[If you find a formatting
problem, see my note in the Profile feature of this blog. Also, a longer
version of this entry will appear, on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog. Edits done 3/26/13, with important ones between asterisks. Another edit 4/20/13.]
Subsections below (numbering
follows the full entry draft; certain subsections [4 and 6] are omitted for this entry):
1. Why did I quit the MC? A complex of reasons, befitting an elaborate
job
2. MC-related (or GW-related) amusing topics yet to be covered (but not
all here)
3. Summary observations on the MC
5. Have I given the full MC story (as to typical features)? Not quite
A
special section appears as part of an entry that is the longer version of this
entry, on my "Jersey Mountain Bear" blog: A thematic transition from the Marvin Center
history to an early (1989) paid-writing job
1. Why did I quit the
MC? A complex of reasons, befitting an elaborate job
Why did I quit the MC? I
submitted my resignation on September 10, 1985, to be effective six weeks later—an unusually long lead time for quitting a job, in my
overall experience. As it later turned out, Mr. Cotter allowed (after, I think,
I requested) that I would stay on for another two or so months through the end of
December 1985 while a replacement for me was found, and I trained the person a
bit.
The main reason (which had to do
with (3) below) that I stated in my
resignation letter was rather gruffly put, and wasn’t the only reason. There
were, more exactly, three reasons:
(1) I was tired of the same old problems that plagued the night
manager job (especially the weekend version, which usually dealt with the
fancier, and potentially more problematic, nighttime events)—part of the source
for problems will be looked at when I discuss C.J. in subsection 2 ("MC-related...") below.
(2) I had to move on from GW eventually, because the graduate
school phase of my schooling life was inevitably not going to be at GW (because
of the programs I was tooled for and wanted to get into—I first tried for
comparative literature). And generally I was committed to graduate school as a
phase of my career since 1984 and would be through about 1988. (See also subsection 3 ["Summary observations..."] below, at the sub-subhead The
MC was meant, in my mind, to be transitional.). This meant that, at
some point (hopefully not too inconveniencing to the upper-level management), I
had to quit the MC—the only outstanding question for me being when (and, further, my considerations
regarding timing and rationale for leaving in relation to graduate school were
more elaborate than this, and in a way were also a little naïve of me—as not to
be discussed here).
(3) A particular problem came up—having to do with the Security
department—that, when I addressed it in what I thought was an appropriate way,
was a spark for my being angry at how triflingly I was handled in response.
(It’s amazing how many jobs you can have where you can have an abiding,
relatively low-level set of problems that you usually maintain patience with,
but eventually can cite as a reason to leave; but what actually occasions, or
provides a strong pretext for, your leaving is an unusual, stupid incident or issue that is inflammatory in its
own way.)
The problem was that Security
personnel did things in the MC that were not in accord with what the MC needed;
in particular, I recall the outer doors being locked too early by Security at the end of the day. (There were some other things Security did wrong that I cited in a letter I wrote to the Security head in late August, but this one issue is what I clearly
remembered when first preparing this entry.) It was a routine part of managers’ job (both student and staff MC
managers) to lock the outer doors at the end of the day, which could be 11 p.m.
or 12 midnight, whatever the official hours were, on different days. But
sometimes Security guards did this locking too, not at our specific request.
And I found that they would (sometimes) lock the doors too early.
Obviously the students had a
right to get into the building right up until closing time. If a student wanted
to stop in on the ground floor to get food from a vending machine, and knew the
MC was open to midnight, if he or she found the outer doors locked at 11:45
p.m., this was a clear disservice to him or her. We managers would never have
caused this to happen; our job was to be of service to the students, and we
knew when building hours were. But some Security guards—I can think of one in
particular who I knew locked doors early, who was in general (and in my
opinion) a stupid oaf—took it on themselves to lock the doors early, as if
completely out of convenience to themselves. I had seen this more than once,
and enough to write a letter of complaint to *Curtis Goode, who I just found (3/24/13) was the addressee of the letter and I believe was the successor to Byron Matthai, the former* head of
Security. I don’t think I named any particular guards in my letter.
Well, I never would have expected the response. In long retrospect, this
looks like a case of my being called down for not “observing the chain of
command”; and *actually, as I reinspected the letters (3/24/13) for the first time in a long time, I found Mr. Cotter referred to the "chain of command" explicitly, but there was more to this situation than I had recalled, including stuff that justified my position. (A subsequent little entry on this blog, and/or an addition to the expanded version of this entry on my "Jersey Mountain Bear" blog, will spell these things out.)* Mr. Cotter reacted disapprovingly, and indicated I should have
channeled a complaint through him, which would then be handled as to go from the
higher-level MC management (if this was deemed appropriate) to the head of
Security (with probably an “appropriate” gloss of diplomatic language, though I
didn’t think my letter to Goode was harsh). In short, I had (per the
dissatisfaction with my move) short-circuited a “path for complaints” of the
type I made, which path I never knew existed. And I got a definite feeling
there was more of a perturbed sense, on the part of higher-level mucky-mucks, at
how I wrote my letter to Goode (both the fact that I wrote it and, I’m less
sure, how it was phrased) than there was at the original issue of the MC’s
doors being locked with disrespect for students’ rights. (A subsequent review of my letter shows that I was strong in my tone, but on the other hand, I was succinct in referring to rather serious problems. Moreover, the specific problems I pointed out on the part of Security guards--and there were numerous--would seem to me to be more important.)
I don’t have much of a different
opinion about this today, about 27 years later, than I did at the time (though today
I would handle my reaction to the
managerial reaction to me, as in my
resignation letter, with a more seasoned manner). I think it was simply wrong
for the whole issue to have been made one of my “not following the chain of
command” than of some Security guards acting in inadvisable or vaguely “rogue”
ways to the inconvenience of students. (It's possible the blow-up of emotions on the part of Mr. Cotter and maybe Mr. Goode was some of what exacerbated problems here, which could have faded if focus had been placed more quickly by upper management on the objective issues I raised, but I don't believe this--sticking to real issues really quickly--was done.) I thought this was petty of the
higher-level types and almost too surprising. I was surprised Mr. Cotter was so
much “not with me” on this. I have wondered at times if there wasn’t some other
agenda (among the higher-level types) in play that wasn’t clear to me.
This kerfuffle seemed a good
occasion to finally submit my resignation, which as I suggested under item (1)
above had already been brewing (but had been “subordinated” to an attitude of
patience) on the basis of the “same old, more typical problems” that kept
affecting my job. (See the C.J. sub-subsection to follow.) [Update: Further analysis of the resignation situation is seen in this entry of April 1.]
2. MC-related (or
GW-related) amusing topics yet to be covered (but not all here)
There are a few entries I
drafted on various interesting topics related (or not so related) to my MC
days, and I realized that some of them could be saved for a new, occasionally posted
category—“GWU Days”—which would not be a long, close-together snake of series
entries as the MC ones have been. Some could be put on my “Jersey Mountain
Bear” blog.
Topics for future occasional entries
One draft has an interesting
story on a GW visiting writer, David
McAleavey (he was a poet; he was a teacher of sorts in 1984, but not a full
professor; he seems to have become that later at GW). He had my help in 1984
when he was helming some little event at the MC. There was also a follow-up
exchange I had with him in 1985—very interesting. Will wait.
The second half of the Fern K. story will wait. There is
actually some very interesting substance to it, and it extends for some years,
but I’ve dealt with it enough for now, in Part 12.
I didn’t want my Andy Cohen story to be sadly curtailed,
so I will deliver a little follow-up, what it was like when I met up with him
in November 1986, when I visited GWU and environs for the first time since
February 1986 (and this was the first time I saw Andy since about April 1985).
November 1986 was the last time I saw him. (See End note.)
There were a number of little college-life tidbits I found in
my early-1980s diary that joggle the memory on some stuff from that time, not
all of it related to the Marvin
Center. They reflect how
college could be then, whether showing how more immature one could be at that
stage of life (regardless of one’s trying to be more mature in shouldering
college responsibilities), or showing how things were in the 1980s (culturally,
interpersonally, or otherwise) as different from today. Before too long, I will
pay visits to some of these old anecdotes, for whatever relevance they may have
today.
I also discovered an item in my
early-1980s diary that has given me a lot of pause, and led me to draft an
entry that is really more an item of
family history than an episode of purely college stuff: I repaid a chunk of
money to my mother in summer 1983 that was rather hefty for me then (and was
probably the last of several installments over time)—hefty in view of more
typical particular debts I had, and in view of the fact that I was working hard
for my own interests, school-related expenses not least. Generally and
obviously (to me, at least), we were never a family where “parents” turned
their pockets inside out to put their children through college. In my family, since
1970, there was only one parent, and while
we two children were in college, sometimes (not very often) “money flowed from
child to the parent.” In this case, if I remember rightly (I have to revisit
records of the episode, and it’s like an old, dark closet that does not please
me to reacquaint myself with), I had been repaying my mother for a lot of money
I borrowed from her for expensive and numerous repairs in summer 1982 of my VW
Dasher, the junker I bought in spring 1982 that turned out to be a bottomless pit
of mechanical problems. I think I was repaying her the last installment of what
I owed, in about June 1983, as facilitated by my having more income rolling in.
I was willing enough to do this at the time; I probably felt it was the decent
thing to do, if I didn’t also feel obliged (by some signal from her). In
retrospect, considering the many uphill challenges to my career over the long
term, not least with respect to my mother’s (shall we say) financial ways, I
take a dimmer view of that 1983 situation.
All these future blog entries
will appear either in this blog or my other blog, depending on which is more
suited to them. (My other blog is for more specialized tastes, so to speak; it
is like my “alternative music” station, while this blog is my “Top 40” station.)
Adding to the C.J. story a bit
The entry on C.J., Part 3,
seems as if it could use additional narrative and analysis. At one point I
added the note that the revenue-generating side of the MC (as to host groups
from outside GW) may have been set up to pay off a mortgage that may have been
taken out to pay for the original building of the MC, which was in the late
1960s. But this is just speculative. Another problem that affected us night
managers directly (and rather hamstringingly) was actually within the more
detail-oriented side of C.J.’s department: simple errors in scheduling of
events. On occasion, two events could be scheduled for the same location at the
same time, which was an obvious, embarrassing error. This sort of problem was
part of the rationale for getting a computer system to handle scheduling there.
This problem also, I think, was a prime example of the sorts of problems I
considered when formulating my set of rationales for quitting my job at the MC:
being tired of the same old issues that never seemed apt to be ironed out. (See subsection 1 above.)
Sleeping on Mr. Cotter’s couch
I’ll give here one little
anecdote from summer 1983, because it’s amusing for reflecting the slobbishness
of college life, and it does involve the MC. My dorm-mate Ron, whom I had lived
with (along with another dorm-mate) in junior year (1982-83) at Milton Hall,
decided to stay on the GW campus in summer 1983, as did I. Per usual university
policy, the relatively cruddy, small dorm of
Madison Hall was used by the student housing system for summer students.
For our particular convenience, Ron and I both lived for the summer in Madison
Hall, which was a block or so away from the nicer Milton Hall. We found the
Madison room unsatisfactory pretty quickly, he more than I, though an attempt
spearheaded by him to get us back into Milton Hall for the summer didn’t work
out (technically, as the housing office made clear, we could have stayed in Milton if we had made this intention known by
a certain, earlier date). Anyway, we “liked it or lumped it” when it came to
Madison Hall, though Ron took a while to let his dissatisfaction about our
temporary setup go; he fairly routinely referred to the room and nearby
communal kitchen, with friends, as a “rice on the ceiling” kind of place.
Ron was a fun roommate,
generally, but he could be distinctly more of a partier than I preferred to be,
and not just with me (he and I occasionally went out to bars) but with others
(whose range of partying activities was greater than mine). One night I came
home from work and found Ron had been smoking pot with a friend in our dorm
room, and I needed to get to sleep. I think I had to work the next morning. I
feared getting a “contact high” or such from the pot smoke, and overall it just
made sense for me to get the heck out of there for sleep that night.
I had MC keys with me, so I got
back into the MC and slept on Mr. Cotter’s office couch that night (this was in
August, I think). Those were the days, when you could live like that. I don’t
remember how well I slept that night. Nowadays, sometimes my sleeping situation
isn’t terribly much different, but it’s less “catch-as-catch-can” and Spartan than
that 1983 situation was.
3. Summary observations
on the MC
Was the MC right in line with my more envisioned career direction? No
The MC was meant, in my mind, to
be transitional. In fact, my work at the MC was, as I always saw it, a
sort of way station, something to earn money from, pending more serious career
pursuits (starting with further schooling—graduate school, which for me would
not be at GW). See subsection 1 above.
My occupying my job at the MC was (always in my mind, if less conveniently for
upper-level MC management) a temporary phase that followed my graduation from
college, and allowed me a little break after eight hard years of schooling
(while I also took classes, usually one a semester, as a postgraduate,
non-majoring student).
As I think about all this, I am
sure my supervisors at the MC, especially Mr. Cotter, knew about this. But as
time went on, I think the arrangement, or general idea, became less convenient
to them. When I had submitted my resignation in late summer 1985, Mr. Cotter
became especially disenchanted with me. I’ve always felt sorry about this; 90+
percent of the time I worked under him starting in January 1982, he was a good
guy (and I’m not saying this in light of the fact that he died many years ago).
In his quiet way he was steadily protective of his underworking managers. I’m
not sure why he got miffed with me; perhaps my being (over months) opinionated
about things in my staff time there got to him. The fact that I was bound to go
to graduate school, eventually, should have been understood by him; I don’t
think I kept it secret from him.
I have one possible explanation
for why he became disenchanted with me: I think he knew my particular slot in
the overall set of managers/shifts was hard to fill. At 30 hours (wedged into
three days), it wasn’t quite full-time, but also, you had a lot on your
shoulders on the weekend. And the more general onerous side of this old job exemplifies
a particular type of phenomenon I’ve encountered numerous times since: that you capably occupy a weird slot of a
job that leaves a lot to be desired, and yet, despite how often you alert
supervisors to the job’s shortcomings, the supervisors never see fit to fix
them all (or even most of them, at some jobs). Then after you’ve exercised an
unusually large amount of patience with the job long enough and finally quit, it
later turns out you are vindicated because your successor(s) never stay in the
job as long as you did, or the job is reconfigured so that it isn’t quite so
burdensome to successors. (This seems, in my long experience of the field,
to be a typical feature of a lot of editorial jobs, and I’m a bit surprised how
the MC job, which in many ways was blessedly free of the characteristic
problems of editorial jobs, still had this large feature.)
In fact, the man who took my
place in this MC job, a philosophy major (a year or more younger than I),
stayed in it only about a year (as I found in November 1986); I myself had been in it,
in its staff form, for a little over a year and a half.
The temporary aspect of my MC
job, regarding my longer-term career goals, was the case while my transition to
graduate school became complicated. I’d decided against law as a
career, having turned down in about spring 1984 a partial-tuition scholarship
to Boston University law school for a number of
solid reasons. Unrelatedly, by late 1984, I was working on my first novel
manuscript, whose most concentrated effort ended up extending from May 1984 to
June 1985. This did not mean I was ready to try to become a writer yet (for a full-time
or even depended-on part-time career; this sort of thing always looked like a big gamble).
And, as far as applying to
actual graduate school programs went—which had started within late 1984, aiming
at getting accepted in spring 1985, with school to start in fall 1985—suffice
it to say that the process turned out complicated, and needed a repeat-try the
next year. I won’t recount that process here; it is all too subtle and complex
to spit out in a blog. But my process of seeking a suitable graduate school,
complete with the kind and amount of financial aid I wanted, would continue
after I moved back to New Jersey.
(The broader interpretation of what my plans were from about fall 1984
through about late 1987 is this: On one track, go to graduate school [first,
in 1984-85, I would try—apply for, with the necessary component of
scholarship-type aid—comparative literature; then in 1985-86 and 1986-87, I
would do the same for philosophy], with the longer-term result of probably
becoming a professor. On the other track, I would also develop my skills and
practices as a writer of books, first of novels. The writing would be my true
calling; the professor work would be a means to support myself. All this
involved a considerable faith in long-term efforts working out, and one of my
principles here was to aim to do something
I could respect myself for [after a long process of getting to this level].
After an abortive semester in graduate school in 1987, in August 1990,
unexpectedly, I would in a sense start to satisfy [a relative term here] both
my “professorial” and writing “career aims” in the prostituting way of doing
catch-as-catch-can editorial work, to the extent that this helped my writing
efforts and was a means to earn money. Boy, does this open the door to a
possible darkly humorous blog entry; let’s hold off on that.)
Actually, how this side of my 1984-85
career, with respect to the MC, pieces out, illustrates an important thing: my
work life has always had multiple tracks, at different times and for different
reasons. (1) In college, I had
non-career jobs (like at a hotel, or at the MC) for money. (I never went the
route of the “internship,” unpaid or otherwise; I found that area bizarre when
I heard about it in college, and as much as I’ve learned about it over the
years, I’ve always found the idea/practice quaint and the province of spoiled
brats.) (2) With the MC, I had a
temporary job prior to heading off to a full graduate school program (even
while I did take post-graduate courses while still at GW). (3) Once I moved back to New
Jersey, I was faced, for more brute practical
reasons, with needing to get multiple jobs (usually in a series) to plug financial
holes. Then in terms of sheer common-sense strategizing, while partaking in
VISTA in 1986-87 and going to graduate school in 1987, I could not start a career job in those years (similar to
sticking with the MC job in 1984-85 as a sort of stopgap).
After the blue-collar-type job
of doing paste-up at a Sussex
County newspaper in 1988,
I didn’t really start more career-type work until editorial work beginning in
August 1990. Then, I had three jobs in a row that were “full-time” or close:
All American Crafts (1990-91), AB Bookman (1992-93), and Clinicians Publishing
Group (1993-94). The politics and improvident nature of these places led me,
not in any direct, easily maintained path, to become a freelancer, which really
got underway in 1997 (in terms of enough work to meet my financial needs).
Freelancing, with multiple things going on through the year, seemed the best
way to keep money rolling in and not depend on any one company for “all your income” (which has long, for 20+
years, seemed the best policy where media companies are concerned). Freelancing
for me lasted in its most provident phase about 11 years—1997 through 2007.
I’m proud to say I can account
for the complexity of my work life, which in many ways was necessitated by
circumstances and the crazy nature of some of the industry involved. I had no more the option to “become the man
in the gray-flannel suit” and go to one employer for all my work life than I
could wave a magic wand and become the Sheik of Araby.
In terms of a minor effect on my
morale, the atmosphere regarding peer relations on the GWU campus wilted for me
after my graduation. By early 1985 at GW, numerous old friends in my
class were gone. For some, if they were going to some post-graduate schooling
(either law school or grad school), they were doing it elsewhere. Other peers
who had whatever other career paths to pursue had left the campus. As for those
whom I’d known who remained, well, there was an odd change—I can recall one who
attended the GWU law school, which at that time was called the National Law
Center, who became more aloof from me, while I don’t think this was necessarily
a personal reflection on me. Even
within the MC context, people like Andy Moskowitz, who was the theater manager
(having started that as a student and become a staffer at it later), became a
little distant in their own way.
Some of this aloofness or
distance was subtle, and hard to specifically account for today; perhaps to
some extent it reflected (aside from the other people’s reasons for it) my own
self-doubt as I was in a transitional phase of my career, as I headed toward
being more of an “itinerant artist” as well as along the quixotic path of
trying to get into a suitable graduate program. Meanwhile, more objectively,
these peers and I were no longer swimming in the “bolstering” and “dignifying” aspects
of the hard and rewarding regimen of college as we all just had. Further, in
late 1985 and very early 1986, I experienced the sheer element of career choice/“chanciness” as making
things for me more “weirdly” unsettled, as the MC job was coming to an end and
I had no good prospect in D.C. lined up as a replacement, and I wasn’t decided
yet on returning to New Jersey.
(This sums a subtle and important set of conditions very roughly. In some ways
my novel A Transient, and more normal
recollections of the time, would convey the situation better.)
The Andy Cohen situation cast a
shadow on things. Most pungently, by summer 1985, the way Andy Cohen had
left both college at GW and his job at the MC (which I told the darkest aspects
of in Part 9; consider the parking-tickets issue), queered things for me.
Though, more objectively speaking, my career wasn’t on any clear downward trajectory, after Andy had had
his “meltdown” and left, I seemed (as a result) more isolated and/or
demoralized. This, in itself, still wasn’t an especially big reason for me to
leave the MC. Perhaps the Andy story will be further fleshed out to your
satisfaction when I recount, later, our meeting in November 1986.
5. Have I given the full
MC story (as to typical features)? Not quite
My 13-part series on the MC,
believe it or not, leaves a fair amount out, to show the true range of detail
and color of that job, but you get the picture of scope and responsibility of
that job. (For a letter of reference I got from Boris Bell in 1986, look here.)
##
End note.
Another note on Andy Cohen.
On proofreading my three entries on Andy, I am pleased to have presented as
much as I have, while I regret these entries (especially the first) are a
little repetitive in places. But all things considered, they are elegant
enough, given the topic. One of the fun things about blogs is that I can
present stories that are hard to get out in normal media, some of which stories
I have had “in the garage” for many years. I tried to get some out in book
manuscripts—and that as a general avenue turned out to be more quixotic than I
would have expected. But blogs are like
seeing your favorite rock musician live—there’s an excitement of spontaneity
and insouciance about it, and there are fumbles and bum notes. If you want the
full studio production of one of my stories, you would need to see the book. If
you want a “live” taste of such “artwork,” in all its flatulent glory, “on Letterman,” here on this blog is your
taste.
Further, the problem of having an elegiac portrait of a person (like Andy) come
out seeming “schematic” or “self-contradictory” in a way, in the
sketch-oriented confines of a blog, also might be apparent in my recounting
my 1983-85 dealings with Fern K. in Part 12, and this concern may be
relevant in my treatment of more recent workplace issues. Again, a fuller treatment in less hectic a “place”
than a blog allows a more nuanced, fairer portrait, and certainly a “lovingly
full” portrait—of anyone.
Anyway, one thing I said in my
A.C. entries is that Andy provided some inspiration for my fictional character
Samson. It’s important to note that (1)
I “backed into” doing this specific derivation of Samson, in the sense that (in
about early 1985) I sidled up to it not entirely easily, and I was selective
with “modeling fictional characteristics” on a real person. (2) There were some moral scruples I
had in 1985 about this—more generally, your becoming a fiction writer while
modeling things on real people or events is a strange process that, as
ethically fastidious as you may try to be, is still complex and
“innocence-losing,” though (as you develop) you get more “integrally” adult
about it.
(3) Making a negative character based on Andy may seem as if I was
disillusioned about Andy at best,
which was true in some regard; but it’s probably more correct to say that by
March 1985 I was mystified by, as well as disappointed in, Andy regarding
certain things about him; and as a college-age person can do, I worked this
into my writing as a sort of “therapy” along with all else. I should point out,
again, that there have been readily-enough embraced positive ways I’ve
remembered Andy too.
