by Randy Dyess
Donna gasped at the news, but realized she wasn’t surprised at the news since her and Owen’s opinions of most corporate executives were not very high. They believed most executives are more concerned about themselves, their stock options, and how powerful they can get. Destroying someone else or even the company they worked for wouldn’t bother many of them as long as they came out more powerful or richer in the long run.
“Mark told me he didn’t know me and was only concerned about the company since I had taken his promotion away from him. Even then, he could not let what was going to happen, happen. He related what he had discovered the other guy was doing and said he knew how to stop it so the company wouldn’t get hurt. He worked twenty hours a day for about five days to get the project on track and reverse all the damage the other guy did. He was able to erase all the lies planted to set me up. He also gave me enough ammunition to get the other guy fired and booted out of the company without any benefits he had earned. The company may have taken a hit, but I think Mark didn’t want to see me hurt by some vindictive asshole. He just wouldn’t come out and say it. While we may not have been close friends these last few years, he saved me and my job and has never asked for anything in return, so I owe him this.”
“Agreed. Tell him everything. I’ll back you if the others start making noises,” Donna said. “Besides, we don’t know how long it will take him and Kelly to come around.”
“It won’t take long. Mark is one of the sharpest people I have ever met. Right after I started, Damian wanted to go over our entire disaster recovery plan so we would survive a terrorist attack on the company. We didn’t trust anyone currently at the company at the time because we didn’t know them or how skillful they were. I mean everyone always talks highly of their computer guys. Sometimes the guys are not good at anything they do not do every day. We brought in this outside consulting firm and paid them millions to create a ‘bullet proof’ DR plan. They spent months putting the thing together. Before I would let them present it to the other executives, I decided to let Mark go over it. Mark knew more about Plains’ systems and processes than anyone else. He tore them up. I mean within fifteen minutes. He had poked so many holes into their plan I ended up telling the consulting firm I wouldn’t pay them until they fixed all the holes Mark had found. I also told them they need to clean up the holes in any revisions they made. It took them another six months to beef up the report enough so that Mark couldn’t find anything wrong with it.”
“Wow!”
“Exactly. I think they lost money on the project. They kept bringing in new guys to help out. After a while I realized they were using Mark to train their consultants on how to put together a ‘proper’ DR report. No one ever said anything, but I think they offered him lots of money to leave Plains and go to work for them. I guess he turned them down, which I am glad, because that was before he saved my butt.”
Donna smiled and gave Owen a quick peck on the cheek, sat back quietly for the rest of the trip back home.
Chapter 11
The next morning, after waking up later than normal, no one felt like getting dressed and going out for breakfast. Mark wanted to expand his cooking skills, so he offered to try his hand at making breakfast for the entire family. He prepared a breakfast of eggs, bacon, biscuits, and gravy, but threw in a potato, onion, and bell pepper hash to use up some of the leftovers from yesterday’s party. Everyone said the breakfast was great and even loved the sliced, cooked tomatoes he whipped up at the last minute. Mark and Kelly had been trying to figure out how to use unneeded food and leftovers so their food waste was kept to the minimum. Reusing the tomatoes for breakfast was a perfect way to find another use for the leftover ones from the party. “You’re getting to be quite the cook,” Kelly joked, as she was helping Mark wash up.
He turned to her and said, “Why don’t you take the kids over to your mom’s this morning. I’m sure they would love to see them and it will give me a chance to try to write down everything I can remember from our conversation yesterday. Once you get back we can go over my notes and add anything I’ve missed.”
“That sounds good. I haven’t talked to mom in a few days, so I think I will spend the morning with them as well. That should give you enough time to go over everything, make your notes, do the research you so much love to do, and organize your thoughts before I get home. I’ll give you until lunch and I’ll leave the kids at mom’s house for the afternoon. I’ll come back right after lunch and we can go over everything you’ve come up with.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Mark replied, “Why don’t you get the kids ready and I’ll finish up here?”
After seeing Kelly and the kids off, Mark went up to his office and started making notes on everything he remembered from the discussions with Owen and Donna. It took him several hours and multiple passes of remembering yesterday conversations, making notes, and rereading his notes before he was convinced he had captured everything he wanted. As he was looking over the notes one final time, Mark started thinking about the financial conversations they had with the Millers. He knew now Owen and Donna believed in a worse future for America than he and Kelly believed. Based on his own research and conversations, Mark was convinced Plains and other airlines would fold up and Kelly’s job would either disappear or be seriously reduced in salary. He had never put together everything he had learned with the overall effect on the world. He knew the overall effect Peak Oil would have on the economy, but he had never thought deeply enough to realize how much everything would change. A part of him believed he and Kelly would go to different jobs without any changes in their lives other than those caused by the reduction in their salaries. He never considered banks would close or the upcoming depression would be so bad civilization would fray around the edges or crumble completely. He always believed in the power of the American way of life. He never thought America would not be able to “come up with something” to end a depression with nothing more than additional homeless and poor people. The more Mark thought about the total picture, the more he found himself believing Owen was right. Maybe he and Kelly should prepare for a much deeper collapse than they originally believed in. Maybe they needed to worry about a time in which almost no one had a job. A time, money would be something out of the past. A world in which there may be some form of government left. People would be living lives similar to the American frontier. Law enforcement did not go outside on their small towns. Government would exist, but you wouldn’t interact with a government official except for once or twice a year to pay some form of tax. The military would exist, but it would be very small and only used for direct threats against the country. The military would not help keep criminals from riding roughshod over normal people. The military would stay holed up in a few bases or provide security for whatever remained of the government and its property.
Mark got up from his chair and even though it was only 11 o’clock in the morning, he needed a glass of wine to clear his head. He found himself out on the deck thinking about all the novels he read and all the movies he had seen which depicted an apocalyptic world. Would an apocalyptic world be what they were facing if gas became $10, $15, or $20 or more a gallon? Would we adjust or would we fold? He was still deep in thought when Kelly walked in.
“Hey ,Hon, you all finished?”
“Hey, Sweetie, you back already?”
“It’s after lunch. Did you not eat?”
“Damn. No, I have been sitting out here for the last two hours thinking about things.”
“Why don’t I make you a sandwich and you go get your notes. I can read them over while you eat and then we can go over everything.”
Mark got up and went to get his notes from this morning while Kelly put together a quick sandwich for him with some of the leftover steak from yesterday. While he was eating, she sat out on the porch and looked over everything he had scratched down during the morning. “Anything missing?” Mark asked.
“Nothing I can remember off the top of my head. Somet
hing might come to me later, but I think this covers about everything we talked about,” Kelly replied.
“What do you think about all of this?”
“I know we both agreed on the financial bit before, but based on your notes here, you think it might be a lot worse than we originally thought.”
“That was what I was thinking about when you walked in. Maybe Owen and Donna are right. Maybe the whole thing will blow up and it will take decades before we have something close to a functioning society like we have today. Maybe we should think about how we would live with no real jobs or money available. Lives in which we may have to barter for the few things still available. Lives in which we are totally responsible for ourselves and shouldn’t count on having jobs or the government being there for us or anyone else.”
“I haven’t thought about the whole thing this way before. I know, based on what I have learned from my research and what you and Owen have discussed things may get worse than we believe. But do you think it will get bad enough to cause society to collapse? Do you think instead of having 50% of our income, we will not have jobs at all?” Kelly asked with a concerned look on her face.
“After thinking about it this morning. I think we should continue with our plan of adjusting our daily expenses so we are able to live on 50% of what we make today. We should give ourselves by the end of the summer to make the adjustment. Once we get to 50% and have gotten used to that amount of income, we should try to cut our expenses down by another 50%. Another 50% and maybe even another 50%. By next summer we should be living like we would if we made only minimum wage. This would be very difficult, but it would give us a head start of how we would have to live if the whole thing collapsed. I believe the only way we would survive a meltdown would be if we prepared for the meltdown and get used to it before it actually happens. It will be a lot easier to change our lives around when we have extra money to make adjustments. It would difficult if we wait and do not have money to buy a heavy coat or stock up on food or any other things we may have to do. I wouldn’t want to be trapped in this house if things went south. There would be no way we could live here on no money. We couldn’t heat or cool this thing let alone be able to plant a garden in the small yard we have.”
“And if a meltdown never comes?” Kelly asked.
Mark smiled. “We retire at fifty in our little house in the country. We live out our lives holding each other’s hand on the front porch and eating tomatoes directly from our garden.”
Kelly smiled and asked, “What about the house? We’ll never make our goal if can’t sell it and we still have to make payments for a few more years.”
“Ok, we fudge it. We figure out how much a small house and land in country would cost. We use that figure in our budget for the housing costs after the crash. We can fudge some of the other numbers as well for utilities, HOA fees, and upkeep to match the smaller house and our new way of life. This would make us try to get something smaller we might pay off. The monthly payments would be staring us in the face when we try to figure out finances after a crash.”
“Ok. What if we don’t sell this house and can’t move forward because of the costs of this thing?”
“We give ourselves a year. If we don’t sell it by then,” he looked at her with a grave look on his face, “we walk away from it.”
“Sounds harsh,” Kelly replied with a worried look on her face. “I saw from my research other people are doing the same thing around the country. If they are not able to sell their house because they are underwater on them, they walk away from the mortgage after buying or renting something else. It hurts their credit and might come back to haunt us if the economy doesn’t go down as far as we think it will.”
“True,” Mark said, “but we both believe something will happen and it will make us lose this house anyway. Might as well do everything on our terms and not because we are forced to after going through all our savings like John did. If things get as bad as we both now think they will, credit scores won’t mean anything to anyone anyway.”
“I’m not sure I like it, but ok. One year trying to sell it and we default and walk away,” Kelly said with a small frown on her face. Sometimes she couldn’t believe all of this. It seemed to her the evidence was pointing to a huge collapse in the global economic system. As much as she wanted to stay in the world she lived in now, she knew that would just be living in a dream world for the next few years. After that, the dream world would turn into a nightmare. “We do the same thing with my car lease over the next year. We can’t get rid of the lease until next summer, so we find out what it would cost to buy a suitable substitute and put the money aside. The lease would be written off as a luxury until we can stop it.”
“Exactly. While we may not actually be living at 50% of our pay, we will act like it as much as possible,” Mark replied.
Mark thought for a bit and asked, “What about a house? When we sell this one, we still need somewhere to live. If we are going to live on next to nothing, we would not be able to afford a house payment that is more than a few hundred dollars a month. This means we need to own a house.”
“So we find one in which we can pay off quickly,” Kelly remarked.
“How are we going to do that?”
She looked at him, “We close out our 401ks. I know we will get nailed on the penalties, but if things go like we both now believe they will our 401ks won’t be worth anything anyway. Why not walk away with something from them rather than hold out and let the stocks behind them sink into nothingness.”
Mark looked at her and smiled. “I have to admit that is a great idea. I’m usually the one who wants to do something risky. You are changing faster than I am. So once we close them out, whatever is left over after taxes and penalties, we put aside for a purchase of a house. We can add some to it, but basically we buy something outright with that money.”
“Agreed. Let’s do it now before we chicken out.”
They went into Mark’s office and dug up their 401k information. Having only worked at their present jobs, they didn’t have 401ls lying around everywhere like some people do because they had worked numerous jobs. It did not take long to round up the information. Mark had the one with Plains and Kelly had the one with Texas Restaurants. It didn’t take them long to find out they would actually have to leave their jobs before they could close out the 410ks. They briefly considered taking a loan out against their 401k, but tossed the idea aside because neither one of them wanted another loan.
“Even though it didn’t work out as planned,” Mark said, “at least we have a figure now based on today’s stock prices. Let’s hope that it doesn’t go down too much before we can close out.”
“So you are saying, let’s hope we get fired or laid off before the stock market crashes and wipes out the money.”
“Something like that. We might have to make that a plan B and figure something else out about living arrangements, but at least this is a plan.”
“Wait a minute,” Kelly exclaimed.
“What?”
“While I was at my mother’s this morning, she mentioned Granny wanted to sell the farm to someone in the family. She had approached everyone else in the family. No one wanted it because it is too remote to live on and commute to Dallas or Fort Worth. They few who didn’t care about the commute didn’t have the money. Granny didn’t ask us because Mom told her there would be no way we would do it. She thought we were too ‘city’ to buy a small farm so far away from Dallas even though it is only about ninety minutes away.”
Mark smiled and said, “She would have been right a few months ago. Let’s plan on visiting your grandmother soon and see if she was serious. Maybe we can do something with her which would allow us to have our own retreat without having to wait until we cash in our 401ks. If we could get the farm and start working to get it up to speed, we could rent something small and cheap within commuting range of both our jobs. That would give us something permanent and we could spend our time and money on improv
ing so the place can be ready for when things fall apart. This would resolve the next problem on the list as well, which is how we would feed ourselves if everything collapses. With the farm, we may end up like Owen and Donna and grow all of our own food. Even if this doesn’t work out and we have to buy something else, I think we should still consider getting a place large enough we can have a garden. I think having a garden would not only provide us with food, but could be used to teach our kids a lot about work and responsibility. We can make them responsible for something they like to eat. If they don’t follow up on planting and taking care of the item, we don’t have their item to eat. Show them long-term consequences of their actions or lack of action.”
Both of them were happy as they made plans to skip work on Wednesday and drive up to Madill to see Kelly’s grandmother about the farm. They had planned on going up there in a few weeks after the kids were out of school. They figured more than one trip in a month wouldn’t bother Granny one bit.
“Let’s take a break,” Mark said as he crossed off the first two items on his list. “I know there is a lot more to these items, but we can work on it over time. I want to clear my head before we start talking about the crime stuff.”
They took a little break and when they were ready again, sat back down and started reviewing their beliefs about the crime rate after the meltdown. “Do you think guns and karate will be necessary?” Kelly asked.
“I don’t know. I never gave it much thought, but what Owen and Donna said made a lot of sense. Things are violent enough now. What do you think will happen when the counties and cities start reducing the number of police officers? What will happen when gas gets so expensive the cops can’t afford to simply drive around all night looking for whatever trouble is out there?”