Dispatch From the Job Front

[sasha]

In early January 2002, Markem Corporation - a medium-tech manufacturer of industrial marking systems - laid off about 2 dozen people, mostly from R&D. I was one of them. Like many of us, I'd been with the company for over 20 years, and hadn't pounded the street since my original hire. The company hired an outplacement agency to guide us through what had become an unfamiliar landscape - how to gussy up a resume, how to write a letter of introduction, how to conduct ourselves in job interviews. They also emphasized the importance of solidarity - that we were our own best support group, having experienced together the trauma of being let go after so many years. I took this last seriously, and regularly emailed my fellow refugees on the vicissitudes of the job hunt. This is one of those letters. Includes a few curious references to then-current events and turn-of-the-century cybertech...


"Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 6:30 PM
Subject: Bushwhacking

Hello again, everyone

First off, an apology. This letter isn’t a news update, as much as... well, I'm not sure just what it is. Rambling. It’s about five pages (300 lines) of rambling. I had some thoughts I wanted to share, and I know sometimes people’s eyes glaze over when I spew, so if you're hungry for news, this isn't it. Be forewarned...

Boy, what a difference between today and yesterday, eh? Today the roads are sloppy with an inch or more of fresh, wet snow. Yesterday I smelled mud. Mud! That's an April smell. Today we're back to a black-and-white world. But yesterday - yesterday was just too nice to justify sitting upstairs in front of this damned computer waiting for a 28K modem to download corporate home pages for the dubious pleasure of reading "no job openings at this time" whenever I clicked the "Careers" button.

No job openings at this time. No Room At The Inn.

Yesterday began pretty much like any other, at 3am jerking awake out of a weird dream. This one started off in a car with Garry E. - he was driving along this fantastic mountain highway, taking the curves really fast. I was standing in the back seat, shifting my weight from foot to foot like a skateboarder (as if I'd ever get on one of those things!). Then I was back at Markem, talking with Rick L. about a job. He didn't seem too sanguine about it. Finally, I'm back in my cubicle, at whose entrance an abashed Mick S. stands, awkward and glumly apologetic. He's got a handful of those long wooden-stemmed Q-tips, and he's explaining to me that Rick noticed I had a lot of wax built up in my ears. It seems Rick had sent him over to clean them out. "It's not my idea," he assures me, and while Al B. holds my head steady, Mick swabs out my ears.

Dreams. Huh.

Anyway, my daily routine is to toss and turn for the next few hours, maybe drifting off into some kind of half-sleep by 6; but I make myself get up a little after 7. I go upstairs to turn on the computer, and while it boots, I come back down to make my coffee. There are a couple of items I've always sworn I would never compromise on. Good olive oil, for instance. I insist on virgin oil, and if possible, extra virgin. Good olive oil should be green, sweet and fruity enough to sip raw. Coffee is another. I'm partial to shade-grown Guatemalan. It's a tad pricey, but until I started making a pot a day, not just on weekends, I didn't mind spending $11 a pound for a bag of fine brew. Well, it's not that I've lowered my standards, mind you, but Eight O'Clock Coffee ain't half bad, even at 7 am after a dream about two former colleagues putting me through a procedure not unlike checking a cat for ear mites.

I turn on the stereo and tune it to NPR's "Morning Edition." Pedophilic priests. Hints of government collusion with Enron. Hundreds of corpses stacked behind a crematorium in Georgia. A tearful statement by the pregnant widow of a news correspondent murdered by shithouse-rat crazy thugs in Pakistan.

Fuck this, I think. I pop in a Miles Davis CD instead and head back upstairs while Miles, Herbie, Ron, and Tony tentatively open an understated, introverted jazz conversation.

The computer has successfully booted, and there on the monitor is a black and white image of the incomparable Bettie Page, possibly the greatest pinup queen ever to grace the walls of filling stations and machine shops back in the 1950s. Any of you old enough to remember those? That was how I first learned about sex. My dad would take me with him into the greasy service bays of these rural gas stations to visit his old high school buddies or whoever they were. Hot summer days - the sound of crickets in the fields behind the garage, the smell of grease-packed earthen floors... and The Calendars, featuring long-legged, come-hither women wearing long black silk stockings and long black silk gloves - and nothing else. I was fascinated, but a little intimidated by all that open sexuality. There was a ferocity about it I suspected I was too young to understand, but still I yearned to get a closer look at those undraped bosoms, and would wander through the garage pretending to examine the tools and engine parts on the workbench, all the while working my way over toward the forbidden fruit nailed to the wall.

But Dad was no fool, and always managed to corral me before I could get close enough to satisfy my curiosity. "Come on, Sandy," he'd say to me, "your mother's probably wondering where we are." I'd turn, disappointed but oddly relieved, too, and dutifully follow him back to the car, a black and yellow 1956 Studebaker station wagon. The Stoodie Hornet, he called it.

Dad's not here now, so I'm free to admire Ms. Page while launching Explorer. She's in a classic cheesecake pose - reclined on a couch, her long legs curled up beside her, propping herself up with one hand and holding the back of her neck with the other. Both of her modestly-sized breasts are exposed, but for some reason my eye seems always drawn instead to her underarm, thence down the outline of her arched back to the langorous curves of her thigh. They don't make 'em like that anymore. I settle down with a sigh and start covering up the divine image with program windows.

First stop: Monster Board. Nothing new, though one more person has viewed my resume, bringing the grand total all the way up to five. Whoa, folks, get in line. No shoving. One at a time, one at a time. Then on to my Yahoo mailbox, where there's a message from FitzwilliamNet. Someone's looking to start a food co-op here in town. Two messages await me at my WebRyder account. My cousin Jimmy, a newbie, has fallen (as I did) for the Neil Armstrong-Mister Gorsky yarn, and sent it my way. But there's also good news from my ex-wife: after a 6-month dry spell, she finally got hired. She wants to know the particulars of my health-care plan, since it would probably make more economic sense for her to resume responsibility for our daughter's coverage. I reply immediately, telling her I will call Kasandra (Markem HR) in an hour or so and get the information. Then I try to tell Jimmy as tactfully as I can that, as good a story as it is, Armstrong never said "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" from Mare Tranquillitatis.

By now, the coffee maker has stopped snuffling, and nice smells are drifting up the stairs, so I go offline before fetching my first mug. I return and spend a few hours sifting through my spreadsheet of company listings, eventually selecting a few I feel I've collected enough data to compose a halfway intelligent-sounding cover letter. It's nearly noon when I email this information to myself at Yahoo, where I can retrieve it at the unemployment office to print out on the expensive paper.

The day had begun a dull overcast, but sometime during the morning the clouds had broken, and now a shaft of sunlight paints a stretched-out image of the window upon the sloping wall to my left. I wonder if my afternoon would be better spent driving to Keene and printing out my letters, or taking a walk. When I see that it has gotten up to 50 degrees, the answer is obvious.

It was time to go for a walk.

But I'm bored with my usual routes, which, in concession to what little snow and ice have fallen this winter, take me along the town roads surrounding Laurel Lake. After studying the topographical map on the wall for a while (actually a collage of six adjoining quadrangles I've taped together), I decide to bushwhack directly into the woods behind my house, which I haven't done since the fall. I lace up my hiking boots, slip my compass into my jacket pocket, and step out the back door.

The land behind (south) of my house is part of an undeveloped tract of land extending down into Royalston, MA. It's completely boxed in by unpaved roads, so it's impossible to get lost, provided you travel in a straight line. Still, the box is a couple miles on each side, making for a lot of good tramping. I've thoroughly explored my own spread, of course, and have familiarized myself enough with some of the adjoining land to be able to make directly for various features of interest. But I felt like exploring, like going somewhere I've never been. I decided to go to the southernmost point of all my previous rambles, a heron rookery, and to press on southward from there. Then maybe I'd veer off to the west until I hit Howeville Road (or Laurel Lake Road, as it's known at the Massachusetts end) and return home that way.

I pressed into the woods and followed one of the trails I've cut to the southwestern boundary, to my Meditation Corner. Here an enormous old white pine stands guard. One great limb near the base extends out horizontally for about ten feet before soaring upward. It is a private tradition that I must climb onto this limb and sit for a few minutes whenever I visit; it would be rude not to, so I did.

What a day! So warm! I leaned back against the trunk, shut my eyes, and listened. They say the woods are silent. They aren't. All around me I heard furtive little flutterings and peepings, probably chickadees and nuthatches whispering to one another (about me, no doubt). The occasional jay shrieking from somewhere, the distant drumming of a woodpecker. Only moments before, I'd flushed a grouse, the muffled thudding of its wings as it took flight distant enough to elicit from me only a startled "Jesus Christ!" Any closer and I probably would have wet my pants.

And the wind. With so many branches to rustle, even the slightest breeze can set hundreds of wooden arms into motion, dislodging bits of stuff from the canopy that rain down with tiny brittle sounds. Once the trees themselves start to sway, any leaning deadfall scrapes against the moving trunks with an unearthly groan, like the bowing of a ghostly cellist. Even the rushing of the air itself through the treetops sounds different depending on the nature of the woods. In white pines, it has sort of a hissing sound; but in red pines it's more of a "whooshing". You can tell what type of forest you're in just by the sound the wind makes overhead. Silent, indeed.

After paying my respects to the grand old pine, I slid back to the ground and continued meandering south. I know the way now, and have identified individual trees marking turning points. There's that solitary hemlock among the maples; the oak with the funny-shaped trunk; that maple by the rock I once found a fox scat. I was glad to see that none of them were damaged by the ice storm we had a few weeks back, though there was a lot of fresh windfall. In due course, I found myself at the edge of an open marsh created, most likely, by the unseen inhabitants of a large beaver lodge a few hundred feet from where I stood. This was the Heron Rookery, perhaps 10 or 15 acres of open, shallow water punctured by dozens of long dead, gray tree trunks. The year I'd discovered this place, I'd counted no fewer than 21 nests atop those trees; but over the years, that number seemed to drop. The year before last there were none. There were three last year; two of those were still intact. I sat again, on a sun-warmed rock, and contemplated my situation.

Here I was, an unemployed 52-yr old bum with no immediate prospects, out of work after 21 years with the same company. That much tenure can be a Bad Thing - it can make you complacent, it can make you stagnant, it can make you undesirable by any other smaller, more aggressive hirers. iRobot in Jaffrey, for instance, thought I was somebody's grandfather coming in to visit before I gave them the schtick I give whenever I'm fishing for data. Kimball Physics told me they had "some real concerns" about my spending so long at the same job. Sometimes all I feel I have to offer is my experience, and here they were telling me that my experience is a liability! I thought of some of the Markem people dismissed in earlier layoffs who have yet to re-establish themselves: one is stocking shelves at the Rindge Market Basket, one is driving a bread delivery truck, one is running the cash register at a thrift shop. Several aren't doing anything at all. All the pundits tell us that the economy is going to come around "real soon now", but there's no sure sign of that yet. In some ways, it looks really grim.

And yet...

And yet at that moment, none of that mattered. None of it seemed real, or important enough to fret over. I sat there alone in this wonderful, holy place on an unusually warm day in February, and felt nothing but peace and happiness. My future is no more secure than that of the moose and deer who had left the numerous piles I'd encountered, yet they seem to do all right, and they don't have jobs either. What's that passage from the Bible, about the lilies of the field that don't toil, but that thrive anyway? Maybe my girlfriend would know, she spent a number of years in one of those born-again churches before following her own natural ethnic spirituality to forge a belief system more consistent with her Choctaw-Cherokee roots. We've had some intense discussions on the subject. We disagree on quite a lot, but we're both in agreement on one thing: what we call prayer isn't about talking to some "god". It's about listening.

A crow soared overhead and cried out. It wasn't the raucous "caw" you usually hear from crows, it was an odd, rattling croak, more like that of a raven. Jim M. and I would sometimes watch the crows in the yard outside our window at Markem (probably why we're out of work now!) They'd provided comic relief, waddling in ungainly, quarrelsome herds as they foraged for food in noisy dispute over delectables. Little dinosaurs, we used to call them.

There was nothing petulant or comical about the being I watched now. He rode the thermals like a hawk, climbing ever higher. I wondered what the view was like to him, and tried to envision the marsh from above as a patch of white amidst the brown and purple of the low surrounding hills, and me, a tiny green and blue speck at its northern edge. He croaked again, and it reverberated from those same hills. The only time I've ever heard that croak was from solitary individuals, probably who'd gotten separated from their flock and were searching them out. It might be an alarm call - "I'm lost, where is everybody?" It's a lonely sound. I watched him spiraling up, getting smaller and smaller until he finally heeled over to one side and disappeared over the tops of the trees. I wanted to think he'd found his tribe and was rejoining them.

I followed the shore of the marsh for a while, then decided to begin exploration in earnest. I took out the compass and set out on a southwesterly heading, which seemed to keep the sun slightly to my left.

I tramped for a few hours with no sign of a trail, and was getting a little tired. I'm not used to following a compass track, and several times found myself veering more southward than I wanted to go. The sun was getting lower and lower in the sky, and I was getting a little concerned about the hour. I found myself in a dark, chilly hemlock swamp, whose frozen seep was slick and treacherous with surface melt. It was slow going. I was hoping to come across some kind of trail, even an old skidder track, but each open linear stretch of white I spotted turned out only to be a natural clearing. I was on virgin ground, trudging alone into unknown territory with only a compass I barely knew how to use to guide me (okay, I had the sun, but I'm trying to make a point here, believe it or not), and only the vaguest idea of where I might end up. I began wondering if I'd made a mistake in attempting such an adventure without practicing my compass skills around the backyard first.

Eventually I encountered another open marsh, a huge one, that stretched to the south farther than I could see. I didn't want to walk any further south - it would be just that much further north I'd have to go later. I made up my mind to go around this barrier at its northern end.

I skirted the marsh northward for only a short distance before reaching the inlet. This inlet was actually broad and rather deep, and the only place that seemed to offer any kind of footing was a decidedly flimsy-looking beaver dam, with no handholds of any sort. Upstream from there the brook broadened even further, so that, despite the rocks and logs available for crossing, it looked like a formidable task. I chose instead to cross just downstream of the dam, where there seemed to be enough ice and debris left over from its construction to bridge the hummocks of swale grass without ending up the way McC. did a few weeks ago: up to his waist in cold, muddy swamp-water miles from home.

I got across without sinking in any deeper than my ankles.

I wanted to get to a road as soon as I could at this point, so I changed my heading from southwest to west. I soon encountered a stone wall that defined one edge of an old skidder track, which soon opened up to a cut accessed by a well-defined dirt road, though NOT the one I was aiming for. It ran precisely north-south. I hesitated, then turned north. That was the direction I ultimately wanted to go, after all. In about five minutes a house came into view, and the trail I was following emptied onto the long-sought Howeville Road.

I took stock of my position and immediately recognized where I was. I was about a half-mile south of the Mass-NH border, on what would become Howeville Road as soon as I crossed the state line. I'd come a little further south than I'd intended, but I was here, I was safe, I knew the way home, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I had dry socks on my feet and a glass of fine whisky in my hands. I thought of the chicken breasts I'd filleted the day before, and how good they'd taste sauteed in a pan with a little olive oil, a lot of onions, a lot of mushrooms, and glazed with a little sweet vermouth, served over brown rice with a heaping green salad on the side. My mouth began watering as I chugged up the muddy hill back to New Hampshire and my little cabin at the edge of this magnificent bit of wilderness.

So that's my deposition. Why did I bother telling you all this? I guess its because we're all bushwhacking right now. There's no trail, and all we've got is a compass someone gave us with minimal instructions on how to use it. Some of you have probably never been this way before. (This is my 3rd time.) We don't know where we're going, or where we're going to end up. The hour's getting late, and we're getting cold, wet, hungry, and a little scared. But I've got to believe - I've GOT to believe - that the wilderness is boxed in, and as long as I walk in a straight line, I'll get somewhere. It might not be exactly where I think it ought to be, but does that really matter?

Come to think of it, in the end, what could possibly matter more than dry socks, a spot of whisky, and a home cooked dinner?

Also, while you're out there whacking the bushes, it's okay once in a while just to sit and look around. And to listen.

Listen.

Peace & good hunting,

Roy"

[saw]

Really enjoyed this letter, the detailed slap in the face of being abandoned juxtaposed with the exploration of unknown forest....and there was a real connection to be made with bushwacking your way into the future.....great writing

I learned the trade of carpentry from a lovely man named Floyd Sands in Key West Fla. He was patient and steered me in all the right directions. I started off like many young guys as a laborer. Soon i was in charge of rigging all the scaffolding. Which was an important job. It required proper blocking, needed to be erected straight ( plumb), and tied into the block walls with cut nails and wire. I took pride in making them safe for the workers.

One day Floyd says to me, " go with Johnny from now on"....Johnny was a carpenter, and now suddenly I was a carpenter's helper...and Johnny was so generous with sharing his knowledge, for many of the older carpenters felt threatened by younger guys, and would deliberately let you fuck something up. I had a bicycle with a giant basket in front to carry the tools I was amassing....and there I was walking around with my new tool pouch

One day I got a flat, and Johnny threw my bike in his pick-up truck to "carry" me home ( as they say in Key West )...I lived in a trailer park the next key up on Stock Island.....he drove me to my trailer and just before getting out of his truck, he says, What do you see when you look around here ?".....I said, "Um trailers ?".....he said look at all the places where their steps are just piled up cinder blocks.....He said with just 3 power tools, you coud knock on doors an offer to built them a wooden pair of steps, the perhaps a porch with steps, them maybe a porch with flower boxes.....And low and behold I did it !....and it was the very best feeling ever in my short life....I knew i would be able to take care of myself....and in Key West the work was Year round

back in Baltimore, my mother came down with breast cancer....so I moved back home....sadly she passesd away at 49
I had become reacquainted with old friends and I never went back to Key West after spending the last 8 years there. But I soon found out that carpentry in Maryland can be seasonal. I was laid off alot....The work was not steady....I couldn't depend on it to raise a family....I believe I was feeling the angst you were feeling.....No steady job

so moving ahead, I had gotten married, and before my first child was born, I applied to become a letter carrier....and was hired.....each job I had for 26 years......and in the post office every two weeks there was money in my checking account...In 26 years they never missed a single time to deposit money in my account

so I was lucky, never had that prolonged anxiety of having no work

I continued in my off time to have many carpentry projects.....I added a room on here where I continue to live...a big enclosed sunporch with a view of Lake Montebello .....I made all of my kitchen cabinets etc etc

But I can't imagime what you were feeling at 52....but we seem to be able to always find solitude in the woods

[sasha]

I've been laid off 4 times in my life (well, 3-1/2 - after one of them I managed to jump immediately into another division of the same company). I received severance from the last 2, which, along with being single, made short-term survival a lot easier. The package we all got at the time of this letter was 2 wks salary for every year of service, and medical coverage at the same group rate we'd been paying while employed. So I was never in hardscrabble mode, but as the year wore on, and the rejection slips piled up while my fat reserves shrank down, I started getting a little worried. I'd been confining my job search to engineering-related industries, but when the leaves started to turn, I was answering ads for assistant editorships, teaching, and even considered returning to computer programming, despite my skills being 25 years rusty & out of date. It wasn't until mid or late November that I finally scored a hit as a QA tech for a manufacturer of single-use medical devices (syringes, catheters, trach tubes, & such). Now I was an hourly punching a time clock for a lot less money, but at least I had someplace to go every day. The office politics & medieval labor practices at this place managed to beat the work ethic right out of me, but that's a whole 'nother story.

I've also been fortunate enough to have met a few Old Hands along the way. The senior QA tech at the last place I worked was a large, motherly gal I'll call Wendy. Wendy could be a bit moody & defensive at times, but her knowledge of the product line and testing procedures was encyclopedic. And because we must have watched the same TV shows as kids, our senses of humor overlapped. She was always humming commercial jingles from the 1950s & 60s, and we could crack each other up just by quietly singing "bloop-bloop" out of the blue in falsetto. She took me under her wing and eased me into the workplace culture during my 1st months there.

Then there was Hazel Krupsky. I met her at my 1st necktie job back in 1974 - programming an IBM-360/30 at a now-defunct machine tool shop in Springfield VT. She was actually my mentor, showing me the ropes and how things were - and weren't - done. She was about 20 years my senior, but we never seemed to run out of things to laugh about. I remember a minor infestation of ants in the office we shared with our boss & one other programmer. I glanced back at her with a question one morning, to find her sprinkling crumbs from a cookie she was munching onto the floor. She caught my puzzled stare. "Feedin' 'em," she mumbled past a mouthful. Over time she (possibly with my help) had built little houses for them out of computer punch cards & office supplies, & proudly displayed the little village on our floor to a few of her female friends next door (one of whom I fell hard for - but that, too, is another story...) We came in one morning to find the village replaced by posted warnings that the exterminators had been at work over the weekend. By the end of the day, she'd made a couple of headstones out of card stock and placed them on the floor under a work table...

And there was also viewtopic.php?f=98&t=31550

and viewtopic.php?f=98&t=31469

It's been an interesting ride, for sure


(EDIT - I mistakenly said 3 wks pay/yr of service at my 3rd layoff - it was only 2 wks. 3wks was for the layoff before that, the one I managed to dodge.)

[saw]

I think you should consider a chapbook...

[sasha]

I didn't know what a chapbook was, had to look it up. I guess that's what I've been writing lately - disconnected flashes of memory, here and at AC (though I've mostly withdrawn from there). I was trying to respond in kind to some of your specific comments, but apparently (as I often do) got caught up in the memories... ooh, shiny objects...

Oh, that reminds me of the time... <click>

[saw]

we are our stories
our experiences
our connections
woven through the time
we have here

an account of our stories
is an account of or lives
good or bad
matters not
honesty is what counts

no points off for misremembering