I’m sitting here in my home “office” (really a bedroom we have with desks in it) looking out the window at the wind blowing the rain off the leaves of the tree just outside my window. I am melancholy.
What I want to do is leave my house and go to a public place and hang out with people I don’t know. Have a glass of whiskey while the conversations around me fall across my ears, a cacophony of noise that I pay little attention to, but refills my cup of social necessities. I want to hide from the day of frustrations one encounters when working remotely: technology that is close to working well, but not quite. There’s always a glitch. But when you work remotely, you’re also head of Information Technology. I’m not equipped for that, but I make do. The markets haven’t been kind lately. My clients are wonderful people who understand what is happening at the exact same time where they don’t. I mean, we’re living through a plague. What kind of biblical bullshit is this? Can we really understand it? Do we want to?
Tempers are short these days. People are pleasant enough, so that’s ok, but the slightest thing can set them off. I have one client who is upset that a rate she wanted for a mortgage refinance wasn’t available. She called 2 weeks ago. The rate was given at that time, with the caveat that nothing is locked until the application is taken. 15 days go by, and now she wants to go forward, and the rates have changed. She wants me to magically reduce them. Perhaps the markets will do it for me, but I simply don’t have that kind of control. She’s “disappointed” in the process. Yeah, the process. It gets us every time.
I have another client who has engaged in risky trading. I mean super duper hyper risky behavior. He’s made quite a bit of money while everybody else loses. Good for him. However, as what always happens when people engage in risky behavior with only positive results, they go in for even riskier behavior. My firm put the brakes on him. If things go south, and they eventually will (for him), he may never financially recover. The manager and compliance people no longer wish to take on the risk of signing off on his trades. Take your business elsewhere, they say, never mind the 10 year relationship he and I have had. Man, I play poker with his kids, go to his birthday parties, break bread and drink wine with our spouses in a foursome. Poof. It’s gone.
Another client writes me a nastygram. “I told you to get out of the market!” he screams to me over an email. He told me that in December of 2018. I followed his instructions and did what he asked. On the same day. Only 5 months later, after selling low, he now wants back in. Again I honor his request, and he buys back high. His recent recognition of being invested in the market enrages him. He conveniently forgot the conversations we had about him getting back in, and his affirmative request to do so. He later confirms he never looks at his statements, the transaction confirmations, and all the other communications he receives. He just wants to buy a house, and now he can’t, he says. (he can). He threatens legal action, which of course gets the attention of my firm. We have contemporaneous notes, phone records, etc. He will lose any argument he tries to throw at us, but I feel bad for the guy. He’s losing his mind. It’s just sad.
Today, I took a journey in what must have looked like full HazMat gear into a grocery store. I went at 1:00pm (ish). The store was very well stocked for most things. It was refreshing. But I couldn’t get garlic. Actually, I also couldn’t get flour, a specialized type of squash (it was on the list, I can’t remember what it was, but they didn’t have it), and a couple other things. All of it was no big deal, but the garlic really jarred me. Why is it hard to get garlic? The woman at the cash register looked defeated. She tried to be kind (she succeeded, as far as I was concerned), but she looked like she wanted to be anywhere else. Who could blame her. She’s working in a petri dish.
One the way home, I heard on the radio the first child in the US died of Covid-19. I wanted to cry. Well there goes the hope that this doesn’t impact the young’uns. I don’t know if the boy had health issues. I guess that matters, because we want him to have had health issues, right? We *need* that, otherwise the horror that we are in gets worse. Regardless, he’s dead, and we know he is unique only because he was first. And of course the political news came on. I changed the channel to a comedy station. George Carlin was on. That guy is just as funny now as he ever was. Perfection.
We are all allowed to be anxious, nervous, sad, and depressed once in a while. I don’t plan to stay this way. Today was just a rough day. Oh yeah, a racquetball injury to my right knee is taking much longer to heal than expected. I’m not playing anymore, perhaps that’s why I’m so cranky. But that is giving it a chance to repair itself. Silver linings, you know? To be fair, it’s quite lovely having my kids back in the house, sequestered from returning to college. The amount of laughter coming from our kitchen table every night is five-fold what it was ‘back in the day’ when they lived here full time. I think it’s safe to say, we’re living well…with an asterisk. That fucking asterisk.