Tis the Season

Today is audit day. Every year someone impeccably dressed from the headquarters of my Broker-Dealer shows up at my office door looking very official. He or she demands to see a few randomly selected client files. Then they want to see all of my compliance files. There’s the correspondence file, the checks received blotter, and the thankfully empty customer complaint file. Then he or she disappears into the conference room where they pour over it all looking for a mistake. Eventually they leave without saying anything except, “If there’s a problem, you will hear from us.”

Somewhere in the witches brew of my DNA is a molecular strain that predisposes me to rebel against authority. I have always struggled with the concept of having a boss, which is most likely why I ended up working for myself. Still, there is no such thing as total independence. Everyone has some form of a boss. In addition to my wife, and the IRS, I must ultimately answer to the suits at my Broker-Dealer. I do so reluctantly. I have never been able to buy into the fiction that they are “on my side, and that we are all in this together.” My view has always been that they perform their intense oversight of my business to protect themselves, not me. If I became a liability they would run away from me faster than a southern democrat running away from Obamacare in November.

Nevertheless, I never fear these annual audits for one very simple reason. In thirty years, I have never done anything intentionally deceitful to a client. I have never taken advantage of a client’s ignorance. I have always tried to do what was in his or her best interest, not my own. I say this not as a boast, but rather because merely as a practical matter, honesty is so much easier than deceit. Imagine how Bernie Madoff had to feel every time his office was audited. His mind must have been filled with tortuous worry. Would all of his schemes escape scrutiny? Would an indiscreet moment or an ill-filed report turn up? I cannot imagine having to endure that every minute of every day. Honesty allows for peaceful sleep. Honesty doesn’t require a good memory. It turns out that your Mom was right all those years ago when she warned you that if you became a liar, your lies would eventually catch up with you.

Now, this is not to say that I have nothing to fear from these audits. I am not the most organized person on the planet. My record keeping skills often leave something to be desired. But, administrative mistakes seldom get you carted off in hand cuffs. Better to be unorganized than a liar. I guess Bernie was the worst of both worlds…an unorganized liar.

When this audit is over with, I’ll have to get prepared for next week’s OSJ audit. Tis the season!

The REAL Zombie Apocalypse

Yesterday afternoon, I got home from the gym, like I do almost every day of the week. I proceeded to my routine of grabbing a bottle of water and heading upstairs to my black leather recliner where I grab my Google Nexus to check my email, track the stock markets, peruse Facebook, and check the news. Only, something was wrong. Something was very wrong. A troubling message flashed across the screen, “unable to open page, check your internet connection.”

Thus began a frantic thirty minutes of that most rare and hopeless exercise, me as an IT troubleshooter. The only thing I was able to discover was that none of the internet connection-reliant devices in my house were functioning. My computers were worthless, the television was out, and even my cell phones could not make an internet connection. To make this untenable situation even worse, my wife wasn’t home. See, in the Dunnevant house, there is only one person with the patience and technological savvy to get to the bottom of something like this, and she was at the grocery store or some such worthless place instead of here fixing the internet. Soon, Kaitlin got home. I asked her what to do. Aren’t the millennials supposed to be tech-savvy? She walked into my study and peered at the router thing with the blinking lights for a minute then confessed, “Who am I kidding? Where’s Mom?”

Thirty hellish minutes later Pam got home and began barking instructions. Nothing she tried worked. Apparently this outage was “ice storm related” and would require a visit from a Verizon Fios Professional who would be glad to service us Thursday between the hours of one and five. WHAT???!!! We can put a man on the moon, but let one eighth of an inch of freezing rain fall from the sky and our internet goes out? What are we to do for the next 48 hours for Pete’s sake? Don’t these people know that Christmas is coming? How are we supposed to do our online shopping, HMMM???

The rest of the night I walked through the house like one of those Zombie Apocalypse people, trying to find something to do with myself. I couldn’t watch the game. I couldn’t play Words With Friends, I couldn’t stalk my Son on Facebook. All of a sudden a bitter realization blazed across my consciousness.  I am a slave to the machine. Despite all of my efforts at independence, all of my vain conceits about being contrarian, I have been co-opted by big brother’s grid. My life has become dependent on connectivity. They’ve got me.

So I sit and wait for the nice man driving the Verizon van to arrive.   

College Football, Nelson Mandela, and a great joke

It’s Sunday morning, and it’s sleeting outside. My refrigerator is full of food, church has been cancelled, and Pam is downstairs making a breakfast casserole. Clearly, it’s time for me to pontificate on current events.

For all of the hand wringing about how college football needs a playoff system, once again the right two teams will be playing for the national title. Although my gut and my eyes tell me that the two best teams are Auburn and Alabama, I do get why Florida State is number one in the polls. Although they play in a much weaker conference, they have destroyed everyone on their schedule, and they have a terrific defense. Auburn played a much tougher schedule week in and week out and their only loss came in Baton Rouge on a Saturday night where the visitors practically never win. Regular readers of this space know of my devotion to SEC football, of my convictions, (born out by the record of the last ten years), that the SEC is vastly superior to any other conference in college football. But this year, I’m thinking that their streak of dominance may be about to end. Auburn has a virtually unstoppable running game, despite the fact that although it’s a triple option offense, most of the running plays end up being right up the gut, power football. Still, no one seems to have figured out how to slow it down, let alone stop it. However, Auburn’s defense is horrendous, especially against the pass. Florida State has a great passing game and the one thing that all of the past SEC champs used to have, and even greater defense. Count me among the old geezers who still believe that to win championships, eventually you have to be able to stop somebody. My money is on Florida State.

Nelson Mandela passed away. His death has dominated the news for the past 48 hours and deservedly so. He was a great man precisely because he was not a modern man. Mandela chose to reject Machiavellian schemes of revenge and score settling when he was released from over twenty years of political imprisonment. Instead of getting even, that most 20^th century virtue, he chose to pursue healing and reconciliation. This fact alone is reason enough to celebrate his life.

A political joke:

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid got together and decided that something had to be done to improve their image with “regular, middle class types.” So Nancy says, “I’ve got an idea, let’s go buy some regular people clothes, you know…jeans and t-shirts and go into a working class bar somewhere in Montana and buy everybody a round of drinks!” Harry loved the idea, but added that as a conversation starter and to better blend in with the local folks, they should bring along a dog. So, Nancy and Harry walk into a bar in Bozeman, Montana with a Labrador Retriever and start buying everyone drinks. Everything is going great for a while, then an old gnarly looking rancher walks in, goes up to the dog, lifts its tail and stares for a minute, then shakes his head and walks out. Not long after, another old rancher comes in and does the same thing. Over the next 30 minutes, another ten ranchers walk in, lift the dog’s tail, then shake their heads back and forth and leave without saying a word. Finally, Nancy looks at the bartender and says, “Excuse me. I’ve noticed these men lifting our dog’s tail. Is this some sort of quaint local custom?” The bartender says, “Lord no. Someone’s out there running around town, claiming there’s a Labrador Retriever in here with two assholes.”

My DMV Adventure

Over the past several weeks I have made quite a few snide remarks about my frustrating experience with the Division of Motor Vehicles. I have alluded to rude and incompetent employees, bureaucratic paper shuffling, and even used my experience to illustrate what we might expect once Obamacare is fully implemented. First a bit of background.

My Mom died in June of 2012. By the time Dad’s county tags for his van had to renew in October of this year, Hanover County refused to issue new tags since my Mother had passed away in the interim and her name was on the title. So, in order to get new tags issued, I had to remove Mom’s name from said title. This would involve contacting the DMV for instructions as to how to proceed. Thus began my three week odyssey within the bowels of the dehumanizing, soul-crushing world of government bureaucracy.

Anyone who has visited the DMV knows the drill. You walk in and are greeted with a sign that says that before you can join the throngs of people sitting in plastic chairs waiting for service, you must first stand in the information line. This is a line that snakes across the back of the sterile, strange smelling room where you wait to tell a bored Asian woman why you are at the DMV in the first place, to which she says, “I not sure this will work,” then gives you a piece of paper with a number…C123. Discouraging, but at least I’m now in a plastic chair.

The man next to me has mud-caked boots and smells of bourbon at 9:30 in the morning, all the while mumbling “mo***r fu**ng government.” I decide to stand. After 15 minutes, a woman’s voice announces over the cracking PA system, “now serving number C123 at station 11,” in that halting, robotic, creepy simulated human voice sort of way. I find station 11 and am greeted by an extremely pale woman, who without once looking up from her computer screen says, “What do you need?”

I proceed to share my tale of woe. I explain my two previous visits, I detail the difficulty I’ve had with all of the incorrect instructions I have been given by her colleagues that has caused me considerable angst. I lay out all of the completed paperwork in front of her, hoping to impress her with my due diligence. There’s Mom’s death certificate, a copy of my Power of Attorney, a Title transfer and change authorization form and all of the pertinent vehicle data. The pale one looks at the forms, then without explanation disappears behind the opaque glass wall behind her. This has happened on both of my previous visits. This is the place where DMV apparatchiks go to get away from me and plot their strategy for my destruction. Whenever they return from this cone of silence, it is never good news. Bad, even sinister things always seem to happen behind the opaque glass wall. She spends a full seven minutes back there before emerging, her face a mass of complete nonchalance. She says nothing to me. Instead she begins frantically typing away on her keyboard. Finally, after another four wordless minutes she grunts, “you be paying for one year or two?” Forty minutes after entering the DMV for the third time in as many weeks, I leave clutching my Dad’s county tags proudly in my hand. I immediately went home and took a shower.

The day before my triumph, my Dad got the following letter from the DMV.

 

The professional government employee who typed this letter has the most coveted possession in all of America. She has a guaranteed government job from which she can never be fired. She has very generous benefits, plenty of perks and never has to compete for anything. And this poor woman can’t even spell the street name of her employer’s address correctly. …To have you wifes name refomved has become an instant classic in my house.

Yeah, I’m sure the fears about government run health care are all overblown. What could possibly go wrong?

My Dad's Birthday

December 7th, in Franklin Roosevelt's immortal words, is indeed a day which will live in infamy. But for me and my family, it will always be a wonderful day because 92 years ago, my Dad was born. Although he's been gone for over two years now, I still think about him nearly every day. Something will happen at work, I'll hear something on the news, I'll read something about some fresh new idiot doing something moronic at a church somewhere and I will think of him and imagine what he would say. I will remember his wisdom and try to channel it. I wonder what he would think of what has become of us since he went home? What would he think of Trump?

My father was a conservative sort but he was no ideologue. He carried with him a sincere affection for FDR and a life long tender hearted love for the poor and disadvantaged. But he also had no patience for people or governments who didn't live within their means. That's it. That's all I really know about my Dad's politics. Isn't that amazing? The man lived 89 years and for much of that time had an actual pulpit rather than a bully one, and I still know so little about his views on politics. The reason for this was simply the fact that Dad considered himself a minister of the gospel first and as such a citizen of the Kingdom of God, not any Kingdom of Man. Although he was very proud to be an American, it never preempted his loyalties to the cross of Christ. May we all go out and do likewise.

The last birthday we celebrated with Dad was nothing special. We brought dinner over to the house and gave him some gifts. Luckily I thought to write what follows. It was a nice memory, the sort that warms the heart and takes away some of the longing and loss that I feel on his birthday. But I have nothing to complain about where Dad is concerned. We had him for 89 years, almost nine decades of setting the personal integrity bar a mile high for his descendants.

Tonight we will celebrate my Dad’s 89^th birthday. His actual birthday is Saturday, but since we will be having dinner with him, we will have gifts tonight. Dad was born in 1924 into a world that none of us can imagine. In rural Buckingham Country, Virginia, electricity was a luxury item. The leading cause of death in 1924 was the flu, followed closely by diarrhea. The most valuable fuel was kerosene and it would be over 60 years until he lived in a house with central air conditioning.

My Dad’s father was a share cropper. No one from his family had ever attended college. By the time my father was 45 years old, he had served his country in the South Pacific during World War II, fathered four children, graduated from college, and then obtained a Master’s Degree in Theology from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, all while working graveyard shifts as a Teamster, loading trucks in 100% humidity five nights a week.

He was married to my mother for 65 years, until her death in June of last year. His health has been failing him for some time now. It has been our privilege to care for him over the past 18 months. He has made it so much easier with his easy smile, gratefulness and incredible attitude. I look at him now and can hardly imagine what it must have been like to live such a life, to start out in such humble circumstances and end up with such a long list of achievements, not the least of which was becoming the patriarch of such a large and loud tribe. But, he has managed it all without the accompanying ego that usually inhabits high achievers. He remains eternally humble and thankful for every blessing that has come his way.

Happy birthday Dad!

Why Are Farts Funny?

Since there are no earth-shattering news stories demanding my attention this morning, I am finally free to discuss a subject that has always fascinated me, that is, why are farts funny? Perhaps the question should be restated as, why are farts funny…to men?

Flatulence, even the word itself makes me want to giggle. From my earliest memories, hearing someone fart has elicited laughter from me. My best friend growing up was Al Thomason, and the two of us never laughed quite so much as when we were engaged in some raucous flatulence competition. I would like to say that those immature, adolescent days of tomfoolery are over, but although I am now 55 years old, I still laugh at the memories.

You could get ten world leaders in a room discussing an eminent threat to civilization, like some asteroid hurdling towards the planet, yet if one of them inadvertently let a loud one slip, I guarantee you they would all be laughing, except for Hillary Clinton. Woman don’t get it. All of my life woman have looked down on men who think farting is funny. It’s like it’s beneath them or something. They always screw up their faces and say, “that’s disgusting!” Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. If scientists are to be believed, everybody does it multiple times a day, making it an entirely natural, reoccurring bodily function, sort of like breathing. Only, there aren’t companies out there manufacturing remote control devices designed to project breathing sounds across the room. That’s because breathing isn’t, er, well, it isn’t hilarious! You can’t buy a breathing cushion, but whoopee cushions are the number one selling novelty gift of all times.

Here’s a thought experiment for all men over the age of 40. What is the most famous and memorable scene from Blazing Saddles? It’s my guess that 95% of you just said, “that scene around the campfire when all the bean eating cowboys started farting.” The other 5% of you never saw Blazing Saddles and therefore must relinquish your man cards immediately.

My point is that no matter how cultured and respectable we become as men, the fundamental hilarity of a well timed fart remains eternally funny. It is my considered opinion that this is an act of God. Our creator, in his great wisdom has placed within the heart of man a childish funny bone. The uncontrollable impulse to laugh at flatulence is a kind of divine comic relief, meant to remind us that no matter how terribly serious our lives become, we are still capable of laughter.

Or, maybe we men are just disgusting.

Weird Stuff My Mom Used to Say

I was with one of my dear 82 year old clients yesterday when I heard her use a word I hadn’t heard anyone use since my Mom passed away. As she was fumbling through her files looking for something she said, “fiddlesticks!” It made me smile to hear that word again, and it also got me to thinking about several odd words and phrases that Mom used that I seldom hear from anyone else. Here are just a few:

John Brown. This all-purpose word appeared often in Mom’s vocabulary. She used it as an adjective as in, “I’ll be John Brown!” I took this to mean that she was either surprised or agitated. She would also use it as a substitute curse word as in, “If you kids think you’re gonna sleep until noon on a Saturday, you’ve got another John Brown think coming!” When I was little, I had no idea who or what a John Brown was. When I learned in school about the wild abolitionist and slave rebelling instigator John Brown, Mom’s use of the term gained her considerable street cred with me. Who was this white, southern woman using John Brown’s name as a slang term??

Draw back a nub. “If you try to steal a roll from this basket, you’re gonna draw back a nub!” Although I knew she wasn’t violent enough to make good on such a claim, still there was something about the way she said it that made you think twice.

I swannee. Clearly, this word served as some sort of milder, more Christian alternative to the conventional I swear.

Phooey. At times of great or even minor frustration, Mom would let loose with Phooey! Lately, Pam has taken this word up to my great delight.

I declare. Sometimes this came out as “I do declare,” or even better, “I declare honestly.” Whenever I heard the phrase, I knew that something truly profound was about to come flying out of my mother’s mouth, and I better pay attention.

Whether these expressions were used in isolation or on those rare occasions when several of them would appear in the same excited sentence, they communicated very specific moods. And although none of us kids knew exactly what they meant, they always made us perk up. Whenever you heard something like this:

“I declare honestly, if you kids don’t get out of my hair, all of you are gonna draw back some John Brown nubs!”…you knew it was time to back off.

I would give anything to be able to get her all riled up so I could hear them again.