Thank you for your e-mail

Thank you for your e-mail. Due to recent budget cuts, I am not fully staffed. Therefore it may take up to 20 business days for me to reply. Working harder in response to the budget cuts so that I may continue to fulfill my pledge of serving the public to the best of my ability is not an option. You actually thought I took such a pledge? Ha. Ha ha. Ha.

Due to self-mandated furloughs, I will not be able to answer your e-mail on odd-numbered days beginning with a T or ending with a y. Also our systems will be down for required maintenance on all Greek Orthodox holidays that in any way involve a lay or religious figure whose name ends in "opolous."

I value your loyalty, and demand your patience and understanding.

401 que?

My two years and change at a long-dead company back East did provide me with an enduring (one can hope) legacy: participation in 401(k)s. I find it odd, though, that despite being so deeply embedded in the national economy and psyche, these plans remain so little understood and, in some regards, so darn weird.

First of all, even at companies that claim to be committed to employee participation, get-out-the-participation drives rarely seem to go beyond a terse introduction upon hiring. I keep hearing that opt-out enrollment is becoming common, but I've never encountered it or encountered anyone who has encountered it.

Then there are the inexplicable (literally -- just try and find anyone to explain these things; you can't) variations among plans. My most-recent employer and my current employer both use Fidelity as a plan administrator, yet the plans couldn't be more different. My former employer offered a gargantuan range of funds, perhaps too many; the current one offers a peculiarly small list, and it is dominated by high-cost funds that aren't even managed by Fidelity. Each employer, I believe, gets to tell the plan administrator what funds to include. I can't imagine the conversation that led to either of these lists.

The fund that I embraced at my last job and hoped to continue contributing to at the new one, Fidelity Four-in-One Index Fund, is not on the current list. The next-closest thing in terms of diversification is one of those retirement target-date funds, which is fine, except that its administrative fee is eight hundred percent that of the index fund. (Eight-tenths of a percent as opposed to one-tenth of a percent.) What do I get for those extra seven-tenths of a percent? Absolutely nothing, if history is any judge: the side-by-side performance charts that Fidelity provides are, for the purposes of a retail investor, identical.

And yet there is one feature of the new plan that I adore, and that more than makes up for any of its faults: funds appear in my account mere hours after the market close on payday. My previous employer, by contrast, held onto money in accounts payable for up to several months, until the last possible day before breaking the law. I was evidently the only person to notice this, let alone point out to payroll that it didn't seem like a healthy practice.

Finally there is the peculiar influence that dollar-cost averaging has on my mental state: while participating in a 401 I can't decide whom to root for, Team Bull or Team Bear. I know that my wishing for things doesn't make them happen. Still, I ought to have my priorities straight!

A pro-BRANDING demonstration?

I saw something new today, at least for me: a march down Main Street (well in this case it was Broadway) in support of a brand.

Of all the things to march for or against -- a brand? The marchers carried balloons and signs demanding that the Frontier Airlines brand and cutesy-critters advertising campaign be retained. I wish I'd gotten a picture, but I swear, the signs actually used the word "brand."

If these were workers, what real (that is, financial) stake could they possibly have had in retaining the brand following Frontier's merger into Republic? Brands don't pay the bills. The whole point of a merger is to be able to save money by letting people go. It's not that I'm completely unmoved by the Frontier brand myself. Frontier is actually a small part of the reason we moved to Denver. When we boarded at LaGuardia, it was like entering a different world, one where common courtesy was, well, common. Frontier represented a flying slice of Colorado. Their coffee was good too.

Over the years, I admit, we didn't always fly Frontier; their pricing was sometimes so completely out of sync with the competition that it looked like a spreadsheet error. Then Southwest arrived, and their staff managed to out-nice Frontier's. But hey, every time we headed for a Southwest flight at DIA, we took a moment to comment on how cute the Frontier tails were.

Whether Republic maintains the Frontier brand or not couldn't matter less. Whatever was good about Frontier management will be gone; whatever was bad about Frontier management will be gone. Because Frontier management will be gone, and with it, much of Frontier's workforce. Maintaining the brand won't reverse the reality that a once-hopeful local company failed.

Frontier workers, don't let the bulkhead hit you on the tail on the way out. And don't be so sentimental. It's time to say buh-bye now.

Inging

Several months ago in this space I predicted the coming dominance of verbals and gerunds in branding. Well, lookee what arrived in the mail:

You hearinged it here first.

Excuse me but I couldn't help noticing...

Every time I go to the gym there's a guy there getting absolutely no benefit out of his exercises because, instead of isolating the muscles he wants to work on, he throws his whole body into every action, spreading the force around and thus strengthening nothing. I always want to say, "Hey, guy, you're getting absolutely no benefit out of your exercises because, instead of isolating the muscles you want to work on, you're throwing your whole body into every action, spreading the force around and thus strengthening nothing!"

I don't go to the gym that much so it's entirely possible that this guy is looking at me and thinking, "Hey, guy, etc. etc." but I do feel confident enough in my knowledge of exercise theory to know that I'm doing it better than he is. He gets too little benefit in exchange for too much cost. He's inefficient, and inefficiency is always the enemy.

Of course I say nothing. Am I being polite, or complicit in the fellow's early death from obesity and his family's grief? Or both? Deciding when to speak up and when to stifle is, of course, a major (if not THE major) skill each of us needs to learn in conducting our personal and professional lives. As a journalist I figured it was always my job to speak up, but now that I'm a corporate manager expressing myself carries unprecedented consequences.

The great risk, of course, is failing to cover my tooshy when commenting on a process or product that just may be the pet process or product of someone who participates in deciding whether I get to keep my job. Not a single boss in the world says s/he wants to be surrounded by yes wo/men, but they all do. (We all do, I should say, for I'm a boss now. An extremely middle-ranking boss, to be sure -- the NCO of the corporate world -- but a boss nonetheless.)

On the bright side, I'm enjoying having people in my life who have a tangible interest in taking my opinion seriously. As I told one of my reports, "I'm jealous of you because I've always wanted a boss like me!" After observing worker-manager relations up close in a large variety of settings these past 23 years, and paying decent money for a management degree, I do feel better qualified to manage people than many of the managers who have managed me. Since management's only genuine task is to facilitate production, I'll concentrate on the work, divide tasks according to my understanding of the team members' capabilities, and judge us all by what we produce. If anybody, report or superior, shows me I'm doing something that impedes production, I'll change it.

I probably won't tell the guy at the gym that he's wasting his time and his dues, but I definitely will tell my reports when I see a way for them to improve what they do, and thus improve what we do. Twenty-three years from now, I hope, they'll look back and remember having learned something together.

The dukes of moral hazard

I agree, to a degree, with the Republicans who say unemployment benefits keep people unemployed by removing an incentive to work (namely, money). Of course, the amount you get is so low nobody would choose to live that way on purpose. (And, in a bizarre effort to reduce the risk of this sort of moral hazard, unemployment gives even less to people who were making less -- who, of course, need money even more.)

From a recipient's perspective rather than the perspective of an out-of-touch Beltway insider in a baby-blue tie, unemployment insurance doesn't prevent us from taking work, but from taking the wrong work. Everybody has his/her personal threshold for how long s/he can last, financially and emotionally, before taking the first crappy job that comes along. I had several job opportunities before landing THE opportunity, but receiving UI helped give me the confidence to turn them down so I could keep looking.

Macro-economically, this makes no sense at all: I should have taken the first thing that came along because the really good job, the one that I hoped was out there somewhere, would still be out there somewhere, and someone else would get it. A machine doesn't care where its cogs come from. This is precisely how they used to do it in planned economies like Red China. (Take that, Representative Boenhaed.)

As a human being with aspirations other than taking the first paycheck that comes along, however, one wants to get what the HR folks call "the right fit." And that takes time.

Time, then -- more than groceries -- is what UI buys us. Like any other social benefit, it also buys us a level of counter-revolutionary stability. Think of UI as an alternative to hiring the Pinkertons. Not having an army of unemployed throwing rocks at your limousine seems like a decent return on investment.