What’s All This Then!

This is one of those videos that I just had to share with you. I don’t know if it’s the thrill of what Boston dynamics has created with this all-terrain robot or if it’s the eeriness of how this machine looks like a large headless dog as it maintains its balance on extremely icy roads and as it gallops along on a runway, gracefully leaping over an obstacle in its path. At 235 pounds, it’s ability to walk is amazing when you consider that it’s also carrying a 350 pound load while navigating on very unstable grounds. I can’t wait for it to become available for general use.

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So now it’s official. The new owners, henceforth known as “the Liberators”, finalized the sale of our company and began meeting with all of us last week. They spoke of pay raises and new product lines and less mismanagement. You can imagine how the morale at work quickly rose to new heights. Considering our morale was at rock bottom, it didn’t take much to get us excited about coming to work again. In fact, after the initial plant like meeting, there was an immediate improvement when they fired a VP because “his vision for the company was not in line with ours.” Not surprising. There had been a running joke that there was only one way to get things done with this VP: make him think that he was the one who had thought of your idea. Otherwise, be prepared to be rushed into solutions that often ended up causing more problems. (I am still amazed how we narrowly avoided a couple of serious product recalls.)

When I started with this company 17 years ago, they had about over 200 people supporting sales of about 1 1/2 million dollars a month. Last week, when the former owners signed the company over, there were less than 80 people supporting 2 1/2 million dollars a month. I’m not saying that the old owners were bad businessmen. Yet as time went on, they did less and less to grow the company. The last seven years have been very telling. There were several downsizes. Pay raises were nonexistent. The owners began micromanaging expenses to the point they would allow heating and air to operate only between 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m during the weekday. You can imagine what fun this was during cold winters and scorching summers as we worked during six in the morning to six at night. “Please Mr. Scrooge, may I have a small lump of coal for a fire?”

Naturally the owners’ greed began to take its toll on everyone’s morale. Before the extreme cost cutting measures, the company was making a good profit. It didn’t take an accounting genius to realize that their profits grew even more as they greatly reduced operating expenses. It didn’t help matters when, last year, we learned the owners were taking out over $1 million a month from the company. Last week before the papers were signed, the outgoing CFO shut off the bank’s line of credit to our company without telling anyone in accounting. For several hours, those of us without direct deposit weren’t sure if our paychecks were valid or not. I don’t know if he did this because he and the owners had sold another of their businesses for $21 million that very day.

I have to say that, right now, the names of W.R., J.S. and J.L. are spoken at work with the affection usually reserved for Osama Bin Laden. You notice that I only show the initials of these former owners. No need to summon greed demons. Besides, the last thing I need is a lawsuit for pointing them out. Of course, there are no guarantees that the new owners will be any better. All we have at the moment is our liberators’ past track record, a record that shows, not only can they talk the talk but, they have already walked the walk in other successful enterprises. On a personal note, I was asked by one of the new VPs if I would defer any job seeking because of the plans they have for me. Thinking back on our conversation, I feel like I have already been hired on by a new, very promising company. The next few months should prove to be quite interesting and, hopefully, profitable.

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A survey of Japanese cellphone users reveals that almost half of them use their cell phone while bathing. What?! How come we Americans don’t have water proof phones like the Japanese?! If you so much as use ours in dense fog, the phone dies a watery death and the service providers refuse to cover the loss because “you should have known better.”

Yes, I know that the Japanese have a reputation for being an extremely busy group. Yet, what is so important that they have to multi-task while bathing? Well, the most popular reason is to check email. Now I’ve read some filthy messages but none have ever made me feel so unclean that I needed a bath. Exactly what are these people writing to each other?

The next prominent reason for having an electronic device in the water is to listen to music. Of course, this makes sense. Nothing beats the sound quality of a tinny cellphone speaker echoing in the bathroom.

Are there any other reasons? Well, add a handy-dandy attachment to the end of your phone and you have an excellent back scrubber. What better way to get those hard-to-reach spots, unless you have one of those chicklet-sized telephones. (I should point out that a discussion on mobile phones is probably the only time you’ll hear guys boost about who has the smallest.)

What else? Some of you are ahead me. You’re thinking what about putting your phone on vibrate mode to enjoy … a relaxing massage. But no. Another popular use happens to playing games. Of course! Vibrate mode and you can have a rousing game of ‘hide the cellphone’. When the phone rings, well, rub-a-dub-dub, more fun in the tub!

You know it’s only a matter of time before this fad sweeps across the globe and invades our baths. But I don’t think I’ll be joining. When I share my shower, it’s not going to be with my phone company no matter how much they want to reach out and touch somebody.

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So there you are … in a room with three light switches. In the next room, there are three bulbs, each one connected to one of the switches and all are off. You can’t see into the room with the bulbs. So how do you figure out which switch operates which bulb? I post the answer later ….

And, no, you don’t put my dad in the next room so he can say, “Who left a light on? Turn it off! I’m not made of money, you know!”

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I probably shouldn’t be telling you this but we may be seeing gas prices around one dollar a gallon. This might even happen within the year. But before these tidings of great news can come to pass, we might have to endure paying almost five dollars a gallon at the pumps first.

How can I say this? Well, it certainly wasn’t an oil slick birdie who told me about this. I got tired of minimalist news reports saying, “Oil prices increased today” and then going on about how petting baby seals was bad for the enviroment. What happened to journalistic standards of filling in details, such as, “how much did prices go up” and, that all important, “why did they go up”? So I did my own investigation.

At first I thought it was those greedy people in China and India gobbling up all the oil while our poor, starving cars stranded themselves on the sides of roads. But it turns out that there is more than enough oil to meet the world’s demand. If this were a simple matter of supply and demand, we would be looking at about $80 a barrel; and could only blame India and China for the rise from the good ol’ days of $30 a barrel.

No, there is another culprit in these ongoing price increases: speculative investors of pension funds, sovereign wealth accounts, and banks across the world. OIl futures, it turns out, are a very safe investment, or so it seems. Well, much safer than, say, investing in a paper towel business and revolving door company. With those, you could be wiped out before you could turn around. In any case, their oil investments weren’t much of an influence back in 2000 when it was about $9 billion. 8 to 9 billion dollars is what we spend on oil each day now, globally. However, now those same investments are at $250 billion — several weeks worth of oil spending — and growing! And why not? If you have $3,000, you can go to the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and control almost $70,000 worth of oil.

So it’s all that ol’ speculative “make money quickly” bubble that is pumping up the prices. According to some economists, this bubble could take prices as high as $150 a barrel. That’s the bad news for us. The good news is that, while we might not be able to predicted how high and how soon, we do know how other speculative bubbles behave. Remember the speculation in housing, metals, and stock markets? They all tended to burst. And the quicker they went up, the harder they crashed. Some economists are brave enough to say that, within the year, we could see an oil splat of $30 a barrel. We’ll see … A lot can happen before all this leaves us in an oily residue. For now oil companies will keep making record profits and our government will continue taking half of that for itself. As for you and I, we”ll just sit tight and see whether we end up walking more as we go shopping for dog food because the pension firm lost our retirement money.