Remora

LI's uncertain morality

We just finished re-reading the day before yesterday's post. My God, we do go on and on, don't we?

We'll allow the pro-legalization argument to settle, for a bit, in the stomachs (or, okay, brains -- the metaphors are getting awfully out of hand here, lately) of our poor readers. There's a lot to digest there, in a little space.

And we will highlight the article du jour from the NYT -- it is surely this wonderful piece about the glamorous, highwire lives of certain executive secretaries who choose to defraud their bosses. Intro grafs ahead:


"ike many busy executives, E. Scott Mead, a top banker at Goldman Sachs, trusted his secretary to help him run his life. Beyond answering the telephone and setting his schedule, she helped organize family vacations and managed his expense account.

Mr. Mead may have trusted her too much. The secretary, Joyti De-Laurey, is to appear in court today in London, charged with embezzling more than $5 million from Mr. Mead in an elaborate fraud in which she is accused of wiring blocks of his money to bank accounts in Cyprus."

Joyti DeLaurey, it turns out, isn't the only exec secretary with the sense to dictate the terms of her employment on the sly. A number of these buccaneers of the office pool are covered. Anamarie Giambrone, for instance, who worked for a Bear Stearns bigwig, used erasable ink to make out checks that she had her boss sign. Then she erased the names of the payees, substituted her own name in their place, and inflated the sums. She poured 800,000 dollars into such ventures as buying a pizzaria for her family. Of course, her lazybones boss never checked up on his checkbook.

Having often worked as a secretary ourselves, LI just can't get into a froth about these crimes, like we get into when we approach the topic of the Neronian exec set pillaging their companies. Secretaries don't usually have such colorful sub-streams of income. A friend of ours works at a multi-national corporation in which the secretaries are so badly compensated that a number of them have to work second jobs. Alas, tthe luxuriant lifestyles of exec secs in NY are not, by any means, the norm -- the second job lifestyle is the more usual pattern.

LI had just started to get into the heart of this issue -- the link between secretaries, typewriters, Arthur Krystal's review/non-review, in the latest issue of Harper's, of German Philosopher Friedrich Kittler. After I'd assembled my magpie bits, however, my computer blinked off. I don't have the heart, at the moment, to shore any more fragments against that ruin. More, though, about secretaries and such in the next post, which will probably be after the holiday. In the meantime, since you can't access the Krystal review, here's a page with some of Kittler's writings ( in German) posted. And here's a very munchy interview, in English, with the man his own self.