Packratting

I’m a terrible packrat when it comes to pictures I’ve taken or words I’ve committed to paper (or email or fax). For instance, I have more than 35,000 pictures stored on Flickr, a notebook full of copies of letters I’ve sent to one old friend, still MORE notebooks full of printed-out email “conversations” with people. This may strike people who’ve grown up with computers as a huge waste of time, and I suppose it probably is (well, except that technology has a bad habit of replacing itself every so often; whatever words I saved on 5-¼” floppy disks, for instance, would be lost forever had I not also printed them out, and the same can be said for whatever I saved on my old Smith-Corona word processor. Paper takes up space, and takes time, but at least it is more or less “permanent”).

Going through some of that today I came across a letter I’d written to a former boss about 16 years ago, part of which I’ll reproduce here just for chuckles, grins, and because it may show some of the roots of my “99-percentness” (which of course is not a word). (Names of specific people and the institution for which we worked are changed).

One of the hospital’s ubiquitous vice-presidents came by PCC yesterday to give a brief presentation on our “Mission Statement” and “Strategic Plan.” She talked of downsizing, reduction by 20-25% of FTEs and so forth, cross-training remaining workers so that they can be moved hither, thither and yon, wherever the work happens to be on any given day. Robert, your ever-so-shy former secretary, had the temerity to ask how the hospital’s administrator-to-worker ratio compared with that of other hospitals. “We have a CEO, COO, executive vice-presidents, senior vice-presidents, administrative chief of staff (whatever HE is), vice-presidents. For two years we’ve heard nothing but 'do more with less,' yet you bring in a whole herd of administrators to tell us how to do it.” Barb--the VP--blushed and admitted that, yes, our hospital has more administrators than the average hospital.

She also talked about “outsourcing” certain services, like food services and housekeeping. After the meeting I took her into the hall and showed her the stained carpet. “This is subcontracted housekeeping,” I said. “What I would ask, as a customer, is, ‘if you can’t keep your carpet cleaned, how are you going to do all the fancy stuff you brag about?’” Barb admitted I had a point.

Listening to Barb chatter on about the hospital’s “vision” and where it wants to go in the next few years, I found myself imagining a huge beehive full of interchangeable “worker bees” completely devoid of individuality, all hustling and bustling noiselessly in service to some sequestered queen. This is not the first time that image has appeared in my mind; I see it whenever I listen to Steve at one of our office coordinators’ meetings, too, especially when he talks about “leveling the playing field,” which basically means reducing every support job in the hospital to the least common denominator, thereby allowing us to hire nothing but Secretary 1’s at right around minimum wage. The ultimate purpose is to reduce us all to the point of easy expendability.

I’m not a complete idiot or idealist--I KNOW that we are all expendable, as inherently worthless as a Confederate dollar or a politician’s promise. Nevertheless, that the hospital’s administration has decided, apparently, that it is perfectly okay, even preferable, to slap us in the face with that knowledge every day, while at the same time telling us how “important” we are, is disconcerting, at best.

I should have become a plumber (NOT one of Nixon’s).

In retrospect, I wrote that particular letter at about halfway through the 31 years since Reagan’s election and maybe even about halfway into the “housing bubble,” the stock market’s “irrational exuberance,” etc., all the bad banking practices (or outright thievery) that nearly collapsed the world financial system a couple of years ago. Nostradamus I am not, but, like some kind of weird coal-mine canary, I think I--and a lot of others--sensed the shitstorm about to crash down around us, even if we couldn’t describe it with anything more than, “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.”

If I were going to dress up for Halloween today, I think I would go as a vampire (speaking of coal-mine canaries, isn’t the recent popularity of vampires a neat coincidence or something? Maybe there are a LOT of coal-mine canaries out there) with a big Goldman-Sachs or Wells Fargo logo on my back, or maybe a photo of our congressmen/women clustered around a TV, guzzling Dom Perignon and laughing at OWS people being tear-gassed.

Please allow me to introduce myself . . .

I'm a man of no wealth and little taste, to paraphrase the bard of wherever he's from, Mick Jagger.

My day job (well, more accurately, early afternoon/evening job) is medical transcription:  I transcribe medical reports dictated (spoken) by doctors and others (nurses, social workers, et al) who live and work a thousand miles away from me, in a place I've never been and to which I likely never will go, which is kinda weird, when I think about it, and NOT, at the same time--I number among my Flickr friends and Facebook acquaintances many people who live and work multiple thousands of miles away from me, in places I've never been and to which I likely never will go.

Physically, I live out in the country, 9 miles from the nearest tiny town, 18 miles from a town somewhat larger, yet probably not quite qualifying as a "city," no matter what it calls itself and no matter that the local university has a nationally known (among universities of a certain size, that is) football team.  I'm dead smack in the middle of what people on the coasts like to call the "flyover zone," and I like it here--keep right on flying over, thank you very much.  When the light hits them just right and the sky is blue enough, the contrails of your jets are wayyyyy cool!

Somewhat surprisingly, I don't miss living in the "big town" ("still hayseed enough to say, hey, look who's living in the big town!"  Thank you, Mr. Mellencamp).  Sometimes I wish I could get a pizza delivered, or Chinese, and sometimes I wish there were someplace I could go to walk where there were actually other people to gawk at and wonder about, try to imagine the lives of, but those wishes come less and less frequently with every sunrise I view from my front porch, in the company of my dogs and cats, especially when I've accidentally made a good cup of coffee and it is steaming in my hand.

I haven't figured out yet what this blog is going to be "about."  When I first set out to do it, I had a pretty clear idea (well, for me it was clear):  The "Occupy Wall Street" movement, or whatever it is, had set me off on a soul-searching meander through my working past and working present, and determined me to turn on my inner rant--and we all have "inner rants"--let "my voice be heard," etc.  We all want our voices to be heard, right?

But then it occurred to me that my ranting voice, while valid and all that, is not my only voice, or even my main voice.

While there would be no shame or embarrassment, or whatever, in being defined by my ranting voice, neither would I want it to define "me," any more than I want to or can be defined, as a person, by the job I do.  My ranting voice is part of me, my job is part of me, but neither one is "all" of me.

So I've decided that,  yes, I will rant sometimes (eloquently, I hope, but at least with all the words spelled right), but other times I will talk about dogs and cats and wayward possums and maybe the occasional bald eagle.  My job, my status as a worker in a decidedly worker-unfriendly age, is a part of my life, but the other stuff--the dogs and cats and possums and eagles--is what fleshes it out, what makes life matter to me.  The "other stuff" is my life; work is just a helpful way to structure my day (and pay the mortgage, of course).

The Habit of Seeing

There is a certain freedom that comes to you when you both realize and acknowledge that your life will never be fodder for a "reality" show, that you are distressingly normal and undoubtedly never will become a rich reality star or even a Kardashian (what IS a "Kardashian," anyway?  Is that from "Star Wars," one of the prequels?  Certainly it sounds like a creature that would drive Captain Kirk or Spock or Deanna Troi to distraction).

The realization/acknowledgement, conversely, gives one freedom to blog.  Like those people out in Arizona or wherever who doggedly send radio signals randomly out into space, in the mostly forlorn hope that someday the signals will be heard by an alien culture that doesn't want to turn them into food, and might even message back, you can sit down, write words, and send them out into the ether, then come back and do the same thing tomorrow.  Of such are our tomorrows made, right?

I'm a newbie to this whole blog thing, and had a hard time even coming up with a title.  My first choice, "The Habit of Seeing," was already owned by somebody.  (Which is irritating because it would have been perfect for me, damn it!  It's a play on my photography hobby and on a book by Flannery O'Connor, "The Habit of Being," which really was just a collection of letters she had written over several decades.  Read that book and you feel you come to know her, which is a trick.)

The title I eventually settled on--"Slow Change, Troubles and Doubts," comes from an old song by Simple Minds (which aptly describes me, albeit in the singular form), "Don't You Forget About Me."  "Slow change" was part of one line, "troubles and doubts" part of another.  I've always loved the song, and figured that my mixing-and-matching lyrics, chances are no one else would have come up with that particular combination before.  It also works for me because I'm slow to change, and have ALWAYS been about "troubles and doubts," it's what I do best.

(It's so weird calling that song "old," by the way--I still hear it on the radio from time to time, but it dates from the early 1980s.  Which makes it old, but new at the same time.)

Thought briefly about calling the blog "Ritalin," for more or less the same reason Simon and Garfunkle, or Simon, anyway, named a song "Kodachrome"--"don't take my Kodachrome away."  I could sing the same about Ritalin, if I were actually on it (probably should be).

To get back to "the habit of seeing," I occasionally take pictures, and likely will post some of them here.  Carrying a camera around, with the intent of actually using it, forces you to develop the "habit of seeing."  Among all the habits I have, and all the habits I could name, that might be the only one worth any kind of while.

Once I get through this introduction stuff, I'll actually get down to blogging.