Ringing the changes for Marcia

Today marks a major turning point in my friend Marcia’s life: she’s decided to pack in her job as personal administrative assistant to an IT exec for a major US automaker’s UK division. The corporation is making all kinds of cutbacks & when they offered her a severance package, she weighed up the options & decided that not working for them would be better for her in the long run than continuing down the path she could see before her.

Well, hell—I’m about 8000 miles away & I can see that that particular path doesn’t lead anywhere you want to be, & I’m not talking about the expected office relocation to Luton.

Marcia’s been with the company for just gone ten years, sorting out calendars, travel, frozen BlackBerries & I don’t know what all. I’ve got to hear about some of it, & all I’m going to say is that I’m surprised the company is still actually selling cars at all.

I’m kind of sad about it, because when she turns off her company laptop for the last time, I lose about 50% of my regular readership. (I'm the comic relief in her workday.) But you would not believe the load of crap (a word she would not stoop to use, but I’m an American & you expect that sort of thing from us) she’s been managing, & I’m so relieved & happy that she’s had the courage to recognize when she’s looking at “that’s enough” in her rear view mirror, & to walk away. This past year in particular has just been beyond the beyond—every time you thought you’d reached the absolute pinnacle of corporate idiocy, you realized you were only at the base camp & had another 4000-foot climb to go.

I’ve known Marcia since my days at Newbridge Networks in the UK. She was PA to the European GM (then the CEO), & I was on the same floor. Not sure how it is that we connected, but we did, for which I’m truly thankful. When the bottom fell out of my world in September 2001, she was one of the friends who helped prop it up. & then again in 2003, 2009, 2011 &…well, you get the drift.

Marcia’s my friend who’s a bell ringer. I’ve had the spectacular pleasure of climbing into bell towers (some centuries old) to watch her band ring a couple of times. Through her, I even got to go into the tower of the Washington National Cathedral, because it turns out there’s this global confraternity of ringers, & we went up one Sunday afternoon for a practice. Beat that with a stick, why don’t you?

Here’s Marcia at Mount Vernon, from that same trip she took over here:

Ringing is so complex, so involved—watching it done on both church bells & hand bells, I kind of understand how Marcia’s had the ability to manage all that corporate nonsense for all these years—you concentrate on what’s needed & ignore the external noise. Peals can go on for hours & you have to be on top of where you are & where you need to be for all that time.

Marcia came back over a few years later & I had one of the best Thanksgiving celebrations in my life in her honor. I brought out the good china (which hasn’t actually been used in the seven years since), did the turkey with stuffing (my great-grandmother’s recipe), mashed potatoes, pumpkin & pecan pies, the whole nine yards. I even toyed with the idea of that green bean casserole (you know the one I mean), but since it wasn’t part of my childhood holidays, I bagged it right away. (Another friend from the Newbridge time told me that if I really wanted to provide the ultimate middle-class American Thanksgiving experience, I should have Cool Whip with the pies, but I went with whipped cream. &, for the record, I don’t like either pumpkin or pecan pie; but it was fun to watch Marcia try them.) Marcia & two other friends were there & it was absolutely stellar.

Even though the kitchen sink backed up. But that happens to be a holiday tradition for me, so that’s okay.

Well, anyhow, Marcia’s going to spend time with her grandchildren, maybe work on the cross stitch project I’ve been hearing about for around eight-nine years, hack at the hedge in the back garden & possibly get in some more ringing. She won’t be fighting with archaic IT systems, German admins with BSE, execs thinking she can suspend the laws of physics with respect to time/space or the rest of that crap.

I don’t have any recordings of Marcia’s band, but I’ll send her on with this:

&, my sistah—I think you’ve earned a glass of rioja.

Still writing dangerously

Argh!

For the past three days, I’ve had the protagonists of my novel sitting in a country pub, waiting for their dinners. I’m stuck—& this time my [blah-blah] device doesn’t seem to be working.

Raymond Chandler advised writers who lose the plot to have a guy burst through the door waving a gun. Old NaNoWriMo hands tell us to parachute ninjas into the story & have our characters deal with them.

I’d just settle for a shepherd’s pie & a nice plate of fish & chips. & another round of ale.

Facebook drama, Act II

By way of follow-up to my post about Drama Queens (of either XX or XY chromosome configuration) on Facebook, here’s something I came across.

Not DQ material, exactly. And not entirely a humble-brag. But this sort of invitation to one’s friends to share some appreciation of how special one is (which specialness one is extremely careful to call out), seems to lie at the core of the whole FB phenomenon:

I mean—the idea of going to a reasonably public forum (public because you’ve lumped all levels of associates, from passing acquaintances to live-in lovers, into the category of “friends”) and, well, just gushing like this is completely cringeworthy.

Isn’t it?

And the fact that such gushing elicits (as it was obviously intended to do) equally cringeworthy encomia just…well, I believe I’ve gone into insulin shock.

Just gag me with a mobile device.

Check it out!

An interesting story in the WSJ about how public libraries are trying to interpret their mission in the 21^st Century.

They’re putting on hog butchering demonstrations (Overland Park, Ks.) and running virtual bowling leagues (Des Plaines, Ill.), among other activities. Along with books (hard copy and electronic) and videos, they’re lending musical instruments and construction tools.

And in addition to improving lectures on local botany and ancient Greek pottery, they’re offering rock concerts and stand-up comedy shows.

I haven’t noticed any of this hoo-ha at any of the six library systems that I use in the Valley they call Silicon. I do know that in the Milpitas branch of the Santa Clara County Library, on the mornings they hold the toddlers’ story time, you have to park at the top of the garage because the lower three levels are packed with SUVs and mini-vans, and you wade through massed squadrons of very upscale strollers parked by the stairs to get to the adult non-fiction section. But that’s pretty traditional.

Although I think some of the stories are told in Mandarin.

I’m not sure how I feel about all this new-fangled approach. I thought the North Seattle branch of the public library had lost the plot when it only had about six aisles of books and devoted the rest of its space to computers, DVDs  and CDs. The system did have books, because I used to request them and have them delivered to NS for pick-up; but they didn’t seem to have as many as the King County system.

So much for their image of being the national vortex of intellectual achievement.

I mean, it was like that old “Laugh-In” joke: “I went to the Beautiful Downtown Burbank Library, but their book was checked out.”

I grew up with and in the Pasadena Public Library. My first paycheck job (you know—an actual paycheck that you had to deposit in your bank, as opposed to being paid in cash for babysitting) was with PPL, shelving books in the Children’s Room of the main branch. I researched papers in the periodical stacks, where I’d get lured away from the stories I was after by magazine advertisements from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. They had a listening room, where you could plug into classical music or jazz or Broadway shows; and they rented out a couple of electric typewriters by the half-hour.

(Hey—that’s how Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451; only he used the UCLA library for that.)

And PPL was in the vanguard of expanding services to its patrons. They were the first library I ever heard of to open on Sunday afternoons. Back in the 70s, they were primary movers in the Metropolitan Cooperative Library Service (MCLS)—where libraries in communities surrounding LA city pooled resources. You could check out materials from any one of the participating libraries through your own system.

Of course, I’m a little fuzzy on how you found the danged things, because they still used those card catalogs to list all their holdings.

But if another library in the system had what you wanted, you could request it and pick it up at your local branch. It opened up a major chunk of the world to you. Amazing.

A few years ago I stopped by PPL’s main branch. It’s a venerable building, as such things go in Southern California. I walked into the main hall and found table after table laptop-ready, with masses of electrical outlets and high-speed Internet access. They had a coffee kiosk in the courtyard off what used to be the Fine Arts room. And it isn't Starbucks!

But with all the new high-tech offerings, I didn’t see the niche where the old winos used to come in when the library opened, park in one of the overstuffed chairs and stay until closing—warm in winter, cool in summer. I wonder where they’ve gone?

Unless they’re at the hog-butchering lectures or logging onto the libraries’ public computers.

Facebook drama

I’m sure you’ve noticed it on Facebook: someone will post something along the lines of, “I’ve totally HAD it. This is THE END!!!!” or “Men/women are all assholes!!!!!” These may or may not be followed by 17 posts from friends asking “What up???”, and maybe (or maybe not) some elaboration from the originator.

Frankly, in my experience these sorts of posts get lost amongst the “Just checked in to [some place I’ve never heard of] for [pizza/cocktails/burgers/bikini wax]”, “Cutest EVAH cat picz” and multiple variants of various Internet hoaxes—the ones that used to be emailed around.

I mean, let’s face it: there’s a boatload of banality on FB.

But it apparently doesn’t go unnoticed, and someone has taken the time to pull together evidence of Drama Queens on Facebook. I am relieved to note that some of the DQs’ friends are on to their tricks. I especially like the one that starts, “I now understand how it feels to not be able to get over someone”.

Okay, they may not have the charm of Dog Shaming, but they are amusing.