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).
##
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.)
##
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.
##
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).
##
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.
##
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.
