marry his Fiancee in the months following his diagnosis.
A few months after his initial diagnosis, and a few months before he is scheduled to fly, he was informed that he had MDR-TB. Multidrug resistant tuberculosis. At this point, his doctors began expressing to him that he should not travel.
This is where things get very, very cloudy. It does not appear that he was ordered by the government or a law-enforcement agency that he COULD NOT travel. He was merely told by his doctors that he SHOULD NOT travel.
Apparently, at least he and his father continued to ask questions such as, "Am I contagious?" and "Why are you saying we should not travel?" and "Is this because of some real risk, or are you just covering your butts?" (Not actual quotes. Just imagined quotes based on what I understand of the story.)
It would appear that they had already made plans for Mr. Speaker's wedding in Greece and were very, very resistant to following the doctor's request that they not travel.
There is zero doubt: the doctors were resolute throughout that Mr. Speaker should not travel.
However, the Speakers assert that they were told repeatedly that Shyster-meister Supreme, Andrew Speaker, was not contagious.
So, in asshat move #1, they decided to ingore the doctor's requests.
In fact, proving that the shyster never falls very far from the scheize, Speaker's father hid a tape recorder which they claim has a doctor saying something to the effect of, "we don't want you to travel... it's not because you're contagious, we're just covering ourselves".
Trouble is, that's just one statement, by one doctor. It hardly means that was the overall gist of what was being communicated. In fact, what was being communicated appears to have been substatial enough that Sheister Senior was going to record a conversation to try and win a game of "gotcha".
It appears at this time that the public health officials were attempting to draft documents making it explicit that they were demanding that Speaker NOT TRAVEL.
They assert that they were going to hand-deliver this letter to him.
Unfortunately, they couldn't reach him. He had changed his flight plans to travel to Greece earlier than had been planned.
Now, did he do this knowing they were going to unambiguously demand that he stay in the country? There's not, as far as I know, a way to know this from the public record. Suffice to say, he changed his travel plans at the last moment which coincided with the precise time-frame when public health officials were trying to hand-deliver a request to him NOT TO TRAVEL.
Coincidence? Maybe. However, personally, I'm skeptical.
While in Europe for his vacation, a test result comes back that indicates that Speaker may actually have XDR-TB, which is even worse than MDR-TB.
They called him in Europe. Instructed him not to fly on commercial aircraft and turn himself in to Italian health officials.
At this point, Speaker begins outright defying all requests from the CDC. He flies travels via public conveyance through several European countries, then enters the US, from Canada, by car.
He claims that he couldn't afford a hundred grand or more for a private jet to get him back to the states. He claims that the CDC said they would not pay to transport him back home.
When he went to enter the US, the border agents got a notice on their computer screen that he was a public health risk, and they deliberately ignored the notice let him into the country anyway. Literally, they had identified him as THE TB PATIENT, and decided they didn't need to do anything about it and let him in anyway. (And these asshats are supposed to protect us from terrorists? They won't even bother to protect us from tuberculoid attorneys!)
In their defense, they claimed that he "looked healthy".
Now, it turns out that Speaker didn't have XDR, "just" MDR. Personally, I think that's neither here nor there.
So, why is it that, even though it turns out that he probably wasn't contagious, that I still think he's a disgusting example of humanity?
1. If somebody told you that you have a disease that is exceptionally difficult to cure (and in the majority of cases, impossible to cure), and that you should report to health authorities, would you then expose yourself to hundreds of people on public transit?
I'm glad it turned out that this guy doesn't have XDR-TB. I'm glad his wife doesn't have it. Thing is, if there were even a CHANCE that I might have something like this, I would never do something that would endanger the public, against the advice of public health officials.
That's the main beef, here. Yeah, the diagnosis was incorrect. But it doesn't take much to see that these tests, in isolation, aren't that reliable. Near as I can figure, Speaker had as many tests tell him he DIDN'T have TB as he had tests that said he DID. This doesn't appear to be a 100% accurate and reliable science.
However, any decent human being would not have risked infecting others. Had he complied with their requests, continued testing would have shown he could travel. Instead, he took matters into his own hands.
He basically decided that he was going to do what he wanted to do to benefit himself. If he killed others, well, then that was just too bad for them.
2. How many times did we have to hear that he probably contracted TB while working with poor people in Vietnam? Gosh, the guy was practically mother theresa. How could we say he was a very, very bad man. Trouble is, that's a bit of an exaggeration. He went over there briefly as part of a Rotary club project. This isn't a guy who lived in a leper colony for 3 years as a man of medicine and compassion. This is a guy who went there for 5 weeks.
Noble? Sure. Good thing to do? Yep. A crappy deal that he may have contracted TB there? Sure was.
Get out of jail-free card for willingly throwing as many other people under the bus as you need to in order to save your own ass? Not in a million years.
This is just an attempt to wrap himself in a cloak of decency to try and mitigate the fact that he basically acted no better than a murderer during one highly publicized part of his life.
3. On his law firm's web-site, Mr. Speaker proudly points out that he attended the Naval Academy. What he omits is that he didn't graduate. I have a special disdain for people who want the kudos associated with military service, but who can't be bothered with... oh... actually performing any military service. What this guy got was a year or two of free education at taxpayer expense, after which he decided that either the school was too hard, or that he was too good to serve his country and he walked. Or maybe he was rendered unfit for military service due to some physical, psychological, or emotional problem.
No harm, no foul. The Navy doesn't want him, either. However, putting this as some sort of achievement on his resume just highlights how craven he is to try and strap-hang on the sacrifices of actual servicemembers. He didn't SERVE your country. He took advantage of a good deal, then walked when he would have had to give something back.
Like I said, no harm, no foul, but if this is an example of things he's proud of, frankly, he either has a distorted sense of pride, or he's never actually accomplished something he can be proud of.
4. After trotting around Europe following his wedding in Greece, Scummy McSleasemeister then cried poor that he couldn't afford the cost of a charter plane to get himself home.
Now, six figures is a heck of a sum of money to pay. However, I'm left to wonder two things:
First, what kind of personal injury attorney is he? Personal injury attorneys should make money. Where is his?
Second, sorry dude... wedding in greece, honeymoon in Europe? I'm not buying the "I just can't afford it" argument. In fact, in later interviews, Speaker did say something to the effect of, he could have probably found a way to come up with the money, but it would have been exceptionally difficult.
Understandable. That's a lot of money. However, what does it say about the guy that money for a wedding in Greece is perfectly okay in his value system, but money to make sure he doesn't murder a few dozen people is entirely too inconvenient?
And what about his shyster dad? Are they both crying poor? Practice of the law isn't particularly noted for low salaries. Especially when one abandons all human decency to become a slip-and-fall attorney.
5. At some point, clearly, the wedding in Greece became more important than listening to the CDC.
I can't say the exact time when it happened. However, sometime between being diagnosed with garden variety TB and the time when the CDC was trying to hand-deliver a letter, the CDC stopped merely suggesting that this guy not-travel and was clearly trying to tell him that he REALLY SHOULD NOT travel.
Speaker's argument basically boils down to: Well, they suggested it, but at no time did they tackle me and throw me in a prison.
And until they did something that legally prevented him from travelling, this guy was going to Greece. In fact, it appears that he was deliberately changing his travel plans to keep them from contacting him to keep him from going.
Again, the heart of the real problem here: he was in it for himself. Period. Didn't care what the doctors said.
He seems to think it is a defense that he didn't get quarantined by the fed. (He was, upon his return.)
Basically, he's saying that basic human decency wasn't a good enough reason.
He's saying that the way the world should work is that doctors shouldn't say things like, "don't travel". That's not enough. If they were serious, they need to do something other than say, "don't travel".
What does he think they should do? Put a gun to your head, say, "don't even f***ing move" and call in a SWAT team?
In any event, this jerk is doing exactly what you'd expect some third-rate shyster slip and fall scumbag to do. He's suing the CDC.
So, yeah, there's more to this story. There almost always is. However, none of it seems to erase the main problem that folks have with this guy: when he thought he could benefit himself at the cost of potentially killing dozens of other innocent people, he helped himself.
It would be as if somebody said, "Hey man, that machine gun you've got. It's not a toy. We think it may have live ammo in it".
Then, instead of putting the machine gun down, I say, "Well, screw it. I'll just open fire on this bunch of pre-schoolers playing soccer".
I mean, yeah, if it turns out afterwards that the machine gun was, indeed, not loaded, that's a good thing.
But it sure as hell doesn't excuse me for thinking it was okay to kill a bunch of innocent people.
Lucky for all of us that the threat wasn't as bad as the CDC thought at the time. However that doesn't excuse this guy's behavior. Are we supposed to be angry that the CDC acted in a very conservative fashion to try and ensure that this guy didn't needlessly infect untold numbers of people? I mean, yeah, they errored on the side of caution. Go figure. Avoiding the possibility of creating a mountain of corpses will make some people error on the side of caution.
I consider it a supreme injustice that this guy should enjoy any kind of life at all.
He displays the ugliest of the ugliness of human spirit and sank to depths no decent human being would ever sink to.
He represents all that is evil and wrong in humanity.
He is, simply put, a very, very bad person. No amount of PR spin will ever change that.
This is a timeline by NPR of the events of Mr. Speaker's scumminess:
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/tb/
This is an article about his current difficulty in practicing the law. He thinks it's because people are afraid of TB. I'd be more afraid that he'd throw my ass under the bus the first second he thought it would benefit him. that's sorta the way it goes: people don't want to do business with people who would kill you before they'd inconvenience themselves.
http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1189587766087
This one doesn't even fall into the news category. But if you want to read about what a 3rd rate lawyer does, after essentially attempting to manslaughter a few dozen people, when he has the opportunity to sue:
http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/health/2009/04/30/2009-04-30_andrew_speaker_quarantined_for_tuberculosis.html
It got a lot of publicity. Probably because... oh... the possibility of a person flying around, after they've been told, by the CDC no to fly around, with a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis isn't something that happens every day.
He's back, now, trying to sue the CDC because he feels his privacy rights were violated when they went public about the fact that he was defying their orders and had exposed hundreds, if not thousands of people to a disease that is a global health concern.
The interesting thing about this case is that usually, the media sets up a frenzy and zooms in on a private citizen, and the private citizen doesn't really have a chance to get their story out.
The part that's unusual, here, is that the private citizen did a great job of getting his story out. It's the CDC's side that's under-reported. Partially because the CDC isn't commenting on the case. In fact, other than reporting that he was jetting around despite their request that he not, they really haven't said much, publicly about this case.
In fact, it was the media that broke the identity of this spoiled, horrible little self-absorbed shyster. It wasn't the CDC. They really were trying to protect his identity, yet also balance that against their need to protect the public health.
So, what really happened?
It would appear that Mr. Speaker was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had several tests, and some of them came up negative, but at least one indicated that he had the disease.
He was, unfortunately, also planning on travelling to Greece to marry his Fiancee in the months following his diagnosis.
A few months after his initial diagnosis, and a few months before he is scheduled to fly, he was informed that he had MDR-TB. Multidrug resistant tuberculosis. At this point, his doctors began expressing to him that he should not travel.
This is where things get very, very cloudy. It does not appear that he was ordered by the government or a law-enforcement agency that he COULD NOT travel. He was merely told by his doctors that he SHOULD NOT travel.
Apparently, at least he and his father continued to ask questions such as, "Am I contagious?" and "Why are you saying we should not travel?" and "Is this because of some real risk, or are you just covering your butts?" (Not actual quotes. Just imagined quotes based on what I understand of the story.)
It would appear that they had already made plans for Mr. Speaker's wedding in Greece and were very, very resistant to following the doctor's request that they not travel.
There is zero doubt: the doctors were resolute throughout that Mr. Speaker should not travel.
However, the Speakers assert that they were told repeatedly that Shyster-meister Supreme, Andrew Speaker, was not contagious.
So, in asshat move #1, they decided to ingore the doctor's requests.
In fact, proving that the shyster never falls very far from the scheize, Speaker's father hid a tape recorder which they claim has a doctor saying something to the effect of, "we don't want you to travel... it's not because you're contagious, we're just covering ourselves".
Trouble is, that's just one statement, by one doctor. It hardly means that was the overall gist of what was being communicated. In fact, what was being communicated appears to have been substatial enough that Sheister Senior was going to record a conversation to try and win a game of "gotcha".
It appears at this time that the public health officials were attempting to draft documents making it explicit that they were demanding that Speaker NOT TRAVEL.
They assert that they were going to hand-deliver this letter to him.
Unfortunately, they couldn't reach him. He had changed his flight plans to travel to Greece earlier than had been planned.
Now, did he do this knowing they were going to unambiguously demand that he stay in the country? There's not, as far as I know, a way to know this from the public record. Suffice to say, he changed his travel plans at the last moment which coincided with the precise time-frame when public health officials were trying to hand-deliver a request to him NOT TO TRAVEL.
Coincidence? Maybe. However, personally, I'm skeptical.
While in Europe for his vacation, a test result comes back that indicates that Speaker may actually have XDR-TB, which is even worse than MDR-TB.
They called him in Europe. Instructed him not to fly on commercial aircraft and turn himself in to Italian health officials.
At this point, Speaker begins outright defying all requests from the CDC. He flies travels via public conveyance through several European countries, then enters the US, from Canada, by car.
He claims that he couldn't afford a hundred grand or more for a private jet to get him back to the states. He claims that the CDC said they would not pay to transport him back home.
When he went to enter the US, the border agents got a notice on their computer screen that he was a public health risk, and they deliberately ignored the notice let him into the country anyway. Literally, they had identified him as THE TB PATIENT, and decided they didn't need to do anything about it and let him in anyway. (And these asshats are supposed to protect us from terrorists? They won't even bother to protect us from tuberculoid attorneys!)
In their defense, they claimed that he "looked healthy".
Now, it turns out that Speaker didn't have XDR, "just" MDR. Personally, I think that's neither here nor there.
So, why is it that, even though it turns out that he probably wasn't contagious, that I still think he's a disgusting example of humanity?
1. If somebody told you that you have a disease that is exceptionally difficult to cure (and in the majority of cases, impossible to cure), and that you should report to health authorities, would you then expose yourself to hundreds of people on public transit?
I'm glad it turned out that this guy doesn't have XDR-TB. I'm glad his wife doesn't have it. Thing is, if there were even a CHANCE that I might have something like this, I would never do something that would endanger the public, against the advice of public health officials.
That's the main beef, here. Yeah, the diagnosis was incorrect. But it doesn't take much to see that these tests, in isolation, aren't that reliable. Near as I can figure, Speaker had as many tests tell him he DIDN'T have TB as he had tests that said he DID. This doesn't appear to be a 100% accurate and reliable science.
However, any decent human being would not have risked infecting others. Had he complied with their requests, continued testing would have shown he could travel. Instead, he took matters into his own hands.
He basically decided that he was going to do what he wanted to do to benefit himself. If he killed others, well, then that was just too bad for them.
2. How many times did we have to hear that he probably contracted TB while working with poor people in Vietnam? Gosh, the guy was practically mother theresa. How could we say he was a very, very bad man. Trouble is, that's a bit of an exaggeration. He went over there briefly as part of a Rotary club project. This isn't a guy who lived in a leper colony for 3 years as a man of medicine and compassion. This is a guy who went there for 5 weeks.
Noble? Sure. Good thing to do? Yep. A crappy deal that he may have contracted TB there? Sure was.
Get out of jail-free card for willingly throwing as many other people under the bus as you need to in order to save your own ass? Not in a million years.
This is just an attempt to wrap himself in a cloak of decency to try and mitigate the fact that he basically acted no better than a murderer during one highly publicized part of his life.
3. On his law firm's web-site, Mr. Speaker proudly points out that he attended the Naval Academy. What he omits is that he didn't graduate. I have a special disdain for people who want the kudos associated with military service, but who can't be bothered with... oh... actually performing any military service. What this guy got was a year or two of free education at taxpayer expense, after which he decided that either the school was too hard, or that he was too good to serve his country and he walked. Or maybe he was rendered unfit for military service due to some physical, psychological, or emotional problem.
No harm, no foul. The Navy doesn't want him, either. However, putting this as some sort of achievement on his resume just highlights how craven he is to try and strap-hang on the sacrifices of actual servicemembers. He didn't SERVE your country. He took advantage of a good deal, then walked when he would have had to give something back.
Like I said, no harm, no foul, but if this is an example of things he's proud of, frankly, he either has a distorted sense of pride, or he's never actually accomplished something he can be proud of.
4. After trotting around Europe following his wedding in Greece, Scummy McSleasemeister then cried poor that he couldn't afford the cost of a charter plane to get himself home.
Now, six figures is a heck of a sum of money to pay. However, I'm left to wonder two things:
First, what kind of personal injury attorney is he? Personal injury attorneys should make money. Where is his?
Second, sorry dude... wedding in greece, honeymoon in Europe? I'm not buying the "I just can't afford it" argument. In fact, in later interviews, Speaker did say something to the effect of, he could have probably found a way to come up with the money, but it would have been exceptionally difficult.
Understandable. That's a lot of money. However, what does it say about the guy that money for a wedding in Greece is perfectly okay in his value system, but money to make sure he doesn't murder a few dozen people is entirely too inconvenient?
And what about his shyster dad? Are they both crying poor? Practice of the law isn't particularly noted for low salaries. Especially when one abandons all human decency to become a slip-and-fall attorney.
5. At some point, clearly, the wedding in Greece became more important than listening to the CDC.
I can't say the exact time when it happened. However, sometime between being diagnosed with garden variety TB and the time when the CDC was trying to hand-deliver a letter, the CDC stopped merely suggesting that this guy not-travel and was clearly trying to tell him that he REALLY SHOULD NOT travel.
Speaker's argument basically boils down to: Well, they suggested it, but at no time did they tackle me and throw me in a prison.
And until they did something that legally prevented him from travelling, this guy was going to Greece. In fact, it appears that he was deliberately changing his travel plans to keep them from contacting him to keep him from going.
Again, the heart of the real problem here: he was in it for himself. Period. Didn't care what the doctors said.
He seems to think it is a defense that he didn't get quarantined by the fed. (He was, upon his return.)
Basically, he's saying that basic human decency wasn't a good enough reason.
He's saying that the way the world should work is that doctors shouldn't say things like, "don't travel". That's not enough. If they were serious, they need to do something other than say, "don't travel".
What does he think they should do? Put a gun to your head, say, "don't even f***ing move" and call in a SWAT team?
In any event, this jerk is doing exactly what you'd expect some third-rate shyster slip and fall scumbag to do. He's suing the CDC.
So, yeah, there's more to this story. There almost always is. However, none of it seems to erase the main problem that folks have with this guy: when he thought he could benefit himself at the cost of potentially killing dozens of other innocent people, he helped himself.
It would be as if somebody said, "Hey man, that machine gun you've got. It's not a toy. We think it may have live ammo in it".
Then, instead of putting the machine gun down, I say, "Well, screw it. I'll just open fire on this bunch of pre-schoolers playing soccer".
I mean, yeah, if it turns out afterwards that the machine gun was, indeed, not loaded, that's a good thing.
But it sure as hell doesn't excuse me for thinking it was okay to kill a bunch of innocent people.
Lucky for all of us that the threat wasn't as bad as the CDC thought at the time. However that doesn't excuse this guy's behavior. Are we supposed to be angry that the CDC acted in a very conservative fashion to try and ensure that this guy didn't needlessly infect untold numbers of people? I mean, yeah, they errored on the side of caution. Go figure. Avoiding the possibility of creating a mountain of corpses will make some people error on the side of caution.
I consider it a supreme injustice that this guy should enjoy any kind of life at all.
He displays the ugliest of the ugliness of human spirit and sank to depths no decent human being would ever sink to.
He represents all that is evil and wrong in humanity.
He is, simply put, a very, very bad person. No amount of PR spin will ever change that.
This is a timeline by NPR of the events of Mr. Speaker's scumminess:
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/tb/
This is an article about his current difficulty in practicing the law. He thinks it's because people are afraid of TB. I'd be more afraid that he'd throw my ass under the bus the first second he thought it would benefit him. that's sorta the way it goes: people don't want to do business with people who would kill you before they'd inconvenience themselves.
http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1189587766087
This one doesn't even fall into the news category. But if you want to read about what a 3rd rate lawyer does, after essentially attempting to manslaughter a few dozen people, when he has the opportunity to sue:
http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/health/2009/04/30/2009-04-30_andrew_speaker_quarantined_for_tuberculosis.html
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Race and Perception...
Enough has been written on the issue of race that I doubt I can contribute anything substantial in the grand scheme of things.
However, an old friend from the neighborhood mentioned this special and it made me think about a lot of things:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
Race is an issue that I almost deliberately suppress because the implications were something that caused me a lot of anxiety as a young person.
It's amazing to me how much the world has changed since my younger days. For one thing, immigration policy changed monumentally right around the time I was born.
When I attended school, until about the 3rd or 4th grade, I was literally the only minority in my elementary school, and quite possibly in my town's entire school system.
Due to the changes in immigration policy, it's very rare that you can find a school system anywhere without at least a handful of asian students.
A person might reasonably draw the conclusion that my anxiety was self-imposed and that this was an issue that dealt mostly with my feelings of isolation, etc.
Unfortunately, that's not true. I was subjected to racial taunts and slurs. I was physically attacked once in a while. During the 2nd grade, the kids made my bus ride a living hell by calling me names so vile I can barely bring myself to say the words now as an adult.
7 years old. Younger than my son is, today. And these kids were older. I just didn't stand a chance.
It shaped my life in ways I probably will never fully understand. To this day, I am a confrontational person who gets unreasonably angry when I feel I'm being cornered. I had a lot of difficulty with assimilating socially in school.
Now some might point out that others are isolated and ostracized and bullied and have difficulty assimilating in school for reasons unrelated to race. I agree and I don't mean to say that my experience was unique or that nobody else ever had it bad in school. If a thumbnail anectdotal poll of most people's friends is any indication, a whole heck of a lot of people were pretty damned glad to get out of High School with their sanity intact. I'm just saying I'm one of them and this is a large part of the reason why.
The thing that stood out to me about the documentary, though, was the premise that people have to experience something akin to racism before they can fully understand just how bad it is.
I sufferred more racism than most people. At an age that was right around the age of the kids in that documentary.
Now, I do HATE racism with a passion. I will not tolerate it from anybody. I don't believe it has any place in any aspect of civil society.
But that's not because of my experiences. That's because I'm a rational human being.
The perspective of the documentary discounts the fact that many, many fair-minded people are that way despite never having had to experience something like racism.
Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with a few friends from the past. A few that stand out are John Pander, Stu Kemper... I never did lose contact with Patrick Hoffman. At various times in my life, they were all good friends to me. If they, or their families, had a racist bone in their bodies, they all did an admirable job of hiding it.
Same for every girlfriend I've ever had. Especially true for one particularly beautiful woman who married me.
The surprise for me in life is not how much racism has hurt me: it's how truly fair and wonderful most people are.
The amazing thing to me as I've gone on through my life is not that racism exists or that it has an ugly impact on life. Hey, stupidity of all kinds exists. Some people just want to hate. If they don't hate your race, they'll hate your country or your religion or your gender or your football team.
The thing that continues to amaze me is that so many people are good and fair-minded and truly beautiful inside.
I remember getting back in touch with some of the Korean linguists who I had served with in Korea. It stood out to me that a whole heck of a lot of them had Korean wives or girlfriends today.
For the most part, these were white kids from the suburbs when they joined the Army.
Really, it makes sense, though. These were guys who respected foreign culture and language and devoted several years of their lives to living them. That's just not the background you find in a closed-minded bigot.
The other shift we're seeing is one where race isn't some sort of binary construct. It's not a "you are or you aren't" situation. I've always been completely and totally offended at having to identify my "race" on a piece of paper.
Am I Asian? I'm as white as I am Asian. I lived most of my childhood seeing about 200 white people for every Asian person I saw. I was raised by my grandparents who were Hungarian and German. We ate kielbasa and stuffed peppers in my house.
This is not to downplay my Asian ancestry, but of what possible use could it be to classify me as "Asian"?
The box that said, "other" was even more offensive.
Nowadays, those idiotic forms will let you check "all that apply". My understanding is that various minority advocacy groups are the main driver in keeping the boxes at all.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Whereas in the past, whitey wanted to know who the brown people were to keep them down, now a bunch of poverty and race pimps want to know who the brown people are to make sure we get our quota of whatever somebody wants us to get.
We live in an age where our president is a combination of white and black. I had to chuckle at a comment about a Korean male golfer, when somebody said something to the effect of, "Wow, looks like Asians might be getting good at golf." I had to point out: Tiger Woods is Asian. In fact, racially, he's more Asian than black.
Soledad O'Brien, more than a decade ago, spoke of how she liked the fact that more and more people look like her. I liked that thought. That we were entering an age where it was okay to be a hodgepodge of ethnicity.
I don't believe you have to suffer an evil to understand it is evil. Civil right laws were written and passed by people who were almost exclusively male, white and overpriviledged. The supreme court justices who enforced those laws? The same.
Back to the documentary: maybe the kids learned something about racism. My suspicion is that instead, deep down, they were simply good and fair-minded people. That with or without the experiment, they were going to grow up to be decent folks.
I don't believe that making people experience ugliness is that valuable an exercise. There's already enough of it in the world. You don't need to contrive opportunities to make people experience it. It's just something that happens.
I also find it ironic that the teacher in the exercise appears to have been a very fair-minded person despite not having been raised with an episode like this in her childhood.
So, despite my somewhat rocky past, combined with my somewhat more positive observations later in life on the issues of race, I am still a believer in the goodness in people. At least here in the United States. Which is yet one more reason why I wouldn't live anywhere else.
However, an old friend from the neighborhood mentioned this special and it made me think about a lot of things:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
Race is an issue that I almost deliberately suppress because the implications were something that caused me a lot of anxiety as a young person.
It's amazing to me how much the world has changed since my younger days. For one thing, immigration policy changed monumentally right around the time I was born.
When I attended school, until about the 3rd or 4th grade, I was literally the only minority in my elementary school, and quite possibly in my town's entire school system.
Due to the changes in immigration policy, it's very rare that you can find a school system anywhere without at least a handful of asian students.
A person might reasonably draw the conclusion that my anxiety was self-imposed and that this was an issue that dealt mostly with my feelings of isolation, etc.
Unfortunately, that's not true. I was subjected to racial taunts and slurs. I was physically attacked once in a while. During the 2nd grade, the kids made my bus ride a living hell by calling me names so vile I can barely bring myself to say the words now as an adult.
7 years old. Younger than my son is, today. And these kids were older. I just didn't stand a chance.
It shaped my life in ways I probably will never fully understand. To this day, I am a confrontational person who gets unreasonably angry when I feel I'm being cornered. I had a lot of difficulty with assimilating socially in school.
Now some might point out that others are isolated and ostracized and bullied and have difficulty assimilating in school for reasons unrelated to race. I agree and I don't mean to say that my experience was unique or that nobody else ever had it bad in school. If a thumbnail anectdotal poll of most people's friends is any indication, a whole heck of a lot of people were pretty damned glad to get out of High School with their sanity intact. I'm just saying I'm one of them and this is a large part of the reason why.
The thing that stood out to me about the documentary, though, was the premise that people have to experience something akin to racism before they can fully understand just how bad it is.
I sufferred more racism than most people. At an age that was right around the age of the kids in that documentary.
Now, I do HATE racism with a passion. I will not tolerate it from anybody. I don't believe it has any place in any aspect of civil society.
But that's not because of my experiences. That's because I'm a rational human being.
The perspective of the documentary discounts the fact that many, many fair-minded people are that way despite never having had to experience something like racism.
Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with a few friends from the past. A few that stand out are John Pander, Stu Kemper... I never did lose contact with Patrick Hoffman. At various times in my life, they were all good friends to me. If they, or their families, had a racist bone in their bodies, they all did an admirable job of hiding it.
Same for every girlfriend I've ever had. Especially true for one particularly beautiful woman who married me.
The surprise for me in life is not how much racism has hurt me: it's how truly fair and wonderful most people are.
The amazing thing to me as I've gone on through my life is not that racism exists or that it has an ugly impact on life. Hey, stupidity of all kinds exists. Some people just want to hate. If they don't hate your race, they'll hate your country or your religion or your gender or your football team.
The thing that continues to amaze me is that so many people are good and fair-minded and truly beautiful inside.
I remember getting back in touch with some of the Korean linguists who I had served with in Korea. It stood out to me that a whole heck of a lot of them had Korean wives or girlfriends today.
For the most part, these were white kids from the suburbs when they joined the Army.
Really, it makes sense, though. These were guys who respected foreign culture and language and devoted several years of their lives to living them. That's just not the background you find in a closed-minded bigot.
The other shift we're seeing is one where race isn't some sort of binary construct. It's not a "you are or you aren't" situation. I've always been completely and totally offended at having to identify my "race" on a piece of paper.
Am I Asian? I'm as white as I am Asian. I lived most of my childhood seeing about 200 white people for every Asian person I saw. I was raised by my grandparents who were Hungarian and German. We ate kielbasa and stuffed peppers in my house.
This is not to downplay my Asian ancestry, but of what possible use could it be to classify me as "Asian"?
The box that said, "other" was even more offensive.
Nowadays, those idiotic forms will let you check "all that apply". My understanding is that various minority advocacy groups are the main driver in keeping the boxes at all.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Whereas in the past, whitey wanted to know who the brown people were to keep them down, now a bunch of poverty and race pimps want to know who the brown people are to make sure we get our quota of whatever somebody wants us to get.
We live in an age where our president is a combination of white and black. I had to chuckle at a comment about a Korean male golfer, when somebody said something to the effect of, "Wow, looks like Asians might be getting good at golf." I had to point out: Tiger Woods is Asian. In fact, racially, he's more Asian than black.
Soledad O'Brien, more than a decade ago, spoke of how she liked the fact that more and more people look like her. I liked that thought. That we were entering an age where it was okay to be a hodgepodge of ethnicity.
I don't believe you have to suffer an evil to understand it is evil. Civil right laws were written and passed by people who were almost exclusively male, white and overpriviledged. The supreme court justices who enforced those laws? The same.
Back to the documentary: maybe the kids learned something about racism. My suspicion is that instead, deep down, they were simply good and fair-minded people. That with or without the experiment, they were going to grow up to be decent folks.
I don't believe that making people experience ugliness is that valuable an exercise. There's already enough of it in the world. You don't need to contrive opportunities to make people experience it. It's just something that happens.
I also find it ironic that the teacher in the exercise appears to have been a very fair-minded person despite not having been raised with an episode like this in her childhood.
So, despite my somewhat rocky past, combined with my somewhat more positive observations later in life on the issues of race, I am still a believer in the goodness in people. At least here in the United States. Which is yet one more reason why I wouldn't live anywhere else.
Parenting and Coaching
As some of you may know already, Logan made the city's travel baseball team. In fact, it's a little bigger than the city. It's actually the team for the entire local recreation district with includes both the city of and neighboring township. It's quite an accomplishment for him and I'm very proud he made the team.
I'm also very happy that he made the team. The level of play is considerably better. That's only natural considering that this is a hand-picked team of 12 kids, selected from almost 50 who tried out. Those 50 were clearly head and shoulders above the hundreds who played rec league ball the previous Spring.
The other factor is that the coaching is much, much better. The head coach is able to teach Logan things about the game that I just can't. The assistant coach was probably the best rec league coach we had. Since my baseball experience consists of being the worst player on my little league team in the 2nd and 3rd grade (despite the fact that I absolutely love baseball and think it's the most elegant and beautiful sport in the world), I need others to teach my son if he's going to reach his potential.
I would like to see him play a sport in High School, and I am hoping this increases his chances of making his High School team. (These 12 kids will eventually be distributed between the two public High Schools, and maybe a few parochial schools as well.)
That having been said, I notice that the coach is harder on his own son than he is on the rest of the team. It's been noticeable all year long, but tonight it was particularly pronounced.
Now, on the one hand, the coach's son was making some boneheaded plays. For instance, he threw a baseball, full-force, to first base when he was simply too close. He could have injured the kid playing first base. The correct play was to flip the ball, or as these kids are being coached, to throw it like you might throw a dart. (Elbow in line, then a forward throw using mostly just your forearm.)
It wasn't just that one, but the kid made a few other bad plays and the coach was being pretty hard on him. Eventually, the boy was crying. Couldn't blame the kid. These kids are 8 and 9 years old.
Granted, they're talented athletes. Even at this age, I can't hold a candle to the skills these kids show. They're also driven. There isn't a kid out there who hasn't worked hard on his game.
They're hand-selected not just for their physical abilities, but for their maturity and self-discipline in gaining the skills that got them here.
But they're 8 and 9 years old. They're still just kids. I'm sure some folks think I'm a permissive parent, but I've come to believe that you teach kids with nurturing and support. Punishing them too often or severely and setting them up with too-stringent rules just sets them up for failure and the potential for self-esteem issues later in life.
The coach is a guy for whom I have an actual fondness. He loves kids and he's a great coach.
After the practice, he walked over and asked if I thought he was being too hard on his son.
I really did. So, I said, "I would probably dial it back a little."
We talked and I emphasized that he had a great son, and he agreed. I pointed out that it's hard to coach your own kid, though.
For those who haven't experienced it, you can take reasonable, normal, caring, loving fathers and in certain circumstances, with their own sons, their patience flies completely out the window.
I think a little of it is a father's own insecurity about themselves manifesting itself. Sort of like, "Well, my son is a reflection of me and he's letting me down."
A little of it is just that fathers may have worked really hard with a son on a particular skill. So, when the son goofs up, the father is frustrated.
Thing is, at this level, a coach may get frustrated because he worked with his kid and his kid goofed up. However, every kid on that team has involved fathers who are working with the kids quite a bit. So, the coach's kid is no different than any other kid who makes a mistake.
There's also an element of safety, here. One of the things the kid did was actually dangerous. However, in the kids defense, it happened at the very end of practice after he'd been ridden pretty hard for an hour and was probably feeling the pressure of having his every move being microanalyzed.
I pointed out to the coach that his son is probably trying extra hard for his Dad, and to some degree, trying extra, extra hard to try and avoid being criticized.
I offerred the observation that both coaches are harder on their own kids than they are on anybody else's. The other coach is a little harder, but not nearly so much as the head coach.
However, a lot of that just comes with being the son of a head coach. That's a hard job and this isn't the first or only situation where a head coach is hardest on his own kid.
I suggested maybe he work something out with the other coach to let the other coach deal with the head coach's son.
Now, don't get me wrong... the head coach's son is going to be one of the more challenging kids on the team to coach. However, after what I saw tonight, I think part of his problem (though not the whole problem) is that he's playing under a microscope where the head coach is WAY harder on him and the disapproval of the head coach also means the disapproval of HIS FATHER.
Reminds me of a time when I was driving and a woman who shall remain nameless was telling me which route to take, which lane to get in, when to turn... finally, I had to tell her, "you're making me crazy right now. I'm actually a much less safe driver because you're micromanaging everything I'm doing."
I had to think about not just the normal tasks of driving, but I had to worry about whether the lane I was in was going to draw a comment, etc. It reflected in my driving. Enough that I had to tell her, flat-out, to stop it before I got into an accident.
The situation this kid was dealing with was backseat driving on steroids. He's only 9 and he wasn't just hearing backseat driving.
The main reason I am posting is that this stands out so much to me. I actually had a lot of difficulty going to sleep last night because I couldn't get this out of my head. I woke up way too early and this was the first thing that came to mind.
I do hope the coach takes my advice to let the other coach handle his son. Kids don't listen to their own fathers the same way they listen to a coach. And fathers don't coach their own kids they way they coach everybody else's.
It's just an unfortunate, but all-too-often overlooked reality of parenting that I think folks need to be aware of.
I'm also very happy that he made the team. The level of play is considerably better. That's only natural considering that this is a hand-picked team of 12 kids, selected from almost 50 who tried out. Those 50 were clearly head and shoulders above the hundreds who played rec league ball the previous Spring.
The other factor is that the coaching is much, much better. The head coach is able to teach Logan things about the game that I just can't. The assistant coach was probably the best rec league coach we had. Since my baseball experience consists of being the worst player on my little league team in the 2nd and 3rd grade (despite the fact that I absolutely love baseball and think it's the most elegant and beautiful sport in the world), I need others to teach my son if he's going to reach his potential.
I would like to see him play a sport in High School, and I am hoping this increases his chances of making his High School team. (These 12 kids will eventually be distributed between the two public High Schools, and maybe a few parochial schools as well.)
That having been said, I notice that the coach is harder on his own son than he is on the rest of the team. It's been noticeable all year long, but tonight it was particularly pronounced.
Now, on the one hand, the coach's son was making some boneheaded plays. For instance, he threw a baseball, full-force, to first base when he was simply too close. He could have injured the kid playing first base. The correct play was to flip the ball, or as these kids are being coached, to throw it like you might throw a dart. (Elbow in line, then a forward throw using mostly just your forearm.)
It wasn't just that one, but the kid made a few other bad plays and the coach was being pretty hard on him. Eventually, the boy was crying. Couldn't blame the kid. These kids are 8 and 9 years old.
Granted, they're talented athletes. Even at this age, I can't hold a candle to the skills these kids show. They're also driven. There isn't a kid out there who hasn't worked hard on his game.
They're hand-selected not just for their physical abilities, but for their maturity and self-discipline in gaining the skills that got them here.
But they're 8 and 9 years old. They're still just kids. I'm sure some folks think I'm a permissive parent, but I've come to believe that you teach kids with nurturing and support. Punishing them too often or severely and setting them up with too-stringent rules just sets them up for failure and the potential for self-esteem issues later in life.
The coach is a guy for whom I have an actual fondness. He loves kids and he's a great coach.
After the practice, he walked over and asked if I thought he was being too hard on his son.
I really did. So, I said, "I would probably dial it back a little."
We talked and I emphasized that he had a great son, and he agreed. I pointed out that it's hard to coach your own kid, though.
For those who haven't experienced it, you can take reasonable, normal, caring, loving fathers and in certain circumstances, with their own sons, their patience flies completely out the window.
I think a little of it is a father's own insecurity about themselves manifesting itself. Sort of like, "Well, my son is a reflection of me and he's letting me down."
A little of it is just that fathers may have worked really hard with a son on a particular skill. So, when the son goofs up, the father is frustrated.
Thing is, at this level, a coach may get frustrated because he worked with his kid and his kid goofed up. However, every kid on that team has involved fathers who are working with the kids quite a bit. So, the coach's kid is no different than any other kid who makes a mistake.
There's also an element of safety, here. One of the things the kid did was actually dangerous. However, in the kids defense, it happened at the very end of practice after he'd been ridden pretty hard for an hour and was probably feeling the pressure of having his every move being microanalyzed.
I pointed out to the coach that his son is probably trying extra hard for his Dad, and to some degree, trying extra, extra hard to try and avoid being criticized.
I offerred the observation that both coaches are harder on their own kids than they are on anybody else's. The other coach is a little harder, but not nearly so much as the head coach.
However, a lot of that just comes with being the son of a head coach. That's a hard job and this isn't the first or only situation where a head coach is hardest on his own kid.
I suggested maybe he work something out with the other coach to let the other coach deal with the head coach's son.
Now, don't get me wrong... the head coach's son is going to be one of the more challenging kids on the team to coach. However, after what I saw tonight, I think part of his problem (though not the whole problem) is that he's playing under a microscope where the head coach is WAY harder on him and the disapproval of the head coach also means the disapproval of HIS FATHER.
Reminds me of a time when I was driving and a woman who shall remain nameless was telling me which route to take, which lane to get in, when to turn... finally, I had to tell her, "you're making me crazy right now. I'm actually a much less safe driver because you're micromanaging everything I'm doing."
I had to think about not just the normal tasks of driving, but I had to worry about whether the lane I was in was going to draw a comment, etc. It reflected in my driving. Enough that I had to tell her, flat-out, to stop it before I got into an accident.
The situation this kid was dealing with was backseat driving on steroids. He's only 9 and he wasn't just hearing backseat driving.
The main reason I am posting is that this stands out so much to me. I actually had a lot of difficulty going to sleep last night because I couldn't get this out of my head. I woke up way too early and this was the first thing that came to mind.
I do hope the coach takes my advice to let the other coach handle his son. Kids don't listen to their own fathers the same way they listen to a coach. And fathers don't coach their own kids they way they coach everybody else's.
It's just an unfortunate, but all-too-often overlooked reality of parenting that I think folks need to be aware of.
Friday, October 16, 2009
5 Years of Servpro
It was October 15th, 2004 when I left my last employer. As I've said many times, I loved the company I worked for, but hated working in IT and in 2002, I got a boss I considered an unholy nightmare.
My luck was due to change. From the time I joined the company in 1993 until 2002 when my favorite boss retired, I had an uninterrupted streak of 3 awesome managers to work for. I can't speak highly enough of both the corporation and the managers who ran it.
2004, that all changed and I was hanging out my shingle as an entrepreneur. Or, as some folks label us, a "frantrapraneur" since I bought into a franchise system.
It has been such a wholly positive experience for me that I honestly can't say enough good things about it. Everything I had ever hoped to get from owning a business, I have gotten in greater measure than I would have hoped.
This is not to say that there are no challenges. I have frustrations and nail-biting times just like any other person. Who doesn't? But the frustrations are smaller and the nail-biting times are more than offset by the times when things are good.
Financially, this has been a slam-dunk. I'm not rich... or maybe not rich-rich. However, I'm more comfortable than at any other time in my life. I am truly blessed to be able to provide my son with opportunities that many folks would, but can not provide.
I have been, so far, able to provide him with what most parents hope for: greater resources and opportunities than those I was given as a child.
Since opening my doors, I have never made a late payment or missed a payroll. That's not always easy and I wish I could say it gets easier every year. It doesn't. Revenues have tended to increase, but so have expenses. So, when we stumble, we just stumble on a bigger scale than before.
However, at a time when so many people are feeling the negative impact of the recession, I am truly, truly fortunate that at least so far, I am not.
The best part? Being in business for myself has given me a lot of space, personally, to try to move closer to the person I want to be.
This business has become more than just a livelihood. It has become, in many, many ways, the way in which I give back to the world.
A well-run business produces wealth, but it also produces jobs. We just added our 13th employee, and by the time Christmas rolls around, we'll be adding as many as 4 more. That means 17 families will be positively impacted by my company.
I've come to cherish my employees and everything they do for the company. This long ago ceased to be "mine" and operates day to day as "ours".
I remember years ago going to the Servpro convention and hearing folks gush about the positive impact Servpro has made in their lives.
I figure there are other franchise systems out there. Maybe some that are better than this one. I just don't know of any offhand.
The longer I'm in the Servpro system, the more I like it. It has truly changed my life and my fortunes, and the financial implications are the least of the positive benefits I've enjoyed so far.
With any luck 5 years from now, I'll be posting another short blog on how great my time has been.
Until then, there's payroll to meet and people to employ and customers to delight. If I can keep the right people in the right places, maybe we can navigate this crappy economy and come out in the recovery better and stronger than ever.
My luck was due to change. From the time I joined the company in 1993 until 2002 when my favorite boss retired, I had an uninterrupted streak of 3 awesome managers to work for. I can't speak highly enough of both the corporation and the managers who ran it.
2004, that all changed and I was hanging out my shingle as an entrepreneur. Or, as some folks label us, a "frantrapraneur" since I bought into a franchise system.
It has been such a wholly positive experience for me that I honestly can't say enough good things about it. Everything I had ever hoped to get from owning a business, I have gotten in greater measure than I would have hoped.
This is not to say that there are no challenges. I have frustrations and nail-biting times just like any other person. Who doesn't? But the frustrations are smaller and the nail-biting times are more than offset by the times when things are good.
Financially, this has been a slam-dunk. I'm not rich... or maybe not rich-rich. However, I'm more comfortable than at any other time in my life. I am truly blessed to be able to provide my son with opportunities that many folks would, but can not provide.
I have been, so far, able to provide him with what most parents hope for: greater resources and opportunities than those I was given as a child.
Since opening my doors, I have never made a late payment or missed a payroll. That's not always easy and I wish I could say it gets easier every year. It doesn't. Revenues have tended to increase, but so have expenses. So, when we stumble, we just stumble on a bigger scale than before.
However, at a time when so many people are feeling the negative impact of the recession, I am truly, truly fortunate that at least so far, I am not.
The best part? Being in business for myself has given me a lot of space, personally, to try to move closer to the person I want to be.
This business has become more than just a livelihood. It has become, in many, many ways, the way in which I give back to the world.
A well-run business produces wealth, but it also produces jobs. We just added our 13th employee, and by the time Christmas rolls around, we'll be adding as many as 4 more. That means 17 families will be positively impacted by my company.
I've come to cherish my employees and everything they do for the company. This long ago ceased to be "mine" and operates day to day as "ours".
I remember years ago going to the Servpro convention and hearing folks gush about the positive impact Servpro has made in their lives.
I figure there are other franchise systems out there. Maybe some that are better than this one. I just don't know of any offhand.
The longer I'm in the Servpro system, the more I like it. It has truly changed my life and my fortunes, and the financial implications are the least of the positive benefits I've enjoyed so far.
With any luck 5 years from now, I'll be posting another short blog on how great my time has been.
Until then, there's payroll to meet and people to employ and customers to delight. If I can keep the right people in the right places, maybe we can navigate this crappy economy and come out in the recovery better and stronger than ever.
Miracles of Modern Science
As I recover from my deviated septum sugery, the thought occurred to me that modern medical science is just amazing.
I've had a history of sinus trouble, and it has had a substantial impact on my life. For most of my life, I've tried to limit my time in the cold. I've become acutely aware of the telltale signs of a sinus infection. I've had to run to the doctor a few times a year to get meds to cure them.
I had one sinus that had a partially blocked opening, which the doctor opened up. It was the source of most of my infections in the past. I do breathe noticeably better these days.
It was a tough surgical procedure with a rather inconvenient recovery, but all in all, the effects appear to be substantial. It will, in many small ways, change the way I live my life for the better.
It reminds me of getting Lasik surgery back in the Spring. (The recovery for that, btw, was about as minimal as I could ever imagine. It was basically, "go home, go to sleep, wake up with 20/15 vision".)
Strange how we're born with these frailties and abnormalities and just learn to cope and live with them. More and more, medical science changes that equation for us. I once had a fungal condition of the skin that lasted, literally, from when I was 7 years old until I turned 28. A product came on the market, Lotrimin, that cured the condition in a week. Literally, the sample-sized topical cream cured the condition completely. I can't tell you about the mountains of other medications I tried throughout the years.
As I get older, it amazes me that although there are parts of my physiology that are clearly getting worse (my body is in all-out rebellion against ever letting me run long distances again, that's for sure), gradually, my life is actually improving.
With the potential for deployment now roughly 6 months away, it'll be nice to know that I won't have to worry about eyeglasses, sinus infections or skin-rotting fungus like I did back when I served in the Army in the 1980s.
Don't get me wrong... I'd take all 3 of those conditions if it meant I could be a 17 year-old again.
For people of my son's generation, though, they won't have to take that tradeoff. They won't ever have to wear glasses if they don't want to. Even for those who can't afford it, the military is now routinely and regularly correcting servicemember's vision as a free benefit.
I just can't help but marvel that if I'm activated to military service in 2010, I will be, in several respects, in much better condition than I was in as a young man.
There are cost benefits to this, too. One of the rationales I used for the laser vision surgery was that I wouldn't have to buy $500 worth of eyeglasses every few years. Not to mention $200 worth of contacts every year. Throw in the fact that I don't have the inconvenience of contacts or glasses and this is a huge, huge benefit to me.
Imagine the cost-benefit if this had taken place when I was 16, instead of 43?
The deviated septum surgery? Imagine the cost of 2 or 3 doctor's visits per year and 2 or 3 scrips for antibiotics? Yeah, it may take a decade or two, but the benefit is there.
So, I'm thankful for all the stuff the doctors have fixed. Like anybody, there are things I wish were different that the doctors won't be fixing in this lifetime. Like anybody, there are things that are getting worse every year.
However, overall, I'm fortunate that thanks to modern medical science, I actually am ending this year with a much better body than I started it with.
I've had a history of sinus trouble, and it has had a substantial impact on my life. For most of my life, I've tried to limit my time in the cold. I've become acutely aware of the telltale signs of a sinus infection. I've had to run to the doctor a few times a year to get meds to cure them.
I had one sinus that had a partially blocked opening, which the doctor opened up. It was the source of most of my infections in the past. I do breathe noticeably better these days.
It was a tough surgical procedure with a rather inconvenient recovery, but all in all, the effects appear to be substantial. It will, in many small ways, change the way I live my life for the better.
It reminds me of getting Lasik surgery back in the Spring. (The recovery for that, btw, was about as minimal as I could ever imagine. It was basically, "go home, go to sleep, wake up with 20/15 vision".)
Strange how we're born with these frailties and abnormalities and just learn to cope and live with them. More and more, medical science changes that equation for us. I once had a fungal condition of the skin that lasted, literally, from when I was 7 years old until I turned 28. A product came on the market, Lotrimin, that cured the condition in a week. Literally, the sample-sized topical cream cured the condition completely. I can't tell you about the mountains of other medications I tried throughout the years.
As I get older, it amazes me that although there are parts of my physiology that are clearly getting worse (my body is in all-out rebellion against ever letting me run long distances again, that's for sure), gradually, my life is actually improving.
With the potential for deployment now roughly 6 months away, it'll be nice to know that I won't have to worry about eyeglasses, sinus infections or skin-rotting fungus like I did back when I served in the Army in the 1980s.
Don't get me wrong... I'd take all 3 of those conditions if it meant I could be a 17 year-old again.
For people of my son's generation, though, they won't have to take that tradeoff. They won't ever have to wear glasses if they don't want to. Even for those who can't afford it, the military is now routinely and regularly correcting servicemember's vision as a free benefit.
I just can't help but marvel that if I'm activated to military service in 2010, I will be, in several respects, in much better condition than I was in as a young man.
There are cost benefits to this, too. One of the rationales I used for the laser vision surgery was that I wouldn't have to buy $500 worth of eyeglasses every few years. Not to mention $200 worth of contacts every year. Throw in the fact that I don't have the inconvenience of contacts or glasses and this is a huge, huge benefit to me.
Imagine the cost-benefit if this had taken place when I was 16, instead of 43?
The deviated septum surgery? Imagine the cost of 2 or 3 doctor's visits per year and 2 or 3 scrips for antibiotics? Yeah, it may take a decade or two, but the benefit is there.
So, I'm thankful for all the stuff the doctors have fixed. Like anybody, there are things I wish were different that the doctors won't be fixing in this lifetime. Like anybody, there are things that are getting worse every year.
However, overall, I'm fortunate that thanks to modern medical science, I actually am ending this year with a much better body than I started it with.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Chapter Two: Burning the Bridges Behind Me... or was it boats? Was it bras?
There are some alarming statistics about small business failure. Some estimates say that 95% of all small businesses fail within the first five years.
The difficulty there is that there are no standards for who gets to start a "small business". In this way, small businesspeople are much like motivational speakers or rappers. Absolutely anybody can be one and there are no talents or qualifications involved.
Most people who start a small business aren't really serious. You see a lot of folks whose real occupation in life is to act as a disposal mechanism for somebody else's money. For instance, a trophy wife, a congressman or a crack addict on welfare never really add any value to the world. They just suck up money from somebody else and spend it.
Some of these people would like to be able to portray themselves as offering something worthwhile to the world.
So, they start a "small business". Perhaps they start a business making hand-crafted home-style decorations that they'll sell at craft shows. After a few days, they realize they don't like selling things at craft shows. They also realize that they don't particularly like putting the stuff together any faster than one unit every year.
Then, one day, they realize that they're married to somebody who makes $90,000 a year at the local auto assembly plant. This breadwinner has never noticed that the "small business person" was capable of bringing any income into the house. Nor, do they ever expect the person to.
So, the would-be “small business person” goes back to gluing cotton balls onto sweatshirts that say "Ewe's Not Fat… Ewe's Fluffy" at a rate of 1 every 9 months and giving them to one unfortunate obese relative every Christmas.
Voila… another small business failure.
It's not so much that small business is so risky, it's that for most people, it's not particularly necessary. It's much more attractive to be able to say, "I'm a home decorating consultant" versus, "I got lucky and married a rich guy and now the divorce would be too expensive". So a lot of people feel compelled to try and contrive a small business for themselves to justify the oxygen they're removing from the environment.
But when it comes to doing some of the more arcane things involved with running a business, such as finding a paying customer or actually doing work of any sort, a lot of these hobbyist businesspeople soon give up and move on to something else like watching Oprah and going shopping.
With my business, I backed myself into a corner where failure simply wasn't an option.
There is a fable about a Roman general who, upon landing with his army, burned the ships to provide for no retreat. This wasn't a particularly bright tactic because after his army won the battle, they had no way to get back home. So, they starved and died on a lonely shore, miles from home, when it would have been so much easier just to return in the boats that had brought them.
Still, I felt that I needed similar motivation. So, after I got to work one day, I burned my car. In hindsight, I can say that this wasn't as motivational as a person might imagine. It also makes for a long walk home. In my case, it made for a long walk to the strip club, but a short ride home with a seriously top-heavy woman named “Candee”.
There were other symbolic ways of burning the bridges, too. For instance, debt is a fabulous motivational tool. At one point in time, I was $300,000 in debt. My wife was constantly searching for the rock, and I actually went so far as to hide it in the back yard.
Finances are quite the motivator. So are big rocks.
Also, I knew that there were a lot of former co-workers who would have been more than happy to see me fail. One of them was my former boss.
It is imperative for him to prove that he is competent at what he does. Granted, that hasn't happened, yet, but in theory, it could. Both he and the person who promoted him are really looking forward to that day.
At his level, one of the things he should be doing is identifying, grooming and promoting people who demonstrate entrepreneurial ability.
As any business leader will tell you, entrepreneurial ability is the hardest thing for a business to find and the most important thing to a business' long-term success.
The people who are capable of running a successful business, for themselves or others, are rare indeed. These type of people are so rare that when they aren't available, people like my ex-boss will get promoted instead.
If it turned out that I was a slacker idiot, my boss' decision to boot me would be validated.
If it turned out that, instead, I had enough entrepreneurial ability to start a business and become wealthy in a few short years, it would tend to indicate that perhaps he had made a poor decision.
If it turned out that not only had he disposed of a valuable company resource, but did so because I was recovering from an accident, then he'd not only look like a poor decision maker, but a complete jerk, too.
Proving that he was, indeed, a big stupid jerk is quite the motivator as well.
In all seriousness, if there had been a way for me to quit at a few times during the early days of my business, I would have done so. I didn't have a choice, though. I can't tell you the number of times I was driving home from a hard, 18 hour day of work in the most inhospitable conditions.
There is a fork in the freeway where one way leads to the hospital and the other way leads to home. After a hard day of cleaning carpets, sometimes, it took everything I could muster in order for me to take the road that led home.
If not for the fact that I was broke, I'd have taken the road that led to the hospital. That's because that road also leads to a really cool strip club.
I found out the hard way that telling a stripper that you're not going to tip her, but you would be glad to wet-clean her rug, will get you slapped like nobody's business.
Plus, I have basic needs that I have to meet. For instance, one modest need of mine is to have enough guitars that if I should ever happen to become a platinum recording artist on the verge of a world-tour, I won't have to go shopping first.
The chances of me meeting those needs if I were to run my business into the ground would have been remote, at best. So, my back was against the wall. I needed to make this thing work.
So, I continued to take the road that led to home. When the next day dawned, I took the same road back to work. Burning deep inside me, however, was the vision of a day when I could give the wife back her rock and go to the strip club and tell those women they can clean wet-clean each other's rugs for all I care. With a big enough pile of money, I think I can make that happen.
The difficulty there is that there are no standards for who gets to start a "small business". In this way, small businesspeople are much like motivational speakers or rappers. Absolutely anybody can be one and there are no talents or qualifications involved.
Most people who start a small business aren't really serious. You see a lot of folks whose real occupation in life is to act as a disposal mechanism for somebody else's money. For instance, a trophy wife, a congressman or a crack addict on welfare never really add any value to the world. They just suck up money from somebody else and spend it.
Some of these people would like to be able to portray themselves as offering something worthwhile to the world.
So, they start a "small business". Perhaps they start a business making hand-crafted home-style decorations that they'll sell at craft shows. After a few days, they realize they don't like selling things at craft shows. They also realize that they don't particularly like putting the stuff together any faster than one unit every year.
Then, one day, they realize that they're married to somebody who makes $90,000 a year at the local auto assembly plant. This breadwinner has never noticed that the "small business person" was capable of bringing any income into the house. Nor, do they ever expect the person to.
So, the would-be “small business person” goes back to gluing cotton balls onto sweatshirts that say "Ewe's Not Fat… Ewe's Fluffy" at a rate of 1 every 9 months and giving them to one unfortunate obese relative every Christmas.
Voila… another small business failure.
It's not so much that small business is so risky, it's that for most people, it's not particularly necessary. It's much more attractive to be able to say, "I'm a home decorating consultant" versus, "I got lucky and married a rich guy and now the divorce would be too expensive". So a lot of people feel compelled to try and contrive a small business for themselves to justify the oxygen they're removing from the environment.
But when it comes to doing some of the more arcane things involved with running a business, such as finding a paying customer or actually doing work of any sort, a lot of these hobbyist businesspeople soon give up and move on to something else like watching Oprah and going shopping.
With my business, I backed myself into a corner where failure simply wasn't an option.
There is a fable about a Roman general who, upon landing with his army, burned the ships to provide for no retreat. This wasn't a particularly bright tactic because after his army won the battle, they had no way to get back home. So, they starved and died on a lonely shore, miles from home, when it would have been so much easier just to return in the boats that had brought them.
Still, I felt that I needed similar motivation. So, after I got to work one day, I burned my car. In hindsight, I can say that this wasn't as motivational as a person might imagine. It also makes for a long walk home. In my case, it made for a long walk to the strip club, but a short ride home with a seriously top-heavy woman named “Candee”.
There were other symbolic ways of burning the bridges, too. For instance, debt is a fabulous motivational tool. At one point in time, I was $300,000 in debt. My wife was constantly searching for the rock, and I actually went so far as to hide it in the back yard.
Finances are quite the motivator. So are big rocks.
Also, I knew that there were a lot of former co-workers who would have been more than happy to see me fail. One of them was my former boss.
It is imperative for him to prove that he is competent at what he does. Granted, that hasn't happened, yet, but in theory, it could. Both he and the person who promoted him are really looking forward to that day.
At his level, one of the things he should be doing is identifying, grooming and promoting people who demonstrate entrepreneurial ability.
As any business leader will tell you, entrepreneurial ability is the hardest thing for a business to find and the most important thing to a business' long-term success.
The people who are capable of running a successful business, for themselves or others, are rare indeed. These type of people are so rare that when they aren't available, people like my ex-boss will get promoted instead.
If it turned out that I was a slacker idiot, my boss' decision to boot me would be validated.
If it turned out that, instead, I had enough entrepreneurial ability to start a business and become wealthy in a few short years, it would tend to indicate that perhaps he had made a poor decision.
If it turned out that not only had he disposed of a valuable company resource, but did so because I was recovering from an accident, then he'd not only look like a poor decision maker, but a complete jerk, too.
Proving that he was, indeed, a big stupid jerk is quite the motivator as well.
In all seriousness, if there had been a way for me to quit at a few times during the early days of my business, I would have done so. I didn't have a choice, though. I can't tell you the number of times I was driving home from a hard, 18 hour day of work in the most inhospitable conditions.
There is a fork in the freeway where one way leads to the hospital and the other way leads to home. After a hard day of cleaning carpets, sometimes, it took everything I could muster in order for me to take the road that led home.
If not for the fact that I was broke, I'd have taken the road that led to the hospital. That's because that road also leads to a really cool strip club.
I found out the hard way that telling a stripper that you're not going to tip her, but you would be glad to wet-clean her rug, will get you slapped like nobody's business.
Plus, I have basic needs that I have to meet. For instance, one modest need of mine is to have enough guitars that if I should ever happen to become a platinum recording artist on the verge of a world-tour, I won't have to go shopping first.
The chances of me meeting those needs if I were to run my business into the ground would have been remote, at best. So, my back was against the wall. I needed to make this thing work.
So, I continued to take the road that led to home. When the next day dawned, I took the same road back to work. Burning deep inside me, however, was the vision of a day when I could give the wife back her rock and go to the strip club and tell those women they can clean wet-clean each other's rugs for all I care. With a big enough pile of money, I think I can make that happen.
Chapter One: Crossroads
It was late on a Friday when my boss called me into his office to fire me. I walked in with a sense of dread and loathing. The dread and loathing wasn't because I knew I was going to be fired. It was because dread and loathing was my general mood any time I had to deal with this toad who, by some bizarre quirk of the English language, was referred to as my "superior".
Our HR Manager was sitting next to him. HR only got involved if something really bad was happening. For instance, if somebody else was getting a promotion I wanted, you could bet that some HR person, somewhere, had a hand in it.
Other times, they would step in to prevent you from firing an ineffective employee or to remind you that taking boxes of paper towels from the supply cabinet to your car was, in some cultures, considered a form of theft.
Whenever the company was doing something that was clearly not to the employee's benefit, HR would be the spin doctors. For instance, when the company eliminated pensions, it was HR who got to remind us that this was not so bad because we were allowed to save our own money for retirement in the 401(k) program the company had all along.
I actually liked the HR manager at the factory, personally. His hygiene was good and he tended not to download virus-infected internet porn onto his work computer. As the IT Manager, instances of internet porn could consume weeks since I had to carefully examine each image, sometimes for several minutes and usually several times, each.
His good personal behavior put him among the top few people in the factory as far as I was concerned. I even invited him to my son's birthday party one year. He delighted the preschoolers in attendance with a tale of how Humpty Dumpty would have been much better off if he'd continued his previous employer's health benefits under COBRA.
In a work setting, though, there were few sights less welcome than an official interaction with the HR manager.
He and my boss were seated on the same side of the table. I was seated on the other side. With such an unusual seating arrangement, there were very few possibilities as to the nature of the meeting.
I quickly eliminated the possibility that this was a job interview and figured they were there to fire me.
My boss's first words were, "We have a problem". This was an ironic turn of phrase since the result of the meeting was probably going to be the happiest day either one of us had seen in 2 years.
He explained that the amount of internet traffic coming from my computer was excessive. Because of this, he had permission from corporate to fire me.
I thought his choice of words was odd. It wasn't, "I'm going to fire you". It wasn't "You're fired". It was "corporate says I have enough here to let you go."
Picture the neighborhood bully stopping an 8 year old and saying, "Give me your lunch money, or mom says I can beat you up".
But when it comes to firing somebody in a Fortune 500 company, almost everybody needs mom’s permission.
Firing somebody is messy; it's better for the company if a person simply resigns. Otherwise, HR, given their role in the organization, would probably have to step in, yet again, to keep the company from ridding itself of an ineffective employee.
Allowing somebody to resign is the corporate equivalent of somebody burning your house down, but giving you the option to hold the match afterwards and claim that you did it yourself.
The main reason people do this is so that when they apply for their next job, they can say that they "resigned" rather than they were "fired".
I'm not sure why this logic holds sway. Everybody knows your next interview is going to involve questions like this:
“So, you used to work for the Parker Hannifin Corporation at $95,000 a year. You resigned your job to fulfill a lifelong dream of being unemployed and collecting food stamps for 14 months. And now that you've fulfilled that dream, you want to work for us for $95,000 a year again? Why not go back to Parker?”
Most businesspeople of any real value know that once you’ve been in the work world for a few decades or two, it’s possible to have been fired from a job. Really, very few people would hold it against you if, for instance, you worked for a company for 13 years and were then let go after a year or two with a new boss.
But HR people are squirrelly and are reluctant to ever hire a person who has been fired. So be it.
The part that’s hard to fathom is that it’s HR guys who came up with the whole “resigned” thing. They invented their own set of rules, and then invented their own way to beat the game.
I did get a severance package. That's the corporate term for "bribe the fired guy" if you're middle management. If you're a CEO, you get a severance package which means "your choice of any two nations on the South American continent plus your brother's wife as a chambermaid".
This was an easy decision, though. First, my options consisted of resigning and getting something or being fired and getting nothing. Luckily, with my MBA and 13 years of Fortune 500 experience, I was able to deduce that “something” was, indeed, better than “nothing”.
Second, just a couple of months earlier, I had actually contemplated walking into my boss' office and saying, "If you give me a severance package, you could have my resignation today." The conversation actually did take place, but the boss was asleep and I really didn't want to wake him. He was so much easier to deal with when he was unconscious.
So, for him to call me in, say I wouldn't be working there anymore and give me a severance package to boot would be about like the police arresting a crackhead and sentencing him to 3 days on the crackpipe at the government's expense.
Why did I hate my boss so much? It was hard to put my finger on it. Maybe it was the fact that in the culture he came from, the words "nap" and "meeting" are interchangeable.
On many occasions, a meeting he'd convened would be moving right along until everybody in the room noticed that he was sitting in his chair with eyes closed, fast asleep. We'd stare at each other, unsure of what, exactly, we were supposed to do, then we would continue the meeting as though nobody noticed that at the head of the table, there was a small-statured Buddha wrestling with the gods of slumber.
Eventually, he'd wake up, listen to a few words, respond with a comment that was tangentially related such as "Chinese bats bite coconuts" and the meeting would continue. Relative to the things he said while fully conscious, the things he said when coming out of slumber were only marginally more puzzling. So, all was fine.
So, he busted me for surfing the net using a work computer. As the IT Manager, it was somewhat difficult not to use the computer now and then. And surfing the net was sort of a professional hazard. Like bartenders and alcoholism.
I'll admit that I did surf the net frequently. For instance, if I were in the middle of a conference call where I wasn't really needed I might surf the net. Or, if my boss came into my office to talk to me, surfing the net was probably the only way for me to appear alert. Luckily, he usually fell asleep after only a few minutes.
When he'd wake up, he'd say, "What are you doing on that computer?" I'd tell him that I was preparing my expense report. He'd say, "Why is the expense reporting software called 'implications of head trauma in motorcycle accidents on concentration and short-term memory'?"
Usually the strain of asking a tough question like that required another nap and by the time he woke up, I was already out the door on my way home. This was sometimes problematic if it was, say, 9:30 in the morning, but you have to balance work and family life.
Leaving at 9:30 would allow me plenty of time to have an "executive's lunch" at a local strip-club and get sufficiently buzzed that the thought of watching hours upon hours of Barney with my son was starting to become appealing.
Work-life balance doesn't happen by accident. You have to work for it.
Still, it was a bit odd that I'd get busted for net surfing. HR had previously prevented us from firing people who had used the computer to download pornography, jokes with ethnic slurs in them, content that was degrading to women and pictures of somebody's Aunt Eunice's vacation to Branson.
If they could tolerate egregious violations of human decency such as that, what could possibly have been so bad about me downloading valid, work-related information about the effects of head trauma from motorcycle accidents?
I signed a pre-prepared resignation letter. They escorted me into my office where 2 boxes had been prepared for me to pack my stuff into. They stood over me as I packed up. Apparently, they wanted to make sure that the pictures of my 3 year old son weren't somehow company property.
You never know when some unsupervised ne'er do well will try to stuff a laptop computer down the front of their pants and walk out saying that they buy their underwear secondhand from Sponge Bob Squarepants.
I asked if I could say goodbye to my staff and the boss said "no". I tried explaining that if I were "resigning", the customary thing to do would be to say goodbye before I left.
The boss, using his impressive skills of logic and rhetoric, countered with "no".
Apparently the "resignation" thing is not particularly designed to allow a person to keep their dignity, as I imagined it might. The reason I came to this conclusion is that for the next 4 weeks, I got calls at home from people asking, "What did you do that got you fired?"
This may come as a shock to nearly everybody, but I'm going to allow the possibility that maybe the company only plays the "resignation" game only because it's good for them. No, really, maybe they're actually acting only in their own interests.
I know that makes me sound terribly cynical, but I suspect it may be true. I'm starting to think that the company cares more about itself than it does about the people it is firing. When it's good for them, I “resigned”, but when it would have been good for me, I was simply fired.
As I was leaving, smiling and shaking the hands of my boss and the HR manager, I found it difficult to express my grief. It was difficult because my feelings of grief were being overshadowed at the moment by feelings of giddy joy. Sadness is so much easier to express when you're not giggling like a 6 year old who just heard Santa fart at the mall.
I shook the hand of my boss and wished him good luck. Granted, I was using a liberal definition of "good luck". By "good luck", what I really meant was, "I hope you die of a heart attack, you narcoleptic mental deficient."
He smiled in return and shook my hand. He wished me "good luck" which is the way a corporate boss tells a long-serving departing subordinate, "please Jesus, don't make anything of yourself after this because that'd really make me look stupid."
During the drive home, between choruses of "Zippity Doo Dah", I briefly considered my options.
Option one would be to start my own business and become a millionaire.
Option two would be to move to Phoenix, buy a house, become a police officer, and by virtue of the appreciation in the price of real estate, to become a millionaire.
When I got home to my wife, I told her, simply, "I lost my job… but the good news is that we're going to be millionaires".
Her response wasn't quite what I expected since it lacked words like "slacker asshole" and "jackass loser". She asked, simply, "what are you going to do?"
I told her about my plan to join the PD in Phoenix. She responded, "Oh."
When it comes to my wife, she's really the rock of the family. I call her the rock of the family for her strength in all situations. Also, because of the rock she keeps in her purse to help her split my head open and collect on my life insurance policy if I should ever really goof things up.
That night as we snuggled to go to sleep, she lulled me to sleep with soothing phrases like, "Move your head a little to the left. Not so close to the nightstand. Here, put this towel under your head so you won't ruin the pillowcase."
The next day I was supposed to go to a family gathering in Akron, 3 hours away. My 3 year-old son had been talking about nothing else for weeks.
All week long, the conversations in the house went:
Me: Son, are you excited about going to Akron?
Logan: What?
Me: Akron. Are you ready to go to Akron?
Logan: Where?
Me: Akron, to see your grandma.
Logan: Who?
I was feeling under the weather, though. The thought of moving from Toledo to a land of perpetual sunshine in Phoenix where all a person has to do is buy a house and watch it increase in value faster than Microsoft stock in the 90s was depressing me.
Either that or I was being dragged down by the realization that I had no job and no real prospects for a job. Nah, I had to be depressed at the thought of leaving Toledo. That's the only thing that makes sense.
I was just too tired for a car-trip and told the wife that I needed to relax and collect myself with a few beers at the strip club. She responded by tossing her rock into the air and catching it over and over.
So… at the hayride, people asked the customary, "How's life at Parker?"
I responded, "I wouldn't know. I don't work there anymore."
"Good lord, when did this happen?" they'd ask, shocked.
"Yesterday. I found out I resigned at 4:30 yesterday afternoon."
Then, their tone went from one of shock and sympathy to one of puzzlement.
"So, you've been there as recently as 4:30 yesterday afternoon?"
I'd explain, "No, I was there until about 5:00. Had to sign some paperwork and pack up my stuff."
Perplexed, they'd continue, "So, you're saying you have no idea what's going on at Parker because you left at 5:00 on a Friday? Do you think that much has changed today while the place was closed?"
Arrrgggh!!! "Look, I resigned, I don't work there anymore. I don't care what's going on there anymore."
"But you didn't care that much about the place when you worked there," they'd say, "and what do you mean you 'found out' you resigned. Did you get fired?"
Arrrggghhh!!!!! I see the Parker people have even let the cat out of the bag to my family! Let me "resign instead of being fired" my ass!!!
That was probably the worst day I had since I wrecked my motorcycle 6 weeks earlier. That was a really bad day.
It was a pretty bad wreck. It was actually a pretty bad series of wrecks. I only remember the first one. I lost consciousness, multiple times, and eventually ended up with a bike that was no longer capable of being ridden, with a damaged helmet, sitting in the emergency room of the local hospital, with no recollection of how I got there or what had happened.
The doctor said I got brain damaged. This didn't bother me much. I had prior brain damage. So, additional brain damage was likely to go unnoticed by family and friends.
They also told me a lot of important things about head trauma. The doctor said I got brain damage.
After three days in the hospital, I was a bit foggy. During that time, the doctor told me I was brain damaged.
So, when I went back to work, I told both the HR Manager and my boss that I had been in an accident and taken a pretty hard shot to the head. I explained that it was very difficult for me to concentrate, but that the doctors expected me to recover pretty much fully. Only time would tell.
I should probably have taken a few weeks off, but needed to be there to try and finish out two overdue projects I'd been working on. "Working" on these projects consisted of asking the software vendor to do something, and them saying they wouldn't do it.
Then, I'd ask their legal counsel if it'd be okay to change the contract, and they'd say "no".
Then, I'd go to our legal counsel and ask if it was okay not to change the contract and they'd say "no".
Then, I'd have to go to our director of information systems and ask if it was okay if they didn't change the software and he'd say "no".
Granted, this could have been accomplished by any person with a preschooler's grasp of the English language, but the only other person available to handle these negotiations would have been my boss. Since, again, this task required a preschooler's grasp of the English language, this ruled him right out and put the burden squarely on my shoulders.
Letting my boss and the HR Manager know that I had just taken a shot to the head was just my way of making sure that they didn't mistake any unusual behavior for intentional mischief. You know... unusual behavior… like excessively and compulsively surfing the internet trying to find out information about head trauma in motorcycle accidents.
What I really should have done was taken some time off, set up some evaluations to determine any effects the accident may have had on my cognitive ability, and waited until I was 100% before returning to work.
I still wonder why I didn't do that. Go figure that my decision-making wasn't really all that clear. Could it have been the recent head-trauma? Nah. Though I do wonder sometimes if walking around feeling like my head was being squeezed in a vice was affecting me at all.
Who knows, it might have had odd effects like, oh, inability to concentrate and an obsessive preoccupation with head trauma in motorcycle accidents.
In any event, my career with the Parker Hannifin Corporation was over. I no longer had to endure corporate politics, idiotic bosses, unruly subordinates, paltry raises, relocating every 3 years… I was really going to miss that place.
Our HR Manager was sitting next to him. HR only got involved if something really bad was happening. For instance, if somebody else was getting a promotion I wanted, you could bet that some HR person, somewhere, had a hand in it.
Other times, they would step in to prevent you from firing an ineffective employee or to remind you that taking boxes of paper towels from the supply cabinet to your car was, in some cultures, considered a form of theft.
Whenever the company was doing something that was clearly not to the employee's benefit, HR would be the spin doctors. For instance, when the company eliminated pensions, it was HR who got to remind us that this was not so bad because we were allowed to save our own money for retirement in the 401(k) program the company had all along.
I actually liked the HR manager at the factory, personally. His hygiene was good and he tended not to download virus-infected internet porn onto his work computer. As the IT Manager, instances of internet porn could consume weeks since I had to carefully examine each image, sometimes for several minutes and usually several times, each.
His good personal behavior put him among the top few people in the factory as far as I was concerned. I even invited him to my son's birthday party one year. He delighted the preschoolers in attendance with a tale of how Humpty Dumpty would have been much better off if he'd continued his previous employer's health benefits under COBRA.
In a work setting, though, there were few sights less welcome than an official interaction with the HR manager.
He and my boss were seated on the same side of the table. I was seated on the other side. With such an unusual seating arrangement, there were very few possibilities as to the nature of the meeting.
I quickly eliminated the possibility that this was a job interview and figured they were there to fire me.
My boss's first words were, "We have a problem". This was an ironic turn of phrase since the result of the meeting was probably going to be the happiest day either one of us had seen in 2 years.
He explained that the amount of internet traffic coming from my computer was excessive. Because of this, he had permission from corporate to fire me.
I thought his choice of words was odd. It wasn't, "I'm going to fire you". It wasn't "You're fired". It was "corporate says I have enough here to let you go."
Picture the neighborhood bully stopping an 8 year old and saying, "Give me your lunch money, or mom says I can beat you up".
But when it comes to firing somebody in a Fortune 500 company, almost everybody needs mom’s permission.
Firing somebody is messy; it's better for the company if a person simply resigns. Otherwise, HR, given their role in the organization, would probably have to step in, yet again, to keep the company from ridding itself of an ineffective employee.
Allowing somebody to resign is the corporate equivalent of somebody burning your house down, but giving you the option to hold the match afterwards and claim that you did it yourself.
The main reason people do this is so that when they apply for their next job, they can say that they "resigned" rather than they were "fired".
I'm not sure why this logic holds sway. Everybody knows your next interview is going to involve questions like this:
“So, you used to work for the Parker Hannifin Corporation at $95,000 a year. You resigned your job to fulfill a lifelong dream of being unemployed and collecting food stamps for 14 months. And now that you've fulfilled that dream, you want to work for us for $95,000 a year again? Why not go back to Parker?”
Most businesspeople of any real value know that once you’ve been in the work world for a few decades or two, it’s possible to have been fired from a job. Really, very few people would hold it against you if, for instance, you worked for a company for 13 years and were then let go after a year or two with a new boss.
But HR people are squirrelly and are reluctant to ever hire a person who has been fired. So be it.
The part that’s hard to fathom is that it’s HR guys who came up with the whole “resigned” thing. They invented their own set of rules, and then invented their own way to beat the game.
I did get a severance package. That's the corporate term for "bribe the fired guy" if you're middle management. If you're a CEO, you get a severance package which means "your choice of any two nations on the South American continent plus your brother's wife as a chambermaid".
This was an easy decision, though. First, my options consisted of resigning and getting something or being fired and getting nothing. Luckily, with my MBA and 13 years of Fortune 500 experience, I was able to deduce that “something” was, indeed, better than “nothing”.
Second, just a couple of months earlier, I had actually contemplated walking into my boss' office and saying, "If you give me a severance package, you could have my resignation today." The conversation actually did take place, but the boss was asleep and I really didn't want to wake him. He was so much easier to deal with when he was unconscious.
So, for him to call me in, say I wouldn't be working there anymore and give me a severance package to boot would be about like the police arresting a crackhead and sentencing him to 3 days on the crackpipe at the government's expense.
Why did I hate my boss so much? It was hard to put my finger on it. Maybe it was the fact that in the culture he came from, the words "nap" and "meeting" are interchangeable.
On many occasions, a meeting he'd convened would be moving right along until everybody in the room noticed that he was sitting in his chair with eyes closed, fast asleep. We'd stare at each other, unsure of what, exactly, we were supposed to do, then we would continue the meeting as though nobody noticed that at the head of the table, there was a small-statured Buddha wrestling with the gods of slumber.
Eventually, he'd wake up, listen to a few words, respond with a comment that was tangentially related such as "Chinese bats bite coconuts" and the meeting would continue. Relative to the things he said while fully conscious, the things he said when coming out of slumber were only marginally more puzzling. So, all was fine.
So, he busted me for surfing the net using a work computer. As the IT Manager, it was somewhat difficult not to use the computer now and then. And surfing the net was sort of a professional hazard. Like bartenders and alcoholism.
I'll admit that I did surf the net frequently. For instance, if I were in the middle of a conference call where I wasn't really needed I might surf the net. Or, if my boss came into my office to talk to me, surfing the net was probably the only way for me to appear alert. Luckily, he usually fell asleep after only a few minutes.
When he'd wake up, he'd say, "What are you doing on that computer?" I'd tell him that I was preparing my expense report. He'd say, "Why is the expense reporting software called 'implications of head trauma in motorcycle accidents on concentration and short-term memory'?"
Usually the strain of asking a tough question like that required another nap and by the time he woke up, I was already out the door on my way home. This was sometimes problematic if it was, say, 9:30 in the morning, but you have to balance work and family life.
Leaving at 9:30 would allow me plenty of time to have an "executive's lunch" at a local strip-club and get sufficiently buzzed that the thought of watching hours upon hours of Barney with my son was starting to become appealing.
Work-life balance doesn't happen by accident. You have to work for it.
Still, it was a bit odd that I'd get busted for net surfing. HR had previously prevented us from firing people who had used the computer to download pornography, jokes with ethnic slurs in them, content that was degrading to women and pictures of somebody's Aunt Eunice's vacation to Branson.
If they could tolerate egregious violations of human decency such as that, what could possibly have been so bad about me downloading valid, work-related information about the effects of head trauma from motorcycle accidents?
I signed a pre-prepared resignation letter. They escorted me into my office where 2 boxes had been prepared for me to pack my stuff into. They stood over me as I packed up. Apparently, they wanted to make sure that the pictures of my 3 year old son weren't somehow company property.
You never know when some unsupervised ne'er do well will try to stuff a laptop computer down the front of their pants and walk out saying that they buy their underwear secondhand from Sponge Bob Squarepants.
I asked if I could say goodbye to my staff and the boss said "no". I tried explaining that if I were "resigning", the customary thing to do would be to say goodbye before I left.
The boss, using his impressive skills of logic and rhetoric, countered with "no".
Apparently the "resignation" thing is not particularly designed to allow a person to keep their dignity, as I imagined it might. The reason I came to this conclusion is that for the next 4 weeks, I got calls at home from people asking, "What did you do that got you fired?"
This may come as a shock to nearly everybody, but I'm going to allow the possibility that maybe the company only plays the "resignation" game only because it's good for them. No, really, maybe they're actually acting only in their own interests.
I know that makes me sound terribly cynical, but I suspect it may be true. I'm starting to think that the company cares more about itself than it does about the people it is firing. When it's good for them, I “resigned”, but when it would have been good for me, I was simply fired.
As I was leaving, smiling and shaking the hands of my boss and the HR manager, I found it difficult to express my grief. It was difficult because my feelings of grief were being overshadowed at the moment by feelings of giddy joy. Sadness is so much easier to express when you're not giggling like a 6 year old who just heard Santa fart at the mall.
I shook the hand of my boss and wished him good luck. Granted, I was using a liberal definition of "good luck". By "good luck", what I really meant was, "I hope you die of a heart attack, you narcoleptic mental deficient."
He smiled in return and shook my hand. He wished me "good luck" which is the way a corporate boss tells a long-serving departing subordinate, "please Jesus, don't make anything of yourself after this because that'd really make me look stupid."
During the drive home, between choruses of "Zippity Doo Dah", I briefly considered my options.
Option one would be to start my own business and become a millionaire.
Option two would be to move to Phoenix, buy a house, become a police officer, and by virtue of the appreciation in the price of real estate, to become a millionaire.
When I got home to my wife, I told her, simply, "I lost my job… but the good news is that we're going to be millionaires".
Her response wasn't quite what I expected since it lacked words like "slacker asshole" and "jackass loser". She asked, simply, "what are you going to do?"
I told her about my plan to join the PD in Phoenix. She responded, "Oh."
When it comes to my wife, she's really the rock of the family. I call her the rock of the family for her strength in all situations. Also, because of the rock she keeps in her purse to help her split my head open and collect on my life insurance policy if I should ever really goof things up.
That night as we snuggled to go to sleep, she lulled me to sleep with soothing phrases like, "Move your head a little to the left. Not so close to the nightstand. Here, put this towel under your head so you won't ruin the pillowcase."
The next day I was supposed to go to a family gathering in Akron, 3 hours away. My 3 year-old son had been talking about nothing else for weeks.
All week long, the conversations in the house went:
Me: Son, are you excited about going to Akron?
Logan: What?
Me: Akron. Are you ready to go to Akron?
Logan: Where?
Me: Akron, to see your grandma.
Logan: Who?
I was feeling under the weather, though. The thought of moving from Toledo to a land of perpetual sunshine in Phoenix where all a person has to do is buy a house and watch it increase in value faster than Microsoft stock in the 90s was depressing me.
Either that or I was being dragged down by the realization that I had no job and no real prospects for a job. Nah, I had to be depressed at the thought of leaving Toledo. That's the only thing that makes sense.
I was just too tired for a car-trip and told the wife that I needed to relax and collect myself with a few beers at the strip club. She responded by tossing her rock into the air and catching it over and over.
So… at the hayride, people asked the customary, "How's life at Parker?"
I responded, "I wouldn't know. I don't work there anymore."
"Good lord, when did this happen?" they'd ask, shocked.
"Yesterday. I found out I resigned at 4:30 yesterday afternoon."
Then, their tone went from one of shock and sympathy to one of puzzlement.
"So, you've been there as recently as 4:30 yesterday afternoon?"
I'd explain, "No, I was there until about 5:00. Had to sign some paperwork and pack up my stuff."
Perplexed, they'd continue, "So, you're saying you have no idea what's going on at Parker because you left at 5:00 on a Friday? Do you think that much has changed today while the place was closed?"
Arrrgggh!!! "Look, I resigned, I don't work there anymore. I don't care what's going on there anymore."
"But you didn't care that much about the place when you worked there," they'd say, "and what do you mean you 'found out' you resigned. Did you get fired?"
Arrrggghhh!!!!! I see the Parker people have even let the cat out of the bag to my family! Let me "resign instead of being fired" my ass!!!
That was probably the worst day I had since I wrecked my motorcycle 6 weeks earlier. That was a really bad day.
It was a pretty bad wreck. It was actually a pretty bad series of wrecks. I only remember the first one. I lost consciousness, multiple times, and eventually ended up with a bike that was no longer capable of being ridden, with a damaged helmet, sitting in the emergency room of the local hospital, with no recollection of how I got there or what had happened.
The doctor said I got brain damaged. This didn't bother me much. I had prior brain damage. So, additional brain damage was likely to go unnoticed by family and friends.
They also told me a lot of important things about head trauma. The doctor said I got brain damage.
After three days in the hospital, I was a bit foggy. During that time, the doctor told me I was brain damaged.
So, when I went back to work, I told both the HR Manager and my boss that I had been in an accident and taken a pretty hard shot to the head. I explained that it was very difficult for me to concentrate, but that the doctors expected me to recover pretty much fully. Only time would tell.
I should probably have taken a few weeks off, but needed to be there to try and finish out two overdue projects I'd been working on. "Working" on these projects consisted of asking the software vendor to do something, and them saying they wouldn't do it.
Then, I'd ask their legal counsel if it'd be okay to change the contract, and they'd say "no".
Then, I'd go to our legal counsel and ask if it was okay not to change the contract and they'd say "no".
Then, I'd have to go to our director of information systems and ask if it was okay if they didn't change the software and he'd say "no".
Granted, this could have been accomplished by any person with a preschooler's grasp of the English language, but the only other person available to handle these negotiations would have been my boss. Since, again, this task required a preschooler's grasp of the English language, this ruled him right out and put the burden squarely on my shoulders.
Letting my boss and the HR Manager know that I had just taken a shot to the head was just my way of making sure that they didn't mistake any unusual behavior for intentional mischief. You know... unusual behavior… like excessively and compulsively surfing the internet trying to find out information about head trauma in motorcycle accidents.
What I really should have done was taken some time off, set up some evaluations to determine any effects the accident may have had on my cognitive ability, and waited until I was 100% before returning to work.
I still wonder why I didn't do that. Go figure that my decision-making wasn't really all that clear. Could it have been the recent head-trauma? Nah. Though I do wonder sometimes if walking around feeling like my head was being squeezed in a vice was affecting me at all.
Who knows, it might have had odd effects like, oh, inability to concentrate and an obsessive preoccupation with head trauma in motorcycle accidents.
In any event, my career with the Parker Hannifin Corporation was over. I no longer had to endure corporate politics, idiotic bosses, unruly subordinates, paltry raises, relocating every 3 years… I was really going to miss that place.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
A day in the life of a small businessman
I'm the first to tell you that being a small businessperson in 2009 is not a lot of fun. We started off okay, but as the recession works its way deeper and deeper into people's everyday lives, it's impacting the way people behave with money.
Like may businesspeople these days, I've had to deal with a few months where making payroll was sometimes in jeopardy. When a small business makes money, there's no feeling like it in the world. You can make as much money in a month as people make in a year. However, when a small business loses money or struggles, there's few feelings like it. You can lose money tens of thousands at a time. Unless you're exceptionally wealthy, losing 5 figures hurts. Especially when you know there's no guarantee you won't lose another 5 figures next month.
So, we've been struggling. We've still never made a late payment. We've still never missed a payroll, but in the new recession-induced economy, those statements are a lot less certain than they were even as recently as a year ago.
To make matters worse, credit of all types has dried up. No lines of credit or small business loans are available for the vast majority of small businsspeople. It's a highwire act without a net. One substantial stumble, and you are insolvent.
That sets the general tone for the story that is about to unfold.
We had a customer who had us clean his contents, which were smoke-damaged by a fire. The customer had no job, nor did his wife. He's not unlike a lot of folks around here. He did have a fire, though. This gave him access to the entirety of his policy limits, which he used every penny of.
In our industry, whenever possible, we ask the insurance companies to pay us directly. Second best is a two-party check to both us and the homeowner, which needs the homeowner's endorsement to be cashed. Worst of all is a one-party check to the homeowner.
This may seem like a small thing, and usually it is. The vast majority of people who get a one-party check made out to them pay all their vendors promptly and fully.
Trouble is, some do not. They surmise, correctly, that anything they don't pay to vendors, they get to keep.
That's bad news to us because some customers will then attempt to weasel out of paying us. The bottom line is, the law has precious few provisions that require a person to pay their bills. If they don't want to, they really don't have to, unless you're the government or a secured lender. Even then, there just aren't many ways to MAKE a person give up their money.
Or, the customer can go bargain hunting. Wanting vendors to cut corners and cost. Trouble is, my business offers warranties of up to 5 years on many types of claims, and our policy is that if it is a quality issue related to our workmanship, my personal policy is that there is no limit on how far out a customer can call us to remedy something we might have done incorrectly.
If I'm on the hook for quality for a period of time measured in years, I can not afford to cut corners. I don't want bargain hunters. I want people willing to pay a fair price for superior service.
The customer gave us some indication that they were going to be difficult. Combined with what we knew of their personal situation, we asked the insurance company to issue payment to us, single-party.
They refused, but said they would send a two-party check to the home-owner for our services. That way, the home-owner would have to endorse it and hand it over for us to get paid. However, the home-owner could not, for instance, cash the check and deposit it in their bank account.
Because we felt secure that the check was going to be two-party, we delivered the home-owner's furniture. They had some confusion on their invoice (for instance, they thought that we charged them over $800 for a month of storage. In reality, we charged for 7 months of storage. but the way the invoice came out, it simply had one line for storage.)
We asked if they had received the check, and they said they had not.
After a while, we got a call from their adjuster who said he was closing the claim, He said he had sent the entire check to the home-owner, one-party, weeks prior.
What???!!!
He also told us that the home-owner had already told him he didn't intend to pay the bill because he felt he didn't have to.
Oh great. If I could just emphasize the environment here for a moment, I'm trying to keep a dozen people employed in the State of Michigan. This isn't as easy as it may look. Our creditors get paid whether we do or not. They don't cut us slack just because we don't get paid.
I called the adjuster and spent some time trying to jog his memory.
"Don't you remember when we asked if you would send us a single-party payment? You said no, but you'd send two party to the insured?"
We explained that if we had known he wasn't going to honor his word, we would not have released the furniture to the home-owner until they paid us. We'd have kept it in our warehouse, allowed a thorough inspection (which we had already done with this home-owner) and delivered the restored furniture when they paid us.
The adjuster was unapologetic. Said simply that we needed to get the money from the home-owner.
I tried again to jog his memory on our previous conversations and he simply cut me off, saying I needed to discuss it with the home-owner. The home-owner had the money. The adjuster didn't remember anything I was saying and couldn't do anything about it, anyway.
I was frustrated and after the second time he cut me off, I said, "Well, thank you for your time. Unfortunatley, we'll know from now on that we can't take you at your word."
A moment of weakness on the part of a guy who, again, is trying to keep a ship afloat in the sea of the great recession, at ground-zero in Detroit's shadow.
We then tried to get hold of the customer. He would not return our calls.
At that point, I had little recourse but to line up our collections agency. I left one last message explaining that if we didn't hear back, we would have no other choice but to turn his account over for collection.
He called back. Funny how that happens. (The other funny thing that happens is that once it's turned over to a collections agency, who then assesses penalties, interest and collections charges on top of the debt, people call the office ready to pay the original bill. Unfortunately, at that point, it's too late. But I digress.)
He said he wasn't happy with the services. That's the first words out of a person's mouth when they're trying to avoid a bill. We had signed statements from his wife that everything had been cleaned to her satisfaction, but once they had a check in their hands, we were no longer diligent cleaning people doing a needed service.
Of course, we never, ever leave a customer with services they are not satisfied with, and I was ready to offer that we would re-clean anything he had until he was pleased with it.
I asked what he wasn't happy with. He said the storage charges were excessive. We stored a whole house's worth of contents for 7 months, and charged about $200 a month, which, for heated indoor storage, is exactly what the market-rate is. However, I said I was willing to work with him on that.
He said he might be able to pay the bill immediately if we would work with him. He gave me a number that I could live with. I gave him nearly 30% in discounts if he would agree to pay that day.
In this situation, after all these years in business, you take what you can get. Turning people over to collection benefits nobody. If the customer can come close, I'll work with them. Not just pragmatically, but because I always, always want to give a customer what they want if it is reasonable to do so.
The customer, did, indeed, come in and pay his reduced bill, at a savings of over $2,600.
Life is good. We dodged a bullet. Yet one more payroll we will meet.
I went to lunch and when I got back to where I had cell-phone reception, I had a message from the adjuster:
He had gone over his paperwork to close out the claim, and discovered that, yes, indeed, he had promised us that he would pay us separately, via a 2 party check, He had set aside the amount, separate from the rest of the customer's claim. He apologized and said that he'd be sending the check to us.
Good news right?
Not really. We already negotiated away $2,600+ as an inducement for the customer to pay his bill.
What's particularly frustrating about this was that I was very pleasant with the adjuster on the phone. I only got frustrated when I kept trying to jog his memory on our agreement, and he kept cutting me off.
The adjuster called again when he realized that we had given a reduced price to settle the debt. In the end, the adjuster is trying to make up to us, some of the mark-down that the customer got. However, it's still an error that will cost us more than $1,000.
One might reasonably ask, what is $1,000 to a company that does about a million dollars of business in a year? (Oddly, nobody wonders why the electric company will get snitty about a hundred bucks when they make billions a year.)
The bottom line: it's $1,000 directly out of my pocket.
My employees get paid whether I make a profit or not. Same for our suppliers. Same for our franchisor. Same for the tax man.
What's left over is what I earn.
In the end, this is more of a humorous incident than anything. If you couldn't laugh about stuff like this, you wouldn't last long in small business.
I'm actually more pleased that we seem to have an opportunity to create a good relationship with this adjuster, where previously, it looked like things had gone sour. He's a good guy. Like most adjusters, though, he's overworked, with a lot of files to clear. It was easy for him to forget this small detail about one of his claims. That's why I wanted to try and jog his memory. He had previously been a very likeable and reasonable fellow to work with, which made his conduct at the end so utterly surprising.
Overall, I'm reminded of something my friend Patrick says from time to time: "Let them make their money". There are all sorts of businesses out there. As a consumer, I want the best bargain I can get.
However, there comes a point where you're really impacting a person's ability to earn a living. I'm not advocating paying or supporting businesses that provide bad service or inferior products.
But when a business holds up its end of the bargain, it's only fair that people pay a fair price. It's amazing how many otherwise moral and good people somehow don't feel this is true.
I'm trying like the dickens to keep a dozen people employed here. There are no other jobs for them or myself around here. Granted, there's a profit motive in this for me, too, but time and time again, I've made the decision to keep people on the payroll, full-time, when it would have been just as easy for me to lay them off. Owning a business doesn't just boil down to dollars and cents. Not to me, and not to any good businessperson.
I have obligations to my customers, my employees, my community.
I tread a lot more lightly on small businesspeople now that I am one. We're providing needed services or products, but also forming the economic foundation of our communities.
Every day, I wake up with the goal of keeping people working. To keep this community from turning into Detroit, proper.
The bankers and insurance companies who use my tax money to give themselves seven figure bonuses would not so much as blink if I were to become insolvent next week.
The car companies who use my tax money to keep making cars people don't want to buy couldn't care less my collections slowed down to the point that I could not meet payroll.
If you hire me, I'll give you the best possible service at a fair price.
All I ask is that when I'm done, you help me keep this company and its employees on their feet by paying a fair price for superior goods and services.
Like may businesspeople these days, I've had to deal with a few months where making payroll was sometimes in jeopardy. When a small business makes money, there's no feeling like it in the world. You can make as much money in a month as people make in a year. However, when a small business loses money or struggles, there's few feelings like it. You can lose money tens of thousands at a time. Unless you're exceptionally wealthy, losing 5 figures hurts. Especially when you know there's no guarantee you won't lose another 5 figures next month.
So, we've been struggling. We've still never made a late payment. We've still never missed a payroll, but in the new recession-induced economy, those statements are a lot less certain than they were even as recently as a year ago.
To make matters worse, credit of all types has dried up. No lines of credit or small business loans are available for the vast majority of small businsspeople. It's a highwire act without a net. One substantial stumble, and you are insolvent.
That sets the general tone for the story that is about to unfold.
We had a customer who had us clean his contents, which were smoke-damaged by a fire. The customer had no job, nor did his wife. He's not unlike a lot of folks around here. He did have a fire, though. This gave him access to the entirety of his policy limits, which he used every penny of.
In our industry, whenever possible, we ask the insurance companies to pay us directly. Second best is a two-party check to both us and the homeowner, which needs the homeowner's endorsement to be cashed. Worst of all is a one-party check to the homeowner.
This may seem like a small thing, and usually it is. The vast majority of people who get a one-party check made out to them pay all their vendors promptly and fully.
Trouble is, some do not. They surmise, correctly, that anything they don't pay to vendors, they get to keep.
That's bad news to us because some customers will then attempt to weasel out of paying us. The bottom line is, the law has precious few provisions that require a person to pay their bills. If they don't want to, they really don't have to, unless you're the government or a secured lender. Even then, there just aren't many ways to MAKE a person give up their money.
Or, the customer can go bargain hunting. Wanting vendors to cut corners and cost. Trouble is, my business offers warranties of up to 5 years on many types of claims, and our policy is that if it is a quality issue related to our workmanship, my personal policy is that there is no limit on how far out a customer can call us to remedy something we might have done incorrectly.
If I'm on the hook for quality for a period of time measured in years, I can not afford to cut corners. I don't want bargain hunters. I want people willing to pay a fair price for superior service.
The customer gave us some indication that they were going to be difficult. Combined with what we knew of their personal situation, we asked the insurance company to issue payment to us, single-party.
They refused, but said they would send a two-party check to the home-owner for our services. That way, the home-owner would have to endorse it and hand it over for us to get paid. However, the home-owner could not, for instance, cash the check and deposit it in their bank account.
Because we felt secure that the check was going to be two-party, we delivered the home-owner's furniture. They had some confusion on their invoice (for instance, they thought that we charged them over $800 for a month of storage. In reality, we charged for 7 months of storage. but the way the invoice came out, it simply had one line for storage.)
We asked if they had received the check, and they said they had not.
After a while, we got a call from their adjuster who said he was closing the claim, He said he had sent the entire check to the home-owner, one-party, weeks prior.
What???!!!
He also told us that the home-owner had already told him he didn't intend to pay the bill because he felt he didn't have to.
Oh great. If I could just emphasize the environment here for a moment, I'm trying to keep a dozen people employed in the State of Michigan. This isn't as easy as it may look. Our creditors get paid whether we do or not. They don't cut us slack just because we don't get paid.
I called the adjuster and spent some time trying to jog his memory.
"Don't you remember when we asked if you would send us a single-party payment? You said no, but you'd send two party to the insured?"
We explained that if we had known he wasn't going to honor his word, we would not have released the furniture to the home-owner until they paid us. We'd have kept it in our warehouse, allowed a thorough inspection (which we had already done with this home-owner) and delivered the restored furniture when they paid us.
The adjuster was unapologetic. Said simply that we needed to get the money from the home-owner.
I tried again to jog his memory on our previous conversations and he simply cut me off, saying I needed to discuss it with the home-owner. The home-owner had the money. The adjuster didn't remember anything I was saying and couldn't do anything about it, anyway.
I was frustrated and after the second time he cut me off, I said, "Well, thank you for your time. Unfortunatley, we'll know from now on that we can't take you at your word."
A moment of weakness on the part of a guy who, again, is trying to keep a ship afloat in the sea of the great recession, at ground-zero in Detroit's shadow.
We then tried to get hold of the customer. He would not return our calls.
At that point, I had little recourse but to line up our collections agency. I left one last message explaining that if we didn't hear back, we would have no other choice but to turn his account over for collection.
He called back. Funny how that happens. (The other funny thing that happens is that once it's turned over to a collections agency, who then assesses penalties, interest and collections charges on top of the debt, people call the office ready to pay the original bill. Unfortunately, at that point, it's too late. But I digress.)
He said he wasn't happy with the services. That's the first words out of a person's mouth when they're trying to avoid a bill. We had signed statements from his wife that everything had been cleaned to her satisfaction, but once they had a check in their hands, we were no longer diligent cleaning people doing a needed service.
Of course, we never, ever leave a customer with services they are not satisfied with, and I was ready to offer that we would re-clean anything he had until he was pleased with it.
I asked what he wasn't happy with. He said the storage charges were excessive. We stored a whole house's worth of contents for 7 months, and charged about $200 a month, which, for heated indoor storage, is exactly what the market-rate is. However, I said I was willing to work with him on that.
He said he might be able to pay the bill immediately if we would work with him. He gave me a number that I could live with. I gave him nearly 30% in discounts if he would agree to pay that day.
In this situation, after all these years in business, you take what you can get. Turning people over to collection benefits nobody. If the customer can come close, I'll work with them. Not just pragmatically, but because I always, always want to give a customer what they want if it is reasonable to do so.
The customer, did, indeed, come in and pay his reduced bill, at a savings of over $2,600.
Life is good. We dodged a bullet. Yet one more payroll we will meet.
I went to lunch and when I got back to where I had cell-phone reception, I had a message from the adjuster:
He had gone over his paperwork to close out the claim, and discovered that, yes, indeed, he had promised us that he would pay us separately, via a 2 party check, He had set aside the amount, separate from the rest of the customer's claim. He apologized and said that he'd be sending the check to us.
Good news right?
Not really. We already negotiated away $2,600+ as an inducement for the customer to pay his bill.
What's particularly frustrating about this was that I was very pleasant with the adjuster on the phone. I only got frustrated when I kept trying to jog his memory on our agreement, and he kept cutting me off.
The adjuster called again when he realized that we had given a reduced price to settle the debt. In the end, the adjuster is trying to make up to us, some of the mark-down that the customer got. However, it's still an error that will cost us more than $1,000.
One might reasonably ask, what is $1,000 to a company that does about a million dollars of business in a year? (Oddly, nobody wonders why the electric company will get snitty about a hundred bucks when they make billions a year.)
The bottom line: it's $1,000 directly out of my pocket.
My employees get paid whether I make a profit or not. Same for our suppliers. Same for our franchisor. Same for the tax man.
What's left over is what I earn.
In the end, this is more of a humorous incident than anything. If you couldn't laugh about stuff like this, you wouldn't last long in small business.
I'm actually more pleased that we seem to have an opportunity to create a good relationship with this adjuster, where previously, it looked like things had gone sour. He's a good guy. Like most adjusters, though, he's overworked, with a lot of files to clear. It was easy for him to forget this small detail about one of his claims. That's why I wanted to try and jog his memory. He had previously been a very likeable and reasonable fellow to work with, which made his conduct at the end so utterly surprising.
Overall, I'm reminded of something my friend Patrick says from time to time: "Let them make their money". There are all sorts of businesses out there. As a consumer, I want the best bargain I can get.
However, there comes a point where you're really impacting a person's ability to earn a living. I'm not advocating paying or supporting businesses that provide bad service or inferior products.
But when a business holds up its end of the bargain, it's only fair that people pay a fair price. It's amazing how many otherwise moral and good people somehow don't feel this is true.
I'm trying like the dickens to keep a dozen people employed here. There are no other jobs for them or myself around here. Granted, there's a profit motive in this for me, too, but time and time again, I've made the decision to keep people on the payroll, full-time, when it would have been just as easy for me to lay them off. Owning a business doesn't just boil down to dollars and cents. Not to me, and not to any good businessperson.
I have obligations to my customers, my employees, my community.
I tread a lot more lightly on small businesspeople now that I am one. We're providing needed services or products, but also forming the economic foundation of our communities.
Every day, I wake up with the goal of keeping people working. To keep this community from turning into Detroit, proper.
The bankers and insurance companies who use my tax money to give themselves seven figure bonuses would not so much as blink if I were to become insolvent next week.
The car companies who use my tax money to keep making cars people don't want to buy couldn't care less my collections slowed down to the point that I could not meet payroll.
If you hire me, I'll give you the best possible service at a fair price.
All I ask is that when I'm done, you help me keep this company and its employees on their feet by paying a fair price for superior goods and services.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
The Beatles, not just another band
On the occassion of the Beatles remastered discs coming out, I've been listening to some of the songs I haven't heard since I was about 16 years old. The remastering has made them fresh enough that I'm rediscovering some of this music.
A lot has happened in the nearly 3 decades since I became a certified Beatle freak. I became a fan starting in about the 4th grade, but right about the time I entered High School, I stopped playing football and basketball, became a very moody, very lazy teen, devoted myself to about 4 hours of guitar practice a day, and dealt with the death of John Lennon just as I was fully discovering his music.
It is amazing to me to listen to various musicians talk about the influence of the Beatles. Not just the folks you'd expect, either. Crowded House / Neil Finn sounds like a modern incarnation of the Beatles. Other bands from the Psychedelic Furs to Oasis have been compared to the Beatles. However, the Beatles heavily influenced other bands with sounds as divergent as Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss to Garth Brooks.
Their influence has been everywhere.
In the past 30 years, I've noticed some social trends in music.
First, a lot fewer people play guitar these days. True, a lot fewer people seem to play any sort of instrument, but Elvis and the Beatles inspired an entire generation of guitarists. I think it's no accident that the pyrotechnician / guitar virtuoso generation (Vai, Malmsteen, Satriani, et. al.) happened when kids who were listening to the Beatles as children grew up to be adults.
Second, the further we get away from the first-generation influence of the Beatles, the more disposable and just generally crappy popular music has become. You can almost trace the lineage. The Beatles are the canon of popular music. The music of the 70s is still resonant today. You can sell a lot of cars by putting on Led Zepplin's "Rock and Roll" or Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog".
AC/DC recorded the 2nd best selling album of all-time just 10 years after the Beatles left the scene. The best-selling album of all time? Had a Beatle who performed on it and produced it.
The 80s? Great music starts to fade out, but is still present moreso than on modern charts.
By the time the 90s rolled around, virtually no music of any worth appears to be standing the test of time.
Today? Music is just crap. Sorry kiddies. This is where I wear my old-man's hat with pride. Just as previous generations had to listen to folks say, "Mays is okay, but you never saw Dimaggio", verily I say unto thee: Lady Gaga is an idiotic joke. You should have been raised on the Beatles.
It's to the point that only one act that appeals to young kids even appears to use guitars! (The Jonas Brothers, for whom I don't have a particular love, music-wise, but I appreciate that they're trying to carry the torch of popular music made with guitars.)
The other thing that I've noticed is that no other band has filled that void. If anything, the Beatles have loomed larger with every passing year specifically because no other band has ever come close to their impact on music.
The Beatles broke up when I was about 5 years old. It never dawned on anybody at the time that nobody would carry the torch forward. It was as though Elvis lit the fire, passed it on the Beatles who turned it into an inferno, and then... well... I honestly can't say that I've seen much greatness since. Yeah, there was a spark now and then... but not 15 albums worth and over 200 songs of such quality.
The Beatles story is legendary in its details. A bunch of underage and not-particularly well-regarded musicians from Liverpool go to Hamburg Germany to play in clubs in the red light district. They are forced to play sets that last from 10 to 14 hours, straight, with no breaks. They are sent back home once or twice when it's found out that they are too young to legally work.
They return to England as young 20-ish young men with fierce chops, the tightest harmonies since the Everly Brothers, and the best songwriting ability on the planet.
They literally created the genre of the band as singer/songwriters. There were some singer songwriters prior to the Beatles, but not so much in the big leagues, where the money was real and the expectations were high.
Then, just as quickly as they burst onto the scene, they disappeared after being a presence in the American conscience for only about 6 years and maybe 1 more year in parts of Brittain. Over 200 songs in the amount of time that most modern acts release, at most, 3 albums.
It still stuns me that nobody has filled their shoes, but frankly, our world continues to be over-sanitized and over-protected. A bunch of underage musicians from Akron would no more travel to the red light district of another country to be the house band than they would be legally allowed to drink a beer.
If innovation comes from anywhere, I can't see it coming from the industrial world. It'll have to come from some place like India or China or Russia... unfortunately, instead of being allowed to incubate in the Kaiserkeller on the Rappabond, they'll be plucked too soon and thrust into the spotlight, only to fizzle out as the latest flavor of the week.
When I was 9 years old, I knew the Beatles were the greatest band, ever. I'd been listening here and there since my cousin Charlie brought over his brother Mike's copy of Sgt Pepper's for me to play on my little portable phonograph at age 7. By the time I was 14, I was sure that there wasn't any other band that stood up to the Beatles.
The shocker is that in the time since, they are still the world's greatest rock band. With the way trends are in popular music today, I don't see how anybody will ever be able to equal their greatness. The industry simply would not allow it.
So, re-discovering their music in remastered discs is the closest I can get to finding a new "world's greatest band". I'll take what I can get. In the mean time, I'll hope against hope that somebody picks up the torch.
A lot has happened in the nearly 3 decades since I became a certified Beatle freak. I became a fan starting in about the 4th grade, but right about the time I entered High School, I stopped playing football and basketball, became a very moody, very lazy teen, devoted myself to about 4 hours of guitar practice a day, and dealt with the death of John Lennon just as I was fully discovering his music.
It is amazing to me to listen to various musicians talk about the influence of the Beatles. Not just the folks you'd expect, either. Crowded House / Neil Finn sounds like a modern incarnation of the Beatles. Other bands from the Psychedelic Furs to Oasis have been compared to the Beatles. However, the Beatles heavily influenced other bands with sounds as divergent as Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss to Garth Brooks.
Their influence has been everywhere.
In the past 30 years, I've noticed some social trends in music.
First, a lot fewer people play guitar these days. True, a lot fewer people seem to play any sort of instrument, but Elvis and the Beatles inspired an entire generation of guitarists. I think it's no accident that the pyrotechnician / guitar virtuoso generation (Vai, Malmsteen, Satriani, et. al.) happened when kids who were listening to the Beatles as children grew up to be adults.
Second, the further we get away from the first-generation influence of the Beatles, the more disposable and just generally crappy popular music has become. You can almost trace the lineage. The Beatles are the canon of popular music. The music of the 70s is still resonant today. You can sell a lot of cars by putting on Led Zepplin's "Rock and Roll" or Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog".
AC/DC recorded the 2nd best selling album of all-time just 10 years after the Beatles left the scene. The best-selling album of all time? Had a Beatle who performed on it and produced it.
The 80s? Great music starts to fade out, but is still present moreso than on modern charts.
By the time the 90s rolled around, virtually no music of any worth appears to be standing the test of time.
Today? Music is just crap. Sorry kiddies. This is where I wear my old-man's hat with pride. Just as previous generations had to listen to folks say, "Mays is okay, but you never saw Dimaggio", verily I say unto thee: Lady Gaga is an idiotic joke. You should have been raised on the Beatles.
It's to the point that only one act that appeals to young kids even appears to use guitars! (The Jonas Brothers, for whom I don't have a particular love, music-wise, but I appreciate that they're trying to carry the torch of popular music made with guitars.)
The other thing that I've noticed is that no other band has filled that void. If anything, the Beatles have loomed larger with every passing year specifically because no other band has ever come close to their impact on music.
The Beatles broke up when I was about 5 years old. It never dawned on anybody at the time that nobody would carry the torch forward. It was as though Elvis lit the fire, passed it on the Beatles who turned it into an inferno, and then... well... I honestly can't say that I've seen much greatness since. Yeah, there was a spark now and then... but not 15 albums worth and over 200 songs of such quality.
The Beatles story is legendary in its details. A bunch of underage and not-particularly well-regarded musicians from Liverpool go to Hamburg Germany to play in clubs in the red light district. They are forced to play sets that last from 10 to 14 hours, straight, with no breaks. They are sent back home once or twice when it's found out that they are too young to legally work.
They return to England as young 20-ish young men with fierce chops, the tightest harmonies since the Everly Brothers, and the best songwriting ability on the planet.
They literally created the genre of the band as singer/songwriters. There were some singer songwriters prior to the Beatles, but not so much in the big leagues, where the money was real and the expectations were high.
Then, just as quickly as they burst onto the scene, they disappeared after being a presence in the American conscience for only about 6 years and maybe 1 more year in parts of Brittain. Over 200 songs in the amount of time that most modern acts release, at most, 3 albums.
It still stuns me that nobody has filled their shoes, but frankly, our world continues to be over-sanitized and over-protected. A bunch of underage musicians from Akron would no more travel to the red light district of another country to be the house band than they would be legally allowed to drink a beer.
If innovation comes from anywhere, I can't see it coming from the industrial world. It'll have to come from some place like India or China or Russia... unfortunately, instead of being allowed to incubate in the Kaiserkeller on the Rappabond, they'll be plucked too soon and thrust into the spotlight, only to fizzle out as the latest flavor of the week.
When I was 9 years old, I knew the Beatles were the greatest band, ever. I'd been listening here and there since my cousin Charlie brought over his brother Mike's copy of Sgt Pepper's for me to play on my little portable phonograph at age 7. By the time I was 14, I was sure that there wasn't any other band that stood up to the Beatles.
The shocker is that in the time since, they are still the world's greatest rock band. With the way trends are in popular music today, I don't see how anybody will ever be able to equal their greatness. The industry simply would not allow it.
So, re-discovering their music in remastered discs is the closest I can get to finding a new "world's greatest band". I'll take what I can get. In the mean time, I'll hope against hope that somebody picks up the torch.
What Real Health Care Reform Would Be
I had a question about what I would consider a good health-care reform bill. So, I figured I'd spell it out.
Any meaningful reform of health care would involve:
1. Universality. I am not a person who will ever say that anything is "too expensive". That is not an absolute statement. What's too expensive for a crackhead living on the sidewalk may not be too expensive for Bill Gates. So, whether something is "too expensive" or not depends on what sort of resources are available.
An interstate highway system was something that was a stretch to afford in the 1950s. However, it would have been cost-prohibitive in 1910. As the economy grows, we, as a nation, have the ability to afford larger and more expensive undertakings.
This highlights my belief in stimulating economic activity. Rather than having a mind-set of trying to fight for slices of the pie, the best path has always been to make the pie bigger. Or, in the infamous words of GWB, "make the pie higher".
I think our economy is large enough, now, that we can implement universal health care without bankrupting ourselves. In fact, universal health care is pretty much our only shot at NOT bankrupting ourselves.
So, any meaningful health care reform would involve providing coverage to every person, regardless of ability to pay. More on that later.
2. Funding via a flat-tax on income. Health care should be funded by a line-item in the federal tax code, the same way medicare is. We pay 2.9% for Medicare taxes, and our employers contribute another 2.9%. There is also no cap on the wages that are subject to Medicare tax. We could fully and completely fund the incremental cost of universal health care by increasing this tax burden from 2.9% to 3.9% for both taxpayer and employer.
I would also make other changes to the tax code, such as making ALL INCOME subject to Medicare taxes. As the system currently is written, Medicare and Social Security are regressive taxes that hit people whose income is 100% derived from wages harder than it hits people who have some portion of their income in, say, stock dividends.
Granted, the tax implications are a bit complicated, and beyond the scope of this blog posting, but I believe that all income is income, and should be treated as such unless quickly re-invested in an investment of similar characteristics.
Because we have this complicated system where wages and investment income are treated differently, we are now using the tax code to PAY MONEY to low wage earners. A huge percentage of the US population files a tax return every year not to pay taxes, but to get government entitlements in the form of refundable tax credits.
It's welfare, which I abhor. But it's been implemented to negate the effect of regressive taxes, which I abhor. Our current tax code simply piles evil on top of evil rather than simply saying that if you have income (regardless of source), you need to pay tax on it.
3. Negotiated Pricing. Every business in America has the ability to negotiate with its vendors. Some vendors are tougher than others. Some won't negotiate much. Some will negotiate a lot. However, every day, in every venue, a person with money can negotiate pricing on things they want to buy. I once astounded a guy who I had a roofing business with, by negotiating a lower price on roofing shovels at the cash register of a lumberyard.
However, lobbyists have been busy trying to get laws written that prevent the US government: the nation's largest health-care buyer, from being able to negotiate rates.
The end result is that for pharmaceuticals, every other industrialized country pays, on average, about 30% less for prescription drugs. Because our congresspeople have sold us out to lobbyists, we can't even get the same rates every other industrialized country gets.
As for medicare pricing schedules, and other things that health-providers abhor, I don't think anybody should be FORCED to take government-health patients. But if you control that much business, you should be able to negotiate rates. As I've ranted about previously, doctors offices are some of the most poorly run businesses I see. Customer service is hideous. Their back-office function is a wreck. The only thing approximating efficiency is the rate at which doctors see patients.
Like any business that doesn't have to be efficient, doctor's practices are not. They don't like the squeeze, but they should be using it as impetus to make themselves better. They aren't. Which tells me they're not being squeezed hard enough.
Bottom line: simply being able to negotiate our purchasing contracts would mean that we'd save 30% on our pharmaceutical costs with the stroke of a pen. The same type of savings could probably be achieved throughout the health-care system.
4. Total government health-care expenditure pegged to a percent of GDP. Canada pays for 100% of all the health-care required in their country with 11% of GDP. I would say that we should peg ours at about 10%. Flat-out, our government health-care spend should never exceed 10% of GDP.
Since this means that we could not spend every penny on every thing, then we'd have to make some choices as to where the government should best spend its health-care money.
5. Death panels. I want them. Not every health-care dollar has the same impact. We spend the greatest portion of our health-care money on end-of-life care. The reality is that human beings get sick. Human beings die. We hate it when they do. That's no reason to throw a half million dollars at every person with a terminal condition on the hopes that we can prolong their lives for a few weeks at zero quality of life.
What if you WANT to keep gramps hooked up to a machine in a vegetative state? Good for you. Pay for it yourself.
Where money is involved, you need to make choices and some of those choices are hard. I have elderly relatives and I love them dearly. However, if I have to choose between, say, health-care for a newborn child for 20 years, and a liver transplant for an 87 year old, only one of those choices makes any sense at all.
England, frankly, has tackled this rather daunting and difficult task and has done a respectable, though imperfect, job of prioritizing health spending based on impact on quality of life.
People distrust the government, and I don't blame them, but unless we simply want to open our wallets and let health care spending grow to infinity, we have to have cost-containment.
Again, I am not saying that a person shouldn't be able to spend THEIR OWN money on this sort of thing. If you really want to squeeze 3 more weeks of life out of auntie Gertrude so she can live in a vegetative state being fed by a tube and breathing with a ventilator, you can spend your own $300,000 to do it, or have a charity car-wash and wash 150,000 cars, or whatever.
However, your desire to want to throw vast sums of money at minimal health outcomes should not come at other people's expense.
6. Streamlining of administration and proliferation of best-practices. All over the country, there are pockets of innovation where ideas that save money and produce better health-outcomes are being sprouted every day. Nobody really cares. Doctors make money by providing services. So, they aren't looking for a way to reduce services.
One hospital in Chicago took a common problem: an ER patient complaining of chest-pain, and broke it down into a simple questionairre with a half-dozen questions on it. In the vast majority of cases, instead of a battery of tests, the prudent thing to do was to give the patient aspirin and send them home with a list of other symptoms they should look for. The difference in cost? Less than a dollar, versus six figures. The outcome? Patients who were diagnosed using the new set of questions, and who were usually sent home with aspirin, had identical health-outcomes to patients who were given the battery of tests.
While the experiment was being conducted, the doctors whined a blue-streak that this was not the way medicine could be practiced. That it was coming between doctor and patient. That it was taking away a doctor's judgement in a situation.
Sound familiar? The doctors whine about these same things at EVERY attempt to proliferate best-practices in their industry. The basic argument? We don't want to do what's best. We want to do what we feel like doing.
Not many other people have the luxury of saying that at work. However, we've let doctors get away with it for a while, now.
Bottom line: there ARE best practices that save money and save lives. Doctors, as a profession, are extremely resistant to any suggestion that standardized practices have any benefit at all. The doctors are wrong.
7. Some form of copays, but very, very, very modest ones. As any ER doctor or nurse will tell you, if you have patients who do not have to pay anything for medical care, some percentage of them will abuse the priviledge. I literally remember an ER visit where I was being stitched up and an indigent patient in the area next to mine hung around complaining about "high blood pressure" until she was given a sandwich, at which point, she left.
So, there needs to be some sort of copay, but not a big one. Literally, a co-pay of $5 will go a long ways towards eliminating abuse of universal health care. A hospital in the 80s began a practice of asking for a 25 cent copay for indigent patients in their ER and it cut down unnecessary visits by 90%+.
Things that are provided at no cost are perceived as having no value. There needs to be some cost to the users of health-care. Not for economic reasons, but for behavioral ones.
That's the basic gist of what I'd like to see. Remarkably, Obama's plan had some of these provisions. (It did not, contrary to popular belief, have the Death Panel provision), but Max Baucus has put his own interests ahead of the interests of the human beings who live in this great nation and made sure that the resulting health-care bill is simply the stupidest thing to hit Washington since... well... Max Baucus.
Any meaningful reform of health care would involve:
1. Universality. I am not a person who will ever say that anything is "too expensive". That is not an absolute statement. What's too expensive for a crackhead living on the sidewalk may not be too expensive for Bill Gates. So, whether something is "too expensive" or not depends on what sort of resources are available.
An interstate highway system was something that was a stretch to afford in the 1950s. However, it would have been cost-prohibitive in 1910. As the economy grows, we, as a nation, have the ability to afford larger and more expensive undertakings.
This highlights my belief in stimulating economic activity. Rather than having a mind-set of trying to fight for slices of the pie, the best path has always been to make the pie bigger. Or, in the infamous words of GWB, "make the pie higher".
I think our economy is large enough, now, that we can implement universal health care without bankrupting ourselves. In fact, universal health care is pretty much our only shot at NOT bankrupting ourselves.
So, any meaningful health care reform would involve providing coverage to every person, regardless of ability to pay. More on that later.
2. Funding via a flat-tax on income. Health care should be funded by a line-item in the federal tax code, the same way medicare is. We pay 2.9% for Medicare taxes, and our employers contribute another 2.9%. There is also no cap on the wages that are subject to Medicare tax. We could fully and completely fund the incremental cost of universal health care by increasing this tax burden from 2.9% to 3.9% for both taxpayer and employer.
I would also make other changes to the tax code, such as making ALL INCOME subject to Medicare taxes. As the system currently is written, Medicare and Social Security are regressive taxes that hit people whose income is 100% derived from wages harder than it hits people who have some portion of their income in, say, stock dividends.
Granted, the tax implications are a bit complicated, and beyond the scope of this blog posting, but I believe that all income is income, and should be treated as such unless quickly re-invested in an investment of similar characteristics.
Because we have this complicated system where wages and investment income are treated differently, we are now using the tax code to PAY MONEY to low wage earners. A huge percentage of the US population files a tax return every year not to pay taxes, but to get government entitlements in the form of refundable tax credits.
It's welfare, which I abhor. But it's been implemented to negate the effect of regressive taxes, which I abhor. Our current tax code simply piles evil on top of evil rather than simply saying that if you have income (regardless of source), you need to pay tax on it.
3. Negotiated Pricing. Every business in America has the ability to negotiate with its vendors. Some vendors are tougher than others. Some won't negotiate much. Some will negotiate a lot. However, every day, in every venue, a person with money can negotiate pricing on things they want to buy. I once astounded a guy who I had a roofing business with, by negotiating a lower price on roofing shovels at the cash register of a lumberyard.
However, lobbyists have been busy trying to get laws written that prevent the US government: the nation's largest health-care buyer, from being able to negotiate rates.
The end result is that for pharmaceuticals, every other industrialized country pays, on average, about 30% less for prescription drugs. Because our congresspeople have sold us out to lobbyists, we can't even get the same rates every other industrialized country gets.
As for medicare pricing schedules, and other things that health-providers abhor, I don't think anybody should be FORCED to take government-health patients. But if you control that much business, you should be able to negotiate rates. As I've ranted about previously, doctors offices are some of the most poorly run businesses I see. Customer service is hideous. Their back-office function is a wreck. The only thing approximating efficiency is the rate at which doctors see patients.
Like any business that doesn't have to be efficient, doctor's practices are not. They don't like the squeeze, but they should be using it as impetus to make themselves better. They aren't. Which tells me they're not being squeezed hard enough.
Bottom line: simply being able to negotiate our purchasing contracts would mean that we'd save 30% on our pharmaceutical costs with the stroke of a pen. The same type of savings could probably be achieved throughout the health-care system.
4. Total government health-care expenditure pegged to a percent of GDP. Canada pays for 100% of all the health-care required in their country with 11% of GDP. I would say that we should peg ours at about 10%. Flat-out, our government health-care spend should never exceed 10% of GDP.
Since this means that we could not spend every penny on every thing, then we'd have to make some choices as to where the government should best spend its health-care money.
5. Death panels. I want them. Not every health-care dollar has the same impact. We spend the greatest portion of our health-care money on end-of-life care. The reality is that human beings get sick. Human beings die. We hate it when they do. That's no reason to throw a half million dollars at every person with a terminal condition on the hopes that we can prolong their lives for a few weeks at zero quality of life.
What if you WANT to keep gramps hooked up to a machine in a vegetative state? Good for you. Pay for it yourself.
Where money is involved, you need to make choices and some of those choices are hard. I have elderly relatives and I love them dearly. However, if I have to choose between, say, health-care for a newborn child for 20 years, and a liver transplant for an 87 year old, only one of those choices makes any sense at all.
England, frankly, has tackled this rather daunting and difficult task and has done a respectable, though imperfect, job of prioritizing health spending based on impact on quality of life.
People distrust the government, and I don't blame them, but unless we simply want to open our wallets and let health care spending grow to infinity, we have to have cost-containment.
Again, I am not saying that a person shouldn't be able to spend THEIR OWN money on this sort of thing. If you really want to squeeze 3 more weeks of life out of auntie Gertrude so she can live in a vegetative state being fed by a tube and breathing with a ventilator, you can spend your own $300,000 to do it, or have a charity car-wash and wash 150,000 cars, or whatever.
However, your desire to want to throw vast sums of money at minimal health outcomes should not come at other people's expense.
6. Streamlining of administration and proliferation of best-practices. All over the country, there are pockets of innovation where ideas that save money and produce better health-outcomes are being sprouted every day. Nobody really cares. Doctors make money by providing services. So, they aren't looking for a way to reduce services.
One hospital in Chicago took a common problem: an ER patient complaining of chest-pain, and broke it down into a simple questionairre with a half-dozen questions on it. In the vast majority of cases, instead of a battery of tests, the prudent thing to do was to give the patient aspirin and send them home with a list of other symptoms they should look for. The difference in cost? Less than a dollar, versus six figures. The outcome? Patients who were diagnosed using the new set of questions, and who were usually sent home with aspirin, had identical health-outcomes to patients who were given the battery of tests.
While the experiment was being conducted, the doctors whined a blue-streak that this was not the way medicine could be practiced. That it was coming between doctor and patient. That it was taking away a doctor's judgement in a situation.
Sound familiar? The doctors whine about these same things at EVERY attempt to proliferate best-practices in their industry. The basic argument? We don't want to do what's best. We want to do what we feel like doing.
Not many other people have the luxury of saying that at work. However, we've let doctors get away with it for a while, now.
Bottom line: there ARE best practices that save money and save lives. Doctors, as a profession, are extremely resistant to any suggestion that standardized practices have any benefit at all. The doctors are wrong.
7. Some form of copays, but very, very, very modest ones. As any ER doctor or nurse will tell you, if you have patients who do not have to pay anything for medical care, some percentage of them will abuse the priviledge. I literally remember an ER visit where I was being stitched up and an indigent patient in the area next to mine hung around complaining about "high blood pressure" until she was given a sandwich, at which point, she left.
So, there needs to be some sort of copay, but not a big one. Literally, a co-pay of $5 will go a long ways towards eliminating abuse of universal health care. A hospital in the 80s began a practice of asking for a 25 cent copay for indigent patients in their ER and it cut down unnecessary visits by 90%+.
Things that are provided at no cost are perceived as having no value. There needs to be some cost to the users of health-care. Not for economic reasons, but for behavioral ones.
That's the basic gist of what I'd like to see. Remarkably, Obama's plan had some of these provisions. (It did not, contrary to popular belief, have the Death Panel provision), but Max Baucus has put his own interests ahead of the interests of the human beings who live in this great nation and made sure that the resulting health-care bill is simply the stupidest thing to hit Washington since... well... Max Baucus.
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