Personal Services
When I was actively in harness and shoving off for work each day, it seemed to be more than luxury, more a necessity, to use lots of personal services. I peaked in that regard in or around 2000 when I was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, acting as Chairman and CEO of Deutsche Asset Management USA. I was the senior officer at the 280 Park Avenue location, the historic headquarters of Bankers Trust Company, the company I had been with for twenty-three years before Deutsche Bank bought the firm. That meant that I was sort of in charge of the building, a building at the toney address on Park Avenue between 49th and 48th Streets. That is next to the current J.P. Morgan headquarters and across from the historic Waldorf Astoria. That building had a center driveway between the East and West buildings specifically for the limousines of the top officers of the bank, which meant that there was room to park right there, in a spot where daily parking cost $50-70 for the day. One of the perks of being a senior officer at both Bankers Trust and Deutsche Bank was to have a car and a driver at your personal disposal. For as long as I could remember as a junior and mid-level officer, that perk was the rabbit we were all chasing because it seemed like such a luxury. This was especially so if you lived outside Manhattan and needed to commute, but it was also very nice if you needed to run around in town and could do so without chasing taxi cabs.
I had joined the Management Committee of Bankers Trust in 2008 and was given my car and driver at that time. It was a nice moment, but even by then, it was a bit anachronistic and more of something to be downplayed than boasted about. We had all come to understand that boasting about perks like corner offices was silly and that offices were tools more than perks. The same was supposed to be true about cars with drivers, but no one could deny that having someone take you to your doorstep or being there at any time of day or night to retrieve you effortlessly from the airport (once you got off your First Class flight), was a very nice perk.
I carried my car and driver over into the Deutsche Bank regime with ease. Normally, being a residual officer of an acquired company brings about a significant diminution of status, no matter how senior you were. That didn’t really happen to me at Deutsche Bank and it especially didn’t happen vis-a-vis executive perks. In those days, American bankers earned much higher salaries and especially bonuses relative to its European counterparts. To balance the books somewhat, it was normal practice for European executives to have a full retinue of executive perks, some that went well beyond cars and drivers. The point is that as I assumed my Deutsche Bank role as Chairman and CEO of DBAM, it was assumed and quite normal that I would keep my car and driver. I actually had gotten very friendly with my driver, a man of Colombian descent named Fernando. I would say that we actually became friends.
Something I noticed in those days that my job and lifestyle (I lived in Manhattan) was such that a car and driver was much more of a luxury than a necessity. Private/public transportation in Manhattan is actually very well-developed and efficient and one really didn’t need a dedicated car and driver. It used to concern me that I was underutilizing Fernando more often than not. And then, the moment came when it was time for me to leave DBAM (100% my choice and much to the disappointment of my boss in London). As DB was phasing out cars and drivers in the U.S. for good reason (increasing cost and falling need), so I chose to keep Fernando on my personal staff as I transitioned to building my own venture capital company with some partners. He would drive my personal car and be available to me and my partners as needed. The truth was that I did this as much to keep Fernando employed than anything else. In fact, at the time I lived at 15th Street and Park Avenue and my office was at 12th Street and Broadway, a distance of three blocks that took perhaps four minutes to walk. It was actually harder to drive there than walk there, but Fernando came to pick me up every morning. I ended up moving several times after that and kept Fernando for about two years beyond leaving DB. All tolled, I had a personal servant in Fernando for about four years. It bordered on being a ridiculous situation, As some wag said of my Tesla X’s gull-wing doors, “so unnecessary!”
While this was my most egregious decadence in terms of personal services, there have been plenty of other examples with people who cleaned up after me and my family, did our gardening and generally made our lives easier to the point of dysfunctionality. I am not going to get into the details of the way in which my three wives have handled and used personal services, but suffice it to say that we all go through changes in deciding on whether and how much we need others to do our bidding rather than doing for ourselves. I am hardly the only one who has had to sort this out as a result of my financial success and lifestyle.
Now that we are retired and settled into our lives on this hilltop, we have choices to make every day and progressively as time passes. It is inevitable that as we get older, we may have increasing needs for others to serve our personal needs since we may be less and less able to do for ourselves. Speak to a disabled person and you will find the reality that it is a crisis of personal pride when we become debilitated and unable to do things for ourselves. Kim and I are still far from that point (knock on wood) and I am finding that I actually prefer to do more for myself than ever before in my life. When I was young, these things were an annoyance, when I was at the peak of my career, they were things I simply had no time to do for myself, but now that I have more time and much more inclination to prove to myself that I can do things for myself, I enjoy doing them.
The best example is in the garden. I have Joventino come once every three weeks, which is quite light assistance on a property this large with as much cultivated garden as I now have. There are certain things like planting that I prefer he do for me. Some maintenance I find a drudgery and like him to do it. But mostly, I like having someone who specializes in horticulture to come and take care of things I don’t think to do. Meanwhile I am enjoying doing as much of the gardening as I can myself. If I do a little bit every day, I find I can stay on top of it with no problem. Every day I gaze out and see something that I think I should do. Right now I am looking at lantern aloe outside our dining room window that should have its seed stems trimmed. These are less of necessity and more of aesthetics.
Kim does most of the routine cleaning maintenance around the house, but that said, we are siting here waiting for Isabel and her crew of Mexican young women to come in and do their weekly cleaning blitz. Kim does almost all her own entertaining and cooking, but deep cleaning seems best to leave to Isabel’s crew. I think we have found our balance and personal services are still a part of our lives, but I think its fair to say that we both want to do as much for ourselves as we can for as long as we can. I am sure that we will come full circle and get to the point where we long for the days when we could do more for ourselves. Between now and then, we will keep our personal services to a minimum.