Standing on the edge of the ditch

Sep13

In a sense, my father, who once cried about the murders of our family but always denied its relevance to our lives, was right. I never stood, nor did anyone I ever knew, on the edge of a ditch waiting for a murderer’s bullet. Not when I was an eight year-old with a terrifying imagination and first learned of it did I actually stand on the edge of a ditch with the rest of the family waiting for the order to lie down and be shot. Much less fifty years later when I am that much closer to my own natural end, after standing beside the open graves of loved ones many times now.

To be truthful, these things happened thirteen years before I was even born. I’ve never been machine gunned, or shot with even a small caliber gun, never been tied up with ropes or even been hungry for more than a few hours. For crying out loud, I’ve never even been whipped in the face or beaten bloody. My father took the manly stance that his dramatic young son was just sniveling, looking for pity in the echoes of the murder of our family back in some far away Ukrainian hellhole more than twenty years earlier. Some of us never get over anything, it would seem.

If I’d been a Black kid it would have been the fucking slave ships I’d have been whining about, the millions crowded below decks in airless holds, chained, driven insane, thrown to sharks if they grew too indignant. Then I’d have been worked up about the hundreds of years when I could have been sold, whipped, sodomized like any flesh robot you could own. It wouldn’t have soothed me to hear that life here for the former slaves was better after the Civil War, or that not millions, only thousands, of former slaves were ever beaten, raped or killed for being indignant. And probably less than ten thousand, total, who were ever burned to death or hung from trees while crowds laughed and whooped and had picnics, sold body parts and photos as souvenirs.

My father would have said “for Christ’s sake, son, they put those Klansmen on trial in Mississippi for what they done to those boys down in Meriden. The country is changing, for the better, it has changed a lot in your lifetime.” It would have been peevish to tell him only one of the murderers of those Civil Rights workers would ever see the inside of a jail cell. Or that sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation, schools would be as segregated as at the height of Jim Crow. Hindsight, you know what they say about it.

“Is this really what you are thinking about at 4:36 a.m.?” asks a concerned voice.

“No, not at all. I was thinking about this hours ago, but couldn’t shut off that great documentary about how they did the animated life of Graham Chapman I’d seen earlier…”

“Drawing again, I heard the scratching of your pens….”

“Yes, Sekhnet wandered in like a zombie, saw the animation on TV, looked at the drawings on the couch and said ‘Oh, God, he’s generating more papers…'”

“You can see her point.”

“Yes, I can certainly see her point. These twenty thousand fucking drawings are a plague. I do myself no favor drawing them. But listen, do you mind if I get back to what I was thinking about?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

It was an accident of birth, and dumb good timing, to be born in a place and era when I was not forced to lie face down on top of dead bodies and wait for a bullet to end my life, as all of my grandparents’ families were. Pure luck not to be living in a 2014 slum without sewers or any kind of toilets, where babies die by the truckloads from ragingly contagious excrement borne diseases that basic sanitation prevents. Good fortune not be born in a place where children are dragged from their homes and forced to kill, or are ‘collateral damage’ statistics in drone attacks, or fated to live in neighborhoods where human predators attack, or if the criminals don’t get you the cops will. A blessed accident of birth to be born wearing this face instead of one that invites real kicks and blows. The kicks and blows I receive are gentle indeed compared to real ones.

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” [1] The pains we are given to deal with are painful enough for each of us, unbearable sometimes, though they’re not as painful as many more terrible things countless people are enduring at this very moment. It doesn’t give us perspective, sadly, not to be standing on the edge of a ditch waiting for the order to fall in and be executed. In a sense we are all standing on the edge of a ditch in a world where ditches for mass graves are dug all the time.

“Take this shovel, dig a hole deep as you want to be buried and stop crying and farting about it,” is about the worst thing any of us can hear. In that childhood nightmare where Nazis in storm trooper uniforms were slicing through the screen of the back porch of our house to get at us I remember thinking “a lot of good those screens did” a second before I woke up with my heart pounding in terror.

That no idea, no matter how good or well-presented, can be sold in the marketplace of ideas without properly calculated marketing? A female mosquito landing on your shoulder for a drink. That unscripted candor has no place in a salesman’s pitch? Please. That’s as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that may vary, according to circumstance, history and financial situation. The world is just the world, although it is not always easy to keep perspective when the world is chanting something loudly and continuously enough to drown out all other thought.

They were apparently banging drums and making a racket on the hill by the ravine to the north of Vishnevets those days in August 1943, to mask the cries and other sounds of the massacre. The noise of the drums and lusty screaming, as you can imagine, was a fearful sound to the remaining ragged, starving citizens of Vishnevets, waiting their turn at the lip of the ravine.

The world of competitive commerce and war constantly and insistently beats the drums, to drown out the silence that might lead to forgetting about the drumbeat of commerce and war and allowing people to recall matters of a deeper nature, to gain a more humane perspective.

It’s possible, I suppose, that these two lusty drummings are only comparable in the mind of a madman. Then again, many things in our world are the work of madmen.

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Flick My Bic

Sep11

Back when cigarette smoking was much more prevalent, still cool and not as sneered upon by society, there was a commercial often shown in movie theaters, oddly enough. Before the movie started you’d have a jolly ad designed to drive you to the concession stand to buy fantastically expensive drinks, popcorn and candy.

Then, in a quick companion commercial, two Bic lighters would walk stiffly up to each other on the giant screen, poised like two rectangular plastic erections. As each spoke the top of their metallic head would burst into flame. The ad’s tagline was a jaunty “flick my Bic!”, and the distinct cadence of “suck my dick!” was not lost on any of the fifth grade boys in the audience.

I think not of the geniuses who came up with that memorable ad campaign but of the French genius capitalist who first realized you don’t need to make fine products that people will own with pride and take care of. His breakthrough, which led to a vast fortune, was understanding that you could make a lot more money selling cheap disposable plastic pieces of shit to people increasingly addicted to convenience.

Bic pens, a revolutionary skipping ballpoint refill in a clear plastic tube, were crap, sold by the billions, used briefly and simply tossed into landfill — no problem. Bic later made disposable razors, sold a billion of them in no time. Ditto the Bic you could flick, hold up flaming at the end of the concert to ask for an encore — when its fuel was done, toss it into the gutter. You could flick all the Bics, actually. Soon every capitalist in competition with Bic was making disposable products out of the cheapest plastic they could find — the race was on. Sixty years later it’s hard to buy a pen, or anything else, that’s not disposable.

The philosophy was incredibly simple, liberating and lucrative. Use the disposable piece of crap a few times and don’t worry about it — no need to refill or reuse it — just toss it in the garbage when it’s done and take the next brand new one from the pack. Life is too short to be sentimental or worry about a future featuring millions of tons of indestructible plastic in landfills and oceans, or the loss of a sense of design, craft or pride in one’s product!

I would like to go back in a time machine to meet this genius, Marcel Bich, in much the same way, when I was ten, I used to fantasize about meeting Hitler. Not to shake his hand, you understand.

The old Brooklyn baseball fan’s dilemma: you are in an elevator with Stalin, Hitler and Walter O’Malley, the guy who moved the Dodgers from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to LA. You have a gun with only two bullets, what do you do?

Answer: shoot O’Malley twice, make sure he’s dead.

Unfair joke, really, since it turns out O’Malley did everything possible to keep the team in Brooklyn — he got screwed by Robert Moses, an evil bastard who probably deserves to be in that elevator more than O’Malley does — and finally took the team to greener pastures in Los Angeles rather than give in to Moses and relocate to Queens.

But I digress, and although it’s probably just as unfair to blame Marcel Bich for the devastation his billion dollar idea led to, I can only say:

Fleek my Beek, Baron Bich.

from Wolfgang Saxon’s 1994 NY Times obit:

Baron Marcel Bich, whose inexpensive Bic disposable pens, lighters and razors made him wealthy enough to sustain an 11-year quest for the America’s Cup, died on Monday in Paris. He was 79 and lived in suburban Neuilly-sur-Seine.

After fixing up a leaky shed in Clichy, a northern Paris suburb, after World War II, Baron Bich and a partner, Edouard Buffard, began turning out inexpensive penholders and pencil cases. Later he obtained the patent rights to a ball-point pen invented by a Hungarian, Ladislas Biro, and formed Societe Bic in 1953. (The baron’s name and the pen’s are pronounced beek in French.)

The inexpensive pens proved irresistible to consumers, beginning with the French. The corporation rapidly expanded, with factories in many countries turning out billions of pens sold singly or by the carton. Later he produced disposable razors and lighters. Annual Sales of $1.1 Billion

Fair Play

Sep2

My sister, raised in the same war zone I came up in, vowed that her children would not grow up to be fearful people. Her conscious goal was to instill confidence and agency in them. They both seem to be doing fine in that regard.

She expressed the great terror she felt recently blinking at the prestigious job offered to her daughter through the lens of learned maternal fear. She reported that her “fear-based” worldview left her paralyzed, nauseated, blinded to the many auspicious facts about this prestigious job offer. I reminded her of her goal with her kids and how it seems to have worked out well. I predicted her daughter would do fine in that 100 year-old Florida magnet school with the award winning jazz band and debating team, that they wouldn’t have offered her the job if they didn’t intend for her to succeed.

“I want to thank you so much for what you said the the other day. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me.” I told her that anyone looking at the facts, and knowing her, could have said the same. Apparently nobody did. I was glad my comment made her feel good.

We commiserated about how aggravating, and gallingly common, it is not to have even a cursory response to something we’d put time and effort into.

“I don’t know how you can continue to do what you are doing, with no pay and, especially, with no appreciation for the hard work you do,” she told me sympathetically, before promising to look over the last few things I sent her, particularly the curriculum, and give me some feedback.

“I have a day off tomorrow and I’ll check gmail and look at what you sent me, and I’ll send you my two cents,” she said.

That’s what she said, a couple of days ago.

The possibility that most of them are sadists

Aug26

On his deathbed he expressed tormented regrets, spoke for the first time of things he’d found impossible to talk about, tried to make his peace. “I must have been insane to believe I was doing something good when I machine gunned those people into that ditch. I pray that God will forgive me, for that one, at least,” he said.

“You did the best you could,” his son said, “God will understand.” He gave the old man some water. “Besides, since when do you believe in God?”

“It’s not God so much I believe in now, but justice. It seems impossible that there is no reckoning for the bad things we do here.”

“It is our pain that makes us do the bad things we do here,” said the son.

“Pain also brings forth the best of some people,” the dying man observed sadly.

The son nodded, heard the rest of the old man’s unspeakable confession. He listened with special attention to the detailed apology for the years of truly regrettable cruelty to his own family. Knowing that death was about the dying man’s needs and not his own, he mildly told him he would have done better if he could, closed the old man’s eyes after the dying man breathed his last.

At the time he thought of this belated conversation as a blessing to both of them. Years later he realized the blessing had probably been much greater for the old man, being forgiven and let off the hook as he opened up, for the first and last time, to express his regrets for the pain he’d caused. He’d given the man an easier death. “Why was I so mild, letting the old killer off the hook?” he sometimes wondered.

Eventually the son looked at patterns in his own life, questioning his largely unnoticed attempts to be mild above all else. Mildness is easily mistaken for passivity, which is widely hated in a competitive society where people are judged largely on their ambition and accomplishments in the marketplace. He wondered if he’d been unconsciously attracted to people like his father, collected as his friends a group of unrepentant sadists who would possibly be filled with regret on their deathbeds, but not a moment sooner. Had he surrounded himself with smiling but angry friends who were the least equipped of anyone to understand his desire to be mild, the first to point out what a pussy he was when he got in a tight spot and resisted lashing out, as any self-respecting person would?

“It’s an oversimplification to call us sadists,” said the dead man from his grave. “Do you think we derive pleasure from defending ourselves and our righteousness at all costs? It’s a reflex to protect ourselves, first and foremost. It’s not about sadistically taking it out on our victims, for our pleasure. We feel they would have done it to us if we didn’t strike first, so we hit them hard to keep them off balance. It’s paranoia, maybe, but not necessarily sadism. The entire pleasure, if any, is in not being victimized again. Plus, we are completely overwhelmed by our own demons, it’s not about others, it’s about us.”

The son was sick of hearing the dead man’s opinions, but they had to be considered nonetheless. “On the Asperger’s spectrum is probably a better way to think of some of them. A chap who calls to report on and get solace about his problems but seldom inquires about his friend’s troubles. ‘Ah, but your troubles are well known!’ he’ll exclaim, full of bonhomie, then back to his recitation, the reason he called.”

“I have to talk to you, at least you listen,” one tells him, “nobody else lets me talk. Do you have any idea how painful it is not be be listened to?”

“I never worry about you,” says another, truthfully, but oddly nonetheless.

There was one with a great sense of humor, an unappreciated person of great talent with an even greater need to be right, who decided the best course, when he was trying to be funny, was to look at him with a slightly disgusted expression and slowly shake her head. Why laugh at his attempts to make her feel better when it was so much easier, and so much more satisfying, to make him feel like an asshole? Nobody ever gave her anything.

He was able, without rancor, to shed the most destructive of these old friends when the time came to cut the ties. No need to curse or express disappointment, it was a rational act of delayed self-preservation. If a friend acts consistently hurtfully, is unrepentant and ignores requests not to behave that way, it is time to take your leave. Wish them well and head for the door. Few will wrap their arms around your legs as you go, experience teaches that their pride always prevents this.

As a result of being more selective in his friendships, there were days when the only voices he heard were his own, often asking himself out loud who the hell he was talking to, and the dead father’s voice. It was a heck of way to take a vacation, but better than fighting, he reasoned.

He could see the old man as a strong young man, setting up his machine gun, hear him cursing the people he was about to shoot, and going about his business feeling quite justified. “These people were scum, they’d have done the same to me in a second, if they could have,” he said, acrid smoke hanging in the air, his accomplices shoveling soil into the ditch.

Seven Miles from home, New York City Style

Aug24

We spent a lovely day yesterday visiting friends 41 miles (according to the trip odometer) north of here. The ride back was quick and uneventful, until, 7 or 8 miles from home, the hungry cat waiting for his hours’ overdue dinner, the snappy 82 mile roundtrip turned into an exercise in something else.

Brake lights, as far as the eye could see, with the lights of the bridge tolls in sight. Construction on the bridge, why not do it at 10:00 on a Saturday night? This is NY, the attitude is “fuck ’em,” and so they did.

We might have known about it in time to take another route (although a sign on the highway had warned us of construction and delays on the alternate Whitestone), but the device that runs the app that warns us of traffic nightmares was out of power, no car charger with us. As we sat in the mass of idling cars the other navigational device kept cheerfully chirping out its instructions, in an Australian accent. “Continue straight, to toll, then enter Throgs Neck Bridge,” he said again, as Sekhnet struggled to figure out how to mute him. At 10:17, when we stopped, we were 0.4 miles from the toll. The traffic report on the radio was spectacularly short on specifics as we sat among the gas breathing cars.

By 10:30 we’d inched about 0.1 a mile. Announcing this annoyed Sekhnet, who said nothing at first, but snarled when I made the same announcement at 10:40– ten minutes, another 0.1 of a mile. A quick calculation revealed that we were not actually stopped, but traveling at a peppy one mile an hour. We’d be through the toll by 11:00 at that rate, I thought conservatively. But the estimate turned out to have been optimistic, as the several right lanes unaccountably continued moving and merging in front of our stalled lane (the two right lanes on the bridge were closed, we were in the lane that was open– go figure). We didn’t pass through the tolls until 11:30. It took about ninety minutes, with five or six lanes merging to two, and then one, before we reached the point on the bridge where the lanes reopened and traffic spread out and resumed at 55 mph.

Less than ten minutes later we were home, the cat eating with great gusto as each of us hurried off to a bathroom.

Clever Marketing is the Key to Success

Aug15

Sekhnet came up to urge me to join every social media site linking businesses that I can find. I am isolated and it is an increasing problem, especially for someone trying to run a shop and attract customers. She showed me the social networking entry for an accomplished man we know, an angel investor on a site where these entrepreneurs mingle looking for opportunities. She showed me how clearly he laid out his interests, qualifications and expertise. She urged me to do the same, to advance my stalled not-for-profit business. I agreed that she was right about the usefulness of joining more sites where I might meet like-minded people, then read her part of the email I’d spent the past hour writing.

I’d been led to pet one of my favorite peeves by my friend’s emailed, on target, comment:

(“You spend way too much time petting your peeves,” Sekhnet observed.)

I’ve grown more and more bitter over the fact that nothing succeeds on its own merits–that whatever makes it in our world, does so because someone has packaged and sold it cleverly. Which helps to explain why we end up, in the culture, in our food, in our politics, with so much rancid shit.

Well said and I share the bitterness, though I try (mostly without success) not to let it stop me. A sociologist who wrote in the 1930s (Harold Lasswell, I think) whose work I read decades ago while researching Hitler’s rise to power and how ruthlessly Herr H. used the mass media to influence public opinion and promote his famously rancid ideas, concluded that “the religion of the United States is advertising”. He proclaimed this self-evident truth before TV, in the infancy of radio, when the mass media was being cranked out and printed on pages that were disseminated by child hawkers on street corners. He described how American industry sent Polish immigrants back to Poland to unfurl giant painted banners of American streets literally paved with gold and lie to the workers they fronted steerage tickets for to bring to work in factories. Greek Americans went to Greece, Italians to Italy, wherever they were recruiting they sent native recruiters to lie in the mother tongue. Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information was run by an ad man named George Creel who whipped up patriotic fervor for a war being fought by the rest of the world in muddy trenches along the lines of the worst of the Civil War, except made even more hellish by the addition of machine guns, poison gas and airplanes. There were parades in the streets and long lines at the recruiters because of Creel’s genius in whipping up support for WIlson’s senseless (except to those who made a killing) War to End War, War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, War for Fuck You We’ll Kill You Under the Espionage Act For Trying to Use the First Amendment in Time of War to Aid Our Enemies, You Fucking Traitor!

The rulers of our society have always ruled by selling lies to people raised from infancy on advertising jingles and tag lines. By the time kids are ten they’ve done their Gladwell’s 10,000 hours quota of commercials on TV, they are masters of being marketed to. Presidential debates and elections? Decided by image, body language, sound bites. A few years ago promising presidential candidate Howard Dean lost his political future by cackling euphorically into a microphone at a rally. Might have had good reason to be euphoric at that moment, he was leading in all the polls, but they played the 3 second clip of a cackling madman 24/7 until he was toast. It’s despicable what greed and cynical marketing have done to the world and it explains much of the misery, disease and early death. Capitalism is a cancer and the only cure, it would appear, is the total destruction of life on earth, which they are well on their way to accomplishing. God bless ’em. But in this context, in our competitive free market society, there is only one way to successfully sell an idea– the old fascist way, the single-minded way Mr. Hitler had such brutal insight into, to put the most distasteful possible gloss on the gentle and perfectly neutral art of persuasion. Trying to do it without retching, not always easy for the squeamish.

Sekhnet told me I should clean it up, lose the ending, and send it to the Nation as a letter or note, that people would be interested in the little history I’d presented, that I write these great things and never send them anywhere to find an audience for them.

“Did you ever read the Nation?” I asked her. She hadn’t for a long time, but knew their politics and thought their readers would appreciate a letter to the editor containing this well presented information.

I appreciate her feelings, I really do, and her desire to help. Motivated by love, and my best interests, and an understandable desire to see me step forward in the sticky muck. She agreed that it wouldn’t do to send it in without cleverly packaging it, somehow, and relating it smartly to some current hot topic, the hook. The irony was not lost on me, though I took the way of the world and said nothing about it.

Then her native optimism and desire to help rose up again– the stories of a Big Lie are so common that I won’t have long to wait until the next news cyclone generated by one, and I can send it in then!

Meantime, I do the online equivalent of printing it out, rolling it up and sticking it where the sun don’t shine.

Son of Duh!

Aug12

On August 6th I discovered that one can upload a video into Google Drive and easily embed the link on a website, as I did here on August 6th. This way it’s possible to show a video on your website without everybody instantly seeing on youTube that it has not begun to go viral.

It is a neat workaround, since on youTube disabling ‘make video statistics visible on the watch page’ does not seem to make video statistics invisible on the watch page.

I’ve spent several hours today, on four computers, on macs and my PC, trying to recreate the simple step of cutting out an embed code for a video uploaded to Google Drive. If I hadn’t done it so easily here, on August 6th, I’d think I dreamed it. You can click on the link to Animation by several creative adults to see what I’m talking about.

Google has a helpful link posted on the help subject of embedding a video from Google Drive. It takes you to a forum, begun in 2012 and extending to the present, where frustrated users complain bitterly about the lack of functionality while others try to find semi-satisfying workarounds to this perplexing situation.

If it’s not the humans, forgetting to wash their asses for days on end, and insisting on dancing vigorously in the tiny, airless room, it’s the humans who program the computers, or the computers themselves, or the companies who hire the humans who do these things, or don’t.

The Psychology of Self-Motivation

Aug10

I watched this promisingly named TED talk with great appetite just now. Finding the secret to self-motivation would do wonders for me as I try to stay focused on pushing this heavy, maddeningly successful but even more maddeningly unsold, program up the hill. It will succeed or fail as a program and business based on my self-motivation, based on how well I learn to confidently and succinctly package and sell it. It all depends, now, on my salesmanship. Salesmanship which I must learn on my own, without dependable feedback, except for one or two people by email.

I watched the excellent presentation by an engaging psychology professor. During the course of a snappy talk, illustrated by paradiddles, rim shots and other stages of his long ago progress on the snare drum, he reveals the secret: acquire competence by getting good feedback, be encouraged by encouragement, encourage others, avoid the fear of failure and replace it with the desire to succeed because you like what you’re doing, be part of a community of people who give good feedback and encouragement.

Fuck.

Thanks, professor.

Four Cruel and Predictable Koans

Jun28

While walking a man paused periodically to scrawl these in a small book.

Do you hear the man on the plunging plane exhorting his fellow passengers, with no oxygen mask on himself, to put their oxygen masks on before trying to help other passengers?

In that same man’s defense: he’s excellent at several different hobbies.

Wishful thinking makes no more than a wish.

Stopping to note a thing doesn’t make it noteworthy.

The Customer is alw…, well, can sometimes be… uh, can I get back to you?

Jun20

“How can I help you?”

“Well, first, I’d like to access the remaining 5.5 ethics credits I bought from you two years ago,” I say.

“OK, so how many do you need for this cycle?” he asks, drawing his calculator close to figure his commission.

“Before we get to that, I’d like to access the 5.5 credits I already purchased from you. It says in the email you sent me just now ‘Credits Never Expire!’ and I haven’t been allowed to access the remainder of the 12 ethics credits I bought from you.”

“Well, that actually means per two year cycle, but I can see how you could read it that way.”

“It’s not possible to read ‘Credits Never Expire!’ any other way, it’s kind of unambiguous,” I say to my Dedicated CLE Manager.

“Well, in the future it will be specified more clearly what is meant, they’re going to make that more clear…”

“‘Credits Never Expire!’ with an exclamation point and the word ‘never’ in bold, they’re going to explain what that actually means?” I clarify, bitchily, “if I log on and am informed that the remaining credits I purchased, the ones that never expire, are not available to me, you would have to call that false advertising, wouldn’t you?”

At this point he realizes he’s talking to some disgruntled smart ass lawyer who will insist on the supposed plain meaning of the advertising claim that appears, in this guy’s stilted reading, not to be true. False advertising is such a harsh thing to accuse somebody of. Untruthful, or inartfully drafted advertising is not lying, per se, or if it is, why is that my problem? I don’t write the copy. I only get paid when I sell these credits to these lawyers forced to take these courses every two years. What’s he going to argue about next? Riveting Course Content!? These wildly entertaining lectures on the mechanics of legal work are not riveting enough for him? Give me a fucking break.

“Let me get back to you,” he says. “Give me five minutes to get this straightened out.” I know I should have better things to do, and many larger fish to fry at the moment, as another CLE speaker drones on in another window on this computer I’m pecking at, but I can’t help but notice that promise was made more than twenty-five minutes ago and the clock is creeping toward 5 pm on a Friday. I wonder idly what it is that he is straightening out.

“So strict!” they are thinking, “you are so STRICT!!! You really should get a life and be happier, it’s not possible to be healthy being so strict!”

I call back, am asked my name, when I give my name I’m told my Dedicated CLE Manager is assisting another customer and this friendly fellow walks me through the log-in and assures me that my 5.5 credits have been restored. I can’t see them until I try to use them, he tells me, but my account at least is not showing up the way it did when last I checked. Thanks all around and I get on to other things. A moment later the phone rings. My Dedicated CLE Manager, apparently having asked his colleague “did the asshole sound mad?” He got the all clear, we had a pleasant 20 second chat, told each other to take care and on with the rest of today’s fun already in progress.