Be Right Back

Fighting a Cold while working insane hours on a big project.  Need sleep.  Need to recover.  I’ll be right back.

Meanwhile, I watched “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”.  It boils down to this, at least from the perspective of how this impacted ME personally…

• Government was strong-armed by lobbyists (Ken Lay, Abrahmson, etc.) to relax Federal oversight (aka “de-regulate”) over energy markets.
• Enron and companies like Worldcom, Tyco and others drank their own Kool-Aid and grew into the Hulk, pushing stock prices higher and higher, artificially.
• They in-turn gave hand-jobs to accounting firms like Arthur Anderson and others to help them inflate market prices and in-turn share in the artificial margins of trading on them.
• Californians got raped like nobody’s business
• The market turned out to be a house of cards and imploded
• People at all levels of the market, the auxiliary markets, and their families and communities were pulled down in a spiral of 401-k meltdown.  Some even killed themselves.
• The government finally stepped in and realized the car was spinning off the road and nobody was behind the wheel.  Investigations ensued and eventually it was “discovered” that oversight isn’t such a bad thing.  Gee. (Personal note: If you have teenage kids, and they want to throw a party at your house, and they say to you “hey, go see a movie, you guys can trust us”, what would you do?  Ok, now imagine those teenagers are drunk on the lust for outrageous profits, insane CRAZY-ASS profits, and they want to party inside your bank account)
• The fallout yields a determination to lay down some new rules on behalf of the two folks Mr. Sarbanes and Mr. Oxley.
• IT folks are left holding the bag to implement and enforce a tangled mess of who can do what and see what between various segments of their financial departments.
• IT folks suffer with SOX compliance and no sleep.  The financial department managers go to Vegas, Orlando, or Honolulu to attend conferences, but tell the IT department there isn’t enough budget to attend MMS or TechEd, sorry.

What a sad story.  Remember to have my part played by Brad Pitt.

Now, think about this: Think that’s all behind us now?  Think again.