Noise

Yesterday was unusually noisy. I got on a bus in the morning to go downtown and pick up a book at the library and then go meet a friend for lunch. I left a little early because I didn’t want to rush. As the bus glided across Mt. Tabor, whooshing smoothly along beneath the green canopies that are unusually lush this year, a woman sitting in the back shouted through her list of maladies for her newfound friends, a couple seated not more than a row from her. “It’s OCD I’ve got,” she said. “You know, obsessive-compulsive disorder, that plus some post-traumatic stress issues.” The couple oooed and ahhhed appreciatively. A diagnosis of some sort – any sort, often – is a status symbol in Portland. There were many other items on the agenda: an upcoming wedding, a summer camp for someone’s child, and loud mouth’s new dwellings, which she’s moving into next week. “It’s a great apartment, and they take Section 8,” she bellowed.

I picked up my book, trolled around the stacks a bit, and, having almost an hour before I was to meet my friend, decided to go for coffee. I love doing this on weekday mornings. As long as one’s available, I sit by a window and watch the business of daily life in action. There is a lot of movement downtown, a lot of accomplishing going on. The office workers, the street kids, the tourists and the city workers with their flags and bulldozers, they’re all on a mission, and I love to watch. I got my coffee and sat down in front of a long panel of glass, and witnessed something I didn’t think was possible. I discovered that there is something I hate more than overhearing people’s cell phone conversations, and that’s overhearing people’s cell phone conversations and, thanks to the speaker phone feature, the other person as well. Some slob sat there and took three calls in the 14 minutes I managed to remain seated before I fled. He was looking for files, and checking on the status of a repair job of some sort and waiting for someone to drop something off. Even the hiss of the espresso machine was no match for this asshole. He and the people he was shouting with were louder, so I guess he won.

The loud conversations on the bus are like texture to me, a piece of living around other people. The cell phone set to speaker phone mode, on the other hand, is another sign of our demise, I think. Someone who thinks it’s okay to have conversations so inane that they’re not even necessary with the other person on the speaker in a way that’s impossible to not hear is either completely oblivious or so delusional that they believe they, and their conversations, matter. I’m not sure which is worse. I’m not sure I want to know which is worse.

But it all ended well. I had a great lunch with a good friend and on the way home, shortly after I got off the bus, I was walking toward my house and I heard something odd. It was like a tapping noise, or a clicking of some sort. I stopped and listened for a moment, then kept walking. In a few moments I stopped on the sidewalk, and there, on the front porch of a little green house, sort of hippyish, was the source of the noise: a guy, sitting on the floor, using an old typewriter. I hadn’t heard that noise in so many years that it was exotic, which made me wonder, for a brief moment, if someday I’ll respond that way to hearing someone talk on the cell phone. I can only hope.

We're hiring

Being a homo and all, I hate to rail on things like this, but I saw something Friday that is such a great example of the tone deafness that liberal people often suffer from that I could not pass it up. The finances in Oregon are a disaster, as always. The schools in Portland are about $19 million short, in spite of the tax hike we approved earlier this year. The state agencies have been ordered to cut their budgets by 10 percent, also in spite of the new taxes. One of my friends who works for the health department, where she works on finding real solutions to real problems – childhood obesity, tobacco, things like that – is forced to take furlough days regularly. A woman from one of the schools in my neighborhood came to a meeting recently to grovel for a $2,000 grant to support keeping its library open before and after school hours. The grant is from a local tavern, which donates proceeds from the brew fest it has every August. It’s a nice gesture, I think. Come get drunk and support the schools. It’s how we do shit here in the territory.

Anyhow, even though we’re going broke, Multnomah County is hiring a diversity officer. I’ve never hyperlinked to anything on this blog, but there’s a first time for everything. If you’re interested, check out the job description and apply. If you don’t have time for the actual description, here are a few highlights. Most of it is such bullshit it would make people who do HR at PR agencies – a double disaster, clearly – quite proud. Stakeholders, initiatives, capacity, competencies, system wide, aligning, organizational change, best practices – it’s all there. Here’s the best single line, one of the key responsibilities: Creating a safe environment for difficult conversations around equity and diversity issues. And if you can deliver on that sort of foolishness with a straight face while other more critical offerings are slashed and burned, your minimum annual salary will be $78,000. That’s not quite as much as you’d make for the same level of deceit at a PR agency, but it’s not a bad start.

A quality performance

One of the biggest pitfalls of working in the PR biz, for me, is that I simply assume that most of what’s on the news is seriously distorted, if not fabricated outright. For that reason, I was really impressed with the guy from BP who went before Congress to talk about the oil spill. I’m amazed that the word ‘testify’ is still used: as far as I can tell there’s no testifying whatsoever. Whomever has drawn the unlucky number for the public flogging – bankers, auto people and, last week, the oil industry – shows up and is yelled at and cut off mid-sentence and generally ridiculed. It’s all on camera, of course, and it’s a great opportunity for our elected officials to show us how tough and down with the people they are.

And an even greater opportunity for those elected officials to get some great material – or ‘collateral,’ as the marketing people like to say – for their upcoming elections. I find it as entertaining as anyone, but my problem with it goes like this: if the shouting officials are members of a committee that’s supposed to oversee energy issues, to use last week’s example, did they not pay any attention to what BP and others were doing in the gulf until the rig blew up? Last week the members of Congress took the stage and yelled about BP’s abysmal safety record. And that’s news? Nobody knew? Are these people who sit on the energy committee paying any attention to what mega companies like BP are doing? Or does the committee take its cues from the group that was making sure the nation’s finances were in good working order? If BP was violating regulations meant, allegedly, to ensure the viability of the gulf, who let that slide? Do these people we elect do or say anything sensible when the cameras aren’t running? I accept that we’re suffering from an acute case of memory void, but I’d like to know what these elected people were crowing about when BP set up shop in the gulf and hired some locals. My guess is that it wasn’t rules and regulations.

Anyhow, the guy from BP was having none of it, and for that I’d give him a solid A if I were handing out grades. He refused to speculate on the investigation. He refused to answer questions that fell outside of his area of responsibility and his tenure with the company. He out-snided the character actors firing off “questions.” Good for him. The night of his appearance, I was listening to the BBC news and on came a guy who runs some sort of bullshit strategy consulting firm in the U.S. He said he’s coached hundreds of CEOs and that the guy from BP really did not do well. He needed to show more passion, said the consultant. He needed to really let the people in the gulf knows that he cares about them, that he identifies with them. That’s wrong on all counts, I think. The people in the gulf are suffering because they’re at the bottom of the money ladder. The guy from BP, on the other hand, well, he’s a millionaire. He’s supposed to pretend to identify with people who run shrimp boats and lobster stands? He runs a big company that apparently was allowed to cut corners for the sake of profit. And he should show some passion? I would imagine he saves his passion for yacht racing, which he did over the weekend with his son. Unlike the elected officials, he showed his true colors on camera, for all the world to see, and it was quite a middle finger raised at people I believe deserve it.

Good points

Over the past week I’ve been exposed to two very good examples of what used to be called common sense.

The first was from a friend of mine who prides himself on not knowing much about current events. He is much more interested in Oprah and The Young and The Restless, lines from which he can recite on command. On Saturday we were talking about the oil disaster. “I stopped watching that story,” he said. He told me he got sick of hearing about how hard it is to do anything five miles beneath the gulf’s surface. “They say that every time anyone asks,” he said. “And I wish someone would say, ‘It wasn’t that hard working under five miles of water when you put the drill in there in the first place.’” I thought that was an excellent point, and I’ve thought of it every time I hear someone on the television say “Remember, we’re doing all of this under five miles of water, and it’s very difficult.”

The second example came my way when I was eating pulled pork and potato salad with a friend who knows a lot more about current events than I do. I was grousing about one of my clients. This guy cannot manage to hit ‘reply all’ rather than ‘reply’ when the e-mail message pertains to everyone on the ‘to’ and ‘copy’ lines, I explained, but he is a social media expert. “That’s just impossible,” said my friend, who was wearing the most adorable pair of pajamas I’ve seen in a long while. “That stuff just came out last year. How could anyone be an expert on it?”

The game

The week before last two completely unrelated things collided in my mind. I finished watching the first season of The Wire, an HBO series about drugs and crime and politics in Baltimore. It was created and written by a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, who got fed up with the real story never making it to print and decided to take his talents to a television show, and it’s amazing, I think. Then, on Friday, I met a woman I used to work with for lunch. I have never liked this woman (it’s a long story, one that began with her not saying thank you when I forwarded calls to her that came to me because our extensions were very similar), and I don’t like her now. So why, I asked myself as I walked toward the restaurant, are we having lunch? Well because, it’s part of the game, and there is some dark impulse within me that drives me to continue playing, or at least observing.

First, the woman: She came to the agency where we used to work to manage a group that performed tasks that were so far above her head it was laughable. But, as she told me many times (then and now) she’s a leader and they’re the worker bees. Her words, not mine. She got fired in a pretty gross way, but it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. In her current job, she’s been demoted twice. And yet, for an hour and a half she talked of very little except the fact that she knows more than others, that she’s smarter than most and she’s worth more money. She hasn’t spoken to our former manager for years because our former manager, according to her, is unprincipled. At the same time, she thinks another former co-worker of ours (who has also since been fired) is lazy and a pretty crappy presenter. And yet she’s “gotten him in” for interviews all over the town “at all the right places.” In a rare display of direct honesty, I said, “So you think he’s sort of shitty but you’re comfortable recommending him for jobs?” Oh sure, she told me, because he has an excellent resume and he’s good at translating technical information to marketing people. Bullshit on both counts, I explained. I’ve looked at this joker’s resume many times, and the longest he’s held a job (besides the one he was just fired from) is 14 months. And I’ve seen his “translation” work. Kind of like her, he assumes that everyone works for him, so he used to send me the text for his presentations and ask me to “make it pretty” – an insulting thing to say to someone you’re asking to cover up the fact that you cannot write a cohesive and grammatically correct sentence. Well, she went on, he’s interviewing all over and the offers are rolling in. He just turned one down because it “only” paid $80,000 per year. You are kidding me, I said. Oh no, she replied, that’s almost $30,000 less than …

I did not throw up.

Her $100,000-plus friend also hates our former boss, the unprincipled one, I was told. Really? That’s interesting, because he had lunch with our former boss right after he was fired. Our former boss shared with me the exact same details of his firing that were shared over Friday’s lunch, details she could not have known had she not heard them from $100,000-plus. I kept that one to myself, believe it or not. She also hangs out with one of our more odious former co-workers, another do-nothing know-it-all, who, whaddaya know? brags to me every time we talk, as if it’s something to be proud of, about how he hangs out regularly with the guy who was friends with the woman I had lunch with but, as it turns out, was behind her very unceremonious firing. Not surprisingly, they haven’t spoken since. But Do-Nothing plays them both and lo and behold is on the receiving end of my lunchmate’s recommendations as well. I shut up about that one as well.

And our former boss is the one who is unprincipled? That’s always struck me as funny for some reason. She too was fired from the company where we used to work, and she is not without her faults (nor am I). But in the same way that people hate the police but expect them to be on the scene instantly when something happens, it’s amusing to me how twisted and treacherous all the back roads leading to our former boss’s lunch calendar are the moment someone is in need, even if that someone is Do-Nothing or $100,000-plus.

The lunch was both good and bad. Bad because I felt slightly nauseated when I was walking back to my house. Bad, because I thought, this is the sort of shit that makes earning a living so tasteless. Bad because I say yes to socializing with someone I do not like. Bad because every exchange with her leaves me confused about one central issue: does she want me to join her circle of smarmy duplicity or is she trying to taunt me by showing me the menu at a party to which I’ll never be invited? Are her snide little comments about “good little workers” and “when you’re at my level” (that’s one of her favorites) made as revenge for being friends with our former boss rather than her? Or is she so high on her own mythology that she thinks it’s true? That’s a common problem with a lot of these characters: they believe their own lies.

I got my answer from The Wire. The only difference in the instinct behind the behavior on that show and that of the corporate people I know is that at the office or the golf courses or the happy hours there are not usually drugs and guns. In both venues, to win, you destroy others, in the sneakiest way you can manage, because if you don’t you’ll be destroyed and lose. And apparently I am not the only one who compares my work world to the one portrayed on The Wire. In one of the episodes a fight with clubs and all breaks out in the courtyard when an unauthorized dealer sets up shop in the courtyard. Two of the cops are sitting in their squad car, watching, pondering why the gangs are so hard to shut down. That’s simple: their motivations are free of ambiguity and therefore way more powerful. As one of the cops says, “When they fuck up, they get beat. When we fuck up, we get a pension.”

Missing

There’s yet another missing child story in Portland this week. At one of the elementary schools, a boy said goodbye to his stepmother, who shot a photo of him, and then went down the hall to a science fair. And he has not been seen since.

I am afraid I have become desensitized to these stories. The reason for that, I think, is that the television people – particularly those on the morning network shows – get confused when they’re staging them: they seem to think it’s Halloween, and they’ve come to work with their detective costumes on. The stories, of course, go according to a script. The parents, or an aunt, or a neighbor is propped up before the cameras, usually accompanied by a lawyer or a cop, and sobs through an attempt to answer questions by ‘news’ people whose singular goal, as far as I’m concerned, is to wrestle forth as many tears as possible. There are insinuations galore, about who may or may not be a suspect, about how fit or not fit the parent or guardian may or may not be. There are often pictures, or flowers, or devotional candles, and there’s always something or another along the lines of how the missing child could “light up” a room just by walking into it. And sooner or later, one of the television drones asks, in a way that I have come to think of as funny (which is totally inappropriate, I realize), this gem of a question: How do you feel? One of the more offensive millionaires in the business, Robin Roberts, often gets more confused than the others, taking off her detective costume and changing quickly into a reverend costume. The speed with which she does this is impressive. I’d love to see her salary divided by the number of times she’s cooed “our thoughts are with you.” I’d bet every time she utters that schlock she earns more money than anyone I know earns in a decade. It’s sick, sick theater, and the viewing public apparently cannot get enough of it.

So I was impressed, actually, with the parents of the boy missing in Portland, who have chosen to not go before the cameras. Good for them. The police are giving statements a plenty, I think. The parents have issued statements through the law, which I think is more than sufficient. But then detective Matt Lauer got on the story, saying that he didn’t mean to imply suspicion – a comment designed, I think, to do just that – but does anyone think it’s strange that the parents haven’t been appearing on television? And a newscaster on a local station, one who cannot get through a sentence without stumbling over the words, reported that the parents had posted something on their Facebook page (of course) about going to the gym … and isn’t that interesting? Not really.

But it was one of the local conservative talk show hosts – who I am sure wouldn’t be above throwing lit matches into gasoline tanks for the sake of a good show – who said the most sensible thing I’ve heard so far: she said that she thought people should bear in mind that some people are more comfortable talking in front of cameras and microphones than others. It’s amazing to me, the places where reason sometimes hides.

Offensive and reprehensible

Yesterday I had the very rare experience of not believing my own ears. I had to listen to the news on the radio not once, or twice but three times before I stopped doubting the state of my hearing: Helen Thomas, who has been in the news biz since 1960 and is about to turn 90, who has a unique ability (I believe) to make the White House uncomfortable because she asks questions, who writes an opinion column, Helen Thomas yesterday was forced to resign because she said she thought Israel should get the hell out of Palestine. The pro-Israel camp in this country, of course, went ballistic. How dare she? What a racist. The same camp fueled the flames by asking, what if she had said all black people in America should be forced to return to Africa? Well, what if she had? Maybe they should call Oprah and ask her. In addition to being a really clumsy comparison, I think it’s interesting that the same people who go into attack and belittle mode every time a group uses the word “holocaust” to describe its experience did not waste a second when it came time to latch on to another cultural narrative. The press fraternity at the White House expressed its condemnation of her and was planning to meet and take a vote on whether she should be allowed to retain her seat in the front row in the briefing room. That sounds like an episode of Survivor to me. Barack Obama said “kick ass” on television, speaking, of course, about his tough stance toward BP, although I think what he was really doing when he uttered those words was stroking himself a bit over the fact that he’d managed to run Helen Thomas out of town. In fact, I’d imagine the entire pack of frat boys at the White House are breathing a sigh of relief over Helen Thomas’ departure. Robert Gibbs, one of the president’s goofiest appointments, I think, called her comments “offensive and reprehensible.” I am learning, slowly, that if you listen to people criticize others long enough, they will eventually tell you all about themselves. I include myself in this theory, and now I include the president’s press secretary as well.

Anyhow, I am not going to get into the nuts and bolts of what I think of Israel because that’s clearly not allowed. As one of the guests on On The Media said last night, criticizing Israel is an issue of national security. So shifting away from politics, since that’s a forbidden topic, I was wondering last night what it would be like to meet Helen Thomas and have the chance to ask her just one question. Here’s how it would go: Hello Ms. Thomas, it’s an honor to meet you. I have on two-part question for you. If you were invited to host Saturday Night Live, would you accept? And the second part of the question, if it were one of those Facebook campaigns, how many people would have to sign on?

We need to see some tears

I’m not exactly proud of what I’m about to say. But, considering that I’m about to say it, I suppose I’m not exactly ashamed either. I think the oil spill is one of the most entertaining events to come along in quite a while.

More than a month into the whole debacle, people are now spewing forth their “outrage” and “anger” toward the guy at BP, who, for reasons I will never understand, still goes before the cameras. He’s a criminal, I’ve heard. He’s a liar. He owes the people of Louisiana and the entire Gulf Coast region. I think he deserves an award, personally. He clearly understands the fine art of manipulating people into rearranging their priorities to the point where preserving the environment takes a back seat to our lust for “free enterprise” with minimal interference from Big Government. Good for him, I think.

The Big Government thing is one of my favorite parts of the story. That weirdo governor of Louisiana was the Republican Party’s great, acceptably brown hope for a while, spewing forth his nonsense about keeping Big Government’s hands off Louisiana. Louisiana, he said, is a place for entrepreneurship, a place where people can hope and dream and work hard. Big Government and its lust for bureaucracy shouldn’t get in the way. Now, where’s the military to clean up the mess? Where are the checks written by Big Government? Where’s the president? He should move his entire operation to the town of Venice, according to one fisherman, and provide people there with daily updates. How dare he make a trip to California to campaign for Barbara Boxer? And how dare he have a party at the White House for Paul McCartney? Big Government spends too much money, but regardless of cost, Big Government should drop everything and focus solely on the situation in the gulf, where an entire way of life is at great peril. Please, shut up.

Equally entertaining are the right wing radio talkies, who are outdoing themselves on this one. The real problem here is that Obama is just using the spill as an excuse to blame the Bush administration yet again. Even though I think it’s pretty obvious that one of the main causes of the disaster is that the regulations were interpreted as suggestions rather than rules, it’s not presidential for him to say so. The main reason it’s not presidential is that the White House should not be used to divide people for political purposes. Republican presidents, according to a guy from some conservative think tank, never did that. That was what he said. I couldn’t believe my ears, either.

Even better, we now have a professional sports angle on the whole thing. The pitcher whose perfect game was ruined by an umpire’s bad call … now there’s our man. He was so gracious in his post-game interview, steering clear of the impulse to blame, which is what the president would have done had his perfect game been stolen. The president should take a cue from this guy. He should man up.

At the same time, he should be more emotional. In what I think is one of the most horrific snapshots of the country’s psyche, the talkies have been railing on Obama all week because he hasn’t started crying during press conferences or during his walk along a beach, where he got a good look at what the region stands to lose. He’s acting like a professor, sang the chorus. What an elitist! Although, when I stop and think about it, I do wish he’d usher forth a tear or two. That way, the networks could play it over and over and over again, and then maybe we’d see a little less of the Web cam footage, which I’m afraid is going to give me nightmares or, worse yet, jeopardize my beloved regularity.

When the light turns yellow

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Birthday cake

Today, my business turns three. I cannot quite believe that. It seems like I’ve been doing this for many years and, at the same time, like I just started a couple of months ago. That’s a good place to be, I think. I have enough experience to know that it’s best to avoid those downward terror spirals – commonly called panic – that for me are debilitating. At the same time, I make enough mistakes that it’s very clear to me that there’s plenty to learn, plenty of opportunities to experiment. I deal with awful people, and I deal with great people. I’ve been shocked at how some people treat me because I am “a vendor” but also shocked by how truly decent even more people are. For me, for now, it’s a perfect mix.

One of the things I’ve tried to figure out is this: three years ago, did I start my own business because I wanted to see what it would really be like to be self employed? Or did I start my own business because I needed a good reason to exit, as gracefully as possible, a job I stayed in a bit too long? If it were a parade, in what order would I find the carts and horses, the chickens and eggs? I have no idea. And this morning I decided I really don’t care.

What I do care about is that I’ve done it thus far, and I hope to continue. Not having to risk my own life and the lives of others on the roadways of Portland is a good thing for everyone. I love not having to spend nearly a third of the year thinking about “telling my story” in a performance review. I do really love going after new clients (I’m not sure why, but I do). I am grateful to not have to participate in an office narrative, the recovery from which requires at least half the stage time. Not spending many of my waking hours in recovery and/or protection mode has freed up a lot of time to focus on other, more productive pursuits, like not drinking, freeing up a certain portion of my brain to get to know other people, reading, cooking, sleeping much better, paying attention, all of which I’m planning to celebrate today.