Earning Those Options

I'm sure many of you were disappointed by the conspicuous absence of yesterday's column and trust me when I say that I'd love to give you the name of the lollipop responsible for causing said absence. But seeing as I'm the Senior President of Ethics and Best Practices, well, that just can't happen.

As you are well aware, the mortgage industry has been scrutinized quite heavily of late. I personally don't quite understand why we are being tossed under the proverbial bus. Is it our fault that a few idiots out there got in over their heads? Are we so rotten that we deserve to be called predators? Absolutely not. If anything, we should be hailed as financial visionaries. After all, the ARM loan is an instrument of genius.

But I digress.

Wrapping around to the subject at hand, yesterday yours truly earned all 500,000 of his 2008 stock options. I'm not sure if any of you have dealt with whistleblowers, but if you've never had the opportunity, pray that you don't. They are, to be nice, the most God-awful scum imaginable.

I know somewhere in their warped little state-school minds they think that they are making the world a better place. The reality is, such diarrhetic idealism only serves to undermine progress and the aforementioned lollipop was hell bent on pissing controversy all over our good name. And for what? So he could get his name in a few papers for bringing to light the genius of our accounting? It confuses me how such people make it this far in life.

However, me being me, I laid out in great detail how it would not be in this man's best interests to go public with his information. After all, wouldn't he rather receive a nice payoff?

"This is more important than money," he said.
"Is it more important than the police finding child pornography on your computer," I asked.
"How much money are we talking about?"

Problem solved. Idealism, like everything else, can be bought.

Some may scoff at the very notion that someone like myself could hold a position such as I do. But their petulance is misplaced. My job is not to cater to the ethics of a few high-minded, holier-than-thou dandies. Rather, it is my responsibility to see that theirs conform to the company's. And while that may not make sense to some, those of us familiar with reality know that idealism serves no useful purpose in society.