[*An expanded, or reconfigured,
version of this entry could be included in the print “Jersey Combo Plate”
package. Edits 2/10/14. Edits 2/19/14. Edits 2/20/14.]
Subsections below (for Part 1):
Starting to look at what AM Medica means
Coincidental resonance with some current events
What is a “placement agency” and what kind of “freelancer” was I at AM
Medica?
Opening the door to AM Medica—from a more practical and subjective
standpoint
The company’s main line of products at the time, and the specific account
I was on
My immediate—and none too pleasing—boss (a start)
What follows:
Part 2:
My immediate—and none too pleasing—boss (full subsection)
One of my “secretarial” tasks—for me, more offhand than loved
The company structure—from my empirical viewpoint
The anecdote about a psych publisher
The strange transience of workers—unlike what you ever saw in Jersey
Part 3 (inclusion of
subsections, and titles, updated):
This work stint consumed my entire weekdays, while it seemed to help my
placement agency, GLG
In the teeth of the AM gig, brutally long days
In the teeth of the AM gig, a spur to incidental, young-years-type creative efforts
In the teeth of the AM gig, brutally long days
In the teeth of the AM gig, a spur to incidental, young-years-type creative efforts
Lunches with my sister and other mealtime novelties
The burden of this job was reflected, among other ways, in peculiar financial details
The arguable sine qua non of leaving: my working on "Ref Man"
Blessed relief
Blessed relief
Just to make clear: when I said
at the end of the Jason Aronson story (look at the end of this entry) that the “Dollars & sense” series was ended for now, I did not mean
that the other series would be ended, such as the occasional “Running with the
bulls” (on the latter theme, check out subsections 3 and 4 from this introductory entry). As was first planned, “Running with the
bulls” was meant to be both separate from “Dollars & sense” and possibly able
(in a specific entry) to overlap with it (that is, specific entries that fall
under both banners). And I would be disappointed not to do at least one “Running with the bulls” entry.
But my priorities for this blog
have been changing a bit, and anyway, I wanted my sets of entries that I
outlined in the introductory entries here and here to be adaptable to different purposes—such as my having expanded versions,
or additional stories, that end up in the “Jersey Combo Plate” collection. And
I didn’t want to have one of the new series end up a long set stretched out
over many weeks, like my Marvin Center series of last year, of which only a few
entries have turned out to be really popular (to judge by links I see tallied).
From a more accessible
viewpoint: The current couple of entries on AM Medica don’t really square with
my original idea of “Running with the bulls…,” nor are they largely a story on
New Jersey–firm business practices and manners. But they do involve a lot of
running, and that in tough circumstances. (I also have, in reserve, a “Running
with the bulls” story that solidly fits within the thematic framework, about a New Jersey firm, but if
this is published in any way, it will be through the print “Jersey Combo Plate”
avenue.)
E-Z takeaway: (1) A placement agency put me in a temp job
in New York City, ostensibly as an editor, with a horribly long commute. (My
first check from the placement agency, as it happened [and not that the agency
was devious with this], came after I was at the job three weeks, having
accumulated $200 in bus costs for that time, which I had some trouble absorbing
before pay from this job would cover such costs.)
(2) The client company was flightily
managed (by my immediate supervisor, anyway), including an avoidable,
manager-induced lapse in its securing copyright permission for an item I did “admin”-type
work for, to use as a handout in a conference.
(3) This anecdote illustrates in stark
terms how the business of medical promotions is primarily oriented around
billing the Big Pharma client, not ensuring quality of media product,
especially at an editor’s hands.
(4) This temp job did not pay me enough for
the extra NYC-related costs, and my boss handled me like a “girl Friday” much
of the time, hence my triggering my “tenure’s” being ended.
Starting to look at what AM Medica means
When I talk here about the firm
AM Medica, or Access Medica (as it was alternatively called)—I want to
serve some other purposes. (Originally I wasn’t going to do much online
research online into where it stands now, but I did, and it provides some
interesting additional foundation for my analysis here. I’ll look at what I
found below.)
For instance, the AM Medica
story is a sort of crossroads in a number of ways:
* AM Medica symbolized, to an
extent (and in the larger scheme of my anecdotes), the start of the breakdown
of the placement agency GLG. My placement at AM Medica in March 2005 was,
in a sense, a sign that the placement agency The Guy Louise Group was in
financial trouble, which would become more evident in late 2005, and would
reach “the point of no return” by about late 2006. GLG presumably wanted to
haul in money from a source that probably seemed eminently promising: Manhattan firms. And I
got to be the guinea pig that carried this “experiment” for them, for five busy
months in the middle of 2005. (Only one other GLG-employed editor was put in a
position similar to mine at AM Medica, and he lasted only about two weeks.
Whether GLG placed other editors at other
firms in NYC, I don’t know; I tend to doubt it.) Hence, the AM Medica story is
a sort of preface to my GLG series.
* My work at this place came in a
pretty successful year for me, a year that now seems of a “past, productive, unruffled
era.” The year 2005 was a sort of “high-water-mark” year for me in
retrospect. It was when my working for medical-promotion firms as aided by GLG
still was effective and made sense—at
least in terms of money, and following basic labor law or its spirit—as you
would expect as a rank-and-file worker. (But of course 2006 was when the GLG
business model, and related practices of its clients, started to come apart at
the seams.) In my personal life, I was having one of my best years setting up
educational lectures in Sussex
County for NAMI Sussex. I
was between working on book manuscripts with an agent and starting to write
independently of that agent. It was a few years before the Great Recession. In
a way, it seems like a wonderfully halcyon time for what creative and
professional activities I was in.
* AM Medica was a sui generis spectacle compared to other medical-promo
places. (Also, some comments below on where it stands—or doesn’t—today.)
The AM Medica job was not only a harbinger of sorts for the breakdown of GLG,
but it was in a way the most freakish medical-promotions job I had. I mean, it
wasn’t simply a matter of sleaze and rude manners such as you can readily see
in New Jersey
(in fact, rude manners, as far as I was concerned, were basically limited to
one person at AM Medica). It was crazy in the way that lesser-stature media
places might seem to be in Manhattan,
on the broader nature of which I have only scattered and often second-hand
information. And not simply providing a story today of resentment or the like, AM
Medica provides a kind of humor in telling of what a crazy work gig it was. The
details will make this clear. (Interestingly, one feature missing from AM
Medica—which I’ve also found lovably absent from what few other NYC gigs I’ve
had—is the mentality of a coworker questioning your very right to be
there—i.e., the extreme, “undermine-thy-cubicle-neighbor” mentality you so
often get in New Jersey.)
I hasten to point out
that this mini-series is not to
suggest that, because of unprofessional or haphazard practices at AM Medica,
the firm posed any risk to the public in a health-care respect. The particular
product account I mainly worked on there was aimed at doctors working in a
fairly settled area of health care, serious
pain management (in many cases meaning chronic pain), such as with cancer treatment or chronic back-pain problems,
which as it happens now entails occasional,
as-judged-necessary use of morphine. It also tangentially involves issues of
some patients’ potential to get addicted to painkillers. But there was no
direct-to-consumer material we worked on (or nothing that wasn’t already
established). There was nothing we worked on that required FDA approval (at
least that, in its wordage or format, was in play with us) as to the content of
a distributable item of literature. The worst anecdote I have to tell from AM
Medica has to do with one publisher’s copyright-permissions rights being
infringed on, which was partly the result of that company’s not interacting
well enough with AM Medica when I was there. But this is not a story to
warn consumers about a problem for them. Its main interest is in how
a Manhattan form of a medical-promotions firm seemed—in
its lower-level operations—almost farcical, in my opinion and in line with how New Jersey firms have operated,
in some of what it did.
As to what I discovered
recently: a few facts actually undergird my discussion in this mini-series, and
bolster my impression of the firm as a farcical place in 2005. (By the way, in
2005 it had about 15-20 or so workers; empty cubicles and offices suggested its
employee roster used to be a good bit larger.) First, I found that the parent company, Access Worldwide (to be
looked at more in Part 2), bought AM Medica in 1998. Second, there is a decision in a legal action in federal court (in the Southern District of New York) that is viewable [my summary here is subject to adjustment] regarding the fact
that a former employee of the firm, a young woman in a sort of junior
account-executive role (or the like), was subject to a lawsuit from AM Medica
where it sought a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order against her regarding its beliefs about her allegedly violating some kind of
confidentiality pact. This allegation was based on her having taken a job with
a rival firm and—as AM Medica seemed to imply was nefariously connected—a
former client of AM’s starting to be a client of this new firm. AM actually received a denial of its motion (on the question of the injunction, in an evidentiary hearing, with the decision to follow); in the interesting decision, the judge notes that AM’s contention that
the woman took a new job only when/because the other firm got the former client
of AM’s (as if implying her actionable intent) had no foundation established in
the hearing/discovery preceding the decision. In short, this suit was a way of
AM Medica’s trying to squelch a former employee’s getting better opportunities
at another job, under the theory (whether disingenuous or not, I don’t know)
of claiming violation of confidentiality strictures. The decision showed there
was no merit to this. This court action—in 2003—was about two years before I started working
there—as a temporary worker through a placement agency. (As we will see in Part
2, the turnover there was weirdly rapid.)
Third, I found that AM seems no longer to exist as a company at
all; the trade name appears to be owned by an individual who works (or is
recorded as being) on the East Side of Manhattan. So, the trade name
was assumed (bought? At a sort of “fire
sale” when the company was closing?) by a solo practitioner. My analysis here in no way implies that
this person isn’t reputable or capable (I don’t know who she is, and have
not contacted her). Indeed, the company’s having vanished, with only its name
surviving for use by a solo professional, is quite consistent with my own
analysis of AM in this mini-series, while not impugning what she is doing.
Anyway, my point in this series is not so much to argue for the shakiness of a
company as for how outlandish a work situation I was in—doing temp work, with a
horrendous commute, across the Hudson River in Manhattan, when the work after a
while seemed totally trivial for me professionally, never mind what my
placement agency, GLG, was making off my back in the process.
##
Further, the AM Medica story
provides me with an opportunity to comment on—as it happens, regarding the
copyright-infringement issue I just mentioned—the oddness (in my experience) of psychological publishers (which I alluded to here, in the second paragraph), which I wanted to give
a few more, short anecdotes on. We will see one in Part 2 of this mini-series.
(The anecdote here will be on a publisher we dealt with for permissions
purposes.)
Coincidental resonance with some current events
Lastly among what makes this
tale a “crossroads,” the AM Medica story seems to “resonate” with a certain
area of current events today—the George
Washington Bridge
scandal (“Bridgegate”). Now I am not seeking to “pile on” with hands-rubbing
commentary on this New Jersey–political (and serious legal) matter, nor do I
seek to (as some might mock me for) “make relevant” to current matters of
import some “precious old story of my own [in the workplace world].” In fact,
the AM Medica story has been “on my blog-story agenda” for some time, back into
at least December 2013, and I really don’t want to draw any parallels between
it and what we see plenty of coverage of in the local and national media right
now, in “Bridgegate.”
But there is one area of overlap
between the two: in working at AM Medica, I had to commute to New York City five days a week. (Of course,
where I crossed the Hudson—in
a bus—was at the Lincoln Tunnel, not the GWB. But the principle suggested here
still applies.) The commute itself was a monster: about two and a half hours one way, which included the varied modes
of my driving to a commuter-bus station about 20 minutes from home; taking the
bus in the New Jersey Transit system (over an hour’s trip); and then walking in
Manhattan from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to my place of work in the Chelsea
section of Manhattan, about 15 blocks (I didn’t want to take the subway, even
in inclement weather). All this traveling itself was a grueling aspect of my workday, never mind what happened at the
workplace during my day there.
In this gig I came to appreciate
just how tough it was for anybody to work in Manhattan, and why higher pay for all sorts
of jobs there seems more than justified. Also, in such a situation, you become
aware of what a “nuclear power plant” of the economy NYC is. Old
infrastructure, blaring evidence of hectic commerce, busy/stolid people—all
provide a whole new atmosphere in which to be part of an exciting and tiring
area in which to work. The stress of the whole enterprise is like the “ambient
radiation” of this “nuclear power plant.”
The last thing you need in this milieu is someone in a political “high
place” interfering, in bad faith, with transportation tools and infrastructure.
You better believe that the infrastructure and vehicles of mass
transit—bridges, tunnels, buses, trains, passenger cars—are all performing as
they should to keep the larger economic engine operating as it should. In
short, in this context, it is never a
good “time for traffic problems,” deliberately induced by an officer of the
governor’s office or some other state-government employee.
What is a “placement agency” and what kind of “freelancer” was I at AM
Medica?
It is important, if on its face
a little tedious, to understand something about how “placement agencies”
operate. I covered some of this in this entry from 2012, where I
talked about what is a freelancer versus other types of editors. The fact is
that the lines between the types of work arrangements that are relevant here—freelance and temporary (or “temp”) being the chief terms—have become blurred,
because of actual practices set up by
company managers as well as average
people’s understandings (whether effective in the work context or not). For
instance, you hear of people “temping” and, in a TV sitcom where the writing
may be naïve at times about a range of things, you hear an assumption voiced
that temp work is minimum-wage. Actually, when you work as an editor through a
placement agency, you could make well,
well above minimum wage, and it’s important to understand what this means,
both in your favor as the worker, and not.
Let’s try to make this simple:
A freelancer—per such
definitions as those of the Editorial Freelancers Association (as I knew it
when a member in the 1990s)—is a worker who contracts independently with a
company (often, a publisher), not
through an agency. You do a specific job—say, copy edit a book manuscript—per
an agreement that was made ahead of time. This could include what seems a high
hourly rate, say, $25 an hour. There may be a hard-and-fast time limit to the
work, or an expectation of a due date with a provision to extend the time a bit
if needed. I learned how to contract with employers along these lines. It isn’t
hard to do, but you have to have a track record of sorts that allows you to
“hang out your shingle,” and seek work over the long term, as this kind of
worker. And it could well be demanding work in its own way—along with the longer-term
trouble posed by dry spells when you aren’t able to line up work for a given
period.
A temp of the most
commonplace kind is a worker who is employed by a “temp agency,” where the
agency finds places (client companies) for you to work. The stint could be
days, weeks, or months; and a given, ongoing stint could be extended at will by
the client you are working for (and at). The pay rate is a steady rate for a
given job (or type of job), and it is dictated to you ahead of time (usually
there isn’t wiggle room for you to negotiate a rate). And the pay is usually
with taxes taken out—it is a payroll
situation. You are employed by the temp agency and it takes care of your
financial arrangement (including your being paid, and taxes being handled
professionally, etc.—which all is permitted by the client’s paying the temp
agency). (This all may seem like common sense, but it is amazing how this
“structure” was violated in the case of The Guy Louise Group in 2006-07.) This
while your specific, daily work is managed by the staff managers you work under
at the client.
Typical agencies of this temp
sort have been Manpower, Olsten, various “brands” under the corporate umbrella
of the Robert Half company, and a host of smaller firms (some seem to spring up
in an almost ad hoc fashion). A lot of craft-level workers like this
arrangement, because they are relieved of the worry of looking for work and resolving
any emergent problem of getting paid properly (as can happen in some rare
instances in the freelance mode described above). (There are temp agencies even
for lawyers and accountants.)
Temporary work involving what I call a placement agency rather
combines these two types of work modes. A placement agency is your employer; it
finds you the work, and pays you, usually in payroll fashion, with taxes taken
out, etc. But the type of work you do, especially as an editor, is presumably
the skilled, rare kind that you usually proffer and perform when working as a
freelancer as described above. And typically, the pay rates for placement
agency editors is pretty high per hour (say, $25 to $30 an hour, or higher).
If someone (working at a client
company at which you worked in this mode) were to think—in line with
commonplace assumptions that do not square with proper workplace thinking—that you
were “merely a temp” who, per the commonplace assumption, “gets low pay per
hour,” that person would be naïve, if not downright abusive if he or she spoke
disrespectfully to you on the basis of these assumptions.
I had worked as a “temp” of the
old-fashioned kind—through Olsten—in 1994-95, at the client of MetLife in its
pensions and annuities division offices in East Hanover, N.J.
After having done this, for reasons I won’t specify here (and not related to
MetLife, which was nice in its handling of me), I never wanted, nor want today,
to work as this kind of temp again. And the pay was fairly low—starting at $9
an hour, I think, going up to $10 an hour. I would have to consult records, to
double-check. But working as a temp this way was a step down from my prior editorial
stint at Clinicians Publishing Group, where the pay was about $12.50 an hour.
(This all could prompt an interesting anecdote from 1995, but “let’s not go
there” right now.)
When I worked at Prentice Hall
in 1997-98, being one of the several proofreaders in the art/production
department handling a massive high school-literature textbook project, I was
employed through a temp agency, which I suppose could have been called a
placement agency, though I wouldn’t have used the term then (I hadn’t heard of
it yet—and I don’t think this agency used it for itself, either). I don’t
offhand remember the pay rate, but it might have been about $12 an hour. I
found there were numerous temp agencies used by Prentice Hall for such
work—including small ones with such droll names as “Here’s Help” (recently I
discovered there is [or was] a branch of this in a town in Orange County, N.Y.,
distant from where Prentice Hall was in New Jersey). Such smaller agencies
seemed to have sprung up like toadstools after a summer rain in the area of
where Prentice Hall (and other large firms) were located in Bergen County, N.J.
The one I worked for was in a
hole-in-the-wall office in or near Paramus, N.J., and one guy who ran it, a
glib, hardworking fellow, talked about us temps being “guaranteed”—but I never
knew what this meant. They never tested us, at least for any specific,
sophisticated editorial skills (or if they did, it was in a rudimentary
fashion). We were basically taken on faith. And the way things worked, it was
as if such firms were “making hay while the sun shone”—they ferried temps
Prentice Hall’s way while the massive textbook project chugged on, raking in
the money (allowed by our working) while it was to be gathered, almost like a
plethora of leaves on the lawn on a fall day.
I didn’t actually get into a
situation involving a placement agency,
which connoted a sort of selective type of firm for “special client needs,”
until I started working for Horizon Graphics in spring 2001.
Sidebar:
Semi-defensive comment. If this seems—especially if you have worked in
these capacities—as if I am being ponderous and either repeating the obvious or
being overly ornate in explaining points, I am trying to eliminate
ambiguity—because, in fact, it would shock you how people, starting in the middle
of the last decade, who were presumably well ensconced in the “placement
agency” or “temp” world, could seem to run well afoul of the basic assumptions
of this type of work. For instance, by about 2002, it became evident I should
use the term placement agency to
describe the type of place I will look at next, because this kind of place’s
air of exclusivity, high pay, and supposed safeguards made this kind of
temporary work different from a more usually-conceived “temp’s”—which should
also help show how AM Medica’s using me in 2005 as if I were the usual,
old-time kind of “temp,” even while The Guy Louise Group seemed to use me (from
its own angle) as a means to keep its business model afloat, suggests there was
becoming something extensively rotten in the “state” of “temping Denmark.” This
is to say nothing of what happened with GLG in 2006-07.
The bare essentials of such a
firm, with my critical comments and tones withheld, are that they took on temporary
workers, who may have been tested (for work skills) in some way (usually with
tests—of specific workers for specific jobs—that were supplied by the client
firms, not created by Horizon itself), and who then worked for client firms at
high rates per hour, often with confidentiality agreements involved (usually
administered by and at the client).
In rough outline, things went
well for me with Horizon Graphics. I had work that, hourly and on average, paid
more than just about anything else I’d ever done, and this went on through what
looks now like a halcyon period for such stuff—2001 into 2003.
More precisely, my gravy-train
days with Horizon Graphics ran from May 2001 until about late 2003. This
started (in 2001) when I worked very briefly for a division of what was called
CommonHealth, which at the time was a large confederation of what had
originally been separate little advertising and promotion agencies; and this two-and-a-half-year
period included my working numerous stints at different companies, including an
eight-month continuous stretch at another division of CommonHealth (in 2002-03).
After a relatively busy summer with Horizon in 2003, Horizon seemed to be going
dormant, because it had run out of work for various of us temps. (Three of us
had our time stopped at once at one firm, as it decided not ever to use
Horizon’s services again.)
Then I had a few spaced-apart,
little stints at other client(s) through Horizon into 2004, but the gravy
train, in a sense, through Horizon had ended for me in about September 2003.
(And similar had happened for one or more other temps employed through it.) In
fact, Horizon got to a state where one of its principals, a John DiS., moved
the “operation” from its Boonton office into his home in Montclair, where the business phone line also
rang. I never had work from Horizon again after this move had happened, though
I had been in touch with them until sometime in late 2004, I think.
Meantime, someone—actually, an
employee of CommonHealth I was familiar with—tipped me off in early 2004 to
another placement agency, The Guy Louise Group. I thought that was a funny name
for an agency—it didn’t seem like an obvious big deal of a firm. Well, I would
end up having, on average, more work, and more money, through GLG from April
2004 until, roughly speaking, very early 2007 than I had made through Horizon.
The rest of the story on GLG’s history will wait.
Opening the door to AM Medica—from a more practical and subjective
standpoint
I had wanted to write this set
of entries on AM Medica mainly, if not entirely, from memory, with a certain
“soft focus” and elliptical quality that somehow, at the time, characterized my
experience there. But I decided to dig up some records, whatever I had, on it.
This story isn’t like that of Jason Aronson, where the more you rooted the
story in facts with exhibits to back them up, the more interesting it became.
AM Medica was a place where precision, concrete accomplishment, and common
sense often seemed beside the point.
When I dug out an envelope with
clots of paper from several places I worked at through Guy Louise—branches of
CommonHealth; Torre Lazur; Roche (the pharmaceutical company—the only one I
ever worked within); and others—I found only a little stuff on AM Medica. But
even so, what I saw gave me a little bit of the creeps. The weirdness of the
experience wafted off the old paper, a bit.
After you’ve worked years in the
medical promotions industry, you’re struck by how you have (in your records) so
little proof of what you did there. I
mean, with the publishers I typically worked at in the 1990s, you always ended
up—even if it seemed (prospectively) hard to accomplish at the time—with work
samples, some of which could be quite good (even if you had to accumulate a lot
of banal or non-career-serving work in the process of getting the samples you
really wanted, or that could testify to your best talents). When you worked for
small places, despite all the negatives, you could get samples you could use in
work applications, in photocopy form, for years afterward.
Not so with medical-promotions
places. Because they are so corporate—and managed almost as if to forestall
anyone taking a lot of credit (in readily established evidence) for what that
person contributed to a finished product—you end up having spent years in that
arena, and yet with very little in the way of evidence of your solid work there.
This is aside from the proscriptions these companies might impose on your
revealing much evidence of what you did behind their closed doors. I mean, even
if you wanted some evidence—if you took a chance on abrogating their
confidentiality agreements, perhaps with excellent cause or legal justification—there
still isn’t much you can have evidence of. This is even in cases where you
might have worked somewhere where a lot of paper—including of drafts or
iterations of work you served as a craftsman—was generated, some of which ended
up in your possession.
Sure, you can have tons of
timesheets (whether from the placement agency or linked more directly to your
work for the client), and pieces of personal paper, such as I scribbled my
times spent on individual accounts, as has long been my practice in the
medical-promo realm. But more generally, you could still seem (by virtue of
your memory, at very least) to have done a lot of putting in time somewhere, which was duly entered into clients’ accounting
systems—but evidence in your possession of the actual media products you helped
craft…? Very little.
AM Medica was no exception to
this, but this place even took this phenomenon to a bit of an extreme: there
seemed to be a “bias” to big money numbers there, so much so that that is where
I first got a grip (and in rather gargantuan terms) on how medical-promo firms
tend to “pad” bills to the client. A freelance editor there—who apparently was
hired in the more strictly “Editorial Freelancers” style of working—could get
paid $100 an hour. The total billed to the client for this editor, including what
was noted “accounting-wise” as an “AM Medica markup” (whatever that meant),
could be $250 an hour, covering the $100 an hour that went to the editor.
But what did I actually work on?
What did this company produce? And was the firm making good use of me?
Let’s go to a more direct look
at the place—and remember that I got here because The Guy Louise Group wanted
to break into the New York City work market—and seemed to have me as its only
worker in that market for a good part of 2005, and GLG even suggested to me
that it didn’t want me to leave until AM Medica was good and ready to. (But when this was, wasn’t entirely clear for
a long time….)
The company’s main line of products at the time, and the specific account
I was on
AM Medica by 2005 seemed mainly
to be for arranging “medical education” sessions, or “conferences” (the typical
industry term), which was the sort of thing some New Jersey firms also have
done, either as a sideline that was minor in the firm’s larger set of offerings
or as a main function. Here, “medical education” was mainly promotion of a
certain pharmaceutical product. This area of the blurring of the
ideas/principles of “education” and promotions/sales (initiated by Big Pharma
companies) has been looked at by The New
York Times in articles over a number of years within the past decade. It is
not my intention to parse (or tell anecdotes in) this whole area, to show just
what kind of work was education
versus promotions. By and large, and
in my general opinion, the firms I worked at—whether through the placement
agency Horizon Graphics or that of GLG—that featured “medical education” mainly
were fashioning modes of promotions.
When I was at AM Medica, the
main account I was aware of (and which I worked on) was a pain-management
medication, Avinza, which was specifically in the synthetic-opioid category.
And I think the only “product” I was helping produce was an educational
session, which I think took place in July (at a hotel somewhere, as these
things often do). This project involved—and these firms often have workers
dedicated just to this—booking doctors onto flights and stays in hotels, and of
course there was a panoply of educational materials to produce. There was
typically a big PowerPoint presentation, boiling down the educational points
for doctors’ viewing; and typically there was a duplicate set of these slides
that had narrative for a lecturer to follow (and which, of course, were “for
his eyes only”), which generally fleshed out the PowerPoint copy a little.
In general with such projects, there
could also be handouts of various sorts for the attendees.
With this Avinza project, there
were a slew of handouts. As best as I
can determine, pain management involving opioid medications—such as in
standardized treatment of back ailments, cancer, and other medical issues—is a
particular specialty involving some key things:
* its own concerns about how to
best administer a medication that can lend itself easily to addiction;
* the semi-subjective but
clinically important measurement of pain; and
* generally seeming to be a
stepchild among health-care specialties.
As a result, with this area of
medicine there seems to be an intellectually neat-enough set of concerns, and
not a whole lot of cutting-edge science, to be represented in the “medically
circumspect” information to be presented in backing up use of a medication at
hand. (I mean, there are innovations or refinement in treatment, but there are
not the technological advances, or need for same, such as you might see in
heart surgery or cancer treatment. For instance, one historical fact in the
area of pain management is that doctors reached a point years ago where they
eschewed use of morphine [with its obvious liabilities]; but then, in more
recent years [more than a decade ago], they started using morphine again, in
certain cases or situations.)
Now in AM Medica’s case, so much
of the material on pain management, addiction issues (and the related potential
for patients’ criminal behavior), and so on was relatively established, and
held by such reputable entities as the American Academy of Pain Medicine. (See End note.) Thus, all
AM Medica really wanted to do to accumulate a slew of handouts for the
educational meetings was pull almost all of it off the Internet, such as from
an organization’s own cache of useful documents provided for the public or others.
The freelance editor briefly
involved with this project, a young woman of about 23 who lived in Manhattan, worked
at AM Medica for a few weeks (and even had a company e-mail address set up for
her), and her charge was mainly to search for and pull the various items off
the Internet (which she had a definite skill at searching for). Meanwhile, a
lot of the printed material would be photocopied and stapled, by a factotum
there, a man with an Arab name (who was very nice), who worked in an
office/photocopying room; he was like a cross between a one-man band and a
train engineer, getting all his office machines cranking away, collectively
almost like a cacophonous carnival contraption. He assembled packets and other
relevant material for conference attendees. He stayed in the office; meanwhile,
some of AM Medica’s other workers would descend on the distant conference scene
like a SWAT team of electronically coordinated media crack operators.
.
So the company was little more
than a sort of audio-visual “support” entity, but with editors who turned up on
the scene of the educational conference to help manage the logistics and
technical issues, while whatever doctor(s) was/were lined up to lead the
conference did their thing (lecturing, primarily).
I believe that, in the past, when
it had also apparently been a not-large standalone company, AM Medica had
produced “original” media material as a main function. This had been, as far as
I know, in the 1990s (or starting before,
and into the 1990s), when (as best as
I could see) it was also distinctly less flim-flam-ish than it struck me in
2005. (As I said early on, it was acquired by an offshore parent company in
1998; whether a direct result of this was that it became more flim-flam-ish, I
don’t know.) (I could only find glimpses of its history in the old files I
found in offices that had been vacated by former workers, some of them
long-timers who had left not too long before, presumably at the “behest” of
coldly changing times that led the firm to be more apt to engage in
“educational conferences.” For instance, I found it had once employed—in about
1997—a freelance medical editor, Melissa C., who had worked for Clinicians
Publishing Group in 1993 and who was a good freelance medical writer.)
In fact, in 2005, AM Medica
still had an arm that, as a small sideline, produced ghostwritten articles or
the like for outside entities. One coworker, a nice, somewhat “wisely reserved”
Indian American woman named Raveena (I think), seemed to have responsibility
for this area. I think I did only a little work (like proofreading/copy
editing) for some of her stuff. (Raveena ended up resigning while I was still
there—she was “pleasantly discreet” about her plans, almost as if a reflection
on how crazy the place was.)
My immediate—and none too pleasing—boss (a start)
My boss was a Jay Petal (I won’t
spell out her full first name; and I use a pseudonymous surname); she was/is Indian American. (Raveena also was
this; but as a measure of things, Raveena generally [or sometimes with healthy
situational irony] looked rather askance at Jay.) Jay was, at first, the main
contact for placement agency GLG’s dealing with me. But there was another
woman, whose name was (I’ll disguise it) Kristine De Tour, who (after a bit of
time) handled the dry logistics of my scheduling issues; definitely she was my
person at AM for these details later in my time there. Kristine was a sort of
admin to the company chief executive, a genial enough, middle-aged man named
Steadman (or Stedman) [but his surname I’ve forgotten].
Jay was a pain in the ass. She
had a Ph.D., but in an academic or learned-professional’s sense; her degree was
in something related to odd variation on medical research, if I recall. As the staff manager who was overseeing
medical copy in the way of controlling what we editorial underlings did, as far as her degree went, she was not
what you typically saw (as far as I’d seen in New Jersey firms).
This was to say nothing of her
manner of managing things. I mean, she had her wits about her for certain passing
functions—and in general, we editors all can seem not quite matched to current
editorial work given our original degrees. But Jay was not really a hands-on
type of editor, though she did seem to have an eye for the content of the
printed material I was dealing with under her. And in terms of my trying to get
her cooperation on the hands-on stuff I was dealing with, she could be very
difficult.
(Subsection to be continued in Part 2.)
##
End note.
