Prentice Hall series, Part 5: The cumulative nature of developing a freelance career, and the occasional necessary evil of temp agencies

Subsections below:

By 1998, the opportunities from different companies (compared to today) bubbled up like bonanzas of oil in an oil field

Prime Time Staffing—pros and big cons

Sidebar—the typical route to getting non-temp work at big companies

Sidebar: The PTS/PH relationship—a Rube Goldberg sort of “structure”

A glance at the home stretch

Sidebar—fluky copyright dates

[See Part 4 for links to series Parts 1 through 3. Edits below 6/14/15. Edit 6/24/15. Edit 7/7/15.]

By 1998, the opportunities from different companies (compared to today) bubbled up like bonanzas of oil in an oil field

One of the things about these years is that enough other options for work came up that, if you got kicked in the ass by a certain place, you tended to let it slide because a replacement, not shabby, came up pretty quickly. As it happened, until June 1999: not only did I have North Jersey Newspapers copy editing going on regularly (this was mainly a nighttime job), but I had occasional work through Country Inns magazine; and The World Almanac work for me started, as I said in Part 4, in May 1998, and would continue (definitely less than full-time hours per week, growing as fall approached) until early or mid-November.

I don’t mention all this to brag, but to show how scattershot (though bountiful from a retrospective perspective) such a career can be, which for me inevitably was a product of so much straining (via mailed resumes, or occasionally hearing of, or being “tipped off to,” opportunities through the grapevine). All these things, importantly, I didn’t get through a temp agency. (And I would have more time at The World Almanac in 1999 and 2000-01. My stints there were typically several contiguous months.)

And from July to October 1998, I worked at Troll Associates, a sort of grade-school book-club marketing company that was a second-place competitor to Scholastic (and eventually its product line was bought up by Scholastic). Troll I did a few hours a week, and as a freelancer there not through PTS or any other temp agency. (I hope to talk more about that experience another time.)

As it happened, 1997 and 1998 became my first big financial years in several years—though in dollar terms they wouldn’t seem tremendous to a lot of middle-class sorts; the total money for the years was big enough for me in terms of the type of freelance editing I was doing. I say this because I’m astounded how much progress I could make in this kind of career then, compared to now. Considering also the changed nature of the industry and how you can practically get work, it really shows that a flowering world is long gone.

And the majority of these work gigs I got through ads in the paper, something that is very uncommon now, while I still (almost as a conditioned reflex) peruse classified sections in the newspaper today, but not as religiously or anxiously as 15 or so years ago. And for a long time now this hasn’t been my primary way of scouting up work.

I had remarked in Part 1 about how

big companies that used to be able to employ freelancers in a generous way of rounding up a herd of locals (via temp agencies)[,] who were a reasonable drive away[,] have generally [today] gotten to be more of an entity that maintains its corporate power and self-protections by doing the most it can NOT to use local freelancers….

In the old days, with that life, given work commitments, you could be running around in your car to different locations—coming onto one location (in Upper Saddle River, N.J.), diligently putting in time, then heading in the general direction of home, doing more work at another location (in Butler, N.J.)…. And I remember (from spring 1998) doing some proofreading of World Almanac early-stage pages in a public park in Butler across from the building where I worked part-time at a newspaper (before I went in to the newspaper office to work)….

This was a way of being a tried-and-true, trusted professional who was known by his or her physical reality, so to speak, not via the Internet-mediated imagery, mythmaking, paranoia, etc. (A negative of these days I recall was the sheer amount of driving, though in a general sense I’ve always liked driving.)

This was the freelance-editor world you had then, for better or worse. (Mostly better.)

You may gawk: Newspaper ads? Plodding around like a dopey roadrunner? You say, How nerdy.

This picture may sound nerdy and plodding, and it did have its tedious, sometimes frustrating side. But the positive side of all this is that when, to a large extent, people’s employing you depended to a good extent on how your pragmatic, affable personality impressed them, this came as it could only do in many cases to seal a deal, when you turned up at a workplace, and stupid illusions were banished. Your ability as a freelance worker made its best impact when you were involved in concrete get-togethers. That’s something sadly lost in this day of young workers who are much more adept at social media (with pictures of their pretty faces and party-ready bonhomie) and, as they trod in their own (coffee-fueled) lives, having their attention stapled to their smartphones, than at having some heft and agility in concrete work contexts (this is to say nothing of Internet defamation).

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Note that this kind of freelance work over a given year means patching together work, of whatever duration and whatever frequency per week, from different sources. Is it easy? As I’ve suggested, not always. Is it security-instilling? Depends what you mean by security: if you mean does it leave you feeling you can always pay your bills on time, not necessarily; but if you mean does it expand your ability to feel in control of the chance to get work, which itself conduces to some security, yes.

If I was to review all this and say what do I regret most about the way the publishing industry in New Jersey is, as inherent conditions of this kind of work situation, I think one general regret is something that couldn’t be helped: it didn’t allow in the least for saving for retirement (and of course, it didn’t even really help you have enough cash flow for paying for individual health insurance, if you had wanted to get that).

But I think one thing you do come to fairly easy as a “lesson learned” is (as you get older) to put on a short leash, if not make nonexistent in your life, the use of temp agencies, which prove to be among the stupidest and most borderline-sleazy elements in this kind of work world.

Prime Time Staffing—pros and big cons

If outsiders were to assess what about this PH School project of 1997-98 was “obviously sleazy,” perhaps the likeliest candidate would be the role of temp agencies in it. As perhaps the biggest percentage of my papers from the PH School project are time sheets, copies of letters or faxable notes, and so on concerned with Prime Time Staffing (first discussed in Part 2). And I’m amazed at how much apparent objective cause there was for this communication, which was primarily for everyday concerns.

(Drolly, there are even memos—reminders of X or such—from the main person at PTS—Eric, his name was—as if we were all little staffers working in his office, though of course—as is typical of these temp situations—the real “leaders” of our work experience were at the client company [especially with such intensive work, with some of us coworkers’ brains almost fused by virtue of the “mania” of what was going on], and the temp agency “leader” only had a very derivative, flimsy hold on being our “leader,” but don’t tell him or her that.)

Sidebar—the typical route to getting non-temp work at big companies. Incidentally, a larger trend I can tease out here is that, in my experience over about two decades, any really-big publishing company I worked at had me start in a temp capacity, then I got to where I was employed directly as a freelancer and not through an agency (i.e., hired and paid directly by the client company, in my opinion the more dignified way), though the arrangement could mean sporadic or seasonal work and/or a sort of decidedly restricted way I was giving services (through a specific function or project, let’s say). This was true, in 1995-96, with Reed Reference Publishing, where I started as an “in-house temp” (this status was of a group of us being employed directly by Reed, not through an agency), and years later (Reed’s name changed by that point), in 1999, I started working at a reference title under their collective roof, Magazines for Libraries (which was published under the Bowker imprint/ownership at the time), as a freelancer working out-of-house, which would continue for many years (even when the company that owned the title changed).

The same pattern was the case with Prentice Hall, through my non-temp freelance work for them, over a few years, didn’t total up to be a whole lot of work. Meanwhile, very notably, these large educational or reference companies had a way of wanting to tap me understanding that I was good for what skill I offered. This is especially true of educational publishers: if they can see you’re good for them for proofreading or copy editing of their type of material, they’ll snap you up almost like a godsend.

By the time I got to the new (for me) and very different track of medical promotions in the new decade (2001-10), though I worked for many companies and the relationship was typically more limited and at-a-remove, in one large company’s case I had the same route of starting in a temp capacity and later being employed directly, but in a temporary capacity: but in this firm’s case, the temp phase lasted several years (and was sporadic to the point of gigs’ being quite few-and-far-between at times), and with this firm, my becoming employed directly as a freelancer came about in a quirky way. Also, medical promotions in general does not value freelance editors in the same fundamental way educational publishers do, an important distinction that is significant on a number of levels, not to be further explained here.

(You ask, Why did I lose the opportunities I had in educational publishing? That’s a good question. In part, I gravitated away from that work after about 2005 because medical-promotions paid more—and certainly I’m not the only editor to think like this, given how many editorial professionals of many different stripes I’ve found have ended up in the cattle cars of medical promo. The years 2004-06 for me were quite busy with work largely through the placement agency The Guy Louise Group [I know, another “temp” agency, but this wasn’t as average a temp agency as was PTS, and if it wasn’t for GLG’s abrupt collapse in 2007, they could still be a robust source of work, for others if not for me too]. My work in this area preempted my working much for educational places. But I think, also, the educational-pub industry has changed a lot, especially in its using outside vendors for production-related work that hire their own proofreaders [I don’t even know who these vendors are], and in a way this maximizes the educational pubs’ “holding all the aces” in terms of being a corporation that does as few favors for a street-level worker as it can for a freelancer like me. I admit, this is partly based on speculation, but it also derives from some of what I’ve heard from a former contact at Prentice Hall.)

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One strange thing about the PH School lit project of 1997-98 is that I have so little in the way of “work samples” to show from the project—in fact, the sense of “corporate ownership” was such, as it was conveyed clearly enough in this hectic project and as it “routinely” inspired a sort of paranoia in workers like me, that I have only a few things:

* one copy of the grade nine HS lit textbook (actually, a pretty good trophy in this situation, which was confidently given to me by a manager at PH);

* a copy (which I probably made from this book) of a back-of-book credits page as ran in all the lit textbooks, showing my name among many others in the studio (this is a “master” good for making work-evidence copies that I routinely use as enclosures for letters seeking work);

* only one measly, unmarked page showing the kind of proof of teacher’s edition (TE) marginalia that we worked on in reams; and

* another such TE page which has joke editorial markings on it from Mike, my fellow temp proofreader (whom I first mentioned in Part 1), which I hope to make available as an exhibit, because it shows some of the nature of what we were doing as well as the playful side of his personality.

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But I have a seeming ton of PTS paperwork. It seems as if the project (for us hired through temp agencies) wasn’t just about us underworkers handling the endless “harvest of leaves” of those textbook pages, but about doing our level best to see that firms like PTS were able to bill PH.

Actually, many temp agencies provided workers to this project. Rebecca Myers, a fellow proofreader (who, like I, had previously worked at AB Bookman; I discussed her at some length in Part 3), was there through a firm called “Here’s Help,” which I’ve recently found still has offices in various locations, at least in New York State. PTS provided PH with a lot of the temps, but there were several other agencies involved, too.

It very distinctly seemed as if, as a broad phenomenon, there were plenty of temp agencies, all around the office park areas and elsewhere in Bergen County (and neighboring counties), like local militias in the Middle East, ready to provide men from hither, thither, and yon when a big company wanted workers it could press work out of and chuck out when the big company was done.

In essence, this situation still exists, but now the way “creative”-placement (and older-type temp) agencies acquire or solicit workers, and some other considerations (like what online reputation means), involve the Internet (for better or worse), as was not quite the case in 1997-98.

PTS in 1997 was housed in a somewhat hole-in-the-wall office in a building that was in a marginal area, technically in Ridgewood, but closer to Paramus, if I recall rightly (their mailing address was in Ridgewood, which made them seem classy, but the particular location of the office building wasn’t terribly classy). I think I found they were looking for workers through an ad in the newspaper in spring or early summer 1997, and that was how I got involved in the PH School project. There was no other way I could get this work, on all available evidence.

The ponderousness with which I was handled when first being lined up with the project shows what a joke these agencies can be. I went for an initial interview; I think I was given a proofreading test (which PTS faxed, or otherwise supplied, to PH). There were a number of characters who ran the office; the person who interviewed me, I think, was not who became my regular contact later, Eric. The person who interviewed me seemed as little able to understand the technicalities of being an editor as any Shmoe who might work (with dark-stained underarm sweat in a business shirt) in some corporate sales department. I remember him, near the end of our talk, assuring me I was “guaranteed,” and I had no idea what he meant by this. (There was no insurance involved, if that’s what you wondered. And PTS had no other way to vouch for me apart from what references I gave them.)

There was some meeting where this same person, I think it was, was talking to me about his finding a way to sell me to PH (in effect) as a proofreader. I thought he was really being too roundabout and ponderous with this, because I felt—knew—that my demonstrable skill should have clinched the deal if the relevant client firm saw—in the flesh, in the thick of doing the production work—what I could do. (This is not as “smug” or braggartly as it may seem. I knew from working at All American Crafts, AB Bookman, and Clinicians Publishing Group alone [1990-94], never mind what came after, that I knew I could rise to the occasion here. The absurd aspect was a PTS staffer, who was self-confident only about his narrow range of work at his desk, and who knew not a thing about proofreading, trying to get his mind around how to pitch me. In some sense, I think, this same kind of absurdity still can go on today, anytime a placement firm tries to exploit you as a technical editor without the staffer immediately dealing with you knowing firsthand, at all, what your kind of work entails.)

I also have a set of notes in my journal concerning some series of missed phone calls and/or coincidences that led up to my finally being lined up to travel to, and get checked out at, PH to see if I would work out. (I think I was almost lucky to have this happen, given the missed calls and such.) [Update 6/24/15: The situation was actually more complex, nuanced, and purposive than this; for details, see Part 9 of this mini-series.]

You might remember from Part 2 that I said two previous prospective proofreaders had been brought in, and neither worked out; one was transferred to PH’s sales department. (Obviously not a good editor.) The other, I was told by coworker Rebecca Myers, didn’t even know proofreading marks. (You’d be surprised how readily this kind of situation can sometimes arise at a supposedly big-time media firm.)

But now, in later July 1997, things were apparently so hairy in the studio, with the need of more proofreading staff, that when I came there, aside from Penny’s “manic” way of talking at the time (mentioned in Part 3), there was such desperation to get another pair of hands that I was accepted almost on faith, though I’m sure my proofreading test recommended me too. And here (I recall this well) you could see what a pressure-cooker-cum-cultish situation this was. Various people there were so relieved to have another proofreader that I was sort of embraced almost from Day One, and I felt that the PTS man’s slight awkwardness about how to “sell” me showed that he missed the point: with these kinds of tasks, just have me jump into the pool, and with my seasoned experience already, I can do this. And that’s how, basically, I was accepted into the pressure cooker.

Then, for about six months, I worked in that situation, trying to be as enthusiastic about keeping up with the crazy flow as anyone else. And I diligently got my time sheets off to PTS to get paid. Of course, the PTS contacts would chirpily be in touch—it was by phone in those days (I did not have a computer yet, which would allow e-mail)—and act as if they were my trusty employers, but it was about as amusing here as any other time I would work at a demanding location through a temp agency that my real sense of what was up with the job—realities on the ground, basically—was perfectly obtainable by me at the workplace, so I knew better there what the deal was with my job than anyone at the temp agency. So it made the temp agency look a bit weird, like a benighted fifth wheel.

Sidebar: The PTS/PH relationship—a Rube Goldberg sort of “structure.” One of the clearest examples of how the PTS dimension to things could get absurd is in the following. I think one day, relatively late in my time at PH, I was trying to find out how much more time, or what my next time was, but I asked it of an HR staffer. (I can’t remember, exactly, if my time was extended weeks at a time, as sometimes happens in these arrangements, but that might have been the case.) As was often my practice in going about to different relevant people on my feet, at this point I checked in with the Human Resources department at PH, which PTS and the other temp agencies had their usual direct dealings with. (I think it was rare that any of the temp agencies phoned in to, or were called by, anyone [among the hands-on workers in the literature project] within the likes of the studio itself.)

HR departments, as you might know, are an area with their own quirks, adherents, detractors, etc.; the Dilbert cartoon with its character Catbert is a good rallying point for those of us who never really warmed to HR departments. I also remember Sheila Buff, the teacher-of-sorts at the Editorial Freelancers Association whom I mentioned in Part 4, saying to us that as freelance editors, “Don’t send your resumes [or other tries at getting work] to HR departments [at publishing companies]. Human Resources is the home of the asshole.” This is one of the grand quotes that pretty much squares with my ~36-year work experience.

In this particular story, the capacity of HR to be asshole-ish doesn’t quite apply. There was a Kathryn Santers, I think her name (and spelling) was, who was the main HR person I dealt with at PH. She was very nice, youngish (no older than 35, perhaps), and professional within the standards of HR people. She was also the main contact for Eric, at PTS, I think.

So I checked with her asking what my next expected time (days? Weeks? Don’t remember) to work was. She said she’d get back to me.

At some later point, I found I’d gotten a call at home from PTS. I don’t recall how I found this out. In those days, I was able to check in at my answering machine at home to see if there were messages (and I often did this from pay phones, including at PH—those were the days). Perhaps someone at PH (whose number for emergency reasons I’d given my mother) told me I’d gotten a call at home, and I should call there to get the message.

Anyway, I found that PTS had called my home number to leave the answer to the question I’d given to Kathryn Santers.

Why hadn’t Kathryn come to me and spoken in person? OK, so maybe she felt PTS was my employer; therefore they should tell me. Well, my next question: Why had they called my home number instead of where they should have known where I was, at PH?

That was how cumbersome and ludicrous the arrangement with PTS could be.

Worse would happen, not least on a moral level, when my time with PH finally ended in June 1998 (as it happened, for a few years).

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The worst bit of PTS’s actual fumbling—instead of the pretentious relationship I’ve just indicated—was when a paycheck of theirs to me seemed lost in the mail. I contacted them about it, and they told me they were not responsible for paychecks once they were mailed out. I think they were amenable to cutting another paycheck and putting a stop on the earlier one, but they said they would deduct the cost of the stop from my paycheck. (I think this is what prompted Rebecca Myers to refer to them as “shysters,” as I mentioned in Part 3.) But as it happened, my check arrived after all—about 12 days late, or something like that.

A glance at the home stretch

When we get to the home stretch of this story—and if you’re smart, you’ll realize that these gigs are never just about doing precious editorial work on the splendid books, but a whole ton of business-related stuff (off-color or not)—I hope to shape it, summarily, around the following:

* The first three or four months I was involved, from July to about early October 1997, we three proofreaders (Penny, Rebecca, and I) were doing basically what was termed proofreading there, of pages of the student editions (“SEs”) of the textbooks.

* The deadlines for the student editions pieced out this way: grade nine and grade 11 student editions out first (in fact, the grade nine book was in our hands by the end of the year [1997], and that is how I got a copy); and grades 10 and 12 later (one or both would be done in 1998, and in a production process that continued after I left in January 1998, as I recall).

Sidebar—fluky copyright dates. By the way, Prentice Hall had a weird practice I’ve never seen anywhere else, though apparently other educational publishers have done this too. Copyright, as you might know, when you register and get assigned a date, is a sort of legal process; it includes a feature of both literally and figuratively getting a date stamped on a document by a “court” (in fact, a mailed-in application gets date-stamped). There is a specific set of criteria in a copyright application asking about the date the work was finished, etc. Most essentially, the copyright date is when the work was finished, as stated on an application and sent to the U.S. Copyright Office. If you finish in late December and the application says December and the form isn’t logged into the Copyright Office until early January, technically the copyright date is whatever year December was in. (In my experience, sometimes a magazine, where cover date is important sales-wise, would put a copyright date of, say, 2015, when it went to print and was on the newsstands in January 2015 even though the editorial content was finished in December 2014. This is an innocuous deviation.)

The essence of the copyright date should be clear. But what did PH do? It used the copyright dates as a marketing tool, and its marketing materials would boast about a book having a “19xx copyright date!”—as if the fresher the better—even if the book had been completed and printed in an earlier year. Well, the PH School literature books all had 1999 copyright dates, for marketing reasons. But the grade nine book was finished, first printed up, in 1997. My copy has a 1999 copyright date, but was available in 1997. The other literature books, even if they were finished in 1998, have copyright dates of 1999.

And it’s not like PH had no way to understand how the copyright process went. I remember seeing copyright applications—such as I’d used over years—on a clerk’s desk in the studio section of the PH School division. (The clerk couldn’t have made the administrative decision to use alleged copyright dates as marketing gimmicks.)

* By October, the teacher’s editions (“TEs”) were being prepared. These were bigger (page-size-wise) books, with the relevant SE page inset on the TE pages, and marginalia the only new content being made, to fit around the SE page. When Mike was brought in in about October [update 7/7/15: actually, he came on in early December 1997; more info to come in Part 10], he with us other proofreaders was mainly focused on supposed copy editing we were doing of TE content written by staffers; this copy editing involved a little more creative (or judgmental) latitude than we had used as proofreaders (and in this later period I think some regular proofreading of SE pages was still going on, also).

Mike, who had some stature as a young academic, seemed (in retrospect) tapped specially for his input for the TE copy, though all of us proofreaders did some specifically TE work and we were effectively peers in this regard. Since he was not used to the ton of SE work the rest of us proofreaders had previously done, he was coming in at a bit of a disadvantage. (The two women, Penny and Rebecca, had a bit of an ironic viewpoint toward him, as if he was something of an outsider, which in a way was fair enough; their alienation from him, such as it was, was also different from their alienation from me, such as it was.)

But he sidled up to the heavy demands, and a future entry or two will hopefully tell how this happened. He would consistently bridle a bit (if with some humor) against the heavy demands and the quirks of how we freelance proofreaders were expected to be partners in this process.

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Well beyond this later story, which ends when Mike and I were released in January 1998, there will be the comparatively subdued (and lower-content) aftermath, with my work at PH in spring 1998. And in this latter phase, the way Christina B., of the Production Editing department at PH School, ended my time under her in June 1998, also seemed a good time for me to end my time with PTS. (More to be researched on this; but what I recall will give a punch at the end of my PH story.)

I eventually found, several years later, that Prime Time Staffing had moved to Bridgewater, N.J., where its principal owner was some female I’d never heard of before. (Tony P., a fellow freelance worker I crossed paths with many times in work situations from 2002 through about 2006, and certainly with whom I did lots of e-mail correspondence from 2002 to about 2011, crossed paths with PTS at some point, as I recall. I think I tried to tell him what I usefully or relevantly could about PTS as background info; and I think they called him with some work opportunity, but it may have been near their location in central New Jersey. He was well versed in working for temp agencies, and possibly he never worked for PTS because of the likely location of their gigs, but I think he could appreciate whatever I’d told him of how they’d been sleazy in 1997-98.)

I found it droll that Eric and whoever else I knew from its Ridgewood incarnation had apparently gone from PTS, and someone new would carry on the tradition of trying to milk the corporate cow.

My Prentice Hall series, Part 4: What is a book packager? And my own longish-term association with PH

More aspects of a huge freelance gig prelude a droll story about personalities and the quality of the freelance life in New Jersey

Of this series, Part 1 (March 19), “My coming story on Prentice Hall, if/when it happens”:

http://gregoryludwig.blogspot.com/2015/03/my-coming-story-on-prentice-hall-ifwhen.html

Part 2 (March 30), “Another preliminary glance at the Prentice Hall story: A big firm giving a big push”:

http://gregoryludwig.blogspot.com/2015/03/another-preliminary-glance-at-prentice.html

Part 3 (April 2), “Another intro to the Prentice Hall story: A TV actress as lead proofreader, leaving a bit to be desired”:

http://gregoryludwig.blogspot.com/2015/04/another-intro-to-prentice-hall-story-tv.html

Subsections below (Part 4):

Book packaging: What kind of sub-species of print publishing?

A picture of a book production situation, based mainly on my 1997-98 PH experience

What is a “book packager”?

An interlude: What was my history with educational publishers starting with Prentice Hall in 1997?

More work at PH, not just at PH School

Other educational-publisher work

Part 5 (next entry):

By 1998, the opportunities from different companies (compared to today) bubbled up like bonanzas of oil in an oil field

Prime Time Staffing—pros and big cons

Sidebar—the typical route to getting non-temp work at big companies

Sidebar: The PTS/PH relationship—a Rube Goldberg sort of “structure”

A glance at the home stretch

Sidebar—fluky copyright dates

[Editorial note: Please excuse the occasional density of this entry. Given the complexity—and successful nature—of the events, now approaching 20 years old, unfolding this in semi-casual blog entries is a bit tough. Give it some patience, and you might find it rewarding. Edit 7/8/15.]

As I go about unfolding this story, I find that I make passing references to things—like “copy” and “four-color [printing]”—that outsiders, or workers in other areas of the media, might not be fully familiar with. And I neglect to mention other things that might help you understand the premises, practical framework, etc., of this story. So let me catch up on some of this.

(The techno-flavor of this shouldn’t scare you; the details aren’t crucial to understanding much of the remaining entries in this series.)

Copy, for those who don’t know, is a technical term that refers to any wordage that is part of a print-published item (book, newspaper, etc.). An article drafted for a newspaper, to be edited and ending up on the printed page, can be generically referred to as copy. The same with insider reference to wordage put onto pages of a book—such as, “The teacher’s edition has copy in the margins that make notes on details in the student text.”

“Four-color” is a description of the type of printing process that results in color material (or the term can apply to the product itself)—pictures and/or words on the page. (For a specific kind of color-printing process, the four colors—which are mixed to result in the spectrum of colors in a picture—are red [magenta], blue [cyan], yellow, and black.) For this Prentice Hall series, you need not know many of the details of this process, aside from what allows you to understand how the textbooks in question had color features on all, or almost all, pages.

(I will want [or hope] to talk in a future entry about how certain marketing-related aspects of the textbooks, germane to color pictures and colored word-subheads, etc., were clearly in this project and of a type—think of marketing of specific movies—that would seem to outsiders to be rather afield of what we would expect in serious textbooks, and weren’t typical of textbooks when I was in high school over 30 years ago. After all, by 1997, Viacom, which owned Paramount Studios, owned Prentice Hall [though this wouldn’t be for long], and the potential for cross-marketing was feasible enough.)

Among other things, these technical details show how we proofreaders, with our being in the so-called studio meaning we were more “art-related” than otherwise, could handle in some sense a massive volume of material when the criteria for our work tended to be more visual and esthetic in a way than entirely, drily verbal.

Lastly, “pre-press” means processes that are at a publishing (or other media) company immediately prior to material being sent to the printer, which latter is very much a blue-collar, factory-type operation. From my experience, production editing and related work (such as I’ve been in) that is very close to making things ready for the printer can still be an important step away from things being sent to the printer, and the latter step is the province of a “pre-press” worker. In fact, “pre-press” professionals may well have a substantive, high-sensitivity role of their own.

Book packaging: What kind of sub-species of print publishing?

One big aspect of this story actually gives me a way to explain a few other things: what kind of project was this that so many temps were hauled in, to help make textbooks? Wouldn’t that run a risk of making a messy, incoherent, unprofessional set of books?

In very general terms, if things worked out as the staff management planned, the answer is no to the second question. A lot of the educational-publishing work I did—and if I can expand on this point in the future, I will also argue very forcefully that, usually, teachers, even with the best of teacherly skills, aren’t the best editors—had to do with print-production aspects: these were proofreading, occasional (or a certain level of) copy editing, and occasional tasks pertinent to printing (like checking color proofs of pages for flaws). In general, the kind of editing work that is relevant here comprises, on the verbal side, a sort of technical editing (e.g., proofreading for certain kinds of problems) and, on the visual side, miscellaneous, very-visually-oriented tasks. All of this was really aimed to preparing a book for being printed, not coming up with original intellectual ideas or specific text that would require some kind of expert to determine or quality-control the content, etc.—such as you might see with high-quality trade books.

Meanwhile, people who only know about, or aspire to work in, trade books, such as novels and nonfiction reviewed in major book-review publications, would tend only to be concerned with the latter set of considerations, i.e., idea/content type of writing and editing. But when books feature a large visual component, and/or educational texts have graphics and visual aids as a big feature, there is a lot of (often rapidly-paced) work surrounding the issue of making material ready for the page that is closer to finalizing pages to go to the printer, than it is to having a Word-file-type ream of a “novel” being circulated among editors, consultants, and whoever else for months or a year before the book is readied for printing.

And as I suggested in Part 2 of this series, my having had experience in magazines (mainly 1990-94), a lot of which were in color, prepared me to a good extent for the production-editing stuff I did at Prentice Hall and one or two other places in the productive (for me) years of 1997-2002 or so.

A picture of a book production situation, based mainly on my 1997-98 PH experience

Anyway, with production editing and related layout functions—especially when this all involves layouts of graphics-heavy and illustration-heavy pages, with work on these tending to be wedged fairly close to the deadline for material to go to the printer for the books to be manufactured—conceivably it’s easy and plausible to get a huge number of people, well-organized, to work on the materials to get them into form acceptable to the publisher (in this case, Prentice Hall) and off to the printer (whoever that outside vendor is).

What makes my 1997-98 Prentice Hall story notable is how a very few proofreaders in the “studio,” the name for the pre-press production facility (I say “pre-press” here just to show how much wedged up against our products’ going to the printer we were), were used for so much material. This while even there were dozens of compositors—this was the technical name for layout-making technicians [update 7/8/15: on doing further research into my journal, I found that the technical term used by at least my supervisor Penny, who was not a super-crack editor, was "operator," though the more typical term for this worker is compositor, which I will continue to use in this entry hereafter]—and not only were there many of these during the day shift, but some worked a second (evening) shift, perhaps along with whatever editors might be available to work with them; this double-shift arrangement may have gone on for only part of the production process. Most or all of the compositors (within the period July 1997-January 1998, when I was there) were freelance, there through temp agencies, as were most of us proofreaders. As it happened, compositors who pleased the PH management more with their work were kept on past January 1998 to work on later stages of the multi-stage PH School literature project, or on other projects. But we freelance proofreaders weren’t handled with the same “save whom you value” way (more of this story to come).

In any event, most of the total lot of compositors only worked during the day; some who worked day shifts may also have worked some nights, but I seem to recall there were some compositors you only saw working night shifts. And along with the compositors, of course, also taking part were many, many PH staffers of various sorts (e.g., editors of various levels, or art-related technicians).

When I eventually come to the aspect of Prentice Hall’s being sold to Pearson PLC in 1998, that will add to the story. It could help explain why this HS lit project was pushed along so ruthlessly, in a way, even while we underworkers were game and willingly hectic, so to speak, in doing the work.

What is a “book packager”?

Back in about 1995, I remember that when I attended one of the numerous lectures and other meetings offered to its members by the Editorial Freelancers Association—whose office I went to for these meetings periodically from 1994 to 1996—Sheila Buff, who I think was in charge of the educational program they had, once made the point that one type of publishing company that was arising, which could prove to be a good source of work for some, was a “book packager.”

She took pains to explain this as different from a normal publisher, and—having worked for one or more herself—she explained it in somewhat clumsy, after-the-fact terms as if she was only coming to grips with what it was about herself, and (as she suggested) its business type apparently was atypical and rather new to Manhattan. But (in retrospect) I think the general principle of what this kind of company was is something that defines the likes of what the studio operation at Prentice Hall was in 1997-98 and what other educational-publisher operations I’ve been associated with have been more or less like (though in these other instances, the work tended to be more verbal than visually centered). A “book packager,” Sheila said (not in so many terms), was a sort of publisher that didn’t so much produce books with original, trade-book content—i.e., were mostly verbal, and cutting-edge culturally—as it produced “coffee-table” type books, or books (often heavy with photos) that were suited to specific audiences or such. I remember her “coffee-table” characterization as if it was the most elegant, comprehensive way she could put it, and she was no dummy about the book-publishing industry.

I think the kind of company she meant is the kind of book-producing operation you tend to see more often in New Jersey, at least as I’ve been able to access it from 1990 through about 2010. That is, it’s like a publishing company without a “words-focused” brain. It does everything else: design the pages as to how they’ll look with whatever is put on them; and designate what is needed from the printer, i.e., prepare materials for the printer to use (in the old days, 1990s, these were often “mechanicals,” concrete items to be photographed from; but starting then too, pre-press materials could be digital: a digital file was sent to the printer—modern media people will be much more familiar with this).

No one at this (“book-packaging”) kind of company is an “acquisition editor,” “developmental editor,” or any other type of heavily verbally-oriented editor—think of Michael Korda, Robert Gottlieb, or William Shawn—who deals with the wonder, challenge, complexity, etc., of a mass of words—in a big nonfiction or fictional work. Here, instead, the highest-level editor would be some kind of managing production editor. And copy editors and proofreaders (these last functions being what I’ve mostly done) would do low-level changing, correcting, burnishing of words to finalize the copy for what gets printed.

I hope this is all clear.

As an aside, TSI Graphics, which was based in St. Louis, Missouri (I think; or was it a town in Illinois?), opened an office in Ramsey or Upper Saddle River, N.J., not far from Prentice Hall. I think it wanted to snap up a lot of textbook outside-vendor work from PH on the basis of close-by location. I worked for TSI for a few months in early 1999. My experience at Prentice Hall (and perhaps The World Almanac) helped get me “entré” there. I may do a blog entry focused exclusively on it down the road.

But TSI was a book packager (with, in its most sober moments, no illusions about this). In a way, it was like the PH School division’s studio that I am talking about, but smaller, more nimble, and more tooled to dealing with a range of quite different projects.

##

I think that the book packager is something that, functionally, is fairly easy to run if you get the right people for it; its being corporate and methodological without having the sort of “ingenious” editing associated with the best trade books need not mean it inevitably turns out mediocre product. Further, I think that, today, a lot of the publishers that seem to cater to small genre audiences and writers, as well as (on a simpler level) Internet-mediated services like Smashwords, tend to be more like what book packagers were becoming in the later 1990s than like actual publishers with highly skilled acquisition, developmental, and such editors.

This type of publishing capacity, at least for educational-publishing purposes, is what allows the management to haul in a whole lot of talented, willing workers, through temp agencies, to work on a project, big or not. Then, the only source of scandal, if any, is how mismanaged the project is. In principle, the “book packager” business model isn’t inevitably going to make bad product; but what may end up causing poor or flawed product are specific management decisions, and higher-level executive commands, rationales, etc.

An interlude: What was my history with educational publishers starting with Prentice Hall in 1997?

The following should help you negotiate this series, also. My 1997-98 PH story does stick out in my mind, and seem worth recounting, for how high-handedly the project was managed, and how it gave some temp workers such a kick in the ass when it abruptly ended for me and others. The whole nature of this thing is interesting: today, I remember details and qualities as I slowly peel away the crust of forgetfulness, and when my writing frees up the memories….

But the whole thing was such a pell-mell “crazy train” of busy-ness, and then almost a cruel shock when it suddenly ended, that a big wad of papers I had from that time, most within a folder (apart from some PH brochures and such), have generally stayed closed up (almost as if to seal away a frightening revelation) and all but forgotten for years. (Part of the reason for this “sealing-off” was that many other work opportunities came up in the next few years that rather prevented me from poring over my PH records in stewing, disappointed, investigatory, or other such fashion.)

Opening up some of it, I find I haven’t seen some of this stuff in about 18 years—hard to believe. With some imagination applied in retrospect, the project was really like some historical fandango—a presidential campaign, or a hustling military activity maybe—where a big shitload of stuff happens, stress is endured, records are kept; and when it’s done, its people go back to their privacy, and they almost want not to review the whole mess till for almost purely accidental reasons, they tentatively review the records many years later. (“Oh, Comrade Stalin did what? Order the killing of 1,000 Polish officers? I didn’t know that was going on at the time, though some of my records seem, agonizing to admit, to suggest that!”)

More work at PH, not just at PH School

As it happens, after the HS lit project ended for me in January 1998, I was left feeling almost like someone who is jettisoned from a plane which lowers in altitude enough to chuck you outside but not actually land, and then flies on. I wondered if I’d have more work there in the near-future.

I did work (in about March 1998) for a division of PH called Prentice Hall International, which dealt with books published in other countries, under an editor whose name I forget, a female who was nice and whom I tried to contact subsequently for more work and got none from, after probably mid-spring 1998. This little bit of work was also through the Prime Time Staffing (PTS) agency.

Eventually I was back at PH School in spring (May?) 1998. Now, I wasn’t technically working in the studio, I was in what I think was called the Production Editing department (which was in the same general office area as the studio), under high-level managerial staffer Christina B. (I definitely remember her last name). I’d had only slim dealings with Christina, I think, during the HS lit project. Now the project I was involved with—with Amy Capetta, a new freelancer at the time whom I mentioned in Part 3—was a history textbook, specifically for the Texas market. (By the way, the big, more-specific U.S. markets for major educational texts—because the states have specific requirements for content and because the states themselves are huge—are Texas and California; and perhaps Florida [?]). Again, I was at PH through PTS. I was there only a few weeks, and Christina suddenly ended my time there, in June—and this had a cold finality about it. Specific story to come.

After June, I itched to get back into Prentice Hall, but I don’t think it happened again in 1998. The last time I saw Penny, the head studio proofreader of the HS lit project, was maybe in June, maybe a little later in the year. (I either happened to cross paths with her, or specifically sought her out, and we chatted a bit.) But I don’t think I got into Prentice Hall again, for some years.

And I think I ended my time with PTS, in terms of any real work from them (and my really seeking anything from them), in June 1998—and this struck me as appropriate and timely, and still seems that way as I reacquaint myself with the period. Any further work for some branch of Pearson for me (after Pearson had finished its purchase of Prentice Hall, though I don’t know how much this directly impacted my being employed) would not be through a temp agency, healthily enough. (And what about work at some other firm that year? I’m coming to that, but I did have the very promising avenue of The World Almanac, which had started in May 1998.)

Other educational-publisher work

To flesh out my larger educational-editing picture: TSI Graphics, as I mentioned, I worked at from February through mid-April 1999 as a staffer, and as a periodic freelancer until October 1999. Once or twice I worked for them again much later, such as, sometime in 2000, for its chief editor Dee Josephson, as I mentioned in Part 2.

I finally got into another gig with the larger company of Pearson when I landed work with Silver Burdett Ginn, a company in Parsippany that Pearson bought up in 1998 along with Prentice Hall. That gig started about September 1999 and ran until sometime in the spring of 2000. This was working, via copy editing (and to their very specific rules), on two grade-editions of the “Blest Are We” Catholic-school books. (Yes, Protestants like myself could work on those books.) I worked there not through a temp agency. This involved work I picked up from the office, took home, worked on there, and brought back. This situation was nice, but the work not terribly voluminous per period of time. (It obviously coincided, over the longer term, with editorial work from other companies.)

I again worked at Prentice Hall itself, for the supplements department of the Humanities and Social Sciences section of the higher-education (mainly college) division, in spring/summer 2001 and spring/summer 2002. This was freelance (again, no temp agency), with some work done in-house and some done at home. The hourly rates could be good (this to be explained). And with my last work with this gig in late summer 2002, that was the last time I ever worked for Prentice Hall (not that I didn’t try to get in there again).

I would work for other educational publishers outside the Pearson realm, such as Peoples Publishing Group (now Peoples Education), notably in fall 2000 on the “African-American textbook” (the 2001 edition of Molefi Kete Asante’s African American History: A Journey of Liberation) and intermittently on other products afterward, until 2005. I would also do work for Bogart and Barr, a book packager of sorts, that would have some hand in educationally related books (such as for Enslow, a New Jersey firm) and reference books (such as a science-fiction reference tome); my sporadic time with them was 2002 to 2007, but that work wasn’t quite as typically educational, or as massive-demand a project, as with Pearson in 1997-98 and some of Peoples.

As I said, I certainly tried to get work from Prentice Hall again, whether doing in-house work or take-home. My tries were not continual. In fact, I found that in very recent years, the last times before the past year or so that I tried to elicit work from a contact at Prentice Hall were in 2011, maybe once or so in 2012. I know it’s not been continual through the past four or so years, and I’m not sure how it was in the several years before that.

To be continued.

Getting the Knack/Only in NJ: An encounter with stark rudeness in a supermarket

A man irked at me for “cutting in line” comes within distance of assaulting me, not that there was much I could, or need, do about it

[Edits 5/8/15. Edit 5/12/15.]

There are a number of ways to introduce this topic. I’ll stick with this:

Remember that song (if you’re old enough) by Randy Newman, who later was a film scorer, called “Short People”? It was a hit on the pop charts in 1977, and it was a satire of bias, with its articulated ideas about short people’s having “no reason to live,” etc. Some people at the time thought its lyrics were serious, but I knew it was a satire. (Yet you didn’t have to be dopey to be fooled by it: a good friend of mine whom I roomed with and wrote songs with, who was going to law school, said in about 1985 [or a few years later] that he’d thought in 1977 the song was serious in its voiced bias.)

The point here: years later, on 60 Minutes (in the 1990s?), Randy Newman, being interviewed by whomever, was asked if he had anything against short people; this was asked (maybe slightly tongue-in-cheek) in the context of considering the past outcry against the song. What he said was funny: he didn’t before the song….

I thought this was an interesting measure of human nature—meaning, of average listeners to the song, not of Randy Newman. A song that, to me at age 15, was clearly a satire was taken as serious (its words taken at face value), and more than this, there was so much outcry (which I didn’t really remember from 1977), that it got to vexing Randy Newman, and on 60 Minutes he felt a good way of discharging his feeling about this was implying that he did have something against short people (he meant with irony), but only after the outcry against the song.

Well, something related can be said about where I stand in recounting the following incident at a supermarket today. This will be interesting in its own right, giving a snapshot of where things are socially today (and believe me, I consider myself lucky in the sense that I don’t have to worry about, if I had black skin, police shooting me on limited pretext). But in recent weeks, I could have remarked about how Italian-Americans behave from any number of angles, with the only editorial question for me being how acerbic, or not, or how couched in careful language, I would do it. (And this isn’t prompted by any news story out about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who per the state’s main newspaper The Star-Ledger, seems to figuratively step in a pile of shit every day.)  But it seems not out of line to make some general observations (not with pleasure in this) based on the following incident.

##

I was with my mother at the Shop-Rite (a chain-style supermarket, for those out of northern New Jersey) in Franklin Borough, Sussex County, today, accompanying her on her weekly food-shopping trip. This has become something of a tradition for us, and this tradition started late last fall when she was uncertain about how well she could get around following her feeling weak/uncertain on the heels of surgery in October. I drive her down (about 25 minutes away), and first, I usually have some errand of my own within the strip-mall area the Shop-Rite is the anchor store for; then I join her to push her cart for her in the store while she finishes up. I unload the groceries on the checkout conveyor belt (she has a favorite cashier she uses), and bag the stuff after it’s been price-scanned. Since she doesn’t have two working arms, I do basically all the “heavy-lifting.” All pretty banal, not worth much recognition.

Actually, it can be a bit of a tedious process. The whole trip is both something I willingly do with her (because, in part, it gives her a day out of the house, well away from home) and have to “work” to be patient with (partly given how I try to make my own “work weeks,” and how these trips have an interrupting effect)—mind you, this mix of emotions and “agendas” is typical of my dealings on her behalf, and I think it is neither strange/insincere or freakish, given the everyday challenges (in the U.S.) of the many adult children of more-senior-but-semi-disabled adults whom they care for.

For many weeks now, the shopping trip has gotten rounded off by our eating lunch at a Burger King that is in the immediate area and had gotten remodeled not long ago. The worst complaints I have about this lunch include the fact that the food, for my preferences when thinking of my heart health, seems not much better than the hospital breakfast fare of “basic grease and carbs.” (But she pays for it, so….)

##

Anyway, this day, amid whatever very-minor variations on this trip we had, I did a couple errands before I joined her in the store. (Passing trivia: There was a group of people loading up a shopping cart with a huge batch of groceries that, to judge from the ton of ground beef and other lower-income-type food and the look of the people themselves, seemed to be headed to a group home of some sort, or just a poor, rather large household. My mother and I would comment on this group, confidentially, a few times.)

But the real issue of note is when, as she waited on line for her favorite cashier, I decided to part with her for a few minutes, and I knew I had time to pick up a tube of toothpaste for myself, pay for it on a self-serve express line, put it in the car, and get back to her before I had to be there to unload her cart.

I approached the set of self-serve express checkout “kiosks.” There were/are about six of these (no fewer than six), and they are (in Shop-Rite’s fashion, fairly similar to what you see at an A&P) little setups with scanning devices, TV-monitor-like screens, and contraptions for bagging. They are for one person to use at a time.

Several of them, at the moment, were being used. There were a couple being operated by cashiers, such as for an elderly man, which was a very atypical practice (for self-serve checkout kiosks) at any supermarket I’d ever patronized. I wasn’t sure if, today, there was a line of waiting customers for all of these kiosks; there didn’t seem to be, compared to what I’d seen for years at other supermarkets I’d been at.

And one kiosk was unoccupied. I headed to it. If anyone was on line, he or she would have gone to it.

And right away, some man, in what could have been called the area of an apparent “line,” was commenting—I almost didn’t quite hear him—about there being a line, or such, and that I was being “rude.” I was surprised.

Almost as quickly, moving to the side, he apparently went to another kiosk.

As it happened, he was leaving before I did, and I only had one item, and I wasn’t slow processing it.

As he approached me (to walk past), he grumbled, “Asshole!”

And that wasn’t enough: he bumped into me very pointedly. (He had plenty of room to do otherwise.)

He had a “better half” with him, a woman. They left basically together, but they were not walking close together.

He looked in his forties; later thirties at the youngest. I didn’t get a good look at his face. (He could well have been judged to be “not from the local community.” I had never seen anyone at this store act like this before.)

##

I was somewhat shaken. I said to my mother a bit later, in reporting to her the incident when I first had the chance (and, as happens in these situations, I kept my composure as I worked to talk about it), that this sort of thing—being deliberately bumped into by someone making a rude point—had happened “a few times” over the years. But actually, the more I thought about it later, the more it seemed the last time I really experienced that kind of pointedly being bumped into in public was in 1981, by someone who felt like a boulder bumping into me when I was in my freshman year at GWU. This was, generally, when plenty of peers could be decidedly rude, in various (usually less physical) ways.

Anyway (to return to the moments just after the man had bumped me), I finished with my transaction and headed outside. The man and his better half were walking across the parking lot to a fringe area. If I could have seen what car he got into (which in fact I could not), I might have seen if he was from out of state. It wouldn’t have shocked me if he had a New York plate (meaning that, given the important clue of the rude behavior, he was from a city area, not the relatively bucolic, friendly-residents area of New York State near my home township).

I was mainly keeping to my business as I took the toothpaste to the car, and put it in and returned to my mother, hoping to be on time for her needs. I was.

##

I was feeling a bit chagrined, a bit offended.

Another way I could have introduced this anecdote was to say, “Do I have another story of being humiliated in New Jersey (which generally seems to be the personal humiliation capital of the world)?” Actually, I would suggest that I am not a fool to suffer this kind of thing, nor do I feel I should be regarded as a goofus to report these stories on my blogs. As I know from dealing with the issue of pointed interpersonal rudeness at least since dealings with my freshman roommate Alan L., whom I blogged about last fall, the big question in life is not “How can you avoid being humiliated, whether by random strangers on the street or by associates in some sort of honest, mutually serving work or other association?” but “What do you do about it afterward, if anything?”

I could sum myself as, over the years, maybe being hit by a few too many trucks, metaphorically, but knowing well what to do in the aftermath, such as (metaphorically again) getting the license-plate number of the truck.

##

Anyway, when I talked to my mother on the checkout line, while other women (of varying ages, most of them younger than my mother) were standing around, within earshot, I talked in measure tones about what happened. On one key point, I lowered my voice very discreetly: “I think the guy was Italian,” by which of course I meant—and my mother understood—that I was 99.9 percent sure he was this.

Lest this sound like I’m daring to speak rudely, I think the following point needs to be made: I have known Italian-Americans as friends, classmates, coworkers, good neighbors, and others for many years, and every ethnic group, as we know, has good and bad members, and no ethnic group has cornered the market on uncivilized behavior. But it seems to me quite unambiguous, and I speak from experience (and all our experience can vary), that no ethnic group in New Jersey has members—as do Italian-Americans—that can speak vocally, if not quite loudly, to make a moral point, but can in the same stroke either contradict themselves with how they are making the point, or be so pompous, licentious, rights-infringing, etc., that they decidedly erode the moral standing they are presuming to speak from.

To review: This guy took umbrage of my “cutting in line.” I wasn’t aware there was such a rigid line. But let’s assume there was. What did he do next? He got to check out, and could leave before I did. So maybe, not so bad I cut before him? But next he called me an asshole to my face—and that wasn’t enough. He also bumped into me.

As I said, no other ethnic group…. And that isn’t a loose spouting of rhetoric; I am being quite serious, because this sort of “going above and beyond normal bounds of civilized behavior, to the point of almost comically-grotesquely undercutting their moral high ground” has been done regarding me (and regarding others, of course) by Italian-Americans in the support-group context (End note), in the workplace, and in other ways.

##

Maybe the worst feature, or one of the worst, of this situation was what happened next. I spoke about this matter with my mother, in fairly low tones. But I could tell that I had enough “glowing indignation” that other people within earshot, of a wide array of evident backgrounds, were seemingly morally attuned to me, seeming as if “something was up, something was wrong,” without their saying anything. Not that, by normal moral standards, most of these people would have needed to do anything. (My mother, herself, didn’t say much, as to suggest what to do to get some “redress”; she seemed to get pensive after a while. This didn’t bother me; I knew if anyone had to, and would, do anything on my behalf, it would be me.)

Maybe worst: The security guard there, who was just a few feet away from me when the man cursed me and bumped into me, didn’t do a thing. I referenced the guard when talking to my mother. I saw him later, standing in his more normal spot, not far from the express lines. He always seemed like a rather unimpressive country sort, like someone who had been in the military and now was just working as a security guard for a little money while retired. (I know something about this work angle: when I worked for Wells Fargo Contract Guard Services—whatever it was called—in 1989-90, they routinely sought ex-military people, I think in part because they knew such people were attuned to, could live with, the work “ethos” of dealing with boredom 90 percent of the time and being able to spring into dealing competently with an emergency in the other 10 percent.)

Now, as I talked to my mother, the security guard seemed aware of me in a new, slightly “chary” way, but showed he was about as little apt to get involved with anything untoward as the “cigar Indian” that he usually comported himself as, there.

Mind you, this was a subtle situation. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t spout some of the caustic things I might have said (though I did remark in rather acerbic tones in line with this first idea), “I would like not to have to come to this hick supermarket again!” or, obviously more provocative, “[expletive deleted]!”

Now some of you might say, “Could you have complained to the management, like at the customer service counter?” Well, what would they have been able to do?

Would I have called the police? For what purpose?—the man who’d bumped into me was gone. And it wasn’t a full-fledged assault. I wasn’t wounded.

But like I said, the being deliberately bumped into, for the man to make an emphatic point, was something I really hadn’t felt since 1981 (though in 1981, there wasn’t an actual explicit point being made other than I “had no right to be in the point of the sidewalk where I was”). (Somewhat similar behavior from a coworker in 1996, in a small cubicle, was in an overall-weird situation where the physical “bump” was more a piece of a larger “pizza” that was problematic for different reasons than being bumped by a stranger on the street.)

Are there any long-term lessons we can derive from this?

My own favorite is just not to go to that supermarket again. I almost never did anyway, for basically neutral reasons and for years, before my mother started having me drive her down there to help her do her shopping.

End note (added 5/8/15).

There are actually several examples in the support-group context, but my "favorite" is probably this: After he had been an uneasy ally of mine for a few months in spring 2002, a fellow support-group attendee who had aims of eventually running the group--yes, he was/is Italian-American--suddenly turned on me, for the long term, right after a feature story was done on the group (which I had arranged, and which this man had spoken approvingly of when it was "in process") in a county newspaper mid-year. He remained consistently and bitterly alienated from me--making increasingly accusatory or critical remarks to me (by e-mail), and this culminated in a "palace coup" situation in spring 2003 where I was removed from running the group (and my rising to this role had been almost by default anyway). This man, as a prime plank in his unseating me, charged me with violating group confidentiality by discussing another, sporadically attending person who hadn't come in months, via e-mail--which e-mail discussing had been with him, the charging attendee. The reason the third person, a female, was discussed with this man (in June 2002, I think) was some licentious instances of her behavior, and prior (April 2002) discussion about this woman (by phone) outside the group--between me and an elderly woman--had started at the behest of this elderly woman, who had run the group for about eight years and was considered a sort of saint for doing so by numerous others among group attendees. The irony about this man's charging me (in spring 2003) with violating confidentiality by e-mail--in such excoriating, uncompromising terms that made it seem as if there was no possible extenuating circumstance for doing so--is that he shared printouts or forwarded versions of my e-mails with yet another man, the latter of whom was the one who did the dirty work of ousting me from running the group. This sort of hypocrisy might seem drolly comical to you, but when you're the focus of it, put in hard, uncompromising terms and some heat of temper, along with some measure of your being financially gypped in the process, it is really not funny.