So it really does take about an hour to get from door to door, Astoria to here. I left the place at about 10:35 and reached TrumpTower at 11:32. Thinking again that the 5 levels of escalator must be a deterrent to some people, since I am yet to see this space anywhere near crowded. No elevators are publicly available, though they are present but roped off. I would think handicapped visitors would be accommodated through those elevators. If not then the ramp entryway here which would appear to be designed for ADA compliance is is kind of pointless, since you can’t get up here via escalator if you are in a wheelchair. Yes, an ADA lawsuit waiting to happen.
Thinkinf of Calvary Stories again, after making that video yesterday. A compendium of stories about “notables” (o, how I hate that word), would not interest me and I doubt it would interest anyone. So instead of aspiring to collect a book-length volume of such stories I think I’ll just give them away to the Internet. The problem with that, of course, is that writers and idlers scoop that stuff up and reword a few things, then pretend they did the real research. It’s enough to make me want to just make stories up, which wouldn’t be out of character for me. It would be easy to get away with tiny hoaxes, I think. Like a lot of minor transgressions you can get away with things forever if you don’t get greedy.
I wanted to do that when I first moved here. I wanted to plant a handwritten piece of music somewhere at the Performing Arts Library’s research division; planted in such a way that it appeared to be an undiscovered sketch by Igor Stravinsky or Leonard Bernstein. I had read of the Piltdown hoax, and how Arthur Conan Doyle was seriously considered a candidate for the hoaxster despite only circumstancial evidence. That evidence, though, painted a pretty convincing picture, as I recall.
The Donald Trump mystery years at Wharton, which appeared to have been debunked, provides additional conspiracy fodder, though, as I wrote earlier. If the only person who remembers Donald Trump rememers him as having a completely different personality than he dos today then maybe it lends weight to the idea that a substitute student was paid to attend Wharton in his place, a technique rumored to have been not uncommon among wealthy draft dodgers of the day.
And here I am perpetutating this stupid idea in Mr. Trump’s back yard.
As for Calvary stories — I would almost certainly never attempt a hoax or phony story, though it would be tempting to do so only in a way that foiled or trapped those who would steal my content. I know that some data providers are said to seed their products with harmless errors as a way to detect if their data has been stolen via copy and paste. That’s certainly within any content creator’s ability, though I was always curious as to what these “harmless” errors were. I think it was Garmin, the GPS device maker, that was said to have been among such companies doing this.
I thought today that hand-writing the stories and scanning the pages on which they were written might be as bulletproof a way as possible to prevent wholesale copying and pasting. Using images of text instead of text would not turn away a determined thief, since screengrab software which converts text from images to actual text is easy to come by. I use such widgets myself — ABBYY Finereader’s screengrab reader to transcribe tombstone inscriptions — and doubt that any typewritten text in JPG format would be immune to its clutches, unless some kind of ROT encoding can be implemented. but i know nothing of such cloak and dagger techniques, which were used by the 9/11 hijackers to share secret messages. Perfectly innocuous looking JPG images were shared among the hijackers, but with embedded text matter buried somewhere within. Whatever way they did it is probably considered a joke now but they got away with it back in ’01.
Handwritten Calvary Stories might have some aesthetic appeal, except that my handwriting is probably worse than it ever was for lack of practice. I actually wonder if my handwriting really is as bad as my mother complained it was, or if that was just one of those motherly complaints that came along because there was nothing else to work with. I didn’t like spinach, either (what kid does?), but you’d have thought I didn’t like chocolate the way she went on about it. Seemingly understandable, though, was her dismay at my dislike for mashed potatoes. I’ve met few people in my days who express anything but shock that I can’t stand mashed potatoes.
Tourists file through this space, moreso today than I remember from last week. Actually what looks like a group of 3 women office workers just strolled in, each with large bags filled with lunch.
I just realized that I can see 9 West 57th Street from here. That is the site of my first real job in New York, at a cosmetics company where I did word processing and administrative detail. Those were good times, until they were not. By the time I left to take a job on that new-fangled Internet thing I was at wit’s end with the job and the company, probably not possessed of the foresight to see that I would almost certainly have been fired had I continued in that role for I was doing such a half-assed job. I didn’t care any more, and the company had no interest in the Internet or online anything. The real influencers in my professional life at that company had all moved on. There was nothing for me there.
The most influential boss I had there wanted to send me to executive training school. I just heard someone on Bloomberg Radio talking about those programs yesterday, and how companies are steering away from them nowadays when they had been commonplace for generations. The expedited MBA program (which is where i think this boss wanted to send me) was conducted at a resort, and felt more like a business retreat than an academic program. These days they cost on average about $180,000. Whatever that amount equated to in early 1990s money was just chump change to that company, though.
If I ever wonder how my life would have been different had I gone through with such a program I certainly do not let it bother me. An executive role would probably have vanquished my soul and left it curbside, with that dead raccoon I saw on Cypress Hills Street on Sunday. I can think of few things less glamorous than the executive lifestyle. I like the businessperson lifestyle of travel and worldliness but if I ever were to enter that world again I’d aspire to nothing higher than VP, which was kind of a joke title at my last corporate company. Freakin’ everyone was a VP, it seemed, and if that wasn’t enough of a joke then what really got the laughs was when somebody was made “President” of their department, a business unit which might have only 2 or 3 people working in it.
I started as a temp at that company, from day one putting in 10-12 hour days cranking out hundreds of pages of DECKS, as they were called (and probably still are). The truth of things is that I lied my way into the job, though it was intentional, and actually I guess I did not so much lie as slip through an opening that should not have existed. I had signed up with a temp agency and was told to report to their office to take a word processing test. I might have failed the test, as my experience with word processing software was limited to foggy memories of using Microsoft Word at the college computing center. I had graduated college about 7 months earlier and not touched a computer since.
On the day I reported to the temp agency office to take the test the computer I was scheduled to use was not working correctly. I remember seeing that computer and thinking it looked like everything was there but what did I know… I was told to call the next day to schedule another time for the test.
I called the next day and talked again to Barb, who I never met in person but had talked to several times in arranging this test and other things like paperwork and contact info. When I called Barb I expected her to ask when would be a good time for me to take the word processing test. Instead she said “You wanna work?” I said “Sure.” She read off the address and very familiar name of a cosmetics company, along with a manager’s name and phone number, all of which I wrote down somewhat incredulously. My reflex instinct was to ask “But don’t you want me to take the test first?” But Barb just talked too fast and hurriedly moved on to the next phone call, not hanging up on me but just moving right along.
So I didn’t exactly lie but I let a lying circumstance get me through the door. I don’t remember any more how quickly I really got up to speed on using Microsoft Word again but within a day or two of me being there I was being hailed as a savior for the business. That may have been a lot of hot air meant to further inspire me but apparently this business unit had gone through at least a dozen temporary word processing people who either just couldn’t take the stress of the long hours or else they were just unskilled, and got sent on this assignment by temp agencies that did not even make them take any kind of test, as happened with me. I guess I’ll never know what was so horrible about my predecessors in that position but I suspect the freakin’ hysteria that characterized that workplace might have had something to do with their inability to focus. I didn’t put this detail together until I was gone from there but numerous temps would report to work at that company, expected to be around for a couple of weeks or longer, only to not return after one day; or a few famous instances of going out for lunch on their first day and never returning.
That makes it sound like a bad company but it was not, at least not to me. People stayed there for their entire careers, and people quitting was rare, so I don’t know what the culture of temp workers has about it that repelled them from this company.
What is a “GOOD COMPANY” anyway. The woman who hired me, making me “perm” after a few months “temp”, couldn’t contain her enthusiasm for me getting this job, beaming at me and repeatedly saying “This is a GOOD COMPANY!” At the time all I could think was hell yeah, any company that would hire me sounds like a GOOD COMPANY.” I realize now, of course, that she was distinguishing this business from others which treat employees like dirt, where Human Resource departments either do not exist or do not matter, where management does not shield its employees from vindictive gossip but instead throws them to the lions.
Yes, that was a GOOD COMPANY, and though I’ll almost certainly never reach out to that woman who hired me that day I hope that some form of cosmic payback lets her know how much I appreciated that and other gestures of professional guidance.
I talk about this now as if it was the start of a long and illustrious corporate career. I lasted at corporate for about 7 years before getting whacked from a Product Development position at Time-Warner. Then, as with the cosmetics company, I was so ready to move on that I would likely have been fired were I to continue in that role. I just didn’t want to be there any more. It was the corporate mega-merger of the century that forced them to get rid of me, and I was happy as hell about it.
Nowadays I consider myself almost unhireable. Age bias in the tech realm is endemic, though not as strong as gender bias. I have to find new ways to earn a livelihood, but the idea of returning to corporate is not on the table, at least not seriously enough that I would make significant effort to get anyone’s attention. If something came to me I’d have no choice but to consider it, but going through the channels of applying to positions is hopeless for me now. I’ve just been out of that realm too long and hiring companies know it, but most of all it would take a silver bullet to hit the spot in pinpointing something that I could do in a corporate environment that would actually be valuable. I am a creative professional and creative thinking has no real place in a serious corporate environment.
Holy crap I’ve been writing for over an hour straight. I’ve been working toward strengthening that muscle. Writing uses muscles, just like any other disciplined pursuit.
Getting back to Calvary Stories after that diversion caused by noticing that 9 West 57th Street is in my field of vision…
The Othmar story and my consolidated and lightly fictionalized account of the day my father died could be two bookend stories between the more or less factual accounts of real people who are buried there. I don’t think I’ve written about Othmar anywhere on these pages but it is a story I concocted and spent many days and weeks with a few years ago. Guess I shouldn’t give it away to anyone reading this but I think it’s a pretty damn good story. the consolidated account of my father’s death and its connection to Calvary would make a good incantation to a set of factual accounts of people buried there, except that the story itself is not factual.
I have a story that is similar in incantational spirit to open a volume of payphone stories, all of them intended to be as factual as I can muster. That story has already been published, though it would need another handful of transitional paragraphs to explain its significance to me personally.
I COULD OF COURSE ACTUALLY WRITE THESE THINGS AND NOT JUST TALK ABOUT WRITING THEM.
Werll there isi that, though I have actually written great swaths of material, so it’s more about the real work of editing and such, not the fun stuff of blasting out ideas.
Time for a break, not that I feel like stopping but it is getting pretty cold up here, and my intent for today was to find another publi space to experience, after checking in at my Trump Tower office, hah. Adding some pictures this time.
