A Veritable Age Of Unreason

When one gets a few years past middle age there are certain rights bestowed upon them. One is the right to be a curmudgeon. There are perhaps lesser rights such as loss of embarrassment and control of certain bodily functions. But for the moment I will dwell on the former rather than the latter.

Of late, Italiphil and I have been complaining about the general rudeness in business today. Common courtesy has disappeared and an ugly rudeness has taken its place. We grumble on about it a lot. Less enlightened and younger readers may say we’re fast approaching curmudegery, if there is a word, but we still remember a day when a phone call was promptly returned and a person’s handshake really was his bond, not just a Cameron Crowe line

When you’re in the midst of curmudgening, you tend to wonder how it has come to pass that the world has gone so wrong and how very smart you have become over the years. This, naturally, leads to being more pissed off.

Our parents had to put up with the Beatles, long hair and a confusing set of differing values. It seems our lot has to endure with smart little boys with bright ideas – like derivatives, start up ventures and the convenient parsing of certain sexual acts not being sex at all. Or at least our generation can’t get that final notion past our wives. We also have to put up with rap, which as near as I can tell is the sound of one man yelling while others throw trash cans down a flight of metal stairs. But I can live with these affronts. What Italiphil and I have struggled with is the loss of appreciation for what our age and experience has brought us. Certainly years of toil should mean something to the smart young people nipping at our heels to get a piece of what we have.

In my business there are a number of people who have entered it presuming they would begin at the top. The old adage of doing what I am doing while their mammies were wrapping their butts in diapers could never be truer. And yet it doesn’t stop their conceits and where they believe they fit in the world. This isn’t to say that some of these younger people aren’t clever, it’s just we don’t want to feel that our time spent blazing the trail for them was wasted.

When Pete Wilson was lured from the Senate to take the lowly job as governor of California, he brought with him much of his young Senate staff. One never met a bunch of more cocksure twenty-somethings. We used to call them the “Penny Loafer Boys” because they wore the uniform of DC and Ivy League training: blue blazers, starched blue cotton pin-point Oxfords and, of course, penny loafers. They came to Sacramento believing they actually knew what they were doing. Within a few months, Willie Brown had them twisted into so many Rubic’s Cubes that they were passing tax increases and extending rights to gays – not exactly what the conservatives had in mind when they dialed Pete’s number.

So Italiohil and I wonder, if we’re not sounding too old and out of step, is it too much trouble to return our phone calls promptly, as a point of taking another task off your Blackberry list if nothing else? Or, what if you ask us to write you an urgent proposal and to have it in your e-mail inbox by the morning, that you actually read it and say thanks? How about giving us some credit for knowing what you think you know, only we actually knew it when we were your age? Perhaps you could just give us some credit when you’re stealing our ideas or re-inventing what we already invented?

It would really be appreciated if you youngins could do this for us. Then we can stop being a curmudgeon and matriculate to being dirty old men. We could use the change of pace.