i spent pretty much a full day writing a story about the last rotary dial payphones of NYC. it’s amazing how i forget that writing sentences is hard, and writing paragraphs is hard. add to that dealing with software and images and running the whole publishing system like a cham-PEEN and it all takes a lot out of you. boo hoo

my web traffic seems to be back, ending my worst month in years on an upnote. can’t wait to see what the future brings.

yesterday was the 10-year anniversary of my escape from corporate. i didn’t exactly escape. i was fired. but it was exquisite timing because i couldn’t stand the job any more — combined with a phat severance package — and i have not seriously looked back since. i never looked back at that particular company but i did sort of entertain notions of other corporate employments. alas, any time i even enter a corporate office building any more i feel queasy.

i don’t know if ten years off the structured corporate tit is altogether a good thing. i think it probably is, but with reservations. i mean, after 10 years of corporate i could count on 1 finger the number of products i worked on that i was honestly proud of. one. these days after 10 years of doing my own thing, i can think of quite a few. it is hard for me to take pride in the work i do for other people.

and maybe that’s how i should think about things going forward. work on things to make myself proud. or to impress myself. that’s it! hurrah.

i sometimes think about those corporate years and i wonder: how did i do so well? i was not that great, i made huge mistakes, i was as lazy as a Thomas can be, and at times i exhibited every character flaw from the corporate checklist of fail. yet i just kept getting promoted and raved about and hailed as an essence of greatness. i know from a friend at the company that the guy who fired me, when he left the company some years later, told the CEO in his exit interview that his lowest moment, the worst day he ever had in 17 years with the firm, was the day he fired me. i don’t know if he was just going for a drama award with that statement, but i don’t know why he would have said it if it had no substance.

but i remember my time at an earlier gig. pre-corporate. pre-NYC. i was the classical programming director at the college radio station. not exactly a plum position of great influence but not bad for a radio hack like me. radio was supposed to be my career direction. i took the job fairly seriously. i was ambitious about it, and tried to leverage the experience of the job with exaggerated resume accounts of my radio fabulosity.

but even at the time i knew the truth: i fucked up a lot. i made mistakes on-air, i lost things, i screwed up acquisitions of records and CDs, i hired DJs who were obviously unreliable and often failed to show up for their shows… i was a goddam loser at the job but somehow i was referred to as something special, maybe not anything awesome or game-changing but, simply, a quality radio guy.

but i was not. i might have learned a lot in a professional environment among experienced professionals, but all for naught, as the real world of day-to-day radio broadcasting in traditional commercial formats would have chewed me out and spit me up.

the point being… i don’t know the point… just that i don’t understand how i failed up so much. maybe i am just the king of the world. maybe i’m pretty. (quoting Muhammad Ali here).

…..

i might be able to purchase the new computer tomorrow. i mean, i could buy it today, but i wanted to throw some free money at it, and the free money should land tomorrow. then i’ll do my taxes and that return should make up for this lousy month of February. i pretty well have to get a new desktop, as i’m sailing on faith now that the laptop can serve as a desktop replacement. it handles well, but i need more expandability.

pardon me while i explore my expandability.