Call Me. Please!

I get it. I really get it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s right.

I carry a Blackberry everywhere and use it to review emails all day and night. When I forget to put it on silent mode it buzzes at me all night like a dog asking to go out for walk. At 3 in the morning I might get up to turn it off – but not before checking to make sure I haven’t missed anything while sleeping, of course.

Sounds like an addiction but think of how productive I am! I arrive in the office in the morning and all the emails from the night before are cleaned up. Swept up. My work area is spotless and polished and ready to roll.

In addition to the crackberry, I carry an iPhone for longer emails or documents. The screen is larger and clearer and I can do quick internet searches. I can also take pictures. I love photographing food. After all I might be stranded on a desert isle some day and I’ll need to dream about some good meals. Assuming I remember to bring the chargers, of course.

A laptop sits on the desk at home, a computer on the desk at work in my offices in Stamford and Houston. These are faster than the handhelds and good for reading long documents or spreadsheets. On trips I leave the laptop behind; I hate taking it out at airports and lugging it around all day. And as my vision dims and my shoulders begin to resemble Cro Magnon Man – computer hump, they call it – I try to cut back on “screen time” as well. Computers seems so, well, last century if you know what I mean.

But while I may not like computers, I can’t live without them!

I tweet occasionally, send out an annoying video card once in a while, and forward those execrable jokes that a friend sends me once a day. All of this falls in the category of expanding the horizons of education, for myself and others. The internet is a vast classroom. Not all classes are worth taking, some have bad teachers, but there’s something for everybody and a world of knowledge to acquire. And the health classes aren’t half bad either!

When my father sends me an historical essay, I forward that too. In fact, I run something like a virtual post office on my computer, stuffing the PO boxes of friends with appropriate junk mail that comes in by the truckload every day. What I don’t read or forward I shred like junk mail. (I love that sucking sound that “Empty Trash” makes when you delete a document; Apple users know what I’m talking about.)

When I’m in the car I talk on the car’s hand’s free device. This is to make sure I’m productive in those long drives to the office or to the City. And it’s safe: it’s one of our policies at MX: Must have hand’s free device.

Well, almost safe. As George Washington might say if he wrecked the family car, “I cannot tell a lie.” I also check emails from time to time and even text when I’m in a hurry. I know. It’s worse than drunken driving. It’s like trying to eat a bowl of pasta on the highway. While steering with two knees and balancing the bowl on the steering wheel. But I rationalize to myself that I am reducing the risk of a stress-induced heart attack even while I increase the risk of an accident. “Traffic on 95. Be there in 10. G2G.” I probably think the world would cease to revolve if I didn’t warn my next appointment I was running late. Not to mention that they might have to scrape me off the median strip.

And I text. Like a teenager. This also makes me productive. Quick, laconic instructions or comments, without any messy conversations. Maybe I don’t text 2,400 times a month – the average for school-age kids, according to a recent survey. But what I lose in quantity I make up in speed. You know how your mother used to complain, “You’re all thumbs!” Well, today it’s a virtue! I have ten thumbs and type like a squid on steroids. I would challenge any of our customers to a texting contest but it wouldn’t be fair to have them pay for my electricity for a year. I once typed 140 wpm on an old Underwood typewriter, pre-electric days. Sometimes the word processing program can’t keep up with me. Texting is a piece of cake.

The other day I was sitting in our living room at home and I saw a familiar sight. It was like seeing an old blanket on the couch. Or an old mug in the cupboard that’s followed me since college. It was black, curved, and had two ends with perforated holes. It sat in a cradle-like base and had a long coiled black wire that ran from one end to the base. It was a telephone.

My, my, I thought. What a novel idea. It’s probably been months since I picked that thing up. What if I called my friend in LA? And had a chat?

As I imagined the act of hitting the buttons and speaking into the receiver I had the annoying feeling of that coiled black wire getting in my way. I imagine the conversation. The irritating, time-consuming, endless exchange of pleasantries:

“How are the kids?"

“How’s work?"

“This unemployment sucks, doesn’t it?"

“When are they going to do something?”

“Are you going to the reunion?”

“What do you think of dem Yankees?”

“Mets, nah! You can have ‘em.”

“And what do you think of the election now? What? Election again? In November? Two months!”

“Damn , time goes fast.”

And on and on till the grass needs to be cut and the leaves clog the gutter and the snow covers the ground and the sand slips through the hour glass. Who has time for such things? Send a text!

But then I think: “What am I doing?!” When was the last time I curled up under that warm blanket? Filled that mug with hot cocoa? Talked to my friend in California?

I get it. It’s all about efficiency. About getting things done. Relieving anxiety. Increasing productivity. Expanding the frontiers of knowledge.

But then again…

 

Five Years Ago

Five years ago this Sunday Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and brought a nation together in grief and frustration.

The storm, one of the five deadliest in US history, set records for intensity as it tore through the Atlantic. After clipping the tip of Florida it entered the Gulf of Mexico. There it became the strongest hurricane ever measured, surpassed only by Rita a couple months later.

A Category 3 storm when it entered the Gulf, it grew in 9 hours to a Category 5 on August 28, with winds of 175 miles per hour. Fortunately it slowed before it reached the coast the next day.

The images from that day five years ago will long be with us. Curiously, most of the historic section of New Orleans escaped damage. Most of the city is below sea level and protected by a levee system from the rising waters of the Mississippi. But the hurricane, whose strong winds extended 120 miles from the center, bypassed the French Quarter and headed for the enormous lake that borders the city to the north, Lake Pontchartrain.

One might place Hurricane Katrina in a category of natural disasters, like the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, or the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 which swamped Indonesia, or the earthquakes in Japan.

But that would be a mistake. Because Katrina was as much a man-made disaster as a natural one. It is true that the genesis of the storm was meteorological. But mankind has weathered storms for millennia and has learned to prepare for them. Look at the levee system that protects Holland from the North Sea, the construction standards in LA, the flood barriers in the Venetian lagoon.

The damage from Katrina should have been mitigated by man-made preparations. It was not. It was actually made worse. Levees breached in 53 places, putting 80 percent of New Orleans under water. Some storm gates were never closed.

True, it was not possible to secure hundreds of miles of coastline. Mississippi and Alabama were also hit and of course there were no levees there. But most of the damage fell on the beleaguered delta. 1,577 people in Louisiana perished with 135 remaining missing. 238 died in Mississippi.

As if the storm’s damage were not shocking enough, the nation’s inept response was even more discouraging. This is where the frustration comes in. I can understand the breakdown in communications and services in the immediate aftermath of the storm. It was heartrending to see families suffering for days in the sweltering, unsanitary conditions of New Orleans’ Convention Hall. Or lying in the hot sun on the bridge.

Recently on a business trip to New Orleans I rented a car and drove through the Ninth Ward. On the one hand, I was pleased to see that the conditions were somewhat better than news media shows when it reruns video footage from five years ago. Conditions are much better, no doubt.

But only somewhat. Driving up and down the streets I counted just about every other house as renovated or under construction. But that left many more homes in shambles or replaced by vacant lots.

I continued my drive further along the Pontchartrain waterfront, toward the Lakeview and Lakefront areas of the town. Here the recovery was much more rapid. Here the homes, many of them multi-million dollar spreads lying in the shadow of the levees, appeared to be 90% renovated or in reconstruction.

Was it more than coincidence that the prosperous parts of town, that were equally affected by the levee breaches, had bounced back faster than the poorest parts of town? Probably.

Today, New Orleans still bears the scars of Katrina. Some of those scars will never disappear. They will continue to remind us of those days five years ago when nature unleashed its fiercest blows and men and women failed in their duty to protect each other from harm.

 

We Salute Dr. Little, a Giant Among Us

In some ways I wish I had never heard of Dr. Tom Little.

When he was unknown he was an optometrist from Delmar, New York, a father of three. For over four decades he travelled to Afghanistan to provide free eye care to farmers and herders in the mountains. His trips were purely apolitical. He continued to serve his flock whether the government was led by a king or by Communists or by religious fanatics.

Today he is known. Because last week, in those same mountains, he and eleven other aid workers were shot to death by Taliban tribesmen who claimed they were spies.

If Dr. Little remained unknown, his work would have continued. An aging farmer here, a child there, would be treated for vision problems. The crew from the International Assistance Mission would have continued to bounce along weather beaten roads in their Range Rover. Any day they might appear on the horizon in a cloud of dust, bringing hope to little villages that are too small to appear on any map.

Instead, we must read about them in the morning paper. And that is a sad price to pay for being known.

I have run across many Dr. Littles over the years. As a member of Rotary International, I have heard and read about many doctors who fly off to remote places, selflessly lending their skills to families who have no access to clinics or medical care.

I suspect that many of these charitable doctors don’t think about the risks they’re taking. One of the doctors travelling with Dr. Little – a Brit named Karen Woo – wrote a blog just before setting out: “The expedition will require a lot of physical and mental resolve and will not be without risk.” She added: “The effort is worth it in order to assist those that need it most.”

It appears Dr. Woo ordered a wedding gown of raw silk from an Afghan tailor just before driving into the mountains. “What’s a girl to do?,” she wrote.

We often honor the famous who draw attention to themselves. Perhaps from time to time we can also remember the anonymous ones. They get no awards. No prizes. No pictures in the newspaper. But many change lives. They are invisible but they are giants.

Still, I wish I had never heard about Dr. Little.

 

The Urinal Index

When we hear of Nottingham we probably remember Robin Hood, that legendary figure who fought the town’s Sheriff with his band of Merry Men.

Nottingham played another important role in English history. In 1811, it was the scene of attacks by workers on the machinery used by mills manufacturing cotton and wool cloth. The workers were called Luddites because they claimed to be inspired by a man named Ludd who apparently destroyed some knitting machines in the 1770s in a fit of anger.

The Luddites were angered by working class conditions and set about sabotaging the mills and even assassinated a mill owner. With time their name would become associated with people that oppose modernization.

Surely one can’t condone the Luddites’ acts of violence. Nor can one plausibly argue that mankind was better off in a golden age of wood plows and ox-drawn carts.

But modernization has its price. Change and progress may be good, but change can be disruptive, with lost jobs, obsolete skills, bankrupt dreams. Efficiency is not an unalloyed blessing. It has a human cost.

Our economists track productivity, the ratio of output to human capital. The theory is that an economy benefits if it can produce more output with the same labor force. We applaud countries with improving productivity and frown on those with many workers performing manual tasks.

But isn’t there a point at which increased productivity can go too far? The ratio grows too large? The human capital is spread so thin that we actually introduce inefficiency, risk and danger into the system?

BP’s off-shore drilling operations might have become more efficient and productive as fewer people took on more responsibility. But at some point the efficiencies become penny wise: One more person might have meant one incremental notch of lower productivity. But it could also have forestalled disaster.

Suppose the banks had had one more person in their risk management departments watching the deteriorating value of their subprime bond portfolios. Suppose one more person had been working at NASA looking at the O-rings on the Challenger space shuttle. Or one more person reviewing the intelligence data before 9/11.

Last year I flew into Bermuda, a tiny archipelago of islands off the coast of North America. I used the bathroom. It was small, as one would expect in a small airport. But it was spotless. A gentleman stood at the door, hastening to clean every washbasin after it was used. The wastebaskets were empty. The towel holder was full. The toilets and urinals gleamed.

A few days later I returned to Kennedy airport. The washroom was filthy. There were no paper towels. The wastepaper basket overflowed. The urinals had not been cleaned in hours if not days.

Was Kennedy airport more productive? You betchya.

Next time I think of the productivity index I will ask myself: How many urinals can or should one person clean?

Efficiency may be nice. But I’d prefer to have fewer urinals per responsible worker. I think we all would.

 

June is the month…

June is the month of weddings and graduations, of long days (at least in the northern latitudes). Of peonies and gladiolas and lilies. Of chrysanthemums and snapdragons.

June puts a smile on your face, especially those long days. There is nothing so invigorating as stepping outdoors at 9 pm and seeing light in the western sky. Or rising in the early morning to birds singing their hearts out and fresh air filling your lungs.

The bees are an annoyance. And if you’re in the Adirondacks the black flies are a plague. But then the lightning bugs come out at dusk and surprise us with their glow. I love how their bellies warm up slowly like the new compact fluorescent bulbs, crescendo and then die.

June starts in the quickness of spring, with fresh breezes and occasional rain showers. Then it ends in summer, with long torpid afternoons when the humidity can feel like a wool blanket.

The summer solstice comes around June 21. It is remarkable how almost immediately one can sense the days growing shorter. Soon the crickets will fill the night air. We’ll look up and a flock of birds will be heading south. We’ll notice our breath emerging as fog in the cool air.

I watched in mid-June as my son graduated from college. He was walking up the aisle with his diploma in hand. Parents and siblings stood on the sides, smiling, applauding. So much hope, so many long days ahead, so many flowers and birdsong. They can’t foresee the days growing shorter, the birds heading south, the cool air descending.

A dear friend pointed out to me recently that my son was walking up the same aisle that wedding couples walk, flanked by their friends and family. We watch them with tears in our eyes. Their feet are carried on clouds of hope and promise. The preacher may have warned them of life’s inevitable woes. But they only heard the birds. And the bees.

And some day it will be the same aisle that the flag draped coffin navigates, as the veteran of life’s stormy seas moves toward his or her final resting place. The flowers will be cut then. And the air will be still.

June is the month that puts a smile on your face. And at the end of June a little ache in your heart. June reminds me of the words of Ecclesiastes,

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance …

A toast to all those college graduates and newlyweds. May your days be long.

 

Sometimes Life Does Not Imitate Fiction

I just returned from New Orleans. By a quirk of air traffic control I flew over the spreading oil slick. And I felt, along with millions of our countrymen along the Gulf Coast, physically ill. It will probably be decades before the true impact of this environmental disaster is known.

In stores and restaurants and on the streets of the French Quarter one hears constant references to the slick. It is easy to understand why. The culture and livelihoods of every person living in that region hang in the balance. Coming less than five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated three quarters of the town and surrounding parishes, it is hard not share the grief of our Gulf Coast friends.

There have been several reasonable and unreasonable reactions to the devastating oil spill. Crisis management always involves a combination of backward looking analysis and forward looking planning. In the intensity of the moment we are prone to rapid and sometimes unjustified conclusions and actions. With oil gushing from the seabed at an estimated 12-17,000 barrels a day, it is hard not to seek quick fixes. Yet we must try to resist our impulsive natures.

Here are some of the reactions and ideas I heard in New Orleans.

1. Righteous indignation. There has been no time for a complete investigation and BP is entitled to challenge some early conclusions. But it appears that corners were cut and risks taken that should not have been. Did BP omit precautions because the project was 6 weeks late or were they being penny wise? Was the Interior Department’s Mineral Management Service so cozy with the oil industry that it failed to insist on adequate safeguards?

If so, the state of Louisiana and the entire country have reason to be outraged. I was glad to see the President express that anger. Instead of defending the status quo he spoke for all Americans when he criticized faulty disaster preparations and slow governmental response.

2. Lack of credibility. One of the things that most upsets me is BP’s downplaying the seriousness of the leak. For a month the oil giant insisted that the well was leaking 1,000-5,000 barrels a day. Petroleum engineers and physicists who studied the now-infamous webcam videos from the Gulf floor estimated the spill was at least 12,000 barrels a day. Then this weekend the latest estimates came in at 12,000-15,000 barrels.

I heard a number of oil industry spokesmen claim the size of the leak was irrelevant. I disagree. The scope of the reaction is directly proportional to the scope of the crisis. We may never know but I suspect that knowing the magnitude of the leak would have stimulated earlier and more aggressive efforts. Moreover the government may have taken an earlier and more proactive role.

It now appears that BP may have deliberately underestimated the size of the leak because they have a financial incentive for doing so. The oil company can be fined up to $4,000 or so per barrel of leakage. At that rate a spill of 10,000 barrels a day for 40 days would translate into a $1.6 billion fine.

One might argue that these facts can wait a fuller investigation. But with its credibility in question, how can we trust that BP is dealing adequately with this crisis?

3. Suspend off-shore drilling. This is an understandable reaction but not a reasonable one. Even the Democratic Senator from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu, called for cooler thinking than this. So have the governors of Mississippi and Alabama, both of whose coasts and tourist beaches are threatened by leaks from offshore wells.

The economy of our country and of the Southwest relies heavily on U.S. exploration and production and much of our petroleum resource is located off shore. Oil production from the Gulf provides a third of U.S. production. Two-thirds of that volume comes from deep water. Some 33 wells now drill in these depths, employing many of the 200,000 people employed in offshore drilling pursuits.

Study what went wrong and tighten procedures, yes. Require added precautions on the deep water platforms that have emerged in recent years, yes. Acknowledge the mistakes, yes. But do not do further damage to the regional and national economies by stopping a program that has largely worked well for several decades.

A six month moratorium might not seem unreasonable, but these platforms, and their crews, are mobile. They can go where the work is. In six months they could be gone and oil production now and for years could be curtailed.

I am not of the “Drill, Baby, Drill” school. But I do believe we must weigh our national security interests in reducing oil imports against the real but measurable risks of drilling. In 65 years some 50,000 wells have been dug. The safety record of offshore drilling is remarkable. The one significant leak before this one occurred on a Mexican rig operating with lower safety standards. For three decades the industry has successfully drilled in deep water. Likely as not, the accident on Deepwater Horizon occurred because of a cascade of human errors. Let us not destroy an entire industry because of a case of preventable error. After the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska we didn’t terminate water transport of oil.

4. Accelerate revenue sharing. Ironically Louisiana is the source of much off shore production but gets a small share of federal lease revenues. Congress agreed to reallocate to the state some 30% or over $3 billion. But not until 2017. That schedule should be accelerated immediately. Small parishes that line the Gulf not to mention the state itself are starved for resources and should receive their fair share now so they can contract with businesses to protect their shores. Hurricane season is a couple weeks away and there is no time to lose.

5. “BP, move aside”. Understandably, BP’s failure to stop the leak prompts a call for government to step in. But government is completely unprepared for this task. The Coast Guard doesn’t have the boats required to corral the spill or mop it up, let alone plug the leak. There are no miracle workers in the ranks of the Army Corps that would any more successful than BP’s hardworking crews.

Americans are fond of thinking that no problem is too large to tackle. After all, if we could land a man on the moon... But consider this: Man has walked on the moon more often than on the ocean floor. Moreover, some problems may prove intractable.

Americans of my generation remember the Iran hostage crisis in 1979-80. After months of unsuccessful negotiations to free 52 hostages held in our embassy in Iran, President Carter authorized a rescue mission. It was a disaster. Helicopters sent to Teheran were overwhelmed by sandstorms and ditched in the desert. That aborted mission took place 10 years after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Not all problems are solvable the way we may like.

As long as BP accepts help from others and does not try to Lone Ranger a solution, we need to support them, not interfere with their work. Nobody wants to plug this hole as badly as they do. We need to look over their shoulder. But as long as they appear to be managing the process well, we need to support them, not stand in their way.

At the same time, government oversight is essential. We must insist BP spares no expense, ignores no input, and delays no initiative.

6. “There has to be a way...” Life is not a made-for-TV movie. The good guys don’t always win. The maiden is not always rescued from the castle. The cat may be too high in the tree.

We must hope and pray that this leak is plugged soon. Then we can take time to learn what mistakes, if any, were made, and how we should reassess the risks and rewards of off shore drilling. In the meantime we must refrain from letting our anger overwhelm our reason, or let the comforting fantasies of fiction overwhelm the rocky and unpredictable realms of reality.

 

April 2010: A Month to Remember

There are some months in human history that inspire awe.

Late September and early October 1066 was such a time:

• England’s King Harold defeated Norse invaders at Stamford Bridge on September 25.


• Less than three weeks later Harold, after a speedy march south, was himself defeated by Normandy’s William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings on October 14.
  

April 1865 was such a time:

• The Confederate’s General Robert E. Lee, leading the South’s largest army, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865.


• The Union’s celebration was brief. The following Friday, April 14, President Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater, dying the next morning.

May 1940 was such a time:

• On May 10, just as it seemed as if England was about to reach a compromise with the Third Reich’s Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill was named Prime Minister.


• On May 28, Churchill outmaneuvered the proponents of compromise and, ironically with the support of Neville Chamberlain, convinced the Cabinet to risk all in a battle for survival against Germany.

Not only do these months inspire awe. They inspire a bit of reverence. For the rapid, unfolding, unpredictability of life. For the unmatched energy and dynamism of the human species. For the drama and ingenuity of men and women confronting unforeseen and overwhelming challenges.

April 2010 was such a time:

• On April 14, a sub-glacial volcano in Iceland known as Eyjafjallajökull, resumed erupting after a hiatus of 87 years. (The eruption may have begun as early as March 20 but that event was minor and barely noticeable compared to the drama of a few weeks later.)


• Then, less than a week later, on April 20, an oil well blew a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. This caused an explosion on the platform Deepwater Horizon, killing 11 workers on the rig.

These two events seem utterly unrelated. They occurred in different parts of the world. One occurred below the icy surface of Iceland. The other happened below the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

One was a natural phenomenon. The other was caused by man-made oil exploration activity. Ironically, the natural phenomenon caused a threat to man-made aircraft, while the man-made disaster caused a threat to the natural environment.

But in my mind they will always be connected. Each event was sudden and unforeseen. Each posed dramatic challenges that called for creative responses. Each bore tragic consequences for people in the immediate vicinity of the incidents.

And no matter how far we may live from the ash clouds hanging over the British Isles or the plumes of oil and gas threatening the Gulf Coast and the Florida Keys, each event affects all of us, as surely as the historical events I recalled above.

When Harold’s troops marched, first in victory and then in defeat, they carried with them both the hopes and the anguish of a nation.

When Lee’s troops surrendered, and Lincoln fell, a nation was forged in a cauldron of shared pain and sacrifice.

When Churchill persuaded his Cabinet to favor war, the room fell silent with the terrible knowledge that war would mean a terrible cost.

Today I think of the families of the eleven oil field workers who lost their lives. Like the 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, who lost their lives in early April, these workers on the Deepwater Horizon were engaged in a dangerous occupation. But they never expected the morning of April 20 to be their last.

Likewise, the commercial fishermen and tour operators along the Gulf Coast had no way of foreseeing that their lives might soon be changed forever. In place of a sudden human toll they are facing economic hardship, dashed hopes, years of challenge.

Meantime, thousands of families in Iceland have been displaced, their lives, crops, livestock, and way of life lost, destroyed, or permanently altered.

And at the same time, across Europe, millions wonder if travel will return to normal or whether they will live with the disruption of volcanic ash for decades.

Awe. Reverence. History has a way of making us humble from time to time. Often it presents us with things we prefer to forget.

But April 2010 will be a month we will long remember.