I’m sane now. I think I’m capable on coherent speech. Maybe.
So I work for this little non-profit–it stages new music concerts, usually 7 or 8 a year. I get to arrange the concert details–make sure the musicians have transportation here, get them a place to stay overnight and make sure they’re at the venue on time, make sure the sound guy turns up in the right place with the right equipment–stuff like that. I also keep the mailing list, write the PR, make and send out fliers, arrange ticket giveaways…and let me tell you, we can’t even give tickets away. I’m not kidding. Nine times out of ten, the winners never even turn up to claim them, or if they do they’re walking out five minutes into the concert. It’s not that the music is bad, it’s just…not usually very accessible. I also write, design, and mail out the newsletter, and update the website.
Some of you may remember my rant about the newsletter. And yes, this is, in part, another newsletter rant. But first things first.
Around Christmas, I decided that Paidhi Boy didn’t really need to go to Montessori, and it would be better for my mental health if I quit. So just as I’m about to tell my boss this, he tells me that the board Executive Committee had a special meeting just to discuss their concerns about how I was doing my job. He tells me they’re concerned that I sometimes fail to arrange a ticket giveaway for a concert. They’re concerned that I don’t routinely mail fliers to every single school music department in town. They’re concerned that the newsletter always seems to get in the mail late. They’re concerned that I’m just not giving the job the attention that it deserves. So, the boss says, they’re going to give me an evaluation, which I haven’t had in the three years I’ve been doing the job, and maybe that will help get me back on track.
So I told him flat out I was quitting and there was no need. Being a non-confrontational person, I didn’t say I was quitting because he drove me insane. I said I wanted to spend more time on my writing (which is true) and also that I didn’t want to continue in a job I obviously wasn’t doing well with.
I didn’t tell him that the flier mailing takes an entire roll of stamps and never once has gotten us a single new audience member. I know. I sell the tickets, and I know who our audience is, I see their faces and often chat with them before the concerts. I didn’t tell him that nearly every ticket winner walks out. I didn’t tell him that more exposure can only do so much for us, because our potential audience is severely limited as it is. He knows these things–I and others have said them before. But he believes in his heart that there are hundreds of people out there just dying to hear guys make funny noises with their saxophones, and if only they could hear about it, they’d flock to our concerts in droves. But anyway.
So one of the board members calls me on some other business, and says she’s sorry I’m leaving, and I give the “Don’t want to stay if I’m not doing well” speech. And what do you think she tells me?
That’s right. No one, absolutely no one on the board has any complaints about how I’m doing the job. Nope. Just my boss, the president. They told him to his face he was nuts, and told him that if I had any problems at all, he was likely the cause. She begged me to stay, even if they had to split the job up. She agreed that mailing out fliers for every concert was nuts (as opposed to the more understandable posting and leaving them at spots around town meant for leaving and posting such things, of course). She talked me into keeping everything except the newsletter. Because, damn it, this is the last fucking newsletter I’m going to touch.
It’s fucking newsletter time again. So my boss objected to the placement of some of the graphics I was using (I got a used copy of PageMaker, btw, and I truly believe it has saved my sanity, and likely some lives). See, the picture of one member of a duo was by the text for the other one, and vice versa. Okay, fine, I can see how that might be confusing, even if both pictures were labelled correctly, so I flipped the graphics, just did a mirror-image, because otherwise it would have meant more time re-editing the graphics (I’d made triangular slices of the photos, and just moving them would have them pointing in the wrong directions, it just looked wrong). So he calls me up.
“This picture of Kaffe. Did you just flip it?”
“Yes,” I say.
Silence. Clearly something is wrong, but only the gods know what it is. “Well, but, that’s not the right side of her face.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, I was incapable of speech for a full thirty seconds. “Is that a problem?” I finally manage to ask.
“Well, that picture looks like it’s the right side of her face, but it’s really the left, so it doesn’t really look like her.”
Fifteen seconds. I’m getting better at this. “I don’t think it’s a problem.”
“I guess she won’t care,” he said, after a long pause. I think, given what I know he was told by other board members, and some of the things he’s said lately, he’s still stinging from the criticism he got, otherwise he would have argued harder. He was clearly still dubious.
Understand, whenever there’s a mistake (or something he thinks is a mistake) it has a real, emotional urgency for him. He gets very anxious, very upset, at the prospect of anyone making even the smallest error. So he’s not just asking if this is a problem, or suggesting this might be better some other way, or telling me he wants it done differently–he’s getting upset at the idea that I’m not paying enough attention to the job to keep from making mistakes like this, mistakes that will almost certainly cause the sun to explode, and all civilization as we know it to end. So he’s got this real undercurrent of anxiety in his voice, real distress and anger with me for letting slip the fate of the world. Which is why it drives me nuts. And I hate to say, “It’s not that big a deal!” Because doing the job should mean doing my best, not just shoving off what I can’t be bothered with because it’s not that big a deal. If that makes any sense. But damn it, this kind of crap is unreasonable!
And here’s something that only started to bother me after the last newsletter went out. I’m not a prima donna, but it has begun to irk me that articles by certain people he leaves untouched, while mine get completely overhauled. Unless, of course, he thinks I didn’t write it. One time (the last newsletter, in fact–this is what triggered the whole thing) someone was supposed to send me an article and didn’t. So I wrote the damn thing myself, pasted it in, and sent it to the boss.
“Wow,” he said, “that’s a great article!” and no corrections. Not so much as a single comma.
“What,” I asked, “no problems there?” I have never written anything he for which he didn’t have numerous corrections.
“None,” he says. “So Board Member X sent it in this morning, huh?”
“No,” I say, “I wrote it this morning.” Silence.
And Board Member Y, who is certainly a good writer, has a somewhat rambunctious style when he’s writing about music. He can do things that would send Strunk thudding to the floor, gasping and clutching his chest, while White claws frantically through a drawer searching for the nitro pills, and yet his work is never re-written by my boss. Oh, well, he’s a professor of a Language Related Area, so he Knows What He’s Doing. (Yes, my boss actually said this one day.) I, on the other hand, am nobody, and I have apparently not sacrificed the appropriate number of goats to The Elements of Style. It’s not that I resent being edited–it never bothered me until I saw how he treated my writing when he thought someone worthy had written it. Somehow certain other people have this mystical authority that makes their text sacrosanct, while I require contant guidance and correction–unless, of course, the boss thinks someone else wrote my text.
I’ve gone on long enough. And I have things to do, things I haven’t been able to work on because this newsletter, and the situation, have taken up so much time and energy. But you know what? This is the last fucking newsletter I’m ever going to do for this organization. Ever. I will gouge my own eyes out with a rusty spoon while whistling Stars and Stripes Forever before I even think about touching a leaf from a tree that I think might be turned into paper that might be used to wrap the paper for the fucking newsletter. So there.