I heard an interesting report on NPR this morning. It was about a woman who was fired for using the workplace computer for writing at work. She had been writing on paper, but her boss told her to stop. So she started using her work computer to write.
What she was writing was her diary. And the content of much of her diary was her attempts to avoid work.
So then her boss found her diary. Oh, she got fired, alrighty.
I’m sure most people are OK with that decision. Hell, I am. But I don’t necessarily see an incorrigible loss as a person here. I see her diary writing as looking for a way out, trying to get herself organized for something better in some way. I will grant you, she went about it in what was probably the stupidest manner possible, but still, a lot of stupid and unproductive stuff that happens at work is because people tend to come in pretty complex organic shapes, and work generally wants them to be square or round or whatever shape the job needs them to be, generally a much simpler shape than they actually are.
The generally accepted notion is that employees must strive mightily to be all that they can be to succeed at a job, but for most lower-level jobs, it’s mainly a matter of learning to endure boredom and stupidity. I see this woman’s diarizing as a creative response to the problem.
The tone of the NPR piece was that she was a useless git and serves her right for getting her ass fired. I found myself hoping she finds success somewhere else, maybe as a writer. Sounds like a potential blogger to me.
I think this story was potentially much more interesting and informative than NPR’s simple bit of snarking, but clearly, it was written by someone witless on the NPR staff. Hmmm, maybe she could take their job …
But she also spent months fighting to get unemployment insurance payments, until she finally exhausted her appeals.
You could be right, but I didn’t hear anything that sounded remotely redeeming.
Sure. I know some people think of the Web as the equivalent of the slush piles that used to relentlessly accumulate in editor’s offices. But there’s a difference – unlike slush piles, which editors HAD to read (or feel very guilty about not reading) no one HAS to read a blog, or a webpage, or an ebook. In fact, you have to promote your work fairly relentlessly to get anyone other than friends and family to read it.
Speaking as an employer, the generally accepted notion is that we don’t pay people out of the goodness of our hearts. We pay them because we have a job for them to do.
As a general rule, we usually allow a great deal of latitude with our employees unless they abuse it. When a few minutes late turns into showing up at 10:45 am or occassional grabassing turns into work not getting done, then we have to crack down on people.
The problem is always if you give some people an inch, there are always a few bad apples who ruin it by taking a mile.
Not to mention a potential Darwin Award winner. Who could possibly think that keeping a diary of how you [screw] off at work, laughing about it, and doing it on the company computer, was a good idea?
Uhm, actually, as I was reading it, I was wishing that I could get a copy of it for the museum where I work. That kind of detail of daily minutae is something which is pricesless for historians.
I don’t think future historians of our current era will have any problem finding the details of daily minutae. Your museum could print out thousands of blogs right now without having to boost that slacker’s ego, lol.
I think you’re fetishizing the fact that she was writing, and I am not sure I understand why. We could find all kinds of “laudable” or interesting ways for people to goof off at work and deal with boredom, and some of those might make an interesting story. Tell me about the person who got fired for teaching themselves to translate ancient greek. Or the one who developed and practiced a flawless magic show during downtime. Writing in a journal, or doing any kind of writing, doesn’t stand out for me. If NPR had written the story about how interesting she was for writing a journal about disliking work, I would have wondered if the NPR writer had been living in a cave for the last six years.
And ironically, from reading the article, there were times she had to work at finding nothing to do. It sounds like it became an obsession for her. I can imagine her dreading Mondays because it started a whole new week of trying to find ways to waste time.
I notice your elisions of my OP left out the part where I said:
As for “fetishizing the fact that she was writing…” I’m not sure what you mean by that. Perhaps you could explain.
Diarizing, to my mind, constitutes an attempt to bring order and understanding to you life. You write it down so you will know what you’ve been up to, maybe take a few stabs at explaining it to yourself.
I’m sure much of the impetus of her diarizing wasn’t just the creative process, to whatever extent you might choose to describe her work as creative, but as a rebellious impulse at being jammed into the role of desk clerk or whatever it might be that she does. (I can’t seem to access the Des Moines Register article, I’ve tried with tow different systems and two different connections, so I don’t know what her role was, but desk clerk sounds about right.)
There’s an old and well-established tradition of doing this. Think Linda Ellerbee. To wit:
And note that Linda Ellerbee was a working journalist at the time. Even stupider than what this woman did. But Linda Ellerbee’s a great journalist, right?
It couldn’t possibly be that it was her very intelligence that led her to rebel against her job’s conditions, however stupidly, just as Ellerbee’s intelligence led her to rebel against her idiot boss.
I dunno what the woman in the story will be, a Linda Ellerbee or a flop, but I see some potential there. Pity you don’t.
