Irresponsibility

Irresponsibility

On Friday, I was in the second day of the administratively enforced blackout (as in total grid shut-down) from our local utility. The cause (excuse?) was the Santa Ana wind and its harsh dry gusts that could easily induce a wildfire that could quickly get out of control and create a liability for said utility. I had had the foresight to anticipate the possibility of this situation earlier in the year and put my money where my foresight was by buying and installing two Tesla battery walls for a total of 25.4kW of stored electrical energy for use during such a shut-down with the 9.7kW solar photovoltaic system installed on the roof and available to feed the batteries with needed replenishment during the daylight hours. They throw off between 20-60 kWs of power depending on the season (naturally the at-risk times are at the lowest production cycles). But all that planning was for naught on Friday morning since a system glitch that I now understand Tesla is experiencing all over the place with its battery walls (a not-inconsequential concern to a half-trillion-dollar going concern like Tesla). The end result was that I had no power on Friday morning and had to hit the road to find some.

You see, I was scheduled to give testimony once again on my weekly expert witness case for what is now the tenth time (I believe there are 25+ more weeks of the same yet to come). The way this works is that they group up to a dozen claimants per arbitration and spend a week on each arbitration. They have honed the process so that my and other witness testimony is now on tape and shown to the arbitrators and then the witnesses are made available to the arbitrators on Friday for questions. I spend a few hours preparing and then up to three hours on Friday answering whatever questions come to mind from the dozen arbitration judges. Strangely enough, every week has a somewhat different focus and flavor and it is less similar than you might expect even though the central four opinions that I have made are always the focus. I should also mention that the arbitrators seem to vary greatly in their degree of financial sophistication based on the nature of their questioning. My lawyers continue to say they are quite pleased by my performances, so they are happy to keep me on the payroll week after week until this ends. This case first hit my desk one year ago and has been the gift that keeps on giving.

The American Arbitration Association protocol calls for visual presence via Zoom, which I have always been able to arrange until this week. My lack of power forced me to head out at 7am to find a WiFi locale to allow me to sign on at 8:15am. I had seen an outage map from the utility so I drove West towards the coast that seemed to have been spared. But by the time I got to Oceanside, I realized that the days of glomming onto free WiFi in a Starbucks or some such eatery or coffee shop were long gone thanks to COVID. There simply was nowhere to go for Zooming, so I searched for a 5-bar cellular spot to allow me to connect by phone, which was allowed in a pinch…and my Santa Ana excuse was clearly such a pinch. So, here I was, wandering the streets of Oceanside in the early morning hours.

That was when I saw him. He was the symbol of my age and of these strange times when we all must tread the line between being responsible adults and being the free spirits we all secretly want to be. He was standing on the corner, a block from the beach and the surf break. He looked to be about my age. He was wearing nothing but a wetsuit with the back zipper undone. Under his arm he had a shorty surfboard, the kind you see surfers wiggling around on doing fancy tricks. He had a towel over his surfboard-toting arm and was struggling with his face mask. Yes, despite being out of doors and just off the point break, this throwback surfer dude was doing his best to be COVID compliant on the sidewalks of Oceanside. But the reason surfer dude was struggling with his mask was that he desperately wanted to light up a cigarette while allowing his mask to slip down over his chin. The contradictions and irony of the visage was unambiguous even though confusing. This was a guy who had made enough money to live the surfer dude life, not enough for La Jolla, but enough for Oceanside. He was liberal enough to want to make his political correctness known in his insistence of masking himself, but his nicotine habit, a vestige of his youth no doubt, overcame his political correctness instincts. It was all a very strange statement about our times combined with the Baby Boomer retirement phenomenon that is underway and that I am certainly participating in. It is a strange mixture of personal freedom and civic responsibility with which we are all wrestling in these trying times.

I finally stopped and found a breakfast place that would allow me to use the bathroom, but had no WiFi. I had time, since I was abandoning any hope of a Zoom call and thereby defaulting to an audio call by necessity. After a nice egg scramble in a chilly outdoor tent, all by myself, I paid my bill and headed out in search of a decent five-bar cell service spot to park and participate. I found it in the parking lot of one of the many retail stores that has bitten the dust since the pandemic. No time to worry about them, I had an arbitration hearing in which to participate. About an hour into listening to another witness wander aimlessly through their personalized manner of describing ERISA law, I got to hear the legal advisor to the respondent, a guy who, in theory, was being paid by the respondent for many years specifically to keep them out of exactly this sort of hot water where they could be sued for failing to honor their fiduciary obligations. By that time (as interesting as it was to me) I decided to crawl home since it did not look like I would be called on to give testimony too soon. Indeed, the arbitrators (remember there are over a dozen of them plus lawyers for both sides and witnesses and court reporters totaling over 20 people online) called for a break for fifteen minutes, which gave me just enough time to dash to my home and set up on the patio for my testimony.

So, you see, my entire morning excursion was for naught since I could have accomplished the same thing by just declaring that I had no WiFi connection and could not do a Zoom call and could only do audio, but that struck me at the time as irresponsible in my role as an expert witness standing up for the widows and orphans of this retirement investment plan. So I went the distance to Oceanside and back, getting breakfast, but really only adding one thing to my repertoire…Mr. Surfer Dude as a symbol of the confused irresponsibility of my generational cohort as it tries to navigate the confusing combination of retirement and COVID all at once. Fair trade for a morning on the road and in court.