[Minor edits done 12/14/12. Also note (added by 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing.]
[For bearings, (1) see general conclusions at the end of this entry, which are from my September 7 blog entry “Sugar-coating the horse pill.” (2) For information that had been on my June 28 blog entry on my concerns about confidentiality, see near the end of this entry. Generally, below, “confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to are numbered per the criteria listed in the June 28 entry, and are also listed below. Also, (3) 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.]
[For bearings, (1) see general conclusions at the end of this entry, which are from my September 7 blog entry “Sugar-coating the horse pill.” (2) For information that had been on my June 28 blog entry on my concerns about confidentiality, see near the end of this entry. Generally, below, “confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to are numbered per the criteria listed in the June 28 entry, and are also listed below. Also, (3) 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 of course isn’t meant to be the last word on all the matters discussed, but is a cursory presentation on what I can best provide testimony on, under current circumstances. In line with my contention that I see cause for serious concerns about the 2010 business matters that I make slow progress in addressing, at least I should provide my side of things here, understanding that other parties may have their own versions and facts to which my version below may need to be adjusted. While other parties may choose not to respond, the idea that my own set of representations is completely without factual basis is not something I can agree to. Also, this blog entry does not imply or guarantee that further discussion of the 2010 matters will be done on this blog.]
Subsections below:
Tweedle Dum’s joining the team in 2007: A female who couldn’t relate to me
Not all young women there (in 2008) were paranoid about relating to me
The 2008 Ferguson
No work for CommonHealth in 2009
How things started in 2010: No indication of a disaster, but with things definitely declined; yet with a new trafficker starting
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Tweedle Dum’s joining the team in 2007: A female who couldn’t relate to me
Another staffer at Ferguson
In 2007 and 2008, by the time I understood what her job was, she seemed to me “yet another trafficker” in a non-central cubicle. The October 28, 2007, press release about her (which I saw only years later; DOF) announced that she “comes to Ferguson
Broad characteristics, germane to any “harassment” criteria
When I saw Tweedle Dum in 2007 and 2008, she did not seem to take any sort of noticeably “high and mighty” approach to her job, as could (on the contrary) definitely be said to be more the case in 2010. When I first dealt with her in August 2007, I found that a certain equilibrium had to be met: I noted in my journal entry (written on August 10, 2007, which I read to my mild sense of surprised discovery in August 2012), “Dealings with [Tweedle Dum] have settled into a more silly impertinence. [You ask in 2012, “More than what”? More than before? I think “more of a routine than had been before”…] She seems to be a trafficker.” Funny how her position wasn’t obvious to me at first, and I had been there about a week by this point.
In fact, there are a few pockets of notes in my journal about her from 2007 (and none, or virtually none, in 2008). In putting together this blog entry, the main thematic organizational device should be: What about the company culture, and what about Tweedle Dum in particular, could have led to what she did regarding me on August 26-27, 2010? The company-culture side (including manipulative use of editors and a certain cultural female-centeredness there) I think I’ve done a fair amount to explain. When it comes to what I privately observed of Tweedle Dum (and wrote on) in 2007 and 2008, here’s what I can say:
I don’t feel there was any sense in the air of 2007 or 2008 that Tweedle Dum may have wanted to complain about my being in some way “sexually harassing.” (However, her actions on August 26-27, 2010, make you retrospectively look at things between myself and her from earlier years to see if there was any inkling in her of this attitude, “having a beef,” then.) What I would feel free to say about Tweedle Dum is that, regardless of whether a woman feels ill at ease with a male because of how he may look at her, or may “give off some vibe” toward her—and I should note there was clearly no complaint (that I was aware of) that Tweedle Dum may have made about me in 2007 or 2008 (or else I would not have been back there in 2010), one way to assess what rights a female has within the hairy area of “sexual harassment” is to say how well developed her “firewall” between (1) her personally-oriented flirting in the proper context (or susceptibility to getting same from another) and (2) being a professional woman is (see my June 15 blog entry). Oh, she’s 25? No, she’s 31? And she doesn’t like how that male behaved to her—so did she say “I don’t like your behavior”? In short, how strong was the complainer’s firewall? How adult did she behave in the interaction, how diplomatic was she? Well, just on the basis of what I saw in 2007 and 2008, I would say Tweedle Dum’s firewall wasn’t terribly strong (in terms of her apparent leeriness about a male’s intentions), but then I didn’t cross paths much with her at all—certainly not as I would with “Georgia” in 2010, the latter situation necessitated by our work roles.
On the level of more generalized, legal guidelines, see Part 2 (to this entry’s Part 3) for some passages from the Nolo Press book Your Rights in the Workplace, sixth edition, by Barbara Kate Repa (Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo, 2002).
Suffice it to say here that, in 2007 and 2008, and to my knowledge, there was nothing going on, between me and Tweedle Dum or otherwise, that even remotely approached a sexual-harassment type issue—which makes the 2010 developments even harder to understand, requiring us to consider a sort of corporate hysteria that was going on in 2010, conditioned in part by a newsworthy merger that was going on at Ferguson that year between CommonHealth and Ogilvy Healthworld.
Fine-grained, personality-related characteristics
A somewhat wider focus. In terms of sheer memory, and separate from any formalized ideas related to sexual harassment, I’ve long harbored recollections of Tweedle Dum since 2007 and 2008 as a skittish, evasive, squirrelly sort. She could never stand in my cubicle entrance, as to drop off work, for more than the sliver of time it took to drop it off. No bit of small talk from her, nothing. By 2008 I would find that, as a more managerial trafficker, she preferred to funnel editorial work to any underworkers such as myself through Tweedle Dee. This would be no less true in 2010.
Tweedle Dum, more generally, seemed not “from the [suburban New Jersey ] area”; that is, by personality and sense of bearing around the place, she was not your typical Parsippany area (or even Morris County, Sussex County, Passaic County...) medical-media worker. She was not, I came to think by 2010, the type to make common cause with all and sundry, including such as myself, out of a sense of “we’re all classmates” bonhomie or the like. It helps to flesh out this description to say she had last worked (according to the 2007 press release on her) for a health-care media firm in New York City
(Her age, I would find with some high credibility online, would put her at about 34 in 2010, so she was about 31 when she came to Ferguson in 2007.)
Here’s a little perspective, in order to compare the professionalism of myself and Tweedle Dum: In 2007 when I was there (and Tweedle Dum was 31), I was 45 going on 46, and I had worked in the editorial areas of media for about 17 years, and in medical-advertising agencies for about six years. Meanwhile, as I said, Tweedle Dum would never deign to engage in any sort of “idle” or ice-breaking conversation. What was I, some kind of grubby Roto-Rooter serviceman? She would be disposed to do that sort of small talk with Tweedle Dee; with him, it would be clear by 2008, she made a point of being on some good, richly relating terms with, for work objectives if nothing else. Sometimes she would talk with him on some personal-life facts, I found in 2010. (This may be a little schematic.) Certainly, through 2010, she didn’t do any of this with me.
A narrower focus. The next observation/question may seem to get a bit personal, and I focus on this only in the following sense: Where personal idiosyncrasies seem longstanding and occur in multiple contexts, they may raise the question of what kind of personality quirks in the person—in this case, Tweedle Dum—we are dealing with. Now, similar to the case with Tweedle Dee, where we say “Let he who has not been a dweeb in climbing the ladder of an editorial/writing career cast the first stone,” with Tweedle Dum there is ground to ask, “Does she have some kind of anxiety disorder? Or some other neurotic-type tendency?” The reason we ask: After so little ground she has shared with me, whether in interacting casually or regarding solid work issues, you have to wonder why she saw fit to take the measure she did with me by August 26-27, 2010. Now, if she has an anxiety disorder or such, on one level, OK, fine; a lot of us media types have our issues. But for her to be so aloof and apt to engage in gross double-standards as to lead to her move of August 26-27, 2010, we have cause to ask again, OK, who’s kidding whom here? And we wonder whether, as a manager whom we hold to some kind of higher standard, she ought to tend to her own issues before acting on apparent extreme anxiety, in effect acting on unjustified illusions, with the result of treading grievously on a coworker’s rights (to get work, to a fair hearing, etc.).
In fact, not only could she be “squirrelly” in dealing with me, barely able to spend more than an instant in my cube, but oddly enough, as seen generally and independently of my presence, her eyes often seemed not to face the camera in photos. This was weirdly true in an ID-type photo that was arrayed beside her cubicle entrance, as was routinely done with employees, as I saw in 2007-08. And a more recent Facebook page showed her eyes not meeting the “look” of the photo-taker. Further, in dealing with her directly about some solid work issue—in one of the very, very few instances I engaged in this with her—there was something going on where she “inveterately” put up a weird distance/stumbling block you had to get around in meeting her eyes in the simplest, let’s-talk-a-minute-about-this-work-matter way. In view of all this: About 30 years ago, you would have wondered if a person displaying all these “evasive eyes” phenomena had a “selective attention” problem. Today we might ask, is this a case of ADHD? Just anxiety disorder? Something else? As I suggested above, this sort of issue is maybe not relevant, except that when you consider her broadcast alert of August 26-27, 2010, you immediately have to ask, What was (is) her health/personality issue?
This is on a minutely functioning psychological level, and from a fairly sympathetic attitude. Somewhat more “judgmentally,” we could say she maintained an air of aloofness, archness even, that maybe was ironically matched to a sense of her (feeling as if she had) not really having earned her place there—though in another sense, in the way of those who bound ahead ambitiously, pell-mell, in work positions at the same company, maybe she felt entitled to it after all. But compared to an old bear like me, who has had many miles of work of a highly practical, and tough-opportunity-getting sort—little was handed out to me without my having done a lot of footwork to get it—I certainly had learned, and earned the right, to approach coworkers on a solid, let’s-be-real basis: if you have something to talk about, or vice versa, I stand before you, and we meet eyes, etc.
Whether she shied from my approaching her this way out of fear of what she supposed were my “more personal intentions,” I tend to think, in view of all I’ve said, that that was more her problem than mine. More precisely, if you question my intentions, let us meet eyes (or at least stand before each other in mutual respect) and talk about work problems first. If you have an overriding tendency to suspect I’m a hungry wolf with more than work issues on my agenda, that starts to look as if it’s an obsession or groundless fear of your own. In any event, Tweedle Dum’s almost thoroughgoing tendency to be so aloof—not just with me, but with her “evasive” eyes look in photos that obviously involved other people, and her more generally seeming to be regarded by a large of people as rather excessively aloof or high-handed there anyway (e.g., with some hints made when she was away on vacation the week of August 16-20, 2010, such as her big stuffed leopard being put jokily on her empty chair)—suggests that the burden to prove “whose motives were most honest to the context” lay on her shoulders, not on mine.
Lastly, let’s skip ahead a bit to a moment from August 26, 2010, where she passed my cubicle and flightily seemed to remark on my being idle, which was conveyed to Tweedle Dee—in the context this had all the inappropriate-for-there flavor of a small-time shopkeeper thinking (illusorily) that the “help” couldn’t just be standing around for two minutes lest that help “eat up all the profits already!” This was something more germane to a 20th-rate bagel shop than to a big-time medical-media firm: this sort of slighting, biased remark on my momentary work situation is quite offensive to me, especially when I was generally efficient about handling my time there in 2010, and even that last week I kept up with my four-month-plus average of proofreading about nine items a day. If Tweedle Dum was no better a production manager than to be under the illusion that after my four-plus months’ service I was a waste to have there, because I was idle a few moments—and after over the long term I would have thought I’d left that mentality behind in the seedy restaurant-and-such jobs I’d had when I was a student—then she wasn’t much of a production manager. Which starts to get us to a more trenchant, generalizing assessment of her that I had planned to save for my detailed account of August 2010.
Incidentally, I tend to regard in a confidently skeptical way young women who seem ill at ease to engage in the tiniest amount of small talk with me, yet who have no problem with peering in at me across a distance when I’m working in my cubicle (as if they’re watching a mangy, unfamiliar raccoon mucking around, or something), or overhearing a personal phone conversation I’m in as if they want to get some kind of “low-down” on me. These observations are not paranoid of me; in fact, I’ve seen these things enough times to know it is a solid trend among some young women with limited work experience (those born, say, since 1980-85). My “confidently skeptical” name for young women who do this is “work stalkers.” They have very limited interpersonal workplace skills, but have no problem in their powers of perceiving someone “as a spectacle” from afar. (I think I’m getting too old for the workplaces that harbor these “work stalkers,” as if these are par for the course with, and legion among, the newest “class” of young up-and-comers.)
Not all young women there (in 2008) were paranoid about relating to me
Among the few things I’ve remembered well from my time at CommonHealth in September-October 2008, there was a young woman with a cubicle near mine who was a classic twenty-something young hopeful. I’m not sure what her job was, but it wasn’t something so central as trafficking or production management or such; it was definitely more entry-level. Not as a main feature of her job, she was taking on the task of managing notices and/or celebration-related tchotchkes for coworkers related to Halloween. [I recently recalled more clearly she was heading a contest for cubicle decorations with a Halloween theme.] She evidently felt that was the sort of “group-spirit” thing she would willingly take on, though to some extent (regarding enthusiasm) I think she was a party of one with this particular task.
She was from Florida and accordingly had an air of not being fully “synced up” with the mentality of the New York metro-area rat race, and so she seemed a little out of step with the culture at Ferguson
I think she was one of the twenty-somethings I’d encountered at CommonHealth over the years who, on first meeting me, had this typical cheery way of meeting your eyes as if they wanted to be recognized for the enthusiastic, technically qualified team player they felt they should be considered. You couldn’t blame such a young person for this attitude; it was a good measure, I think, of a typical twenty-something in that kind of situation. But it also, as she couldn’t know, showed how naïve she was about the kind of workplace she was in.
The 2008 Ferguson
By the way, my time at Ferguson
A more precise look shows that, in retrospect, this is an interesting little corner of things: My first day back at CommonHealth in 2008 (September 18) was also the day right before I won my motion for summary judgment in the lawsuit, which was on September 19, 2008.
Per my very sound decision, I did not explicitly talk about this lawsuit with anyone at Ferguson (Tweedle Dee or otherwise). For one thing, I had found from working at the Pace medical-ad agency (not a very high-class place) in spring 2008 that, there, I did not get much understanding, much less morale-boosting support of any kind, with the little bit I mentioned the lawsuit to my immediate supervisor. Partly because of having learned from Pace, the small extent to which I did mention the suit in any way at CommonHealth in September 2008 was in line with my arranging with Tweedle Dee to not work Friday, September 19, because that was when I knew the judgment on my MSJ would be rendered. Initially (after contacting me on September 17), he had wanted me to work both September 18 and 19; I probably had no problem in begging off for September 19 (and certainly had no compunction about doing so) because his sudden phone message for me to come in and work was unexpected anyway—and as I know from long experience, while these firms tend to ring you up as if you have no life of your own, you do have the occasional “trump card” of having prior plans for something important (by this I mean along the lines of asserting your prerogative, not simple facts about which people can have common sense, because common sense isn’t always a “ready commodity” at these places).
Along with this, I am surer, no one there should have been aware of my part in the lawsuit independent of anything I could have said there about it.
In fact, I was not confident about how my September 19 hearing would go. By the way, there was an arrangement for me to listen in by phone, there being the idea in the judge’s office that I need not show up for what would essentially be her reading her decision (her interaction with the parties on September 12 was considered sufficient for hearing purposes where all parties needed to be present); so I did not need to make the long drive to Freehold, N.J., again.
But I had a sort of edgy, angry, anticipatory mood about the September 19 decision, which it’s hard to convey without the richer context of the “tissue of narrative” of my manuscript Second Thoughts. As before, I felt that by rights, by the logic and merits of my MSJ, I should have won, but given the many strayings from standards in this lawsuit—on the part of the plaintiff and her attorney, and in some weird way on the part of Judges Perri and Uhrmacher—I felt as if another “freak of nature” could occur and I would lose.
As I listened on the phone, I sound-recorded the judge’s reading of her decision, in a low-tech way. When the judge finished with her dealings with me, I gave a simple “Thank you,” and I had my adjudication.
Among other things that could be considered about this suit on its own terms (apart from what my work dealings were), it is also interesting to consider that, as I have long thought, the whole lawsuit could have been dismissed—with or without prejudice—against all defendants in 2008. As it was, it had received three dismissals in 2008, along each of the three main ways a lawsuit could be dismissed: along the lines of insufficiency of the complaint—the legal wording is something like “failure to state a claim on which relief can be granted” (this was regarding Wikimedia; information on this can be found online); with an MSJ dealing with the main parameter of jurisdiction (regarding Shweta Narayan); and with an MSJ dealing with simple matters of fact (regarding me) (New Jersey state court rules governing MSJs fall under R. 4:46; the applicable federal rule of civil practice is 56). Yet the suit would grind on for another more-than-two years, until November 2010, when it was dismissed because the plaintiff failed to follow court rules (which was also repeatedly true in 2008).
In September 2008, I was simply minding what was my business in going to work at CommonHealth, with no comments about the lawsuit, or very very little, the brief time I was there. And certainly my disposition in working there was not affected by the suit.
In any event, within the most “radioactive” phase I was in regarding the suit (“radioactive” because of the brute fury it caused me), in late summer 2008, I was working at Ferguson
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No work for CommonHealth in 2009
I had no work at all at CommonHealth in 2009, though I tried to elicit work (from the Ferguson
2009 was the first year, since I’d started working at CommonHealth in 2001 (not constant within any given year), that I did not work there at all.
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How things started in 2010: No indication of a disaster, but with things definitely declined; yet with a new trafficker starting
I sent Tweedle Dee an e-mail in January 2010, and a snail-mailed letter in March 2010, and apparently in immediate response to the letter, I finally got an answer from him in March 2010. I was to come in and work; and this was almost a shock.
But not only because of that, I think from the beginning in 2010, I had more of a sense than usual that I was entering the mouth of a sort of workplace-type tornado. This was in the sense that there was a sucking on your time and energy in a way in which you felt “your life was not your own.” In a way, this has been a feeling I’ve had with stints at other medical-media places whenever there was a certain headlong, manic quality to what was going on there. And in this case, this sense in March, or in April-May when I started working there somewhat more regularly, might not have seemed especially portentous (suggestive of highly significant problems) yet.
But looking back at 2010—even considering how in some sense my nerves might have been frayed from 2009, a disastrous financial year for me (the worst for me in 20 years)—I think that the “tornado sucking” sense I had early on could be (not unreasonably) considered in the sense of “something wicked this way comes”; there was a certain ill wind blowing. And of course, whether hindsight is more apt to prompt this reading than I should have had cause to have at the time, certainly when you look at what was going on later, in summer 2010, if you had the long experience of the company I had by then, you could marvel at how manic things had become in general at CommonHealth, or at least in Ferguson. [CC #3, arguably #4]
As one objective measure of this, a few Ferguson staffers had a habit in 2010 that had not previously been typical of CommonHealth: you as a freelance editor could more generally be in the thick of a pressured process that, by August, you could feel was making a strong draw on your energy (and in practical terms you felt obliged to dedicate a lot of time to them, despite the open-endedness of the schedule), but you wouldn’t know what particular day or days you would be in for the next week until almost at the last possible minute. That is, the scheduling of you became so micromanaged and down to what immediate needs were, that over the somewhat longer term, you very much felt your time was not your own: in 2010, for a high-pressure account to lead to your time being scheduled (at times) almost bit-by-bit this way, it made this one of the very craziest stints I had ever had at a medical-media company.
As we’ll see, Tweedle Dee had a way of relying on specific information from “above”—basically, from Tweedle Dum—as to when I was needed next, or whether I should come in later in the week or such: it was as if he wasn’t even contributing to this scheduling situation, while Tweedle Dum was in charge of it 100 percent—which wasn’t the way freelancers’ scheduling seemed to be handled in the past in editorial departments there, including at Ferguson (say, in 2004). Moreover, Tweedle Dee wouldn’t know—to be able to tell me—until the last possible minute; it could be late on a Friday afternoon that I would hear what my schedule was for next week. Sometimes, if whether I was needed for an immediately upcoming day was unresolved, I might not get the news until Tweedle Dee had sent an e-mail (which he could have sent a good bit after 5, after I’d left work), which I wouldn’t see until I was at home that evening, or the next morning.
One of the craziest examples of this was when I got an e-mail sent August 20 from K.K., who was one person in charge of the account on which Georgia and I worked; K.K. was a project manager who was both a sort of immediate supervisor of Georgia and an immediate contact for employees of the Big Pharma client whose account it was [CC #3] (a press release from a past year, seen on CommonHealth’s Web site, indicates that before about 2008, K.K. had “worked as a marketing coordinator at DePasquale Companies, a professional beauty product manufacturer and distributor…”).
For Saturday, August 21, 2010—which was the actual beginning of the craziest week of that month (my last week there)—I knew it was up in the air whether I’d come in as an unusual matter (I rarely worked weekend days there in 2010), but I didn’t know when I went to bed. I think I was starting to get anxiety that welled out of the whole work situation like noxious stuff from a backing-up sewer: I couldn’t sleep (possibly my nerves were on edge on the assumption I would have to work the next day, meaning I had to be up, ready, and out by about 8 a.m.). As I was awake at 3-something or 4-something in the morning, I finally put my computer on, and saw an e-mail from K.K. that had been sent at 9-something the night before (so there was no way I could have seen it before bed): yes, I had to work Saturday. Then, knowing I had to work within a very few hours, I could not get back to sleep. I ended up going to work with less than four hours of sleep for that day, which made it grittily hard to do proofreading work on some sensitive items subject to FDA approval [CC #3, arguably #4, looking ahead toward #5].
This (from August 2010) is all getting ahead of myself. March, April, and May 2010 were pretty calm and normal (in CommonHealth terms), generally speaking, as I remember.
There were very few people in the editorial department at that point (early in 2010). Tweedle Dee, of course, was there. A woman who had been a staffer there for a few years (I remembered her from 2007 or 2008) had been laid off—just three weeks before I was called in as a freelancer! And a woman named Paulette L., who used to work at the CommonHealth division of Noesis, located in Morristown (she had been my supervisor when I had freelanced there), was also on staff at Ferguson Morristown location to the big Parsippany complex, and was folded into the Ferguson
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[If the focus on detail sometimes seems to get a little tedious/nuts below, while I try to be elegant, I think it is important—just as much as the history of the company I drew for 2001-06—for understanding the “baseline” activity from which the August 2010 craziness derived.]
In late April, a new trafficker was hired, who Tweedle Dum had meet various of us in Ferguson
Paulette, for her part, left the company within a few days or very few weeks; she ended up at one of the Big Pharma companies—“on the other side,” as some say who decide to work for an actual Pharma company rather than a medical-media firm. I’ve long thought that maybe Paulette thought “the last straw” for her deciding to leave CommonHealth was seeing how young a person would be hired to do trafficking.
For my part, one thing that’s long stuck in my mind as distinguishing this new trafficker, who was (pseudonymous) Georgia Bellamy, was how she met my eyes when she was brought to meet me. Usually when twenty-somethings are meeting us “old hands,” they have a cheery look as if to say “Appreciate me!” You can’t blame them; they are young people who’ve been taught by schools, TV, movies, and other media to regard media as the grand ship of “a wonderful new place of arrival” to get to, and when they’re there, they have a kiddish way of wanting to “link” with you or “show themselves a worthy comrade” or whatever it is. I’m fumbling a bit, but I am trying to convey what seems the universal young person’s way of showing, in her or his eyes, “appreciate me!/hail fellow well met” or such.
With Georgia
The “hungry eyes” thing—which I detected in her at the time without feeling “ready to deal with any untoward, or on the other hand welcome, emergent developments from her”—I think of in retrospect as showing some of what would end up making Georgia
I had few or no work dealings with Georgia Georgia
In mid-June, when it was getting hot out, I was in to work, and it was a strange day in that no one who was about my age, who would have any usual work interaction with me, said hello or anything else. There was a strange stoniness toward me. Hard to say, even today, why this was.
But Georgia
Incidentally, the first news about the solidifying merger between CommonHealth and Ogilvy Healthworld had been broadcast within the company by early June—this was obviously the sort of thing that would probably not have meant much to Georgia, understandably. As for me, I think I discovered the news in late June or early July, and it didn’t mean too much to me right away (it definitely became more worth keeping in mind as an explanation for the weird corporate politics brewing in the office by about mid-August).
Anyway, that’s the blue-skied calm before the late-summer storm. If things hadn’t gotten weirder in how they were done there than they were through late June 2010—and there was definitely some more unevenness, and frenetic quality, to how some editorial work was handled, among other falling off from previous practices—my few months there might have ended up a fairly typical stint at CommonHealth, if longer than most. And Georgia would have been one of several twenty-somethings I’d crossed paths with, from whom I would have parted, if that had happened in June, with perhaps not much more thought on her part or on mine to what our interacting meant, either as to what happened there, or what our future respective “fates” would be. This would have been like other young women I’d worked with there over the years, for whom I had cause to develop clear portraits only after the August 2010 mess, in order to formulate a key prelude (a background to help others interpret the bizarre declines in conduct) to the August 2010 story. Some of the women from long-ago years—say, 2004 or 2005—I’ve had rusty memories of. Georgia
Would things have gotten crazy in my own little nexus there in August if Georgia
If one were to say “If someone older than, or more mature than, Georgia
So what is there to lament here? What lesson, relevant to future whatever, rolled out of this?
One thing that has long offended me—which continues to make me say, “I can’t believe that…”—is that my long stretch of solid work wasn’t taken into account when the gratuitous alert about me was done. All that work I did, the biggest amount of items I’d ever proofread in one long train of accumulated stuff, of any of my stints at the company: it seemed to mean nothing as I was pilloried in some broadcast suggestion that I had harassed Georgia, and yet I was to be brought in for one last day of work on August 27, with others notified as if they might be on the lookout for a possible meltdown or blowup from me.
My story of summer 2010 would include measures of the many ways that practices in how to handle editorial material—especially for the account Georgia and I worked on—had declined (in some ways strikingly) at CommonHealth compared to 2001-06 or so. One thing this meant was that if, instead of the normal sound lifeboat you had to use, Georgia and I were in a leaky lifeboat (and she couldn’t know this was a deviation from accepted practice) and I had to work extra to keep the thing seaworthy while we did the more normal work you need to do in a lifeboat (rowing it, etc.). With the high pressures and the substandard conditions, we were all on our mettle to be good professionals. And Georgia
But the way that Tweedle Dum and, as a sort of underling in a way editorial directors didn’t use to be there, Tweedle Dee handled the situation—while they either were (rather inexcusably) ignorant of quite a lot of relevant facts or arrogantly chose to ignore them—both was insulting to me and deviated from all acceptable professional practice I’ve seen in many jobs since 1978.
And that’s partly why, after we’ve traveled through months of multiple, complex blog entries on this company, up the “Nung River
Instead of severed heads, there are people not keeping their heads, metaphorically.
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Considerations regarding confidentiality, from the June 28 blog entry:
“Confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to above are numbered per the criteria listed below.
(1) I can talk about what happened more than 10 years before I signed an agreement, or I can talk about an issue when it has been more than 10 years since I worked on an account that involved the issue (which is consistent with the express language of the agreement); meanwhile,
(2) anything that happened within 10 years from the time of signing is not allowed to be discussed outside the company, except:
(3) given the proper conditions, I can talk about something that is NOT a matter of trade secrets as ordinarily understood—“trade secrets” meaning information that pertains to specific brands or, especially, any “proprietary” strategizing regarding how the brands would be marketed (which, typically, and perhaps ALL the time, I was never privy to in my narrowly defined technical work); or
(4) given the proper foundation, I can talk about something that is NOT a matter of trade secrets and that IS a deviation from accepted practice with respect to ethics that seem to be expected in media offices, and/or with respect to more general office manners, and/or with respect to technically-related methods or assumptions, as understood (or as should be understood) across the medical-media industry and/or across all publishing-related industries in which I’ve had experience; or,
the most conscience-wracking area, (5) when an issue involves the nature of a specific brand or some issues regarding the strategy or more specific tactics for how the brand is marketed, I can discuss this issue if it raises questions of a possible threat to public health and/or a possible violation of federal law regarding health-care-product marketing, violation of the letter of the law or (harder to address) of the spirit of the law.
Whenever I discuss an issue that involves any of the above criteria, I will reference, by number, which criterion or criteria I am following. Believe me, this is all not an easy thing to grapple with.
General conclusions from the “horse pill” blog entry:
(A) How you were embraced in good-faith and constructive ways—for your technical role, and your sense of being “part of the team”—varied over the years, to say the least.
(B) The roles that (some, not a small number of) women played, and the manner in which they played them, could be rather unusual, to put it very generally—ranging from the facilitative in a way that was based on female mannerisms, to what would be considered impertinent or even sexist-oriented behavior (e.g., when the company seemed to value women for their appearance) in other industries.
(C) Company ways of handling you as a freelancer (not just at CommonHealth) could phase into your being subjected to fraudulent (or highly questionable) situations regarding how or whether you were paid, before you knew it (and that possible fraud was specifically, directly at the hands of a placement agency). (At this point, in the examples we’ve seen, we can give CommonHealth the benefit of the doubt and say that, at least in some instances, perhaps it didn’t know it was straying into “fraud” or “dubious practice” territory, and was consciously engaging in expediencies that it didn’t know might backfire on it. I.e., it wasn’t consciously being fraudulent in delaying paying “The Gary Laverne Group.”)
