Subsections below:
Catch-up on certain
facts, including crediting 50 studio workers
Preface to the
Appendix: The potential for distortions of perceptions of others’ actions, and
reputations
Appendix: An incident
from 2008 showing what they don’t teach you in school
[See Part 4 for a set
of links to earlier parts. Edits below 6/13/15. Note 6/23/15: The series will continue, starting with Part 9. Edit 7/5/15.]
Catch-up on certain
facts, including crediting 50 studio workers
As I’ve said in other blog entries, I go on memory for some
old facts, and when doing blog entries means working within a few-page format
(and with them I’m not directly writing a book anyway), you can be sketchy; and
for most readers’ purposes, that’s good enough. But in this case, I finally dug
out my copy of the ninth-grade Prentice Hall HS lit textbook, and I’m glad I
did, because I found some facts in previous entries to correct, and I can also
proceed with this blog series later with more elicited memory of these old
days.
First, I found that the book I have—for ninth grade—was
labeled the “gold” level, and that’s right, I’d forgotten, the different grades
were labeled with types of metals: gold, silver, platinum….
Sidebar: You like your
pedagogy extra-fancy?
The different colors/levels of the
lit textbooks (I’d forgotten about this, but found this list on a front-matter
page of the book I have):
copper, bronze, silver, gold,
platinum; and
The American Experience; The
British Tradition; World Masterpieces
I have a “gold” book, and I
strongly believe my book is ninth grade, so I think the first levels piece out
this way:
copper (sixth grade), bronze
(seventh), silver (eighth), gold (ninth), platinum (10th)
As for the others, I believe “The
American Experience” was 11th grade, “The British Tradition” was 12th;
and as for “World Masterpieces,” that might have been an alternative
upper-grade (11th and/or 12th) book.
Now, my memory has long been that
our 1997-98 project worked on ninth through 12th-grade books, so I
don’t think we worked on “copper,” “bronze,” or “silver” books, though I do
recall there were (as a general concept we somehow heard about) lower-grade
books in the series. I know PH School handled grades below ninth; I think the
lower-grade lit books were either done by another department there that year
(not the studio/upstairs setup I was in) or were not to be prepared in a new
edition that year.
Another thing is that in leafing
through my ninth-grade book, I am struck, and reminded, by all the fancy
formatting (typeface, colors, and a certain density) of the various little
parts of the book: larger sections had theme-or-genre-related titles like “The
Lighter Side” and “Visions of the Future”; within these, there were parts like
“Everyday Humor” and “Out of the Ordinary” (for the first larger section) and
“Fantastic Ideas” and “Reaching for Tomorrow” (for the second).
More pedagogically, there were
routinely-styled pages at the start of each larger section (such as “The
Lighter Side”) tagged “Reading
for Success,” with a more specific subtitle referring to some relevant
“strategies.” A specific selection of literature would start with a fancily
formatted “Guide for Reading” with a mini-biography on the writer of the
selection and little boxes highlighting bits of grammar and skills to be
mastered: “Build Vocabulary,” “Build Grammar Skills,” “Literary Focus,” and so
on. At the ends of specific selections there was a “Guide for Responding,”
including questions for the students, and “Build Your Portfolio,” with ideas
for larger mini-projects than merely answering questions.
This is just part of what you can
see on these pages, but you (I) are struck by how much “value” is here—the
amount and variety of information that would have to have been handled by us
workers. It can help you understand how a project like this involved so many
people and that there were so many, many page layouts to process. The fact that
a book turned out just a few months after I came there (which was a large chunk
of the total project), with about 1,000 pages, with all the fancy stuff in it,
rigorously put into publishable form, was a minor miracle. The little
subsections I told you about would come through on layouts in multiple
iterations, with whatever variety of errors, incomplete aspects, and so on you
could imagine; various people would mark these, corrections could be done. I
guess I’m thankful this is so long ago I worked on this, or I might be rather
keenly reminded in “posttraumatic” fashion—with something like twitching,
shuddering, or a feeling of dread—what this beast of a project was like.
Second, some initial pages in the book show the big
“council,” as I crudely referred to it in Part 7, that was behind the editorial
planning/wisdom/etc. of the book—so it wasn’t just us lowly craft workers cobbling
together, in grubby, pedestrian fashion, the grand materials for learning.
There’s a list of “program advisors,” 14 of them, all teachers; there is a
“multicultural review board,” nine of them; and “contributing writers,” six,
all of them “former” teachers or instructors. I’m sure none of them worked in
our office complex in Upper Saddle River, or maybe a few of the writers did (on
an ad hoc basis).
In general, when during production it came to verbal-content
matters, any number of people could be consulted (by us proofreaders) for
resolution: usually, higher-level editors in-house (i.e., PH staffers); and maybe
in-house copy editors in their production-related department (for certain
technical details). On more macroscopic issues (and this was during the initial
planning, not during production), PH workers (not we proofreaders) would
presumably consult with the “program advisors.” This should all be as you’d
expect.
Sidebar: A proofreader breaking
out into writing, like rhythm-guitarist Keith Richards stepping out into a
tasty lead-guitar break. Another fact about editorial production is
what someone in my shoes does. Not surprisingly to you maybe, sometimes
laypeople (when it comes to publishing) will think that a proofreader (which
word they seem to think they understand) or a copy editor (which is more arcane
to them, if they venture to claim to understand it at all) does little more
than put in periods, cross t’s, etc. In fact, in numerous publishing situations
at large, even when my named role is a proofreader or copy editor, situations
could arise where I could have input on certain content features, and even
write some things. (Actually, this could happen in one of a number of ways: how
my role was generally defined or how
it often allowed this sort of
variation; and, alternatively, the sheer weird-variation
quality of the setup I was working in, due to lack of professionalism of the
setup or not. With a case like editing press releases at North Jersey
Newspapers, you could find the situation where it would clearly seem to take
less energy and hair-tearing to just write a new item to replace a terrible
thing you were proofreading or copy editing, than to tediously edit the mess at
hand.) When it came to textbooks, when I worked for Peoples Publishing in 2000,
I actually wrote some little items that appeared in the African-American
textbook (as it was nicknamed; and whose general author was Molefi Kete Asante)
which weren’t editorially changed (much) afterward. That actually grounds some
tasty little insider stories about the project, but I have deliberately held
off on talking about it, which I’m generally proud and fond of.
The “Gold” PH textbook has many of the “credits” for
PH-worker contributors on the copyright page (where, yes, the © date is 1999,
while that particular book was finished in 1997 [and, a technical detail, an
array of multiple-printing related dates shows that a 1998 printing had not yet
been done], and the other books in the series were also “© 1999,” but were printed
and bound no later than spring 1998). Slightly oddly, what was referred to as
the Production Editing department
(as I pretty distinctly recall) is only labeled “Production” here, with
Christina B.’s name first (no rank given), Elizabeth Torjussen (she was known among
coworkers as Betsy or Betsie), and Holly Gordon (I’d forgotten about her; I had
few dealings with her, and she was nice). Interestingly, Debbie McC.-or-O’C.
and Claudia D. are not listed on this page. (As I’ve recalled, I think Debbie
was more involved with the teachers’ editions, so she would not have been
listed in the student texts.)
There was a “design”
department—how could I forget?—including, among other names, Laura Bird,
whose physical appearance I remember well (she was neat and professional, not
the type of art person with, say, purple hair). Yes, the sheer page design
wasn’t done by functionaries “upstairs”—design managers were actually on the
studio level.
Another interesting feature is that—aside from Douglas
McCollum being listed as “Director of Language Arts” (that’s right; PH didn’t
talk about the field, for public school, as “English” but as “Language
Arts”)—the upper-level editorial staff
is all listed as one big lump of grouped names, no ranks given. Several of the
names, of younger workers, I remember (I can picture the faces that went with
most). And important to note: There were no “acquisition editors” in PH School;
instead, editors tended to function like a committee that worked on books that
themselves were rather authored “by committee.” The “acquisition editor” kind
of editor was what you’d see in the Higher Education division of PH, where
textbooks were typically authored by individual professors or small sets of
them. There, the books were closer to like trade books, which is what the term
“acquisition editor” may connote. (I will discuss this stuff more when/if I get
to an account of my work for PH Higher Ed in 2001 and 2002.)
Ellen Bowler is listed first in the ninth grade book’s
credit list of editors, and as I recall, she was one of the more senior editors
(if not the most), in fact the main personage to go to for an important, but
technical, content issue (meanwhile, Doug, who generally was an approachable
enough sort and did do hands-on editing on the layouts, was not basically for
consulting on technical issues by us plebes).
Perhaps most driving-home of all the “credits” info in this
book is on p. 999, near the very end, where spillover of PH-worker credits from
the copyright page is contained. Here, interestingly, four people are listed as
among “editorial” (I remember at least some of the names); and under
“Production” is a sole name, Claudia Dukeshire (yes, the person I’ve earlier called
Claudia D.).
Most of note, under “Design and page layout”—i.e., the studio workers—are 50 names, including myself, Penny, Rebecca, and even Betsy Bostwick;
and just about all of the rest were freelance compositors [update 7/5/15: I found the actual technical term for them at PH, at least according to my supervisor Penny, was "operators"]. No labels for any of
us are given. I’ve always found it weird that the studio management never
separated out us proofreaders/editor-types from the layout people. On the other
hand, I’m grateful someone took the effort to type out all of the names
(including mine) and put them somewhere in the book. Given how behemoth and
hectic this project was, that was actually a gracious development.
##
Preface to the
Appendix: The potential for distortions of perceptions of others’ actions, and
reputations
If you want to know why I try to have a detailed memory of
some of these job situations, it’s very simple: Politics goes on in media
companies (sometimes of an especially harmful sort) as I’ve seen nowhere else
in the work world (and my experience goes back to being an assistant manager at
a large student union 30 or more years ago). And in media companies (in my
experience, anyway), you usually don’t have competent Human Resources
departments who can help; and your trying (with, outside a given firm, the aid
of a lawyer or not) to build a legal case can be a non-starter, due to the
nature of the relevant evidence—not sensational or obtainable enough for a
trial (and the potential cost for litigation that may run roughshod over the
parties without accomplishing anything worthwhile in a long-term sense).
(Any New Jersey law firm that I’m aware of that has been apt
to tout its specializing in Human Resources–related issues is the sort that, in
my opinion, would turn a blind eye to the kind of peculiar, complex, and
painful issues that arise at media companies, insofar as such a firm broadcasts
that it works closely with HR departments on mundane issues like how an
employee is terminated, confidentiality agreements, etc. That, to me, is a lot
of square-dancing among idiots, while bigger fish that need to be fried—with a
potential to set important, visionary legal precedents—get neglected.)
To a large extent, all you have on your side is your ability
to witness, and your wit in understanding what is going on, which is to a good
extent a function of experience. Usually, the most you can do is keep journal
entries, and have memories in your head (the latter of which can, of course,
degrade). And the worst part is that other people not central to the “nexus” of
an issue can have not-good ideas (or form goofy narratives) of what happened:
they can look at the situation as a soap opera, e.g., a “love story” of sorts,
when it’s not; and they can be seriously mistaken on key work-related facts,
even some that aren’t hard to ascertain. And when a certain illusory reputation
(conveyed in more “judicious” talk) billows out over time, increasingly
divorced from the root facts, that can cloud issues in an almost tragic way,
because the real, original issue gets further in the past, never fully
addressed, and the illusory reputation seems to “stand for the facts” when it
couldn’t be further from the truth.
And when it comes to the Internet age and the fact that some
people seem to develop their sense of themselves only through that medium (and
not through feet-on-the-ground competence), you have—similar to the
billowing-reputation issue just noted—the potentially awful influences of
things’ taking on a “wildly” unhelpful, propagandistic image and notoriety
through the potent means of Internet transmission and selective or obfuscating representation.
About the only thing working in your favor in this latter situation is a sort
of saving quality provided by the level of stupidity
that seems typical of a lot of Internet “received wisdom.” You hope that
readers of Internet stuff who mean the
most to you (while you ignore the others) have the smarts to read past the
dreck and get informed—even if guardedly—via the presented “facts” that try to
represent things more fairly, adequate to the complexity of an issue, and
reflective of an appropriate, moral way to approach such issues.
Here’s one gross and sometimes darkly comical example (and
for me, it didn’t even originally involve any workplace). In the case of a
certain lawsuit in which I was involved in 2008, it seems that some non-central
onlookers, in years since 2008, have thought that I remained an ally of sorts
with the plaintiff, Barbara Bauer. This seemed especially indicated (but as not the only such example) when, in fall
2011 when the guttersnipe-front The Write Agenda first had been coming to a
head with some of its rhetorical business, and especially the blog Writer
Beware did a substantive entry on it, there was an uptick in searches on my
LinkedIn page. I thought that this implied suggestion of my being connected to
TWA was grievously wrong, given that I had labored, from 2009 through 2011 (on
a personal Web site that I took down in August 2011), to represent what was
appropriately informative to the public (as well as what was a big problem)
about the conduct of the lawsuit, and I thought only an idiot would have felt
that, ever since Bauer named me as a defendant in an AMENDED, 2008 version of
her 2007 suit, I was still an ally of hers. Rest assured: Given how
gratuitously she included me in the suit, and given what apparent reasons could
be inferred for this inclusion, and given how she violated court rules
repeatedly in 2008 as I was fighting to get out of the amended suit (to say
nothing of what’s happened regarding various people, connected to her, since),
there was no way I would ever be an ally of hers again. (My statement about her
Ph.D. on my other blog in recent weeks is a sort of decent but coolly
conservative gesture in an angeringly complex situation [not all of which is
revealed], not an exercise in my “alliance” with her.)
The one arguable (but very
narrowly arguable) way I could be said to have been an “ally” of hers post-2008
was in suggesting, in about 2010 and 2011 and in a sort of pro forma manner, that
there was a smarter way for her to pursue her lawsuit—because, in general,
there seemed a solid grounds for her to sue. Not that I welcomed this; actually, in line with what some close to me have said
or suggested to me was the Monmouth County–vicinage state Superior Court’s incomprehensible
handling of this suit, I was anxious by
early 2011 about that court, in the future, quirkily letting the same old
2007-08 mess of a complaint be acted on. (Indeed, I’ve been profoundly
shaken by the legal system in New Jersey by this suit, and the one positive in
it from a long-term career perspective is that it confirmed my decision not to
go to law school in 1984 as the best career decision I ever made.) Anyway, the
one grounds for her to sue was the Googlebombing of her in May 2006. On no other basis was there grounds to pursue
any suit approaching the horrifically messy one she pursued in 2007-10; quite
clearly, if there were no Googlebombing, she could not sue the raft of people
she did (under the theory of addressing a “conspiracy”) (leaving aside the
validity of including certain names).
(By the way, one of the things I’ve held in reserve things
to say about the suit is what my set of speculated reasons are that she
included me in the suit in 2008 [along with other new names], and one of these possible
reasons derives from what a defense attorney conveyed to me in spring 2008; and
all of the possible reasons would
suggest the bad-faith nature of the suit, as including me. It’s also to be
noted that, as it took me a long time to really understand, when the suit was
going on in 2007, defendants Strauss and Crispin apparently tried to move the
suit to federal court to get it dismissed there. Both attempts failed [and Strauss
and Crispin were represented by attorneys], but apparently the question of
jurisdiction remained, which helped shape the 2008 amended complaint as it was
pursued in state court. All these facts are supported in a document I lately
have shared with select viewers, which I’m hesitant to make a blog entry now.
Lastly, any future legal addressing I do of Bauer [if any], I believe, should
happen in a federal jurisdiction.)
As it happens, for a long while I have taken a tack, at most
times, of commenting on the suit only to the extent I “should” as an
“affiant”—meaning, what I could testify to as to firsthand or otherwise
justifiable knowledge (the sorts of things I could best know, and sometimes might
be obliged to reveal) as a “party with standing” in the past suit (as it was
conducted through late 2008). I tried not to comment on more global aspects of
the suit, or much on other parties’ dealings in the suit. This self-limitation
I adhered to before the suit was
dismissed in November 2010, and to a lesser extent afterward. Only this year, in the wake of a campaign of sorts against
my “Missives from the Jersey Mountain Bear” blog starting in about May 2014,
have I been apt to speak on the lawsuit a little more freely than in a long
while. Most definitely, the “SAC” (the January 2008 “second amended
complaint”), which still gets referred to in Internet search results, to me is
NOT a legally actionable or coherent document. It is about as baseless and inflammatory
as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This is just one example of how people’s mistaken
perceptions of a controversy can create an ever-lingering atmosphere of
disinformation on your status, and on your aims when you talk about the
controversy, and so on. (And the Bauer suit didn’t have to do with a workplace
matter; in fact, my employers in 2008 [of a type where I worked in-house] knew
nothing about it. But in 2010, people’s partial knowledge of it at a workplace
I was at in-house, and their apparent assumptions about it, were quite
mistaken, and these assumptions were most bizarre for their not asking me a
thing about it, while they were aware of Internet information about it.)
Similar—and less sensational (or less Internet-mediated)—can
happen regarding quieter, in-office controversies.
For example, while I occasionally (less often than people
may think) refer to a nasty situation at a medical-promotions firm in summer
2010, some people might think that among other aspects of it, an individual
“baddie” I’m (still) talking about is Person X, who was a trafficker (and a new
hire at the firm) with whom I was immediately involved in a tightly processed
batch of work. But in any serious writings on this matter, I have always felt
that the real “baddie” was her supervisor, whom I’ll call Janice E. I. S., whom
I gave the pseudonym in my blog entries “Tweedle Dum,” and it pains me a bit—for the sake of all immediately involved
(including Person X)—that people (however indirectly or debatably they convey
it) don’t get this important distinction.
In any event, this preludes the situation I’m about to
describe in the following Appendix, which concerns another young trafficker
(with whom I worked a very brief time
in 2008), regarding whom my sympathies on a certain level are less, and where
the question of “Who is the real baddie here?” can arise. First, I don’t harbor
any resentment about this person; to
me, what lingers (along with my memory of her ego-tinged behavior) is how
atrociously the company (Pace) was managed, and in a way, there are a few solid
indications beyond what I’d long remembered of this situation that are available
today, that show how tacky the Pace environment was at the time.
First, Donna D., who was a sort of production manager there
(who was fired or resigned, I think, right before I left), on her LinkedIn page
for some year(s) now (I can’t find it lately) does not reflect her having been
at this company in 2008 (it suggests she left in 2007), though not only was she
there through at least May 2008, but I was required to apologize to her
following an office-mishap (my expressing anger) that ended up a sort of prelude
to the situation described below. So, if Donna D. was such a key personage that
I had to be required (in the eyes of others there), like a high school kid, to
apologize to her, why does she not indicate she worked at Pace in 2008?
Even more amusing (in a dark sense) is a fact I’ve found
concerning my editorial department supervisor
in my later months there, George K. (who came on board at Pace a month or two
after I started as a freelancer in November 2007), who seemed like such a
stolid “corporate-manager” type of editorial worker (and even had worked at
Reed Reference Publishing back in the 1990s—a company I, in earlier years, got
important career-related help from); meanwhile, he was the one to “discreetly”
tie off relations with me when my time abruptly ended at Pace. The fact: today on
his LinkedIn page, he doesn’t list having been at Pace in 2008. He says his
term there was 2006-07, and I know he wasn’t even there in November 2007, when
I started. I knew when he came on new, in early 2008.
So not only have I felt embarrassed enough about my
association with Pace not to bandy about my connection with it in my own
advertising of my services, aside from listing it as a detail on my resume.
Even no fewer than two managers, like Donna D. and George K., don’t want it to
be known they were at Pace in 2008 (though for what specific reasons they had, I don’t know).
So in the following, if the issue looks like “what a brat
this young woman was,” actually, it was this: what a dump Pace was. And this now is supported by LinkedIn info
from two managerial sorts, who would be quicker, in general and one presumes at
whatever place they work, to suck up to the corporate line than I would.
Appendix: An incident
from 2008 showing what they don’t teach you in school
Here is a story that I’ve mulled over for months, wondering
when/if I would have a right occasion to use it. As it happens, it’s one of a
few very good anecdotes I have from the world of medical promotions that shows
how crazy the managerial moves can be, when it comes to the abstract question
of treating people with respect as they should be, regarding (among other
logical implications) whether someone—myself or another—is providing value for
the money we cost, or not.
From November 2007 through late May or very early June 2008,
I worked, not constantly, and in a freelance capacity as employed directly by
the company (and not through an agency) at Pace, one of the worst medical-promo
places I ever worked at. Pace was a subsidiary of the Interpublic conglomerate.
As one measure of them: back in about 2000-02, when I still used to scout for
work a lot through classified ads, they used to run ads in the newspapers (as
did other medical-promo places), and their ads looked really crappy. They had a
big logo for their name in the agate-sized ads, and there was something seedy
about what it conveyed of them. When I finally worked for them years later, I
found just how seedy they could be (they are, I believe, still under the
Interpublic umbrella, and other
Interpublic firms I’ve worked at weren’t too bad).
Two facts that told about Pace are that (1) sometimes some
workers would play a form of stickball in the hall with a broomstick (or cardboard
tube) and a tennis ball, in the hall outside my room, and sometimes I would be
afraid to go out in the hall lest I get hit by the ball that was hit with a whap! and went whizzing past. (2) On one
occasion, someone taped a $5 bill up on the door frame of the kitchen just
across the hall from my room. What this exactly meant, I don’t know. But the $5
“gesture” and the raucous stickball game did connote that this place was like
“third-rate, spoiled-brat college.”
##
One of my supervisors—a sort of production manager—was Donna
D. We got along OK the vast majority of the time (she was maybe a bit younger
than I, or maybe a bit older, but she was a career person in her line of
managerial/med-promo work). In spring 2008, when I was in the throes of the
frivolous-regarding-me Bauer v. Glatzer
case, I was more apt than usual to respond to ridiculous things at work with a
little emotional jaggedness. Pace was a place, as so often these med-promo
places can be, where they hire freelance editors to do fairly sensitive
editorial work, yet at times the staff
editors can be “away from their desks”—in meetings, whatever—when something
needs to be consulted on, and you wonder, “Where the f**k is [editor x, the
staffer]?” And some other, non-editorial manager is riding you as the
freelancer when really the staff editor
should answer for what the manager was bringing up. This, by the way, is part
of an example of “inverted pyramid” management, where one person at the lowly
craft level has too much on his or her shoulders, and there are more managers
(with more demands) than the craft person should be expected to answer for “at their
whim.” (If you ask, “Why is this done with a freelancer?,” I say, “That’s part
of my point.”)
Anyway, as I’ve foreshadowed in the preface, Donna came to
me at one point, and I barked at her in some irascible way—this was purely a
situation where she was momentarily demanding as was atypical of her, and I was
irritable based on the pace of work or such, and she got offended at my
response. There was—what to me added insult to injury in a sense—a subsequent
situation where I was required to apologize to Donna, at the hands of some
Human Resources so-and-so and maybe someone else. This decision was remarkable
for how potentially humiliating it was to me as a seasoned editor (I was about
age 46 at the time). Who ever saw a middle-aged professional being asked to
apologize to a mid-level manager as if the situation was high school?
##
That situation set up a more farcical, and more “fatal for
me,” situation a few weeks later. Here is the crux of my story. A young woman,
Marisa C., was relatively newly hired (actually, her LinkedIn page suggests she
started there in February, which could well be true, but I don’t remember
having any serious dealings with her until May), and on a practical level she took
over the role of the production managing that Donna had had (Donna had left [or
would soon leave] the company, I believe when I was still there).
The immediately following is an amalgam of conclusions, an
early version of which I formulated in 2011 and now gets adjusted by checking
on LinkedIn. My earlier recollection was that Marisa had been employed there all of two
weeks by late May, but it’s possible she suddenly was placed in a more
supervisory role in May, taking over from Donna. But whatever the specific
facts on this, she was undoubtedly—to me—a spring chicken. (Her LinkedIn page
says she worked for a term as a low-level trafficker, also at Pace, starting in
1999 when she was still in college. [She worked at other places in between her
stints at Pace.] It’s amazing how certain types of workers at these places can
be tooled, in line with school or not, as a sort of echt-corporate functionary,
but to have no skills or standards-defending “balls” the way an itinerant
technical craftsperson can. But of course, that’s what medical-promotions
places favor.)
Marisa was obviously in her twenties (I would have said, and
now infer from her LinkedIn page, she was about 27). And what I recall—though
her available LinkedIn page doesn’t reveal this—she had a master’s degree in
communications from William Paterson University, a state-supported college in
Passaic County, N.J. What I definitely recall is that she had body piercings
and a generally recent-student look. All this suggests she was not a really
seasoned professional, never mind how many As she might have gotten on her
schoolwork. (Her work history, as shown on LinkedIn, prior to her 2008 presence
at Pace suggests a stronger professional than I would have gleaned then; but
all of us in our rare, more-intemperate moments in a crazy office can seem less
experienced and skilled than our resumes show.)
##
In a busy situation one day, with now the two staff editors
who were normally on hand being gone for a stretch from the editorial area of
the office suite for whatever reason (it’s amazing how such a banal but
typical-of-med-promo situation can breed vexatious developments), Marisa came into
my small room to ride me about some practical matter. I was busy trying to
finish a reference-checking job, the sort of task that anyone in medical
editing knows is one of the most labor-intensive, sophisticated exercises in editing
you can do in medical promo. I was working diligently to finish the
reference-checking (which had been delayed once or twice already, and had to be
done that day, I think), and Marisa came in to my little room, chattering at me demandingly as if she’d
had too much caffeine. She spoke about the work that was backed up, which I
knew about. She moved as if to start prioritizing the very items on my desk, as
if I wouldn’t have known how to do that already.
Before I could get much of a word in edgewise, she was virtually
(if not literally) snatching the reference-checking task out from under me
(something virtually identical—a trafficker taking work almost literally out of
your hands while you are busy on it—has happened with me at one or more other
places in the last decade, including a large, major firm, though without my
reaction occurring as it did here). (Again: if organizing the editors’ work was
so important, and since it was true work was backing up and I was trying to
keep up, where were the damned staff
editors??)
Well, atypically of me at such places, I let fly with some
blasted-out curses and, very unusual for me (as I sat), stamped my feet
(consider again the ongoing Bauer lawsuit, and by that point I had lost my
first MSJ hearing on May 23, which was a few days before). In a way, this explosion
of my temper was a repeat of what I did with Donna a few weeks before. But this
time, I really blasted off.
Marisa got all indignant (not that you could entirely blame
her). “Do you hear this?” she uttered
astonishedly half out the door to whomever would listen. She was aghast. She
went off to some supervisor and expressed her indignation. When I passed by her
in a lobby later—she was a short person—she moved small-steppingly past me, not
apt to acknowledge me, as if steam was still coming out of her ears, with a
bitter expression on her mug.
Now, anyone who has never
worked in these situations probably may not understand this, but on a purely moral level, I felt badly for
her. I could understand her distress. But on the level of the work-related ethics and procedural
considerations involved, I didn’t really feel bad: for her virtually ripping
work out from under me as I struggled to give it the intense attention it
deserved, while it wasn’t my fault I was the only editor around to handle work
that was piling up, I felt she’d gotten exactly what she deserved. In my
opinion, she was totally immature in her preemptive acting with me, with her caffeinated-jabbering,
impulsive, arrogant manner. My
blasting at her, the rudeness of my tone aside, was the only way she could
start to learn, or at least be tactically deflected from her unhelpful behavior.
(Of course, one could still argue that was rough justice for an office.)
But of course the company didn’t see it that way. And I
knew, right with that contretemps, that my time was done there. If I’d had to
be made (weeks earlier) to apologize to Donna, this event now meant my time there
would end. Very quickly, a furtive managerial move was made to curtail my term
there. The managing editor, George K., who was newly hired just a few months
before, rounded out business with me, taking my electronic door key with perhaps
a slight hint as if I’d be back (but I knew
I wouldn’t); clearly he was hiding the fact that I would no longer be back—and
it was actually kind of funny to me that he didn’t suspect I knew this. (Along
with this, I knew the situation was rather creepy, as you might expect. I
actually grew worried about funding my efforts in the Bauer lawsuit.)
I observed before long that all the people involved with my
time’s ending at Pace—including Marisa, George…—were people who started there after I’d first come on the scene. Even
Donna, who in nicer times was an ally of mine, was gone. That showed the high
turnover there.
This was undoubtedly one of the very trashiest medical-promo
places I’d ever worked. I thought it would take some work for someplace to look
worse, though I would find it was possible.
So if Marisa was a good student in communications at WPU,
with her master’s, she still had a lot to learn in how to be an effective
manager in a media firm, never mind the typical abuses that are endemic and
epidemic in these places.
By the way, her “name card” was in my LinkedIn “People You
May Know” list for a long time in about 2013 and 2014.
