“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.”
Hmmm… Marriage as Ponzi scheme. Interesting premise, but then again, horror never was my favorite genre.
My bride and I had a similar period of wild abandon very early on, where the credit cards were completely decoupled from our meager income, and the asset-to-debt ratio became a vanishing point. The difference was that you found yourself a few months from ruin.
Luxury.
We danced so near the edge that the vertigo still gives me nightmares, three decades on. I worked so much overtime just to keep from losing more ground that I only met my second child at his 8th birthday party, where he referred to me as ‘Uncle Dad’. I’m convinced that the only reason our union survived is because I was never home long enough to argue with my wife about money we didn’t have.
Ironically, as the debt was slain following our painful credit epiphany, one canceled card after another, I emerged from under the burden feeling curiously lost and directionless. Years spent tilting at windmills had given my life purpose, but afterward? Nothingness. It took a while, but eventually we learned to embrace thrift. Once saving money became as much of a thrill as spending it had been, the competitive fire burned brightly.
Kudos to you, JW, for finding a Chapter Two mate willing to accept you along with your debt burden. That was quite a leap of faith on the part of your missus.
I actually had a full disclosure meeting with The Miss (before she was The Mrs.) so she knew what the debt situation was. After my previous marriage, my new mantra was no lies, ever.
A local food plant is trying to sell Gummi Bears by the ton to a cattle operation because the factory overproduces semi-loads of Gummies every week. So yeah they are super efficient at making Gummies, but being profitable? Not so much.
I saw the same thing at one plant that was great at making a consumer product that no one would buy. Result: happy pigs.
There’s a feeling of horror, when you see the debt the ex was hiding. That, and the numerous times of sliding over to the ATM, while playing the slots. In the long run, the expense of divorce was miniscule compared to the final debt waiting at the time I should have been retiring.
Ding! That was a long, dark, stormy afternoon in more ways than one.
I have emerged from that pile myself a couple of times. Chaos has an interesting way of creating burdens too heavy to carry and a mismatched relationship is nothing but chaos. Chaos also distracts you from keeping your eye on the ball and that is exactly what happened to you in regards to your ex who shall not be named scenario. Chaos can come from one side in a relationship and totally dominate what goes on to such an extent you willingly take your eyes off the ball just for a momentary relief.
The Phrase ‘unequally yoked’ comes to mind and I believe it is biblical. Having a spouse who is chaotic is being unequally yoked. Having a spouse who is irresponsible is being unequally yoked. Having a spouse who is emotionally unstable is being unequally yoked. No team or couple can succeed in getting on in life walking in circles. That is what happens when two people are not working together in a harmonious way.
I can say with certainty that we are as individuals our own worst enemies. Relationships create pressures. Even the best ones do. Most people can cope with moderate amounts of pressure of either emotional and/or financial types and do ok. There comes a time when you know that what is going on is not working and yet, still we cling to the relationship. The logic that breaking off the relationship will make things worse is a fallacy but it is really hard to convince yourself to not think the ending will me worse. This is a lesson usually taught to you when you are reasonably young as an adult. As with your story, you did learn that and pay the price for prolonging a relationship that, as you look back, you knew was doomed.
As to efficiency, only people who tend to be liberal can believe such minimalist systems can work and survive. That or people who do not care about the future of the system and are only trying to milk as much out of the operation as they can as quick as they can. Accountants tend to think of things only in present tense and have little to no concept of ‘what ifs’ as it applies to managing a business.
I have learned that in business it is better to throw in the towel if you can see that the hyper efficiency you are forced into cannot work in the long run. It is cheaper to take the hit now than to let things spiral out of control financially. You will go through some lean times but your reputation and honor will remain intact as you show good judgement instead of clinging to something until it crashes and burns. Much like sticking it out in a bad relationship you can see the writing on the wall and should do what you know is best before the disaster gets worse.
It is better to live alone, in peace and within your means than to ever live in a relationship that is out of balance and out of control. Some people (partners) thrive on chaos and will draw you in. They do this for a myriad of reasons. Sometimes they create the chaos so they can feel like they are in control because they cannot control themselves. This is the story of your ex who shall not be named. For what ever reason you could not establish an honest and working relationship with her and most likely, since you are telling the tale with what seems to be sincere commentary, you were not the problem. You survived. I shudder to think of the next victim of your ex.
After a couple of long term relationships in my life that were not all that different than yours, I have been alone and learned to be quite happy this way. I have tried to pass down my thoughts and what might pass for wisdom to my sons and to some extent they have done ok but as I needed to learn this lesson for myself, they both are still apprenticing as adults and will end up reckoning with this concept in due time. That is life. That is how we grow and learn. If it was easy, well, it isn’t so why even pose that it could be. You have to get the bumps and go through the mud. That is how you learn.
The logic that breaking off the relationship will make things worse is a fallacy but it is really hard to convince yourself to not think the ending will me worse.
It’s also a fallacy that breaking off the relationship will make things better. No matter where you go, there you are.
A long time ago, Jesus told a bunch of solid citizens that the Supreme Being gave mankind divorce “for the hardness of your hearts”. In my salad days I thought that made no sense. Surely He must have been talking about the softness of our heads and the foolish decisions we made to leg-shackle ourselves to the worst possible partners?
Decades later I know better.
It’s the hard hearts. And it only takes one to wreck the ship.
I’ve spoken with the Daughter Product about this: Don’t yoke yourself to a man you do not respect enough to be the Captain to your X.O. If I had a son, I’d say not to marry a woman you don’t love enough to lead.
But it’s still (it always was) a high-risk game.
Really like that penultimate paragraph. Good stuff.
“Don’t marry a woman who won’t follow when you lead. And find that out before the wedding.
It’s non-negotiable. Period.”
The price tag on that lesson runs to six digits. But it was still worth it.
Well said – in every respect. What did the poet say? “The wedding guest’s a wise but sadder man.” I try to keep a smile on my face.
Or at least a clown nose on it.
You say that factory doesn’t exist but there are legions of “efficiency experts” out there trying to make it happen. As a manufacturing engineer, I have had “just in time” and the Toyota-styled Performance Enterprise System hammered into me for many years. In the quest to squeeze every possible penny out of a system, they set themselves (and the rest of us) up for a crash. When I point out that any perturbation in the system, locally and up- or down-stream, is going to shut us down, they say, “We don’t plan to fail.” Management eats that sh…errr…stuff up. Even though I can list a dozen failures that are likely to happen in any given year and just about guaranteed to happen every 5 years or so, planning for them is inefficient. Congrats – you just turned an inconvenience into a disaster.
One small ray of sunshine in this whole COVID mess? A veritable avalanche of supplier issues hit and, when a few of us pointed out that it sure would be nice to have a buffer of those parts and materials warehoused, we weren’t so easy to dismiss.
I was wondering why nobody does the calculation this way: This bit of eficient practice lets us do X + 10 units. Where current business number is X units requiring Z resources.
Therefore we should use Z resources and do X + 8 units, banking 2 unit capacity against a rainy day.
And I answered myself: Because another company will do X + 7 – 9 and spend the extra 1 – 3 on rent seeking to submarine you.
Am I wrong?
You’re absolutely right – they’ll use short term thinking and temporary gains to undercut and steal business and the product’s buyers will be thrilled to go along with it because there are bonuses to be had this quarter – who cares about tomorrow?! Doesn’t that cover an awful lot of society these days?
I started to go on a rant about DoD contracting and liar’s poker but it’ll just get my blood pressure up…
How are those computer chips coming?
Oh, I’ve seen one very, very close. And the smallest thing would cost it millions in lost production.
It depends on everything going right, all the time.
The only bills that temporarily took me to the cleaners was when I had open heart surgery. Not only could I NOT work, losing my income. I was expected to pay the doctors, the hospital, and my bills. So I set up a schedule when I got back, paying the medical bills in turn, while living bills were payed regardless. I took me about 8 months to finish, but I got it done – what a weight off of my shoulders.
I was lucky not to have a house mortgage, college tuition or car payments – THAT would have been tough.
Yes – it’s so odd that there are so many costs so early on, and especially in 2021 the world is really tough for the 20-something set. I dug out faster than a kid could today.
Efficiency is a construct of the white male capitalist pig patriarchy, comrade.
Engineers be racist!
Mommygov will never run out of rainbow stew as it regenerates in the magic soil.
Preppers are scary non-conformists with aluminum foil hats like ol’ uncle Jethro in the soil roof hut in Appalachia.
We keep telling him to use his white privilege but he just laughs and strums his banjo.
The supply of Delusionol (h/t-C.H. Smith) is running low and the train is pulling into reality station.
We need an imported voting bloc to keep the ponziconomy going.
It is a ponziconomy – the government only took in 57% of what it spent last year in taxes. They’re just printing at this point.
That doesn’t matter.
We’re paying them in the same fiatbux they’re giving us.
Fair is fair.
Where it gets ugly is when the hamsters stop running on the wheel, because they realize the food pellets are fake.
Yup. And meanwhile I’m stashing like there’s no tomorrow . . . .