This topic was suggested by a TMP reader. (Uncredited only because I haven’t asked permission to credit him/her.) Yes, that is allowed at TMP. Encouraged, in fact.
The other day, a man in suburban Baltimore was shot and killed by his ex-wife. The story jumped out at me for several reasons — it is very unusual for women to kill their exes — but the detail that really seized my imagination was that the man had worked for the Baltimore County school system for more than 30 years. Got up and went to the same place every day for thirty years. It sounded like heaven. (It wasn’t a good writing day.)
I am statistically eliminated from working at any single job for more than 30 years. Or am I? I started writing what would become the first Tess Monaghan novel in 1991 (and can actually trace its origins to a phone conversation two years earlier). That means my fiction-writing career could be said to be 18 years and counting, just two shy of my 20 years in journalism. And of those 18 years, I have spent all but three plus of them actively engaged with the same character, Tess Monaghan.
Does that make it easier to write a Tess novel? In some ways. I don’t have to invent the world whole again. I have a very clear image of her when I sit down to write a Tess novel.
But the age gap between us grows and now she’s had a life experience I’ll never have, giving birth. With almost fifteen years between us, I am wiser (I hope) than Tess in most ways. The trick is trying to put myself back into the mindset of the mid-30s, while imagining the juggling acts that dominated the lives of most of the parents I knew.
The other day, I watched a new barista being trained here at Spoons. Seems like a nice young man, one anxious to do well and to offer polite, speedy, courteous service to the customers. But first — he has to master what appears to me to be a fairly complicated cash register. That’s how jobs go. The things that seem insurmountable (machines, systems, paperwork) quickly become second nature. But we forget how overwhelming they are at first. Heck, I was still making mistakes when trying to file photo requests in my final year at The Sun.
So what has gotten easier in the almost two decades I’ve held my current job? Beginning. Sussing out problems sooner rather than later. Letting go of things that don’t work.
What will never get easier? Middles. Breaking my own bad habits — the over-reliance on “just” and “so.” Forgetting that the reader doesn’t know everything I know.
Now it’s your turn. What are the joys of tenure? What are the frustrations? Is it a blessing or a curse to go to the same job every day for thirty years?
I was one of those guys who couldn’t hold onto a job to save my life, probably because I had a crappy attitude that didn’t exactly motivate people to keep me around longterm. But eventually I realized my dad put up with far worse working 60-hour weeks and spending almost all of them on the road.
I’ve been at Ye Olde Day Job for about 11 years now. Upside, you don’t have that stress of worrying when the ax is going to drop. And here, even in this economy, it’s not too bad. Downside, the same job for over a decade can become unrelentingly dull at times. Get up and take the same bus to work everyday, get coffee at the same time, eat at the same places for lunch, sitting in the same dull cubicle. It’s kinda mind-numbing.
But I have a paycheck, and I do work I like. So it’s not too bad when it ceases to excite.
I just saw TMP denizen Ab at our weekly soup kitchen gig and brought this subject up. And I realized that Viva House is a place where I’ve gone from newbie to veteran in a relatively short time, only six years. Serving a free lunch might seem like a relatively simple task, but there are lots of things that come up that stump a newbie. A big part of it is developing an instinct for when to be firm and when to be flexible, and knowing which situations have to be mediated by the true bosses, Brendan and Willa. I have always been grateful that I was a pretty seasoned server when someone began vomiting during lunch one day. If that had happened early in my time there, I might have been utterly defeated.
Today, a teenager* passing through the line asked me a question that I’ve never been asked: “How do you pay for this?” I told him that Brendan and Willa are amazingly frugal people, that all the work is donated and Viva House receives financial contributions as well.
*We had 200-plus people come for sack lunches today, some walking blocks, even miles in the case of one woman, in the 90-degree heat. Thirty were children. I just happen to think those are good stats to share.
Speaking of tenure-just think of how many years Willa and Brendan have been operating Viva house! I know that they were doing it when I had my first job out of college almost 30 years ago and it was established then, not new.
I always thought that I’d find a good job and keep it. I’m not an original thinker and that was simply the way it was done in the era that I grew up in and it was certainly a huge value in my family’s household. It never occured to me that any other options were valid. My father worked for Bethlehem Steel until until his health wouldn’t let him anymore and my aunt who lived with us had that real prize-a federal government job that she worked at for 30 years.
Somehow and quite inexplicable to me, I have found myself not just changing jobs but careers. I started out teaching in a Catholic high school but left that as soon as I got a master’s in education. I then went to law school and practiced law in various jobs and now I am a librarian. I practiced law for about as long as I’ve been working in a library but my library job has the record for the single job that I have held the longest.
Viva House celebrated its 40th anniversary last fall and I was very proud to be there.
My father worked for The Sunpapers, if you’ll permit me the old localism, for thirty years and it wasn’t his first job in journalism, far from it. In fact, one of my favorite stories about my father is his two-day stint at UPI. He simply couldn’t type fast enough. He writes quickly, but the typing speed required of a wire service almost killed him.
My mother worked 18-20 years in the city school system; she decided to go to graduate school when I was 8 or 9, and was working by the time I was 11.
My sister has worked in Baltimore bookstores most of her adult life and I think she has spent 20-plus years with the Johns Hopkins Bookstore, which is run by Barnes & Noble.
Upon receiving the massive new Burlingame biography of Lincoln for Father’s Day, the first thing that struck me was that it was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
As for tenure – it seems that I am not a rolling stone in the stream of life; more like a discarded refrigerator!
When I was a kiddo, I got a job as a carryout at a supermarket (neither of which much exist anymore), and got promoted to the point that I worked there 9 years to the day…when I graduated from school and my tenure came to an end, it felt very much like the end of a sentence.
I HATED my first job after school, and quit after 2 weeks (it was just a tremendous relief!), but then my next one brings me up to the current day; 23 years and counting. It IS pleasant to really know a job; and indeed, the company I work for is almost entirely different today – from what it was 23 years ago – so that the work has evolved and changed.
It strikes me as almost miraculous that the enterprise does as well as it does; still (or maybe, therefore), I always feel insecure. What if I fail to keep up?
So far, it’s not been a problem, but – as today’s celebrity news reminds us – our short lives can change quickly
I am amazed when I realize that I have been going to the same job for almost 27 years. I have been teaching at the same college since 1982. I am amazed because in my mind I am still the same young guy who first arrived at the place. I am amazed because I never envisioned working at one place for so long. Laura, you speak of the age gap widening between you and Tess. Students who I once viewed as peers now seem like children to me. We had registration the other day and I had difficulty accepting the year that these students were born: 1992. I don’t feel that it is a curse to have been going to the same job every day for all of these years. Although, I am sick of the commute. I always thought that with time the job would get easier. That having done it many times before, preparing for class wouldn’t be so arduous. But it hasn’t worked that way. Students change, the knowledge base changes, and the way I look at some things has changed. But all of that is really a blessing of my tenure. The job is still fresh and exciting. The students are fun. I love being with them and watching them develop.I love learning more and learning about the stuff that I teach. I’m better at some things and not as good as others. My spontaneity and energy have diminished. But my lectures are better organized and (I hope) more interesting. The bad part of realizing that I am a veteran in the place is that I have to accept that I have grown older.
cube stories are making me think of ‘and then we came to the end,’ IIRC, by joshua ferris.
i’ve only had an office and i don;t know that i can be retrained for cubes at this point. i can hear noises that haven;t even happened yet. don’t think i would get a lick of work done.
k
alice hoffman has been at this gig a long time–but i was very surprised today by all of the traffic on her review and the resultant snarkfest that she allowed herself to get into–including tweeting the critic’s email address and phone number [though it had a typo]. http://bitly.com/1avzz2
laura, if you’ve ever been panned [it's possible--there is always someone who doesn't like something, no matter who wrote it], do you remember those words, or do just shrug ‘em off like a quarterback and think about the next down? i am just curious if those kind of things, perhaps from long ago [evil rejection letters, whatever] stuck with you or not, and if they did, were they motivating or just flare-ups of irritation?
this sorta ties in to the whole ‘been doin’ this gig for awhile now’ motif…
//karen
I’ve gotten several bad reviews. One was in People magazine and appeared four days before 9/11, so I got over it really fast. Some have been in online forums, such as DorothyL. Back in the day, when I used to glance at Amazon reviews — I check neither reviews nor ratings there now, and that’s been true for several years — two anonymous reviewers were outed during a glitch. Not the more recent one, which made headlines, but a similar one back in the late ’90s. The surprise was that both reviewers were “known” to me, via the Internet. One was an LA Times journalist, another a desperate wannabe writer. The journalist later approached me for a favor of sorts; I was polite, but not very helpful. Let me be clear: I wasn’t unhelpful because of the bad review, but because I didn’t feel I could trust someone who was nice to my face and slamming me anonymously online, and the favor he sought required that I trust him.
For years, the reviewer Larry Gandle was less than enthusiastic about my work, but he always signed his name to what he wrote and I didn’t have a problem with him. Later, when Larry became a fan of my stand-alones, it was that much sweeter. (His positive reviews also affirmed there was nothing personal in his negative ones.) I dislike a fair number of books, and it’s not personal.
I can’t imagine anyone enjoys any negative comments about anything personal, whether it’s work or hair. But, to date, I’ve never tried to pick a fight with a critic. It’s human nature to want the last word in a dispute, but the novelist gets so many words to begin with. The best refutation, it seems to me, might be in the next book, or in the sheer doing of it. “You think I suck? Too bad, I’m not going to stop.”
Actually, the best encounter I ever had with a critic came because of my wretched memory. I was introduced to someone at a Bouchercon and the name was oh-so-familiar, but I couldn’t summon up the association. So I punted, put out my hand and said how DELIGHTFUL it was to meet the person, thinking she was a writer I should know, at least by reputation. I thought she seemed a little nervous and shy, her eyes darting right and left in a panicky manner. Later, I remembered she was a critic who had savaged one of my books. A book that was nominated, at that Bouchercon, for best novel.
If I had it to do over again . . . I would be even more effusive upon meeting her.
Amazon reviews: about 6 or 7 years ago, I paid a little bit of attention to those, but that has long since gone by the boards. I wrote a review or two for books I really enjoyed – James Robertson’s biography of Stonewall Jackson leaps to mind, as well as Dr Gerry Prokopwicz’s excellent book about the Army of the Ohio – “All for the Regiment”.
I never liked seeing people trash this book or that, and if I really didn’t like a book, I’d sooner say nothing than pan the thing. But then it occurred to me that such an approach was no more (nor less) useless than only writing to praise a book – so I now skip the whole process.
Honestly, the mechanism that sells the most books to me has been C-SPAN, plus the (late) Ft Wayne Lincoln Museum (which Dr Prokopowicz used to run)….and of course Nancy Nall’s site (which lead me here)
One supposes THAT’S the problem with anonymous on-line pans; they literally want to reduce your income potential. Anonymous praise might have the opposite intent – but what good is it if the reader doesn’t know whether the happy reviewer has any brains?
laura,
thanks for your very generous answer. i am particularly amused by the karmic leavening provided to the ‘outed’ person who, of course, eventually needed something. can’t decide if i am impressed or filled with loathing that he had the ba…er, i mean, temerity, to ask. funny too about not remembering the vixen when you met her and were nice. karma does come around, but it is just not always fast enough to suit.
re: the hoffman story–i think the funny part there is that the critic was oblivious to the whole thing as she was incommunicado in new englandish area, so all of that spite was for naught, and just made hoffman look like the arse in public, where she chose to take the fight–and it gave the bad review publicity it otherwise would never have had. reminded me of football where the first guy doesn;t usually get teh personal foul, but the retaliator does.
and i suppose writing well is the best revenge.
your line about the ‘novelist getting so many words to begin with’ really resonated.
thanks,
karen
oh-the other thing that ran through my mind was, ‘what was she thinking?’ when she did that [a.h.]–in an internet society, especially if one is even a minor celebrity, it is tough to do those kind of things in a vacuum. personally, i like to write a letter [in word] and then shred it. i feel like i’ve crystallised my anger, expressed it safely, and can move on.
perhaps she was just being human.
//k
I recently lost a job I’d had for almost nine years.
The cool thing was that I was thought of as senior team member, and someone to go to for answers, based on experience.
The bad part was that my skills were getting stagnant. Now that I’ve been looking for work for a while, I wish I had done some learning, or maybe even tried to jump to another department.
For a slightly different perspective — when I was driving home, I realized that aside from my marriage and my son, there hasn’t been anything else that constant in my life. That’s what I thought about as I was driving home. Nine years, and it was over, just like that.
john,
very sorry to hear of your job loss. be sure to file right away for unemployment benefits; it’ll likely take you longer to get back to work than you think it will, and the first 2500$ is tax free [new special thing for fiscal 2009], so that is like free money. your state may even have applications available online.
//k
John,
Your post here sounds very together and wise, and I hope you feel okay with what happened.
But if you don’t, feel free to do some primal screaming here. It took me years to get over the end of my Sunpapers life. And by years, I mean — maybe seven or eight. Maybe today, in fact! The subject came up and I found I had no desire/need to Explain It All. But it used to be my Niagara Falls. (“Slowly I turn . . .”)
“The subject came up and I found I had no desire/need to Explain It All.”
Isn’t that a lovely release?
Seems to be a combination of acceptance of one’s own imperfection, coupled with the realization that one can be Right and still, at the end of the day – that fact doesn’t really make a difference.
Took me 40 years to learn that (and I still sometimes need reminded…which is the job of one’s Significant Other, a particular strong point of mine!)
karen … thanks for the kind words. I am on unemployment and Cobra. It is taking a long time to find something.
Laura … thanks for the compliment and the offer. Actually, I wasn’t crushed, like some people were, and yet, I sometimes felt like I was in denial. It is what it is, nothing I can do. I miss it, but I’m looking ahead.
and to celebrate, i will, of course…tweet laura’s link…
john–as a gov’t contractor & consultant, i have had lots of sudden unemployment, unfortunately–but always got something within a year. but that is a long time, particularly if there are other folks involved. today’s figures not paticularly heartening, although not surprising. for me, though, stressful part was always protecting of credit, because when that gets hosed, so goes my security clearance. but once things are royally screwed up, it is almost a relief, and you’re down to the basics: can i eat? can i keep my house? can my friend keep getting my presciptions in brasil, because i have no insurance & can’t get refills w/o a $500 drs appt? does my mother really think i still need the latest recipe for squab?
here’s hoping you get something, whatever it is, that’ll fund your looking for the job you actually want.
//karen
Meanwhile, cut and paste this link for a thoughtful piece on bad reviews:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-weiner/dont-ask-alice_b_224230.html
Thanks to Karen for bringing Alice the twittering novelist up, and to LL for that marvelous Jennifer Weiner essay on bad reviews and the deceptive intimacy of ‘personalized’ internet portals like Twitter. I was particularly taken by this passage:
“In this atmosphere, in which a novelist can Tweet an eyebrow threading (you’re a braver woman than I am, @juliebux!) and a New Yorker staffer can complain about the high price of a pet chicken’s cremation (sorry for your loss, @susanorlean!) and a magazine columnist can allude to his fondness for breast milk (bottoms up, @thejoelstein!), it’s easy to forget that you’re not chatting over coffee, and that the things you do in the heat of the moment — posting, for example, a critic’s email address and phone number — will live forever online.”
That “Bottoms up” line (followed by the ‘not chatting over coffee’ imagery) got me laughing, and I’m still chuckling; thus ending my 4th of July work-week with a bang!
Hi Karen:
It hasn’t gotten that bad yet. We still have some options available. And we’re all healthy, at least phycially.
I’m tryin to decide if I should enhance my IT skills, or bite the bullet and learn bookkeeping. Either way, I’ll be earning a “just starting out” salary.
Thanks.
)