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.