Remember when everyone was rich? That was fun. And it was just a few years ago. Imagine. This was when you could walk into the fanciest French restaurant in the city and see a sign at the register declaring, "we accept cash, Visa, Master Card, and Beenz."

If you worked an office job back during the most recent economic boom, Christmas time was especially amazing. There were so many young, smaller companies, trying to suck at the teat of larger corporations - in consulting roles, etc. - that during the holidays they would shower your office with incredibly expensive gifts in order to more effectively suck up to you. The bounty was so plentiful that its recipients couldn't possibly consume all of it. So, instead, they would inevitably just leave the stuff out, for anyone to take. You could walk by any conference room and the table would be piled high with free gourmet chocolates and fresh fruit and bags of honey roasted diamonds, and giant, elegantly arranged trays of pussy. And none of that skank pussy, either – this was Beluga pussy.

But now that everyone’s broke, Christmas time has become a grim reminder of our conservative economy. There are no crate-loads of illuminated yo-yos being dropped off at our door from one of the offset printing facilities hoping to curry favor with our company. The rare occurrence cheese platters and smoked fish and flat breads never makes its way to the general corporate populace. The gifts have almost completely dried up. In fact, today I walked by one of our conference rooms, hoping to freeload off any treasures the vendors left behind and all that was there was an IOU for peanut brittle, and an open box of pancake mix.