“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – oh damn!” – Python, Monty
I’m scared that German sausage might be dangerous – but I guess that’s a wurst-case scenario.
One particular afternoon (decades ago) my ex-wife (She Who Will Not Be Named – SWWNBN) moved out. It was one of those things where we were both immediately happier, though the process of getting a divorce was rough – the judge finally had to sit me down and tell me I couldn’t get the engagement annulled, too.
I kid. SWWNBN and I were awful for each other. One of the major disagreements in our life was money. I was cheap – when SWWNBN wanted to get out of the house for dinner and I fed her Hamburger Helper® in the garage, well, SWWNBN wasn’t pleased.
So on that particular afternoon, SWWNBN moved out she handed me a plastic grocery sack. It was filled to the brim with papers. “Here,” she grunted as the heavy sack thudded on the dinner table, causing the legs to audibly groan, “are the bills. And here is the checkbook. I have no idea how much money is in it.”
SWWNBN then turned and walked out the door. For good.
There’s a dentist office in the Vatican – it’s in the Listerine Chapel.
Let me explain how I got into this situation: stupidity.
I had the brilliant idea when SWWNBN and I argued about money to give her control of the bills. I figured that if she was responsible for paying them, she’d make sure that they were paid, and help economize around the house, keep the thermostat lower, turn off the lights, and understand that our income versus our bills was a constant fight to avoid trying to find the choice real estate under the overpass – but you have to remember location is everything.
SWWNBN had managed the bills for a few years. Surely she had been competent. I picked up the bill on top.
It was a gasoline company credit card. It hadn’t been paid in two months. The balance was (from memory) $780.
For gasoline.
SWWNBN had been paying the minimum balance and juggling the payments so it looked like the Titanic was doing swell, thank you very much, until the alarm went up and the crew jumped ship.
The movies The Sixth Sense and Titanic are about the same thing: icy dead people.
The show of horrors went on as I went through the stack and started sorting them into piles:
- Paid and up to date (one account, the mortgage was in this stack).
- Only one or two months late.
- Late and building a ludicrous balance.
- Company threatening to send people named Vito and Chico to break my legs.
I then went to my computer and opened Excel®. I started making a spreadsheet. The bills were enormous. In order to not have to “donate” a kidney to someone from the United Arab Emirates, my one option was to take an immediate loan against my 401K.
The next 24 months of my life were an exercise in extreme budget management. Every single expense was an exercise in nearly zero choices: every cent had a home before my company direct-deposited it into my account. How close was I budgeting things? By the time I was through with a five-dollar bill, Abe was clean-shaven.
My pay had become exactly coupled to my expenses.
Did you hear about that movie role Nic Cage turned down? Neither did he.
When people think of efficiency, they describe, for instance, a manufacturing facility where all of the equipment is used at maximum capacity, all the time. Whatever is being made flows from one process to the next and there’s no lag. All of the processes are coupled. There is no slack in the system.
This is, of course, a recipe for disaster.
Just like my income being exactly tied to the seemingly endless stack of bills that I had to pay, that kind of factory would bring nothing but chaos. Whenever any part of it had to slow down or stop unless there was a place to put the “in progress” work, the entire factory would have to shut down or Lucy would have to eat a lot more chocolates.
My life was just like that factory. If the dollar didn’t come in, I couldn’t pay my bills. If I had been out of work for even a few months, I would have been bankrupt. At least if I was bankrupt in summer, I might get some prime real estate in the stormwater culvert.
The example factory isn’t something I’ve made up. If you look at the outages of natural gas and electricity during the February storm, you’ll see a system where all of the excess capacity had been used. In colder climates, the systems are built for the cold. In Texas?
Not so much. The excess capacity for electrical generation (in some cases) was down for maintenance as pointed out by Nick Flandrey (his website) in the comments section here.
And it would be difficult to convince a business executive to build a lot of excess capacity for the coldest winter storm to hit Texas in over 120 years. If there’s excess capacity, that executive will try to figure out a way to use it. His career and BMW® payments require it, although I still feel sorry for that poor German that installs turn signals on BMWs™.
Excess isn’t tolerated – it’s not efficient. Not a lot of polar bears use sunblock.
But don’t worry about teddy bears. They’re already stuffed.
But in resilient systems, the excess isn’t just tolerated – it’s required. There is a conscious decoupling from one operation to the next. These are systems that are built to be reliable. Part of our jobs as adults is to scan the horizon as hard as Joe Biden works when he tries to form a complete sentence to see where those breakdowns might occur.
Decoupling is required for many things – the very idea of prepping, for instance, is a conscious act to decouple from a fragile, efficient system. Building up excess capacity (food, ammo, water purification, heat, shelter) is that very act of creating slack. It’s building up space between your car and the idiot in front of you in case they hit the brakes on a wet road and you rear-end them and realize you’re underinsured and then they complain about neck pains and then say just kidding and this just got far too specific.
So, back to me, decades ago, sitting in a chair at a dining room table staring at a pile of bills. Knowing that a truck had pulled into my life and as the bed went up, it had covered me up so deep that only a farmer could pull me out, since he knew that I wouldn’t make the soil richer.
And I dug out of debt, bit by bit, bill by bill. When I retired a bill was a time of great joy. And, the first one I paid off was that gasoline credit card that had been at the top of the stack. Each time I turned a balance to zero?
Why did Angela Merkel cross the road? Because she wanted to go that way and the pedestrian crossing sign indicated it was safe to do so.
I smiled. I had decoupled a bit from my debt. It took six years to get out, and four of those I was married to The Mrs. I still recall paying a final bill on my final credit card on a crisp January morning. I had no debt, not even car debt at that point. Heck, I even paid the exorcist so my house wouldn’t be repossessed.
In my case, decoupling my bills from my paycheck was one of the greatest days of my life – knowing that, regardless of what happened next week was safe. Then that savings stretched out to a month. Then six months. Then a year.
Decoupling gives you time and space, often those things in an emergency that you can’t buy with any amount of money. Remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020? Sure it was rough, but that’s just how Americans roll.
But one of the biggest lessons is, according to Henny Youngman:
“Why are divorces expensive? They’re worth it.”
I fell into a vat of chemicals once. My quick reaction nearly killed me.
