[See my June 28 blog entry on my concerns about confidentiality. “Confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to are numbered per the criteria listed in that June 28 entry. Also, as noted in my July 3 blog entry, where appropriate, I can refer to “data on file” (or “DOF”; this term usually, in typical industry parlance, refers to information that is in the possession of the Big Pharma company; but I make adapted use of the term here), which will usually signify documents I have copies of; some may be drawn from the Internet, and others not. This entry was edited slightly on August 27, with the edit noted between asterisks. Also note (added 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing.]
I. Preface—2001 through 2004
The period from May 2001 through July 2003 could be considered a honeymoon time I had with CommonHealth, and it included the longest continuous stretch of time (about eight months) that I had there, from November 2002 through July 2003. (See my blog entries of July 5 and 16 on a prelude to, and the latter part of, this period.) If I were to get a taste of the best, and most substantial, of this company, this would have been the period in which to do it.
Except for stints at Quantum in later 2003 and Xchange in early 2004, my next significant length of time at CommonHealth was in the Adient division, for about two months in 2004 (April-June). This stint was through the placement agency “The Gary Laverne Group,” which I had signed on with in April; Adient was its first work of note—or of any kind, I think—for me.
Whatever else you want to say about the period I had with CommonHealth that ultimately comprised 2001-04 (and of course I worked, through placement agencies, for numerous other medical-media firms in this time, such as Torre Lazur), I wouldn’t have said it represented a downward trend to hell, either in terms of how one company operated or how the industry as a whole was getting to be. And as a practical matter, you always took what opportunities you could, and CommonHealth usually fit the bill well in meeting my needs in this regard. Also, in terms of quality and in general, as I’ve said in my entry “Sudden end of an idyll…” (July 16), CommonHealth seemed, or I hypothesized it was, the best place to get into, especially as to how professional it usually was. The main negative of any sort that I began to encounter, after about summer 2003, is that it seemed harder to get in to CommonHealth for any significant length of time (such as two or three months that could represent a real shot in the arm financially).
Why I changed agencies, and how my freedom to work at CommonHealth improved. By late winter 2004, I stopped working through Horizon Graphics. The reason was simply that “The Gary Laverne Group” came through with more regular work. (I was tipped off to the existence of GLG by Jen C., when I happened to stop by the Wayne CommonHealth office building in early 2004.) What did this mean in terms of CommonHealth? As it happened, by late winter 2004, my involvement with Horizon Graphics represented my near-inability to get work at CommonHealth, since Horizon went virtually dormant after three of us temps (and Horizon) were no longer used by MBS/Vox in summer 2003, and other work that I got through Horizon at CommonHealth was so sparse. But once I began to work through GLG, my freelance work via a placement agency began to become more regular again, and I would have sizable chunks of time at CommonHealth through GLG.
Any stigma attached to me? How did lengths of time working improve? Did anyone at CommonHealth think my association with GLG reflected positively on me? Hard to say, but it would have been silly for them to think so. Contrarily, if anyone there dismissed Horizon as “no good anymore,” then would this person have thought that for a former Horizon employee like me to come back to CommonHealth as a GLG worker meant I was a tainted wolf coming in through sheep’s clothing? That would have been silly, too. Of course, these placement agencies did nothing for you in terms of training; how you were as a worker was due to your own skills and long-term experience.
As it happened, GLG was a better placement firm for me than Horizon, for about three years (2004-06), and it did get me into CommonHealth again; but I would never have a long spell at CommonHealth (like that of 2002-03) through GLG, and my work at CommonHealth through GLG in some years could become surprisingly slight and scattered, such as tiny stints in 2005 and a several-week stint in 2006. I think this just reflected the luck of the draw, not any value judgments that were made about me at CommonHealth that led to my being kept on a short leash of small stints, or such.
How did the pay situation change? Was I entering a risky zone with this? Further, over the longer term, I think I made more money per year through GLG than through Horizon. GLG’s hourly fees (at least my pay rates) were generally higher than Horizon’s. How anyone at CommonHealth looked at this fact, or GLG’s fees in general, I’m not sure; but as what looks initially like a sui generis situation, the situation in late 2006 where GLG was being delayed payment for my work at MBS/Vox (see my first July 9 and August 1 entries) clearly is telling in terms of what CommonHealth was willing to do with a contractor firm like GLG, and I think reflected a more strategic way of doing things than any particular opinion about me as a worker.
Story about Adient deferred. I am not posting a blog entry (though it is drafted) on my experience at the CommonHealth division of Adient in 2004. (Adient was the successor name for what was called Ferguson 2000 and had been located in Little Falls, N.J., when I was interviewed there in 1995, and later was moved to the CommonHealth complex in Wayne Township, N.J., which is where I worked at it in 2004; see my June 22 blog entry.) This story is illustrative in one unusual way, which I defer comment on; but in another way my Adient stint was notable as the longest continuous stint I had at CommonHealth until 2010, except perhaps for my stint at Ferguson
II. My first time at Ferguson
In late 2004, I had my first stint at Ferguson
For some time, even while I was with placement agencies (I know I did this when with GLG), I sent tickler resumes to one or two people at CommonHealth. This may seem odd, but the reason was to facilitate my getting work through the placement agency when I felt it wasn’t doing enough for me, or, probably the more relevant impetus, I was in strong need of income and the work wasn’t there when needed. Though some may say it was GLG’s role to be sending “ticklers” or otherwise trying to get me work and therefore it was falling down on its job, I would say, That’s up to someone else to have that opinion; all I know is that, while I more or less assumed GLG was in a general way scouting for work for me, it still made sense for me to trigger getting it my own way, due to how catch-as-catch-can work in the media industry was, as I’d got it through GLG and as I’d found over my long experience anyway. And the bottom line is, this technique did work, to both GLG’s and my benefit, I believe with more than one client.
In any event, I know I sent a tickler resume or two to Karen Smaldone, the head editor at Ferguson Ferguson
Anyway, GLG got me in to work at Ferguson
Karen’s valuing me for having worked at AB Bookman was heartening and unusual: this evidently meant she saw me as able to do solid hands-on editing, and it was very rare in my overall experience that anyone in the medical-media realm actually reached out to me so consciously on the basis of my solidly traditional 1990s editorial work.
(By the way, at least one other person who had worked at AB Bookman later worked for CommonHealth: Libby L., an art/production person, who was at AB in 1992 when I came on board—I was actually hired to replace him at AB, which was all the odder for my positioning myself as an editor, not as an “art” worker—actually, a paste-up artist was what AB wanted. AB’s owner Jacob Chernofsky replaced Libby, who had been a full-timer, with me as a part-timer doing paste-up in Libby’s old position, and proofreading, which was my forte then. Libby turned out to be an art/production person at Xchange and/or Quantum for about a decade or so—and when I saw him when I was first at CommonHealth, in a situation in which we could cross paths in 2001 and/or 2002, he didn’t recognize me. This was just as well, because he was bitter when he was let go from AB, and maybe he wouldn’t have had the fondest memory of me, not that I was responsible for his losing his AB job.)
I was at Ferguson
General characteristics of Ferguson
I think it seemed a bit odd (when I got there) that it had taken me about three years, from the time I started working at divisions of CommonHealth through placement agencies, to finally get to Ferguson; but I think by 2004, I found that this wasn’t a great loss, or anything I could easily find an explanation for.
But Ferguson
Also interesting to note is that the main trafficking manager at Ferguson
It wasn’t as if the job description, when a trafficker was hired, had to meet this requirement; but her personality could well flourish into some version of this once she was under the press of work in this job. I should note that the more general feature of this job as CommonHealth seemed to cultivate it is that it was “corporately managerial”—in a way that agencies with banks of “project managers” simply, structurally didn’t cultivate; but in the ferment that was peculiarly CommonHealth’s, the usually-female trafficker in this role developed in some version of the personal ways I am describing here. [CC #3]
The more personal side here involves a rather slippery way to try to describe the phenomenon, and in the appropriate context I would more fully explain the nature and implications of what I’ve observed as the two general subtypes of CommonHealth trafficker: the “cheerleader” and the “horse.” The rather playfully facilitative, maybe somewhat flirtatious, and somewhat overworked “cheerleader” may have been such because she was new to the work and had some of the youthful edge she had because she was still mastering the job (or maybe was apt to have that kind of personality in the work over the relatively long term). Meanwhile, the “horse” was more acclimatized to the work, more rigorous and somewhat dully professional, and maybe valued by the company because she could keep a big volume of stuff moving. Kerrin R., as I recall, seemed like (without my having these concepts fully in place yet at the time) a cross between the “cheerleader” and the “horse.” [CC #3]
(Other traffickers that seemed to define the CommonHealth styles of the role were Katie van H. at Quantum [I saw her there sporadically between 2002 and 2004], who seemed the “cheerleader” type—and she had earlier worked at Torre Lazur; a Fawn D’A. at Carbon, I think it was, who was a quiet version of the “cheerleader”; a young woman at Adient whose name escapes me—I think she had an Irish name—who seemed a bit overly taxed but still capable, more of a “horse” than a “cheerleader”; and a woman who worked for Carbon and one or two other divisions, whose face I can picture but whose name escapes me, who was definitely more of a “horse” but who was very much, and laudably, oriented to details of the work items she handled. In short, unlike the “bank of college kids” you saw at other agencies, at CommonHealth you could peg the traffickers in terms of where they stood on the spectrum of being a “cheerleader” or a “horse.”) [CC #3]
There were characters among the staffers, of course. There was the Paranoid Guy, a sort in his late twenties or so (with relatively low responsibilities) who came around and started giving a spiel on his latest conspiracy theory to the art-related young woman (a freelancer, I believe) who worked near me when I was editing. He was tolerated by coworkers at large, one would presume, because he apparently did his work well enough and, as a general personality, was “cool.” (A Paranoid Guy who was dour, inscrutable, and forever uninvitingly aloof would be shown the door.) [CC #3]
There was also the sort of peasant that, regardless of the specific ignorant remarks he or she might make, every medically related establishment in this country of a certain size seemingly can’t do without: this one was a woman who apparently was a back-office paper-shuffling type who I remember opining—who knows apropos of what—that bipolar disorder was “split personality.” Obviously (and thankfully) she had no direct effect on copy written for promotional materials. [CC #3]
Aside from Paranoid Guy and the likes of her, there was nothing that showed that Ferguson was anything less than the respectable enough place that, as chance would have it for me, it had seemed hard to get into—for me, for roughly nine years, both before and after I worked for a placement agency that was the sine qua non for me to work there. I believe that, probably as a matter of sheer luck, other freelance editors I was apt to encounter in my travels among different firms rarely, or never, got into Ferguson either.
Karen’s tight ship
Karen Smaldone, the editorial director at Ferguson
And in doing this, she never came up with any snide, insinuating, or pettifogging comments about whether errors had crept through when the things were in your hands. She must have known that it took several editors to get an item up to snuff—the type of sensible lesson that not only could be eminent common sense but you learned as a practical matter at many, more traditional media firms. She believed in me enough that I was back to Ferguson a few times to work under her—in 2005, I believe, and maybe in 2006; and definitely in later summer 2007, which was the last time I worked for her. [CC #3]
I think it was some other freelance editor who once worked with her who referred to her as an “earth mother” type; I didn’t know if this was meant as a compliment, backhanded or otherwise. I didn’t get this impression from her. (She didn’t try to sing Carole King songs.)
I still have a little gift of a pen (with a ribbon with the not-quite-company-echoing “Commonwealth”) she gave me one Christmas, probably of 2004.
III. Sea changes in 2007, when the confederation moves to one new building
By early 2007, CommonHealth had moved to, and been consolidated in, its new location in Parsippany. In at least the physical sense, Ferguson Lanidex Plaza
A new editor under Karen
Another development: When I finally worked at Ferguson again, starting *on August 1,* 2007, whatever array of staff or long-term-freelance editors I had seen, or would see, Karen have—either at the Lanidex Plaza location or at the new 2007 location—she now had a new permanent assistant. He was a man who in 2007 seemed significantly enough younger than I, who nevertheless acted as if he was firmly in the pocket of this place, as if he had been there for years, and mildly acted as if he was thick as thieves with Karen. I had never seen him before. As far as I know, he had never put in “apprentice” freelance-editor time with CommonHealth. [CC #3] (A press release I later discovered [DOF] said he had started in 2006, but I had never seen him in 2006 at the location in the Lanidex Plaza area where several CommonHealth divisions were housed temporarily. This doesn’t mean he wasn’t in some other location where Ferguson
This pattern of new employees, who as it happened often supervised me, being placed as permanent staffers at CommonHealth who had not worked there in a more temporary or testing-out capacity—at least in the editorial realm—was becoming more common in 2007, I think. (In fact, in retrospect, and with my doing research in more recent years, it would seem as if the desideratum in hiring such new staffers—sometimes almost comically so—was in their being amenable to a very corporate way of operating; and certainly, the backgrounds of some would indicate no, or almost no, familiarity with the conventions of editing such as I’d learned in the 1990s.) [CC #3; looking toward CC #4] This pattern parallels the overall more corporate quality that was obtaining in CommonHealth at its new location.
This new editor was the one to whom I refer (or will refer) elsewhere as “Tweedle Dee.”
