MR WRONG: Going office

COLUMN DEP’T.

MR WRONG: Mind Your Business, Bloomberg

DID YOU SEE how the United States of America got a bad report on their credit or something from this company called Fitch Ratings? I read this in the electronic mail “Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day” newsletter I get from Bloomberg dot Com because I think for some reason that if I know stuff about Business and the Economy it will help me in my life, har!

The US was stripped of its top-tier sovereign credit grade by Fitch Ratings, which criticized the country’s ballooning fiscal deficits and an “erosion of governance” that’s led to repeated debt limit clashes over the past two decades.

The US saw its scrore cut one level from AAA to AA+, echoing a move made more than a decade ago by S&P Global Ratings.

“The rating downgrade of the United States reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’ rated peers over the last two decades,” Fitch said in a statement.

Also, there’s a typo in there, Bloomberg, “scrore,” how am I supposed to take you seriously as knowing everything about money when you can’t even get your copy straight, huh?

Also, no offense Bloomberg, in this case Michael R. Bloomberg—actual co-founder of Bloomberg and founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies, who was mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013—you got all blowhardy and wrote a thing in the Washington Post the other day and you are totally full of your opinions about this “back to the office” stuff:

At Bloomberg, for more than a year, we have been asking employees to work in our offices at least three days a week. There will always be a need for exceptions, of course, but more than 80 percent of our people have been meeting the standard. In the fall, much of the company will move to four days a week, as some of our employees are already doing.

The rest of the Opinion was about how the Government needs to provide Services to people IRL, and I agree with that, mostly, in terms of being able to get at humans in buildings. For example, I had to go to a Government building a few months ago to get my passport, and it was tough to get an appointment, but once I got inside the building I received excellent and even friendly service from the people who have to work in an office and interact IRL with humans.

But for your own business of reporting on Business, Bloomberg, this is kind of a control freak move, seriously. Fine, people not working in office spaces is bad for the business of having business in office spaces. I thought this was America, the Land of Opportunity, and that Big Business is all about being nimble and agile and ready to adapt and overcome in the Free Market Economy? Where’s that Office Space Disruption pivot? All I see around my neighborhood is retail stores and small restaurants getting priced out of their locations by greedball landlords, and then going out of business! That’s not good! Supply and Demand! Shift that Supply!

People are “woke” these days about all kinds of stuff, and one thing they (the people) woke up to was you don’t have to work in a goddamn office all the time! Sure, if you are a firefighter or a baseball player or medical pro you have to be at a place to do your job. To make pizzas you have to be at a pizza place, definitely, but to trade stocks or write about it, you don’t need to go to an office every day, we haz computers and stuff! The stocks are inside the computers! You yourself market a bespoke Bloomberg Terminal people can use in the privacy of their own not-in-the-office spaces! Also it’s more efficient and less polluting to not commute to work every day.

This Bloomberg bushwa gave me a flashback to another goddamn dopey Opinion in the Washington Post about being in an office:

I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities — “extra.” It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture.

“Office culture, har! I took an opportunity to retort. I been doing block-quotes of these other people, now I am going to block-quote myself:

Extra! In quotes! Helping somebody else do their job is “extra!” Semi-supervising Junior Unfortunates is “extra.” You know what “extra” means, right? It means you don’t get paid to do that shit but you are expected to! Extra-spected! Extra for The Man!

That’s what they want, they want your EXTRA. That’s how they build their thing, with your EXTRA, that they squeeze outta you while you get no EXTRA!

I would like to get back to my main point about the thing I read in the highly-informative Bloomberg newsletter, to wit: If these stupid Republicans would stop doing that thing about the Debt Ceiling where the Government looks like it is going to shut down every two years or so, the rest of the World wouldn’t notice we’re (as in U.S.) broke. Like Dick Gregory used to say, “not poor, just broke,” it’s a temporary situation. As soon as these real estate moguls figure out what to do with their extra office space, things should pick up nicely.

The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly wherever it can appear. Always Be Columning. No refunds. Go ahead and write Wrong if you want: wrongcolumn@gmail.com

WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, August 2, 2023

★★★★★ The full moon shone white up the avenue as the predawn airport Uber waited. When the actual morning arrived, a jogger and a scooter-rider went by the moment the shutters opened. Above the drifting cumulus was some edgeless smear of translucent cloud, sliced through by a negative contrail in one spot and gathering into linear ripples at another. A spotted lanternfly bumbled onto the balcony, then escaped a would-be killing blow, flitting prettily out of reach. Out on the street warm sun came down and cool breeze came sideways. Flies buzzed a dead rat lying with its tail dangling into a storm drain. The storefronts on Broadway looked empty, their interiors too dim to show through the reflected brightness of the street in their windows. The skate shop had set up a rail in the middle of the sidewalk. A downy woodpecker flew down over barbed wire to land with a flurry of black-and-white plumage in an ailanthus growing behind the nursing home. It perched there just long enough to show off its red occiput, then darted up and out again.

EASY LISTENING DEP’T.

INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST

Indignity Morning Podcast No. 121: A stack of paper.

Tom Scocca • Aug 3, 2023

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SANDWICH RECIPES DEP’T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of select sandwiches from "Dame Curtsey's" Book of Recipes, by Ellye Howell Glover, Author of “Dame Curtsey’s” Book of Novel Entertainments, etc. Published in 1909, this book is in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

Lettuce and Cheese Sandwiches
THESE are made of Boston brown bread. Spread the round slices thickly with fresh Philadelphia cream cheese, and lay on this a crisp lettuce leaf that has just been dipped in French dressing. Press another piece of buttered brown bread upon this, and cut each sandwich in half, thus making a semicircular slice. Keep these sandwiches in the ice box until ready to use them. Another filling for brown bread is grated cheese mixed with English walnut meats chopped and seasoned with salt.

Chicken and Celery Sandwiches
PUT through the finest knife of the meat chopper one cupful of cold chicken. Add to it one cupful of celery cut very fine and four tablespoonfuls of mayonnaise. Butter rounds of white bread, spread.

Walnut Sandwiches
THERE is no end to the variety of sandwiches with which walnuts may be combined. A plain bread-and-butter sandwich, with finely chopped walnuts between, and just a suspicion of salt sprinkled over, is one. The same with the addition of a crisp lettuce leaf and a teaspoonful of mayonnaise dressing is still better. A chicken sandwich sprinkled with chopped walnuts acquires a new and pleasant flavor.

If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, kindly send a picture to us at indignity@indignity.net.

MARKETING DEP'T.

19 FOLKTALES collects a series of timeless tales of canny animals, foolish people, monsters, magic, ambition, adventure, glory, failure, inexorable death, and ripe fruits and vegetables. Written by Tom Scocca and richly illustrated by Jim Cooke, these fables stand at the crossroads of wisdom and absurdity.

HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Your $20 plus shipping and tax helps fund The Brick House collective, a Publishing Concern featuring a globally diverse set of publishers doing their own thing, with interesting items and publications available for purchase at SHOPULA.

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