The High Cost of Mediocrity

Back in the days when free agency was new to baseball and Bill Veeck owned the Chicago White Sox Veeck once commented that it wasn’t the salaries that were being paid to the stars that made operating a ball team expensive it was the high cost of mediocrity.

Veeck believed the big name players, the ones at the top of the salary scale, pay for themselves. Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and a few others are the guys who actually bring people into the ballpark. Whether they are actually worth the amount that they’re getting may be another matter but that’s between the ballclubs and their accountants. What inflates the cost to the ballclub is having to pay the utility infielders, fourth outfielders and LOOGys (Lefty One Out Guys) a lot of money to be, largely, interchangeable parts. That’s been going on, spiraling upward, for over 30 years. Until this winter.

Suddenly even the stars are having trouble getting the big bucks and there’s a lot of other good ballplayers, the interchangeable parts, signing for a lot less money. If they’re getting signed at all. Baseball is seeing a huge market correction. Andy Pettitte turned down $10-million a few months ago then signed for $5-million. I’m sure Andy and his family will get by on $5-million if they eat more casseroles, shop carefully, clip coupons and do the rest of the things some of us must do to get by in these difficult times.

The market correction appears to have begun in baseball just as it has on Wall Street but, and this is pretty astounding, baseball would appear to be getting the message well ahead of the financial folks. Manny Ramirez, arguably the best hitter in the Major Leagues today, opted out of a deal that would have brought him about $20-million this year in hopes of getting $25-million or so for several years. It’s getting close to spring training but so far there are no takers.
Meanwhile from Wall Street we keep hearing of bonuses being paid to people who helped the institutions they work for do a thorough job of screwing up their own companies, America’s economy and the world’s economy. The argument in favor of the bonuses for screwing up everything this side of gravity is that they’re the best people in the business and if they don’t get the big bucks and the big bonuses they’ll go to a competitor.

Well, let’s see. These wizards did such a great job that you had to borrow money, my money, to keep your financial institution afloat. Your competitor is at least as bad off as you are. And by the way you’d like some more of my money when I can get it to you just to keep you functioning.
Look, I can lose money hand over fist for half of what you’re paying the imbeciles you have now and I won’t even ask you for a $1.1 million makeover of my office.

I’m no financial genius but just off the top of my head I would think that if my guy does such a whiz bang job that my company is bleeding red ink from every pore like it has the Ebola virus, and the guy who led my company into this situation is spending money like a drunken sailor in a whore house, I don’t believe I’d be too upset if he got stolen by the people across the street.
I might even help. “John Thain is so valuable to us,” I might say over dinner with J. P. Citicorp-BancoGroup, “I don’t know what we’d do if you guys ever got a guy like that. You know J.P. we’d really be screwed.” Then I would accidentally leave a cocktail napkin on the table while I went to the men’s room.

On that napkin I would leave John’s home address, land-line and cell phone numbers, email address(es), the name of his wife, her favorite perfume, the names of their children and all of their birthdays. Of course I’d be prepared to bemoan John’s loss when the J.P somehow managed to steal this most valued and valuable player in our company. I would wonder aloud for the Wall Street Journal’s benefit whether our institution would be able to muddle through without him.

Then I would quietly recruit some reasonably sharp business school graduate, make sure he or she met our minimal moral standards (about on a par with a feral cat), give him or her a reasonable salary and tell the ingénue, “If we all make money you’ll make more. If we all lose money you’ll be looking for work. This isn’t kindergarten. Not everybody gets a trophy. We’ll pay real money for real results. We won’t pay for mediocrity”

Shovel Ready

I’m writing this on a Tuesday and on Wednesday it’s supposed to snow. Quite a bit as a matter of fact. Some say as much as a foot of new snow from this storm. This is a major inconvenience to many and most especially to me but you know what it isn’t? It isn’t news. This is New Hampshire. It’s January. It snows. I don’t much like it but I’m used to it. It doesn’t surprise me. It’s not really out of the ordinary. But it’s been the top story on the local T-V station’s newscasts since Sunday.
Now I understand that we all want to know when it’s going to snow and how much. That’s why there’s a weather segment in the 30 minutes of alleged news that we get here.
Once the snow comes intrepid reporters will be on the air live from several points around the state showing us where it’s snowing while telling us that state officials say we should stay off the road unless it’s absolutely necessary to travel.
So, essential travel includes talking hairdos criss-crossing the state to give us graphic proof that it is indeed snowing not just in our town but in cities and towns all over the state! Lately these people have taken to demonstrating to us what the snow looks like by throwing some at the camera when they’re giving us their (praise be to Jesus!!) LIVE REPORT on the conditions created by the snowfall. The only thing funnier is when they go for a (praise be to Jesus!!) LIVE REPORT on the conditions from the station parking lot. That’s modern broadcast technology at it’s most impressive.
I guess with the economy in the dumper and people in constant migration to new places to try to find work we could have a whole new crop of, say, Mississippians among us who’ve never seen snow before and have absolutely no idea what it is and how it affects things like driving and walking. If you’re one of those people from Mississippi whoever is reading this to you needs to stop now and tell you that it gets slippery outside when it snows. Same thing if it sleets. Even more so for freezing rain. Once you get that into your mind you’ll be fine.
The rest of us know it snows here. It has every winter that we’ve been on the planet and even with global warming it probably will for the rest of our lives. But it does make for good pictures and TV is all about that.
Then there’s the live shot from, well anywhere, that serves no point but to keep cameramen employed and reporters on the street. So let’s say the state legislature passed a major new law today. Tonight at 11 we’ll go (praise be to Jesus!!) LIVE to the State House for a report! Okay, but is there anybody AT the State House at 11 o’clock? Of course not. The legislators, the governor, the attorney general, the janitor and everybody else but the night watchman went home hours ago. But we get a (praise be to Jesus!!) LIVE REPORT because…ummm…because they can. And because “live at the State House” just sounds so friggin’ cool!
I’m all for full employment of cameramen, reporters and announcers (especially radio announcers) and I’m hoping there will be something along those lines in the stimulus package from the Obama administration. I know the programs that get funding have to be shovel ready but let me assure the voters and taxpayers of this great land of ours there is not a special interest group in America that is more shovel ready than those of us in the communications industry.
If we can do live reports from the front steps of empty office buildings and make people think that we’re doing something relevant then we are about as shovel ready as you can get.
Speaking of shovels, you better get yours ready. I hear it’s going to snow. In New Hampshire. In January. Good thing I watch the news, huh?

News, what news?

I’ve been doing it since the days of Huntley/Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. Hell, I used to sit next to my Dad and watch John Cameron Swayze do the Camel News Caravan and Douglas Edwards read the news on CBS. My point is I’ve been watching TV news pretty much from the beginning. And maybe I’m just stepping into the cranky part of my dotage but it’s getting harder and harder to do. Watch the news I mean.

First of all if it’s a Saturday or a Sunday you have to FIND the news. If there’s a football game, basketball game, golf tournament, tennis tournament or just about anything else that requires a jock strap (that leaves out soccer, unless we want to include tampons) the networks will often as not either delay or pre-empt the news on the weekend. When they do bother to broadcast it at all it’s usually pretty thin stuff. And it’s becoming more style than substance by the minute. Take last Saturday for example.

On ABC I found the news being anchored by one David Muir. He may be a competent journalist but I’m not sure I could prove that easily. And there’s the problem of his looks. He looks like he just climbed down off a wedding cake. A 1959 wedding cake. That Brylcreem look is one I find somewhat disturbing. Kind of like the Eagle Scout who took an axe to his grandmother.

So I tried CBS. Over there was a young man named Jeff Glor. From the bio on his website we can insinuate that he is about 30. Trouble is he looks like, even though it’s only 6:30, he should call his mother RIGHT NOW so she knows where he is and won’t worry about him not being home for supper on time.

Now I don’t necessarily have to get the news from somebody who looks like he (or she) went to school with Zeus but do they all have to look like they just showered and blow-dried their hair after cheerleading practice? It’s not that I think they should all look like Quasimodo or even Benicio Del Toro but is having finished no lower than first runner up at the pageant necessary for good journalism?

So I settled on Lester Holt over at NBC. Now Lester at least looks like he’s been around the block a few times…it’s an open question whether he had to stop and ask for directions but they’re all starting to strike me that way. I’m getting information from people who literally don’t have sense to come in from the rain…in a HURRICANE!

Anyway I settled down with NBC, the network whose legacy includes Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw. And a few minutes into the “news” they start in telling us about Air Force One. Not the movie, that was a whole different kind of stupid. The President’s plane.

There was no new information about the plane that you probably couldn’t have found on Wikipedia if you were interested enough to look. So the point of the alleged “story” was really to let us know about a program that would be on the National Geographic Channel the following night. These are called “promos” in the broadcasting business and there’s too many of them in the news as it is but when the promos pretend to be news content that frosts me.

On the weeknights I had to give up watching NBC Nightly News because of Jay Leno. Remember when NBC announced that Leno would be appearing on prime time 5 nights a week when he moves on from the Tonight Show? Well that was worth about 5 minutes of conversation during the Nightly News between Jay and Brian Williams. I don’t know what that was but it wasn’t news. And ever since then I haven’t felt the same way about Brian. He seems like a funny, fun guy (he used to show up on Imus in the Morning and he was very funny there) but at the anchor desk he’s just too earnest. Like somebody who wants to be my friend so much he makes me nervous. Come on, I’m not that cool. Truth be told I never was cool at all. If I were a girl he’d be the boyfriend I dumped who just never went away. He’d keep showing up to wash my car and make like Eddie Haskell with my mother.

Then there’s Charlie Gibson. Does smarmy sound about right to you? Yeah, me too. Like a greasy uncle. Probably sells used cars, BMWs but used BMWs. “Excuse me,” he’d insist, “we call them ‘pre-owned.’” Oh, so nobody who owned it before actually used it? What’s the matter, wouldn’t it start?

And now we come around to the CBS Evening News. Which, in terms on content, may just be the best of the three but I just can’t watch it. I never liked Katie Couric when she was with the Today show over at NBC. She was cute and perky I guess but I’m not big on cute and perky. I guess I like old and a little grumpy.

Luckily, it turns out I’m available.

Understand the meltdown? Me neither.

Okay, I’ve been trying to figure out what the Hell is going on with the economy.
This is not an easy task for me to get my head around because I’ve never been much interested in it and I have the net worth to prove it.
But here’s a bit of irony for you. It turns out that a lot of people, smart people, people who are interested in that stuff don’t have much higher net worth than I do.

It turns out that my “investments” in books, compact discs (written out so as not to be confused with the other kind of CD’s), DVD’s and baseball cards (ones that don’t even have pictures) have put me on the same rung of the economic ladder as people who invested in the other kind of CD’s, banks, insurance companies, mutual funds, hedge funds and stocks.
So what have we learned? Not much.

While I’ve still got my music, movies, books and toys we’re both pretty much screwed at this point.
There’s no money, jobs are disappearing in wholesale lots and Bernie Madoff’s been taking money out of the blind man’s cup while stealing his pencils.

Most of us have been willing partners in this to some extent or another.
I’ve never been one to look under the hood of the car to see how the whole thing works.
I know where to put the gasoline in, where the key goes to start the thing and as long as it gets me where I want to go and the radio/cd player works I don’t much care about any of the other details.
Would it be better for all concerned if I knew how the damn thing worked?
Maybe…but I trust the marketplace to limit the number of lemons available to me and let it go at that.

I think most of us are that way about our investments too.
We don’t really care how they make money for us we’re just happy that our little nest egg gets bigger each year so that we can eventually have that dream retirement at age (fill in the blank here_____) and coast through our golden years.

For some the first step on that ladder is a house. Owning your own house in America is pretty basic. As a matter of fact we rarely refer to it as owning a house.
We call it “owning your own home.” That’s a significant difference, right there.
Because if you own a house it’s just a building, but if you own your own home you’ve done something for your family and become a part of a community.
If you rent you’re a transient and some sort of different, lower class, not quite there yet, kind of person. We rent.

Over the last 15 years I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard some variation of, “you know for what you’re paying in rent you could buy a house.”
Well yeah, I probably could have bought a house but I also knew that it was unlikely that I’d be able to pay a mortgage, do the upkeep, pay the taxes and learn all the do-it-yourself skills that you need to have to own a house.
In short I wouldn’t be dumb enough to do business with anyone dumb enough to give me a mortgage.

Turns out the people handing out mortgages to people like me-who thought they needed to own a house to have a home-weren’t as dumb as I thought.
They were too smart by half.

They didn’t care who got a mortgage because they weren’t going to be the ones collecting the payments.
They’d just bundle up a bunch of them and sell them off to someone else to collect on.
Then the next level did the same.
And another level.
And another level.

So these geniuses built a house of cards and now they’re all shocked (shocked!!!) that it’s collapsed.
They lied to themselves, to each other and to everyone else about what they were doing and apparently convinced all concerned that it was going to be fine.

The sad thing is they’re still doing it.
They’re taking tax-payer money to bail themselves out but they’re still convinced they are geniuses who have such great ways of making money that they don’t have to explain to any one how they do it.
Oh, and yes, they really are worth their multi-million dollar salaries and although they’ve driven their own companies, their own countries economies and the world economy a cliff they still deserve huge bonuses because...well don’t worry about that you wouldn’t understand it anyway.

And they’re right. I probably wouldn’t understand it.

There's a whole breed of people I don't understand. I once worked for a guy who was, as near as I could tell, incapable of telling the truth.
We still refer to him with the description that, “Chris would lie about what he had for breakfast.” It was that basic with the guy.
There’s no reason to lie about it but it was the only way he could say anything. He HAD to lie, or not speak at all.
Now that I’ve learned to spot them I try to avoid people like that. I just don’t understand how they live that way.

I’m not one of them but I bet there are people out there who do understand how to make money and who can tell the difference between something that’s a real investment and something that’s the same kind of bullshit we’ve been getting from Wall Street over the last 20 or 30 years. I’m sure there’s money to be made by lending people money and doing the other things that people in the world of finance do.
But I’ll still feel better about an economy that produces something-goods, services, ideas-and makes it’s money by doing that than I do about an economy that makes it’s money by reaching into the next guy’s pocket.

3:56:13

No, it’s not a citation of a chapter from the Bible. I’d be about the last one to come up with one of those. I was just checking on Amazon dot com to see if one of my favorite movies, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”, is available on dvd yet. It isn’t.

Down at the bottom of the Amazon page was a fairly large display of 3:56:13 that caught my attention. It then changed to 3:56:14, then 3:56:15 and I realized it was just a clock and then I noticed that it was an advertisement. It reads, “It’s (time) Do you know where your career is?” turns out it’s an ad for Monster dot com. And, as it happens, I’m pretty much sans career right now. Not for want of trying.

I’ve spent the last few weeks in a Barnes and Noble Café trying to learn the barista trade. The enterprise can best be described as ill fated. For one thing, until I started working there I not only did not know the difference between tall, Grande and Venti I didn’t WANT to know the difference. As I once told a friend, “I’m not going to learn jargon to buy a cup of coffee.”

Which points up a second problem. I drink coffee black. I don’t add anything to it. I don’t want it to taste like vanilla or chocolate or hazelnuts or anyone else’s nuts. I don’t want cream or milk or non-fat milk or soy milk. I don’t care if it’s 160 degrees or 140 degrees or 130 degrees so long as it’s hot and if it’s not hot enough…I’ll probably just chug it and either go back for a fresh cup or go without for a while. I could go on about the whole latte situation but you’ve probably already gotten my point.

Now from a marketing standpoint the Café is just brilliant. I love to get a cup of coffee and sit and chat with my wife before we separate and head to our favorite sections of the book store coffee and tea in hand respectively. Although the Mrs. would prefer if they’d just offer plain black tea along with all the herbal nonsense but that just proves we’re well matched, doesn’t it? Anyway, marketing = brilliant. Employment = stupendously dumb.

First off Barnes and Noble treats their employees abominably. Booksellers are considered interchangeable parts and treated as such. The corporate approach is, “I’m sorry you’re not happy here. NEXT!!” That said, many of the management types, at least the lower and middle ones that I had contact with, are good people and treat their colleagues well.

But we’re getting off the main topic here which is, as always, me. Because I’m underemployed I figured I’d take a shot at the café when I heard there was an opening that could lead to full time with benefits. If you’ve paid for your own health insurance lately you know how willing one can be to put up with a fair amount of crap for those two magic words with benefits. So they tried to teach me to make lattes and frappuchinos and various other concoctions.

Ever heard the saying, “Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig?” That sums up my experience trying to figure out how to construct those drinks. A couple of shifts doing that and I was asking, “what else can I do around here because this is a disaster.”
So they put me on the cash register.

How hard can that be? It’s touch screen. You find the appropriate grouping: coffee, espresso, sweet street, sandwiches, hot tea, frappuchinos, etc. Then you find the appropriate item, put your finger on the touch screen and you’ve got the first item in their order. So there’s a dozen or so groupings. There’s a learning curve but so what, right? Bet you wouldn’t guess that there’s more than 80 friggin’ frappuchinos options would you? And that’s before you get into the whole sugar free-hold the ice-add protein powder set of possibilities.

Okay so somebody just wants a cup of coffee (you understand that “tall” means small and if you want a large that’s a “Venti”) and a brownie. The screens are set up alphabetically…sort of. Because when you look for “brownie” it’s not under “B” (although cheese cake is). “Brownie” is under “U.” Because it’s not just a “brownie” it’s an “Ultimate Fudge Brownie!” Well, that’s not too bad because a lot of people eat brownies and after a while you just remember that brownie is under “U.” So why is cheesecake under “B?” Because it comes from Boston Cheesecake Factory so it’s listed as “BC Key Lime,” “BC Original,” “BC Pumpkin Spice,” or “BC You’re not going to find what this person wants in less than 20 minutes.”

Now, the only reason I prepare food at home is that I have to eat something, not because I’m interested in culinary art. I’m a meat and potatoes guy. So when somebody for whom I had made a mocha-java something or other handed it back to me complaining that it didn’t taste like chocolate what I wanted to say was, “if you want something that tastes like chocolate how about you buy a friggin’ candy bar?!”

When people complain that their coffee tastes too much like coffee it’s time for me to go.

Not what they’re looking for

The other day I got a call from someone representing a Republican Senator from New Hampshire seeking my support in the Senator’s re-election campaign. Thanks to the blessed miracle of caller I-D I just stared at the answering machine while the nice man left a message. The election season is gearing up once again and even though we’re on the “no call list” politicians and pollsters can still have a field day with us because the list doesn’t apply to them.
But thanks to the blessed miracle of caller I-D we still don’t have to take their calls.
One of the advantages to living in the first in the nation primary state is that we get to have early input in the electoral process.
That’s the obverse side of the coin. The reverse side is a phone ringing 6 to 10 times each evening with somebody or other wanting to know if we’ve decided who to vote for and, if they’re a pollster, about 20-minutes of demographic information about our household.

Sometimes these calls are from a candidate or a particular party. You can spot them when they ask you carefully worded neutral questions like, “Do you support a strong, market-driven capitalist economy protected by the best trained, best equipped military on the planet or do you support those baby killing, tree hugging, pinko-commie-faggot-rat-bastards who are destroying the real America?” I usually hang up on them. Mostly though I save myself from any such travail because of the blessed miracle of caller I-D.

But now I’m toying with the idea of answering the next time the good senator’s supporters call. I would offer my support for his re-election on one condition. If the Senator will vote for a bill that would require that on January 21st, 2009 George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would be arrested and turned over to the Hague for trial on war crimes charges, I’ll vote for the guy.
My wife notes that since I’ve applied for a low level job with a local police agency, the F.B.I. investigation that would follow my requirement for my vote would probably hurt my chances of getting the job.
So I’m thinking I may go with a chicken-shit way out and try this approach.
If you can get the Senator to stop spouting nonsense about off-shore drilling as though it would do anything about the price of gasoline I might be willing to vote for him.

Somehow I still don’t think that’s what they’re looking for.

Mamma Mia Is Right

My Sunday paper’s rotogravure has a full page ad for a movie that will open, according to the ad, on July 18^th. Yes, it’s “Mamma Mia! The Movie”, and here’s what they’re using to grab our attention, “A mother. A daughter. Three possible fathers. Take a trip down the aisle you'll never forget.”

This is a movie with a plot woven around a bunch of ABBA songs. The plot could have as easily been woven around a “Maury Povich Show” since it involves a young woman who is about to get married but doesn’t know who her father is. And in a refreshingly modern twist her mother doesn’t know who sired the daughter either. But she has only three possibilities!

Now they could all go on with Maury, get the D.N.A. test and have done with the whole matter but, since that wouldn’t take even Maury Povich two hours to sort out there is some sort of other contrivance at work to provide a backbone to the film and give us an excuse to sing, dance and cavort to all those catchy ABBA tunes again. I think everybody on the planet, if they gave their response by secret ballot, could name an ABBA song that they really like.

Apparently this was quite popular as a stage musical. And as plots for musicals go, this one isn’t even all that weak. If you overlook the D.N.A. testing angle. But here’s what I just don’t get. Do we really need another way of celebrating slags? Isn’t the continuing notoriety of Madonna enough?

I read today that one in three American women has been pregnant at least once by the age of 20. And the film is rated PG-13 “parents are strongly cautioned” that kids under 13 shouldn’t see it. Well, okay but who’s going to talk to the ones between 13 and 20 who are okay to see it and tell them that getting pregnant by you-only-have-a-vague-idea-who isn’t a good idea. It’s not the stuff of musicals.

But you want to know what I thought was funny about all this? Next to the PG-13 rating is another little caution. “This film contains depictions of tobacco consumption.” Yup. We’ve got a one hour and 48 minute tribute to all the cool things that can happen if you’re lucky enough to have unprotected sex with three cool guys but the warning is because somebody consumes tobacco.

This has to be the funniest planet in the universe. Mamma Mia!