Don't Leave Home Without It

Thursday morning, April 9, 6:15 am. Rhumba and I were getting out of bed to face yet another low-wage day shuffling paper, when she turned to me with an interesting proposition:

"Caff," Rhumba said. It was a light, sharp cough. "Caff, I say!"

We call it the Madame Bovary cough: delicate, mannerly, fake. It means one intends to feign illness on a workday. I raised an eyebrow.

"I'm calling in sick," Rhumba confirmed. "Nothing's happening at work. And I've got things to do around here. Do you want to call in sick, too?"

I thought about it. I'm a Boy Scout at heart, forever earning imaginary merit badges for good behavior. But... the boss was out of town. I had about three weeks of sick time piled up. And after last week's layoff, the office was as quiet as a tomb. Layoffs tend to kill personal initiative in the short term.

"Caff," I said. "Caff! Caff! I'll get a shower and call in. Then we can go out for some breakfast."

Rhumba padded into the spare bedroom, where the computers live, to do something to one of her insanely complicated websites. I took the shower, suited up, and phoned work.

But I couldn't open my voicemail; the voice prompts were different than usual, and they took me through a weird series of commands that repeated themselves without ever leading anywhere. I couldn't even change my greeting message.

I finally succeeded in leaving an I'm-sick message in someone else's mailbox, but even that was a struggle.

"Something's wrong with the voicemail at work," I told Rhumba.

"The Internet's down, too," she said, looking at the network router as if it had personally insulted her. There followed several minutes of cable-swapping, but to no avail.

"I guess the ISP is down," she said. "It happens. I'm going downstairs."

She left, but I hovered over the computer. Rhumba is three times the techie I am, but being a male I just knew that she hadn't tested every possible line. There had to be a bad one somewhere in that rat's nest of cabling. I reached for the first plug...

"Stop!" Rhumba burst back into the room. "TV says the Internet's down!"

And most of the phones, too, in Santa Cruz and southern Santa Clara County. Our phones still had dial tone, but that explained the screwy voicemail at work; AT&T is our voicemail service provider.

We hovered around the TV for a bit and got what details we could: dark tales of cut cables deep within in South Bay manholes; rumors of dead cell phone reception, failure of the 911 emergency service. And even though our phone worked, we probably couldn't call out of the local area. Nasty.

So -- we drove off to breakfast. Had a few bucks in my pocket and a debit card. That should work. Why shouldn't it be a normal day?

And about four blocks from the house, the car radio told us, "All credit card systems are down throughout the area." Oopsy. Debit cards use the credit card system.

"Maybe they have one of the old manual card readers at the diner," I said tentatively.

"Maybe," Rhumba echoed.

"But... maybe we should..."

"Hit the ATM," Rhumba finished.

I wheeled the car around and drove to our local branch of Bank of the Women. We call it that because the staff is all female except for a vestigial male manager who sits in the corner office and never comes out.

But when we got there, the ATM displays read "OUT OF SERVICE." And though bank hours hadn't even started yet, the vestigial manager actually emerged from the building to address a small crowd of customers that had gathered outside.

"All ATMs in the area are down, and probably will be down until at least noon," he announced. "The Internet's out all the way to San Francisco. We can't connect to the data center."

"Can we take out cash when you open?" somebody asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe not."

"Oh jeez," I said to Rhumba. "I guess we're heading home for emergency cash."

I keep a few hundred bucks in bills around the house against the day the banking system shuts down because of some catastrophic global financial reset and all the pretty plastic cards stop working for a day, or a week, or more. And while such precautions may place a tinfoil propeller beanie on my head in your eyes, I never, ever imagined that somebody could close the banks and shut down the credit card system and the ATMs for three million people -- with a pair of cable-cutters.

I grabbed -- well, enough money for any likely eventuality. When I was a kid back in the '70s, nobody would trust an 18-year-old with plastic or even take his check unless they knew him personally or he lived close by. So I carried a couple of hundred with me whenever I left town, even for simple day trips. (I was a saver even then, okay?) And suddenly, it was 35 years ago again.

And off we went to the diner, where the baby-faced waitress was reassuring but under-informed.

"Yes, the credit card system isn't working," she said. "But don't worry, we have this old machine that we can run them through."

"Good. And the ATMs are down too, you know."

"Really?" Her eyes widened.

"Yeah. And the Internet, and a lot of the telephones, and most of the cellphones."

"Really?" I was describing her doomsday scenario.

"Yep. Think of all those college students roaming around out there with two bucks in their pocket, an ATM card that doesn't work, and a dead cell phone."

"Chaos..." she breathed, eyes like saucers. I really should be kinder to the young.

Breakfast was breakfast. They would have taken our debit cards, but we paid cash and got bigger-than-usual smiles for our trouble.

But when we stopped in at a store afterwards to pick up a couple of things, there was no choice: they were taking cash only. And things were slow. While we were there, one customer had to leave her items at the counter because she had no greenbacks -- just useless plastic.

Across Santa Cruz, some businesses took only cash; some struggled with old-fashioned card readers; and some just closed. The big chain food stores with state-of-the-art cashiering systems let people swipe their cards as usual; their systems simply stored all the transactions electronically against the time that the Internet became accessible again; then they would submit them all in one large batch.

But they were the exceptions. It was hard for business to get done. Almost all money is electronic. Nobody carries cash, and the banks couldn't even dispense cash because they couldn't reach their data centers to okay the transactions. All because of a few cut cables.

I was here in Santa Cruz in '89 for the Loma Prieta Quake. All the electricity was down for a day and a half. But before long, business got done. People bought food and water and what batteries they could find. Stores scrounged up gasoline generators to run their cash registers, and people brought their cash. Or checks, because in those days some stores issued check cards to trustworthy customers that told the cashiers, "It's okay to take this guy's check."

But people don't carry much cash now, because we can use plastic for the smallest purchases, and get cash just as we need it 24/7 from ATMs. And we don't need check cards, because most people don't write checks and anyway there's also an electronic network for verifying checks.... which was also down.

We made it through one day. Two? I don't know. Even the big markets, with their ability to electronically store transactions, might start to balk after a couple of days. In recent years electronic-base commerce has made our financial system very efficient -- but also very ephemeral and very, very fragile. Most of us didn't know how fragile it was. Until somebody cut a few cables. Just a few.

And we didn't even have to lose electricity.

Rhumba and I went home, sat tight, and did stuff. Every once in awhile, listening to the latest news on the radio, I thought about getting on the Internet to get more details on what they were talking about. But there was no Internet. No texting or twittering or commenting or browsing. Just TV and news radio, as if it were 20 years ago.

Eventually the radio said that repair crews had reconnected the first of the several cut cables. I'll bet they got the Internet up first, I thought. And I flipped on the modem and router, and our little net made contact with the ISP. And all of you were there again.

And I'm glad you're there. And I hope you stay.

But I'm beefing up my emergency cash stash.

Bring Me the Head of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Not everybody who's been laid off at work had to leave right away; as it turns out, a lot got several weeks' notice, and they're still on the job doing their normal work. Or close.

Annie's one of them. Annie had a major operation several weeks ago and came back to work 'way too early. Because the powers that be had given her enough work for two people. And Annie's the kind of person who'll tackle any job she's given and not stop until it's conquered -- or she is. She's tough as nails, and proud of it.

I didn't see her for a couple of days after the big announcement, so I figured she was taking a couple of vacation days now that it didn't matter anymore.

But I finally ran into her last Friday: pouring some coffee in the break room, looking tired but composed. "My condolences," I said, "if that's the right word."

"Ah," she said, brushing it off. "When you've been around as long as I have you get a little wily. I already had my resume out there. Got a couple of calls."

"Well, good. So you're okay?"

She looked at me. "I thought I was handling the layoff pretty well. Then I got sucker-punched. My son's best friend died yesterday...

"Here's this kid who's been sitting at my kitchen table for five years eating ham sandwiches and... I just..."

Her voice trembled, and she paused. I saw tears her eyes.

"Maybe you should take a vacation day or two."

"No. I'm gonna need 'em later." She meant she'd need to take cash in exchange for accrued vacation when she finally left.

"So I'm going to go into my my office, close the door, and stare at the wall for eight hours," she said. "That's all I'm good for today."

"I'm really sorry."

She smiled wanly. "They say that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?"

"I have found that this is often not true," I said. She went into her office. I didn't see her again that day.

That may not have been the kindest thing to say; but in this culture we're taught to be hard on ourselves, to be tough and strong and stand on our own two feet no matter what. And if we don't, we've failed. Annie's the sort of person who believes that. Or wants to believe that.

But to me it's a lie, a macho old Prussian Army saying popularized by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who hated traditional Christian values of meekness, humility, piety with a vengeance. Son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche had a seriously bad case of Preacher's Kid. If you wanted to put him on the ceiling, just say, "Y'know Fred, the meek WILL inherit the earth." Nietzsche thought the strong should inherit it, because they were so much more creative and productive.

He thought that Christianity was a vast global conspiracy of the weak to hold back the strong. In World War I, the German army printed up selections from Nietzsche's writings as inspirational literature for the troops. 'Nuf said.

And yet it's not clear that even Nietzsche deeply believed "what does not kill me, makes me stronger;" in the context of his writings, it's one of a number of statements that he made to be outrageous, stir the pot, make people think. He didn't actually spend much time supporting it. Good thing, too, because he spent the last ten years of his life insane. I doubt even he would contend that insanity made him stronger.

And I know plenty of people who've been made weaker by things that didn't finish them off -- me among them. I feel a perfect revulsion every time I hear the fatal phrase.

Because I have been made stronger by some life experiences. But the most traumatic of them can break you, damage you permanently if you go it alone, don't admit your fears, bottle up your emotions, don't get help. It's not weakness to reach out to others in tough times; sometimes it's the only thing that gets us through. It's gotten me through. It's the real strength.

A few days later Annie zoomed past me down the hall, stuffing a roll into her mouth, as I chatted up an admin about office supplies. "How are you doing?" I called.

"Better," she answered, vanishing into a conference room stuffed with salesmen.

She doesn't look better.

Layoffs

Top management called an all-hands meeting this week to describe the "new direction" our outfit will be taking in the months to come. It was anybody's guess what the big news would be.

"If there are snacks, it's good news," I joked as my crowd walked into the meeting room. "No snacks? Bad news!"

There were no snacks. And the news was bad. As Mr. Bigboss called us to order in somber tones, somebody whispered "Layoffs."

And I scanned the room for faces that should have been there, but weren't. There were many. Layoff announcements always take place after the deed has been done.

Mr Bigboss is the kind of guy who hurls humongous loads of work in all directions with a big salesman's smile and an overly hearty voice and a pep talk about how much your work will benefit the company. As if you had a choice. Or ever got a raise. It's been years.

But that day Mr. Bigboss reigned in the false bonhomie, at least at first. He's never laid people off before -- to my knowledge -- and it was pretty obvious that he felt bad about doing it.

And I respected him for that, and for getting up in front of us all and saying No, the people who'd been dismissed had done nothing wrong, this had nothing to do with performance, but cuts had to be made and they were in the positions we felt we could do without.

Mr. Bigboss and his management minions had actually planned the layoff thoughtfully: they'd figured out what corners they should or shouldn't cut to most efficiently run the company with a couple of dozen fewer people. And once they knew that, they knew who could or couldn't be let go They explained it all. And it all made sense.

And as he talked and talked, you could see it dawn on Mr. Bigboss that we accepted what he was saying as reasonable, and that we weren't going to rush him with obsidian knives and flay him alive and hang his bloody hide from the flagpole as a grim warning to CEOs everywhere.

And so he gradually perked up and began to smile. And his salesman's voice regained its hearty timbre as he exhorted us all to worker harder and longer to do all the work of the people who were no longer with us. And, by the way, if things didn't pick up, there'd be more layoffs to come.

And then he asked us if there were any questions. One or two brief ones, then nothing. "Any other questions?" he asked. The silence was defeaning. "None?" he asked, looking at us uncertainly.

We stared back at him mutely. And in our silence, I believe that got our message: we were simply enduring him; we had to, to continue to live. We had nothing to say, because there was nothing to say.

He'd made it all very clear. They'd work us as hard as they dared. We'd work as hard as we could. And maybe the paychecks would keep coming and we could continue to pay our bills. Maybe.

Mr. Bigboss sat down, the HR guy stood up and told us that his door was always open, and then we were dismissed.

This is happening everywhere.

That last sentence would end this blog entry well. Except... I'm also going to miss the people who are gone. And I worry about them.

About the very down-home, friendly sales exec -- who was also a jazz musician, and a single parent. The shy admin who put her husband through grad school. The unflappable receptionist who was equal to any craziness that crawled through the door, new to this part of the country. The old hippie, at sea in the impersonal world of modern business. The hyperactive Silicon Valley retread with computer-phobia. And many others. You can see them as real caring, breathing people -- or as faceless unemployment statistics. Just as you choose.

You know, when one businessman screws another, he's wont to clap his victim on the shoulder and say, "But hey, it's just business, right? Nothing personal, right?"

Wrong. Everything is personal. Everything.