Been a while...

 Well.

This morning began with an email announcing a deal with the union at one of our locations. Great news, and something I wanted to see amplified.

As it worked out, I had a working session today with the SharePoint guy who's been helping me build our new site. While we were talking, I mentioned the deal; he clearly hadn't heard - an interesting look at the way a piece of news that hugely affects our entire organization only really gets in front of those people who've been boots-on-the-ground. He and I talked about unions for a minute, and he mentioned a doc on Netflix he said was incredibly good.

After we finished our sandbox session, I edited the morning's announcement, and put it in the news web part.

And, after work, I turned on the doc.

It's hard for me to truly convey how watching this feels. Ambivalent, absolutely; but that barely touches the experience. I've watched a zillion documentaries in my life, but I've never before been anything remotely like the subject; here - at my age - with my career - 9 to 5 draws some blood.

One irony about this movie is that it focuses on SECRETARIES, uniting and becoming a force.

For an awful lot of my career - I am just enough years behind the women featured here - women's professional organizations have overlooked secretaries.

It is the irony of my age, that ten years before me, the center of gravity of women in offices was in the secretarial and clerical pool. So to organize women office workers was to organize clerical and secretarial workers.

By the time I came along... secretaries were "administrative assistants" - and anyone (any woman) who chose to do that job was sort of being pretended away. Women wanted business degrees and "real" jobs, and it was juuuuussst about time to call it old-fashioned to type for a living.

So women's professional orgs became focused on "real" professional women.

Admins became that bubble off to one side on the org chart, and became invisible.

My career marks the beginning of the "Except the admin" era. At the 1:14:30 mark of the documentary, there's one of those tonal shifts as we move toward the final chapter of the story - and the sound bite is: "Secretaries disappeared."

Which they did. Pushed downward into titles explicitly making us subservient, now admin "assistants" - pushed out and up, to do *anything* but typing memos, because that became shameful, not enough, for the peasants. The number of times I have endured people telling me I could basically "do better" - because, of course, what I choose to do is embarrassing, it's peon stuff. That one time a manager, with no malice intended, asked me about admin work because his wife was bored and she should be able to get an admin job easily.

I haven't apologized for the work I chose to do, for at least fifteen years. In my current job (nearly ten years), I am PROUD beyond expressing it, of the service I provide to each and every one of you in America. I literally feed you. Without what I do, it would not happen. What I do now is more important, even, than my work with the Federal Reserve Bank was, affects more of you, and is more deeply fundamental.

My career is neither trivial nor dismissable, yet it is routinely dismissed, and constantly, merely for its nature. I am not Mary Tyler Moore, nor Lily Tomlin. I belong to no union, because I'm that bubble on the side of the org chart. I blazed no trails, just have tucked in and made my way through several of the worst economies of the past 50 years - and covered myself in no glory at all. My activism is for other people, not myself. I am except the admin personified. And what once was Secretaries' Day, a celebration of professionals, is now Administrative Professionals day/week/month, an occasion of lip service par excellence which frequently is focused on flowers and gendered pap. (I hasten to say that my company has a highly creative and thoughtful person who manages our recognition. But the occasion itself does absolutely beg for lip service, and it gets it.)

9 to 5, the organization, is notable for being a women's movement that embraced intersectionality from its start. That is more than most white feminism of its time ever did.

It's also why I never heard of it, even having seen that movie with the same name. I was a WHITE feminist, until at least 2020 really. I didn't realize it, but the changes of the past several years are clear to me. I embrace that. And I recognize this: I was not intersectional because I didn't "get it". At all.

And so, this intersectional organization, that saw secretaries "disappear" at the 1:14:30 mark of the documentary... stopped being about me. It shifted focus to child care, it got its ass out of the office - indeed, out of typical "9 to 5" focus.

There is a woman in the doc who says at 1:17:38 or so, "By the time I came in as a young woman" things were different, nobody calls me their girl, etc. I can't tell whether she may be close to my age (55) or quite a lot younger, but I can say - by the time I came in, it was only *getting* different. I still made my share of coffee, for a lot of years - and I never, ever drank coffee. It was explicitly a job thing, and always a STUPID job thing. I never had sexual harassment issues with a manager, but I certainly had an unbelievable idiot or two. I never DIDN'T have anyone who thought my work was "less-than", for decades there. So, good for her.

But I am glad 9 to 5/925 did look away, did seek to get out of corporate office. I'm insulated and privileged, working in a cube or from home, in my side-bubble.

"Passion" is dumb

The English language once had a word expressing romantic or apopleptic fervor, a word that even sounded like a sibilant storm, opening with a plosive, ending with softness. It denoted special extremity.

Now we have this.

My brother and I discussed the bewildering primacy of the term "passion" back when we attended the second JRW conference, many long years ago. Agents reacting to first pages, or discussing what they were looking for in queries and stories, bandied it about almost more than any other word. I began to wish it were possible to mute words on the entire internet, early in my first experience of querying.

Even when I was young (again, this was many moons ago), the word actually embarrassed me. Maybe because it still did have some power - and implications - back then. But I've never in my life said or thought or felt I was "passionately" in love with a person, and as proud as I am of my career and invested as I am in my work, "passion" is not and I actually hope never will be a word I apply to doing it. That would be ridiculous.

So The Atlantic's takedown of the absurdities we attach to job listing and hunting resonates with my cranky old heart - passionless as it may be.

Like that job, and like so many things, I spent a decent span of my twenties and thirties under the impression that I was supposed to feel apologetic. I didn't have a sexy job for which I held a white-hot torch; I hadn't even gone through specific education geared toward it. My teen years: I was a kid. I didn't know what I wanted to do or "become" and, as much as it was clear I was supposed to, I honestly didn't care enough to develop any fake passions for business or law or even the arts. Majoring in theater where I did cured me of interest in going into THAT - though it probably laid some groundwork for me as an author.

Students in the 80s who seemed into business degrees bewildered me for directing their lives at, basically, just making money - not even making actual things, or having any impact on anything. Graduate school seemed like a lot of work, so a lot of what are referred to as "The Professions" (as if nothing else is) didn't draw me for a second. School for creativity seemed oxymoronic, and yet was the only way I could comprehend to become any sort of artist, and so if there ever had been a visual or musical or other sort of artist inside me (there wasn't), I'd have killed it myself, striving for it.

I never developed a groove that had anything to do with making my living.

Beloved Ex, now. He was a different story. He wanted very much to find a way to make a living that energized him mentally, emotionally. It didn't help our brief marriage, unfortunately, because by the time a truly stunning opportunity came for him - it meant rooting ourselves in Ohio, and I freaked out hard core, and ... yeah, I didn't want to sabotage his opportunity, but I did, AND I didn't want to stay in Ohio. And I didn't. Lots of birds killed with that boulder, and that boulder ... welp, it was passion, in its way.

For me, life's always been lived outside of any office. I make friends, sure. I have experienced strong loyalties and many emotions, in a hundred offices from here all the way back to Ohio. But, at the end of the day, I would never have gone into any of them if they weren't paying me.

Passion's for poorly written poems. It's been no way for me to get things done.

Doesn't make me any less excellent at what I do for a paycheck. Doesn't mean I do not care. I'm not a customer service ninja (which sounds like a bad idea, honestly, what with the kill-y parts of ninja-dom - though, really, the Orientalist stereotyping of "ninja", "sensei", and "guru" is a problem, and also, why are so many of the terms noted like this?), I don't lose sleep at night dreaming naughty dreams of vendor management or the passionate joys of meeting preparation. You want an obsessive or any other kind of job-extremist, I'm not your candidate - and, honestly? I think MOST PEOPLE aren't.

MOST JOBS, let's be candid, are just jobs. They're not sexy, they're not hot lovers, they're not things that get our motors revving. If we're fortunate, and have the right kind of approach, the best most of us can expect from employment is the opportunity to work a good puzzle. Figure out how best to do a thing, then do it, and feel like a rockstar for widgeting, or networking, or calming down some numbers that get uppity.

"Job" is not a word stormy with sibilance. It doesn't start plosive, but with a chop. It ends utilitarian, not reassuringly with a nice, soft N. It's short and ordinary and gets its work done efficiently, nondescriptly.

And it's one of the great words in most of our lives, when we're lucky enough to get one that doesn't beat us down but does provide security. Maybe it gives more than merely that. Great!

But work is work.

They don't call it rapture, for good reason.

Collection

It's the processed-everything and SUGAR, stupid. I'm so glad this science seems finally to be getting out more, let's hope it prevails.

Four(-eyed) flushers. It's probably been about fifteen years since I learned that putting anything other than effluvia or the tissue we use to deal with it into a commode yields problems for the sanitation systems which process our sewage. Now and then, I do still flush the hair after I clean my brush, but usually I do try to stick by the rule, sensitive to the cost of waste management (astronomical, in case you've never wondered). Hit the link above for another reason.

So, consequences are over I guess. Inevitable, but dispiriting nonetheless. Weinstein gets to be "relieved" because Asia Argento is also facing allegations of harassment. Lauer wants to be on TV again. I'm sure there are people who'd watch that; personally, I feel a bit dirty just pointing it out. But the thing is, lots of disgraced men are eyeing comebacks. Not everyone resides at the same level of repellence. But that is the point - they ALL apparently (think they) are owed careers and money and our attention. Sigh. I guess it's true. If you own it, you get to get away with anything.

Please do not click on the links in that last paragraph. If you don't already know what they are (and I suspect everyone does, or is smart enough to guess), you can just hover and read the URLs. That is 100% of the content of the clicks, and *not* clicking will save these outlets the information that we "care". Thanks.

...

...

...

Okay, let's lighten up after THAT, shall we?

My brother and I spent a good fifteen - maybe even twenty - minutes laughing about this last night:

What a great country, where a fella can offer up hot spuds to whoever wants to eat 'em! Ka-pow!

3 full pounds of consternating comedy, y'all. Click away.

In other completely bizarre vintage culture, this:

I'm still agog.

Collection

Ooh - has *anyone* here been reading my blather long enough to remember mere exposure? Well, fair enough, to be honest, I'd forgotten the phrase myself, or at least failed to use it in a long time. Still, seeing it again in this look at remote work dynamics at The Atlantic brings to mind other ways mere exposure affects us. So often, "normalization" was a phrase we heard during the campaign (and since). What "normalization" is is mere exposure.

Also, what "fake news" is is propaganda. I'm all for allowing the evolution of language, but this is not evolution, it is distortion and misdirection. As well as stupid. It is one glossing-over too far, at a time when misdirection is literally dangerous, and terrifyingly successful.

Anyway, I know someone who's heavy into the Agile model (mmmm - scrummy!), so - neato. Now go make with the clicky above.

Awrighty then, in other news (or not) ...

In my entire life, I have never been excited about the choice of a presidential portraitist, but the upcoming work from Kehinde Wiley has me all but squeeing. The first time I ever heard of Mr. Wiley was on a museum legend at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, next to one of his portraits. I was GOBSMACKED, and fell in love with everything about the painting, not least simply its appearance. It is glorious, and beautiful, and what it has to say is poetry and joy. Cannot. Wait. to see this new work.

Interestingly, there was a "declined to comment" in regard to whether the woman artist painting Mrs. Obama will be paid equally to Mr. Wiley, to which I say "sigh" - but it is so predictable that there would be inequity that the unspoken answer is exactly no surprise. Double consciousness.

The Washington Post has one of the most uplifting things I have read in a long time. It's not a new article, in fact it dates back just a hair more than one year. But it's in-depth reporting on a redemptive tale that is splendidly worth reading. On the heir of Stormfront .. and how he renounced "white nationalism" - not just as an ism, but even as a phrase. Perhaps even better than that simple headline: the way this came about is wonderful to read.

Viking-Arabic textile design? I'm skeptical. But The Atlantic raises enters the dialogue of medievalism, racism, and today's socio-political climate - I am thinking of you, Jeff Sypeck!

Work (the Paid Kind)

The only use spam comments have is to remind me of the occasional old post I don't hate rediscovering. Today's special was this one. I remember that day, but my memory is unlike what is said in the post. Funny how brains work.

Yet again, though, it gets me thinking about my current gig. For a long time, I still thought of this as my "new" job - and yet, in a career blessed with so many reorgs and layoffs, it is by a huge margin the position I have held for the longest time in my history.

For decades, I never kept a single job for more than two years. By and large, this speaks to the nature of the economy since I began participating in it; and only a few of my job changes came at my own hands, as promotions of sorts. When I was with a certain large securities firm no longer as-such in existence, my tenure was over five years, but I held four jobs in that time: and every change was upwardly mobile, and every change was at my own instigation. But mostly, I am a product of the ever-"evolving" (growth-and-shareholder-obsessed) economic times I came of age in.

So realizing recently that I've been with my team, my "new" company, for three and a half years has been curious.

It doesn't feel like a long time, compared to the most important jobs I hold in my memory. It also REALLY doesn't feel like I've reached (or distantly passed) an endpoint, which I have felt even in jobs I have loved in the past. Two years and I become afraid. Two years, and I see change whether I want to or not. My last job, which I was proud to hold and did not want to leave, lasted two and a half, and I was giddy with fear just because of my own presumed expiration dating ... slightly before I realized that the changes around me gave me reason to be giddy with fear because I recognized what was going on. I left. And almost immediately, the cliff I'd been perched upon crumbled. I was safe, but it was heartbreaking.

And I am still safe.

The things I have accomplished in this position, with this company, pretty easily surpass anything I have been able to manage before.

When I began to look afield, after a couple internal interviews with said previous employer, I reached out to someone I knew from HR there, who had left. And ended up with the company she went to.

She had recommended me to my now-team, specifically my now-executive, knowing that I was a seasoned admin and he was unseasoned with having one, and that I would be able not only to step into required competencies, but also to form the work I'd do and essentially train my team to have an admin at all. The unwritten side of this was that she knew I'd be able to create my own work.

The way this has played out is that I have created my own terms.

My team don't have me doing PowerPoints to speak of, I rarely write memos that aren't my own idea, and apart from monitoring expenses for compliance and speaking to my direct boss's availability, I don't do a lot of the things most people THINK secretaries spend our lives on.

When I first started, one of the managers under my boss's care jumped in with both feet. He had me working on a lot of things, but one key one remains a core part of my work - albeit now in a very different way.

Both Feet left our company years ago, and in his absence, I picked up a great deal in his area. It took a long time to fill his position, so by the time we did so, I was uppity in the extreme in this department. So the new guy came into a situation with a secretary already managing up. And he seems to have been willing to leave me to it. With the result that that administrative tedium I picked up way back when is now an area in which I have streamlined, assertively managed, and brought into an entirely new proportion.

I've saved my company a crap-ton of money, on my own initiative, cemented best practices, insert-your-least-favorite-corporate-speak here. Because I cared, and because nobody else was doing this work, and because nobody told me not to.



I lived right up to what that HR person expected of me, and then some.


***


So re-reading that old post was interesting, in the context of my continued realization that I seem to be in a job well on its way to Methuselah status as far as my CV goes. I see in it a bit of the same sinking-my-teeth-in/getting-it-done-ery that has served me here, and even some of the amusement I felt at losing a job I so desperately hated (but which I took a long time to realize I did).

I still call that the worst April Fool's Day joke ever - not least as they jumped the gun by a day on the punchline.

Collection

Okay. Y'ALL. I love my country, but even apart from the sulphurous-tinted mass metastasizing in the White House, there are reasons much of the rest of the world finds us bewildering (not to say bat-splat cray). I ask you: kitten. fur. perfume.

Nobody's beating the sweet, bread-baking scent of my Gossamer, no way no how.

"The HELL you say?"

Casey Karp has an insightful post about security and yet more pitfalls of modern technology. Now doesn't Luddite little me feel all smug I never so much as connected my Bluetooth? But man. I can remember when I used to change the oil and even my pads and rotors. And yeah, I'm going to keep linking stuff like this. When did privacy become so recklessly unhip?

Maggie Maxwell has another uplifting one - on how to handle that bad review. Oh, ow. But she's right!

Okay, enough doom and gloom. Take a trip over to American Duchess's blog, where the saga continues, with the 1820s dress and its restoration. Post 1, linked previously. Post 2, here's how they dated it. The comp dresses and fashion plates are fascinating; but then, I'm a research nerd. Post 3 - the guts of the gown! - coming soon.

Grammar pedant and/or legal story time - why the Oxford Comma matters. A labor dispute digs into gerunds and forms, and drivers get better overtime terms.

Indirection Misdirection

"Say WHUT now?"
(Image: Wikipedia)

One of the things about office life that has always confounded me is the absolute refusal and/or inability of many, many people to take a direct route.

This morning, I received an email which was sent to me, a few other admins, and a few people I wasn't familiar with. It was in regard to an expense for "John Doe" - how should this be processed?

To the first email, I responded with, essentially, "Good luck/not mine" and went on about my day. To the second email about it (a complaint that nobody ever notes their location when setting things up), I took six seconds of my day and looked up John Doe. Turns out, JD is an employee in IT at our location, corporate headquarters. Admins copied on the initial inquiry? Did not include the admin for IT. Maybe one of the other folks is in that department.

But the point is, this is a person IN OUR BUILDING. This is a person, clearly, with functioning email and possibly even a telephone of some sort. Maybe they even use our instant messaging function! (I took *four* seconds and checked. He does. And users' telephone numbers are imbedded in IM; all you have to do to call them is type their name in and hit the green phone icon.)

I've been a secretary for thirty-plus years now. It's in my nature to shorten routes as much as possible. It's ABSOLUTELY part of my job to be a guide for others to do that too - I make it my business, and it is my bread and butter, to know to-whom-to-go-for-what. Playing Julie McCoy Your Cruise Director is an important function I fill, and I enjoy it most of the time. I especially enjoy assisting my own team when they need to find where they need to go.

So perhaps I am uncharitable for being confused. Perhaps I miss some important part of another person's process when I field their questions. It is possible I'm uncharitable when I think to myself it's just another a LMGTFY moment.

I was about to link that acronym, but you can look it up if you do not know it. It may cause you to blush, or it may give you a smile. (My intent would be the latter, of course, dear readers.)

So my second response, to the second email, was to look up John Doe, screenshot his deets, and cut-and-paste them into an email reply, asking, "Have you tried to contact him?"



It is not for nothing, ladies and germs, I often say I am passive-aggressive for a living. The key to doing it right is to perform the passive-aggression for all the world as if you could not imagine all the world is not smarter than yourself - as if surely there must be some *reason* NOT to take a direct route - while pointing out the direct route.

It's the opposite of the old "My locker door is stuck." "Oh, did you jiggle it?" scenario - where everyone in school in succession asks - and usually tries - to jiggle the catch. Instead of trying at all, when confronted with something we don't know, we just ask someone we think does know.



Let it be said: with basically a *generation* of experience in my job, I don't hate it that people think I am so good that they come to me with All the Questions. It reinforces how good they think I am, when I get 'em there. It reinforces my own confidence, too.

More often than not, my own kids tend to come at me with things that are easy for me, but which are not inherently obvious. There may BE a direct route, but it was not marked. Like the guy who called me this week asking how to extract a receipt from our travel tool. (You can't; our travel agency emails receipts, and email is not where they're used to looking, so they don't. Easy question, maybe - but only if you know that.)

The thing about going to people you know instead of asking the person whose expense is at issue is - this is SOP for every office in every industry I've ever worked in. There is a worship of PROCESS in play, that overrides even the most basic intellect, no matter who walks in the door of an office building. Because process itself can be so confounding, people self-confound, and forget how to get from point A to point B almost prophylactically. Because there are so many things that work indirectly, people don't even look at anything directly anymore - they just ask the admin.

A friend of mine and I often laugh about the years we spent in a department together, before the big changes of 2008. We were in a regulated industry, and we were used to PROCESS (and even prossa-SEEZ, but that's another rant for another day). She and I still get a grin out of That One Guy we worked with.

That One Guy called me one day - he worked at the suburban location, I was downtown, literally in the executive suite. "Diane, what's the process for me to get a box?"

The idea of walking into the copy room and removing a few reams out of a paper box and taking that box was inconceivable.



We are so hemmed in we call the admin downtown to help us find the special requisition form or online widget just to get a box.

But there is more to it than that. PROCESS is one part of the issue, but hierarchy also plays in: people sometimes do not take a direct route because the relevant personage is significantly higher in an org chart than they are.

Direct routes aren't always practical or career-enhancing.

This is where being Just a Secretary is oddly helpful; we're off to one side on the org chart: but we can pretty much knock on any door we like. I will go direct to most any executive any time, and am both allowed and justified to do so.

Is there a problem with one of our drivers somewhere out in the field? Is the Transportation Manager not available? Diane Major goes to the Vice President of Operations, and nobody ever blinks. Is my boss (a Senior Vice President) in a meeting? I can open his door and pop my head in, when even directors and management will hesitate, even when they have urgent issues. I'm not into pestering the CEO, but my boss's boss? He likes me, and I can get in front of him easy as pie when need arises.

So I *understand*. I get why we have lost the thread and become a web. I don't even condemn this, not in itself. PROCESS develops because one too many nits went off and did something unexpected, and they did it with a purchasing card, or the company name on their vehicle, or they just did it wrong. PROCESS isn't a bad thing; and even hierarchy has its place ...



But I still don't get the John Doe question.

"Well, Dang."

It's become clear to me with age that I'm one of those people who "won't go to a doctor." The thing is, last time I did go - with labyrinthitis, an illness I know ALL too well - they decided to do tests on me ... and told me I had: labyrinthitis. Go home, take meclizine.

Which was what I knew before I took the DIZZYING step of leaving my home, exposing strangers to the virus, my mom insisting on across town to drive me and make me go (and exposing her - and by extension my ailing stepfather), and experiencing a few hours of matchless torture for the privilege of being told what I knew already.

And that test cost me $285.



So, this past Wednesday, when I felt a sore throat coming on, I turned into one of those treat-it-yourself morons. I spent a day at work, possibly quite contagious, downing NSAIDs and thinking I was beating this thing.

Yeah. I know. Just be glad you aren't one of my cube farm mates, I guess. I suck.


I took my laptop home that night just in case, so I could work from home, and not infect anyone.

Thursday wasn't great. I did work, though. You can get good electronic housekeeping done with a puddy and a pup for company.

Friday, though - no way. The fever that had begun the day before was 101.6. I don't know when I've had a fever to speak of; it's been long enough I was actually in incomprehension, looking at the thermometer.



See, my mom raised us skeptical. She wasn't one to easily believe her kids were sick - we were NOT going to get away with malingering - and so, to this day, I often tend to disbelieve it when I am sick. Which is funny, because at heart I am an underachiever, often enamored of the idea of not being at work, home wrapped up in a blanket.

One of my bosses and I once had a conversation about the phenomenon of not being able to malinger; in his case, the superstructure for this was Catholic Guilt. In mine, Mom Guilt.

She's good, no doubt.

So for me to be out of work for two days is almost intolerable; I feel like I'm stealing.

Which is why this weekend - when it got so much worse - was not exactly relaxing. I think Friday may have been the worst of it, but Saturday wasn't the world's most breathtaking improvement. Yesterday - well, yesterday I made myself clean the dang house.

To be fair, being sick in a dirty house is the PITS. But it's a bit more of that mom thing. I wanted to be comfortable - but I also was insisting to my body, "I am better."

Well. Ish.

The cough still hurt a lot, though the fever was gone. I had energy enough to clean. "See!?" Clothes were laid out for today at work (oh yes I did go).

And then before bed I had to admit - that cough had blood in it. Old blood at one time, bright and fresh new blood at another.

Neither of these bears good implications, and I am not a complete ass. Though I did go to the office. Which ... actually may be completely assy. Fever or no, the likelihood where blood in the cough is concerned is "infection" (likely bacterial), and that means that, five days on, fever or no, I could be contagious.

Sigh.

I actually did feel remarkably good this morning. Which is odd, as I've had insomnia unlike anything I've experienced since my twenties for two nights running (and no nap yesterday, because housecleaning!).

I also called the doc.

One prescription later (seriously, I can take the cough; do just give me an antibiotic so I'm not Typhoid Mary over here), I can at least put to rest the Complete Ass of a Coworker concerns, and get on with things.

Thank goodness it didn't cost me $285.

Now to wait for the bill.

Rabbit Holes

Today, I was talking with my oldest friend, The Elfin One, and she asked how my mom and stepfather are doing. He is the one to whom I've alluded a time or two, who has for some years now been slowly dying. A part of this has been deterioration of his cognition. ... and my mom has endured a chronic, profound disruption of her sleep patterns, as he loses track of time completely. The result is she's not quite the woman of stunning recall I have always been used to her being.

TEO asked me whether this is stress or some reflection of an organic problem. I think it's the sleep issues, the fear and unceasing demands. But it's so easy to forget ... that she forgets. With my stepfather, we've grown used to his lapses.

Last week, she came to my house and thought she had never seen the painting I did in my upstairs bathroom ... six months ago or more.

My mom is fully down the rabbit hole with my stepfather. And honestly, she's getting a little rabbity.


The next question is, "Diane, how are you?"

My response to this tends to be some combination of bewilderment and dismissiveness. I'm *aware* this is hard on me too, but I'm much more aware how much easier it is for me than it is for my mom. There's a tendency to push off sympathy so people will spend it, and their prayers, on my mom instead.

Not with TEO. With my oldest, best friend, I can be honest (with my brother too). And I realized where I stand.

I'm like standing guard at the entrance to the rabbit hole.



G-d has been especially kind to me of late. A few months ago, it was stress helping them do their taxes, and for the past few months I've been doing all I can to be not only on call if they need me, but also to just spend time as much as I can. To be an escape valve and a social distraction that is NOT demanding for them.

There's been a lot of social distraction for them lately - family, after family, after family - and my mom is incapable of not *hosting* her family. So for some weeks, as much as we LOVE them, visit after visit has had her fretting over what to cook, had her shopping, had her squiring loved ones around, had her socially "on" in a way that alone can be demanding. As someone who's lived alone for the bulk of my adult life, over twenty years now, I know how exhausting joy can be. Simply smiling all day - it is a pleasure to be with people, but I come home absolutely shot, and aching for my solitude, my home, the furbabies.

For me, there's been a lot of work distraction lately. Three solid weeks now of quite HIGH productivity - prep for our annual meeting, onboarding an exec I've been waiting for over a year and half, and this past week has been an apple pie hubbub. Multitasking extraordiaire.

I'm the lucky one: I'm not down in that rabbit hole, my world is still the real world. I get to sleep normally. And I have a job with the most extreme level of satisfaction I have ever enjoyed - which is saying something very significant.



So now my own question.

How do you hope your mom can have a life like that - productive, healthy, stimulating ... knowing what has to come for her to have that?

Yeah.

Work and The Wrong Work

The past three weeks at my job have been busy, productive, and VERY gratifying. I've made great progress on our annual meeting, onboarded a long-awaited exec in the area of my department for which I provide the most support (and I like him!), and finally begun denting a digital organizational nightmare for that department, which is going to a satisfying accomplishment when it is done.

That last one took up a decent part of my day today. Shew, tedious. Not fun, like being ahead of the game on the meeting, and knowing what I'm doing. Or exciting, like meeting someone who looks to be eager to tackle the work I've been trying to get my arms around for a year now.

But I gave it a run for its money today. So.



Oh, and the other part of this post. "The Wrong Work" - what'd she mean by *that*??

Ahem.

Y'all know what a plot bunny is?

Do you ever find a work  you've deliberately planned can be a plot bunny?

It's a funny thing. I'm actually little prone to chasing story ideas around; I seem not to be very promiscuous when it comes to subjects to write about.

All those years ago - when I attended my first JRW Conference with my brother - when I first entertained the delusion I could be an author - when I found, not long after, Clovis I ... Well, not long after *that*, I found a related subject, which is the WIP now.

And I also happened to work on that family history.

And I knew the third novel was going to be that story.

That story has not distracted me, through these years. I still assume it'll be my third novel, in the way you assume the sun will come up in the east. You don't think about it much, but you count on it anyway.



So.

Guess why I'm asking y'all about plot bunnies. Thoughts?

EXPOSURE

It's not always a good thing for your writing to be seen. Janet Reid's post today somewhat touches on this theme - in a classic example of the old "How can you know my writing isn't good enough!?" rant which exemplifies where the writing is weak.

My own example today was at work. In an interoffice envelope from some other quarter of the company, I received a letter forwarded along to my boss, but actually addressed to "Mr. Contact Unknown, Owner" (incorrect company name).

Rest assured that my boss will see this letter, and its envelope - both identically incorrect - but not for the reasons hoped-for. I shared the thing all over my corner of the world, because everybody needs a laugh. The consensus was twofold: one, that we NEED TO DO BUSINESS with these folks as quickly as possible. And two, that my planned response of "Actually, it's Ms. Contact Unknown" is the best possible one.

Best. Mail merge. Ever.

Also, nice putting your best foot forward, company.

Image: Wikimedia

All this has only the most cursory relation to writing, or even to Janet's post, linked above. Mostly, I'm sharing it because it's funny, and I hear humor is a good way to prevent blog readers' boredom. And I care about y'all. I really do. I don't want you coming here getting bored.

So you're welcome. Mr. and Ms. Anonymous Reader. Happy Monday.

Laughter Is the Worst Medicine?

Disclaimer - though this post riffs on the litany of illnesses I've been enjoying this past month, it's not actually about them, so we open with sort of a non-kvetch alert ...

The cough that's running like wildfire through our cube farm these days is a bit like The Office Hugger. It's everywhere, welcome nowhere, and prone to cling. If it chances to make you chuckle in the slightest, it will take you in a death grip and not let go.

I sound like a six-pack-a-day emphysematic, is what I am saying. The tiniest mirth takes me down, choking, and Snagglepuss himself would wonder how I make that hideous, wheezing sound.

Last week, at the height of a fuller roster of head-cold symptoms, I was taking meds.

I. Hate. Cough medicine.

It strips your brain away and makes you stupid.

I haven't written since the mini retreat with my beloved and talented friends. Nor edited. Nor researched.

Nor has Miss Penelope been blessed with a good walk for too long now.

It was pretty easy to forgive myself for that in the full throes of migraine and flu. Even last week, she was so sweet with her Wheezin' Mama, I was feeling the guilt less strongly than seems fair. Plus, having lost thirteen pounds in a day and a half with the flu, I've still held off eight to ten of that, so "exercise" has been demoted (ahh, the poison of "success" ...).

Today, though the cough is still irritatingly eager, the guilts are asserting themselves - about the lovely young lady who depends upon me for kibble and walkies - and about the work, which I'm missing. Though I have said for some days now I'd pay a good $10 for someone to pummel me on the back and loosen up my chest, I actually haven't felt "sick" since last week. And I take the guilt/missing my writing as good signs too, really.

Best of all, the loss of time thanks to Daylight Savings Time has not cut me down.

Sadly, one reason for this is that I had a bit of a freak-out at work today, thanks to cognitive issues from last week causing a misunderstanding; but (a) I blame the cough meds, and (b) as dismaying as it was, it was not an actual "problem", in that no damage has been done. My sense, a bit over two years into this job, is that this upsets me more than anyone else. So it will be necessary for me to perform like a rockstar on something else soon, and this too shall pass.

In the shorter term: tonight, we walk with Penelope in nature.

I just hope she won't make me laugh.

Collection

"Death by PowerPoint." (I TOLD you!)

"Since 1994, 15 billion mobile phones have been made"
(and it's up to two billion annually at this time)

It's things like this that spark my interest in what I did this weekend: shopping (yes, online) for a vintage wind-up watch. I have a lovely old Longines in a gold tone, a beautiful timepiece and one that keeps excellent time - and now I'd like to have one in a silver tone or gunmetal. A wind-up watch doesn't bring new resources into the environment, AND it doesn't require batteries. Even if I lost it or threw it out, it would not poison anyone. ... and I ended up getting two beautiful watches, tested and working, for under twenty dollars.

“Eternally white, I am confident.” Colorism is a worldwide market phenomenon demonstrating how very well bigotry pays. And pays.  And pays.

Maine's governor brings us the latest in hideously blatant racist statements - part of an ongoing series spanning the history of ever.

... and then there were the thousand or so guys who celebrated New Year's Eve with sexual assault including rape, and called it "amusement"  ... This happened in city after city, and only the slenderest fraction of suspects has been apprehended at all. Plus: the coverup, the queasy racial/political overtones (see also: the ubiquity of the phrase “North African or Arab appearance”), AND victim blaming. ... Eight days on: the chief of police in Cologne consented to resign. About two thirds of suspects identified have been identified as asylum seekers.

And finally, in lighter news - sometimes a clean slate isn't all it's cracked up to be. More of those 1917 blackboards discovered in an Oklahoma school. Some wonderful preserved artwork here.

My Stepfather Pronounces it Linka-DIN (*)

LinkedIn is like that friend with a pickup truck. You don't call them much, but when you have to move, suddenly you remember their number.

Worse ... maybe you kind of wish they wouldn't call YOU, either.

When I was worried about my job two years ago, I quietly updated my LinkedIn profile, reached out to a couple connections; managed to get an interview from one of them. That interview didn't pan out, but they called me back a couple months later - and here I am. (I met the woman who did get that first job, and she is made of solid OSUM gold, and no way should I have gotten that gig. I like mine best in any case.)

Every now and then, recruiters get frisky on LinkedIn, but that seems reasonable.

Over the last month or so, a salesman got silly and tried (a) to connect with me there and then (b) kept messaging me about "who is the right person to talk with about such-and-such" at my company. And (c) got himself DISconnected, because - ugh. No.

More recently, a restaurant reached out to me and at least two of the other Executive Admins at my employer, offering us free lunch. This sounds lovely - and I have it on excellent authority the purveyor sending these notes with connection invites makes great food - however, I work at a food distributor. And they are not clients.

How it looks to some folks when we bring in non-client food to our corporate HQ: not super.

So no free lunch for me, sad to say.

Every now and then I see the old "guess who's looking at your profile!" previews, and sigh quietly. Yes, Virginia, there ARE people I spent years losing touch with, and it was not easy.

Nobody really uses LinkedIn as a social network. It's a nicely distant quasi-tool to occasionally keep up with former coworkers, really. You can get their real contact info off 'em if need be, maybe send the odd bland "congrats" or holiday message or whatever.

Or you can let them know ... you might need that pickup truck. And maybe a spare pair of arms to carry a few boxes. And couches.



(*And I don't make fun of his way of reading the name. First time I ran across the website Plenty of Fish, I read it as Plenty Offish ... which strikes me as a hilarious name for a dating site.)

PowerPoint is Like Twitter

One of the things you run into if you work in almost any office is the ubiquitous misconception that PowerPoint is an program in any way suited to creating a text document. PowerPoint is not Word, and there are umpteen reasons for that, but it also *is* used – perhaps more than not – for documents other than presentations, at least in-person, spoken, before-a-live-audience presentations. PPT has a certain fame outside its drily intended purpose(s) thanks to David Byrne, and that is sometimes my saving grace when painfullystakingly working to edit a report we produce weekly, which some of my kids think is like a book report.

My theory regarding PPT's unique uses and misuses is that the concept of “slides” versus “pages” makes it seem to the brain that there is a buffet table with multiple individual offerings of information, whereas Word can seem like one stupendous serving of text. Excel is a dizzying menu you can’t read from where you're standing, and when you get close enough for your glasses to help you, you find out the whole thing’s in Swahili, and darn if that’s not on your list of spoken (nor read) languages.

The problem with the buffet is, given the limitations of the sideboard, each element on it has only so much space.


This space is best not set out as if it were a full, sit-down supper. This space should not come with its own separate plates, utensils, napkins, glassware, and so on.


And, given the parameters of a pot luck smorgasbord, this space is always going to attract some cooks who will insist upon overdoing their contributions.

You cannot equip text on a PPT slide with full grammatical formality. You cannot indulge in full sentences, elegant (or not) descriptors, nor (for Maud’s sake, even I can’t tolerate this anymore) DOUBLE SPACES AFTER PERIODS. Forget about using “a”, “the”, and any conjugation of the verb “to be”. Put out the dish you have to serve, present it with pride, and be done. Garnish is for the graphics, but the text you write must be simple – and short.

I had a boss once, positively obsessed with pithiness. So much so we called it pith. Good times were had.

Such an imperative to brevity could wear on a wordy wench like me, but even I, for a paycheck, understand that sometimes KISS doesn’t stand merely for Keep It Simple Stupid (nor even Kids In Satan’s Service – hah), but Keep It SHORT Stupid.

As with Twitter, sometimes you find yourself in PPT, figuring out which grammar crime to commit in order to stay within the limitations.

I can get pretty criminal in PPT. I commit crimes against my beloved mother tongue which in any other context would be, for me, all but unthinkable.

But I am a morbidly driven cuss when it comes to PPT, and I *insist* upon dealing with it on its own terms, and so my own terms become necessarily secondary.


This is what it’s like having any job, really.

Even writing – you write for yourself first, but if you want to sell, you revise, and eventually you realize there are readers out there.


Going to work as a whole is like Twitter; you edit yourself to fit the 140 character limit. Some folks cover their tatts, some try to remember not to swear, most of us have, to some degree or other, to “leave home at home” even as others have to remember to leave work at the office. We’re all varying successes; what a PowerPoint extravaganza of poorly considered graphical results humanity might be.

Sometimes, you really feel the limits, those tiny boundaries seeming to compress your own resources. It can be hard to stay inside.

When life is churning up enormous emotions: you have to choose which social crimes to commit, at the office. You have to conserve your reserves of good cheer when it’s difficult to synthesize, but you can’t expend negativity in its stead. You constrict, you shrink, you spend a nod instead of a smile and “how are you” – you only have 140 expressions for the day, and they have to be good ones.

PPT can be a poor medium for text.

Offices can be poor medium in which to store your heart, forty hours per week.

Character limits. Suddenly: some layers in that phrase – one of them being “irony” …

Dirty, Dirty Bidniss

I’ve been reading Janet Reid’s archives – less for education at this point than for sheer entertainment, to be honest. But this post got me thinking. (It is very short, and yes, you have to read it for the post you’re now looking at to make worthwhile sense.)

I’ve encountered agents and editors online and IRL who struck me as … let us say, not self aware. It is not the world’s deepest challenge to find publishing professionals saying things with all the facile and vacuous brightness (and, indeed, the very words) of a stock character in a Hollywood movie about Hollywood. Discussing art and creativity as business translates, and agents have become a trope, be they authors’ or actors’ pit-bull/chihuahua advocates.

More often than evil, the implications tend to go for comedy. Nakedly driven by business concerns, or sometimes almost (… almost …) adorably by dreams, real life Tweets and interviews and so on make clear the expectations and motivations behind “I’m looking for THE NEXT SUCH-AND-SUCH BESTSELLER” or (cringe) the old “this-meets-that” uber-shallow Hollywood pitchery. Expectations and motivations that other stock character, the long-suffering writer, endures to their emotional travail.

It is to sigh.

The point relating to Janet’s post is: I can comprehend the idea of someone who has long worked in publishing getting sneery about the industry and the people in it. Exposed, more than I ever have been, to these dynamics, sooner or later those enamored of their own integrity may feel themselves in need of feeling “better than that.”

Authors, by the way, do this too. Some of them out loud, or in print. Some of them do it in query letters; why else would so many agents have to explain on blogs and in interviews, “When you say ‘all the books being published now are trash’, THAT IS INSULTING” … ? We think my genre is better than your genre – or, more tellingly, my genre is more IMPORTANT than yours is – or reader categories – or other particular writers. And I don’t pretend I haven’t don this, though I have tried to be nonspecific when moaning about querying or reading or what have you.

But most of us learn to keep certain thoughts to ourselves, or at least not to name names – and we all move along.



Which is where Janet’s old post above comes in.

The thing about moving along is, in publishing and in life and in Hollywood and at any job in the world, what it usually means is, dealing with the people we find annoying or inferior, getting it over with, and then dealing with OTHER people.

Because: there are other people in publishing. There are always other people than the annoying ones. Always.

It is no more reasonable to consider “all agents” as possessing any one property than it is to paint every member of any particular gender, race, political party, or age group as a single, monolithic whole – homogeneous, and uniformly good or bad, or rich with nougaty goodness, or perhaps a little too salty with my high blood pressure, so I’d better hold off.

When I was actively querying (and I am still toying with research here and there, though nothing’s been sent of late), I queried GOOD agents. People for whom I have respect.

If I want to participate in this industry, I *need* to respect it.

The idea of considering it a dirty thing on the face of it, but “a necessary evil” is not merely bewildering to me, it’s confounding. To consider my work as product in no way demeans it, to me – if selling art was good enough for Michelangelo, it's good enough for me. As hellaciously painful as it’s been to watch my first borne (I’ll spell it that way rather than literally indicating labor and delivery in the biological sense) possibly fail, it doesn’t tell me I’ve written a bad novel nor that those who recognize they can’t sell it are the bottom-feeding minions of Be’elzebub. It tells me they’re being realistic about business.

It also tells me about the importance of how I populate my stories, and a whole raft of other privilege- and diversity-centric stuff I’ve blogged about already, but those are other posts.

Not one single agent in the world has done one thing to stand in my way. None could nor would stop me if I chose to get The Ax and the Vase out into the world; self-publishing is a perfectly cromulent piece of this business. I feel that *I* do not make a good prospective self-publisher, because the kind of sweat equity I long to invest in this work is different, and I frankly fear my competence to serve my novels without the partnership and network of traditional publishing.

But that doesn’t make traditional publishing my obstacle.

Only I can be that, for myself, and … I kind of prefer not to do that.

My faith in magic ain’t what it used to be (if it ever was), and my expectations have never been that Hilary Mantel oughtta WORRY when I hit the market. But nothing in the years I’ve been learning, and writing, and continually working on all the fronts necessary to my goals …

… nothing has ever persuaded me I don’t deserve this, nor that I won’t get it. It could have happened already, if my resources were greater than they are.

Just not if I had more Magical Literary Beans to get my creative beanstalk to the stratosphere.

Right now, I’m all I’ve got. I joke a lot about my wee and paltry little brain, but we all know I think plenty highly of myself.

I also know, perhaps the one magic I do have in my life, is the great good fortune to find people I respect and am grateful for to work with. Just yesterday, I was struck (hardly for the first time) by the realization that I have a job which is the envy of others doing similar work. Someone said to me, basically, I work with the best people because I am the best myself.

Not something I came by easily, nor early.


Even if I sign with someone unexpected, when it does come, or an agent I thought of as a long-shot/”eh, why not ping ‘em” prospect when I first researched them: when I do have one, my agent will be The Best.

Just as my Penelope is The Best Dog.

And just as there’s nothing OSUM-er than Gossamer.



If I have faith in myself, and in my work – how could I not have faith in the person who chooses (and whom I choose) to advocate it? The agent, the editor who snaps at it, and those who share acquisition decisions, and acquire it?

Yes, yes. It’s all business, and there is a part of the publishing business that concerns itself less with Literary Exquisiteness (or my personal, precious darlings) than with profit.

Hell, it ain’t insurance. And I worked in that industry for YEARS.



So tell me again how PUBLISHING is a bunch of awful little beasts … ?

Effective Professional Communication: The Approach

To all the people who have to make endless calls, trying to get on executives’ calendars – look, I get it. We all have our scripts to follow. Mine is “time is at an extreme premium” when you call me – and that is not a joke. Yours is “I’d just like to get a few minutes with him to introduce him to our company and what we can do for yours.” You have to do this over and over again with the same unresponsive people, and if you think I don’t know that, you underestimate my ability to recognize your phone number on my caller ID. I know exactly when you call, I know you do it on a repeating schedule. I GET it.

Most of you recognize that I am The Gatekeeper, and you behave accordingly, attempting to schmooze me (pointless) or tell me “He said he’d meet with us” (it worked ONE time, when I was new, and man do I have those guys’ numbers – and they will never, ever get in with my boss, ever) or actually behaving with friendly professionalism (the only viable approach). I entertain these varying gambits with exactly the responses they deserve, always professional, but pretty much hermetically sealed against the jerks who try to get one over on me, and impervious to anything but friendly professionalism. The ones who recognize, we’ve all got our scripts to follow: that, basically, we’re all in this together.

Make it unpleasant for me, and I will return the favor by making “progress” outright impossible for you.

So don’t refuse to speak with me when, instead of asking you “would you like to go to voice mail?” I say “Is there anything I may do for you?”

Don’t fail to realize that, if you want calendar time, I’m the person to ask for it; not my boss.

Don’t try to bypass me by snubbing me with a “Just put me in voicemail” and then leaving a message for my boss which (a) starts out with about twenty seconds of egregiously badly recorded music and (b) then segues into “I am so and so and I am FIGHTING to get a meeting with you.”

It turns out that the music was the Fighting Illini fight song – actually a commendable-ish piece of personalization, not that it actually changes the calendar any – and the “fighting” message was an allusion to that. So, okay, so he didn’t intend to make me look bad.

But this guy has been calling for a long time now, and my boss and I both recognize the number when it comes in now, and he’s never tried to talk with me, never left a message, and – cute as the personalization is – it doesn’t TELL US ANYTHING.

If he’d ever once actually attempted to speak with me like a all-growed-up professional, he could have introduced his company and himself, he could have gotten some information to me (and, that way, possibly to my boss – or, perhaps, even someone else more relevant to his needs), he might conceivably have made some sort of progress. Instead, what we have is enough weeks of calls from the same number that my boss and I both know a number is endlessly pinging us – and nothing else. No skin off of us, but it doesn’t make a GOOD first impression. And zero net effect for our fighting friend.

Who, to be honest, isn’t fighting all that hard, and who is strategizing his battle not. at. all.



It’s impossible not to be brought to mind of querying and trying to get an agent.

We all have our scripts to follow, and whether I personalize or not goes by the wayside if I make a lot of noise, without ever conveying the least bit of information ABOUT MY NOVEL. Or even that it is a novel. Or why I think it’s relevant to Agent X, Y, or Z. Or even make it clear that what I am attempting to do is to query something.


I called myself The Gatekeeper above, and would imagine most of my readers who are writers or agents (they do crop up!) would agree, the gatekeeper analogy in querying/publishing does nobody any favors.

But querying is a professional communication, we all agree on that. And to conduct professional communication in the way my fighting foe above has done would be unthinkable.

(Even now, I suspect Janet Reid, Jessica Faust, and hundreds of other agents are/would have to disagree – they probably do get EXACTLY this approach, from geniuses who’ve found the office number, and wish to treat agents to their honeyed words directly, bypassing slush with their pristine and special snowflakes. We’ve heard about it, and there are countless agency sites exhorting that authors NOT call them directly for a reason.)

It is for ME, and for all my wise and wonderful authorial readers, this would be unthinkable. Of course.

It seems so basic to me – yet I have worked in a fairly stereotypical office setting or another for nearly thirty years. Not all authors do, nor could stand to. And so baseline assumptions for effective professional communications are not there. And, given the creative nature of our product, we may think a creative approach is best in getting it out there.

That can work. But even the most unexpected innovations in getting our work out there, in the successful cases, still maintains essential professional respect. It doesn’t involve stalking agents to find out their alma mater and subjecting their voicemail to extreme lo-fi (do the kids know what low-fidelity means anymore, by the way … ?) fight songs. It involves getting attention without demanding it personally and invasively. Maybe by canny support in service of self-published work that stands the test of marketing success and the expectation of future revenue etc. Maybe in the unique voice of an unexpected character, translated into a simple, ordinary query. Maybe in a hundred ways I can’t think of because I am stodgy and dowdy and doing things the old way.

Not by calling incessantly for weeks, with no message.

Not by FIGHTING for time un-earned, while providing no reason it should be given.

DABDA

There may be five stages of grief - but many of us linger on one stage or another. Denial is popular, Anger is overwhelming, Bargaining is a cruel temptation ... Depression may be more powerful, even, than anger. Acceptance is the elusive one.

I'm considering it right now.



The Ax and the Vase is a great novel.

It's been my teacher and my child, something that ushered me into the world of an author, as opposed to a writer. I'm proud of it, and it's a hell of a read.

But. It doesn't seem to be a a viable product.

It's been a couple of months now since any agent even requested a read, and - good as it is - frankly, I just believe it's got an uphill battle in store in publishing, and ... if my plan is to be published, I have to provide the best possible material.

Ax is ITS best possible self, but it is not a market mover right now.

I haven't entirely decided to retire it; the fact that there are more agents to query is either a problem or a tempation.

But work on the WIP has become compelling, and though my faith in what Ax IS is unshakeable, if I'm not realistic about the industry, I'm not its best steward. And that's what I want to be. So I'm thinking it may be best to concentrate elsewhere. I'm opening myself to that possibility.


Anyone who's read me much knows I'm not very precious about my darling, special work, but they also know how much it means to me to have this consideration on my mind. My commitment to Ax is not minimal, nor is my confidence. But the odds are speaking to me, and I can't pretend not to hear. That would not serve Ax and would also hobble the WIP and the rest of my works.


This way of thinking has come on me a little suddenly - but, thank heavens, it's also coming at a time when my excitement about the WIP is building. I can't say there's no intentional connection there, either. If I have the WIP to sustain my hope, letting go of Ax would be ... not less difficult. But possible.

And so - I am considering possibilities. Feedback welcome, but most of my readers here at the blog have not been beta readers of the novel itself, so I understand if the comments stay quiet or theoretical. :)



Sigh.

Round Robot

One of the many evolving wonders of modern technology is JUST how many people you can get holding for each other at one time. Travel is an especially good matrix to get a truly spectacular Round Robot going; one person planning travel for another may be on the line with them while simultaneously on the line with an agent, the agent may be on hold with two entirely different air carriers looking for options … a single call can take well over an hour, easily.

If you’re truly lucky, you may be on hold with Orbitz, who have the most unbelievably suicidal-kitten hold music ever conceived; a short piece, but played on repeat, it begins with all the pathos of a sad, big-eyed cartoon pet in the rain, and ends on plaintive piano notes fading into nothingness, the only emotional response to which is bleak despair. As appropriate as that can be, if you make any part of your living working on travel for others, it feels almost aggressive.


Yesterday I indulged in the foolishness of reporting to work at 8:00 a.m., the actual time I am expected to be in. Usually, I’m a 7:30-er, but, lacking for sleep and unable to cope with it at oh-dark-thirty, I allowed myself that half an hour, with the result that the moment I walked in I was running at top sprint.

Today, I came in at my usal too-early, and had just gotten everything fired up and running when I decided to check an airline website for the status of my boss’s flights, when he emailed me himself to point out the ugh-worthy: first leg delayed an hour and forty six minutes.

This led to an hour and thirty-six minute Round Robot – if you don’t count the follow up discussions, and a second call to get him checked in on the latest edition ticket.

Starting off a day with this sort of thing means the day doesn’t get the chance to drag – at least, early on – which is nice, as when things move along you’re not hating the clock. Still, getting in at 7:30 works better for me in a long run. I don’t like being caught up short right at the start, and an early start often means I’m ahead of obstacles.

It’s also what I’ve become mentally and physically used to, over the past few jobs with flex schedules.

The discipline of early-ness was hard won and now seems to be difficult for me to shake. There was a time (it seems not so long ago, but it’s about a dozen years now) when going in to work at 7:30 was exceptional; the occasion of some special meeting or corporate event. Now, I can hardly see how it’s possible to show up at report-in time and really be effective. It can take half an hour just to get booted up, everything opened and organized, and to put on the day’s work shoes.

Today I got off my desk a series of invoices, processed expenses already spent, shifted risk items and fleet notices and provided titles to Finance. I secured several things that need to be shredded, and sorted a stack of outstanding items and one recall notice. Not bad, and constantly going (even if, sadly, not moving enough!).

I wouldn’t make a half-bad robot myself, some days. Only better.

Blood Runs Cold Again

At my job, I take a special pride in some of the more difficult parts. I don’t take great RELISH in them, but when we get a call from someone who’s mad at something that happened with an employee, I have a fair record of satisfying the disgruntled. I take a very real stake in our reputation, and being part of the operations of our business means I am, as they say, “customer-facing” in a unique way from time to time – when people have a problem with us.

Most of those who call with a complaint, it must be said, aren’t calling in a highly emotional state, and even those who are unhappy tend not to begin by taking things out on me. We’re all in the transaction together, and I do everything I can to explain what I’ll do next, to answer for my company’s reputation, and to take people seriously. And they know they’re not calling the person who upset them, really, so more often than not once I’ve gone through a complaint with someone, they are happier once they hang up than when they called.

Only a very few times has someone called me actually angry. Once it was someone in a contracting position of sorts, mad he couldn’t find our location, and when I (nowhere even near the state in which he was lost) was unable to help him (this was in the very beginning of my tenure, and I was not issued street directions to sixty-three offices when I started here) my vice president told me, “Give him to me. Nobody yells at you.”

Once it was a woman so wildly abusive that once she’d cursed at me violently several times in a row, I actually did hang up. There was exactly nothing I could have done to satisfy her, and as much as I care about our reputation, there was no remediating that (nor, frankly, was that really the problem – just a raving maniac). And I don’t get paid to take instruction on the gruesomely biological suggestions being made.

Today, it was someone who may well have had a very real reason for her upset. But I honestly don’t know. Something in a communication from somewhere in our company offended her, and I am sick about that if we said something that caused hurt or anger. But it was impossible for me to triangulate either the nature of the offense, or its source. I attempted a few reasonable questions, was called a disgrace, and requested to twist a fastener of the non-nail variety off before she hung up.

This was upsetting for me, but as problematic as anything in the exchange was that I could not complete the transaction. I couldn’t help – indeed, was outright prevented, by the petitioner herself.

Far more upsetting, though, was that this woman also abused our receptionist. Not only because our receptionist is very good at her job, AND a nice person for whom I feel loyalty and now some protectiveness, but because I’ve had that job before, and I know all too well what it can be like.

I’m no fan of a holler-er, but I can take that and go home and snoodle my beautiful furbabies and marinate in the magical potion of moral superiority (and I can vent at my brother and/or friends). But holler at someone with whom I share a vested concern for my employer, and someone I LIKE? Bite it, caller, I’m not on your side when you scream like a coward at someone you KNOW cannot respond.

As it was, no matter how much I said, “I want to help you” the woman was the rage-version-of-gleeful in accusing me of being angry with her too.

Um. No. You’re not important enough for me to get upset about lady – until you’ve hung up on me and then I find out you’ve abused my coworker.



The night is rain-into-snow, and I brought home my laptop, though our neck of the woods is not in for the brunt of the big snowstorm on its way to a spectacular pummeling of the Eastern Seaboard. It’s not beyond me to think happy thoughts of sleeping in and enjoying a commute only as long as the distance to my home office, wearing warm, comfortable boots. I’m home and I’m safe now, warm and well-fed with the animules (spelling intentional, yes; a dad-ism, and those are warm too).

That execrable human being can’t get me.

But man did she make my BLOOD RUN COLD for a minute there.

Hoping your Monday was a wonderfully dull day. But, if not, please throw in your own “vent” in the comments!