Good morning. Hello. How are you #990
A surprisingly good day, Alice visited, bananas revisited, bus driver shortages, job memoirs, economists vs business and my failings therein, those golf-club-style weed whackers, typos from the school
Good morning. Hello! How’s shakes? Oh my god I can’t believe we are going to hit issue #1000 in two weeks. That is crazy. Should I do something special? Ignore it? Suggestions welcome. Man. This pandemic has gone on a long time. Bah duh bump.
I was very proud of my sign-off yesterday: “Have a lovely day. I’m sure I won’t.” Brilliant, no? But in fact it turned out to be untrue. Tuesdays are usually really hard on me, what with the nine meetings and all. But yesterday, I dunno. It was just pleasant. I enjoyed all my conversations, and that much social time did not dampen my mood.
And then! Our house guest Alice came by and we had a lovely long conversation all evening, where she told us amazing but true stories about flat-earthers and feminist Bigfoot hunters. What a great night. She also had a firsthand account of their Kai Cenat “riot” (it was not a riot) in Union Square last week, so that was interesting as well. Tl;dr it was not a riot.
And then I had a single tiny wine while putting away my laundry and my god I have a hangover this morning. This is depressing.
I did not explain this banana thing very well yesterday. What I am saying is that bananas, left to their own devices, stay green for a very long time between the picking and the store shelf. But grocery stores meddle with them and spray them with some gas in a chamber to make them turn yellow right before you get them, thus kicking them off on their relatively rapid journey from yellow to brown, thus making it borderline impossible for you to buy a banana on Monday and eat it in a ripe state on Sunday. What they ought to do is either a) not spray them with the gas at all and sell us green bananas and let us manage it on our own, which would be complex but at least doable, or b) have a set of seven different gas chambers and sell nifty bundles like the one pictured yesterday. But they don’t. So they’re not only not helping in this “get a ripe banana every day” quest, they are actively making it impossible, and that is annoying.
It is very hard sometimes for me to write things like that clearly first thing in the morning. I’m not even sure it makes sense this second time. But hey: soon I will be writing this about an hour later each day, so maybe it’ll get better. Right? Right?
I do this hour long call every Tuesday with Kristen, one of my oldest best colleagues, best friends, and head of product at Nimbus. And I don’t know why, but whenever we do our talk, if it’s not raining, I go outside and wander around our trails, stand on our dock for a while, swing in the tree swing. And for the last few weeks I’ve been noticing a lot of weeds. Not really weeds but small tree saplings that are growing on the trails. I pull some of them up, but there are too many. And of course I’m on the phone, so power tools are not really an option. And it reminded me of this golf-club-style weeding whacking thing I had when I was a kid that we inherited from my grandfather. And suddenly I really wanted one. Nostalgia kicked in hard. Weeding with that thing before weed-whackers were invented. As a kid, that thing was so fun. And productive! Bet my mom loved it too. Got her kid to do chores.
And being an adult who earns his own living, I tracked one of these things down and bought it. They are great. And yesterday’s call was the first time I got to use it on a call with Kristen. And it was so great! Except my shoulders hurt and my fingers hurt and my right elbow hurts so it was actually very, very difficult to actually use the thing without pain. That was very sad. It was also the last straw and I have hereby given up on trying to make it to October for a doctor’s appointment an I made one for tomorrow. Wish me luck.
A few weeks ago, Emma read some sad tale on the internet about a cancer-sufferer or something who discovered that her insurance had something called “lifetime limits” where there was a top limit to how much money they would pay out for any patient under any single policy. So she asked us if we had a lifetime limit. And it’s been a note on my to-do list for ages, and for some reason yesterday, despite the nine calls, I thought I had enough time to check this out. And of course it made no mention of it on any of the plan overview documents, but they wouldn’t, would they? So I downloaded every single document I could find from their website and started methodically going through them one by one, searching for any evidence of lifetime plan limits. I did this by searching for “lifetime” and “plan” in every single document. I did learn the term was “lifetime dollar limit” but I could find no mention of actually having one in my plan, so I guess that’s good. You should check yours out and tell me if you find anything.
But I did find that the plan only covers a single amputation in a lifetime and now I have so many questions. Does that cover amputation care, or just amputations? What if you need, hypothetically speaking, two fingers cut off? Is that a single amputation? Or two? Like is it one amputation process, or one limb? Would they just cut off the hand instead, since it’s definitely covered that way? And why is amputation even singled out anyway are they really that expensive?
Seems weird.
I left The Barbarian Group twelve years ago yesterday. Thank you, Timehop, for alerting me to this. Twelve years, wow. I’ve been gone from Barbarian for longer than I was at Barbarian. I still miss it. And they are still some of my best friends. And it's still around, though I can’t really tell what’s up with it other than they have some really dazzling batches of interns. It probably still remains the professional crown jewel in my career, though of course Tumblr and Soundcloud are more famous. For several years I harbored half-baked notions of buying it back or starting another agency but I think I’m over that now. I think the agency-client relationship is pretty broken these days, and you have to either be a production shop, which can still do well, or an ultra-high-end CMO/CEO consigliere, which I would love to do in theory, but I don’t think I would actually be that good at.
I’ve come to realize I am an economist in business, and economists are a) dumb, and b) wrong about how things actually work day-to-day. Keynes’ dictum that “in the long run we are all dead” touched on this tension, this dichotomy, this problem. But the thing that Keynes contributed that probably proves the point more conclusively is his utter failure as a PE investor and stock trader (though he did okay with the King’s College endowment).Being not an idiot, Keynes eventually realized that being an economist only marginally helped his stock investing habits, at best.
So it is with economists trying to be CEOs. I’m often right on paper, in the abstract, in the long term. But my inability to recognize idiocy in the market is bottomless. I cannot fathom companies and humans who do not act in their long-term self interest. I’ve lost my keen ability I had at Barbarian of understanding the short-term motivations of our clients. At Barbarian I understood that, often, our brief was simply to “get the CMO a new job.” But these days, I’m constantly, constantly surprised at companies inability to make long-term optimal decisions, especially in the face of, erm, shall we say, imperfect markets. In the Fisher (Fisherian?) sense.
I think about this a lot these days.
Emma and I were talking about school bus drivers. Apparently the county next door is having trouble finding school bus drivers, so 3,000 of the kids are going to arrive late to school. So we looked it up and a bus driver there starts at $31,000 and you gotta work, like, 5 AM to, like 10, then take four hours off or so, then work 2:30 or whatever to 5:30 or 6ish. All times are approximate but we went and looked at the county’s recruiting page and they seem broadly right. Super long break in the middle of the day, where you could, I dunno, be a Zendesk ticket clearer or an Uber driver or something. For minimum wage. This all seems great in a down economy but these days… why would anyone want this job. This state is so stingy. I’ve lived in five states, this state pays bus drivers $31k, the other four are four of the top five highest paying states for bus drivers. The town I grew up in has the third highest-paid bus drivers in America, and the highest starting wage of bus drivers anywhere: $55k. That’s not too bad. I would almost do that job for $55k. It’s average salary is just shy of $66k.
Anyway this got us thinking: what is the life of a bus driver like? How bad are the kids? What do they do with that time between shifts? I would read a book about this. And then this got me thinking, I would read a book about almost any job. Not a manual, but a memoir. Two of my favorite books are Lab Girl and Hack. Do you know any good memoirs of pedestrian jobs? Preferably by women but I’ll take anything.
We got a “toolkit” from Jane’s school, which is a PDF of links to things like the academic calendar, information on the school safety company (ugh), curriculum and the like. But can I just say, my god, there are so many typos. And that’s coming from me. I am not a typo pedant at all, quite the opposite. But c’mon man, you’re a school for crying out loud. Several words that should be hyphenated are not hyphenated. Someone typed entire documents with two spaces after the periods like it is 1970. I can’t unsee that. Also there are several double-spaces between words, within sentences. It’s really pretty painful. I mean, I mean I guess this stuff does not mean in any way they can’t teach a kid kindergarten, but it really does make you wonder.
Emma took Jane to her kindergarten evaluation yesterday and of course her vocabulary was stellar and the woman complimented Emma on it. Jane said it was all easy and she only made a single mistake, saying a capital I was a lowercase L (or vice-versa, it was unclear). She said they had a talk but she wouldn’t really tell us what they talked about, which is interesting and a mystery. She drew a picture of herself with an emoji speech bubble and roy the cat. What will all of this get her in the selection of Kindergarten and our hope of getting the “good” teacher?
Who knows. Probably nothing.
W Hotel playlist in a better, alternate universe for you today, and thank you to my ex-Barbarian (see?) friend Mike, who is the latest GMHHAY reader to send in a recording of the music in the lobby of a W Hotel thus empirically proving that my playlists are better and they should hire me. Keep em coming people, you are doing good work.
Talk tomorrow keep up the good work you’re doing just great.
I came across a comment on Reddit recently that was in response to someone's query about how to afford childcare. The guy had quit his corporate job and started driving a school bus for his kid's school so that he'd be home when the kid was home (including snow days etc.) So that's a thing.