God doesn’t work here

I make it a policy never to talk about my job, especially online. For one, it’s not a very interesting topic, frankly. I make weekly community newspapers, four of them, from my home office. Two of them are nothing more than life-support systems for legal advertising. One has an actual staff including a full-time editor/writer as well as an office lady and salesperson. The fourth paper is trying to find an identity between the two.

The other reason I never write about work is because lots of hitherto ‘anonymous’ bloggers get their asses fired for bitching about the boss online. I can’t afford that right now. Plus, when I leave, I want it to be on my terms. Getting canned is a bummer. You always remember it later when running down the shittiest days of your life.

However, a funny thing happened at the office today and I feel compelled to share.

This is about paper #4, the hybrid: half of it has no practical purpose for existing (the effort to sell legals for it bears very little fruit on a weekly basis, certainly not enough to cover its print and production costs) and of late, half of it is trying to make a credible journalistic entity of itself. The Company hired a photographer; whereupon discovering she was bilingual and had been to college, they immediately promoted her to editor and head writer of Paper #4. (More about whimsy later.)

The Company is weird. My four papers are but a tiny cog in their mighty empire. Usually, I’m the out-of-sight-out-of-mind fellow, and I like it just fine like that. The more discreet I can make my operation, the more discrete I can make it. And so far it’s working, which is a big part of why I’ve never written about it before. There’s not much to say. I do my work and they pay me.

They also let me work from home which is awesome and my immediate boss is a very interesting fellow – brilliant guy, runs the nut & bolts of the place from writing computer programs to managing personnel issues to climbing up on the roof and replacing the air conditioning unit, he does it all – consequently, he’s almost impossible to get ahold of (especially by me, from my remote location) and only rarely gets to give Paper #4 the personal oversight it would no doubt benefit from.

The Company itself is a Mom & Pop incorporated organization, and as frequently happens in companies of this size and structure, runs kind of at the whim of Mom and Pop. And Mom and Pop – well, they can be mighty whimsical. Obviously, they know what they’re doing, they’ve been The Company for a damned good long while. But they run it like their own personal fiefdom and god help you when their roving eye falls on your cobwebby corner of the Organization.

Yes, the last couple weeks, it’s been my turn for the personal treatment. Mom has gotten directly involved in Paper #4 and my nerves have been the poorer for it. What it comes down to is this: I recognize her right to input at every level of the operation – it’s her sandbox and her toys. Without her, there is no paycheck, there is no joy in Mudville. I’m hip. I’m down.

But Mom is mercurial, or is by reputation and has been with me the few times I’ve spoken to her over the years. (The first time I spoke to her, without introduction or preamble she demanded to know, “Who the hell do I have to kill to get such & such in my newspaper?!”) It cracked me up. She’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. When she’s good she’s great, but when she’s bad you will know her by the trail of the dead. She’s also ripped me a new one on at least one occasion. That’s still cool. It’s kind of edge-of-your-seat exciting when the person on the phone says, “Hold on for Mom…”

The problem is, the paper being Mom’s sandbox and shovels, she’s really uncontrollable. In the literal sense that I cannot control her. I’ve trained most of the rest of the staff there to work in the Fang Bastardson method of maximum efficiency, at least with me. But Mom jumps into the fray from time to time – like now – at whatever point in the process she pleases, and it’s usually after I’ve wrapped and shipped that week’s Paper. It’s crazy frustrating, and I can’t do a damned thing about it, which I suppose is the actual frustrating part about it. And I can’t even try to work it out with her because I’m scared to death of her, like everybody else in The Company.

Now, I wasn’t sure about that last assertion about the rest of The Company till today. I was having a particularly rough time of it today. Wave after wave after wave of corrections came in from every side (instead of collected and transmitted as one concise set of corrections that would have taken me half an hour instead of half the day) and it was really pushing my buttons.

I got so rattled that at one point that after dialing The Company, I had completely forgotten which colleague I needed to talk to at that point. I mumbled to the operator, “Oh God, I’ve completely spaced who I wanted to talk to…”

And in the same hushed voice the kid in the Bruce Willis movie said, “I see dead people,” this poor phone jockey whispered matter-of-factly, “God doesn’t work here.”