Another example of CommonHealth’s being high-handed with a placement agency, showing how it can blow hot and cold, and can hew to high-manager prerogatives, not craft-level carefulness…and, sometimes when hiring a worker on the basis of physical appearance (as for videotaping or videoconferencing “qualifications”), the move can backfire
[Future blog entries on the history of this firm won't be nearly as detailed or trenchant as this, but this one serves as an example of the way evidence, or at least suggestive "signposts," can be adduced to establish some of the nature of the ambiguous behavior within this firm. Also note (added 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing.]
[An editorial clarification, 7/17/12, is inserted within brackets about three-fifths of the way through this entry, just as the quoted e-mails are starting. Further edits done below 12/18/12. New edits 4/6/17.]
[Future blog entries on the history of this firm won't be nearly as detailed or trenchant as this, but this one serves as an example of the way evidence, or at least suggestive "signposts," can be adduced to establish some of the nature of the ambiguous behavior within this firm. Also note (added 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing.]
[An editorial clarification, 7/17/12, is inserted within brackets about three-fifths of the way through this entry, just as the quoted e-mails are starting. Further edits done below 12/18/12. New edits 4/6/17.]
[DISCLAIMER: The presence of quotes from others in e-mails, shown later in this entry, does not imply that these people (pseudonyms are used for two, and incomplete names, common enough not to be an easy locator for the person, are used for two others) approved of this usage or otherwise collaborated with me in the making of this entry. Further, these e-mails are not to be taken, clearly, as (1) a complete account (troublingly to me, they are not) or (2) in a sense of being solid testimony—that is, as something stronger than what might be called “hearsay” in a court proceeding. However, I believe they are useful as what would be called “relevant” material, in the court sense of being able to lead to what was not “hearsay” but would be “admissible in court,” and in the more journalistic sense of being very suggestive in support of a matter (in 2003) that the overall blog entry depicts. Further, saying this is not to imply that they definitely portend a future court matter, either directly related to what they discuss, or anything else business-related to which I am relating them in this blog. However, they are supportive of the larger picture of the set of business issues I am outlining piecemeal in this blog. Lastly, the satirical comments of the temp pseudonymed "Sqodox" may seem ungenerous regarding women, but I think their tone can be understood and sympathized with this way: at the time, Sqodox was about 50, my age now, and he was apt to be more acerbic regarding frivolous treatment by women than I would have been at the time; I am 50 now, so my recent tone does not imply he and I were the same then or are the same now in attitude, except that nearly everyone gets more conservative/selective-in-tolerance in older middle age, and becomes "more of a coarsened Sinatra of the 1960s ("That's Life," "This Town") than the nimble-crooner Sinatra of the 1940s or the artistic/exquisite Sinatra of the 1950s ("In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning")." Sqodox was a good e-mailing friend for about a decade, sharing a lot of personal things--in general, I'd say he has good horse sense that makes him valuable as a reference point for gauging a corner of CommonHealth. He had majored in biology or similar, and done journalistic work many years ago before doing editorial work in more recent years. Zdovox I know less well, but Sqodox knew him better, but Zdovox has a wide range of editorially related experience.]
Subsections below:
Three different editors apparently were sufficient to provide quality—for months
Key parts of the story I get from memory, preluding e-mails giving color
Some notes meant to banish an impression of pettiness: (1) QC’er bitterness as partly based on long, dense work; and (2) the incendiary issue of CommonHealth’s occasional hiring value of female attractiveness
E-mail exchanges added to knowledge among us temps, and flesh out an eye-opening story
One very illustrative situation at CommonHealth in summer 2003 is important to look at, to see patterns that will be significant in other, more consequential situations. Though this occurred less than 10 years ago, it doesn’t pertain to a specific account—it actually touched on a few accounts, in a sense, and it more reflects on some typical (past) functioning of MBS/Vox as an overall division [CC #3, 4].
More to my longer-range point, this story shows a few things about CommonHealth’s structure. The abrupt, seemingly vision-lacking handling of us editors shows, in the short view, how seemingly ham-handed the company could be with editors—including ones, who were different in work style, who’d been giving them good service for several months.
But further than this, it shows that CommonHealth’s administration felt that there was wisdom in its building an increasingly large company, with many divisions and layers of management—rather than the smaller, “boutique” style in which ad agencies of various types seem to have classically operated. In consequence, one might ask, “What virtues does increased size bring? Is there a ‘scalability’ conferred? What do a larger number of bodies on a permanent staff bring?”
It turns out, I believe—and later examples will drive home this point in almost unequivocal terms—that the “scalability” is in the company’s ability to move large amounts of money around—in pulling in large accounts, and (in essence) spreading money from healthy accounts and divisions to divisions that are doing less well, seasonally—all for the benefit of the longer-term (and often managerial) workers, while such “scalability” is not done to benefit the craft applied to (and necessary to) what it produces, such as is done by freelance editors and (perhaps) freelance production workers, much or at all.
All of this also closely relates to aspects of a top-heavy managerial structure that could be called the “inverted pyramid,” particularly in how it puts pressure on a limited number of craft workers, and in how the issue of managerial control becomes a priority, if not a fetish. But I can’t go into all that in much detail here.
Three different editors apparently were sufficient to provide quality—for months
By July 2003, Sqodox, Zdovox, and I were the longest-running set of editors doing “QC’ing”—“quality control” of transcripts of taped interviews, or simply checking them for accuracy and fullness against the videotapes. This was at once a taxing, tedious, fun, and creative process, and in any event it was a “labor-intensive” thing: however many people were doing it at one time, each person had an adequate amount of work, and the value given for time spent I think was worth it.
We, of course, were paid as placement-agency “freelancers,” so this meant that on top of our $27 an hour we got in gross pay, there was another $18-23 on top going to the agency, for a total of $45 an hour or so for each editor. This might seem to add up to a lot of money, but MBS/Vox, at very least, found it agreeable enough to pay us this for eight months. At least, I was there eight months, from November 2002 through July 2003; Sqodox I think started shortly before I did, and Zdovox came on a bit later. By July, we were about as much veterans of that type of work as anybody who had been in that role in those eight months (and there were several others, including other editors about as good, or at least as good—this included the editor I pseudonym “Belinda” in my July 9 blog entry on the breakdown of “The Gary Laverne Group”).
The funny thing was, we each had different ways of working in the QC’ing process, with our being apt to pick up on, or be accurate in representing, different things, as I found when I worked on a transcript one other editor had started, or such. But obviously the work of all of us together was good enough, individual differences aside, that we were all kept there for several months (which would turn out, looking over about nine years, to be the longest single, continuous stint I worked at CommonHealth).
This ended rather abruptly in July 2003.
Key parts of the story I get from memory, preluding e-mails giving color
I have several e-mails, mainly by us editors to each other, about how the collective stint wrapped up. There are a few e-mails from Jen C., our supervisor, about things tied to this. The large story of the background, oddly, I have limited direct e-mails on, and in any event, important segments of the story I have to recount from memory, and some of it I never originally picked up firsthand, I heard about it secondhand, mostly or entirely from Sqodox.
The background story, most of which comes from memory, is that MBS/Vox, starting in winter 2003, wanted to hire a few new permanent staffers. This was perhaps the same agenda they had about a year earlier, when I first worked there, and when suddenly Helene of Horizon Graphics told me in February 2002 that none of us temps were right to be staffers, so MBS/Vox would keep looking, and meanwhile we temps might be brought back as temps. In 2003, there was enough of a “call” on the MBS/Vox management’s part for people to apply as staffers that some of us temps were allowed to apply—and two of us, myself and Sqodox, had been there a year before—as well as others being considered from outside (all of whom, I believe, had not worked there as temps at all). (I decidedly did not apply for a staff position.)
There was, I think, a several-month period, or at least a good many weeks, of the process of MBS/Vox’s selecting who would be hired. Sqodox applied, and had high hopes for getting hired. Another temp among us QCers, “Belinda,” whom I mentioned above, also applied; she was a crack medical editor in terms of being very well versed in a range of medical areas (Sqodox referred to her, by memory, in a 2006 e-mail as “that fun chick that we used to do QC with [who was] still there? You know, that chick who was a walking encyclopedia of medical terminology”).
I think it’s fair to say, as an outsider looking somewhat in, that the hiring process was so cumbersome because, in general, MBS/Vox was still trying to find out “what it was or wanted to be.” It had started in about 2000—the baby of one of the main managers there, who was still there in 2003 (but whom I had very little, if any, interaction with)—with a definite vision of what generally it aimed for. This was reflected in its odd name; “MBS” stood for “mind[,] body[, and] spirit,” and “Vox” stood for “voice," that of the interviewees, the main source of data in the studies that the firm produced. The real problem for management, in 2003, wasn’t the division’s global/idealistic parameters but what kind of technical staff it would have.
Finally, those that were to be hired were informed of this (in about June 2003): Belinda was the only one among the temps who was hired. (She would work for MBS/Vox for about two, or at least one and a half, years, but in a fairly telling development—telling about the division, I believe, not so much about her—she, the “walking encyclopedia of medical terminology,” was let go. She would be back to doing freelance editing for CommonHealth by fall 2005.)
Another worker who was hired as a staffer was a young woman who had not done any freelance QC/editing for MBS/Vox, I believe (or if she did at that time, it was for a very short time). I forget her name--I'll give her the pseudonym "Marta." She was in her late twenties, maybe, and she was an employee (in temp form) of Horizon Graphics. (Whether anyone else was hired by MBS/Vox when Bonnie and this woman were hired, I don’t remember, though in that general period, a young woman from New York
Sqodox would later remark that Marta was hired partly for her looks, and indeed several of the MBS/Vox staffers were attractive—Jen C. was one—and it seemed not improbable they were hired so that, if they were used to appear in some capacity on the interview videotapes that the division commonly used, which a client could see (and which we QCers used as backup to proofread transcripts), they would be suitable as would anyone who looked attractive in a “professional-grade videotape.”
If there was any development tied to this that CommonHealth or MBS/Vox would not want me to reveal, it may be the following—and I feel it is worth telling partly because it was the major turning point, for me, in CommonHealth’s seeming like such a healthy respite as it generally did from May 2001 through July 2003, before becoming—and for my near-term purposes, I say this is not with regard to any particular account [CC #3, 4]—the more ambiguous affair it was in my experience from about early 2004 on. (If you ask, If it was so ambiguous, why did you work there through another several years? The answer is fairly simple, and largely about a practical matter: as a freelancer from 1997 through 2007, I took what I could get from multiple employers within a given year; with medical media in particular, it could be tough to get work when you needed it, but then a godsend when even a two-month stint could mean a big shot of income, judged in hourly pay. And despite CommonHealth’s “grey areas” that I regarded as such from at least 2004 on, the firm was, for my main practical purposes and broadly, usually not so cheesy as other medical-media firms could be. For a long time I considered it the best medical-media firm to get into, whether via a placement agency or, later, working directly. Certainly the breakdown of “The Gary Laverne Group” in 2007, which CommonHealth was partly responsible for, gave cause for pause, but still I overlooked the shit, even when my “tenures” there could sometimes end so abruptly and, sometimes, under something of a cloud or for vague reasons. As I so often have done through many years of working in the media, you don’t ignore the negatives, but you always look toward the positives in lining up future work. Even when, from about 2003 on, I had a bit of sarcasm about or skeptical view of CommonHealth, I looked at it as a situation of “the glass being half-full.” But after what happened in summer 2010, I said with all validity, “What a minute: who’s kidding whom? Who is the suspect one here?” And as a matter of restoring sanity, you do a thorough, fair inventory of recent and past business practices, and you come up with a total picture that is not just “the glass half-empty,” but closer to “the glass almost completely empty and having a bit of poisonous residue in it.”)
The woman, Marta, who was hired as I just described, had been employed as a temp by Horizon Graphics. Generally, the way Horizon—and as I would find later, The Gary Laverne Group—operated, if someone who worked for them as a temp was hired as a permanent staffer by a client company, then the client company would have to pay a large lump sum for the “privilege.” I think this is common across the placement-agency industry. I remember having an e-mail debate with Sqodox (which will be alluded to later, in a more concrete context) about whether a firm like Horizon really held as their main goal and desideratum to get temps (1) hired in order for the temp firm to get the lump-sum payment, or (2) have smaller, biweekly amounts come in off the backs of temps, sometimes for months at a time. I felt that either option was desirable for a placement agency, but that in fact, I saw it as more lucrative for the agency to have some workers be temps indefinitely, because that could add up to more money for the agency overall than the lump sum if the temp was suddenly hired after a few weeks of temping.
Anyway, Marta worked for MBS/Vox for about a month; then she was in a bad car accident, and had to resign.
Management of MBS/Vox, understandably, was not pleased. They were down a new staffer after having taken months to select the new hires. I don’t remember if a big effort was made to hire a replacement right away; I don’t think one was. (Mind you, this woman was not meant to be in a position like that of the linguistic-analysis woman from New York
Anyway, Horizon stuck to its demand that MBS/Vox pay the lump sum for Marta (I think that, in general, such a lump sum was one-quarter of the yearly salary to be paid the new employee—which in this case could have been, who knows, $15,000? $10,000?). MBS/Vox didn’t want to pay this. There was wrangling. We’ll see some bit of concrete evidence bearing on this.
Amid this situation, one net result was that MBS/Vox dropped three of us temps at once, at the end of July 2003. And they would no longer use Horizon for freelance staffing.
Some notes meant to banish an impression of pettiness: (1) QC’er bitterness as partly based on long, dense work; and (2) the incendiary issue of CommonHealth’s occasional hiring value of female attractiveness
Work-equity issue. One thing you might conclude in reading the e-mails below is that these guys seem almost like mere college students, with casual ways of regarding some of the coworkers, and snarky attitudes. I think one thing that’s hard to appreciate is the large amount of work we did—QC’ing, in general, at MBS/Vox was a pretty dense affair. It seemed like a fairly large amount in the two months I was there December 2001-February 2002; there was even more room for feeling it was a lot from November 2002 through July 2003; and even in my stint from September through December 2006, the density of the work was like an “old friend,” with mixed qualities, coming back—and even then, I was hustled along by my different immediate supervisors to push work through. Each account—for a specific product and medical indication—could have a raft of different kinds of interviews. We three temps—myself, Sqodox, and Zdovox—could have different ways of working, when we had developed comfortable grooves, and could still be trucking through a lot, for each of us. A woman beyond middle age, who had been a staffer at Xchange in 2002 when I met her, later stopped being a staffer at CommonHealth and was used as a temp at MBS/Vox for a time in early 2003; I have been in touch with her several times over the years since. She referred (in about 2010) to the “weird vibe” or such that she felt at MBS/Vox; I think what she was referring to was how, among us QC’ers, as enthusiastic as we could be about the work, it was a bit of a sweatshop way we were working: the work technically was very detail-oriented, could be tedious, and it flowed and flowed….
So no wonder that, if a few of us were suddenly dropped like hot potatoes at once, we might have spoken with unusual asperity: it was a lot of solid work we’d been doing, and suddenly this seemed to mean nothing. The e-mails we’ll see later will speak to this.
The looks issue. The issue of whether some workers of CommonHealth were hired in good part on their looks is perhaps the one criticism I make that would most irk some (female) workers there. It is a very touchy issue, and not to be dealt with carelessly, but I don’t mean to take it head-on and fully here. But it is an important part of the larger picture of the “darker side” of the company, which I am trying to draw. As a matter of critical gossip, which certainly was done by some of us workers particularly in the MBS/Vox context in 2002-03 or so, this issue certainly came up, regarding a few women who were already employed there, as well as regarding the woman who is central to the Horizon Graphics–dropping story this blog entry is about. It was originally a matter more focused on by one or more others than by myself.
In a way, the issue had an obvious basis: because MBS/Vox (I try not to delve too much into its usual, most good-faith style of business throughout this blog, though I have in reserve very pointed, critical things to say about the division in general) used videotapes of interviews as means to its products (largely, analysis of multiple interviews toward supporting a certain product of a client) that it turned out for clients, and also—in clips—as small parts of the final product. This in itself is not meant to be criticized. Also, understandably, some workers at MBS/Vox who were selected to be in some of these videos as some kind of functionary tended to be among the more attractive. Further, I believe later in the history of MBS/Vox, if not earlier, videoconferencing with the client was one work tool. All this is reasonable enough, and I don’t think anyone should have much issue with my disclosing this, to the extent it was simply a matter of ad hoc selection of a certain female for a certain task at a certain time. That is, this particular area is not one where it could be said, in the work environment in which we editorial workers were operating independent of any exposure to clients, that, apart from manager thought about ad hoc selection for being in a videotape, females’ qualities as attractive, or as “big personalities” toward the end of facilitating production, or otherwise, were a usual desideratum of the company (e.g., in hiring and in grooming workers).
The issue of judging a prospective worker on the basis of looks becomes more of a problem, I believe, when—as in MBS/Vox’s long process of acquiring new workers in the first several months of 2003—female attractiveness was a desideratum at the outset, and in what proportion this was in comparison to other qualities, such as verbal skills and judgment relevant to writing, analysis tailored to MBS/Vox’s products, etc.
Given that a few of the workers already at MBS/Vox were photogenic, the fact that this one woman was hired in the way that she was was ready fodder for such criticisms of Sqodox’s, which are vivid later in this blog entry. Let’s let the e-mails help this set of incidents speak for themselves. But I would stress that this set of incidents isn’t merely trivial or novel; this set of stuff might seem an interesting, somewhat notorious, but isolated business matter if it wasn’t seen in a context of a broader set of strange values and way of handling workers across several divisions of CommonHealth, including: (1) the frequent presence of other attractive women (without their having previously engaged in a “trial” of temp craft-level work) at CommonHealth at large, (2) the quick dropping of numerous twenty-something workers (for a variety of discernible or unclear reasons) as I’ve seen there, and (3) such high-handed treatment of a placement agency as I describe regarding “The Gary Laverne Group” (see the July 9 entry): these all support the idea that CommonHealth can be remarkably (1) shortsighted, (2) reckless, (3) inconsistent regarding criteria, and in some instances (4) petty in how it hires and employs people, in ways that seem to form larger patterns over time.
So though Sqodox’s grumping about Marta being hired for her looks, and his more general criticisms along these lines, may seem like easy satirizing of the place as an article of bitter disappointment, the larger patterns of the firm as I am describing, with some to come—and the fact that he put a lot of time doing the intense work a number of us QC’ing temps did—suggest that he had more of a point than the tone and rhetoric of his criticisms suggest.
I would further suggest that it may be a criticism as valid as it is easy to make that a woman, with limited craft-level experience of the type we temp editors had, has been hired with even an outsider’s strong suspicion of her looks being a desideratum; but an outsider/layperson can get to a more fundamental level: “Why are female looks being considered at all in support of a kind of business that designs marketing means for medical interventions?”
E-mail exchanges added to knowledge among us temps, and flesh out an eye-opening story
Editorial note: As all these e-mails are from 2003, per my own guidelines for revealing this information, am I being inconsistent with these guidelines in revealing this? If this stuff had happened a year earlier, in mid-2002 let’s say, I would note that the outside-10-year criterion I seek in terms of releasing “confidential information” [CC #1] is met. Well, I figure that here, I think because the story to be reflected below does not concern one client, and does indeed concern fairly elementary issues of fairness in hiring skilled editors, I am justified in releasing this. (Note: None of the e-mails quoted from below, which I have printouts of, have confidentiality disclaimers on them.)
It’s interesting how MBS/Vox’s dropping of Horizon Graphics was squared with by us temps. In summer 2003, I didn’t know the full story yet, i.e., how our end was linked to Marta's leaving. I might have suspect something along these lines, but…
In late July, I e-mailed some message to Sqodox; I don’t have the original, but it probably included some routine chatting about our in-limbo work situation.
In response, he e-mailed, “I got an email from Jen a second after I sent you the last email. Here is a copy of it. [Editorial clarification, 7/17/12: This entry was not meant to give the impression, nor do I believe, that Jen C. was involved in any significant way in the financially-based decision of MBS/Vox's to discontinue using Horizon Graphics. Her role, from all I am aware of, was to relay information and practical direction to us temps, and this would be fairly consistent with how such lower-level supervisory roles were handled anyway--whether at CommonHealth or at other such firms. The standard corporate pattern of "diffusion of responsibility" would have meant the hard money-based decisions were made higher up, and it was the task of the immediate contact/supervisor, such as Jen, to interpret for us craftspeople what was decided and what this meant for our work.]
“[Sqodox],
“All [specific medical indication] transcripts have been QC’d and transcribed. [The order of these terms was her trivial mistake; usually the order of these tasks was the reverse of what she said—transcription first, then QC’ing.] We thought we would need you until August 8, but we will not. I told Horizon the work ended sooner than we thought.
“You can mail in your timesheet for Monday [regarding work he’d done the day before, I presume] and I’ll sign it and mail it back.”
Sqodox commented, following this and to me,
“My reply to her was that I would be in tomorrow to pick up some personal items and give her my timesheet. [I think he was assuming we were done working there for the foreseeable longish term.]
More ascerbically, he added, “I am curious, though, about when she thinks the next transcribing work will begin and whether or not she will have any of us come in and do the work—OR [as I don’t think he meant she would say] if they’ve decided that they’d rather have people do it for free or have young chicks come in and do it with no medical background!” He signed off with me with a friendly sentence.
Either that day (earlier) or the next day (July 30), I started applying for unemployment benefits, something I’ve never been comfortable with doing whenever I had the occasion/need to do it, and in the past, usually running into technical difficulties posed by the unemployment office in Sussex County (apt to happen in the 1990s, not so much or at all in the 2000s, a decade in which it became possible to file online). I apparently e-mailed him something about my unemployment application, and he responded by e-mail (July 30, 11:46 p.m.) in a sort of approving, congratulatory way, then commented on what he found with Jen at MBS/Vox:
“[Zdovox] called me from work [at MBS/Vox] at 2…said that he had 3 hours to go [I think he was the last of us to do any remaining work there] and probably wouldn’t finish what he was doing. Chances are he was doing some sports writing [which allegedly Zdovox did in off-time at MBS/Vox]…LOL… The good news is that his wife[…]got a new job…he was kind of vague about it, but I think she is sort of like an account manager at a med advertising agency. The pay is good and he’s very relieved about that. Just in Cobra insurance alone [as many may know, this is health insurance continued with a previous employer’s group plan, per a provision federal law—maybe ERISA, I don’t remember—but where you, the employee, pay the premiums], they save over 10K a year when they have regular medical benefits from a job. [wife’s name]’s insurance will kick in right away. Meanwhile, he keeps landing these assignments, I think through his wife, where he makes over 1K for a day’s work editing medical documents from at home!!!! Man, I would love to get some of those jobs to do!!! [I don’t think it hurts revealing this communication, since this is all not so peculiar (as to invite legal investigation or other interest) or “proprietary.” Incidentally, I have had freelance medical stuff I was able to do at home in the 2000s, but rarely.]
“I went in this morning,” he got down to brass tacks about MBS/Vox, “to pick up my stuff and give Jen my time sheet. I got there at 9 a.m. When I gave Jen my timesheet, she was her usual cool self [I think he meant frosty/aloof, but I myself didn’t get this sort of impression from her]…. I had to ask all the questions and her answers were vague. I probed about when we would be coming back… I said, ‘Will you need us in late August or September?’ Her response was that she was uncertain. She did tell me that they have nothing else new except the cancer drug…. [In general, this sort of news about whether/when there were projects coming up was not atypical or reason for suspicion, but in this particular connection, in retrospect, I have to wonder whether there really was such a dearth of projects on the horizon.]
“I decided not to make the rounds saying goodbye to [one manager], [another manager], et al… since I don’t think they care if [I] live or die…. Maybe sometime soon they’ll realize how good an editor I am/was….”
He talked about some other personal stuff not related to recent work; that was it for MBS/Vox.
Then Sqodox shared an e-mail exchange he’d had with the third of us temps, Zdovox, which he sent to me July 31, at 12:03 a.m., meaning about 20 minutes after the e-mail I just recounted; I probably saw both of these sometime later on July 31.
“Greg,
“Here is a copy of an email I read from [Zdovox] right after I read and responded to yours [I don’t know which of mine he means; generally, and most likely here, we weren’t e-mailing back and forth “in real time”]….
“[Zdovox’s words, bolded in Sqodox’s e-mail] So I asked Jen, ‘What are the chances we’ll be called back, even in say, 1-3 months?’
“She said, ‘Well, it’s hard to say. Horizon [Graphics]…I can’t really say.’
“What the hell does that mean? Could they be looking at another temp agency? I hate to tell her this, we’re all regis[t]ered with all the different agencies [I myself wasn’t, though]; she’ll just see the same faces. Everybody knows that.
“Oh well. Life goes on. Hello, Monster.com!”
[Actually, in practical terms, as I found easily enough over the years, if other temp agencies would have suggested some of us “same faces” as potential temp workers to MBS/Vox staffers, they—as would other medical-media agency managers, not just at CommonHealth—could have easily refused us, not out of anything particularly personal but in order to make a clean break with the agency they were shaking off, which in this summer 2003 example is Horizon Graphics. Such a fact of trying for a clean break will become evident further below. And sometimes I think such managers—whether at MBS/Vox or elsewhere—may conflate a placement agency they are trying to “banish” from their use with the temp workers it offers in such a way that if there was something more practical in us that they would rather have not had to deal with again—quirks or professional habits of certain disagreeable sorts, or even actual technical work styles—they would decline having us as part of a “package” of banishing an agency, done under the possible rationalizing cover of avoiding a sort of “conflict of interest” (or, somewhat more sincerely, dealing with a temp’s spoiled morale) in having the same temps back in the wake of banishing the previous agency. This sort of rationalization could become evident enough in being implied in practical terms, if not spoken aloud by anyone. As a general proposition, this whole set of practices and consequences may seem like a bitter batch of ideas; an actual example starts to become evident below.]
By the way, I almost never had dealings with Monster.com myself, as a matter of long practice and preference.
Sqodox added,
“This was my response to [Zdovox]’s email:
“[Zdovox],
“WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Now that’s a revelation. Maybe, with any luck, they will go to Manpower and hire a bunch of dumb young chicks to do the editing!!! [Actually, MBS/Vox did hire some new agency, I don’t think The Gary Laverne Group (pseudonymous) at first; their use of a new agency was, I believe, within the period July 2003 to December 2003 or so, certainly by late winter/early spring 2004.] Better yet, they might be able to hire college interns to do the work for free! The interview would involve them [the interns] walking down a runway in the latest fashions. The personality phase will involve getting extra points for mousiness!!! [Later, October 2003 e-mails will help justify my inclusion of this bitterness here.]
“This is why I have decided to leave this whole editing field behind. If freelance at-home work comes my way [which I knew he had done within the previous few months], then of course I would love that, but this field of work is just a bunch of bull.
“Sorry if I sound so bitter, but you know that I never hold back.
“The bottom line is that THEIR jobs [i.e., of Jen C. and other MBS/Vox managers] are also in jeopardy. Yes, Jen should have no problem finding another job with her expertise, but it would do me good to hear that the ball dropped on them too. I predicted this would happen from the first day I worked at [MBS/]Vox. If the economy remains flat, the pharmaceutical companies are not going to be spending half a million dollars to find out why people like those pocket packs of [L]isterine! [Actually, with the Listerine PocketPaks work (see my July 5 entry, “Start of a Biopsy (this won’t hurt a bit)”), this specific question wasn’t asked, due to the key parameters of the type of investigation that was done, whose transcripts we QC’d. But the satirical intent of his remark isn’t too hard to understand.] Or what it is that they feel: pain, numbness, aggravation, stiffness, etc…[typical symptom criteria used in research that we QC’d that backed a range of product accounts, and which weren’t so outlandish in the context of our work]. When you come right down to it, the work we do at Vox is really a bunch of bull….
“Aren’t you glad you sent me that email? Right now, you’re either getting depressed or having a good laugh. I hope it’s the latter.” He signed off to Zdovox with friendly remarks.
I know August and September 2003 were pretty busy for me in unusual ways: there was a stretch of a couple weeks’ work, through Horizon, at the CommonHealth division of Quantum. And I had my hands full, especially in September, with my support-group business with “Betty,” regarding whom and other people I wrote the memoir A College Try that Courted Trouble—the end of September was when she had her restraining-order hearing against her husband, for which I was a witness, that was a colorful climax to my involvement with her (and to the memoir).
It was September 28, the day before the hearing, in the morning that I sent a probing e-mail to Jen, “Any news on when we temps’ll be back?” This was the only content, between salutation and signoff. This was attached to a September 15 e-mail I’d previously sent to Jen in which I did some small talk she never responded to, “Did you see ‘Cabin Fever’? I could possibly see it. I saw ‘Matchstick Men’ this past weekend. Pretty good. I saw [an MBS manager] and [another MBS manager] at different times at Quantum/Xchange within the past few weeks when I was there.”
Jen’s response, on September 29 in the early afternoon:
“Greg,
“We’ve had a change in our relationship with Horizon so you’ll need to contact them directly about future work with us.
“Thanks,
“Jen.”
This was the first time MBS’s wholesale change of relations with Horizon was fully noted to me, by anyone. I surprises me that I skimmed along through that, as I recall, sadness-tinged summer from early August through mid-September apparently harboring some hope I’d be back at MBS/Vox.
I probably shared this news with Sqodox—not sure if I forwarded Jen’s e-mail or otherwise reflected its content.
Sqodox e-mailed me on October 3, a few days after September 29:
“I talked with Susan [surname; manager at Horizon] on Wednesday. She told me about the parent company [of MBS/Vox—and he meant, as the “parent,” CommonHealth] losing a contract and about someone quitting MBS [I assume this means Marta]. I told her that was all old news…losing the [general medical indication] med contract [this I didn’t know about; I don’t even know what division of CommonHealth had lost such a contract, or whether he meant MBS/Vox’s losing this] and that young blonde model [Marta] leaving VOX [sic]. She then told me that (and I think this turns out to be MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR) a problem is that there are negotiations going on regarding how much Horizon is going to pay Vox [I think he was momentarily mistaken; the likely original arrangement is that Vox was supposed to pay Horizon], because the blonde model [Marta] left rather quickly after being hired. That MIGHT be what’s holding Vox up from hiring us back as temps, or for that matter hiring any of us on a permanent basis [I think it was a foregone conclusion that this latter possibility was not at all likely, and it was fine by me].”
He talked about personal items after.
We had some exchange about the Horizon-MBS wrangling. It seems to me as I deal with this stuff that possibly Sqodox’s remark “how much Horizon is going to pay Vox” reflected some portion of all these negotiations, that MBS/Vox demanded that Horizon pay back some of the lump-sum money that contractually MBS was supposed to pay for the privilege of hiring the young woman who quickly quit. I think it was in the midst of this e-mail discussion that I held to my view that Horizon wasn’t simply all about making lump-sum amounts for temps being hired full-time, but that they could make just as much from having temps strung along for many months….
Sqodox said in an October 7 e-mail,
“What I’m getting at is that Vox might be thinking: ‘Why should we pay Horizon 10K [I don’t know if the lump sum was this high] for a chick who ended up only working with us for a month?’
“I know that [Marta] didn’t get anything extra for being hired, but Horizon did. Vox might feel that it is not their fault that the employee left so soon after being hired; rather, it was Horizon’s fault for not screening their candidates [thoroughly] so that something like this wouldn’t happen [his summary of MBS’s beef is, to me, reasonable from MBS’s perspective; but on the other hand, I would point out that Horizon could easily have not been able to guarantee that such a new hire wouldn’t quit as Marta did, and as I recall, the precipitating reason was that she had a car accident]. I think it’s just tough luck for Vox and they should move on and forget about it. [This is a reasonable enough point, but I don’t know if there was more to the situation—which Sqodox innocently didn’t know about—that led to the apparent intransigence of the negotiations between MBS and Horizon.]
“In any event, we remain without anything ‘on the Horizon’ with Vox…”
Looking back, I would say it was quite a foregone conclusion by this point that MBS wouldn’t have us back through Horizon again, however I interpreted the situation at the time. In fact, after I did some brief work at another division of CommonHealth sometime in the late winter of 2004, I don’t think CommonHealth used Horizon Graphics again, because Horizon went dormant by about April 2004. (One of the owners retreated, with I would presume some amount of office property, to his home in Montclair , after the office had been located in Boonton , N.J. , for many years; the company number rang at the Montclair
In view of the developments I ran into with CommonHealth later, some no later than April-June 2004, this 2003 MBS/Vox stuff seems like a fairly innocent time. But one thing that seems relevant to ask, and is certainly inspired by much else I have observed of CommonHealth’s use of placement agencies (as well as that by other medical-media firms), why use these placement agencies at all, if you get into a sticky situation of trying to reverse paying a lump sum for a permanent hire who suddenly quits?
But of course, I am in the process of answering this question in unambiguous terms. (See my July 9 entry, “What is editing? Part 2 of 2: Is medical editing a blind alley? [BETA].”)
