Evacuating Suburbia

Throw out them LA papers

And that moldy box of vanilla wafers.

Adios to all this concrete.

Gonna get me some dirt road back street

~  From L.A. Freeway, Lyrics by Guy Clark

“Concrete and cars are their own prison bars”

~ From Toes, Written by Zac Brown, John Driskell Hopkins, Shawn Mullins and Wyatt Durette

Retirement talk has been revolving around the domestic circle a lot lately.  Mine, not the wife’s.  You see she’s been retired and according to her it’s the shit (that’s urban slang for she likes it).  I know this because she tells me it’s the shit all the time, quite often after I've dragged my worn out bones into the house after a day at the office and an hour on the freeway with a few thousand of my fellow Americans feeling like shit; about 10 pounds of it in a 5 pound sack (which is old school for suburbia blows).  

Warning: It's Almost Fall

Summer's almost gone       

Summer's almost gone

We had some good times

But they're gone

The winter's comin' on

Summer's almost gone

~ The Doors

“If cross country were easy it would be called football.” ~ Slogan on the backs of many cross country team shirts.

Am I ready for some football?  Well - no.   America is all a twitter, sports talk show hosts are ecstatic and television network and National Football League execs are just beginning a 5 month long fiscal orgasm (For those readers outside of the USA, I’m speaking of American football as opposed to futbol/soccer). 

American football is an absolute dollarific orgy.  On average the 32 NFL teams are worth $1.17 billion dollars each.  The average revenue per team last year was $286 million dollars.  Broadcast revenue from the networks for the current contract, now in its final year, averages $1.9 billion per year.  The new contract starting in 2014 will average $3.1 billion per year.  These are just a few of the bank account boggling figures.  And this doesn't even count the gambling money exchanged – both legal and not. 

The Oak Desk

I recently made the decision that it’s past time to get rid of the roll top desk that sits under the window in our bedroom.  A roll top was something I’d always wanted.  I suppose I pictured myself sitting at that desk like some latter day Mark Twain; sipping expensive bourbon from a heavy crystal rocks glass, dipping pen in inkwell and writing the next great American novel.

Stepping Away from the Clif

“I don’t want to go to work on my last day,” she said wistfully.  “I just want to disappear.  I don’t want the sad goodbyes.”  It was the first emotion that I had really heard from her on the subject. 

It’s been a month since that conversation, though it seems like nearly half a year has passed.  We were driving to her office Christmas party; her last.  My wife’s last day at Clif Bar was just two weeks away.  She was retiring from the company that had just 32 employees when she first started 15 years ago; when it was still in the shadow of Power Bar.  Now Clif is a major player and the company boasts over 300 employees and still growing. 

Working For a Living II: Labor's Day

The story's always the same

Seven hundred tons of metal a day

Now sir you tell me the world's changed

Once I made you rich enough

Rich enough to forget my name

From “Youngstown”  Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
From “Solidarity Forever”  Lyrics by Ralph Chaplin

Maybe this year we should call it Labor's Day; own it.  Maybe those of us who are the worker bees should claim it back.  Look to the roots of what the holiday should be about. At one time it celebrated the worker; the worker who fought hard for fair treatment and a fair wage in exchange for the sweat on his brow.  We’ve regressed.  Now it’s just another day off.  How poetic it would be if only the workers got the day off and the CEOs and their high level brethren had to do, just for one day, what the minions do every day and do it thanklessly.  I dare say the first thing that would happen is that they would fuck it up horribly ( Because, "Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel would turn.").

Working For a Living: The Retail Years

“Somedays won't end ever and somedays pass on by,

I'll be working here forever, at least until I die.”   Huey Lewis

Mulling over my working life.  I do that on these days when I come home burned out, wrung out, office politicked out and ready to opt out.  It’s been a forty year sampler of jobs.  Stocking shoes as a teenager at Kinney Shoes working for a little dandy name Marvin and watching the letch, Mr. Slick shoe salesmen try to sneak a glimpse up a skirt while forcing a pair of boots on some young thing.  Working one shift as a busboy at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor and quitting because it stunk of chocolate, couldn’t see doing that for more than the brief time I put in and I preferred going home to watch the (then) Los Angeles Rams play the (then) Baltimore Colts on Monday Night Football.  That was a good game in those days.  Beer tended at a local Round Table Pizzeria.  Then college. 

Back in My Day: Office Edition

It must be some law of nature that once we start approaching sixty we start using the phrase “Back in my day we…..”  Usually spoken in a curmudgeonly, condescending manner it’s an introduction to a treatise about how things were done, undoubtedly better, back in the “olden days.”  As my dad got older he said it and these days, as I enter the glide path to 60, I find myself saying it with an increasing and disturbing regularity to my own grown children.  As the words form I’m thinking, “Geeze, it’s come to this, I’m crossing over into geezerdom.”

And so in honor of this rite of passage we’ll take an occasional visit back to “my day” and compare it to our present day.  These will be irregular posts because as I’m constantly reminded by television ads, folks my age are, well, losing their regularity.  And so for your reading enjoyment I present, Back in My Day; Office Edition.  (Those who don’t enjoy it can of course jump off of this ride at the nearest period).

Back in my day:  We didn’t have computers.

Today:  Most modern offices have computers, which of course leads us to all of the other comparisons that are linked to the computer.

Back in my day:  We generated hand written documents.  They were often multi-part, separated by carbon paper between each sheet that left your hands with black smudges.

Today:  The computer generates as many neat clean copies of a document that you need.

Back in my day:  We put a document in the snail mail.  Depending on the circumstance this could create a week long lag in business.

Today:  Documents are emailed and the business lag is reduced to seconds.

Back in my day:  Snail mail was replaced by the fax. Now purchase orders and other documents could be faxed and received at the destination the same day. It was printed on rolls of slick thermal paper.

Today:  See email above.

Back in my day:  Overseas communication was done by Telex which was generated by a large cumbersome teleprinter.

Today:  See email above.

Back in my day:  If you were on the road, you had to find a payphone to touch base with the office or a client and you were very often incognito.

Today:  Cell phones and smart phones let you communicate with anyone from anywhere; even a quiet restaurant (see inappropriate below).  

Back in my day:  The guys always went into the warehouse on the first of the month to see the new picture on the pinup calendar posted above the shipping and receiving desk.

Today:  Put one of those up and you get to have a meeting with the HR manager.

Back in my day:  The men in the office often referred to some of the women as “sweetie”, “honey”, or some other term of, uh, endearment.

Today:  See pinup calendars above.

Back in my day:  It was called vacation and sick time.  You accrued your vacation time and you were allowed a given number of sick days in a year and each resided on a separate ledger.  So even if you weren’t sick you could take some unused sick days for “mental health” that didn’t come off your vacation time.  “Yeah, uhh, I’m not feeling well, my, ahh, malaria is acting up.  I *cough* probably should stay home.  I should *cough* be in tomorrow *weeze*.” Click.  “Yes!  Now back to bed.”

Today:  It’s all PTO (Paid Time Off) and if you need mental health it shaves days off of that trip to Disneyland.

Back in my day:  There were three martini lunches and we would walk to John’s Grill in San Francisco for a steak sandwich and three martinis, served up and very dry please.  Then we would stagger back to work and try to function.

Today:  Yeah, not such a great idea even with mints and Peppermint Schnapps (Does that really do anything except get you more drunk?).  In the event you can stay under the office radar there is still the unforgiving nature of an inappropriate email being launched whilst wasted.

Back in my day:  Nobody used the work inappropriate.

Today:  “Inappropriate” is a buzz word, a warning, and the most commonly used word in the employee handbook.

Back in my day:  You could date someone in the office.  Hey, that’s how I met my wife and 30 years later we’re still going strong.

Today:  Inappropriate.

Back in my day:  You had betting in the office.

Today:  Inappropriate.

Back in my day:  You brought those boxes of chocolate bars or raffle tickets that your kids (read: you) had to sell for the school/church/athletic team/band, etc, fund raiser.

Today:  Inappropriate.

Today, as I email a purchase order I think back to the days of taking a hand written PO and putting it an outgoing mail tray to be sent and possibly not acknowledged for two weeks.  I wonder how I managed to get through an afternoon after a medium rare steak, a baked potato and three Beefeater martinis.  I still can’t get used to calling vacation, PTO.  In fact I don’t think I knew what PTO even was a couple of years ago.  I am getting a little tired of hearing the word inappropriate.  And I do wonder how people meet other people these days.  My relationships were most often made through work, including my most lasting one.