Betsy, your writing is beautiful! I so appreciate reading something with a style so classically and yet so modernly (I know, it's not a word; I can't help it) skewed, and so expressive and clean! Glad to have found your work!
My best and favorite job is what I'm doing right now: writing & teaching; teaching & writing. Actually I have really loved almost all my jobs--loved working in radio, a nonprofit organization that brought preventive health care and training in developing countries (I did PR), the marketing company my husband and I had (for addiction treatment centers), starting up nonprofit literary organizations and serving as director. I can't imagine ever "retiring." Then what would I do? Oh, I know: write.
Not exactly work. But I was in basic training for the army where I had a fill in sergeant (really a PFC with sergeant stripes). He was my size but too young to drink. He came in the barracks one Saturday wanting to borrow my army ID so he could drink. I told him what he could do with that idea. He picked on me in various ways after that.
I used to tell myself that working in the pharmaceutical industry was good because the products helped people but by the time I left, I was painfully aware of how little that meant to the executives and shareholders.
That first job sounds like heaven for a 16-year-old. For anyone,, actually. I bet it would be hard to find a job like that now that most local pharmacies are gone.
I often think about how 'good' I had it, job-wise, at such an early age. It was over 20 years later that I had another job with benefits that matched my first drugstore job. Sigh.
And yes, that pharmacy is gone now (it was a chain, but it's still gone).
I didn't even last 15 months at my BIG TOBACCO job, it was hands down the most miserable job experience I've ever had.
R&D was busily creating the next vaping product, while over in the next building an entire department was creating slide decks to take to the local schools and discuss how important is was NOT to smoke. WTH?
Speaking of work and books, I just finished "The Alice Network" by Kate Quinn, a terrific spy novel in which one of the protagonists works undercover in occupied France (1915, WWI) as a waitress in a restaurant frequented by German officers. A terrific read.
My first job (at 13) was washing dishes for 25 cents an hour at the Houston House in Newburg, Missouri. My last (and most fulfilling) job was representing claimants for Social Security before Administrative Law Judges. I traveled the country for seven years doing this. I was fired only one time, after a week as a bartender. I had been instructed to be friendly to the customers, which I thought I was. I even played card games with them during slow times. But apparently this was not what my boss meant by being "friendly." No thank you.
Thank you so much. I was happy with every win, and appealed every loss. My favorite was when I was able to win the cases "on the record" so the claimant didn't have to go to a hearing at all. This saved months of waiting, maybe years. And saved the judge from having to hear the case, saved me from having to travel, allowed me to take more cases.
So, this week the challenge is to write an entertaining C.V. of sorts. As a child I wanted to drive a London double-decker bus. I never did, but a Nottingham City Transport double-decker was given my name in 2018. I left school in 1959 with no qualifications , as did all the others at my school. We were just shown the door. By 25 I was a distribution manager, my employer sussing out skills my teachers never discovered, and a Birmingham city councillor as well. The latter a job in itself. I never hated a job, but I did dislike the brown-nosed self-serving managers and bosses I came across.
I was a trade union member from the end of my first week at work. I am very proud of this fact and still carry my card. ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ by Alan Sillitoe was published in 1958 and read by me just about the time I started work, not knowing that twenty years later I would be living in Nottingham and the neighbourhood where the story is set and I regularly walk past a council house near where I live bearing a blue plaque saying this is where Sillitoe was born. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ is one of the best stories ever about being a worker - as is another favourite of mine from my teenage years: ‘God’s Little Acre’ by Erskine Caldwell. I still have the well worn copy I was given by a fellow trade union member in my first job.
Work is very much a shared experience for many and that comradeship colours how we feel about it, even now, decades later. I think you, Betsy, touch on it and perhaps there is a memoir of sorts hidden in the excellent essay you have written this week. I would like to know more. A novel dare I say?
‘Wanting to help’ and taking satisfaction from that is a handicap many employers still exploit. Being good at a job can hold you back. As my paternal grandfather used to say ‘If work was such a good thing the bosses would keep it all for themselves’. Robert 🐰
You've packed not only a resume in here, Robert, but book recommendations and insightful reflections on work. I am so impressed that there is abuse out there with your name on it!
A bus, Betsy, a bus. Abuse’ could get me arrested! With all the talk there is about AI where does this leave its relative Predictive Text? It happens in novels too, as I suspect you know. That would make an interesting exercise: Finding famous grammatical howlers. Robert 🐰
I just finished reading Tom Lake by Anne Patchett, and I loved it. It exceeded my expectations which were pretty high. I think it’s my favorite of all her books though I really loved Bel Canto. Curious if you and others have read it or have an Anne Patchett fav.
Bel Canto is my all-time favorite of Patchett's but I love most of her books, especially a couple of her earlier ones: The Magicians Assistant and her debut , The Patron Saint of Liars. Her essays are great too. I have read everything she's written..
So Ann, not Anne, which actually makes me think of Anne of Green Gables. According to my good reads, I have read the Patron Saint of Liars but I can’t remember doing so. I was not into this book at first, but then it shifted for me. Your comment made me think perhaps you didn’t love it as much as some of the others.
I am still processing it. I appreciated so much in it, above all her distinctive voice on the page and the way she captures the many dimensions of family and love in a single moment. I liked it much more than Dutch House which never really caught me. I may reread that one to try and figure out why.
I think it’s interesting how some books speak to us and some books don’t. I was not into this one at the beginning, and I almost gave up on it. I’m glad I didn’t, but I was worried that I was going to feel the same way that I felt when I read Damon Copperfield, the hype for that book was so high and I made myself finish it, but I confess I wish I hadn’t. Sometimes, I think best selling authors are riding on reputation which sometimes makes it harder to piece out how we actually feel about a book.
Yes on several occasions I have been asked to do things I have refused to do but to write about them? I prefer not to.
You can tell me later then. :)
Betsy, your writing is beautiful! I so appreciate reading something with a style so classically and yet so modernly (I know, it's not a word; I can't help it) skewed, and so expressive and clean! Glad to have found your work!
How kind of you, Lori! Welcome.
Thank you!
My best and favorite job is what I'm doing right now: writing & teaching; teaching & writing. Actually I have really loved almost all my jobs--loved working in radio, a nonprofit organization that brought preventive health care and training in developing countries (I did PR), the marketing company my husband and I had (for addiction treatment centers), starting up nonprofit literary organizations and serving as director. I can't imagine ever "retiring." Then what would I do? Oh, I know: write.
Here's to doing what you love and loving what you do, Judy. Write on and on ...
Not exactly work. But I was in basic training for the army where I had a fill in sergeant (really a PFC with sergeant stripes). He was my size but too young to drink. He came in the barracks one Saturday wanting to borrow my army ID so he could drink. I told him what he could do with that idea. He picked on me in various ways after that.
That sounds terrible, Ron!
I survived. He probably went to Vietnam.
Worst job: corporate drone in the vice industry (Big Tobacco).
First job: retail at a drugstore. I was 16 and had paid holidays, paid BIRTHDAY, and employee discounts. It was a great first job!
I used to tell myself that working in the pharmaceutical industry was good because the products helped people but by the time I left, I was painfully aware of how little that meant to the executives and shareholders.
That first job sounds like heaven for a 16-year-old. For anyone,, actually. I bet it would be hard to find a job like that now that most local pharmacies are gone.
I often think about how 'good' I had it, job-wise, at such an early age. It was over 20 years later that I had another job with benefits that matched my first drugstore job. Sigh.
And yes, that pharmacy is gone now (it was a chain, but it's still gone).
I didn't even last 15 months at my BIG TOBACCO job, it was hands down the most miserable job experience I've ever had.
I thought I could be mercenary and just bank some $$$ for a few years but nope. I could not. I vastly overestimated my ability to function in an environment where the Master Settlement ruled everything we did. https://www.naag.org/our-work/naag-center-for-tobacco-and-public-health/the-master-settlement-agreement/
R&D was busily creating the next vaping product, while over in the next building an entire department was creating slide decks to take to the local schools and discuss how important is was NOT to smoke. WTH?
The cognitive dissonance was excruciating.
Speaking of work and books, I just finished "The Alice Network" by Kate Quinn, a terrific spy novel in which one of the protagonists works undercover in occupied France (1915, WWI) as a waitress in a restaurant frequented by German officers. A terrific read.
Thanks for this,Andy! The book sounds great
My first job (at 13) was washing dishes for 25 cents an hour at the Houston House in Newburg, Missouri. My last (and most fulfilling) job was representing claimants for Social Security before Administrative Law Judges. I traveled the country for seven years doing this. I was fired only one time, after a week as a bartender. I had been instructed to be friendly to the customers, which I thought I was. I even played card games with them during slow times. But apparently this was not what my boss meant by being "friendly." No thank you.
Well, I'm sure the customers enjoyed the card playing and I'm glad you didn't have to put up with whatever the boss has in mind.
Representing SSI claimants is not easy. I know you made a big difference in those people's lives.
Thank you so much. I was happy with every win, and appealed every loss. My favorite was when I was able to win the cases "on the record" so the claimant didn't have to go to a hearing at all. This saved months of waiting, maybe years. And saved the judge from having to hear the case, saved me from having to travel, allowed me to take more cases.
So, this week the challenge is to write an entertaining C.V. of sorts. As a child I wanted to drive a London double-decker bus. I never did, but a Nottingham City Transport double-decker was given my name in 2018. I left school in 1959 with no qualifications , as did all the others at my school. We were just shown the door. By 25 I was a distribution manager, my employer sussing out skills my teachers never discovered, and a Birmingham city councillor as well. The latter a job in itself. I never hated a job, but I did dislike the brown-nosed self-serving managers and bosses I came across.
I was a trade union member from the end of my first week at work. I am very proud of this fact and still carry my card. ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ by Alan Sillitoe was published in 1958 and read by me just about the time I started work, not knowing that twenty years later I would be living in Nottingham and the neighbourhood where the story is set and I regularly walk past a council house near where I live bearing a blue plaque saying this is where Sillitoe was born. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ is one of the best stories ever about being a worker - as is another favourite of mine from my teenage years: ‘God’s Little Acre’ by Erskine Caldwell. I still have the well worn copy I was given by a fellow trade union member in my first job.
Work is very much a shared experience for many and that comradeship colours how we feel about it, even now, decades later. I think you, Betsy, touch on it and perhaps there is a memoir of sorts hidden in the excellent essay you have written this week. I would like to know more. A novel dare I say?
‘Wanting to help’ and taking satisfaction from that is a handicap many employers still exploit. Being good at a job can hold you back. As my paternal grandfather used to say ‘If work was such a good thing the bosses would keep it all for themselves’. Robert 🐰
You've packed not only a resume in here, Robert, but book recommendations and insightful reflections on work. I am so impressed that there is abuse out there with your name on it!
A bus, Betsy, a bus. Abuse’ could get me arrested! With all the talk there is about AI where does this leave its relative Predictive Text? It happens in novels too, as I suspect you know. That would make an interesting exercise: Finding famous grammatical howlers. Robert 🐰
That's what I get for trying to type with my fingers on a phone. Sorry!!!
There was no need to apologise. With me you are in the company of another mortal.🐰
I just finished reading Tom Lake by Anne Patchett, and I loved it. It exceeded my expectations which were pretty high. I think it’s my favorite of all her books though I really loved Bel Canto. Curious if you and others have read it or have an Anne Patchett fav.
Bel Canto is my all-time favorite of Patchett's but I love most of her books, especially a couple of her earlier ones: The Magicians Assistant and her debut , The Patron Saint of Liars. Her essays are great too. I have read everything she's written..
So Ann, not Anne, which actually makes me think of Anne of Green Gables. According to my good reads, I have read the Patron Saint of Liars but I can’t remember doing so. I was not into this book at first, but then it shifted for me. Your comment made me think perhaps you didn’t love it as much as some of the others.
I am still processing it. I appreciated so much in it, above all her distinctive voice on the page and the way she captures the many dimensions of family and love in a single moment. I liked it much more than Dutch House which never really caught me. I may reread that one to try and figure out why.
I think it’s interesting how some books speak to us and some books don’t. I was not into this one at the beginning, and I almost gave up on it. I’m glad I didn’t, but I was worried that I was going to feel the same way that I felt when I read Damon Copperfield, the hype for that book was so high and I made myself finish it, but I confess I wish I hadn’t. Sometimes, I think best selling authors are riding on reputation which sometimes makes it harder to piece out how we actually feel about a book.
Lol, it did not occur to me, either, to say "I'd rather not." But I am now warming myself up trying it!
What idea hath you wrought, @ElizabethMarroSpark? :)