If You’d Like to Make a Call…

Dark days ahead at [The Big Newspaper], no question about it.

The e-mail came this morning, out of the blue: Head Honcho and Head Honcho #2, are now, uh, Headless. Their last day? You're lookin' at it, buddy.

Further consolidation had been talked about for months, and now, on the final day of the fiscal year, here it was, in all of its please-show-yourself-out-the-side-door-immediately glory.

But in the meantime… conference calls! Except that, for some reason, we can't even do that right. Reporters and editors all gathered in the conference room, poised by the speakerphone, awaiting the "big news" from our new Supreme Leader, only to discover that he was apparently addressing us from the bottom of a missile silo somewhere, and it was nigh impossible to make out his words, much less the message. Interspersed with his echo-y, static-filled droning came the endless musical doorbell chimes of other employees trying to join the call from around the chain. At times, the cacophony from the speaker more closely resembled the soundtrack of an old pinball machine than a discussion of the future of the newspapers.

I lasted about 5 minutes before giving up and going back to my desk.

Those hardy souls who stayed for the rest of the hour(!) informed me that it was all downhill from there. We're not, he said, producing the kinds of news that make readers want to buy the product, and subsequently make advertisers want to hawk their wares in our pages. Which means, I guess, that we don't have enough celebrity gossip, but I could be oversimplifying here.

Apparently, the Patch.com model of hyperlocal journalism is failing miserably. Readers don't care what's going on in their neighborhoods – or, at least, not enough to fork over 75 cents to read about it. The only answer, of course, is to go in the opposite direction and produce all regional, over-arching stories with which everybody can identify.

"The world spun on its axis today, causing dozens of people to die at various points on the globe. President Obama held a conference call with members of the G8 to address the issue."

That regional enough for ya? No. What about our extraterrestrial readers?

Luckily, the flagship of [The Big Newspaper] – which, coincidentally, is where the new Supreme Leader has held sway up until this morning – has been producing the kinds of stories that readers and advertisers do like, and with many fewer resources than the slacker, do-nothing losers who populate its sniveling, pus-filled satellite publications. Elitist snobbery being my stock in trade, I like the way Supreme Leader thinks.

And I feel 100% certain that when the layoffs come – and they will – my job is so safe you could invest your 401(k) in it.

The Never-Ending Story

So, being hopelessly anal retentive, I've been working on sleeving, archiving, scanning, captioning and otherwise organizing my old film negatives – all 42 years worth of them – and I've come to the conclusion that this is a job that will never be done. It's a daunting task, and that could be one of my larger understatements. Naturally, it's not enough to simply sleeve the negatives; I also insist on properly dating the sleeves, labeling them completely (it's not just the "Coliseum," you know – it's the "Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum; Oakland, Calif."), and putting them in labeled binders in chronological order.

Mind you, I've been a professional photojournalist pretty much since college, when I spent my last two years photographing everything that moved on the campus of Ithaca College for the Cayugan yearbook. So there's a lot of negatives – hundreds of thousands of them – and a lot of events. Some of them deserve to be saved (think Game 7 of the 2002 World Series or President Ronald Reagan visiting Whippany, N.J. in October 1987), and some, well, not so much (think Rodney P. Frelinghuysen election headquarters in November 1987 or the Denville, N.J. street fair in June 1986), but I'm treating them all equally.

The floor of my office is slowly disappearing under an ever-growing sea of 1000-sheet three-ring binders, and it could be worse: there's a two-year window in there, when I was working for The (Easton, Pa.) Express, from which I have almost no film – it was filed at the time, and now is rotting in a landfill somewhere in Bucks County (or was that Berks County? I can't keep them straight). Thus, my trip to Jim Thorpe, Pa. remains woefully undocumented. That's a shame, don't ya think?

Further, this is just the sleeving and labeling portion of the program – next comes the actual scanning and captioning. Thank God for Baseball Reference.com, without which captioning all those baseball games would be impossible. I'm hoping that, by the time I turn 60, I might actually be close to finishing.

Then I can start on the color slides…

The Bonfire of the Vagaries

Leave it to the combination of Facebook and Father's Day to leave me feeling all weepy and mortal.

Seriously, all these Father's Day wishes, and old photographs of fathers long dead (or only wishing they were) have got me thinking about the basic, irrefutable unfairness of life. I mean, how did my father – a God-fearing, exercise-crazy, all-around nice guy (at least with these rose-colored, 20-20 hindsight bifocals I'm currently wearing) – end up dead when most people his age were just getting around to picking out their next Cadillac? He didn't smoke. He barely touched alcohol. Not a caf-fiend. He was in better shape at 60 than I was at 45. I go out and photograph centenarians who tell me that the secret of a long life is smoking a stogie every morning and then jaywalking on Interstate 80. How did the Grim Reaper get my dad's name and address?

I want an answer! And, "It's a mystery!" is not gonna cut it.

Father's Day also leaves me wondering – in a speculative, road-not-travelled kinda way – about my own decision not to be a father. Which was not so much a decision as I was just so terrified by the prospect of taking care of (read: paying for) raising a child. As I've grown older, and watched my nieces and nephew grow up, I think, "Hmmm… that doesn't look that hard…" Of course, none of their parents are living on subsistence wages…

In my previous life, when I was co-habiting with the Bird Whisperer, we scoffed at the notion of children, and the result was that we ended up having none. In my present life, there's been no scoffing, but a distinct lack of fecundity. That's what we call "getting old."

Not that I spend a lot of time on it, but every so often, when I see some parent savoring a moment of childish innocence, I think to myself, "That'll never be me." And it makes me wistful, not to say sad.

Of course, it would make me sadder when I had to send them off to an Oakland public school…

Don't worry, I'm recovered, but look for something similar to this tear-jerker next Father's Day. Or right after It's A Wonderful Life airs at Christmas. Please don't suggest that I adopt – I am so not interested in raising somebody else's kid.

Unclear on the Concept

From our No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department:

Is there some reason why organizations that pose as "green" – i.e., environmentally friendly – often turn out to be peopled by such pedantic pinheads?

I took a shopping bag (paper, not plastic, thank you) of 3.5-inch floppy diskettes to the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse (http://www.creativereuse.org/) this afternoon, as it happened to be not too far off my beaten path in the course of other errands. I had photographed the manager of the place for [The Big Newspaper] a couple of months back, liked the mission that they seemed to be on, and decided that, rather than feeding my unused storage media to a landfill somewhere, I would offer it to them, and see what good things might come of it.

So I was mildly annoyed when the clerk – who was one of my photographic subjects earlier in the year, but who understandably didn't recognize me months later, and without a camera hanging around my neck – asked if I was there to make a donation, then upon my assent informed me that they didn't accept donations "after 5 o'clock."

(Uh, parenthetical note to the people running EBDCR: your hours for accepting donations should be… the hours that you are open for business. Duh. Or perhaps I could waste more of my time and gasoline to come back another day and donate stuff to your stupid business. What part of "donation" didn't you people get?)

To be fair, the pretty, artificially perky clerk relented a moment later and said that she'd accept my donation, because, after all, it was only one paper shopping bag's worth. She was still attending to another customer, so I stood off to one side and waited.

It was at this point that some other male, 20-something clerk who apparently works as an extra in a Beat Generation coffeehouse, complete with gray herringbone vest, fedora and scraggly goatee, approached from the back of the shop, and deigned to be of service.

The ensuing dialogue went something like this:

Kerouac-ite: Have you been helped?

Me: Yeah, I'm here to make a donation.

Perky Clerk: So what are you donating?

Me: Floppy diskettes.

Perky Clerk: I'm sorry, but we don't accept floppy diskettes.

Kerouac-ite: I really don't believe in floppy diskettes. We don't want something that will just sit here. And besides, we don't accept donations after 5.

Excuse me, you Luddite, you "don't believe" in floppy diskettes? Tell you what: why don't you e-mail that thought to 1998, when I might have cared? I had no idea that your shop had an ideology regarding what it would accept. They're floppy disks, not a lifestyle choice. And besides, the whole reason I'm here is to make sure that they don't end up in a landfill somewhere, and your part of the bargain is that you figure out a way to "creatively re-use" them. Maybe they'd make great ceiling tiles, or drink coasters, I don't know. Go outside and read the sign on the side of the building, jackass! It seems to me that you're abdicating your responsibility to a place that claims to keep things from going to waste.

What's more, I'm pretty sure I came here to make a donation to your second-hand store, buddy, not listen to your smug value judgments about computer components that were popular when you were still in kindergarten. Oh, I'm sorry – next time I'll only come in with my cloud storage, okay? By the way, I don't have an iPhone – can I still stand in the same room with you, Mr. Cool Guy?

Oh and – just wondering – do you guys accept donations after 5?

As I walked back to the car, shopping bag still cradled in my arms, I silently made a vow to never return there for any reason.

Again, to be fair, the perky clerk offered to give me a list of e-waste recyclers, so at least she wasn't a complete waste of skin. But the other guy…

The positive aspect of it all is that it made me so angry that I actually had to sit down and write something about it. I hope you're happy.