Question of the day: One of my three-and-a-half year old sons, Matthew, has a query for his parents that he has repeated on several occasions, and each time it has stumped me, so I am throwing his inquiry out on the Net waters to see what responses it might evoke.
Matthew’s question: “Why are we people?”
I’ll be traveling the rest of this week — off to the Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona, AZ, where I’ll be speaking on Thursday. Depending on how crazy things are I may or may not be posting from there. There’s supposed to be a group blog for the fest too, I’ll link to it once it’s going.
I was mostly offline for a few days, on vacation, then intended to post once I was back home, but my machine at work that runs Radio rebooted and I couldn’t reach it remotely. I’m back now and the Radio is on again…
Though we work in the same town, I don’t think I’ve ever met Henry Norr; I only know him by his long-respected byline as a tech journalist. But I’ve been following the story of his suspension — and now firing — with some interest.
Norr, you may recall, was suspended from his job as a tech reporter for the S.F. Chronicle about a month ago. He’d taken a day off from work because he’d participated in an antiwar protest and been arrested. According to Norr’s own account, he’d followed Chronicle policy in alerting his supervisor to his activities. (The Chronicle has since changed its policy on reporters and political activity, but that’s another story.)
Now Norr’s been fired, and the ostensible issue is that he falsified his time card by marking his day off as a “sick day.”
Now, this may have been a tactical misstep — I suppose he’d be in a stronger position, bureaucratically, had he taken the day as vacation time.
But I can also report from personal experience of ten years’ employment at the San Francisco Examiner — whose then parent company, the Hearst Corporation, now owns the Chronicle; whose old staff, my former colleagues, now work for the Chronicle; and which always shared the same union representation as the Chronicle — that time cards for writers are a joke. (They no doubt have more relevance for copy editors and other folks who work at more shift-oriented tasks.)
I worked most of that time as a theater critic. My work spilled into all hours — I’d be reading a play and doing research in the morning, then maybe take a break for a few hours, then go into the office and check my mail and make my phone calls, then have dinner, then see a show, then return to the newsroom (or later, once I had a PC and a modem, home) to write my review and file it. Sometimes my workday ran in patches from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. the next day. Sometimes I’d write the next morning instead. I typically covered three to five shows a week, and my work cycle was shaped by the timing of opening nights.
Trying to fit this particular workflow into the management-mandated and union-approved time card template was impossible. If I’d followed the rules as the union had defined them via collective bargaining, I wouldn’t have been able to do my job well. If I filled out the time card accurately, I would have invoked the wrath of management, because overtime would have kicked in, and they didn’t want to pay overtime.
I figured my first responsibility was to my readers, to the theaters I covered and to my own standards. So I did my job the way I needed to, and for nearly a decade I dutifully filled out a time card that claimed that I worked a steady five day a week, eight hours a day routine.
I’m not reporting this because I’m unhappy with the result — I got to do the work that I loved, and I think I served my readership well. (Time cards do not really work when the people involved are creative professionals who love their work.) I’m reporting it because everyone involved knew that this was happening. And not just with me.
So when you hear that Henry Norr has been fired because he falsified his time card, be assured that this is not the real issue. The Chronicle is getting him on a technicality because it wants to fire him for some other reason.
Could it be that the paper wants to cow its staff from participating in political demonstrations that have nothing to do with their beats? Or could it be that it just sees an opportunity to trim someone from its payroll at a time when its financial woes are well-known? Maybe the editors don’t like Norr’s work, or maybe they think they’re over-staffed in tech coverage now that there’s no tech boom to cover. Maybe they’re mad at him because he went public with his dispute.
I don’t know. I do know that the time card is a pretty transparent excuse.
Californians can now pre-register for the telemarketing “do not call” list. I just did.
I’m taking this week off to tend to some personal and family business — and to catch my breath — so blogging will be light…
Apparently there’s this multiplayer game called Mafia that has long been popular in SF fandom and that is now crossing over into New York literary circles, thanks at least in part to Jonathan Lethem. (The New York Observer’s much-blogged report is here.) When I read about this game — which involves no paper or board but chiefly is a matter of players choosing whether to cooperate with or deceive one another — all I get is flashbacks to Diplomacy.
Diplomacy was (is?) a seven-player board game set on the eve of the First World War; in theory it was a historical strategy game but in practice it was mostly about negotiation, psychology, and stabbing fellow players in the back. Many of us geeky teenagers spent inordinate amounts of time in the 1970s playing this game both FTF and in a by-mail format, which developed its own ‘zine-based subculture. Mafia does away with the board and the pieces and pretty much zeroes in on the psychology, which makes a lot of sense and no doubt accounts for its popularity.
Refreshed and recharged. Spent the holidays with family, entertaining the kids and (like the rest of the universe) seeing “The Two Towers.” I share the view of Patrick Neilsen Hayden: “Just as with the previous movie, any film of Tolkien that gets so much so right earns a lot of slack from me.”
What I wrote last year about “Fellowship,” I think, still holds for this second installment: “Anyone who watches ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ with a deep knowledge of the text on which it’s based can see — moment by moment, scene by scene, image by image — that what’s best in Jackson’s film is directly drawn from what’s best in Tolkien’s prose.” With “The Two Towers,” this is overwhelmingly the case in the movie’s presentation of the savage poignance of Gollum.
That I have lived to see a good movie adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” remains a great source of wonder, and a New Year’s gift.
We are putting to bed our holiday editions of Salon, which will be updated between now and the New Year’s with various fine year-end roundups (movies, music, sports, etc.) and some movie reviews, and our wire stories, but not that much else.
Blogging will continue here in small doses as time permits. But more important things, like time with my family and catching up with “The Two Towers,” will take precedence!
I’ve updated my link list with a whole bunch of Salon blogs. (Thanks to Mark Hoback for emailing me about this!) Originally my thinking was, hey, I’d be providing tons of links in the main posting area of the blog to different Salon blogs, and ultimately we want to have a more permanent directory listing of Salon bloggers, and so such a list wouldn’t be necessary. But my administrative duties here have cut deep into my posting time, and the directory isn’t here yet, so in the meantime, here it is.
It’s nothing like a complete list of Salon blogs. It reflects a combination of my own interests and blogs that I’ve noticed have some staying power, or that bloggers have put a lot of energy into. If you’re not on the list, don’t have a fit! It probably means I just haven’t stumbled on you yet. And as always anyone is welcome to email me if they think I’ve missed out on their blog.
