Back when I worked in the nightmarish world of quick printing, I did typesetting and layouts for a lot of newsletters, which were counted among my least favorite jobs. Some were worse than others, but none was worse than a particular newsletter for the community association of one of the area’s smaller, quaint beach towns.
As you can imagine, the leaders of a community association in a quaint beach town are very nice, well-meaning retirees who have time to do things like write community newsletter articles. What they apparently didn’t have time to do was figure out to use email or save their files to disk.
Every month, the president of the association and the newsletter “editor” would show up at my office with a stack of printed articles that the various contributors had written, and they would tell me how they wanted it to look. I could tell just by looking at their printed articles, all of which were typed in Arial or Times New Roman, that they had certainly been created on computers. If it’s already on a computer somewhere in the world, there’s no reason I should have to type it, too.
Then I would ask, “Instead of having me spend a lot of time retyping all of these articles, which is going to cost you more money, is there any way I can have them on disk?”
“Well, we have a lot of people submitting these articles. It would be hard to get it all on one disk.”
“Multiple disks would be fine,” I’d reply. “I’m just trying to save you guys some money, plus the headache of having to proofread it all after I’ve retyped it. Not to mention the fact that you’ll get your job more quickly.”
The conversation would always end with them saying that they’d try to do it my way the next month, but when the next month arrived they’d be right back in my office with a stack of printed articles for me to retype.
Then finally, a new association president was elected. I had the same conversation with him the first time he brought the newsletter to me, and he said that he would be happy to provide the text on disk. He told me he would type it up himself and bring me a disk, which I thought sounded a bit odd. Haven’t they already been typed?
The next day, he showed up with a 3.5” floppy disk and left. I put it in the computer and there were all the articles. I was overjoyed. Until I opened one of them. IT WAS IN ALL CAPS. EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE WAS IN ALL CAPS. HE MUST HAVE STAYED UP LATE RETYPING EVERY ARTICLE IN ALL CAPS. WHY WOULD HE DO SUCH A THING WHEN HE COULD’VE JUST COLLECTED THE ORIGINAL ARTICLES ON DISKS? I guess he was too busy doing awesome retiree stuff to be bothered with using his shift key and typing like a normal person.
“Shit,” I thought. “I guess that’s how he wants it. All caps type takes up a lot more space than regular type. I hope you guys like Garamond Condensed.” I finished the first proof in record time and they came back to look at it, and I bet you can guess the first thing they said:
“Why is everything in all caps?”
“Because you submitted your text in all caps.”
“Well yes, but we don’t want it to actually look like that.”
At the time, I had no way to convert all caps to normally-formatted text. So there I sat, with all the articles right there on disk, and I retyped every one. And I continued to type every article in their newsletter for another year, until another president was elected. He decided to use a different print company and I never saw the computer marvels of the community association ever again.
OK guys. Seriously. Why do you staple or clip the approval sheet to the front of the job jackets? It’s a jacket. Its sole purpose is to keep all of the items associated with the particular job inside of itself. When you staple shit to the front of it, you are destroying the job jacket’s reason for existing.
I don’t need to see the approval. I don’t want to see the approval. If the job has landed on my desk, I’m going to assume that it has been approved, because my job is to make plates to go on the printing press, and we don’t make plates for jobs that aren’t approved yet, do we?
Stop cluttering my orderly, OCD office space with all this crap attached to the outside of the jackets. In the past 4+ years, haven’t you noticed that the first thing I do when you hand me a job jacket like that is to remove the staples or paper clips and shove the damn extra paper inside the jacket where it belongs?
So just stop it. My ability to tolerate Tuesday BS has nearly been depleted, and it isn’t even 11 yet.
Play music for your kids. Lots of it.
Even now that William is two, when it comes to parenting I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. But every once in awhile, I discover that we may have accidentally done something right without even realizing it. This is one of those times.
I come from a long line of musicians and music educators. I grew up listening to the music of high school bands, from famous marches to the old warhorse overtures. There’s a lot of debate about whether musical ability is an inherited trait, or if it develops as a result of a child’s exposure to music at a young age. I like to think that it may be a combination of both, but regardless, the ability to perform and appreciate music is something that gives me great joy as an adult. I hope William will also get to experience that feeling someday, so we play lots of music for him, and I don’t get too upset when he bangs on the eighty-year-old Steinway. From Beethoven and Holst, to Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong, to Muse and Weezer, he’s been exposed to a wide variety of music, on an almost daily basis. As a result, it already seems like he’ll be able to carry a tune. He sings melodies and I can tell what he’s singing, and this makes me really happy.
But despite the fact that we’ve made a conscious effort to expose William to lots of music, I never really put that much thought into whether or not it was benefiting his development, until the day that I spent some time with a child who didn’t appear to have had that same exposure to music. Amy agreed to watch the kid of an acquaintance one afternoon. This little girl was about eighteen months old, and she seemed completely normal and happy - pretty much what you’d expect for a toddler of her age. While she and William played in the den, I did what I would usually do and turned on some J.S. Bach jams on the iTunes. William just kept playing, but the little girl stopped in her tracks and stared in the direction of the sound, transfixed by what she was hearing. After a minute or so, she went back to what she was doing. But I couldn’t help but think, “Was that the first time that child has ever heard classical music?” I was assuming a lot. I don’t know anything about this kid or her parents, but I do know that the classical music had a profound effect on her, at least for a few moments. That got me thinking, and hoping, that despite all the ways that parents can screw up during their children’s development, that this has been one thing that we’ve gotten right.
Jon tells a sappy story for Valentine’s Day:
Myspace. Many of us used to check it numerous time a day. Now I might check it once a week, if I have nothing better to do and nothing interesting is happening on tumblr. So say what you will about it, but back in the summer of 2006, myspace was a main component in a series of events that changed my life.
Amy played clarinet in community band, just like me. For each series of rehearsals leading up to a particular concert, the seating order would change, and for several weeks in the spring we found ourselves sitting next to each other. However, since both of us were exceptional band dorks, we were well-behaved and never spoke to each other during those rehearsals. And since we were also both exceptionally shy, we didn’t speak to each other after rehearsals either.
After the spring concert, the band always takes a break for the summer. So while I was attracted to Amy, I still didn’t speak to her, and figured that the best I could hope for would be that I’d see her again when the band started back up in the fall.
About a week later, I got a friend request on myspace. It was from Amy. I excitedly accepted, and responded by posting the comment pictured above. Little did I know that those five words were starting me down the path to marriage and fatherhood. We organized out first “outside of band” meeting via myspace, and the rest is history.
So yeah, myspace kinda sucks these days, but I’ll always give it props for facilitating the non-verbal communication which helped me to finally find my partner for life.
Back in the old days, about a decade ago, I attended a certain southern military college. While I was there, I was fairly consistently in trouble for one thing or another - nothing too serious, but just enough that I was regularly restricted to campus. Unlike most cadets, this never really bothered me, and a few of my friends and I were content to stay on campus and make mischief of one sort or another.
During this period, they had just demolished one of the barracks on campus, and were in the process of rebuilding it. As the second semester of my senior year progressed, it was nearly finished, to the point that they had even installed the flagpole on the roof. As the last “big weekend” of the year approached, when thousands of friends, parents, and dignitaries would be on campus, my main cohort and I hatched a scheme to fly some sort of humorous flag on top of the new barracks.
Utilizing our subterranean escape route [I’m completely serious, but that’s another story], we left the barracks in the dead of night and snuck into the construction site, so that the flag would be flying during the big Saturday morning military parade and review. We arrived on the roof of the four-storey building and ran our flag up the pole. The design was simple - a solid red flag with the yellow “triangle and exclamation point” caution symbol in the center. The symbol was meaningful to us, even though we knew that no one else would get the joke. Before we left, we found a ladder and used it to climb as high as we could up the flagpole, where we deviously tied a knot in the rope, making it impossible to lower the flag without untying the knot first. We then hid the ladder and snuck back to the barracks.
The following morning we woke up early, as we always did in military college. As we marched to the mess hall for breakfast, the flag was clearly visible to the entire campus. I heard other cadets talking to each other, asking, “what the hell is that flag up there?” Guests would start to flood into the campus around 8:00. My cohort and I silently celebrated the fact that our flag would still be flying when they arrived.
Unfortunately, the commandant’s department had other ideas. We had not anticipated that the construction crew would actually be working that Saturday morning. It appears that all they had to do was to call the foreman, who sent one of his ladder-equipped workers up to bring down the flag. The flag was gone by the time people started to arrive on campus.
Had our flag flown for even a couple hours longer, I would’ve been content to let it go. If it had even flown long enough for me to get a picture of it, I would have been satisfied to never see it again. As it was, I refused to accept total defeat. “I’m getting that flag back,” I told my partner-in-crime. He didn’t believe it was possible.
That night I walked over to the construction site to snoop around the foreman’s trailer. Thankfully they had left the lights on inside. I peered in the window and saw the flag sitting on a shelf. I wasn’t brazen enough to see if the door was unlocked, but I immediately started to ponder how to retrieve it.
Monday morning arrived with an amazing stroke of luck. One of my best friends [who had been privy to the flag scheme] was on guard duty. In fact, he was the officer of the guard for our entire barracks that day. As a result, he was appropriately duded up in guard duty regalia, thus creating the appearance that he was a little more important than the average cadet. I raced to my room and got a bookbag and a clipboard, because everyone on that campus knew that if you had important shit to do, you were carrying a clipboard.
So, with clipboard in hand, my buddy and I walked over to the construction site and approached the first guy we saw holding a clipboard of his own, and asked, as though we were there in some official capacity, “did you guys get a flag down off the roof on Saturday?” He asked one of his guys, who responded that the flag in question was in the foreman’s trailer. “We need to take that back to the barracks,” my buddy announced, and clipboard guy happily sent his lackey to retrieve it for us. I folded it into my bag, said “thank you,” and we walked away.
We returned to our barracks and I thanked my friend for his help. I then went to my cohort’s room and triumphantly showed him my prize. He was amazed, to say the least.
In a way, I’m glad they took our flag down that Saturday morning. Not only did it make for a more interesting story, but I got to keep the flag. A decade later, it still hangs on the wall in my house.
