Hurricanes?
Yep. I wrote a column on a laptop at Disney World in the middle of a hurricane. Had to write real fast before the battery died. It was August of 2004.
Tornadoes?
I wrote a column in Kansas City in 1988 in a powerful thunderstorm that was tossing hail and spinning tornadoes everywhere around me.
Heart failure?
Then there was the time recently when I had heart failure and emergency surgery on a Sunday afternoon to install a pacemaker. Naturally, a column was due, so I wrote a column from my hospital bed on Monday in the intensive care department.
Attila the Nun?
Out of the 267 columns I have written, my bride of forty-six years was (1.) not speaking to me during 112 columns, (2.) standing behind me and yelling at me for forty-one columns and (3.) demanding that I drive her to the mall for thirty-three columns. I wrote three columns on a laptop in my car parked in a mall parking lot.
Worldwide Economic Meltdown Crisis?
Just one column was written in these catastrophic economic conditions. This one.
I am writing this on October 9, 2008, exactly two days late for my deadline. It took me 48 hours to work up my nerve to even start the darn thing.
The DOW went below 8,600 today. The value of DOW has dropped more than 40% in just three weeks. Some printing industry public companies have lost more than 50% of their value in the past couple of weeks. I looked up some of them and their earnings are the same. They haven’t reported any fires or train wrecks. No. Those stocks are getting killed by forces beyond their control.
It happened real fast - this financial crisis. One minute I’m pickin’ my tomatoes and the next minute the President is announcing the need for a $700.0 million, whoops, $700.0 billion bailout for a bunch of Wall Street investment banks who are holding bad paper on thousands of home and commercial mortgages in default and either in or about to be in foreclosure. By the way, Marvelle Stump, if you are still reading this, foreclosure is nothing like foreplay.
Well, I got interested in this mess and I discovered it is just a handful of real smart Wall Street executives and an even smaller group of Washington D.C. elected and appointed officials who created this disaster which has no spread worldwide. Notice I didn’t say the guys in Washington were smart. In fact, it may be less than a dozen men, no women, whose greed and stupidity has caused all this heartache.
Then I studied the legislation authorizing the “rescue”. I actually read the bill and learned that it’s not $700.0 billion all at once. It’s $250.0 billion to start, then another $100.0 billion which can be authorized by Congress jumping through a bunch of hoops and finally another $250.0 billion if Congress jumps through even more very high hoops. I think they all should have to personally guarantee the money.
The next thing is that this is not some plan just to send big checks to the offending banks. The U.S. government is actually just buying thousands of empty homes that have been foreclosed. Nobody knows how many empty homes and nobody knows for how much. This will take the bad debts off the banks’ books and put it on the Federal Government books.
What does this mean to all you print communications salespeople?
You are surrounded by greed and stupidity so you are going to have to work harder to make your own mortgage payments.
Times of trouble are times of opportunity. Times of great trouble are times of the GREATEST opportunity.
Don’t whine about it. Tens of thousands of companies and not for profit institutions are still buying printing. I just read where Ron Davis, PhD., the PIA Chief Economist, says overall print sales may be down 2.0% this year. TWO PERCENT!
That’s nothing.
The companies and the print salespeople who will survive and flourish and, yes, even improve their earnings are the ones who figure out how to improve the performance, the earnings, the prosperity and/or the health of their customers. Therein, they become indispensible.
The salespeople who don’t get that will be pumping gas, flipping hamburgers or beachcombing and the rest of you success seekers will have less competition and easier jobs.
For me – I’m sixty-six and rode hard and put up wet. But I’ve got to keep on going. I’m going to keep on showin’ up no matter how much Wall Street or Washington screws up. And you should too.
That’s why I’m stopping this column early. You need the extra time to get out there and sell something!
Success in the sub-prime Printing Industry is an oxymoron, or is it an oxycontin?
