Seven Red

Some of my facebook friends and others have been posting and reposting this email exchange between an NYU Stern School of Business professor and an MBA student. To summarize the exchange, the MBA student showed up for the first day of the professor’s “Brand Strategy” class an hour late, apparently because he or she was “sampling” the first day of other courses in an effort to determine which course to take. The professor sent the student away immediately, since he has a standing policy of refusing entry to anyone who is more than 15 minutes late for class. The student, who could not have known of this policy (not having the syllabus), complains to said professor in an email, explaining the situation, even though he or she has decided against taking the class. It shall be left at that, yes? Oh, no it shan’t. For the professor suddenly feels the urge to demonstrate how much bigger he is than the student, and fires off a rousing, caustic email upbraiding the student for all sorts of shortcomings, and suggesting that he or she get his or her collective shit togevah, like, yesterday. The email finds its way on to the intertubes, whereupon a cheer erupts, and all us betrodden professor-types are meant to fist-pump vicariously through the emailing skillz of our Stern Professor friend, hereinafter, Professor Bickdick (on account of his having such a bick dick). Take that, former abusive student-types!

Now, far be it from me to choose sides between an MBA student and a business school professor (I also don’t adjudicate the relative ethical merits of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, for instance), but there is an odd irony involved in the exchange that most have failed to notice. To get to it, you have to follow the logic of Professor Bickdick’s reply, which I’ll repost here in its entirety:

Thanks for the feedback. I, too, would like to offer some feedback.

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15-20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.

Correct?

You state that, having not taken my class, it would be impossible to know our policy of not allowing people to walk in an hour late. Most risk analysis offers that in the face of substantial uncertainty, you opt for the more conservative path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the professor has an explicit policy for tolerating disrespectful behavior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lottery winner that is your recently crowned Monday evening Professor is teaching Judgement and Decision Making or Critical Thinking.

In addition, your logic effectively means you cannot be held accountable for any code of conduct before taking a class. For the record, we also have no stated policy against bursting into show tunes in the middle of class, urinating on desks or taking that revolutionary hair removal system for a spin. However, xxxx, there is a baseline level of decorum (i.e., manners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admissions department have deemed tomorrow’s business leaders.

xxxx, let me be more serious for a moment. I do not know you, will not know you and have no real affinity or animosity for you. You are an anonymous student who is now regretting the send button on his laptop. It’s with this context I hope you register pause…REAL pause xxxx and take to heart what I am about to tell you:

xxxx, get your shit together.

Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Professor [Bickdick]

Wow. That’s a big dick he swinging around, no? But we should notice a few things about this argument. Professor Bickdick first deploys the usual language of business discourse, suggesting that our hapless student should have performed a risk analysis, and probably would have been wise to hedge his bet. Well, that’s why he’s a business professor type: he can call up the most banal jargon for every situation. But the question is in fact central here: Professor Bickdick is actually quite serious (despite his protestations that he will only get “serious” later) – he’s quite serious, that is to say, that the student should have deployed precisely these decision making devices “in the face of substantial uncertainty.” What we know about Professor Bickdick is that he seeks, at least at the level of his instructions here (I won’t pretend to read his mind) to transform all aspects of life into business decisions. Can we go further? I think so. Apparently, before becoming Professor Bickdick, the good “doctor” (well, I wouldn’t go that far – ahem) made his name by starting a fun little internet site. I won’t link it here, since I’m not in the business of sending more hits to such venues, but suffice it to say that it involves envelopes that are red, and is primarily concerned with leveraging the gift relationship in the service of high priced commodities, to wit:

You give to affirm a friendship, to celebrate a new beginning, to thank a colleague, to honor family, to connect with a loved one, to commend successes, to mark passages, to give a little encouragement — or just because it’s a joy to give.

Put another way, there’s no aspect of your life or relationship in your life that can’t be translated (through the mechanism of Professor Bickdick’s brilliant web site) into a luxury item, like, for instance, a mother’s birthstone necklace ($95 USD), a silk and cashmere cardigan (when your friend or loved one is sick! – $150 USD), and etc. Everything – and especially the gift relation – can be commodified. Finally, Professor Bickdick was teaching a class on brand strategy. Now, I couldn’t find a direct description of a course called “Brand Strategy,” but what would seem like a similar course, “Brand Planning for New and Existing Products,” lists part of its goals as the following:

Creatively explores multiple ways that the branded product experience can create associations in the mind that may develop into mindshare (e.g., the immediate and preferential recalling of your brand when a need arises). Measures the knowledge effects of brand awareness, disposition, propensity, expectations, attitudes, and behavior and discovers the resulting level of brand equity.

Yummy mindshare! If I may risk a lay translation: the class that the student was sampling is concerned with hooking people affectively to a particular brand, or set of brand signifiers, at basically every level of their existence (disposition, propensity, expectation, attitude, and behavior). Or, simpler still, the guy teaches people how to create desiring consumers. So, to summarize, not only does Professor Bickdick instruct his almost student to treat decisions on attending classes as risk analyses; not only did he make his bones (and probably his substantial fortune) transforming the gift relationship – which is structurally immeasurable – into a calculable commodity relation; but the very class that the student had the gall to interrupt is directly involved in the production of a consumer subjectivity. And what is Professor Bickdick upset about?

He’s upset that this student acted like a consumer! He’s upset that this student treated his class as nothing more than another product on a store shelf, to be sampled at one’s leisure, tried out, inspected, and bought – or not. The “lucky lottery winner” that is the student’s Monday evening professor is not a lottery winner at all, but the brand that won the market share.

Oh, but wait, you say. Isn’t there all that stuff in there about “disrespectful behavior” and “decorum (i.e. manners)?” Isn’t there all that stuff in there about “respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility?” Doesn’t that count for something? Why, yes. That is where Professor Bickdick is at his most inconsistent. It is here where we see that all the blathering about risk analysis and all the background on brand building and mindshare never really cut it even for Professor Bickdick. Never mind that Judgement (sic) and Decision Making – presumably based on some derivative of rational choice theory that remains the grand fetish in our business schools – operates in direct contradiction to a notion of mindshare, which seeks to eliminate precisely such analytic calculations in the commodity’s consumption phase. You can’t square “immediate and preferential recalling” with the putative neutrality of risk analysis, however deluded both positions may be. But no matter. As we know from one of Deleuze and Guattari’s pithier aphorisms, nothing ever died of contradiction.

The real incoherence comes when Professor Bickdick tries to mix in remnants from what are essentially dead social formations (decorum, manners, respect for institutions, and the like) with his otherwise formulaic and predictable capitalist jargon. The professor is actually upset that the student treated his class like any other commodity on the market, but he’s equally upset that the sacred unity of his lecture was disturbed. Notice that Professor Bickdick never once suggests that other students themselves may be disturbed by late-comers, an easy enough argument to make, and the only real pragmatic objection to the student’s actions. Rather, the late-comers’ “behavior” is inherently “disrespectful.” It fails to pay due tribute to the eminence that is the professor, or acknowledge the size of his massive, er, congregation. In this sense, Professor Bickdick is quite right to introduce a paragraph break between his nonsense on “substantial uncertainty” and his real lance thrust on a supposed “code of conduct.” The first is the capitalist explanation of how the student erred. The second is the feudalist explanation of the same. We also know from Deleuze and Guattari, however, that the first effects a universal decoding – and indeed, it is precisely such a decoding that all Professor Bickdick’s activities actually serve to produce. It’s all the same to his “gifting” website if you’re celebrating a marriage or consoling the bereaved or honoring a colleague or whatever: it all translates into money, the universal equivalent, and all the dense cultural codes associated with these particular activities fall by the wayside. If there’s a better example of universal decoding than Professor Bickdick’s website, I’d certainly like to hear about it. What Professor Bickdick, in his dick-swinging zeal, doesn’t seem to understand is that such decoding would include his sacred “codes of conduct.” We have, then, the odd presentation of an MBA student who behaves in precisely the way Professor Bickdick teaches people to behave – in the mode of capitalist production, as a consumer, and etc. – but who Professor Bickdick must also sternly lecture (with the joke sent out to friends, no doubt) for violating in that very decoding behavior some archaic mode of feudal respect.

And we’re supposed to cheer about this? Even if we put Professor Bickdick’s incoherent email aside, we might at least say that, yes, yes indeed, we’ve all been tempted to write such emails. And we’ve all been tempted to do so precisely because we teach in this fraught context, where we’re constantly negotiating between the the decoding effects of the classroom gone commodity and the recoding or residual coding of the classroom as hierarchical institutional space. It is in that conflict that the desire to respond in these ways almost always erupts. So, why do most people I’ve taught with not write this email? Is it because we’re still mostly untenured, and such emails would look egregious to a tenure committee? Yes, certainly. Our labor interests are not spared the decoding. Is it because we generally don’t have time to compose such emails, given all our other work and interests? Yes, that too. But there may even be a simpler explanation – however complex the context in which such desires emerge and decisions are made.

Probably, unlike Professor Bickdick, most of us actually like our students.

Is this really going to be a weather post? A weather post? No. I guess I shouldn’t do that, not least because it really means we’ve hit bottom on subject matter – the worst kind of uncomfortable small talk: “Cold enough for ya?” Yeah, well. But it is winter, finally, after a mild November, so we’re just hoping to get our trips off OK out of the sucking pit of O’Hare. We have quite a few. The whole fam will fly to Albany, and from there the short drive to Schoharie to see Granny and everyone else. Then we drive to Queens, spend some time with the NYC famiglia, then back to Schoharie. Then she and the kiddos make the solo flight back to Chicago, while yours truly takes the Amtrak to Philadelphia, where I have some – ahem – business to take care of. No, not that kind. The other side of the table kind. The asking the questions kind. Should be interesting. Then I fly back to O’Hare, and then it’s New Years. So, winter, finally. I suddenly remembered that we’re leaving from Midway.

Has this been pointless enough for you? Good. Because it was all a thin ruse, a mere delivery device for these adorable pictures of the kiddos in and around various signifiers of the season.

1. Series Match-Up – I like a Yankees-Phillies series. First, it’s old school. I don’t know what a Colorado Rocky is, but its only barely a baseball team. In general, I don’t trust baseball teams that purport to represent entire states. That’s right. I said it. A baseball team should represent a city, not a state. Now, before you go off all half-cocked telling me that the New York Yankees and the New York Mets represent the state of New York, let me just stop you. The Yankees were founded long before such nonsense existed – when all teams were indexed to a city. The Mets, for their part, could never be mistaken for representing, say, Watkins Glen, New York, first because they are the Metropolitans, and second because their colors very obviously refer to the colors of the City of New York, and not the state of New York (the nonsense about the Mets colors referring to the Giants and Dodgers old colors is just silly, and hardly worth a mention). So much for that. But Florida? Arizona? Texas? Colorado? This is some new and painfully corporate contrivance meant to produce wide demographic identification (the worst offender appears in another sport – the Carolina Panthers: they don’t even bother restricting themselves to a state). I like World Series when they are Philadelphia v. New York, or Chicago v. Boston, or Detroit v. Los Angeles. This Colorado v. Texas shite has got to go.

Second, these teams are pretty evenly matched. Yankee fans who think the NL team will be a push-over this year, in the style of the hapless 99 Padres, have another thing coming. Indeed, I’d say that Philly is the stronger team at this point, largely because the Yankee offense has been so uneven, especially with runners in scoring position. When the bottom of the line-up hits, and the top of the line-up do their thing, the 09 Yankees are essentially unstoppable. We saw this on display in Game 4 – with all pistons firing, the Angels looked like what they were: a pathetically outmatched team. But there have been real offensive problems, and I don’t just mean Swisher’s performance (though his defense has certainly argued for his continued inclusion in the line-up). The Yankee bats have been iffy at best, which of course can’t be said of the Phillies. NY has been saved by three factors: opponent errors, stellar pitching, and clutch A-Rod. (For just a signal of how A-Rod smacked down Mike Scioscia’s strategy, he was on base five times last night, with two singles and THREE walks, all of which involved Angel pitchers trying to keep the ball the fuck away from his wheelhouse, which itself seems massive at this point. They even walked in a run pitching around A-Rod. Compare games 1 and 2, when Scioscia tried to pitch Rodriguez with impunity, hoping to break his confidence. Bzzzt. Try again next year.) On the other side, of course, is Ryan Howard, who has been tearing up anything in his path since Game 1 of the postseason. Clutch v. clutch. Tight pitching v. tight pitching, and even the Phillies pen didn’t seem all that bad. And Jeter v. Rollins? This should be interesting.

(CCCC Louisville Update): It looks like Hyatt is feeling the pressure from their little test run up in Boston. As I suggested in the comments to my previous post on this, Hyatt is likely “user-testing” the viability of a general labor strategy with their decision to fire a hundred permanent housekeeping staff in Boston and replace them with contract workers. That this test comes as Hyatt is preparing an IPO should come as no surprise. Investors will want to see reductions in labor costs, so Hyatt management has to figure out how to provide these reductions without pissing off an already irritated public. The move was almost certainly suggested by some douchebag at Goldman Sachs (listed prominently in the syndicate underwriting the IPO), who will have to sell this dog at a road show with negative earnings for 2009 appearing on the balance sheet.

Based on the extensive response I got to the email I wrote Hyatt about the Boston issue, they are in full-fledged damage control mode, and probably having to do more than they thought they would. In Boston, the governor of Massachusetts has suggested that all state workers boycott Hyatt, period, and even cab drivers have started organizing a boycott (I’d love to see how *that* would work…refusing to take a customer to a location is illegal in NYC). So their test case didn’t go so well, and we hear word yesterday that Hyatt will “hire back” the fired workers. Of course, that’s not quite right: they will be hired by the contractor “until” at least December 2010, at the same salaries. Now, you might be asking how that could be: wouldn’t it be cheaper to pay these workers their salary than to pay the contracting company the salary plus fee? And wouldn’t this put the lie to the oft-repeated claim that the decision to fire the workers resulted purely from the drop in revenues? Well, maybe not. Hyatt also paid for benefits for these workers, which included, at least, health and 401K/other defined contribution plan. Now Hyatt gets to cut out those benefits, and try to save the PR disaster by pretending they’ve “lost” this fight. They do note – and did so in the email as well – that the contracting service provides health benefits, though again, you’d have to wonder how extensive these are. In any case, I think I will send out another email noting that I don’t buy it, and I’d urge everyone to continue to avoid the Louisville Hyatt Regency until management gets their heads out of their collective IPO-dreaming asses and abandons this outrageous labor strategy.

So I’ll be attending the CCCC conference again next year, ready with my little pen and pad to add to my list. OK, maybe not, but it is an opportunity to see that rarest of rare birds – called Chance to Actually Affect Disgusting Corporate Practice. You see, the Hyatt in Boston axed their entire housekeeping staff on August 31 of this year – after tricking them into training their outsourced replacements. On NPR this morning, a woman who had worked for Hyatt for 21 years – since she was 19 years old – discussed her firing. So, basically her whole adult life thus far has been devoted to this organization, and they pretend the recession means that they should drop her $15 an hour and 401K contributions in favor of much cheaper labor? Um, uh uh. So 4C’s has contracted with both the Hyatt and the Marriott in Louisville for reduced rates; they’re the two main hotels being suggested by the conference. Here’s a stark choice. But it’s easy enough to say No! to the Hyatt and their outrageous labor practices in this case, and tell them precisely why (with specific notes sent to national, the Louisville Hyatt in particular, and the Boston Hyatt in particular). I think it’s also important for the conference organizers to revisit their deal with the Hyatt in light of a decision which very clearly conflicts with the values espoused by the organization, if not with standing resolutions and position statements.  Let’s remember that we often go to these conferences – mostly on the Employer Institution’s dime, which means many of us even pay with money that comes ultimately from union households – and, good Lord, but we hear a lot about writing for social change and resistance and agency and all kinds of stuff like that. Well, here you go. Write a note when you book elsewhere, and maybe these folks can get their jobs back on equitable terms.

Today we were invited over to the next door neighbors yard, where they were having a barbecue, cooking up skirt steak and chicken, and heating up corn tortillas on the grill. It was an interesting experience to say the least, largely because they don’t speak all that much English, and we don’t speak any Spanish beyond what I remember from 7th and 8th grade, and whatever I managed to pick up growing up in Queens (which, given the segregation prevalent at that time, is not all that much). My English is not so very, he kept saying. He referred to Ellie as “your son,” and each time his wife, who speaks less English than he does, would say “daughter,” and he’d say “Oh yeah! Daughter!” Hio, hia. One can see why. Nevertheless, we managed to get on reasonably well, and the carne asada was very good. We all drank beer.

The guy next door is one of those guys who drive around collecting steel and other metal that people throw out – basically a scrap metal operation. He loads up a beat up old pick-up truck that’s been rigged with some additional fencing and a few cross bars and drives the alleys (for New York people, the north side of Chicago, unlike most places in New York, has back alleys on most blocks where the garages are, and where you put your garbage). He then comes back and sections out the daily haul. It’s amazing, really: refrigerators, exercise machines, microwaves, barbells, all manner of tools and vices and scaffolding, air conditioners, fans, and humidity machines, shelving units, lamps, faucet hardware, frames, futon bases, whatever – metal piled up in big chunks, and then he spends some afternoons back there with a hammer and some tools chipping out the steel and metal bits from the smaller or more seemingly plastic trash, like the inner frame of a computer case and similar small things that you really have to work on to get some salvageable metal out of. There are hundreds of guys who do this, mostly recent immigrants from Mexico and various Central American countries. At the old place, I used to see them come on up the alley because that’s where I smoked. They’d stop, inspect various garbage areas, pull what they could sell, and move on. I have a sense of what this guy’s day is like. About a month ago, we had Work Colleague over for dinner, and my neighbor came back with his truck being towed; we helped him push it back into his driveway, no small task given the fact that the driveway opens on to a fairly narrow alley. I was glad Work Colleague could speak Spanish, or that little operation wouldn’t have run so smoothly, I suspect. And that truck’s his whole livelihood. He had it up and running again in two days. So, this guy, my neighbor, basically sweeps up shitloads of metal that people have put to trash, collects it, pulls the scrap from it, all day driving the alleys and lifting heavy shit, then coming back and banging it with hammers: the underground economy next door. Busting his hump, and probably helping the environment in the process, turning bourgeois detritus into carne asada, and then offering some to us.

I spent the last weekend out in Davis, CA and environs, doing the Computers & Writing (C&W) conference thing. My colleague JP and I have been going to this conference every year for the last several, and we usually have a good time. Same this year. The new thing at the conference this year was a Twitter feed that displayed various participants tweets (is there a more obnoxious term?), many of them directly from some presentation room or other. So, you’d go into the break/registration room, and you’d supposedly get a sense of what was going on in the panels that you were not then attending. You could also go back to the feed to see what people had to tweet (ugh) about your panel. All of this, of course, ends up being presented as some kind of openness, and presumably we’re supposed to learn something from all that tweeting (yuck!). The question here, I guess, is whether we actually do.

As anyone breathing is now fully aware of, Twitter is now somehow implicated in the events going on in Iran—so much so that otherwise careful commentators have fallen into the whole “Twitter Revolution” rhetoric as if it’s some kind of obvious fact. The supposedly political use of Twitter washing over the infosphere was thus a frequent topic of discussion at the conference, with most people that I saw entering into rather unqualified celebration of whole thing. I should remind you all at this point that the conference was not made up of Iran experts, but—and I hesitate to say this—Twitter experts, or experts in the use of new writing technologies and rhetoric. But this may be the correct group to stand in as an instance of the general phenomenon, since all the twitter about the tweets from Tehran seems to be much more about Twitter than Tehran. In any case, I’d eat my hat in the public square (supposing such a place still exists) if even a small fraction of the people currently celebrating the Twitter revolution know fuck-all about Iranian politics, culture, and history.  But this returns us to the other point.

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What? My peoples if you wit me where the fuck you at? – Method Man, Triumph

Every year, the Brooklyn Famiglia gears up for one of the big events: Hooligan Day. It’s the day when everybody wears their hooligan kit, watches the FA Cup, then gather at The Gate on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope for the big doo. And every year since 2002 I’ve missed it, since I’ve been away.  And even though it’s just a little afternoon beer drinking kind of thing, it’s the time that I most miss New York. I think we had such a tight community when we were there that it just stings more now that we’re not there, but especially on those real occasions of off-the-wall solidarity. And this year especially, since we’re missing not just the community, but my two nieces who I haven’t seen yet, and the whole transformation of the event into a far more family friendly sort of affair, which it pretty much had to become, all these years later.

And so you’re in graduate school in my field and you have to sign on to this idea that you can’t be very specific about where you end up. But it’s easier to sign on to that than to live it. And it all seems so temporary, until you’re looking down the pike at tenure and buying a place and thinking – is this it for us now? Are we now from here? Certainly, we’re very lucky to end up in a kind of place that’s like the kind of places that we like. But a place isn’t a people. On a night like this in Brooklyn I would call my brother and just head up to the bar to catch a game. No plans. No planes. And there’d be people, and we’d know them, even from just around. You know that guy? Yeah. How you know him? From around. All the Facebook friends in the world don’t match that, I’m coming to understand, technological evangelism and general distaste for the usual technophobia notwithstanding. So you sign on to this thing, but you only sign on to the concrete social dislocation in a very abstract way. Yes, I know this is griping. Or pitiful. Maybe both. A friend said to me last year: “We have a name for people who get jobs where they grew up: the working class.” Well, yes and no, I guess. 

So I just saw these flicks on Facebook, and I wanted to say that I miss my place, and my peoples.  

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. – Jean Baudrillard

How could we have all been so blind? Keith, one of the FBI agents, summed everything up very simply: “I’ve never seen a place like this,” he told me. “You were all living in Disneyland!” - Eleanor Squillari, Bernard Madoff’s secretary, in June’s Vanity Fair

In my ongoing morbid curiosity about my former employer, Bernard Madoff, I read the recent Vanity Fair article by Marc Seal, “Bernie Madoff’s Private World.” It’s the companion piece to the April article also written by Seal. The June article, however, is essentially co-written by Madoff’s long-time secretary, Eleanor Squillari, so you really get an insider’s look at the operations over there. Now, you may know that I’ve been basing all my Madoff posts since Bernie got arrested on this post, which I wrote long before any of this mess hit the fan.  Of course, since then I’ve learned that I worked in the heart of the Madoff fraud, probably sending out fraudulent statements to clients/victims. The Vanity Fair article adds another dimension to that, and some – to me – jaw-dropping updates. The article is written in the first-person from the perspective of Squillari, Bernie’s secretary. Here, then, are the relevant portions:

The 17th floor was a different world from where we worked. Whereas the upper two floors were modern, with everything state-of-the-art, on 17 the corporate image didn’t seem to matter. The desks were close together, the computers were antiquated, and the printers were old ink-jet jobs, not the laser printers we had in our offices [tpspn: it's funny that I remembered the main printer in exactly this way, that it impressed itself so clearly on my memory]. …

The two people who ran the floor, Frank DiPascali and Annette Bongiorno, had once lived next door to each other, in Queens. Annette handled Bernie’s seasoned clients and managed her staff on 17. Short, tough, and overweight, she was rigid and guarded at work. [tpspn: compare my description of her in the original post as "She was a completely round woman, maybe 4 foot 8, implausibly round like a circle drawn perfectly by hand. She was an Italian from Brooklyn who had started off as the founder of the firm’s secretary 25 years before, when it was a very small operation indeed. She’d then made the inevitable ascent to office manager and then operations manager, largely behind her tyrannical personality. Some of the impeccably educated full-timers noted bitterly that she’d never been to college. I saw her make at least three of these people cry in the eight weeks I was there."]…[M]uch of her wealth had to have come from Bernie, whom she had worked for since he started his business, in the 1960′s.

Annette’s staff of six were mostly low-level, clerical women, many of them working mothers, who probably made no more than $40,000 a year. They were young and naive, with no background in finance, so they weren’t able to connect the dots. Annette allegedly instructed them to generate tickets showing trades that had never been made, at least two of them reportedly told prosecutors, and they simply did as they were told (Bongiorno has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

I knew these women. Two of them, Winnie Jackson and Semone Anderson, would come up to 19 every day to deliver figures. Whenever I went downstairs, they were always busy doing paperwork while Annette watched them like a hawk. Once, I remember Annette had the phones removed from her employees’ desks after she became concerned that they were making personal calls. She treated them like children. …

In Annette Bongiorno’s area, located across the floor from Frank, were Winnie and Semone and four other women. Every day I would receive a report with all of the figures from Winnie or Semone and another report of wire transfers from the cage.

This is amazing to me because it’s just as I remember it. But more than that. I closed my other piece with the following:

I never really quit that job. I just called the temp agency one Monday and said I wouldn’t do it anymore. The woman at the agency was really upset, since the firm had apparently started speaking to her about hiring me full time, a revelation so absurd that it simply floored me. They hired Tasha instead.

Now here’s the jaw-dropping part. Temp #1, or “Tasha,” in my previous post is Semone Anderson from the Vanity Fair story. She started the same day I did, and they were set, according to the temp agency, to offer me the position that she eventually took. This is curious to me. I get in there and last about 8 weeks before the mind-numbingness of it all finally kicks in, and I just drop it, the whole job. Here’s how that really happened. I was up in Binghamton for the weekend visiting she, who was still in college at the time. I was supposed to take a bus home on Sunday night, but I just said fuck it. We even got to the actual bus station before I decided to stay another day or two. What about Madoff? she asked me. Fuck ‘em, I said. I’ll find something else. I remember calling the agency early Monday morning and telling the rep, who was notably upset, first because I was bailing on a perfectly good revenue stream for the agency (I believe it was called Cross Temps) for no apparent reason, and second because they get some payoff if you’re hired full time. I turned to she when I got off the phone: “I think she’s pissed,” I laughed. Well, they got the payoff for Tasha/Semone. What’s incredible to me is that she stayed there for the remaining damn near 13 years, and is so inextricably mixed up in this now world famous and historical Ponzi scheme that her name is appearing in Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal! For a job that I fairly casually discarded on a whim, and pretty much left behind without ever looking back.

It’s an odd thing to think about, I guess. But it also goes to two points. First, these finance jobs are the route to some kind of bourgeois life for many working class people in urban areas. Tasha/Semone started at Madoff by stapling and folding on the same slushy January day that I did. Thirteen years. It was her career, and would have gone on in that manner no doubt for as long as they’d pay her. Indeed, Madoff himself and DiPascali and Bongiorno (the latter two haven’t been charged with anything, of course – though this shocks me) all have fairly modest upbringings, like all the fraudsters in the last few financial debacles. (I also sense a pattern that might explain why they were going to offer me that job, even though I openly considered it beneath me, as arrogant as I was: the qualifying characteristics for taking care of business on the 17th floor seem to be 1) Queens, and 2) a distinctly Italianate name. And in finance, a double major in history and English might as well be “no college.”). But the second point sort of derives from the first. Certainly, this Madoff fraud is outrageous and historical in scope. But it’s Disneyland, see? But maybe with a twist: Madoff is presented as real in order to make us believe that the rest of the mess on Wall Street is imaginary. It functions as the displacement for the whole Madoffian financial system, in much the same way that my colleague over there  in Japan right now sees the swine flu as a metonymic displacement of globalization anxieties. We’re crazy about Bernie, to put it another way, because we all work for Bernie. And it goes without saying, I should add, that we all have our money with him.

You may remember my description of the ancient equipment I worked with at Madoff, posted here. I put it like this:

The operations department – where I worked – had an old dot-matrix mega printer, a preposterous machine roughly the size of a mature rhinoceros. The full time people would run these reports, then they’d come out of the printer, then we’d have to separate them, collate them, staple them, fold them, put them in envelopes, and finally run them through a Pitney-Bowes, all manually. Oh, I shouldn’t forget: since the printer was, even then, this ancient relic probably bought second-hand from the fucking Phoenix Program, it spit out the paper on turning wheels, with those absurd little punched-out circles on the paper edges supposedly aligning everything, the kind you still see on some government forms. So, before collating, stapling, folding, inserting, and stamping, we also had to rip the alignment edges off the reports. Thousands of them. Of course, since the giant dot-matrix was ancient, and since this technique for printing things was never very smart in the first place, the damn thing kept misfeeding, so somebody had to stand by the printer all day preventing and correcting the misfeeds, which usually occurred when more than, say, six consecutive reports were printed in a row. Thousands of reports.

I just read this article, in which some other employee discusses the goings-on on the 17th floor (where I worked, in the heart of the fraud, or as the article calls it, the “nexus of the Ponzi scheme”). He says the following:

The employee says he only saw the 17th floor, where the fraudulent Investment Advisory operation was located, about two times. He noticed the out of date computers and the old-fashioned dot matrix printers which printed out paper with green and white stripes. The computers he saw were about 15 years old, including one system that “is not even around anymore—miles away from modern Windows technology. And the statements I’ve seen from victims don’t look like my statements from Fidelity. They had primitive typefaces, as though they had been typed on a typewriter. Nobody sends statement like that, so maybe it was done to create the illusion of old-fashioned transparency.”

He learned that those who staffed the 17th floor were less than knowledgeable, often uneducated, often appeared incompetent. “There was this one guy, who had worked there his whole life who generated the statements but he would often not get them out on time.”

There is no doubt in my mind that I was printing and sending out the fraud statements. You should also notice, if you read the article, that I didn’t exactly change all the names in my account…