Mechanical Bull

When I lived in France, I taught English to a French engineer whose company had been taken over by an American company in the last year or two.  Apparently, many of his colleagues had left in droves, and it wasn’t because they disliked Americans, it was because they felt uncomfortable and condescended to by the new company’s American style of doing business.

French business people who work together, may eat lunch together or talk about their lives, but they usually don’t become personal friends, and they’re not (or weren’t when I lived in France) expected to express great happiness at seeing each other or extreme concern about one another’s personal lives and well being. Nor are they required to be extremely cheery and outgoing.  What they perceive as enforced jollity and pretended office friendship is something they find off-putting and insulting.  It’s bad enough that they have to spend from 9 to 6 with people who are not their friends, doing something they may or may not love in order to take care of themselves and their families. Forcing them to pretend, as they see it, that they really are close to all these people and extremely eager to see them and share their private lives with them is at best childish play acting, and at worst adding insult to injury.

Which gets me back to the event this French engineer told me about, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  It was a get-together – some kind of conclave to build team spirit-with the new team over the ocean – and they had to ride a bull and, worst of all, pretend to like it.

Well, as far as I know,mechanical bull riding is not a corporate rite of passage that we do too much anymore, and Americans are a lot different culturally from Europeans, so why am I even talking about this now?

Well. I guess I’m talking about it because another rite of passage in companies, organizations and mom-and-pop businesses is just around the corner; the office party.

Well, I guess it’s fun, sometimes, and I guess there’s real cheer, sometimes – and for a lot of folks there’s the satisfaction of a good meal, some alcohol and – if they’re lucky – a bonus at the boss’s expense.  Sometimes there may be appreciation, or at least a sense of being treated as more than a cog in the machine, but sometimes, for some of us, it’s just the mechanical bull and another way of paying our dues – and shouldn’t the holidays be about something else than slavery to our work and subordination to or profiting from, our earthly masters?

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  May something outside of the workaday world open up real abundance to you, yours and all of us.

New York City luxury living

Recently, while driving on the East River drive, I spotted an ad for an apartment complex I used to live in touting it as a “luxury” residence. When I lived there it was primarily inhabited by retired postal workers and teachers and was considered solidly middle class. But hey, that was in the old days, when just anyone could live in our town. But with the real estate boom, low-crime rate and shiny, new image, everything in town seems to be luxury nowadays. So to help newcomers find their way around the bewildering array of housing options in our great city, I am publishing the following guide to luxury living in the big Apple.



You’ve found a real luxury apartment in New York City when:

1. You can plug in a toaster and coffee maker at the same time without shorting out the electricity


2. You get heat most of the time in winter


3. Your apartment has been repainted in the last 8 years


4. Something in the kitchen is granite or looks like it


5. Something in your bathroom is marble or looks like it


6. There are new, poorly installed windows that let in drafts


7. Everybody in the building looks like they make more money than you do


8. You have at least 2 closets


9. There is a postage-stamp size exercise room that nobody uses


10. In the summer, your neighbors complain about the traffic driving in from Amagansett


11. Out of town relatives who come to visit, offer to lend you money so you can “get back on your feet” and move to someplace “decent”


12. Fresh Direct delivers to your neighborhood


13. The lobby reminds you of how your aunt Lucinda remodeled her living room after her trip to Miami


14. There is a decorative cabbage growing in a pot in front of the building


15. There is a tree within walking distance


16. No one says hello in the elevator
17. You have an elevator


18. Everyone in the building wears only black


19. You are paying ½ your income to live here


20. You give the Concierge, whose job is to open the front door, the equivalent of a month’s rent at Christmas time to ensure your packages don’t wind up in the East River