I had a meltdown last Friday which lasted all weekend.
I was a complete douchenozzle for some of the time (I was pretty well-behaved on Saturday night).
It started on Friday when I got home from my job in NY and found two packages I could've done without. One was a letter, with affidavit, from the NYC Transit Authority, wanting me to tell them the entire story of the transit fare card incident at 53rd & Lex on August 24th. The other was a packet from my surgeon wanting all kinds of tests and clearances, from my internist and from my cardiologist, prior to my upcoming robotic prostectomy on October 14th.
In and of themselves, they were nothing. I was out about $58.00 with the MTA and the other stuff would kill a couple of vacation days during the next few weeks.
It could be much worse. These are high-quality problems for somebody who, 11 years ago, didn't have a job and was virtually homeless.
Somewhere along the way, my gratitude, which ordinarily colors most of my thinking, flew right out the window.
What saved me was having a schedule and sticking to it, of meetings and forced association with other recovering drunks like me.
I arose Saturday morning, grunting with resentment, and dragged myself to my local 12-Step, 7:00 a.m. meeting. Then, I dragged myself to a 10:00 a.m. meeting in Princeton. Then I took myself to see the new Matt Damon movie (GREAT!) and capped it by driving 80 miles (round-trip) to a gay 12-Step meeting in Pennsylvania with a couple of beginners in tow. That was good. It kept me focused on them, and not on myself.
Sunday, I was a grump again. A fax machine in Atlantic City kept attack-dialing my home phone number, starting at 6:30 a.m.. I did a reverse look-up on the internet of the number and got an e-mail address and phone number for the company. I sent an e-mail and left a voicemail, basically threatening them with physical violence if they didn't subdue their lousy fax machine. Eventually it gave up.
I went to my usual Sunday 12-step meeting, sat in the back and growled at everyone, including my sponsor.
I fled the meeting, went to the supermarket, went home and spent the afternoon isolating, napping and generally feeling sorry for myself.
This morning, I attended my home group meeting at 7:30, got to the office, took all the steps to "do the next, right, thing" and suddenly life is worth living again.
I owe this mostly to a) God, b) the program and c) people who care about me.
We have a saying in 12-Step programs which is very annoying:
"This too shall pass."
It did.
Showing posts with label meltdown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meltdown. Show all posts
Monday, September 21, 2009
Monday, September 15, 2008
Fall of the House of Lehman
Disclosure: I worked at Lehman (variously named during my tenure: Shearson-American Express, Shearson-Lehman Brothers, Shearson-Lehman-Hutton and, just before I left, plain old Lehman Brothers) from December 1983 (just prior to Lehman being acquired by Shearson in the Spring of 1984) until January or February of 1992.
I was "supposed" to have been fully vested in their in-house pension fund after five years of continuous service. It remains to be seen if there's any pension fund left now that the house has collapsed.
We (by which I mean Shearson American Express) acquired Lehman in a fire sale brought about by internal fighting at the old firm. The place was not on the verge of collapse financially, but it was on the verge of collapse politically. Finally, they sold themselves to us. It was an uncomfortable marriage from the outset. It had actually been pushed on us by our corporate parent, the American Express Company, who wanted to RAPIDLY pump up piddling little Shearson into a world-class brokerage powerhouse. However, there was baggage.
One suitcase of which was and is Richard J. Fuld. He was the head of trading at Lehman at the time of the acquisition. Lehman was a fixed-income behemoth when we bought them.
As the years went by the Lehmanites exercised their power and eventually forced out all of the top equity people and replaced them with their own, hand-picked, asskissers. My department was eventually handed over to two people wholly incompetent to head Equity Trading. Eventually Mr. Fuld became co-chief executive and, finally, the sole chief executive of the firm.
One of the reasons I left the firm was because of the wholescale movement of funds (there's no other way to describe it) which occured every New Year's Day when the Lehman Brothers "secret partnerships" would, without notice, dip into the profits of each department of the firm and skim untold millions of dollars off the departmental P&L statements and onto the books of the SPs. These partnerships had, I guess, been "grandfathered" in as part of the deal during the acquistion in '84.
When I found out what was happening I asked one of the vice-treasurers what was going on with my departments (suddenly missing) $600,000. This was her response.
"Oh... that's Mr. Fuld's."
"Kiss my fucking ass" I thought. "Oh." I said.
I made up my mind, on the spot, to seek employment elsewhere. I did NOT want to have to sit in a witness box in a Chancery Courtroom in Delaware someday and answer questions posed by the shareholders of American Express as to where their profits were going.
Maybe the whole thing was legal. Maybe not. I don't know. I got out.
That was 16 years ago.
Do I blame Dick Fuld for the collapse of Lehman (again)? Nah. I remember something that Peter Cohen once said to me. "You don't run big corporations... they run you."
I'm sure nobody is more shell-shocked today at Lehman Brothers than Dick Fuld.
But I still want my piddling-assed pension.
I was "supposed" to have been fully vested in their in-house pension fund after five years of continuous service. It remains to be seen if there's any pension fund left now that the house has collapsed.
We (by which I mean Shearson American Express) acquired Lehman in a fire sale brought about by internal fighting at the old firm. The place was not on the verge of collapse financially, but it was on the verge of collapse politically. Finally, they sold themselves to us. It was an uncomfortable marriage from the outset. It had actually been pushed on us by our corporate parent, the American Express Company, who wanted to RAPIDLY pump up piddling little Shearson into a world-class brokerage powerhouse. However, there was baggage.
One suitcase of which was and is Richard J. Fuld. He was the head of trading at Lehman at the time of the acquisition. Lehman was a fixed-income behemoth when we bought them.
As the years went by the Lehmanites exercised their power and eventually forced out all of the top equity people and replaced them with their own, hand-picked, asskissers. My department was eventually handed over to two people wholly incompetent to head Equity Trading. Eventually Mr. Fuld became co-chief executive and, finally, the sole chief executive of the firm.
One of the reasons I left the firm was because of the wholescale movement of funds (there's no other way to describe it) which occured every New Year's Day when the Lehman Brothers "secret partnerships" would, without notice, dip into the profits of each department of the firm and skim untold millions of dollars off the departmental P&L statements and onto the books of the SPs. These partnerships had, I guess, been "grandfathered" in as part of the deal during the acquistion in '84.
When I found out what was happening I asked one of the vice-treasurers what was going on with my departments (suddenly missing) $600,000. This was her response.
"Oh... that's Mr. Fuld's."
"Kiss my fucking ass" I thought. "Oh." I said.
I made up my mind, on the spot, to seek employment elsewhere. I did NOT want to have to sit in a witness box in a Chancery Courtroom in Delaware someday and answer questions posed by the shareholders of American Express as to where their profits were going.
Maybe the whole thing was legal. Maybe not. I don't know. I got out.
That was 16 years ago.
Do I blame Dick Fuld for the collapse of Lehman (again)? Nah. I remember something that Peter Cohen once said to me. "You don't run big corporations... they run you."
I'm sure nobody is more shell-shocked today at Lehman Brothers than Dick Fuld.
But I still want my piddling-assed pension.
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