Subsections below:
1. Statistics from
different parts of my blogs
2. Toward the
“Dollars & sense” theme: A passing note on my Marvin Center series
3. The “Dollars &
sense” series—what it should be about, and what inspires it [JCP]
4. “Running with the
bulls in New Jersey” [JCP]
I’m at a position in my blog work where I can state with
some confidence some of what I can do in the new year. The things I said I
would work on in 2013—in my “signpost” entries of last winter and spring—I’ve
mostly done, and on just about all the balance, I’ve said I would hold off till
a more or less later time. Some of these latter items can possibly be posted in
the future, but I am in no rush to post them.
One item, on the
radium-soil affair in Vernon Township in 1986-87, I would like to work on
for 2014, because it will have some relevance in more ways than one.
Note on special codes: I
will put a sort of code before some of the subsections below, based on whether
they relate to one of two or more categories of alternative “story distribution
means” that they can be transferred to, as emergent circumstances warrant. This
means that the possible blog series (or one-entry idea) noted below may end up
being shunted to, or finished in (or otherwise dealt with), one of two
avenues for future production and distribution I will use for the stories: (1)
the collection called “Jersey Combo Plate” [code JCP], which I’ve previously mentioned (in this entry), which was languishing and didn’t get off the ground, and now might (and is a relatively CHEAP
avenue—more details to come [update 11/20/14: JCP is not available in print, as has been detailed to people on my mailing list]); and (2) the project titled The Revenant [code RVT],
which for now I will delay commenting on very deliberately until the time is
right. This is a classier project whose nature will indicate why it is being
handled more “with cards behind my vest.”
When you see the code JCP or RVT
beside an idea/series category below (and you will see it on the relevant blog
entries to come), this means the entry/series may end up being partly or wholly
done within the “Jersey Combo Plate” project parameters, or alternatively The Revenant parameters, instead of on
this blog. How you may access material at least in the “Jersey Combo Plate”
realm will be made available before terribly long. (I am doing this partly for
reasons of convenience and “business sense.”)
1. Statistics from
different parts of my blogs
Maintaining my two blogs has required me to wear three hats:
writer, editor, and publisher. (As you know, each can have their down side; get
three such persons together with their down sides, and you have quite a
committee, presenting some kind of
business for your consideration.) Now I add my least favorite kind of
functionary, but so necessary in today’s media-besotted world: marketing
analyst. (By the way, though my statistics on links to specific entries may make it seem like my blog isn't much read, the total number of page views for both my blogs is over 12,000.)
With my marketing analyst hat on, I find:
* In my top 19 list for the present blog (with results as of December 4), all the
entries are from 2012. Why are these so popular? Was the quality of them,
overall, better than those for 2013? Possibly. I do know my mood in writing the
2012 entries was generally different from that for 2013. In 2013, I was both
“slower” and more self-conscious in fashioning the entries.
Speculated reason. The
fact that links may have started to my 2012 entries so prodigiously in 2012, for reasons apart from
perceived quality of the entries over the longer term (into 2013), may have set up a continuing potential for
increased links to those entries to go on through 2013, with concomitant
indifference to my 2013 themes. More specifically, these links may have happened
for such reasons as (in 2012) perceived relevance for some readers to stuff in an outside context going on in that year (whether workplace-related or
otherwise). For instance, to take one especially conspicuous example, the Gene
Mulvihill stuff (posted in November and December 2012) became of note in 2012
among a subset of readers (say, people in Vernon Township, N.J.), and they
shared them with like-minded or equally local readers, and the amounts of links
snowballed for these entries from there, over many months.
* Concomitantly, of my 2013 entries on this blog—and I’ll
admit, I had less enthusiasm (in a sense) for prodigiously doing entries in 2013 than in 2012—very few have
numbers of links that approach the most popular of those from 2012. (Update: As of December 26, the entry in
the spring on the films Freaks and Pink Flamingos had 55 links, putting it
into the Top 19, the only 2013 entry at the time to get this distinction.)
For instance, one of the most popular, “Pentimento pause 2…”
(on the Bauer lawsuit), has 43 links
at last check on December 26. OK, so maybe what I was interested in writing
about in 2013 didn’t float the boats of many of my readers. Something for me to consider as I embark on
2014 work.
* On my other blog (“Missives from the Jersey Mountain
Bear”), there are some interesting facts, but one thing I won’t do is post a
“Top 10” or “Top 15” list for it, or tell you numbers of links for certain
entries. A few things, though, can be said, which may not entirely surprise
you.
(1) Among the seven most popular
entries (for the total set of the blog, which is about 42 entries), the numbers
of links are a good bit higher than the links for the five most popular entries
on this blog for 2013, and they
approach many of the numbers of links for the top 19 for this blog (though the 10 or 12 most popular entries for 2012 for
this blog have higher numbers of links each than all the most popular on the
“Bear” blog).
(2) It’s reasonable to suppose that
increased popularity of entries on the “Bear” blog, generally, can happen more
readily because there are fewer entries overall to wade through, and hence
people’s choosing (and linking to, or referring to another person) items of
interest can happen more easily there.
(3) The general nature of themes on
the “Bear” blog, which is more personal and more detail/context-oriented, seems
to condition the increased popularity of the more popular entries there, though
measuring this in any precise way is hard.
(4) The phenomenon of certain entries being more popular for seemingly obscure reasons on the “Bear”
blog happens as it does on this blog,
and the reason may be the fact that subgroups of people with particular
interests happen to share these entries eagerly, kicking up the link amounts,
in a certain self-potentiating “engine” of a “subgroup” and/or “subcategory of
heightened interest,” without the readers’ looking more over the whole set of
entries for ones of almost equal interest. (For instance, a summer 2013 entry on
a turtle and with reference to “teleological suspension of the ethical”
continues to get more links, and who knows why.) In a very general sense, this
is as with the Mulvihill entries, but frankly, why one or two of the entries in
the “Bear” blog is of such interest and still grows in links (particularly one
from fall 2012 that is superseded by later entries) is puzzling to me.
Anyway, there are three sets of “values” suggested here,
which I am quite mindful of in deciding how to proceed with my blog work in
2014:
+
The sense of a certain relevance/piquancy seen in the 2012 entries on
this blog and perceived to be missing from the 2013 entries
+
The fact that fewer entries makes it easy for people to browse for
entries they’ll like (as on the “Bear” blog)
+
The “subgroup”/“cliquishness of certain interest” phenomenon (noted in
(4) above)
All these lead me to decide how I will do future blogging,
without losing what value that my own means and agenda of 2012 and 2013 have
brought to this.
2. Toward the
“Dollars & sense” theme: A passing note on my Marvin Center series
I make a point of not publicizing my “links”-based
statistics on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog, though I am heartened by how
popular are numerous of its entries, which as a collection are different in
tone and substance from a lot of what’s on the present blog.
But one entry surprises me a bit as to the fact that it’s
among the top five or so most popular on
that blog (of a total 39 or so entries). It’s the long version of Part 13
of my Marvin Center series, which series I unfolded
mainly on this blog (last
winter/spring). As I said, there being fewer entries in the “Bear” blog may be
why the long version of Part 13 (which is only on the “Bear” blog) happens to
receive more attention, but I wonder why it has so very many more links than all
the other Marvin Center entries on this
blog, including the short version of Part 13.
I will hypothesize (for now) that for the readership of the
“Bear” blog, which I have a feeling is overall a bit different than for this blog, the MC 13 entry is especially
interesting, particularly as it may bear on this question that my readers may
have had: “What kind of job did he have in D.C., after college, before he came
to Jersey, where we all might admit there are so many career-related pitfalls?
And especially, why did he leave that D.C. job?”
I’ve already given some quick account of why I left the Marvin Center
in late 1985. I was going to move on from D.C. anyway, for graduate school;
that essentially was in the works since 1984. Money for grad school was a prime
issue; I wanted more financial aid in order to be practically able to go than I
was getting with earlier grad-school applications (spring 1985), which led me
to apply again for acceptances to come in early 1986. The only sticking-point
question was when I’d leave the MC. I thought that if I left many months before
I really would forced to leave the D.C. area for school (presumably late summer
1986), that could serve the MC well (I initially gave about six weeks’ notice)
and serve me, too: months before school was to start, I could find another job
maybe where I’d be going to grad school. (I am working to reconstitute my
careful thought of that time, over 25 years ago. I didn’t make impulsive career
decisions at the time.)
But my real point here is this: Do you blog readers feel I
let a magnificent job, with the MC, slip through my fingers? If (as I said in
this GWU-related entry, at the end of the subsection “1. Lloyd Elliott, 1918-2013”) I was
several steps down from President Lloyd Elliott’s level, was I foolish to, blah
blah blah?
It’s funny how people have interpreted that MC job over many
years. In my first few years back in New
Jersey, occasionally I’d hear people talk as if it
was just a “student” job. One man I interviewed with for a job in about 1989—I
think for a firm that made ventilation equipment for houses and businesses or
such (yes, it was a weird choice for me to apply to, but I was desperate for
income)—seemed to remark off-handedly about it being a student job, and he asked
me—in a way that has irked me ever since—why I’d gone to grad school in 1987
(three years after I’d graduated from college); and he asked me this twice. As if he didn’t understand when I
first told him. He was a real ass for this. It’s always the really bad,
insulting job interviews I remember.
Well, aside from what my career aims were, the MC was
certainly not a “student job” when I left it. I mean, I had many of the same
responsibilities as I did when I worked there, from early 1982 through spring 1984,
as a student, but there were more (and more serious) I had as a staffer. But
even for a student, the responsibilities were heavy enough. You didn’t merely
serve ice cream, or operate a cash register. Among many other things, when the
fire alarm went off, you had (sometimes, depending on emergent circumstances)
to help evacuate students from the building (including someone in a wheelchair,
carried down the stairs, of which I was only one of several who helped in that). You kept an eye out for criminal situations.
You dealt with homeless people who came into the MC. You dealt with the
“bathroom gays” (see Part 8 on that). Etc., etc.
And it was a wonderful job to have, not only to serve my
needs for money, but in how it expanded your knowledge with its exposing you to
so much—not just negative experiences, but so much of the culture of GWU.
But come later 1985, along with all else, it was time to
move on. I’d worked at the MC in one form or another since 1980 (with two
summers away). That’s a long time (at approaching-five years) for someone of
that age (19-24) to be with one firm, especially when I was like so many other
students of my age, really forced by circumstances to work at a ton of various
jobs just to patch money together for school and other little necessities of a
student (I think the statistic I long used is that I had about eight jobs by
the time I graduated from college and about 12 jobs by the time I left grad
school).
Well, here’s the big
point: guess how much my MC staff manager job paid? I used to know the
hourly rate, but forgot it: but yearly, to judge from my tax information, it
was about $12,000-13,000 a year.
Yes. You use your own calculations to see what that’s
equivalent to in 2013 dollars. The job was 30 hours a week, at that yearly
rate. The only benefits: health insurance that I had to pay half of (because GW
had a rule where “part-timers” paid for half of health insurance, and even
though part-timers often were 20 hours/week, I was 30 hours, and still had to
pay half—my insurance premiums weren’t prorated per the 30 hours). I eventually
dropped the health insurance because it almost did not pay at all for the one
regular expense I had (it covered $4 of a $200+ bill for a kind of alternative
therapy).
The other benefit was that you got three credit hours for
taking classes, free, at GW. I took advantage of this. This was the one benefit
really good to me.
There was no retirement plan. There was no life insurance
(certainly, I never signed up for any as an employee, though I had life
insurance that my mother first bought—I think it was marketed through the
association I had with GW as a student—when I was a student, and then which I
assumed the payment of myself, and still have today). I don’t even remember if
the option was offered of free parking in the numerous GW parking garages
(though I didn’t have a car down there at the time).
And here’s something else, though this wasn’t a function of
my being a staff worker there in 1984-85: when I was a student employee, in the
game room and then as an assistant building manager, GW did not take out Social
Security tax. I found this out many years later, maybe 10 years ago. I
contacted Social Security about it, I think it was, and they told me GW had a
deal where they did that with student workers. So, when I looked at my
statement of “pay history” and projected benefits that Social Security used to
mail out each year, the GW student work isn’t represented. It’s as if I hardly
worked from about 1981 through 1984. Shocking.
Do I feel I was ripped off by GW with how I was employed as
a staffer in 1984-85? No. It suited my needs at the time. And since it wasn’t a
career job for me anyway, I didn’t really care that the pay was what it
was—actually, it was a definite step up from what I’d ever been able to get,
for the hours, as a student.
But was I a grand administrative sort who was paid “big
bucks” who frivolously left the job? Well, is that what you young Turks (or
whoever you are making the MC 13 entry on the “Bear” blog so popular) think?
Guess again.
But the more salutary point here is that, throughout any of
our careers, it is a journey we take—from lesser to better, learning along the
way. And I can encounter plenty of situations today where young people have a
rather cruddy deal fobbed off on them as they work as earnest sorts, e.g.,
working a register at a supermarket while attending college, etc. You can look
back years later and appreciate some things about those early jobs that you
didn’t at the time, and also may be struck by how you accepted some kinds of
grubby responsibilities in your early twenties that you would never, for the
same pay, in your forties.
It is in view of this sort of thing—discovering as you go,
from whatever your starting point is, what kind of ambiguous, lesson-teaching
“roommate” your own personal work history is as you try to ascend the
ladder—that I present what I hope will be a useful series following the theme
ideas shown immediately below.
3. The “Dollars &
sense” series—what it should be about, and what inspires it [JCP]
[Two entries in this series are here and here.]
One set of concerns I think I am ready to make a few trenchant entries on, in a series: the level of pay, and the problems you can run into regarding pay—and what I found you can do about them—in the print-media industry (and this can include certain firms related to medical promotions, which area has some important divergences from the more traditional print media industry—some divergences relating to issues of common sense—as I grew versed in it in the 1990s). On this blog in 2012 and less pointedly in 2013, I have done all kinds of entries revealing some of the “dirty secrets” of the print-media industry in its traditional forms, but have rarely touched on pay.
One set of concerns I think I am ready to make a few trenchant entries on, in a series: the level of pay, and the problems you can run into regarding pay—and what I found you can do about them—in the print-media industry (and this can include certain firms related to medical promotions, which area has some important divergences from the more traditional print media industry—some divergences relating to issues of common sense—as I grew versed in it in the 1990s). On this blog in 2012 and less pointedly in 2013, I have done all kinds of entries revealing some of the “dirty secrets” of the print-media industry in its traditional forms, but have rarely touched on pay.
Pay level as an abstract matter, of course, is ordinarily a
confidential matter, per the usual convention. But of all the horror stories
you can tell about the print media world, the phenomena concerned with pay (the
level, and some conditions about how/when you get it) would really scare off
some people new to the area—because so many laypeople seem to think that the
print media is a field that is for “people of talent” or “is a privilege
to be in” or “is an area all about honor” or such, and along with this they
think that the pay is good. Boy, would they be surprised.
Another thing some snarky laypeople to the industry might
think is that, well, maybe some people—like me—get raw deals pay-wise because
they’re some kind of noodge, and they weren’t diligent enough, or they somehow
had it coming. All not true. Especially when you find that other people are
subjected to the same deals, including older and more experienced workers, you
know that the field is one endemically rife with pay difficulties. Over the
longer term, you have to almost be a clergyman taking a vow of poverty working
in this area (as I suggested on my other blog in “The courage of Kate Brex,”
subpart Z).
But of course, it is a business, too, and you may reach a
point where you think that the managing types who try to foist off on you a
stinky deal seem to think that “you have to earn your wings” or “you have to
learn that it’s a tough business”—when you know this in spades already—really
themselves are in deep need of being held to account in some pungent way. There
are things you can do to get, perhaps, a little higher pay rate. Or there are
things you can do—some of which may seem a little hardball-like in other kinds
of industries—if your pay is being delayed (which, yes, happens more often than
outsiders would think), or there are some other doubts you have about how some
specific pay you should have coming is or will be handled.
I will look at some concrete examples of this sort of thing
in future entries; be patient—it will take some time. Also, see subsection 4
immediately below for some notes on how
relevant, or not, my stories may be to you.
Meanwhile, for some basic info on one of the biggest,
weirdest examples of this in my entire work history (i.e., the story of GLG),
look at subsection 5 in Part 2 of this extended introduction.
4. “Running with the
bulls in New Jersey” [JCP]
This series will have some thematic overlap with “Dollars &
sense”—in fact, for specific blog entries, I will put them under the banner of either subhead or of both. [Update 1/22/14: Anticipated entries will be under the banner of "Running with the bulls."]
I definitely want to do a mini-series headed “Running with
the bulls in New Jersey”—about how tough it can be to pursue a prissy editorial
career here. You’ve heard a lot of my stories already. This will be a very
“occasional” series—when the spirit moves me, I’ll do an entry. But I won’t be
as dogged about it, or apt to supply as dense a parade of entries, as I was in
2012 on this sort of thing.
Look at it this way: the entries from 2012 are rather a
prelude to what I might say in the “Running with the bulls” series. Now,
granted, these entries were not all that popular; next to each title in the
list below, with its specific link, I include the number of links done by others as of December 15, 2013.
Note on relevance to
you: If you read the 2012 entries just noted, my future “Running with the
bulls” entries shouldn’t be such “musty old war stories”; the future entries
will be more on nitty-gritty procedure on what I did to iron out standing,
difficult problems. But also note:
this does not mean that my experience
will mean you should do the same
thing, or that you should expect the same results. There is a certain
more-or-less grubby art to dealing with the problems I am to address. How you
are to learn how to deal with them is like
learning to ride a bike: everyone might have his or her own way, in terms
of passing details, of how to do it, but you
“learn” by seeing the Gestalt of
someone “mystifyingly” riding the bike, then you try stumblingly to imitate
this, then, Voila! You might actually
start doing it your own way.
The 2012 entries that in some sense are “prefaces” to the “Dollars
& sense” and “Running with the bulls…” series:
March 28, 2012
0 links
March 31, 2012
5 links
April 6, 2012
12 links
April 27, 2012
38 links
May 2, 2012
19 links
July 9, 2012
19 links
Anyway, I will be more practical in the future series than
those 2012 entries might have seemed.
One story in particular is from 2005, when I worked for the
firm AM Medica in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, as placed there by The Guy
Louise Group. That, I assure you, will be an interesting story. If you feel
that I had “finally arrived” by working in New York City, guess again.
##
Introductory notes to
be continued in Part 2.
