I always wanted to write a book about the small-family owned motel industry. Here are the chapters to “Patel-rel Universe: How five college kids got sucked into parallel lives in the strange world of family-owned motels.”
1: Life behind the front desk: You mean you live here?
2: Hello, my name name is Mr. Patel: Getting to know and love my hotel family
3: A sequestered life: The day the wife from the Big 6 ran off with the man from the Best Western
4: Sabotage: More inter-motel lies, spies and intrigue.
5: Customers and the crazy things they do
6: Snap judgment: Why Europeans get cheaper rooms, and how you can, too.
7: 10 good reasons we’ll say you can’t stay in our motel.
8: The maid’s story.
9: Call 911: Fights and fires and bodies, oh my!
10: Other visitors: Gideons, corporate inspectors, old friends and new ones.
11: “Have you got a woody?”: When things go wrong behind the front desk
12: Our parallel lives: The world of desk clerks, the world of motel owners
13: Check-out time: Saying goodbye to my hotel family.
My last job was working for local government and I suppose I know all sorts of little embarrassing details about elected officials, their screwups and who they blamed it on but people expect that stuff so it isn’t that salacious. What went on with FEMA money after the 1989 earthquake would land a few VIPs and executives in jail, though.
The homeless shelter provided far more material because I was very involved in local politics and got to be a fly on the wall for all sorts of questionable practices and ‘spin sessions’ where they figured out how to make a major fuckup look good. Nonprofits also play some major political games over money too and don’t always spend it on what they said that they would. I know enough dirt to create a community scandal that would go on for months and probably cause a few elected officials to resign and a few nonprofits to have to give a lot of money back that they don’t have any more. I wouldn’t bother though since no good would come of it.
Given that I work in UK central government and have worked in both a Minister’s office and a policy that is both high profile and extremely unpopular, yes I believe I could. It would be full of mundanity too, no doubt, but what book isn’t?
Whilst I haven’t signed the Official Secrets Act there are rules around civil servants disclosing things within their job, so if I wanted to do so I’d probably have to wait until I’d left my career and was 100% certain I was never going to go back. Even then I’d think very hard about it.
ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE, TWO-FISTED ADVENTURES IN THE PRINTING INDUSTRY Chapter III: Agents from the Treasury Department discover that an anonymous press operator has made plates to print fake twenty dollar bills. Despite their best efforts, they never find out who it was. Background checks on all current emplyees uncover the fact that Phoo, the Vietnamese guy in the warehouse, is in the country illegally.
Chapter IV: My supervisor Kurt has sex with the owner’s wife after hours in the Graphics Department on Diane’s desk. At a Graphics Department ONLY party, Kurt shows us the security video of the event; Diane is disgusted, mainly about the ‘desk’ part.
Chapter V: Philly is almost busted making fake immigration papers for illegal immigrant Mexican guys on the color copier. In confidence at a later date, he confesses to also making fake Texas Drivers Licenses and US Passports.
Chapter VII: On my last day, me and Philly lick every single item in the Sales Manager’s—also known as the “King of the Pricks”—office. Later heard through the grapevine that on his last day Philly jerks off in the Sales Manager’s favorite coffee mug.
I’m not sure who would want to read about working as an insignificant cog in the great grinding industrial wheels of the auto industry, but even if someone did, Arthur Hailey already wrote one.
I couldn’t write much of a tell-all book about my life in the hospital lab. But I could probably write a halfway decent book about what goes on in there, even if it’s not sordid and kinky. It’s definitely gross sometimes, and it’s always a lot of fun. Well, we would call it fun, anyway. When we’re not crying in frustration.
Chapters?
Clinical microbiology - same shit, different day
Gremlins in the works - why the instruments are always down
STAT: The art of getting things done faster than should be humanly possible without a time machine
Regulars in the E.R. and the blood alcohol betting pool
The company charged $90 an hour. They paid the actual tutors $15 an hour.
They catered to parents of autistic children, saying that their reading comprehension program would improve the child’s understanding of the world. The word “cure” was never said, but heavily implied. Test scores frequently showed no improvement in the child’s vocabulary, reading comprehension, or oral comprehension, so in conferences, the directors would encourage parents to come up with anecdotal evidence that their child was improving. It cost thousands of dollars a week - the parents wanted to believe.
The CEO was a psycho, power-hungry bitch. We would have to attend weekly unpaid hour-long videoconferences in which she would rant and rave about what a horrible job everyone was doing. Sometimes she would hold training conferences which, instead of training anybody in a new technique, were platforms for her to ramble for hours.
Kids, especially those with severe disabilities, were promoted through the program whether they were able to do the material or not. It lead to terrible frustration for the child and the tutor.
This is the one I quit over. Before starting and after completing the program, the children were given a battery of standardized tests. On the re-test, if the director didn’t feel like the child had scored high enough, the tester would have to re-administer the problems that the child had missed, sometimes multiple times, until an acceptable score was achieved. When I complained to the director that this was unethical, she didn’t even seem to understand why. If any parent asks me about this company, this is the number one thing I will warn them about.
An explosive tell all book? Nope. But I could make a fortune off of a book that teaches parents how to coach their kids to do well on standardized tests. It wouldn’t give away any answers to questions, but would explain what you’re supposed to be doing (at each grade level) when asked to answer common types of questions.
For example, do you realize how common it is for an elementary age kid to have no clue that the reading passages in the test are what they are supposed to base their written answers - to questions that are side-by-side in the booklet!- on?! They answer based on other things in the test booklet, or tell us stories using the same characters, or pick out one word in the question and answer something that has fuckall to do with the story they read two minutes earlier. Why? Because no one has ever told them* that the passages are where you’re supposed to find the answers to what must seem to them like baffling questions.
A “this is how you take the test efficiently” book would be really easy to write considering how many kids take it the wrong way. Not only that, kids who were simply clued in to what the expectations of each type of question are would almost have to do better.
*I love people complaining about teachers “teaching to the test” because if it’s true we should get rid of a great number of teachers who can’t even make something that simple clear to their students. Obviously they’re no longer requiring kids to answer homework questions based on reading passages in their classrooms
What would make my book a bit more exciting is that the consulting firm I worked for specialized in stuff like litigation, forensics, bankrupcy, restructuring, PR and basically all things having to do with fucked up companies.
Chapter One - wherein I photoshop fake invoices to show to my brand principals more than doubling ad-spend
Chapter Two - showing the principal ad rates that are more than the maximum for that magazine
Chapter Three - running two outlook identities so that my principals think I am working exclusively on their product
Chapter Four - my direct report asks me to do things in direct contravention of the product managers instructions, and doesn’t back me up
I could do three: one about advertising, one about teaching, and one about the ministry-for-hire business.
I’ve already written about 50 pages of the first book. It’s not so much ‘explosive tell-all’ as using a lot of lesser-known facts and factual anecdotes to propel a fictional story.