I’m here to announce that there’s clearly no point to any of this. Can we collude to find a way to end life as we know it? As a species we are incapable of doing things right, even if we want to.
(Note: Republicans don’t want to. Nelson Rockefeller isn’t rolling in his grave; he’s digging it deeper to assure that he can’t come up again. I keep emailing Mitch McConnell that after he’s dead, if he’s in his grave and it seems sunny but he feels rain, that’s me pissing on him. It’s the only reason I’d go to the Dark And Bloody Ground, which my elementary school self was taught that was what Kentucky meant.)
OK, OK, I’m done venting. Brace yourselves. This isn’t going to be pretty.
1. Epidural Hoo-Haw. As some of you know, I’ve been laid siege to by a rare condition called epidural lipomatosis. It happens when fat presses against one’s spinal cord. Rather embarrassing, but my GP, aka Sundance Rogers, assures me that it’s not my fault. Obese people can mitigate the condition by losing weight. I’ve never been definitionally obese, but I’ve lost 14 pounds anyway with no respite from the excruciating pain, which, somehow, goes away immediately when I sit down. I do a lot of sitting down. (Recalls the old joke: “Doctor, it hurts when I stand up.” “Well, don’t stand up.”)
The docs said that even with this rare condition, I’m in an especially rare subset in that I have no pain, tingling, numbness etc, etc, in my buttocks or legs. I don’t, not a bit. They keep asking me over and over if I have pain there, because, for some mystical reason, if I did, surgery might be a good idea. Right now, no. Go ask them, I have no idea.
At the end, after appointment after appointment, I finally had an interview with an actual surgeon, after nearly a year of trying to cure myself—acupuncture and laser therapy mean nothing, and this condition chides opioids. He began by asking, “So, I understand that you have a lot of pain and tingling in your legs?”
No. No, I do not. Why doesn’t he know that? It should be all over other doctors’ notes. Jesus Christ.
2. Haircut. I’ve been seeing this nice woman for a number of years. She gave Kate her first haircut. She’s a gregarious and empathic woman and I guess a reasonably competent hair stylist; she has a long list of clients, so I have to make my appointments two months out.
This last time that I walked in and sat down, she gazed at my hair and said, “Oh, you sweep your hair off to the side like that? I’ve been trying to give you bangs!”
She’s given me at least 100 haircuts.
3. Group Management Division. When I was at AIG, I was coerced into providing counsel to an orphan group—no lawyers wanted anything to do with them--called the Group Management Division. As near as I could tell, they made most of their money by selling group life insurance to groups of third party nationals: say, Spaniards working in Argentina. Spain didn’t regulate our coverage because the Spaniards weren’t in Spain. Argentina didn’t care what we did because these people weren’t Argentines.
Our insurance could do bugger all and no one cared. This is not a unit of the company to root for. No one did. Its head, a slimy guy called Greg Something, who took his wedding ring off for an official photo, averred once, I’m told, “George LIKES to work for GMD.” No, Greg, George did not.
This is a perfect example of the question of why should we try to do anything when it’s all so incompetent and dirty as hell. But the dereliction of duty goes on.
I notionally shared the legal work for them with a lawyer for the international life insurance company. One day I had to review an agreement—who knows, maybe they were working with a third party administrator. So I dutifully trotted the agreement around the corner to an Englishman who worked for the international company and dropped a copy off for him to review. He sat bolt upright as he (and I suppose the English) generally do.
“This isn’t within my purview,” he said.
I kept suggesting reasons why he needed to review the agreement, and he kept countering with nonsense—I was already reviewing it, he didn’t do GMD work, I don’t even recall.
Finally, I remember that we were out in the street heading for a lunch, and I said, “David, if you’d have spent as much time reviewing this agreement as you have trying to come up with reasons why you don’t have to, you’d be done by now.”
It was so, so AIG.
4. Lexis®. Also at AIG, we had quarterly meetings in New York of all of the regional legal offices—Wilmington (me), Boston, Greensboro NC, Jersey City, Greenwich, I don’t know. The meetings illustrated the title of this post. The General Counsel, Wayland Mead, who was as much an old white male sonuvabitch as you can imagine (slightly portly, greying hair brushed back, smug, well-tended veneer), went around the room calling on us to say what we did that quarter. (Wayland once smirked Trumply when my buddy Tim Slattery announced in a really passive-aggressive way that HIS subsidiary had recently paid a dividend of $30 million to the parent.)
Oh my god, what a waste of time. This guy named Marty from the Boston office one day literally paused, then said, “I filed an endorsement.” Yes, many American jobs are useless make-work functions. There’s been some press about this.
One day, Marty’s boss, Rachel, said that the business people had developed a piece of software that they were going to name “Lexis.” Any lawyer who didn’t leap out of his/her chair had to be asleep, and some of them were. Lexis back then anyway was a well-known and much-used legal research tool owned and trademarked by someone else.
“Rachel, I don’t know about that,” Wayland Mead intoned. He mumbled something vague about trademarks. It was typical that the company’s trademark lawyer wasn’t there.
Rachel shrugged and shook her head, the very picture of resignation. “Well, that’s what the business people want to do.”
There may have been another exchange or two between Rachel and Mead until he muttered, “Rachel, please see me after the meeting.”
Really? I know from experience that the AIG business people just ran over Legal, either shouting at us, threatening our jobs, or just ignoring us, but, wow, passing on an obvious trademark violation? Why was Rachel bothering coming to the office? Usually those meetings were as quiet as the Bar exam, but that day the sniggering continued into lunch.
5. The Cleveland Indians Baseball Club.
Let’s save the best for last, though a theory from a lawyer friend makes this sound more cynical than a matter of incompetence.
So the “Cleveland Indians”, under nationwide pressure, finally decided to dump Chief Wahoo, associated logos, and the Indians name and do something new and less offensive. (Paying attention, “Atlanta Braves”?)
So they came up with “Cleveland Guardians.” I didn’t understand the origin of the name till I saw that there are two big thick concrete columns, um, guarding the entrance to Cleveland in one direction. OK, great! Nice idea! I was holding out for the “Spiders”, Cleveland’s team’s name way back in the 1800’s. But good.
Except. It turns out that the name is already in use by a male roller blading team. (Who knew that men did that, even?) My favorite sports blog, Deadspin.com, wrote a funny post about it—didn’t maybe an intern, an assistant someone, a vice president, maybe even the CEO, take five seconds to type the name into a Google search? NOW what?
It seems the height of complete, flabbergasting incompetence. My first reaction was that the incident would be perfect for this post. I sent the story out to some of my lawyer friends, and one of them burst my bubble. They knew, she said; they just brought in an accountant and he (of course it was a he; no woman would endorse this) did a cost-benefit analysis and figured that the roller blading team would take a few dollars to go away.
Oh. She’s right, of course. So the change to this particular name wasn’t born out of sheer incompetence, which at least would be adorable and charming but instead dirty cynical maneuvering.
(Fittingly, this very nice lawyer is the niece of Dave McNally, the Orioles 20-game winner from the late 60’s/early 70’s. I knew her maybe fifteen years ago with no contact since, but her daughter and mine have somehow become fast friends, a wonderful coincidence, and we’re in touch again. Well, there’s a bright spot in this blog, anyway.)
I think it's odd, though, that the Cleveland baseball team hasn't said anything that I'm aware of that explains how they decided to use a name already claimed by the roller skating team. Maybe there is no answer: either we're incompetent or we're viciously cynical. No winner. But when they chose the name, didn't they understand what might happen tomorrow? And then shrugged away the consequences? Who's in charge of these goofballs?
Hmmm. Now I wonder if human endeavor’s futility is more to be enjoyed, shrugged at, endured, shared amongst friends who all knew that they’d do a better job than bullying a bunch of guys on skates.
Nevertheless, I think my point is clearly made by these widely disparate events. Let’s just burn it all down and have a nice big whiskey amidst the ashes. Or, less apocalyptic and more tolerant, quit expecting anything good to happen. Whilst enjoying the whiskey. Make mine a Balvenie. A double.
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