Tag Archives: failure

Pat’s Day 2018, keep your mouth shut edition

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I’m a day or three late. Maybe more. Blame Comcast their lack of faith that our internet truly shit the bed. After begging and weeping and prayer, the tech came and left a new modem and cables behind.

Late I may be, but it was worth being late, or at least I tell myself that my lateness is good lateness. It’s better than telling myself I’m tardy.

The Ides of March have come and gone. The day I think of my mother, since she would have been 89 on March 15, had she not decided to not be. I think of her all the time really, not just on her birthday, and she left about 17 years now. Maybe 17. Time flies, and she’s remembered.

Every year since she died, though, I like to remember how they broke the Pat mold and haven’t built another one like it. I remember to not let the bastards grind me down (which I wish was illegitimi non carborundum).

Because of Pat, I remember that non-creative small minded people kind of suck. I remember that there’s both honor and wobbly steps (I edited that from treacherous steps) in not conforming, following, acquiescing, going gently into that good night. Most of all, I remember that like Pat, I am a square peg in a world of round holes, and so it is.

But, that’s not today’s adventure.

Today’s adventure is about work, the thing I have to do. We sell our skills and brains on the open market to live.

I have the shoulder to the wheel thing down, but sometimes I outstay my welcome, or that’s what the authorities at past workplaces have told me. I outstayed my welcome, when a director was boning two women in the office and they all hated me for my non-office-boning knowledge, and they told me I just had to go. Or the time when after about 5 reorgs, the jackass above me was minutes away from being unmasked as a doer of nothing who couldn’t balance a bake sale, and I was shown the door to go.

I’ve always thought of my working as having a shelf life, and my expiration date would come soon enough.

Through all of the trials of the workaday world, Pat’s voice in my head says, “Just keep your mouth shut.” She knew I ultimately wouldn’t keep my mouth shut. And, she’d worry as I lost another job. Albeit lost a job and gained a great story.

I also suspect she was a bit proud of my inability to keep my mouth shut and dodge a fight. Sure, I need to work, and she always needed to work, but she respected that I have some fight in me.

Friday, despite her having been gone so long, her voice was loud and clear in my head, “Just keep your mouth shut.” Here in California, the strange land where I work, in a company that is more earnest than ironic, I’m doing alright with a big mouth and ingrained, East Coast bred sarcasm.

Pat’s head would be blown.

She would say “keep your mouth shut,” but she’d be confused by the work company I’m keeping. I’m working among lawyers, the kind that read and talk about the law not hang out in courts. Until now, the only mix of work and lawyering was when I hired a labor lawyer to help me out of my last employment jam.

On Friday, I was parrying wits with someone who used to be the head of one of the top schools in the country and clerked for a justice from the SCOTUS, while in the company of a double Ivy grad from Yale Law. Magically for Pat’s daughter, they asked me to speak up and no one’s getting fired.

So, I marvel at what a fucking crazy world it is. That I’m me, that she was she, and of all of the things she taught me to worry about or be cautious of and the kind of authority she feared. I’ve ignored her lessons of fear and aversion, and I live on to tell the story.

Here’s the Hemingway version of the story:

People who give away money for a living and run an organization for the purpose of giving away money are asking my opinion on how to make that workplace work better. They are paying me to not keep my mouth shut.

And for two hours, the day after Pat’s day, I got to share openly with the authority figures I was taught to avoid, and I’ve only just begun.

She would have been suspicious and recommended cautious. But, still and all, I think she’d be proud that I have a voice. For her, speak up, speak out and don’t let the bastards grind you down.

The more things change

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First things first — I opened this here writing program, and the first thing I saw were these words:

After a tiring week of having to deal with members for the human race, I’m a tad disappointed that today’s solar eclipse isn’t a harbinger of the earth’s destruction. Sigh.

I have decide to thoroughly dislike a fellow human.

Clearly, I was having a bad day.

Now, days, if not weeks later, I am a goddamn font of contented calm. I’m so fucking zen, I could snatch the pebbles from the sensi’s hand at the same time as I leapt from my good leg to the bad one that was swept by the Cobra Kai and kicked some ass. I’m centered and my chi is on FI-Ah.

Here’s the crazy shit of it all. My historic working shelf life ain’t been grand to tell the truth. My best, most serious jobs have gotten to the five to seven year mark, and I have managed to fail in epic, truly epic, proportions. OK, maybe not epic like Odysseus tying himself to a mast while sailing over rough seas, but as epic as a cube (or in the case of one job, supply closet turned into an office) dweller can live it. I’m not Greek after all.

I had my whole manifest destiny vision quest just over seven years ago, when I moved here to the Golden West. Shortly thereafter, I got my paying gig that contributes to the mortgage and keeps my addiction to munching on groceries alive.

In fact, it’s seven years this week that I started this job. I’ve crossed the Rubicon.

Only this time, it’s a whole other ball of wax, a new ball game, a freshly minted cliche. Unlike the job where the director was banging not just one but two women in our office, blessedly not me; unlike the job where a back-stabbing asshole, who incidentally had stolen some computer equipment, used his work email for sex classifieds, and was an all around weasel, convinced HR I was a violence risk, unlike the job where everyone was convinced the top two execs were likely embezzling at worst or reporting fraudulent data on federal grants at the best, unlike all of them, I seem to be coasting just fine.

No, not just coasting. I’m doing just fine. Like in a crazy, are you sure, no way this must be a trick, doing just fine. Fine like is Allen Funt going to come walking through the door and telling me it’s a joke? Fine. Or maybe in these modern times, Chris Hansen, will explain it all.

Here’s the skinny, which I hesitate to write about, in case there is a weasel waiting behind a cyber door ready to do me in, but I’ll take the risk. Although, I won’t get into enough detail that said cyber door weasel can bite me.

I now have a professional coach. Someone who actually is meant to prod me into achieving shit. And, one of the goals I’m meant to be achieving is doing more writing and pushing myself to actually do what I keep promising myself and then managing to self-sabotage. I’m bound and determined to not let this opportunity pass me by, and I aims to have something that looks like a book in the end.

It may be a shitty book that no one ever buys or reads. But I if it’s three dimensional, or even virtually so with animated pages on a tablet screen, I’ll be feeling alright.

And the bloody miracle of my checkered work life is unlike my last gig, the folks in charge of my employment are A-OK with that side project. I’m practically being begged to forego my workaholic ways, put in no extra hours or thought, watch the clock and slide down my dinosaur the minute the whistle blows at the end of the day at the plant. Like you’re done for the day, go forth and write.

At my last position of stressful employ, not only did those folks in charge tell me I couldn’t be a “real writer,” whatever the fuck that is, they told me I was throwing away opportunity by not giving up my dreams for my corporate welfare. Yup, no dreams of my own just their image of me as a good worker bee content in the hive.

Don’t fucking pinch me, because I don’t want to wake up yet. I’m planning a summer of cutting out of work in time to see the sunset drop over our oceanside town, forcing myself to write and listening to the boss, when she tells me to take it easy.

Hedging toward the forbidden

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Of course, being somewhat educable, i try to learn shit. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes it even sticks.

In other words, given past experience, I try not to write about work. And with that, you know I’m going to skate near that particularly rice paper thin ice.

Mostly, I like my job, and I haven’t felt the wrist-slitting perturbations that became daily episodes in my last state of employ. It’s a weird little group of people. A collective building heaped from the chief on down with folks who academically achieved even when it meant ass kicking and wedgies.

A nerd’s paradise in some respects. But, it is fucking work, and trials and tribulations there are.

The other day, I was driving there, before my getting old V-dub decided it didn’t want to drive, and listening to the radio. Specifically, I was listening to that solid, quirky voice of public radio, Terry Gross on Fresh Air. She was chatting away with Stephen Sondheim on the occasion of his living 80 years on earth.

Total aside, I love Sondheim in terms of his work, but after listening to this interview I think he must be a dick if you were ever to hang out with him Very old school marm-ish corrections and stuff. I kind of wanted Terry to take a shot back, like “Yes, so what are you are saying is you find other people, such as me, to be plodding and inaccurate clowns, is that correct?”

One thing he talked about has stuck with me for days now. In talking about working with Leonard Bernstein in the early days of his career, he mentioned that Bernstein always failed grandly. He said he learned from him that “the worst thing you can do is fall off a low rung.”.

If you’re going to fail, fail big. Might as well get to the top rung first.

I think it’s a life philosophy into which I could swan dive and feel at home.

Arguably, in the many employment failures I’ve had, I’ve failed big. Mind you not Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein big. Just big enough for little old me.

Maybe to them, it would be bottom rung junk. But, for me, it’s from the perspective of a micro-millimeter long ant and a conventional-sized ladder. For an ant, I’ve dropped some dizzying distances from what felt like a pretty good rung of achievement.

Sondheim talking about failing big struck me this week, because I’ve been feeling a familiar fear and loathing.

Like in my last gig, I’ve been a reliable workhouse. The higher up types have given me sufficient strokes to make me feel like there’s a corporate future in which I just might feature in some way. And, now, word on the street is that we might be reorganizing.

It’s a road so familiar, I still got the dust on my shoes to prove it. The strokes, the good positioning, the reliableness, the work ethic, the dealing with team dynamics, the helpong to make change happen and reorganizations possible. I have seen this movie before. I’ve lived the scenes, memorized a whole lot of dialog.

Yet, it is different. I gotta hope it’s different. Different folks, different gig, different job, hell, different fucking state. And, maybe, just maybe, I learned something last time at the rodeo, and I’m a little different too.

If not, if my pit of the stomach fears come true. It’s a higher rung and potentially a better failure. I just fucking hope it’s a good story, if the road turns down that same hill.