Comparing this woman to Ellerbee is ludicrous. Ellerbee was idealistic, this woman, by her own admission, was materialistic. Ellerbee sought out another opportunity, which eventually led to her success. This woman tried to blame others for her failure and sought a free ride at her employers, and public, expense.
I’m at a loss to understand why you want to defend this person, there’s nothing in the story that even implies she deserves a defense. She, blatantly, tried to scam her employer, and the system, and got her just comeupance.
There are certainly injustices out ther, but this ain’t one of 'em. Find a real cause to expend your energy on.
WOW. If the tone of the article inferred she was a complete git they were taking the high road. Sounds like a rebel without a clue (or a paycheck). The upside to this is there’s at least one person who is captivated by her talents.
I didn’t address whether or not she should have been fired, Evil Captor, or whether you or I agreed with that.
I addressed whether or not the fact that she was writing a diary related to work boredom made her interesting enough to warrant a different kind of article than the one written or broadcast.
The fact that she was writing appeared to be meaningful for you, to a degree that suggests you value the act of journaling very deeply. As you go on to explain why the act of writing a diary is so meaningful to you, I think it is apt.
Keeping a journal can be a very profound record of one’s existence, that’s true. You and I could both come up with examples where diaries have become great works of literature. On the other hand, people who keep journals number in the millions. Just look at the stats on web journals! It is a very ordinary, normal, human thing, which may be personally meaningful to the writer for all the reasons that you mention. But its very commonality is telling, too. I would not assume that the mere act of writing a diary suggests intellectual or artistic depth, nor would I conclude that each of these diarists have something deep to tell us about the human condition, or that they should seek careers as writers, or that they will turn out to be the next Anne Frank or Linda Ellerbee or Ralph Waldo Emerson. The fact that some of them do it on company time? That does not, to me, necessarily suggest new depths of human despair that will color these journals with greater insights into man’s condition. Some of these people are just bored.
No, save your pity. It’s not that I believe this young woman has no potential. I just don’t conclude that her participation in a very common human ritual is evidence that she has extraordinary amounts of it. Or any other quality except literacy.
IMHO, the real pity is that you can’t access the Des Moines newspaper article, because I believe reading it would help explain why some of us are a little less romantic about this woman’s diary and motivations.
I really think you should put your money where your mouth is and give this woman a job.
Show me where I said the woman in question is like Ellerbee in every respect. I merely pointed out that Ellerbee did something at least as stupid as the woman: she cheated her employer, stealing from him (or her, or whatever pronoun works for the Associated Press) by using their computers to compose derogatory emails about her boss, undoubtedly on COMPANY TIME. What a fiend that Ellerbee must have been! A total write-off as a human being, undoubtedly! I’m surprised she was ever able to find work again.
That’s not really a fair characterization of applying for unemployment insurance. What would you like her to do, starve? Go homeless?
I never said she was a wonderful person, in fact, as I keep pointing out, I was OK with her employer firing her, a point you guys seem to keep missing. I just think there might be more to the story than meets the eye. Taking a little less superficial approach to the story as it were.
WOW. You missed the whole point of my OP. I never said I thought she had any talent, in fact, in one post I specifically said she might well be a flop. You really need to read the words and respond to them, rather than whatever else is rattling around in your mind.
OK, fair enough.
I personally am not a diarist and have never kept one. I just think it’s indicative of someone attempting to organize themselves mentally. Not a whole lot more than that.
Sure, diarists can be extremely dull people. IIRC, it was at one time almost symptomatic of being a teenaged or prepubescent female in certain cultures. But it does indicate that maybe the person in question isn’t completely comfortable with being a hotel desk clerk or whatever. Because if she was, she wouldn’t be diarizing at work. I’m just saying the potential is there, is all.
Save your pity. I don’t think it’s romantic to regard all the waste that it’s involved in pounding human beings into cookie cutter shapes labelled "hotel desk clerk’ or ‘fry cook’ or ‘administrative assistant’ or the thousand and one other things that people do to make a living. Lots of waste there, lots, and it’s not romantic to want people to be able to work at a level that fully expresses their potential as a human being, it’s practical. As my conservative friends keep telling me, the more skill, training and experience your populace has, the healthier your economy.
Would that I had that power. Generally writing jobs are scarce. I’d definitely consider it, all things considered, if I could.
Shoot, I was going to offer an example of another person who kept a diary on the job. She’s a much better diarist than this person, and a much better writer than most anyone. It’s the “True Porn Clerk Stories” site, which has apparently been sold to some cheesy porn listing site. A shame. The writing was brilliant.
Would that I had that power. Generally writing jobs are scarce. I’d definitely consider it, all things considered, if I could.
Shoot, I was going to offer an example of another person who kept a diary on the job. Didn’t get fired for it, either, though she frequently was in fear of getting canned. She’s a much better diarist than this person, and a much better writer than most anyone. It’s the “True Porn Clerk Stories” site, which has apparently been sold to some cheesy porn listing site. A shame. The writing was brilliant.
No-- they likely will have problems finding these type of documents. 99.999% of blogs and other internet postings will never be printed out or saved in any permenant form. People just don’t use paper as much as they used to for communication. Great for the environment, but bad for historians.
Her diary would be fascinating to future historians because it appears to provide almost a minute-by-minute account of her day, along with other tangentical ramblings. That sort of thing is very, very rare because we roll our eyes at it. No one wants to read something like that and her idea of publishing a book is absolutely laughable to us, but if our civilization collapsed and her diary happened to survive in archives, it probably would be published as an exciting insight into our culture.
Why is Samuel Pepys’s diary so amazing to us? It’s not necessarily because he rubbed shoulders with some historical celebrities, but because he recorded what he ate, when his wife took a (very rare) bath and the expenses of his household. Boring, boring stuff at the time, and we’re very lucky that his heirs didn’t roll their eyes and toss dad’s ramblings into the fire pit. The diary fascinates us because it survived for hundreds of years and now provides historians with those precious tidbits of what life was like for people of his class.
Potential for what? Doing something useless?
I think you’ve got practical and romantic mixed up here. The problem is, there’s not much call for diarists. There is call for desk clerks and fry cooks. So unless you want to support her while she writes stuff that no one wants to read, or can find anyone who’ll employ her for doing that, you’ll have to concede that she needs a job which actually earns her a living.
Can’t express her full potential? Tough. The practical thing is for her to put food on her table and a roof over her head. The romantic notion is that this will come about because of her diary. Practically speaking, she needs to do something that someone is willing to pay for. And neither her former employer nor, I daresay, any future employer is in the category of wanting to pay her for keeping a diary. Staring at her navel and waxing on daily minutiae may fufill her emotionally, but it doesn’t do anything for anyone else.
Sure, so long as it’s skill, training, and experience in things that actually produce something economic. That doesn’t apply to her, though.
And I’ll bet you anything she was a much better porn clerk than this person was a desk clerk. It’s not the writing of the diary per se that’s the problem, it’s the egregious avoidance of doing what one is paid to do.
Umm, you could print a dozen out right now if you feel it’s that important. Or you could save a bunch to a CD-ROM if you want to be easier on the environment. This girl isn’t particularly unique so you shouldn’t have trouble finding such documents if you felt like it.
Evil Captor, I would love to work for you.
Evil Captor, I would hate to have you working for me.
Funny, most of my employers have really enjoyed having me work for them. I understand employers very well, even if I do not share their opinions on every little thing.
The skills that make one a good diarist are transferable to many other professions. Professions where money can be made.
There are tons of jobs that call for people to write reports to varying levels of skill. Might not express her FULL potential, but it gets her moving in the right direction. I’m not demanding that she be moved into a job as a paid diarist, just wishing the behavior could be seen as an indication that maybe there is other work she could do … and would do … well. She’s just pissed at being a desk clerk. Not a thing in the world wrong with that, as far as I’m concerned. Or are you against ambition?
[quote]
Can’t express her full potential? Tough. The practical thing is for her to put food on her table and a roof over her head. The romantic notion is that this will come about because of her diary. Practically speaking, she needs to do something that someone is willing to pay for. And neither her former employer nor, I daresay, any future employer is in the category of wanting to pay her for keeping a diary. Staring at her navel and waxing on daily minutiae may fufill her emotionally, but it doesn’t do anything for anyone else.[/qoute]
I’ve already handled this point, and quite adroitly, too.
And she apparently did nothing to better her life, nothing to go beyond being a desk clerk. She just sat around and whined, to herself no less, while someone else who needed the job went without.
That’s not ambition. That’s being a damned entitled fool.
Ah, but you see, her whining—her juvenile, fatuous rambling, scribbled down in lieu of actually working for her pay as she was contracted to do—was her method of “bettering her life!” And not just hers: by reading her journal, we now have a window into her soul with its burgeoning, undeveloped talent, and our lives are all enriched because of it.
At least I think that’s the point being made. I admit, I’m still slightly skeptical.
I’ll answer this and then drop what has become a hijack. (Apologies to the OP.)
It’s not just an issue of preserving a couple blogs or diaries here and there-- it’s that the vast majority of our communication is going to be lost to future historians. Through modern eyes, one might judge that this is not a particularly bad thing, but future generations will decry it. Just about the only things to survive in paper form will be newspapers and magazines (and even they probably won’t last too long because of all of the acids.)
You['re right that this girl is no one special, which actually would make her diaries more valuable to historians. We want to know the daily minutae. The historical events and lives of the wealthy will be recorded as always, but the lives of the “nobody special” are always a challenge for historians. Yeah, a fan page devoted to Justin Timberlake may seem stupid and pointless to us today, but you never can know what value future historians will find in it for what it said about our culture.
We do try to print such documents on occasion (on acid-free paper with acid-free inks, of course-- CD-ROMs are viewed with mistrust by many in the museum world), but staff, space and budget limitations make it unpracticable that we could save anything but an infantesimal fraction. The vast majority of it will vanish forever.
Our exchange sheds a little light on the problem with preservation. No one thinks that anyone will ever be interested in the ramblings of a young woman, or in modern items. My museum is not the only one which suffers a large hole in its collection from 1950 onward, because no one thinks we want “new” stuff and mom’s old dinette or letters from Dad doesn’t strike anyone as being worth saving. It all ends up in the landfill, and likely, that’s where future historians will have to search for information about our culture.
If there is a ton of call for writing, she could have taken one of those jobs. Barring that, she could have engaged her ‘talent’ and desire to write for the benefit of her employer. Documenting, writing letters to clients, writing to potential clients, writing marketing materials - certainly she could have found a way to engage. However, its her task to put her skills to use productively.