(FORTUNE Magazine) – What makes an executive happy? This is a question of import to anyone who works for one, as well as to happy executives themselves.

It is possible to believe, I suppose, that the things that cause the walnuts in executive chests to beat with glee are much the same as those that move normal men and women, but such is not the case. True, your executive likes food, wine, money, and the love of his or her fellow creatures. But the executive spirit requires something more to feel at ease with itself, a validation of the myth of power that defines the executive life.

The executive requires control. It is control that makes us smile when events fall out the way we wish, because beneath each success is the hidden conviction that we made our luck happen. When our enemies burst into flame, is it not we who in some metaphysical way provided the gasoline and the match? We like to think so. This is why, above all else, your executive hates surprises. Surprise violates the feeling that the executive exists in a Ptolemaic cosmos with his big fat self at the center. How unhappy, then, does the loss of that illusion make us!

I am standing at the baggage claim at Kennedy airport in New York City, consumed by rage. I haven't been so angry since the last time this happened. I feel the blood rushing to my face, a churning geyser of bile launching itself upward into my esophagus. My head is spinning, and I believe that if I were just a couple of years older I might have a stroke. Where is my goddamn limo?

In this low-ceilinged, mildewed, darkening antechamber between one form of pampering and the next, I have come face to face with the last area of executive life that consistently demonstrates how powerless and insignificant we are...how it doesn't matter what we earn, how big our reporting structure is, how meaty our bonus, how large a chunk of the chairman's ear is in our pocket. Where is my Town Car?

People bustle here and there, but I do not move. I am the calm in the middle of the maelstrom, staring with my inner eye into the pasty white face of truth. I see it clearly. I am nothing. Everyone in the concourse is larger than I, even the little guy in the brown suit and blue club tie who ordered the low-salt meal in coach. I control nothing. My Town Car has failed to arrive.

The man in the brown suit and the tie with salad dressing on it walks smugly by, a squat luggage handler in a dirty blue uniform trailing a little wheelie cart behind him, and stuffs into his jacket pocket a small card that says MR. DEBAKEY in bad handwriting. So Mr. DeBakey's world has come together and mine has not. My Town Car is Not Here.

There are, certainly, different levels of Not Here. There is the Not Here that places my Town Car back in Connecticut, its driver drooling into his foam-rubber pillow. There is the Not Here in which my Town Car is stuck in a massive tie-up on the Van Wyck Expressway and might as well be in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. There is the Not Here where the foolish driver has simply misestimated his timing and is right now parking the car in one of the massive lots dedicated to our inconvenience. In that case, while he is Not Here, he will be, in the parlance of the industry, Right There.

My hand trembles with the force of my displeasure. My clamshell works. The signal goes through. Yes! I am an executive with a nice cell phone that works in difficult surroundings. I stand a little taller. "I'll get them on the other line," says Sally, who is used to such moments. There was the time I was standing in the pouring rain on the street outside my office, screaming into my little phone with such force that people crossed the street to avoid me. On that occasion, the car I had ordered three hours prior was not only Not Here, it wasn't even going to be Right There. It wasn't Right Up the Street or Just Turning the Corner. It was, in fact, There. "What do you mean it's there!" I screeched like a tern circling a herring in shallow water. "I'm standing here! There's nothing here!" Beyond the confines of executive control lies a land in which Newtonian laws of physics do not apply, and an object as big as a Town Car can be both There and Not There. What other rules are suspended in this vast, lunatic domain?

"He's just Crossing the Parking Lot," says Sally, adding a new category to the playbook. She does not believe it. Neither do I. It doesn't matter where he is on the physical plane anyway. He is not in my control, that's all.

I wait in the nonexecutive zone. I do not like it here. As I did not like grade school, with its teeming masses of people who could play basketball better than I could. I did not like the early years of my career much, where the guy who sold the newspaper downstairs could have told me what to do and I would have had to do it. I didn't like the years after the first merger--or was it the second?--when the power structure hadn't jelled and you never knew on which side your face should be buttered. But those days are over. I nestle in a carapace of executive function, controlling everything that surrounds me...except maybe for Mort and Dick and Ed and Fritz and Shelly and Ned and Ted and Morton and Jimmy-Boy, fellow executives all, and Rosenstern, of course, whom nobody in his right mind would try to control. And I guess you'd have to add to that list the guy who was supposed to deliver the snow blower last Tuesday but didn't because it Wasn't In Yet. And also I guess you'd have to include the macroeconomic system that seems to be moving toward wholesale consolidation, eliminating central corporate operations as it goes, and the weather, which has been lousy lately, so cold that it seeps right into your bones and reminds you that there will come a time for all of us, no matter how great, when the executive life that looks so permanent will spit you right back up on a hard and comfortless shore in which nobody flies first class and when it is asked where the heck you might have gone to, people just give a heavy look and say, "Not Here."

"What happened?" I ask the driver who materializes at my elbow a while later. He looks tired, and his hair flies away from his head, sparse and vertical. He is at least 15 years older than I am.

"I got screwed up on the parkway," he says. He takes my bag, and I follow behind with renewed executive poise. "Sorry, sir."

Sir! Smart man. "Hey," I say, my anger flowing out of my cuffs and down the pavement as we walk. "It's under control."

By day, STANLEY BING is a real executive at a real FORTUNE 500 company he'd rather not name. He can be reached at stanleybing@aol.com.