Freaky Freebies

Saturday night was the 75th anniversary gala at Our Lady of Refuge and also the rather inauspicious premiere of my latest video, a 20 minute history of 75 years at OLR.  It was quite disappointing.  After nine months and many, many hours of planning, photography and editing, AD really made no effort at all to publicize this very nice little production.

The DVD was shown in the corner of a crowded gymnasium with 300 parishioners noisily feasting and festing, the noise level so deafening that the video could scarcely be heard even from just a few feet away, and the image itself projected on a mere bed sheet just a few feet away from the projector.  To make matters worse, our wonderful tech who had promised to set it up not only so that it could be heard but that it would also continuously cycle failed to do either.  The DVD would play, then end and just sit there for long periods displaying only the menu until someone would come along and press the "Play" button again.  I watched for over an hour and observed only about 4 or 5 people coming by to watch, none for more than a minute of two. 

AD could have at least had Father M announce that we had made a video and encourage everyone to check it out but Father never mentioned it, no doubt because he didn't even know about it.  Everyone else was thanked and acknowledged, including the readers who spent all of five minutes on the gala.  This video that was nine months in the making did not merit a single mention and not a single person saw it in its entirety and likely never will.  It was a complete waste and marks the last time that I will ever make a video as a "favor" to anyone, now fully acknowledging the reality that nobody values that which they get for free.  

It was a fitting end to a career as I now transition into finance full-time, something that will be greatly appreciated since I will be charging hefty fees for my services.  It's really quite ironic how human nature works.  Give somebody something for free, even when that something is very valuable, and they render zero cooperation, then they abuse it, misuse it, disuse it.  Charge them a hefty fee and they suddenly place great value on it, roll out the red carpet for you and cooperate extensively.  I experienced this continuously in my film and video career.  The videos we did for bargain basement prices were the ones where the clients were the most difficult, showing no cooperation since they placed no value on it.  The ones we charged a lot of money for suddenly became high priority as a high value was placed on them and we were treated like royalty as we made them. 

Another very good illustration of this is the world of high-end pianos.  Lourdes Nursing Home had a Mason & Hamlin grand piano donated to them and Manresa had a 9 foot Baldwin concert grand donated to them.  In both cases, these very expensive pianos that would have been six figures had they been purchased, were instead treated like cheap pieces of furniture.  They would not even invest in getting them tuned.  The unfortunate pianists who were recruited to give "charity" concerts had to suffer through playing this high class instrument that had been sinfully neglected.  The first year the Baldwin came to Manresa I played it and discovered under the lid that the pianist who had given the Christmas concert had left a sheet of notes of the work the piano needed to sound like the world class piano it was, instead of the piece of junk it had become.  The following January when I checked under the lid again, the same note was still there, had not even been looked at, let alone attended to.  No, people simply do not appreciate that which is given to them for free.  I'd be happy to give my services away to some deserving folk but the heartache and their neglect and lack of cooperation is just too great. 

So Saturday night marked the end of my video career with the extreme disappointment of the OLR premiere and I now begin the transition to a full-time commitment to the CFP.  But first I will be taking my first vacation since September of 2004, 12 years ago.  I am attending a CFP symposium in Novi November 18 and 19 so will likely be taking off for New York City on Friday November 21st.  My plan is to tour Long Island probably Monday thru Wednesday, then Manhattan Thursday and/or Friday where I will see Tim's new office in the Empire State, see the 9/11 Memorial and tour Liberty Towers, take the Greyline Tour of the island, and then, for the piece de resistance, visit the Manhattan Faziolii dealer and record myself playing the $400,000 dream piano I'll get after I have achieved my fame and fortune.  Since there are no dealerships here in the Midwest, I have to go to New York (and Philly too) to see how this piano, considered the world's finest, even sounds. 

The next leg of the trip will be Philly where I will likely arrive on the 28th or 29th for 2 or 3 days of visiting and sightseeing there, seeing both the Lehigh Valley and downtown Philly for the first time.  If I have become too fatigued by then, I may head back on Sunday the 30th.  But I hope not because, if John and Jenny don't mind, I think it might be fun to do Halloween in Philly this year.  There is plenty of time to make that decision.  There's no particular rush (the beauty of driving) so I could conceivably stay until November 1st or 2nd depending on how my energy holds out. 

I finally took delivery of the missing components of my new computer last Tuesday but was swamped all week finishing this beautiful video for the unwashed masses (literally) so tomorrow will be my first day off in a while that I can devote to setting up my new toy.  But I really won't have a whole lot of time to play with it until my return since most of my time in the next 10 days is going to be preparing for the trip, not to mention the big two-day symposium next week.  I have purchased two brand new gorgeous suits for the interviewing and will be breaking them both in at the conference. 

If my stomach does not get too upset while traveling, it should be a lot of fun to be dividing my birthday week this year between the Big Apple and our nation's first capital.  In closing, I entertained everyone last week with the doom-and-gloomer Jim Rickard who predicted that the economy was going to collapse on September 30th.  Well, the naysayers are already back at it.  Another "world expert" has emerged this week predicting that Wall Street will collapse before the election.  We'd all be rich if we had a dollar for every time someone predicted the end of the world. 

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So now, as a CFP in training having studied the history of all past financial crises and closely observing the ones that have occurred in my lifetime, will predict the following.  This is a theory that I think is very sound but, because it is not gloom and doom, the people in my finance group do not buy into it.  Nevertheless, though I am not yet fully experienced, I have spent a good chunk of my life studying calamities and I have observed that they all have one thing in common.  

This is what they have in common -- no one but NO ONE saw them coming; they all came completely out of the blue.  Thus, if anyone thinks they can predict these things, they're fooling themselves and, if anyone is being so bold as to predict a calamity, then it will almost certainly not happen.  Economic calamities also have something else in common -- they generally occur when fundamental indicators such as employment, manufacturing, consumer prices and wages are all very weak and yet speculation runs rampant.  The speculation makes everything appear to be going great and the underlying cancer goes unnoticed.  This was true during all the major economic crises of my lifetime -- the S&L debacle of the 1980's, the dot com bubble of the 1990s and the sub-prime catastrophe of 2008.  

As there is no notable speculation going on right now and the main reason why the stock market is doing so well these past several years (no, contrary to popular opinion, it really is not the Fed) is because all the fundamental indicators are on pretty solid ground, I think it's safe to say that no collapse of the world as we know is in any way imminent.  In fact, this may be a good barometer for when a crisis is impending:  are the fundamentals in trouble?  Is speculation rampant?  Frankly, all these signs were very much in evidence during the previous crises I have mentioned and it does somewhat baffle me that no one ever catches on.  As I continue to study and learn, maybe this is a contribution I can make in my new career. 

And maybe my next update will be on the new computer.