The Funnies - Special Edition: Happy Armistice Day

"Joe, don't this remind you o' the night when the outfit was movin' up to the front in Argonne?"

"Yes. Only - you an' me had a job then, Jim."

Life Magazine, 1920

The Funnies - The Boss is Out (1917)

"Is the boss in?"

"Does it look like the boss was in?"

Let Go

All and all this week turned out to be one of the kind that leave a fellow more than a little wrung out and tired. You see, this week my cube-mate was "let go". It was a strange affair, in this era of contract employment and "right to work" legislation making just about every job into a short-term contract, it's hard to know exactly how to feel when a coworker suddenly isn't one any longer. There was the prerequisite expressions of dismay and sorry, the well-wishing and assurances that the future holds something better, and then the awkward parting on his last day followed by an even more awkward emptiness. After the depressing reality settled in, though, I started to think about the way we talk about something that's an all too common event.

We think of one word to describe when a worker is deprived of their job, fired. To be straight forward, fired isn't an amicable parting of the ways or the result of downsizing, it's being ushered into a side office for the equivalent of a gangland whacking. Don't say goodbye, there's no notice, there won't be cake in the cafeteria and a card on your desk, just get off company property before your boss calls security. According to the Word Detective website, the term "fired" was first used to describe the loss of a job in the 1880s and is linked to the discharge of a cannon. Imagine a circus performer being shot out of a cannon, and replace the clown outfit with a business suit and you get what our 19th century relatives were thinking.

Where there is a need humanity will invent a term, and it's probably obvious that not all partings between employee and employer fall into the perp-walk out the door variety. There are times when, due to the ambivalent currents of economics and business, a worker joins the ranks of the unemployed and that parting of the ways can't accurately be described as firing. In 1871 the term "let go" came into use to describe just such a situation. Let go describes downsizing, the expiration of contracts, and any number of unfortunate circumstances.

It's not much, but hiding behind the shield of etymology blunts the pangs of parting a bit. Those of us who are left behind are gifted with an appreciation of the uncertainty of fortune, one day everything is ticking along per plan and the next everything is upside down.

The New Normal

Dear Reader,

This was my first week working from home (other than as a writer). It was a strange experience, something akin to playing hooky even though I spent probably more than eight hours a day hooked to my PC. I think the reason it felt like misbehaving was that those eight hours were spent trying to hammer out the basic stuff we all take for granted when we go in to an office for the daily grind. There were server issues to handle, email transitions to be made, and telephone machinations to be considered - all from the quiet sanctuary of my home office. When I used to drive into an office in the morning I would have just dropped by the IT guy's desk to make mention of any issues. Later in the day he'd shamble in, mutter at the monitor, climb around under the desk, excuse himself to go shake chicken bones at the server, and viola I'd be fixed up. Now I've got to call across a time zone and crawl through the red tape before I can get in line to get service. I'll call it progress because that makes me feel better.


I did visit the old building on Thursday. I needed to box up a few things and pay a visit to one of the people who are still working out of the place. It felt a little like returning to a murder scene. The steady decay of shutting down is progressing in earnest now, even the company name has been removed from the building's façade. I walked around the hallways, visited my old office, and after rattling around a little headed home. This is normal, now all I have to do is get used to it.

The Sea of Life

Dear Reader,

Over the weekend I went to a birthday party. It was a celebration of my niece turning 18 and watching her I could almost see her looking expectantly toward a brand new life in the big, wide world. I remember that time of life. I remember standing in the tiny bedroom of my suburban Indianapolis home, looking out the south-facing window late at night. Over the asphalt shingles of suburban sprawl I could make out a single beacon – the flashing red light atop a water tower that stands in Gustafson Park. I'd stand, elbows resting on the windowsill, and watch the light flash out a message only I could interpret.

"The magic is out here." It would flash. "It's waiting on the edge of the night, just beyond the farthest you've ever travelled."

On a cool autumn night, the first breath of approaching winter would waft through that window and I could feel myself changing; turning away from the stale world of childhood and toward the hopeful dreams of adolescence. In that instance I knew the magic was out there. All I had to do was put the safety of home behind me and embrace uncertainty. I became a boat straining at its moorings, drawn by an unseen current that would carry me away from the harbors of my life and onto the open sea. That's what eighteen is – it's being filled with yearning, it's sailing beyond the reach of parental lighthouses and relying on your personal compass. My personal voyages on the Life Sea have been fraught at times. Disappointments, betrayals, and failures are the reefs and rocks that lurk beneath the waves but the glorious feeling of being the helmsman of your own life makes the risk worthwhile.

So, as I write this I sit in my half-disassembled office in a building that will be closed down in forty two days. For over a year I've been heading toward this day – the day when out of the hundred-plus people I worked with only twenty five are left. The facility seems huge and any time I venture into the hallways I'm left feeling like a widower rattling around a big house that used to be filled with life. Each empty office houses a ghost. There's the polite and old-fashioned woman who used to work in Inventory, the guy who could have been the original absent minded professor, the guy who acted as my guide for the first two months I spent at the company, and a hundred others moving silently through the empty hallways. I wonder how long they'll linger once the doors are locked. I wonder if the next tenant will sense their presence and get the shivers.

I'm staying behind to the end. At the end of the week my desk will be moving on, heading for its new job in California. I, on the other hand, will be bunking with the ghost of a former coworker. We'll share stories of the way it used to be for awhile and then I'll get back to work and she'll take her chains out to the foyer for a good rattling. Sometimes the open sea plays tricks on you and you have to sail on, always heading forward, always charting the course toward the magic.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Dear Reader,


I apologize in advance for the fact that lately everything I'm adding to the blog seems to be about the impending implosion of my second job (that is the one that's not being a writer). Unfortunately, while waiting for the second edit of Time of Death to come back from the publisher and slugging away at the last half of my Cinder Girl manuscript the only events of note seem to be the steady goings of my colleagues.

Today was our HR representative's last day. Nobody mourns the going of someone from human resources. In the modern workplace it de rigueur to express contempt for all things related to the department. Maybe far too many HR reps don't represent anything human at all, instead being a corporate organ devoted to the enforcement of self-beneficial policy and obfuscation. All I can say is that, in the case of my small corner of the world, that wasn't the fact. Having our HR rep was a little like having an easily angered terrier in your corner – and I mean that in the most positive way possible even though it might not sound that way!

Regardless, nobody mourns. Perhaps after losing so many fellow employees, those of us who are left can't muster the spirit for heartfelt fare-thee-wells. I'm not certain of the reasons but there wasn't any card circulating around for signatures, there wasn't any goodbye lunch held at some noisy local restaurant, and there wasn't a group meeting to express thanks - only the quiet progression of emptying offices and disappearing faces. The rolling wheel of this last year runs over another victim and continues down the road.

107 days remain, and each promises to be a little more depressing than the last.

The Demise

Dear Reader,

I should have done this sooner. It's something that's been a major part of my life for the last year and I haven't really made more than a passing reference to the fact that it's happening. Since April of 2009 some portion of my waking consciousness has been focused on this thing. It's lurked behind the good and bad news of the year passed, hanging around like smoke in the atmosphere. The dire thing I'm writing about, of course, is the closure of the office where I work and the displacement of the 300-some workers who've made their livings working there.

Until now I've never experienced a plant shutting down. I've worked places where I knew the company was taking on water but, in those cases, the company in question had so many other flaws I felt good to climb into a lifeboat. Hearing those companies went under never felt good but it did give me a certain feeling of validation – a feeling that I foresaw the coming disaster and had the wisdom to get myself out. This time, at least for me, the experience is different. It's different in two ways really.

Firstly, I've never stayed until all the furniture was gone and the doors locked. This time, as a part of my own succession plan, I'll be doing just that. It's like making your home in a hospice, every day someone else is gone. You hear about people who are moving on or will be moving on, you walk passed darkened offices where people you knew used to work, you see the possessions and files being boxed up and labeled for shipment, and the only constant seems to be your playing witness.

Secondly, I've never been working at a really good company when this happened. Sure, some of them were okay and some even had a few good people working for them – but the signs of their demise showed in petty managers, poor or adversarial policies, lack of direction, dry product pipelines, and a hundred other little ways. Not so this time. I can honestly say this is the first place I've worked that really had it all – it encompassed the close-knit feeling of a small company with the resources of a large one, the staff was damned smart, and the policies were geared toward doing the right things for the right reasons. In spite of all those things on October 1, 2010 this facility will close down and all of the jobs were transfer elsewhere. On that day I'll walk out the door for the last time and then the building will go quiet.

Maybe it's the last quarter of existence that's got me in a certain dark mood today. Maybe it's the realization that time is really short that's driven me to write about this subject in what is truthfully a writer's blog, not a diary. I hope you'll forgive my spending time musing over something that's not about writing but then, isn't it? Isn't a writer formed from the experiences they have throughout life? Isn't every moment, every encounter, and every chance happening, traumatic or benign, fuel for creating new characters and new stories? Possibly.

I'll keep you updated on the major happenings in these last months. Maybe something will spring from these missives and maybe it'll just be a record of how I felt in this time and space. Either way, I hope you'll pardon my occasional fixation on matters other than writing.