Having recently begun writing my book about the . . . er . . . good times at the phone company, I find I have already run into a problem. (Besides discovering a proclivity for writing in the passive voice too much.) I remember when I left the company on my last day, carrying my little cardboard box with its meager contents to the elevator for the parking garage; I was happy. Glad to get the fuck out of there. Now, a little over ten years later, after nurturing all those happy thoughts--not unlike the ones you carry concerning "happy days" at high school, when the truth was it was years of tedium combined with injustices and petty annoyances (P.E. is so-ooo stupid) --I find, upon a little digging, that most of my time at the phone company was unpleasant.
I suppose, like life, when you're at work the happiness is in the fleeting moments. Otherwise, nobody really likes having to sell half of their waking hours to a soul-less corporation and then take orders from someone whose authority seemed to have come from some inscrutable, random process having more to do with politics and ass-licking than any real qualifications for "managing" subordinates. Yeah, the phone company likes the word subordinates. Don't get me started. They also, when referring to a mistake during a safety review, call that a deviation. When the union once tried to refer to dangerous neighborhoods as "red zones," the company started calling them "awareness zones." See what I mean? Drives you nuts.
Without any other clues, I decided to begin the book by dredging up stories in a more or less chronological order. That has its pitfalls, I'm discovering. In a random universe (such as ours) chronological order is actually chaos, and some other kind of imposed order might make more sense.
But it's a place to start. The problem is that in re-remembering the succession of events of my career, I find myself remembering a lot of unpleasant things--things about which one might reasonably say they would "never want to through that again." Yet, here I am.
But it's not so bad, I guess. Yet still bad enough so that if I am to continue, I may have to come up with a good reason to write this book--a purpose, you might say, to help me maintain my momentum. I don't want readers to cringe, but truth is a worthy pursuit in writing, if it's not boring.
Monday, May 13, 2019
Saturday, May 11, 2019
It's November Somewhere
At last I can say I am working on a book. Surprisingly, perhaps, it is not the one about Laslo and the strange goings-on at the Busy Bee Cafe. Maybe later. This is about the phone company. What happened is I stumbled across two books written by ex-employees, and in the way this sometimes happens, I thought to myself, shit I can do that.
Turns out it's not quite that easy, but it seems to be going along OK. At least I can say I'm writing at a rate that would have me winning NaNoWriMo, so there's that. I know it's only May . . .
At the moment, even though I am throwing down words, I still am not quite sure what I want to do with this. One thing I don't want the book to do is to devolve into a rambling mess of "funny" phone company stories--you know, the ones with cockroaches in the phones, or with crazy drunk employees violating safety practices, stuff like that. The problem is sometimes it requires too much setup to tell these stories, as I have found--strange as it may seem--the general public does not know how the phone company works and therefore why some of my stories are so brilliantly pithy and ironic or whatever.
OK, well, what I am really trying to say is, I don't want the book to appeal only to other people who have worked at the phone company, full of the types of stories that we used to tell each other in the morning while we prepared to get in our trucks and go to work. Those were mostly lies anyway. So we're left with stories that might be meaningful to what the military would call the non-cognizant agent. Stories like cockroaches in phones, and crazy drunk employees violating safety practices.
Seriously, what I am trying to understand since I retired is how during my entire career the technology and methods evolved and changed faster and faster until it almost overtook me. Which is also called, getting old, I guess, but I can't help but think it didn't used to be like this. At least, so much. When I was pretty new to the company, I saw old guys retiring and it seemed like they pretty much did the same work their entire careers. With me, things kept changing--of course I changed along with them, but in the end, it quit being fun.
And, as always, there is the thing about writing that I always encounter. It is that my "writer's voice" is much better when I'm blogging than when I'm sitting down seriously trying to write. I really need to get past this. Perhaps I should stop being so serious. I mean, my entire life, being serious has never really served me that well. I'm not sure what that says about me, or about the world.
Turns out it's not quite that easy, but it seems to be going along OK. At least I can say I'm writing at a rate that would have me winning NaNoWriMo, so there's that. I know it's only May . . .
At the moment, even though I am throwing down words, I still am not quite sure what I want to do with this. One thing I don't want the book to do is to devolve into a rambling mess of "funny" phone company stories--you know, the ones with cockroaches in the phones, or with crazy drunk employees violating safety practices, stuff like that. The problem is sometimes it requires too much setup to tell these stories, as I have found--strange as it may seem--the general public does not know how the phone company works and therefore why some of my stories are so brilliantly pithy and ironic or whatever.
OK, well, what I am really trying to say is, I don't want the book to appeal only to other people who have worked at the phone company, full of the types of stories that we used to tell each other in the morning while we prepared to get in our trucks and go to work. Those were mostly lies anyway. So we're left with stories that might be meaningful to what the military would call the non-cognizant agent. Stories like cockroaches in phones, and crazy drunk employees violating safety practices.
Seriously, what I am trying to understand since I retired is how during my entire career the technology and methods evolved and changed faster and faster until it almost overtook me. Which is also called, getting old, I guess, but I can't help but think it didn't used to be like this. At least, so much. When I was pretty new to the company, I saw old guys retiring and it seemed like they pretty much did the same work their entire careers. With me, things kept changing--of course I changed along with them, but in the end, it quit being fun.
And, as always, there is the thing about writing that I always encounter. It is that my "writer's voice" is much better when I'm blogging than when I'm sitting down seriously trying to write. I really need to get past this. Perhaps I should stop being so serious. I mean, my entire life, being serious has never really served me that well. I'm not sure what that says about me, or about the world.
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