[See the end of this entry for “Explanations of within-text abbreviations” on “confidentiality criteria.”]
[In the series of blog posts headed “What in the Name of Medicine?,” “medical media” may be used as a generic term for medical advertising/promotions, as a general field or as to a type or collection of firm(s). It does not refer to genuine medical academic publishing. Note: There is some repetition of points between Parts, and cross-referencing, but it shouldn’t be distracting, and is to make things clear in a complex situation. Also, this Part is subject to adjustment. Edit to title 7/2/13. Edit 12/9/16.]
Subsections in this entry:
II. The handling of the product information documents (P.I.s) in August 2010, in general
III. The Geek’s role in bad mishandling of the P.I.s
IV. The Geek’s hand in the “harassment” issue
V. The religious issue—mine in general, and how others’ played in an ugly way at Ferguson
One of the shames of the type of work messes such as I am describing regarding [Agency X] is that people who are new to a company, or new to a type of business, or new to a position may get the most wrong impression about the company, the industry…and especially about each other as workers.
So Georgia
A sadder situation involves a coworker who only came on the scene three weeks before I left. In the mess that arose, where I was tarnished with a broadcast alert about me, how could he possibly know who I was and what kind of worker I was?
But this is an interesting situation: he was actually one of the people who had some influencing hand in how I was unprofessionally handled. You’ll like this.
And this anecdote provides a good basis for my making some statement about coworkers who bond with each other on the basis of some shared religious beliefs, inclinations, etc., that have no relation to the work matters it is our responsibility to deal with as adults.
The man of about 40, EW, who appeared in early August 2010 in the Ferguson Ferguson
A high-level manager a day or so later circulated an e-mail congratulating and praising a big batch of us for how things finished up on this account. I have a copy of the e-mail [DOF]; I was named on it as one of a group of recipients. And my work on this account, which was pretty steady from early on in my time at Ferguson
A starker contrast, in terms of how things went well here, could not be made between that account and Suboxone as it wrapped up in the next three weeks. This latter account was due to be done around August 31.
EW was an eager team player in the Valcyte account, as far as I could see.
One thing that struck me as odd was that he set up an arrangement to be on an e-mailing basis with Kayla the trafficker right away (which she didn’t seem to mind), which none of us regular proofreaders ever did, at least in so gung-ho a way (as he used) in our first days there.
I’m getting ahead of myself; I didn’t expect to do a full story about this man yet; he actually was one of the minor players in the story of the crazy last weeks of the account Georgia
Incidentally, immediately after I left [Agency X], I wrote detailed notes on my last few weeks there, especially on my last full week there. Tired, under extreme anxiety, and so on, I worked hard to make a complete account (or one with the most relevant facts) while my memories were still fresh. This is an important, principled thing to do after being in any work situation (or otherwise serious interpersonal situation) where some exigency or freakish incident (whether potentially court-related or otherwise) might come up where memories, evidence, and so on would later be important.
Within a very short time, my nickname for EW, the 40-year-old man, was “The Geek” (with capital T, to indicate a sort of preeminence). There was something starkly presumptuous about him. He seemed to want to be a supervisor from Day 1. He would ferry job-folders around as if he would distribute them to editors as if he was a new trafficker. What was this?
Once he passed me in the hall and, with his large, bezel-like eyes, said, “Are you looking for something?” Presumptuous! I said, “No, I’m not, thank you,” or such, in a rather clipped way—I was learning to be properly defensive and a little indignant about him from early on.
He had odd mannerisms like little noises he made, an occasional rattling way of talking, etc. He seemed definitely an eccentric. But the most notable personal quality I would remark on, I’ll come to later.
The reason he was there is that ES had recommended The Geek to Tweedle Dee. As you might recall, ES was a woman (as I noted in Part 1 of this series) in at least her fifties who had been working in the Ferguson editorial department since before I came in early 2010, but was absent when I first arrived that year. This recommendation was made a couple weeks or more before The Geek was finally brought in.
More generally, Tweedle Dee was tasked with hauling in new editors and letting others go on a pretty regular basis. In that way, his department was quite unstable in terms of a regular set of people being there for any appreciable length of time, though for a couple months or so, in mid-2010 the “staff” consisted fairly stably of me, Tweedle Dee, ES, and (I forget exactly when he started) another man named J. McC., whom I also first mentioned in Part 1.
J. McC. was someone inoffensive enough with whom I’d previously worked, both of us as temps I think, at the Adient division of [Agency X] way back in 2004. In 2010 he was brought in to Ferguson Ferguson he came in to be a sort of part-timer/temporary; after he was a while at Ferguson
ES, in her own right, was a hyperopinionated, impractical fussbudget. (I mean, she would proofread what were clearly instructions for a production person within brackets on an item—you never proofread those.) But she was good enough in Tweedle Dee’s eyes, because her fussiness suited one detail-sensitive account for which she was made the dedicated editor. In the same situation of dividing up work, back in June or so, Tweedle Dee had made me the dedicated editor for the Suboxone account (this while, of course, I often saw items from other accounts; overall, as I said in Part 1, I saw about 412 items in total while at Ferguson in 2010, while I saw about 140 items for Georgia’s account).
As I would find later (only after leaving [Agency X]), The Geek had worked at a few medical-ad agencies, including a small place called Hyphen that had gone out of business, and the larger ICC (part of the Interpublic conglomerate). He had never worked at [Agency X] before. But he had been a supervisor at ICC, whatever that was worth (which may have been substantial enough).
Another reason I found that Tweedle Dee, ES, and The Geek suddenly made up a sort of warmly united ad hoc team at Ferguson Sparta Township , N.J.
All this description of coworker arrangement and personal tendencies may not seem terribly offensive, and a little like gossip. But it has more relevance as explanatory background when we see what happened the last week of August, which is a key focus, and contains the climax, to my [Agency X] story.
For my limited purposes here, I now focus this blog entry on one important phase of the late-August story.
II. The handling of the product information documents (P.I.s) in August 2010, in general
Outline of the big task
As I’ve said in different contexts on this blog, “product information” documents—for the Suboxone account that Georgia and I were working on—were mishandled by the editorial department. Herewith comes a key part of my story [CC #4, 5].
That last week I was there, in a weird parade of odd activities and decisions that shape how anomalously this account was handled—the decisions coming from management both within the client Big Pharma company and within [Agency X]—we were proofreading newly produced document masters—the electronic files from which the published documents would eventually be printed. The P.I.s were being “laid out,” prepared electronically in a Quark file or whatever it was, by a separate vendor whose specialty was producing such files for P.I.s.
As I think about it now, certain other documents that were relatively simple product-info (“how to take” or such) advisory sheets—“med guides” was one shorthand term for them (see Part 2 of this series, regarding Wednesday, August 25)—might have been laid out by [Agency X] itself (though the copy had already been prepared and FDA-approved and was furnished for us only to lay the relevant documents out and proofread them against the “backup”). This production task wasn’t so strange for us (in a professionalism sense, though it was the first time I had ever encountered it, I think) to be limited to on these.
But the P.I.s, the documents that reflect information required and highly regulated by the FDA and which even comprise copy that goes into the large reference book the PDR, were definitely produced by the outside vendor. Tweedle Dee himself even told me that this outside vendor was typically used, and moreover, in the usual situations, the vendor produced a certification of sorts that it had done its job right, when it delivered the finished documents to the Big Pharma client for whom it was making them. Part of this vendor’s usual job was to proofread these things themselves.
By the way, I refer to P.I.s in plural, to indicate different individual iterations and versions, but there was only one P.I., in terms of wordage, for Suboxone film. But there were always two versions, in a given iteration, sent to us by the outside vendor—each with a different-sized type. Problems that could arise—in multiple iterations (all past the first could be called “reflowed” copy) and in the differently-sized type—could be errors in formatting tables, type style (italic, boldface, whatever). Such things may not seem to laypeople like big errors, but (fairly in line with the usual sense about this) each time an individual layout was done with these items, there seemed to be a chance some wordage or formatting was put into error (this was both a general risk and, if I recall rightly, seemed tied to the vendor’s particular way of handling them)—and indeed such errors occurred here (which weren’t many). The general expectation of this is what prompted a request to do a full read (and here, two full reads were requested with each iteration).
In every other situation in my professional life where a “reflowing” of copy is done, particularly when you know the errors have already been bled out of an item, it may only be necessary to “slug” the newly laid-out version (this could be done in educational publishing or in reference publishing), which is a quickie way that experienced proofreaders can check to see that all copy has been retained in the new version (you “slug” by checking for identical line breaks, same number of lines in paragraphs, paragraph shape, etc.). It did cross my mind at the time with the P.I.s, why not simply slug these? But that would have been cynical, given the situation as it was in my lap.
More generally, not doing a slugging with the Suboxone P.I.s seemed appropriate given the sensitive nature of the P.I.s, but then common sense would dictate that you have more than one person do a “word for word read” of these, to avoid errors due to fatigue or boredom.
Moreover, when I worked at the pharmaceutical company Roche in about 2006 helping in checking entries (for Roche products) for the upcoming edition of the PDR, which typically uses P.I.s as content, a very elaborate and deliberate process involving “marking on” pdfs was used—and more than one editor checked the corrections (one freelance and one staff), as I recall.
##
Anyway, back to the case at hand: For some reason—and the client itself arranged this, and [Agency X] apparently acceded in this—the documents (the P.I.s), with new corrections due to some already-incorporated FDA-instigated emendations (I believe), were being re-laid-out by the outside vendor, and then we were supposed to proofread them. We meaning the editors in the Ferguson
We’re getting into a territory that has, on some level, left me astonished and speechless and beside myself with indignation for over two years now.
In that crazy, stressful last week of August—and I wasn’t the only one suffering stress—there were problems at the vendor end with how the laying out of the documents was going. First of all, each time it did a newly laid out version, as I said, there were two versions—in six-point type and in nine-point type (this in itself wasn’t objectionable). Of course, time was of the essence as FDA approval for Suboxone film was expected to come about August 31. I had to read each different-type-sized document against the “backup”—for the first two iterations, this “backup” was the wordage in a Word document that represented the electronic file from which the laid-out version should have come.
The anomalous handling, and failure to meet the “two reads” criterion
After the first laying out (the first iteration), for some stupid reason, there were errors with the laying-out (on the part of the outside vendor), so a second round of documents was laid out. Thus on Wednesday, August 26, I saw two sets of the documents—two rounds, for each of a six-point and a nine-point. Thus the total times I read the same wordage—and if you look in a PDR and read the material on a medication you may be taking, it is not exciting reading—was four, on Wednesday. (See Part 2, on Wednesday, for more details.)
No second proofreader was being aligned by Tweedle Dee to “do a second read” of these during this laborious process.
See by how many orienting points this failure occurred:
* The cover sheet outlining what was to be done with these called for two full reads—meaning, one read each by two different editors. (For not-clinching evidence, see Part 2, “The med guides: where a piece…” and see this sample of the type of two-reads requests that were being made of such items that week. See also subsection III below, second paragraph.)
* As well, [Agency X’s] own typical expectations for an important item that was, or was close to being, a “Final Mechanical” were for two full reads.
* I even said to Tweedle Dee, sometime on Wednesday, “Someone else needs to read these too, I can’t be the only one.” And he responded as if to say, Yeah, that’s right. And then in his not-always-diligent or not-always-gutsy way, he didn’t do a damned thing. No second reader was gotten for them. [CC #4, 5]
ES had been busy doing a massive task for the account for which she was favored, for two and a half days. She’d started on the task midday Monday and only finished up in the late afternoon Wednesday. So she was out of commission for the P.I.s. for much of Wednesday.
J. McC., the other editor I mentioned, was on vacation this week. No other editor was brought in from another [Agency X] division, as (broadly speaking) had been a fairly utilized method at [Agency X] in the past (this sharing of editors between divisions had actually generally caused outside freelancers to be used less, by about 2007).
And The Geek? Was he being pressed to do the second proofreading of the P.I.s? [I give a sly, sardonic, anticipatory chortle.]
We’re coming to one anomalous way that it’s a shame, when we coworkers are quite new to each other, that we get to know each other as coworkers in the worst ways due to tiny bursts of horrible mismanagement.
III. The Geek’s role in bad mishandling of the P.I.s
By the early evening of Wednesday, August 25, after having dragged myself tiredly through two readings of two iterations of the P.I.s, for a total of four documents read (all with the same wordage), I was tired. I’d been having trouble with sleep most days since the previous Saturday. Meanwhile, I already sensed I was being “favored,” for how I was used that whole week, mainly to do proofreading of the P.I.s and the other FDA-supervised documents (the “med guides”). (Of course, in off moments I did other items too, for different accounts; as I said in Part 1, I actually did an average of 10 items each day that week, which was about the average, or slightly above average, for my work pace for my whole 2010 stint at Ferguson.)
By the way, I am all but certain that the two iterations of the two-typed sized P.I.s were all noted on their cover sheets (by Georgia
In a sense, my wrestling with the P.I.s was mitigated by one factor: a department manager or such ordered dinner for the lot of us working on the account (see Part 2, Wednesday)—and was I there in a meeting room to get dinner. Then—I forget when this task was announced as coming—I had a second bout of the new (second) version of the P.I.s in the evening, from 5:54 through 8:04 p.m. Dead beat, I checked in with Georgia
I went home, while numerous others in the Ferguson
Things go queer the next morning
The next day when I came in, among whatever else was noticeable that suggested the previous night had gotten a little weird, there was yet another version (the third iteration) of the two-type-sized P.I.s to proofread. This is the turning point in the story. This is when, metaphorically speaking, the plane I was flying started going down (regarding my status—or prospects for future work—there as a freelancer), and there was no way to right it; in a sense, the only option I had was damage control.
A couple people touched base with me on the P.I.s. Georgia herself came by and explained what was to be done, which was unnecessary, because I had adequate explanation in the notes left for me. She seemed unusually cautious, and wanted to limit our exchange to the very narrow task at hand. (If she was nervous partly because of the objectively inflammatory nature of this task, she would have been correct about the nature of the task, but less so about me.)
Later, the supervisor on the account named Evelyn R. came by and was a little more adult, in terms of talking about the “crazy P.I.s” and sharing a sort of stoic vexation at how we kept having to re-read these damned things. This time the problem in the laying out at the vendor end was that they had been laid out in the wrong number of columns—it had to be three, not two (or vice versa).
Rather tellingly, when Georgia Georgia
And it does raise the question for an outsider, if P.I.s, those holy things the FDA wanted to be so right, were being handled by people who couldn’t answer whether the present version was two columns or three, what does this say about the responsibility of the medical-advertising firm handling these P.I.s? And number of columns is hardly the only issue. But I hold Georgia
More to my point, let’s look at The Geek. That worthy was there at Ferguson
Now, on the morning of August 26, I found what he had left with me with the new version of the P.I.s: there were the original printouts in six-point and nine-point type, and then there were photocopied versions, blown up really big, for easy proofreading, as he conveyed. His Post-it notes explained some things; he had drawn arrows all over the magnified versions to show where one column left off and continued somewhere else. This looked like a sloppily-made school project. It was somewhat embarrassing to look at.
I took the magnified version—it would have been a bit cumbersome for me to use anyway, and it seemed redolent of a presumptuous way of micromanaging my work, a tendency I’ve always hated in medical-advertising firms—and I thrust it into the bottom of the file-size drawer of the desk I was using.
I would proof the six-point and nine-point versions.
There also was some crazy complication where, unlike with the two versions of the P.I.s I did on Wednesday that I read against Word documents, I now was to proof against some previous already-laid-out version—in essence, using a version that corrected some minor errors that were in the Word documents. (By the way, the night before, The Geek had generously opted to do the “correction checks” on these documents—massive job! There were but only about a half a dozen errors, so it probably took him 20 minutes at most for both P.I.s. A correction check is one of the easiest kinds of proofreading jobs to do, especially at medical-ad places.) But I mistakenly didn’t follow this little guidance, and proofed against the Word documents. I don’t think there was much harm from this, because the errors in the Word documents that were corrected that week were few.
Again, I was the only one to fully proofread this third iteration of the P.I.s, despite the routine guidance on the cover sheets that they were to be proofed by two different readers.
I believe it was Thursday—it could have been another day, and I can check against my detailed notes, but it was most likely Thursday—that something The Geek did led me somewhat later to say staunchly to Tweedle Dee that “He’s trying to act like my supervisor and he’s not my supervisor.” Tweedle Dee probably responded in a way that was in keeping with how feckless he was overall that week.
The queerness of this situation—Georgia a little paranoid of me, The Geek taking on a presumptuous supervisory role amid, now, downright weird developments with the P.I.s, Tweedle Dee exhibiting no true leadership, including to have a second proofreader do some of the work I was doing—was combined with my state of health that morning. I was tired after yet another morning of short sleep.
Now, with this new, stupid P.I. task in front of me, I was almost beside myself. I was so fatigued—from short sleep, general stress, and the ugly prospect of working on those P.I.s again—that I delayed starting on them. I killed maybe an hour just being idle, or dawdling around, because I lacked so much enthusiasm to work on those f**king P.I.s yet again.
One question that is key to raise is, Why wasn’t that f**king Geek led to do another proofreading of the P.I.s—to do a second full read the way the cover sheets required to be done? In fact, last night, Wednesday, when the newest versions were laid out and sent to us, The Geek had done a “correction check,” a very simple kind of read to do, which is not as thorough or taxing (or boring) as a “full read.” But then, he didn’t opt to do a full read, out of common sense—as to admit, “These need reads by two people (as [Agency X’s] own cover sheet is requiring); I’ll do one of them.” No; the screwball spent time Wednesday night doing his enlarging-photocopying and his vaguely condescending Post-it notes. Come Thursday morning, he was certainly not going to do a full read; that was for me.
After having done yet another full read (though the third was, I know, not as thorough/careful as those done on Wednesday) for the two (six-point and nine-point) P.I.s., altogether I had read the P.I. for Suboxone film—with each point-size counted as separate—six times. No one else did such reads during that crazily attenuated laying-out process.
THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE PRACTICE IN ANY VENUE IN WHICH I’VE WORKED, WHERE PROOFREADING IS DONE. WHEN YOU HAVE A DOCUMENT AS SENSITIVE AS A P.I., YOU DON’T HAVE THE SAME PERSON READ IT SIX TIMES. IN PART, OBVIOUSLY (EVEN TO A LAYMAN, I THINK), THIS MEANS EXHAUSTION THAT MEANS THE READER CAN MISS ERRORS.
[AGENCY X’S] ORDINARY PRACTICE IN SUCH A MATTER WOULD HAVE BEEN, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE COVER-SHEET REQUEST WAS TO HAVE TWO READERS READ IT, TO HAVE TWO READERS READ IT, NOT ONE IN THAT STAGE OF PRODUCTION. ANY OTHER AGENCY I’VE WORKED AT WOULD HAVE DONE THE SAME. I’M SURE THE CLIENT FOR THIS P.I. EXPECTED IT TO BE READ TWICE (BY TWO DIFFERENT PROOFREADERS). [CC #4, 5]
I WOULD NEVER SAY I WAS SUCH A GOOD PROOFREADER THAT I WAS ADEQUATE FOR BEING THE SOLE READER FOR SIX OF THESE THINGS, ESPECIALLY WHEN BEING EXHAUSTED BY THEM, BYPASSING THE EXPRESS REQUEST TO HAVE TWO READERS DO THEM.
AND THE FACT THAT TWEEDLE DEE DID A FINAL PROOFREAD ON LATE THURSDAY OR (more likely) FRIDAY (as I believe I saw him doing) DOESN’T MEAN MUCH. (THIS LATE PROOFREADING IS THE SORT I CALL A “COWARD’S PROOFREADING,” BECAUSE THE FINAL PROOFREADING USUALLY ENCOUNTERS VERY FEW ERRORS ANYWAY, AND ALL THE TOUGH WORK—THE “MARINE’S PROOFREADING,” I CALL IT—HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE.)
To repeat, THE PROOFREADING IN THE BEFORE-FINAL-READ PROCESS I WAS IN FOR MORE THAN A DAY CALLED FOR READS BY TWO READERS. THIS WAS NOT DONE. I HAD BROUGHT THIS TO TWEEDLE DEE ’S ATTENTION AND HE ACKNOWLEDGED MY POINT PERFUNCTORILY BUT DEFINITELY DID NOT FOLLOW UP. INSTEAD, THE GEEK—WITH TWEEDLE DEE’S FULL ACCORD, TO ALL APPEARANCES—WAS ARROGATING TO HIMSELF THE ROLE OF SUPERVISING ME ON SOME PARTICULARS, INCLUDING WITH (ON THE P.I.s) HIS STUPID AMPLIFYING PHOTOCOPYING AND CONDESCENDING NOTES.
WHAT THIS MISHANDLING OF THE P.I.s COULD MEAN FOR CONSUMERS IN PRINCIPLE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ERRORS IN IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS, WHICH OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T SERVE THEIR HEALTH INTERESTS. [CC #4, 5]
I have looked at these P.I.s as they are published, by downloading from the Big Pharma company’s Web site. I dislike looking at them, because they give me a bit of a posttraumatic creeped-out sense of the crazy/stressful times when I worked on them. They seem OK as to what details I’ve looked at, from what I’ve checked (which is not all—and not that I really care to look at all). But whether they are OK—or if errors are quite minor—is beside the point. For a company to handle these as [Agency X] did in 2010 DOES NOT CONNOTE GOOD BUSINESS PRACTICE, AND IN PARTICULAR SUGGESTS A LIABILITY—HOWEVER SLIM—FOR PUTTING PUBLIC INTERESTS AT RISK.
THE CORNER-CUTTING WAS BLUNT AND/OR A MATTER OF REPEATED LACK OF DILIGENCE, TO SAY NOTHING OF A DISSERVICE TO ME, AND IT IS CLEARLY THE SORT OF SITUATION WHERE DOING THE RIGHT THING INSTEAD WAS SO EASY AND WOULD HAVE AVOIDED THE WEALTH OF PROBLEMS (AMONG THE LESSER, STRESS CAUSED TO ME) THAT I HAVE BROUGHT UP.
The client company’s complicity in this
What complicated this situation is that the Big Pharma client was in full knowledge of (and indeed, from what I could see, it requested) our proofreading the P.I.s—but why they had us do it rather than the vendor, which usually would certify them, is beyond me. I never saw anything like this before, and Tweedle Dee, who apparently had dealt with P.I.s in some ways numerous times in the past, seemed to find this a new situation also. The one party that seems to have been ignorant of part of what was going on was the client Big Pharma company: I am sure it didn’t know we were failing to do two-person reads (as requested) of the P.I.s.
The FDA’s response to me in two different communications (of December 2010 and October 2011 [this latter letter can be made viewable, at my discretion, by various means, but is currently not available] [Added 12/9/16: Don't ask why this has taken so long to be posted, but here is a scan of one letter received by snail mail in 2011; here is the same letter, in a different disposition; and here is a scan of two letters, one an e-mail received in 2010, and one the 2011 letter.]) did not, as I interpreted it, allow me (or require me) to do anything to alert the public about a danger. On the other hand, the FDA itself admitted a limited jurisdiction in the matter. The “solution” it did suggest, to alert the single Big Pharma client about what happened, did not seem adequate to me. In part this was because the client had allowed this weird handling of the P.I.s by us to begin with. I don’t know how much of what I could have told the client they didn’t already know, aside from the failure of [Agency X] to do two reads with each iteration.
More generally, I felt this shouldn’t have been considered as a limited-venue, anomalous thing where only one client company should have been alerted. The sheer blurring of lines between what the proper vendor for producing the laid-out P.I.s should have done, and what we ([Agency X]) should have done, and how even within this “structure” we weren’t upholding our end of the bargain, seemed more suitable to a wider broadcast to alert a range of Big Pharma companies about the unprofessional decisions that were made here—for whatever warning value it had.
Again, I don’t see the trafficker Georgia as terribly blameworthy in this; in designating how the P.I.s were to be proofread, she was basically following guidance from experienced staffers. And as far as my complaints about the lack of a second reader was concerned, I made my thoughts clear to Tweedle Dee; the ball was then in his court. And of course, for all my exercising some nerve with this, there was the alert about me just on the horizon (as I wouldn’t know until Friday).
As for The Geek: With him and myself overlapping a mere three weeks, on one level it’s sad he and I couldn’t get better grounds for seeing how each of us best was as a worker. But after how he jumped to conclusions about me here, I don’t really regret his not getting to know me more fairly. On a level of considering a broader range of things here, the level of outrage, I have all the grounds I need to say this: for him to handle me and the P.I.s as he did gives me firm footing for not only dismissing him as I would, but for changing his pseudonym: from The Geek to the Silly Jackass (I’m not sure if I need uppercase T for the).
Maybe I’m unfair with this new pseudonym?
No: because his role in “protecting Georgia
IV. The Geek’s hand in the “harassment” issue
I can’t tell you / how I feel / my heart is like a wheel / Let me roll it / …to you.
—Paul McCartney, “Let Me Roll It,” on the album Band on the Run (1974)
You work your heart out…!
—Lee J. Cobb’s character in 12 Angry Men (1957)
As I said, Tweedle Dee, The Geek, and ES all seemed to bond along the lines of religious affinities. Of course, The Geek and ES attended the same church. I remember him making some playful comment on about August 25 or 26 about “hymn jokes.” So far, not so offensive.
The Geek, I saw at one point, didn’t seem to like how Georgia Georgia
The Geek might have said, hypothetically, to Georgia Georgia
One thing that has stunned me the most in reading what this whole [Agency X] stint was about is that my work—its volume, its quality (of whatever level), its way of fitting into the scheme of things for months—seemed to mean nothing as I was handled like a reprobate who had to have a broadcast warning issued about him, while I was brought in one last day, August 27, for reading of yet another P.I.—this time the version of the P.I. for the earlier, already-approved tablet form of the drug (and there might have been two type-sized versions to come).
Sometime in my last days there, I also saw Tweedle Dee and The Geek walking and talking together in a sort of hugger-mugger fashion (keep in mind that The Geek had never worked at [Agency X] before), with Tweedle Dee making common cause with The Geek with far more rapidity and ease than Tweedle Dee ever did, or even tried to do, with me. It’s not hard to see how these two could be on the same page regarding what jejune notions circulated about my dealings with Georgia
V. The religious issue—mine in general, and how others’ played in an ugly way at Ferguson
This all offends me enough. But what even more deeply offends me is that The Geek should be in accord with Tweedle Dee—who himself was offensively disloyal to me in a sense in apparently acceding to Tweedle Dum’s decision to broadcast a warning about me—in my being handled like a hot potato my last day there. I wonder if The Geek’s religious inclinations, along with those of Tweedle Dee (for his own part), helped color his reading of me as a heathen beast to be used for onerous, client-billable work one last day and then eased out the door for good and all time.
I have this to say about religious hypocrisy in general. Of all the moral, ethical, business-ethics, and other practical precepts I go by—and this includes what I “cut my philosophical and psychological eye-teeth on” in college and afterward—the occasional hypocrisies of “religious” people has been bedrock among the things I don’t care for, to say the least. In the 1970s, amid straitened home conditions with low family money, no father, bad national economy, and uncertainty about how I would pay for college, I witnessed how age peers could be punks, what-have-you that wasn’t entirely moral, during the week, and then could trot off to church (for those I saw this hypocrisy in, in the immediate town, it was a Catholic church) as if they thereby had their own ladder to the Holy Land. This rather glibly sums up what I could witness in those days. I think my strong dislike of hypocrisy has a variety of roots, most of which lay in my pre-adult years.
Though I have made allusions to Christian ideas in my blog entries (e.g., my February 1, 2012, entry on the film The Wicker Man), I am not a typical Christian. I can be understood as Christian in the sense of William James. My beliefs and practices in Christianity go back to 1978, when I first grappled with a need to have faith amid severe personal trials. Previously, I had seen myself as an atheist or an agnostic. In later years, when I studied philosophy in college, I developed an intellectual disposition that took cognizance of scientific issues, established scientific facts, and scientific challenges along with the questions and ideas of religious belief. My personality, as does those of many other people, has pockets for both areas. In some ways this sort of thing can mean intellectual (and sometimes moral) conflict, and in other ways not. What it always means is a kind of intellectual (and emotional) breadth. It doesn’t mean idiot conformism, narrow-minded idealism, or rigid inability to interact well with others or at least try to understand them to some extent.
And some of my ways of dealing with religious issues—particularly the need to exhibit compassion for fellow men and women—have come from personal experience (growing up in a part of the country where you learn by hard experience to get along with different types, as well as deal with deviations from normal ways of interacting within your own family).
I never cared for people who wanted to talk my ear off about religious issues. I think it’s like someone slobbering on your sleeve. I always work to avoid dealing with Jehovah’s Witnesses that sometimes come to our door, who are looking to “talk” and leave behind a pamphlet when we get it across they can’t right now. On the other hand, at different times in my life, I have been touched by close friends, who are more thoroughgoingly religious than myself, wanting to persuade me to their side—not exactly converting me, since in these cases we are both Christians already, but wanting to win me over to what they probably feel (no blame here) as a more thorough, consistent stance. I have to gently convey to these friends not to take it personally, but I can’t come to their side right now, so to speak. I have my own viewpoint borne of my life.
Being delicate with religious others has also come up in support-group settings, where some women, “febrile” with dealing with recently acute depression, talk a lot of faith issues, and I know a hard-headed psychiatrist would look at that sort of thing as a symptom of bipolar disorder—faith ideas as “delusions” due to “bipolar.” To me, I see this point a bit too, but my own approach to cases of that would be gentle, where I would guide such a woman to a little more moderation in her talk/thinking while being careful not to label any particular idea of hers as “delusional”: I would say she needs to separate genuine religious enthusiasm, inclinations, and such from “religious obsessions.” Which is a sort of lesson I had to learn for myself over 30 years ago.
My own disposition mixes viewpoints of religion, psychology (as a semi-scientific discipline), philosophy, and the colorful course of study that comes from the School of Hard Knocks. My style of faith includes how I try to keep up a good attitude for dealing with “different types.” I realize that if I treated “other types” based only on hard experience, I would (if also coarsened by bitter experience) dismiss Jews, Italian-Americans, even (in recent years) Irish-Americans: in crass-comic parlance, “cheap, insultingly high-handed kikes,” “manic, stupid wops,” and “spineless, hopelessly conformist micks.” But living with your fellows means finding a way to see the good in others; and I know that trying to shove away the hard-edged summing-up of “different types” means having faith in the “better angels” of Jews, Italians, Irish, whoever else. We all are better for this.
To me, religious disposition means finding ways to be moral in life: it involves everyday choices. It isn’t just a wad of mental chewing gum of “my faith is in my head,” to quote a housemate of mine in Arlington , Virginia
So if The Geek had felt that, per his religion, he had to stand tall and arm-in-arm with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in having me eased out, separated from “Georgia whom I was being a reprobate about,” well, I don’t care for his style of religion. I’m putting that nicely; my original idea for rhetoric here was considerably more bloody-minded.
I especially don’t like his religious stance to the extent that his making common cause with others has meant decreased work prospects for me, to say nothing of his role in the P.I.s I mentioned above.
It is no surprise that according to his LinkedIn page (seen this fall), The Geek went from being a freelance “editor” (starting in August 2010) to becoming a staff “editorial supervisor” at [Agency X] in May 2011. That is [Agency X] in a nutshell; that conforms with their “religion,” making a goofus like that a supervisor when he didn’t know proofreading marks well.
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Explanations of within-text abbrevations
“Confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to are numbered per the criteria listed in the June 28 entry. Also, as noted in my July 3 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.
