too busy

Life has been way too busy lately. One of my biggest failures has always been the ability and propensity to overextend myself. I hate to say no, I hate to let people down, and I hate to not do something that I know that I can do or help out with. I also have major FOMO (fear of missing out), so that leads me to do lots of things that I otherwise may not do.

Plus, the fall is just busy. Chris & I had the fabulous foresight to have our children's birthdays in the fall as well -- and we have a Thanksgiving baby this year, which makes things even crazier. We had Ben's birthday party last weekend and decided to just spend the money and make things less stressful by having it at Kid City Chicago and it ended up being a good expenditure. The kids all seemed to have a good time, I was less stressed and once it was over, it was over. No clean up. No finding things around my house belonging to other kids. No missing or broken pieces to our toys. It was lovely.

b-school geek
So, the financial turmoil has brought out the business school geek in me. I actually really disliked business school when I was going through it. There were only two classes that I really enjoyed in b-school: Business Law and my Visual Basic programming class. The rest I took because I had to.

At Michigan, you had to apply your sophomore year for the business school. It's a 2 year program and they accepted you based on your grades your first year and a half of school. I worked my behind off to get in -- I will never forget the day that they sent the letters out. I was still living in the dorms with friends that I'd had since Day 1 (and earlier) of college. If you were accepted, you got a big, fat envelope. If you didn't get in, you got a small envelope. I went to our mailbox and pulled out my envelope. It was nice and big and I took it upstairs and everyone started screaming (in a way that only college girls can). It was thrilling as I opened the envelope and saw those magical words telling me that I'd been accepted. The undergraduate business school was pretty competitive (and still is, I believe). My details are fuzzy, but I seem to recall something like 3,000+ applying and 600 acceptances, so it was a big deal for me to get in.

Since I'm not here to toot my own horn, I was astonishingly average or below average amongst my classmates, a fact about myself that I hadn't had to confront until b-school. I worked really hard and still ended up with B's and B minuses. Once I was in, I hated it. It was so backstabbingly competitive and I saw people cheating with my own eyes. I refused to cheat and since everything was on a curve, that hurt me. It wasn't just the cheating, it was that I was uninterested in the subject material (especially economics, and it amazes me that I married an economics major!), and unmotivated because I had become a Christian right before I had gotten accepted, thus rendering business really unimportant to me at the time. However, the world really does need Christian business people, as we have found out...

It's pretty unbelievable to me the mess we are in. Actually, I do believe it because I know that we're greedy, selfish people and many will do whatever it takes to make an easy buck. The 3 years I spent in corporate America were enough for me to see that in large scale form. Here are my thoughts on the auto bailout (would post more, but Caroline is up):

The auto companies are screwed. Bad management, bad union contracts, high supply costs, and poor public perception are to blame. I am a UAW baby. My dad, uncle, and grandfather are all proud UAW members. My dad sent me through college on UAW wages. The UAW has done some good things, including fighting for the little guy so that he has a voice. However, it has done some really bad things that have made companies inept and inefficient. Paying people not to work, for example. They can't make money on their small cars because their retiree costs (health care & pensions) are so high, in addition to labor and supplies.

I think that bailing out GM is a big mistake, unless they kick out most of their management and renegotiate their labor contracts. My dad retired at 48 years old. 48!!! He worked lots of overtime, but that's still ridiculously young. And Ford is on the hook for he and my stepmom's healthcare for the next 20 years. It's hard for me to see why taxpayer dollars should go towards something that I can't see surviving long-term (i.e., GM). Their supporters are saying that there was a precedent with this with bailing out Chrysler in the 80's. Are we going to have to give them another $25 billion (+ inflation) in 25 years so that they can survive again? So, that's a $1 billion/year subsidy given by the taxpayers?

I don't think this is going to pass, from what I've been hearing this morning. I think that something needs to be done for the auto companies, make no mistake. But, I think any public money committed to them has to have heavy federal oversight, torn up and renegotiated UAW contracts and a clean sweep of management. I think GM in particular needs to be smaller, not larger. I'm not a full blown, laissez-faire capitalist, but I do believe that competition is good for the economy and think that GM is far too big as it currently exists.

Okay, she's really mad, better go and get her...