STEALIN’ WHEN I SHOULDA BEEN BUYIN’

This one is going to get me in a lot of trouble… well, maybe not, since hardly anybody reads my blog. But if I actually had an audience, this is one of those entries I’d be hearing about for years.

Steve Persall is the film reviewer for the St. Pete Times. Like nearly every film reviewer I’ve ever come across, Steve Persall seems to me to be a foolish, silly, pointy-headed man… which means, he often disagrees with my opinions on movies. It’s one of the hazards of being in a nearly entirely subjective business; lots of people think you’re a great big dope, simply because you liked a Harry Potter movie less than they did, or (in my case) much, much more.

My reasons for disliking Persall’s opinions go a little deeper than just his overall opinion on films (which nearly always disagrees with mine). I’ve noticed that Persall judges movies by a structure of standards that I find bizarre, specious, and frankly outright deranged. Just as one random example, Persall once went ballistic on the movie K-PAX because the producers chose not to change the ending from the one depicted in the book. Persall didn’t seem to have an ending he thought would be better, but he felt the ending of the book was depressing, and seemed to also feel that it was the producers’ duty to America, in the dark, trying times following 9/11, to give us something much more upbeat and cheerful, than the actual ending that the author of the novel that the movie was based on and derived from had chosen to write.

So I think Persall is pretty much a wet end, and don’t mind saying so. But if there’s anything worse than a movie reviewer writing idiotic and chuckleheaded reviews of films that I don’t agree with in general, based on really specious and trivial standards of judgement that only a chowderwit could possibly think mattered, it’s a movie reviewer writing deep, portentious articles about the doom & gloom that is about to encompass the entire universe, because, you know, kids are pirating movies off the Internet.

In the April 18 2003 St. Pete Times, Persall pens a column entitled Pirating movies is no phantom menace – it’s real. (See the clever thing he did there with the ‘movies’ and the ‘phantom menace’ reference? He’s hip and trendy. Worship him.)

In his article, Persall writes gravely, solemnly, and often rather pedagogically of the horrors and dangers of movie piracy. “The film industry wants something done about the piracy siphoning an estimated $3 billion out of its pockets annually”, Steve tells us, presumably with a straight face, which is pretty amazing, since the film industry can’t tell anyone who has a fraction of a percentage point in the ‘net’ of any creative property ever produced exactly what the gross and net figures are for that creative property, and yet, they will still with utter barefaced chutzpah stand there and, apparently, throw around figures like ‘an estimated $3 billion’.

One presumes that A list film directors, major movie and television stars, studio owners, and, well, Jerry Bruckheimer, have all had to sell the big houses, trade in the stretch limos, and are currently busing tables or parking cars outside all the really trendy nightspots in Hollywood, just to make the rent in their lousy flea infested motel rooms. I mean, if ‘an estimated $3 billion dollars’ is being ‘siphoned’ out of all their pockets annually, well, my God. Steven Spielberg and James Cameron must be down on the Strip selling pencils out of tin cups. What will we do. What will we do.

(I’m not even going to go into the grim solemnity with which Persall chooses to speak for the entire film industry when he says things like the sentence I quoted, although if I did, I’d point out that when a guy who writes for the St. Pete Times starts speaking for the entire film industry, I tend to look for a fire exit, or at least reach for my hip waders.)

Persall’s argument is one we’ve been hearing a lot, lately, and one I got into a heated email debate with Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow) over last year. At the crux of it we have a lot of quotes from Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, who, according to Persall’s article, feels that the ‘moral imperative’ is something that, tragically, the young people of today simply don’t understand.

According to Valenti, “Students would never enter a Blockbuster store and with a furtive glance stuff a DVD inside their jacket and walk out without paying. Then why would those same young leaders-to-be walk off the Internet with a movie inside their digital jacket?”

Okay, there’s so much here I want to address. For one thing, when somebody who is the President of the Motion Picture Association of America starts talking about the ‘moral imperative’, honestly… see my previous comment about fire exits and/or hip waders. And leaving aside an entire doctoral dissertation I could now write regarding the details of the moral excesses of roughly 43.7 bazillion movies that have been made in the last one hundred years that serve absolutely no purpose in their existence except to make someone like Valenti a couple of million bucks, there is still the fact that to people like Valenti, ‘moral’ is defined as ‘anything that makes me money’, and ‘immoral’ is defined as ‘anything that keeps me from making money’.

Ask someone like Valenti exactly why DVDs cost $20 to $40 a pop, when, obviously, major stores like FYE can sell those same $20 to $40 DVDs for $15 on their discount tables and still turn a profit. Ask him why 13 episodes of The Sopranos costs $100, and 22 episodes of Angel costs $40. Ask him why CDs, which are far less expensive to make than any other form of recording media, retail for two or three times more than every other recording media. Ask him, or any other executive in a position to profit from these prices, these questions, and they will smile and pat you on the head and tell you, in tones suitable for addressing the little Mongoloid kid who just brought them their fries at McDonald’s, that the market sets those prices. If they have a few minutes, they may give you Economics 101… the actual worth of a product is not measured by the materials and labor and other assets and resources that go into constructing the product, but by how much the people who want that product are willing to spend for it.

The market is holy. The market is sacred. If enough people are willing to pay a vastly inflated price for something… a price that has no relation whatsoever to how much that thing cost to create… well, that’s their choice, and only a fool… nay, only a blasphemous heretic, who should be put to death immediately… would in any way dream of interfering with the market. The market is all good. The market is pure white, surrounded by a sea of greys and blacks.

Well, see, here’s the thing… people downloading movies off the Internet for free, or a very small subscriber’s fee, is pretty much the market at work, too. These people are saying “you know what? Thirty goddam dollars to own something that it cost you 16 cents to stamp out in some factory over in Taiwan is way more than I want to pay. I have an alternative, and I’m gonna take it.”

As to Valenti’s previous question… why will kids who won’t shoplift download a free copy of a movie from the Internet… well, shoplifters get caught, and their lives get severely fucked over for shoplifting. If stealing a DVD from a store at the mall was as easy as downloading a file off the Internet, a lot more people would do it.

Know what would make a lot of people stop stealing anything that isn’t nailed down?

Charge less for it.

Everyone in the food chain between creator and buyer, that endless series of ‘processors’ and ‘distributors’ and ‘marketers’ that makes money off movies and music, all those people, every single one of them, is willing to discuss nearly any remotely viable option for cutting down on piracy and theft… except charging less for the product.

Look. There are people out there who are going to steal stuff regardless. You can’t do anything about those folks, they don’t have a shred of morals or ethics, and they’ll steal from anyone. If they want something, they don’t care. They’ll steal a DVD from a faceless corporation, and they’ll steal a piece of bread from a starving kid. It doesn’t matter. If they want something and they can just go take it without consequences to themselves, then they will.

But a great many of the people out there who are stealing creative properties off the Internet do so because they feel morally empowered by the fact that the prices decreed by the corporate ‘owners’ of those properties are, pretty much, highway robbery. And, by the way, the particular owner of a particular creative property is, pragmatically, a monopoly that can set any price it wants: if you want a copy of Star Wars, there are no competing companies producing different versions of varying quality and price for you to select from, which might help to keep the price down. You have to go to one particular corporation that owns the 'rights' Star Wars, and you have to pay what they want to charge you.

If somebody were to open a store where they sold DVDs for $10 each, I imagine they would experience remarkably little shoplifting. If they sold CDs for $6 each, well, much the same. Those are prices people are perfectly willing to pay for entertainment; they don’t make you feel like you’re getting screwed with your pants on just by taking something you like up to the register to pay for it. You don’t feel so mortally offended when you pay those prices; you don't feel like a mark.

However, people have tried to open stores where they took less per-unit profit and sold such goods for lower prices, because the truth is, when you buy in bulk, you get DVDs and CDs cheaply enough to make a profit on prices like that (and corporations make huge profits, too). And when independent store owners do that, the corporations stop providing them with product. Corporations don’t want prices to go down, even though those prices won’t impact their profits on those sales (since they already sold the product to the retailer). They don’t want a competitive marketplace. They want to be able to tell the retailers they deal with ‘sell this for $20’. I don’t know why they want that, although I suspect they simply don’t want to set a precedent of letting prices for something go down simply because it becomes cheaper for them to produce it. That way lies chaos, madness, and death… at least, by the peculiar and pecuniary standards of profit making capitalist corporations. Every time the technology improves, every time a medium gets more convenient and provides better quality, they want to charge us more for it… especially if making it now costs them less.

Actually, I suspect it’s even simpler than that. Corporations want to charge everything the market will bear. It’s practically a religious thing. Setting prices based on how much it costs them to make something would be a horribly dangerous precedent. Beyond that, it simply makes no sense to them, and probably deeply offends them on some fundamental level. You don’t charge people so much as one penny less than you can get away with. You never say “well, I’m making enough money”. There is no ‘enough’ money. I mean, they’re losing an estimated $3 billion a year! It doesn’t matter if they really need another $3 billion a year… I’m not even sure where, in the global economy, that $3 billion a year is being misdirected to, or where it could possibly come from. And I don’t know what the film industry would do with another $3 billion a year if it got it… make even more crappy American Pie sequels and college frat party movies, which is something we have a real shortage of… not enough mall multiplexes out there yet, either.

But, still… they’re ‘entitled’ to another ‘estimated $3 billion a year’ that they’re not getting. Kids… KIDS!… are stealing this money right out of their pockets. This isn’t a phantom menace. This is real.

Something. Must. Be. Done.

I’ve talked a lot about subjective vs objective here, and this is all a pretty subjective discussion. We’re talking about creative, conceptual properties, brought into existence through collective effort, the ‘rights’ to which are sold through a complexity of complex legal procedures to another collective entity that then distributes ‘authorized’ copies of that creative, conceptual, collectively produced property to the folks who pay the arbitrary price that the unreal corporate entity demands for the conceptual property it now, in some strange way, does not ‘own’, but has acquired the unique ‘rights’ to.

We’re talking about abstractions wrapped in abstractions here, to a point that would drive even a seasoned existentialist completely batshit if he or she tried to actually sit down and figure out exactly what the hell is really going on with all this nonsense.

Sorting through the abstractions to something like an objective reality:

The people who actually created the conceptual property in question have all already been paid. The technical crew, the writers, the directors, the actors… everyone who really had some part in taking the blank film and putting something that did not exist prior to this… something that has actual market value that you can measure and write down in a book… all those people have been paid. The kid downloading a pirated copy of a movie off the Internet isn’t taking anything away from those people; they’ve already cashed their paychecks.

Now, some of those people have ‘points’ in the picture, and I don’t argue the moral validity of those ‘points’… they created the conceptual property being ‘sold’, they’re entitled to a share of what the property brings in. I don’t argue that, but I’ll point out that Jack Valenti almost certainly has argued that and continues to argue that at every opportunity. Realistically, if you have ‘points’ in a picture, you’d better either be the executive producer your damn self, or sleeping with him, or have Christ Our Lord as your personal agent and attorney. Otherwise, as I understand it, the vast majority of the time, those ‘points’ don’t mean a goddam thing except what the studio wants them to mean at any given time.

Objectively and pragmatically, when you ‘steal’ a finished copy of some conceptual property, the person you are robbing is the distributor, whom, the argument presumes, you would otherwise go to and pay for a copy of the movie or song that you want.

But what if you wouldn’t? What if you simply can’t afford to pay $20 for a CD just to get one song that you know you like from listening to it on the radio? And why should you pay for something that they play on the radio for free, anyway? Isn’t that a little confusing? It’s free if you listen to the radio, but you should pay for it if you want it in a different medium? But, leaving that aside, the fact remains… people will often take something for nothing that they wouldn’t pay for. And even more often, people will steal something rather than pay a price they can’t afford… or simply feel exploited by.

I, personally, feel insulted and actively preyed upon by the prices I get charged for a season of The Sopranos. 13 hour long episodes that generally cost at least twice as much as 22 hour long episodes of a network TV show. If I had the opportunity to download Sopranos eps from the Internet rather than pay $90 for the set, I’m sure I would. On the other hand, if a DVD set of The Sopranos cost $30, making it slightly less expensive than a set of Angel episodes, which my reason tells me it really should be, since there isn’t as much Sopranos material as there is Angel material (and one show isn’t any better than the other, as far as I’m concerned), I’d probably be happy to buy it in the store rather than steal it off the Internet. And I suspect many people, in general, feel the same way. If you quote us a reasonable price, rather than jam a gun up our asses and hijack our wallets, we will most likely pay it. If you quote us a truly extortionate price with that smug little smirk that says ‘you’re gonna pay it, you want this stuff and you can’t get it anywhere else’… well, guess what. If we find out you’re wrong and we can get it somewhere else, cheaper, we’re going to go there. That’s how the market works, too.

Furthermore… if you’re a really really rich corporation, and you’re, you know, doing all these bad things that corporations do, like raping the earth and enslaving Southeast Asian kids to make your products really cheaply and giving huge contributions to both political parties so you’ll get lots of great tax breaks and hiding your funds in offshore accounts and laying off thousands of people while giving fat raises to your CEO and colorizing Casablanca and all that shit… and then you turn around and try to talk to me about the ‘moral imperative’ in order to keep me from ‘stealing’ something from you that you did not make and do not, in any morally comprehensible or remotely legitimate way, actually own… something that you would prefer I instead paid you a price that you are simply arbitrarily setting because ‘the market’ says people will pay that much… well. Gee. I'm all broke up for you, my friend. Boo hoo.

When the Motion Picture Association of America becomes moral, it can lecture people about the ‘moral imperative’. And when global corporations become less openly piratical in how they set prices and do business, then they can bluster about video piracy.

Beyond all this, I’ll repeat… when someone decides $60 is too much to pay for a DVD version of Reservoir Dogs and they download it off the Internet instead, this is part of the market at work. Persall admits in his article that a big part of the problem is that the hypercorps who are bitching the most about losing profits at one end (from their movie rights) are making up those profits at the other end (by selling smaller, more powerful image capturing technology to the people who pirate the movies). Many movie and recording studios are also owned by corporations that in another subsidiary, manufacture computers, and to help sell those computers, they advertise software and hardware features that will greatly facilitate video and audio piracy.

And this is, again, the market at work. Let’s remember, the market evolves. The rather torturous process which starts with some guy in a beret with a folding canvas chair getting forty other people to do various interesting things in front of a lot of cameras, and that ends with you handing a high school student standing behind a pane of plexiglass a ten dollar bill in exchange for a ticket that says ADMIT ONE on it, is… well, wildly unlikely, to say the least. It did not simply spring into existence from the furrowed brow of Jove. It started and grew and evolved. It is simply, at present, how the market makes money out of movies. TV and radio work by another model entirely. And comic books used to work by an entirely different model, and now that model isn't working very well any more, and unless comic books come up with a new model, they will probably cease to exist as such within another ten years. (And, in fact, both DC and Marvel are trying to evolve new models… the most prevalent one is to not worry about whether comics make or lose money, but to simply treat the comic book as a relatively inexpensive form of advertising and promotion for the really profitable product… the movies and TV shows, with all the attendant merchandising, that are based on the comic books.)

Ten years from now, there may not be movie theaters any more. Everybody may simply watch movies on their computers. The minute someone figures out a way to make most of the population pay as much (or more) to watch a movie on their computer screens as they will currently pay to see a movie in a theater, movie theaters will become obsolete.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, because the experience of actually going to a theater and watching a film… of sitting in the folding seat in an audience of your fellow human beings, the excitement of opening night crowds and trying to get the best seat and the big echoey theater around you and that huge moving, talking, swooshing and zapping and exploding picture up on the screen… that’s something that can’t be equaled as yet, much less replaced by something better. It’s a unique social and sensory experience. Live theater is a similarly unique social and sensory experience; it was the most popular thing for people to do for hundreds of years… until movies came along. Movies are, to most people, better, and that’s why movies are currently more popular than live theater.

Until something better comes along, people… a lot of people… will continue to go to theaters to see movies, and the industry will continue to make money off those people by charging them an admission fee at the door. That model still works. And when someone pulls up to you in a limousine and leans out their power window and starts bitching at you about the estimated $3 billion dollars they lost last year due to movie piracy, and it’s hard to listen to them because you’re so distracted by the golfball sized sapphire in their pinky ring… well, it’s difficult to take what they’re saying all that seriously.

But, still, the market may change. The model by which movies are turned into obscenely huge profits for people who had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of that film (as well as an elite few of those who did) may well alter over the next decade.

It’s even possible… I don’t think it’s feasible, but you never know… that this ‘menace’ may wipe out the moviemaking industry once and for all. Make it so unprofitable to create a story on celluloid that no one bothers to do it any more.

I’d hate that, because I love the movies. I really do. But I have to admit, one of the things that pisses me off the most about articles like this one by Persall is the arrogance of the attitude. Affluent nations spend more money making and watching movies every year than they spend on their legal systems. On feeding, housing, and clothing their poor. On helping helpless children. On providing a decent standard of living to the elderly.

And then they (we) do it all over again, on professional sports.

Hey, I’m guilty. I go to the movies. I watch football games. I bought a Bux t-shirt. If I took the money I spend on movies every year and just gave it to the guys who own the Citgo station down the block from me, they could send it over to their relatives in the Middle East and maybe buy some starving kids a few decent meals. Or a plane ticket to America.

So I’m guilty, but here’s the thing: I’m not writing articles for the St. Pete Times about the grave, grave dangers of movie piracy, against the backdrop of a world in which people fleeing from an invading army’s missile barrage and bombing runs get shot to death for not stopping soon enough at the invading army’s checkpoint. And I’m not lecturing college students earnestly about the ‘moral imperative’ of not ‘stealing’ a rapaciously overpriced product that I didn’t create, don’t really own, and honestly merit not one single penny of the income from.

Remember. Moral is what makes them money. Immoral is what costs them money. The market is holy and sacred when it sets an exorbitant and extortionate price which you have no legal choice except to pay if you want that product, because that specific unique product is ‘owned’ by a single source provider, which somehow we don’t call a monopoly, even though if another provider wanted to produce copies of the same product of equal quality and sell them for less, they would be ‘immoral’ and get arrested.

But the market is broken, and requires immediate intervention on the part of the authorities, if it lets you somehow get that product for less than the non-monopoly demands that you pay for it.

And the market will be fixed again just as soon as they figure out how to derive an exorbitant amount of money from you doing exactly what they’re screaming blue murder about you doing right now, for nothing.

In the end, I’m completely aware that my entire argument basically boils down to: They steal from us, so let’s steal from them. But they steal a lot more from us, and they do it all the time, and they have all the lawyers, and they make all the laws, and there’s nothing… not one goddam thing… that we will ever be able to do about it.

Except, you know, steal a little bit back, every chance we get.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

CAUSE OF TERMINATION

My sister in law Erica wrote to express concern about me being let go from my job over what I’d written on a weblog, and advised me to hire a lawyer and sue their asses off. And that made me realize that while I’ve gone into considerable detail in various emails to people about exactly why my long term temp assignment was terminated this week, I didn’t bother to write about it in yesterday’s blog… just mentioned I was unemployed, and yes, you could infer that my long ago weblog was the reason.

Actually, my weblog had nothing to do with me getting fired, or terminated, as it were. Well, nothing direct. There was an overt reason why, after I’d been there in that office doing a specific task for two and a half years, and had survived various different office imbroglios, I was finally let go. And there were less overt reasons why I was kept there doing a job that, for the last year or so, had largely been make work and unnecessary, despite the fact that one of my supervisors hated me and the other one didn’t seem particularly wild about my attitude or productiveness, either.

The overt reason I was let go was a fairly simple one: the job I was hired to do back in September of 2000 was no longer a priority. What had become a priority was helping a woman named B. out at the Code Enforcement desk, and that involved a lot of data entry… which I’m not very good at, and don’t like, anyway. Had my agency offered me a data entry job two and a half years ago, I’d have turned it down, and they wouldn’t have offered me one regardless, because they’ve given me numerical keystroke tests and I suck at them. So, basically, the City Clerk’s office needed a specific set of skills I didn’t have, and they only have money in the budget for one temp… so they let me go and will, presumably, hire someone who is better at data entry than I am, and doesn’t mind doing it all day long.

What I was hired to do was a very specific task: typing minutes of City Council meetings from audiotapes. It was perhaps the most mind numbingly boring clerical job I have ever had, and it certainly wasn’t rocket science. No writing ability was actually needed, since the remotest shred of style or eloquence I might inadvertently let slip into my work was relentlessly weeded out during supervisory review. I’m not kidding, when I changed the boilerplate phrase “Mr. _____ appeared before Council once more to present rebuttal statements by stating” to the much less clumsy “Mr. _____ appeared before Council once more to present a rebuttal statement, advising Council that”, I got admonished quite harshly. And when I changed “Chairman presents an ordinance for second reading regarding an ordinance on” to “Chairman presents for second reading an ordinance on”, I got the same lecture. And it wasn’t that this was a legally required phrase or anything… it was just ‘we’ve always used certain phrases’. The person giving me that lecture wasn’t at all amused by my dry, witty reference to medieval barbers having ‘always used’ leeches to bring fevers down, either.

Despite that, they kept me on doing this task for two and a half years. At first it was obviously necessary work; when I showed up, the City Clerk’s office was about three years behind on typing minutes for Council meeting, and I’m not kidding. It’s simply not considered a high priority item, and the permanent position that was supposed to do it had been vacant for a long time, and the audiotapes had finally piled up to the point where our City Clerk at the time, Janett, decided something should be done about it. So they hired a temp, and I waded into it.

Just about a year ago, though, I pretty much got caught up, and started working off current City Council minutes. Council meets at least once a week… sometimes twice a week, day and evening sessions, the evening sessions are generally for zoning hearings. Sometimes Council has long meetings, but on average, they’re over in two hours. With only the new Council meetings to transcribe, well, they didn’t really need a temp. I could probably have turned a two or three hour meeting into usable minutes… which are by no means word for word transcriptions, simply, for the most part, a boiled down boilerplate account of the various actions and motions taken during a meeting, with File Nos. and Ordinance Nos. and Resolution Nos., as well as the names of those who appeared and spoke before Council… in a day’s work. During a week when they had a night session, it would have been two day’s work.

Beyond this, the minutes I typed don’t go automatically into the records book… are you crazy, either of our Deputy City Clerks would have aneurysms at the thought. They have to be checked over, you never know what dumb stuff I might let slip in, like an actually readable phrase at some point. As far as I know, Tampa’s official City Council minutes, as posted in the official archive books, are still about a year behind; I’ve done the typing, but my supervisors, S. and G., haven’t found time to check my work as yet. Since nobody ever comes in and wants to look at minutes, and if they do, they’re usually much happier to listen to an actual audiotape instead (which we of course keep copies of) it’s not like it’s urgent.

All of which basically means, for the last year or so, I’ve been stretching one or two days’ work to last all week, because, well, the economy has sucked down here since 9/11 so I didn’t dare quit (if you quit a job, you can’t file for Unemployment benefits) and for various reasons that were never overtly discussed, my supervisors didn’t want to terminate my assignment, despite the fact that I didn’t have much of anything to do.

Now, you may very well think that having a job where there is little actual work to do sounds great, and I would probably think that too. However, the fact that I had very little work to do, and both G. and S. were perfectly aware of it, and the additional fact that at one time in the last year I did get caught up, and it was a nightmare for everyone, because I came to work and had to go around from one person to the next asking if they had anything they needed help with, and I hated it and so did they, and so G. told me unofficially that if I didn’t happen to get completely caught up ever again, she’d understand… despite those things, nonetheless, you still have to look productive. You always have to look productive. I have never had a job in the world (except for rare assignments where I have been the only person in a particular office all day, which has happened but nowhere near often enough) where, if you get your work done, you can just put your feet up and read a book, or surf the Internet, or doodle in a notebook, or read the paper. No. You Must Look Busy is like some fundamental law of the cosmos, even when both your bosses know that you actually have very little to do, and if you get caught up, they won’t like it, because then they’ll have to FIND something for you to do.

Having To Look Busy was especially onerous for me at this job, because I was apparently the only person for whom this was a requirement. N., a very attractive woman who worked at the next desk over from me (don’t get the wrong idea; she’s a single mom, and Jesusy when she feels like it, and an ethnically aware African-American, so her physical attractiveness was not a factor except in that she was nearly as pleasant to look at as she was often annoying to listen to or interact with), had a job that kept her busy about as much as my job kept me. The reason I know that is because when N. wasn’t busy it was pretty obvious because she would spend the rest of her time talking on the phone, on what were obviously personal calls... frequently quite lengthy ones. Everybody knew this. S. and G. frequently walked by N.’s desk while she was in the middle of these marathon chats. Apparently, spending half your day on personal calls if you have no work is okay, I guess because, in some weird way, you Look Busy. On the other hand, if I’d ever finished up that week’s minutes and handed them in and then tried to spend the rest of my time reading a book or surfing the ‘net or, I suppose, even talking on the phone, well, they would have found work for me to do… or sent me home, which they actually did do once, when I was caught up and they couldn’t find anything for me to do… another reason I never, ever wanted to get caught up again.

B., the Code Enforcement person in the office, really does have far more work than she can do, and never has to ‘look busy’, since she always is… but she takes a lot of personal calls, too. She doesn’t spend as long on them as N. does, but, well, there have been times when she has had people waiting for her up front who needed to talk about their Code Enforcement cases, and she’s been on a personal call for several minutes after being told about them.

I, on the other hand… well… if I ever spent more than a minute on a personal call, I would have heard about it, and if I’d ever been obviously not working at my desk for longer than a minute or so, that would have gotten commented on, too. Towards the end of my stay there, I couldn’t even put a floppy disk in the A: drive of my computer without having S. come by and ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. They kept a very close eye on me. The kind of goofing off tolerated in a permanent employee simply wasn’t going to be tolerated in me…even though nobody wanted me to get caught up, either.

Exactly why I was kept on, in an environment where I didn’t have much work to do and the work I was doing obviously wasn’t essential, is a matter for conjecture. Nobody ever came out and admitted to me that it was a political thing, although, in my last interview with G., when she told me my assignment was being terminated Thursday, I asked her bluntly why they’d kept me on so long after the backlog was cleared up, and she more or less confirmed, without directly stating, that it was pretty much what I’d theorized for a year or so to that point: they needed to keep a temp in the office, even during lengthy periods when they didn’t have much for me to do, because they were trying to convince Budget to give them another permanent position, and if they couldn’t justify having a temp, they certainly couldn’t justify having another permanent position. And, well, I’d been there long enough at that point, they knew everyone could, more or less, get along with me… I was trained and acclimated, had a lot of experience in the office and could answer the phone and answer most questions, or at least direct the caller correctly if I couldn’t, knew most of the players who came in and out regularly… it was better, if they were going to keep a temp around anyway, to have one that people were familiar with and who knew what was up.

However, once it became obvious that they were going to need skills I simply didn’t have at a very good level more than they were going to need the word processing I am very good at, well, the various negative behaviors that they’d more or less tolerated in me (while rebuking me two or three times a year for them, to keep their asses covered) became more and more onerous. And, this last week, it finally just got to a point… Darren isn’t going to do the data entry very well, Darren has been getting on everyone’s last nerve for quite a long time (I really am very obnoxious)… it’s time to make a change.

Mind you, they tried me out on the data entry stuff a couple of months or so back. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I was asked to help B. and I did my best. After a couple of weeks doing that, I was put back on typing minutes. Nobody told me I’d done it badly or it needed to be done faster or better; B. put a stack of files in front of me with sticky notes as to what had to be entered, familiarized me with the COMPLY system they use, and turned me loose. I entered the data, finished the boxes, and gave them back to her. If there was a deadline I didn’t meet, no one told me; if my work was inaccurate and required B. to correct most of it, no one told me that, nor was I given any other feedback at all… until Monday, when I was told that my inadequacy at a job I didn’t want, hadn’t been hired to do, and hadn’t been provided with any real guidelines for doing, or feedback regarding while I was doing it or afterward, had resulted in me being terminated.

And at first, G. didn’t want to tell me that was why I was on my way out. She sat me down and tried to make it about the same crap she’d rebuked me before in semi annual Bitch Slap Meetings in her cubicle over the prior year. She started right in with a real tone in her voice, taking the offensive, saying she was “very very VERY… I mean, EXTREMELY disappointed, Darren… in…”

Since she’d already told me I was termed as of Thursday, I (quietly but firmly) interrupted with “All the Internet use.” And she kind of blinked, and said, “Well, yes. And we’ve talked about it before…”

And I just sighed, and said “So, you wouldn’t be firing me if, all that time I spent on the Internet, I’d been on my phone making personal calls, instead? Would that have been okay?” I didn’t, at any point, mention the software that G. and S., as supervisors, have on their computers, that no one else in the office has, that allows them to watch TV on their monitors, and how G. always has soap operas on in her cubicle in the back whenever you go back there to talk to her. I mean, she doesn’t just watch soap operas; she works, too. And I didn’t just surf the Internet at work… I type minutes, too… and answer the phone when everyone else is busy, and take staples out of files full of boxes, and help people at the front counter when our receptionist is on her break, and go out to get G. her lunch when she doesn’t feel like going out herself.

I didn’t mention the soap operas, but with that odd telepathy people sometimes share, I’m pretty sure G. picked up on me thinking it. And so she switched off of that, and onto my production. “I don’t know what you do all day, Darren… I mean, I see you typing away, and so does S_____, and yet you’re not producing minutes at all quickly, and…” So then I reminded her of what had happened the one time I got caught up, and her and my unofficial, off the record discussion about how good it would be if that never happened again, and she looked a bit chagrined, and shut up about that, too.

After that, she didn’t make any further attempt to rebuke me, which was a relief… she just told me that, well, they needed a data entry person more than they needed someone typing minutes right now, and they’d tried me in that position and I hadn’t worked out well, and that was that.

But nobody mentioned my weblog, at least, not this time. It had been mentioned to me twice in the past, but while I wouldn’t doubt that the rumor was going around the office that I had a weblog, and I wrote my honest opinions of both S. and G. and what I thought of my job in general on my weblog, I really don’t think either of them had ever found my weblog or read any of what was on it. For one thing, I hadn’t written about my job recently, and I don’t believe either of them has the attention span to sift back carefully through archives looking for mentions of them. For another, I doubt G. could have been as calm with me, or S. could have, either, for that matter, if they’d actually read any of my entries on my previous weblog about themselves, or the office, or my attitude in general. In fact, I’m pretty sure if either of them had read any of that, they’d have used the Internet stuff to fire me for cause, because they would have been that furious with me.

So, no, I don’t think I was fired, or terminated, because of what I wrote on my weblog about my supervisors, or my opinions on City Council proceedings or the Mayor’s race, or how I felt about my job in general. I do, however, think that S., at least, was always absolutely furious with me because she knew for a fact I spent most of my days there working on personal writing projects, but she could never catch me in the act (the one time she thought she’d caught me, it blew up in her face spectacularly, and she never dared try it again). And while she kept trying to keep me from doing it… she made me work on the H: drive, which is a network drive, so she could monitor me remotely through Supervisory Functions, and she forbade me to have a floppy disk in my A: drive, and I know she used to check what I was working on sometimes when I was away from my desk in the men’s room… I kept figuring out ways to do it anyway, and she couldn’t figure out how, and that drove her nuts, too.

And I think G. found it very annoying that first, she couldn’t simply have me firewalled off the Internet like I had been for most of the first year I was there (the City changed servers and for some reason they couldn’t set up individual lock outs), and second, despite the fact that she’d told me to stop surfing the ‘net at every opportunity, I kept doing it… and I’m pretty sure she was aware that if I was typing all day on stuff, but wasn’t producing more than two sets of minutes a week (I always produced two sets of minutes a week, every week, as long as there was at least one more set waiting for me to do… if there wasn’t, I slowed down even further until there was… I was not going to get caught up again), then S. had to be right and I must be spending most of my time working on personal projects, but she couldn’t figure out how I was doing it, either.

And I’m sure that that annoyance with me eventually got them to a place where, faced with an obvious need for a set of skills I didn’t have in abundance, they were willing to replace me… two and a half years of familiarization with the office notwithstanding.

I’m also sure they both resented the hell out of my completely unrepentant attitude towards the things they found unacceptable in me, but, well, that’s how I am. I was getting my work done, and in all honesty, supervisors who tolerate a full time employee spending half her work hours on personal calls, who watch soap operas at their desks, and who have told me ‘unofficially’ it would be better if I didn’t get caught up on my work again, simply have no slack to bitch at me for working on my own projects, or ‘net surfing, if that’s what I need to do in order to not get caught up on my work again, but still look busy in case someone from Budget, or a City Council member, happens to walk through the room.

They needed a temp at my desk looking busy for various reasons having to do with internal politics that they don’t want to articulate, and they needed (kind of) a certain amount of the work I was assigned to do to get done… but not very quickly. I gave them both, and I did a good job, for no benefits and much less pay (or, obviously, respect) than everyone else in the room was getting. And over and above that, I answered the phone, helped customers, sealed documents, pulled staples, carried boxes, and ran any errands anyone asked me to run, including quite frequently going out and getting lunch for my one boss whenever she felt too goddam lazy to walk down a block and buy a hot dog her damn self.

So, yes. Did it annoy my supervisors that I was writing for my weblog, typing long articles on comic books and TV shows, and surfing various websites while I was at work? I don’t care. And I wasn’t going to pretend to care, either. And, honestly, while I am certainly not thrilled with suddenly having no income, I have to say that I hated that job, I loathed at least one of my supervisors (S.) with every fiber of my being, and wasn’t wild about G. whenever she decided to shuffle out of her cubicle and actually supervise me for a few minutes at a time. (When G. wasn’t supervising, she was a very pleasant person, which is more than I can say for S., who is just a deeply unpleasant human being in pretty much every way. I didn’t trust G., since you really can’t trust anyone who is your supervisor in that kind of civil service setting, where they’ve been surviving some really cutthroat office politics for years and there are simply some things that they can’t say or do or admit to, no matter what… they can never be completely honest with you, and if their agenda requires it, they’re going to cut you loose. But still, I liked her, whenever she wasn’t being a boss.)

And I’ll also say this… if I hadn’t had the Internet, and I hadn’t been able to work on my own writing projects during the two and a half years I was there and expected to do very little besides listen to audiotapes of City Council meetings and type City Council minutes all goddam day, every day… I would have simply gone nuts. They hired a temp to do that job because none of them wanted to be bothered doing it; as far as I’m concerned, if I’m getting the work done and they’re getting what they need from me, they can just shut up about the rest of it.

But I have a really bad attitude. It’s always getting me fired.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.