Help Me Out Here... Please! Part 1

After a couple of months trying to find a job that was willing to let me schedule around my classes, I finally landed a position as a switchboard operator/receptionist for Global Expertise Corporation. Not their real name, obviously, because I want to keep this job. Even though it gets frustrating at times, pushing a little button and saying the same things a hundred times a day-- because, you know, usually I'm saying the same things a thousand times a day and pushing everyone else's buttons... (um, that was supposed to be a joke).

Anyway, usually it's not too bad. But then there are days... Days like, oh, say, Tuesday, when about every fifth call was some person who required special handling for a Situation That Was Not Like Everyone Else's (except that it really was, including the part about it not being my job to do their homework), and the other four kept coming in on rapid-fire, so close together that there wasn't even time to swallow a spoonful of chili in between. You know those days... Days where you stagger out the door battered and limp, wanting only to drop whimpering into a comfy chair with a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips and watch CSI reruns until your brain re-congeals...but you can't, because you have class tonight and it's going to be seven (!!) more hours until you get home. And besides, you're out of chips.

So, in the interests of your tax dollars not having to support me when my head finally explodes from the pressure of holding my formidable sense of sarcasm in check for eight hours at a time, please take a moment to read these thoroughly reasonable guidelines for dealing with the person who answers the phone.


In no particular order:


1) Have the correct name of the party you're looking for. "Frank Thompson" and "Fred Johnson" are not the same person, and a directory search for one will not bring up the other. It doesn't matter that he's a senior VP. We have about 300 of those, so the description doesn't help. And oh by the way, if you're doing business with a senior VP at a GLOBAL company, then you should be able to remember his name.


2) Likewise, don't call a GLOBAL company and ask to speak to "Bill". Or "Joe". Or "Ms. Johnson." Seriously, go to your favorite online phone directory, or snag an old paper copy from the library, and look up "Johnson." Do you see the problem?


3) Enunciate, or hang up.


4) Use your speakerphone Only For Good. Making me say, "Hello, Global Expertise Corporation" three times while you talk to your executive assistant about what to order for lunch is not For Good. Especially since you're having better food than I am.


5) Ditto for your cell phone. If you have to shout over the background noise, go someplace quieter.


6) On the subject of cell phones, check the number before you return that missed call. If the number ends with more than one zero, chances are really good that the receptionist will have no idea who called you from that number. Our company is called GLOBAL Expertise for a reason. If it was really important, the caller would have left voice mail. If they did, and you were too lazy to check it, shame on you. Shame.


7) Be honest about your motives. You are not looking to "send some information to the director of Accounting." You are trying to get us to do business with you. Tell me that on the front end, and you'll get connected to the right person a lot more quickly.


8) Corollary to #7: if you have walked into our office with the intention of acquiring new business now or at any point in the future, and you do not have an appointment, you are soliciting. Read the sign on the door, and choose wisely. Do NOT try to argue semantics with me; I'm Irish, I rocked the verbals on the GRE, and I have the security desk on speed-dial.


9) Corollary to #8: if you do choose to solicit, be honest about the company you're representing. You "office supply" guys who really work for XYZ Marketing-- I know about you. I'm nice enough not to mention your name on a public forum, but the people who wrote "Why XYZ's Parent Company Sucks" were more than glad to pick up my slack. And you don't even want to know what's going to happen if you get kicked out of our building a third time.


10) Unless you're a policeman, firefighter, EMT, or the nanny of my boss's children, you do not need to interrupt his meeting. I need my job a lot more than you need an answer in the next five seconds.


Got it? Good.

Still don't understand what the fuss is about? Don't see your particular offense-- uh, situation-- listed here? Then you're probably a job search candidate. Not to worry-- I'll get to you tomorrow.

Long Time No See

...So my last post was in July. No way to soft-pedal it; I've been procrastinating.

I could justify it, perfectly reasonably, by saying, "...well, first I started volunteer-mentoring a friend in trouble, then I got laid off right before school started, then school DID start and I had to try and find a job in addition to studying... blah blah blah..."

I'm not always reasonable, but I do try to be honest. I've been procrastinating. One reason is that I felt like there was a huge, gaping inconsistency in my last post, and I had no idea how to address it. Not that anyone was demanding I explain myself-- as far as I know, only 2 people beside myself have even read it (how sad is that??)-- but I just felt the urge. Blame it on my upbringing. The other reason was because I didn't really have anything to say other than, "well, first I started volunteer-mentoring a friend in trouble, then I got laid off right before school started... blah blah blah..." Hence, no posts.

I tried to address the first half a couple of weeks ago; I started a post and saved it but never got back to it. I guess my subconscious was trying to tell me something. Probably that explaining my need to explain myself is unnecessary and annoying. So I won't bother. And as far as my supposed gaping inconsistency goes--namely, what a self-described Grey Triber was doing in a spiritual workshop anyway--all I have to say is this: I'm Irish. Union of Opposites. Read the profile.

As for the second half, that part where I didn't particularly have anything to say at the moment, it seems to have been a temporary condition. Don't say I didn't warn you. :)

Pink and Grey

Recently, a contact on the Gathering of Eagles list posted a link to the forum for an article called "Tribes", by a guy called Bill Whittle. I started reading, and then went on to his other articles... and then it was Tuesday. I remember a sort of a groundswell somewhere in the middle where I took time out to read Harry Potter. Then I went back to Whittle's blog. It was awesome.

Here's a link to the article: http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000129.html

Now, for those of you who returned here after reading it, all I can say is thank you, and I'll do my best not to let you down. My own reaction-- after I removed my lower jaw from the keyboard, bowed repeatedly, and chanted "eeny oony wanah!"-- was to think, damn, if I had a little more confidence and a little less restraint...

They say the birthing process isn't pretty. I'll let you be the judge of that at the end of this article.

In the interests of honesty, if not dignity, I'll begin by wiping the egg off my face in full view of my reading audience. I failed my "detect obvious" check the first five or so times I read that article. You see, when Whittle divides the world into the Pink and Grey tribes, he's setting them up as the Tribe of Feeling Good vs. the Tribe of Getting Results-- not as the Tribe of Emotion vs. the Tribe of Logic. And this is a very important distinction, because it illustrates precisely why I can hear and even resonate with that sort of comparison from Bill Whittle when I can't stand it on a Myers-Briggs test.

I profiled incorrectly, or at least incongruently, on a Myers-Briggs test once, and that wasn't pretty either. I took a modified version of it as part of a workshop a church was offering; we were supposed to divide up by type and do the same exercise one of four ways depending on which type we were. It was an interesting exercise, and I might have just smiled and nodded and written it off as a mild diversion-- except that I got a Xerox of part of the book the organizers were using to run the workshop, and read it on the way home. That was when I found out that the sense of duty and the attention to detail that had landed me in Group C, had kept me solidly out of Group B, where all the creative people in the class were doing all the seeking that had brought me to the workshop in the first place.

I thought I'd been robbed. More to the point, I thought it was my fault. I reacted accordingly. Explosively, but accordingly. The fallout took years to clear.

Proponents of the M-B test will tell you, with a sort of supercilious certainty that you can hear even in the printed version, that it's extremely rare for anyone to profile incorrectly. You are what you are. All I have to say to them is, next time I have to move, you can carry all the boxes full of journaling and writing and exploration and half-finished novels and burning unanswered questions. You do have a dolly cart, I hope?

Actually, that's not quite true. Something else I have to say to them is, quit making stupid assumptions. Just because I have a well-developed sense of duty and tend to serve as emergency back-up memory for most of my friends and family does not mean that I'll best serve the world as an anonymous fact-checker, perfectly content to do the small things quietly in return for absolute certainty of my place in the bureaucratic hierarchy. With the fire in my blood? Are you kidding me?

(Note to Rich and Denise: stop laughing.)


Of course, that's my reaction now-- almost five years later, after my subconscious has had a chance to turn the sour grape juice into something I can drink with a straight face. Yes, I was going down a dark and dangerous path trying to micromanage my way through some really difficult situations, and no, that wasn't particularly good for my creative side. But spending all my time on internal affairs wasn't helping me one bit to get out of those rotten situations, either. Glaringly Obvious Advice of the Day: if you want to reach the stars, you need both the fire and the rocket.

Re-enter Bill Whittle-- one of the few people who can make the Grey tribe sound like people and not like functionaries; one of the few who understands that creativity doesn't belong exclusively to the Pink tribe, and that it can be united with practicality in one package to produce spectacular results. Let me be clear-- probably a third of my wardrobe falls somewhere on the spectrum between "raspberry" and "radioactive azalea", but don't let the t-shirt fool you. I'm not that interested in greater self-awareness or finding validation for my story; I'm interested in solving the doggone problem.

It's not about being special because of what we know. It's about being effective because of what we can do.

The Letter

...So I wrote this letter.


Someone posted a challenge to readers to send 6000 letters of support to the members of Regimental Combat Team 6 in the Middle East, and I decided to join the effort. I had no idea what I was going to say. Eventually, I decided to write about the March 17, 2007 rally with Gathering of Eagles. And as I wrote, I started to get into it-- the way you sometimes do when you're singing along in church or with a really good song on the radio and you just want to close your eyes and let the music carry you along. It was kind of like that, only with writing.


When I was done, I sent off the letter to the address provided, and posted a copy to the Gathering of Eagles forum. I thought the group might like to see how we all looked, from the perspective of a few months later. I figured I'd get some pretty good feedback, but it hadn't been posted yet by the time I left work. I checked again once I got home that night-- quickly, because I had somewhere to be-- and discovered that it seemed to be overwhelmingly positive, but I didn't have time to read it. In retrospect, maybe I should have, because I was like a kid on Christmas Eve, waiting impatiently for the chance to open my presents. Only I was really in my mid-30s and out on the town with a good friend's bachelorette party, which I couldn't seem to keep my mind on for any great length of time. We got home around 2 AM, and let me tell you, I got no real sleep all night. I was even dreaming about checking my e-mail. Somehow I knew this had the potential to become something bigger.

On Friday morning, I finally got a chance to check the list, and the reviews were indeed positive. In fact, I was floored by some of the things they said. One online buddy said that my letter should have come with a "tissue box alert", a sentiment echoed by two off-list friends who read it later. Our national chairperson selected it as the feature article for the front page of the website sometime Thursday or Friday. Other comments came in, including requests to use my letter as recruiting information for our group, and another request for permission to cut and paste it into letters being sent to other overseas troops. I granted them, asking only that they credit my screen name and not change anything other than editing for length.

The funny thing is, that letter is not the one I would have written at the time of the event. On March 18, the day after the rally, my thoughts were of my windburned face and the mud caked on my boots. My stories were humorous accounts of eating a Subway sandwich while standing between two men in skeleton-face bandannas, and using a Porta-Potty in winter conditions. I didn't have even the basic facts of the event-- such as how many people were there-- let alone the perspective that turned the mud and the clawing wind into foils for an act of faith. It was a need to paint the picture for others that brought out that aspect of the story-- and in the process, changed my own picture of the event I'd attended. Sometimes doing for others can bring out resources we didn't even know we had.

I can look at this in two ways. In one way, all I did with my letter was to make a fairly large splash in a fairly small pond. But in the other, the ripples from that splash found an outlet to travel all the way across the ocean. I know my letter has gone overseas at least twice. I know that the members of Regimental Combat Team 6 were glad to receive my letter, even if most of them will never get a chance to read it. And in the end, that's really what it's all about, because I did it for them. Just like we all did, back in March.

(To read a copy of the letter as posted, please go to this link:
http://gatheringofeagles.org/2007/06/21/to-marines-from-a-war-eagle/)

Graduate School

About a week ago, I finally got accepted to graduate school. I've been greeting the congratulations with pleased and proud smiles, and the thought of tuition and books with the appropriate amount of trepidation. According to all signs, the real work still lies ahead of me. But that's like standing at the bottom of Everest and waiting to begin the climb. I may not be up the mountain yet, but I've put in a lot of work and taken a long trip just to get this far.

I officially started this journey about eighteen months ago. But on another level, I started it in June of 1996, when I took a job which had nothing whatsoever to do with my original field, working under conditions which sometimes bore more resemblance to life in the Army than they did to the rest of corporate America. I look back on my time at the rat lab, at days of despair and exhaustion, at days of getting up at 5 AM and commuting 90 minutes each way on public transportation to a job where getting sh#t on was a literal and frequent occurrence, and I think, whatever it is, it's not going to be that bad.

But there's bad, and there's bad. The sense of resignation you get when you just don't have the energy to rise above it all is one thing. The sense of frustration and outrage you get when you've actually broken the pattern to take real, focused, effective action and you still get denied, is another. It feels like getting bait-and-switched by the universe.

Which brings me to those last eighteen months.

I was living in Tallahassee, Florida at the time, and I realized that my Great Leap Southward had not so much given me the whole new life I was looking for, as cleaned all the junk out of the old one so I could actually make use of the resources I had. But to take hold of them, I would have to move on again-- back to where I came from. Obstacles overcome: pride, inertia, old dreams, financial hardship, moving in a tropical storm.

I started the application process by identifying schools that I wanted to attend and studying for the GRE test. Obstacles overcome: limited research interest in the field I wanted to study, self-confidence issues at applying to three top schools, math anxiety, learning to apply math skills in a whole new way, learning to write a coherent and error-free essay in 30 minutes.

I had to get three sets of three letters of recommendation, and my only option was to get them from my former employers. Yeah, the ones I'd told that I was done with science. I had to visit in person to start re-cultivating one of them, and field all the questions about whether I was in school yet and why I wasn't in Florida. Then I had to follow up repeatedly to make sure my letters got sent. Obstacles overcome: Pride, self-confidence issues, transportation, re-establishing communication, repeated follow-up.

I took the GRE, did well, wrote my admissions essays, and completed my applications. Then I had to wait. Obstacles overcome: financial hardship (several hundred dollars in fees), writing a professional admissions essay (took weeks!) the waiting game.

I got denied by the first two schools, and took it hard. I called the admissions office of one of them, and spent 45 minutes on the phone discussing my application and what I could have done to improve it. Obstacles overcome: discussing my shortcomings, fessing up to the boss about making a 45-minute long-distance call from work, not kicking my best friend out of the house when she said something I didn't want to hear.

I wrote a letter to the third school, with the supplemental information suggested by the admissions advisor I'd called the week before. I waited a long time for the response from that school, then got denied by that one too. Obstacles overcome: discussing my shortcomings again, waiting game again.

I finally applied to the fourth school. They don't have my degree program at all, and I had to apply as a non-degree student. I got in. Obstacles overcome: more pride, resignation, more financial hardship (about $100, but still).

So when you count it all up, I spent about 18 months, a cross-country move, a few thousand dollars, a lot of swallowed pride, a lot of mustered courage, a lot of follow-ups, three denials from graduate schools, and a lot of character-building to get in as a non-degree candidate to my "emergency" school so that I can get enough recent academics to try this all again in six months.

Oh, and one of the things missing from my application, the one that might have turned a denial into an acceptance had I only thought to mention it-- was evidence of sufficient grit.

Somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem for next year.

Citizen Erin

About a month ago, severely angered by certain political events, I sat down at my computer and did something I'd never done before. I wrote letters to my senators.

While I wrote, my heart pounded and my hands got cold. Some of that was the result of trying to channel all that anger and adrenaline into a coherent and focused force. And some of it was just plain fear. Would I get in trouble for overstepping my bounds? Would I be dismissed as a nut job? For some reason, I had the unshakeable idea that the only people who were "allowed" to write letters to Congress were those who either wore Brooks Brothers suits or tinfoil hats. The rest of us in the middle just didn't have any need to do that sort of thing.

Let me just get this on the record: WRONG.

First of all, if the CEOs and the crazies are the only ones writing to Congress, then the only opinions Congress ever hears are those of CEOs and crazies. And we wonder why the government is in the mess it's in...

Second of all-- and this is a whole 'nother rant-- we've all forgotten how to be good stewards of our own lives. We don't take responsibility responsibly. Sometimes we don't take it at all. We pay other people to do it for us, then we assume it's been taken care of and promptly forget about it. This makes sense if, for instance, we're buying an airline ticket to Hawaii. We're not expected to get up in the middle of the flight and check on the pilot or take over if he's having trouble. But it makes less sense if we're paying a student's tuition to flight school and deliberately refuse to hear anything about his actual progress-- especially if we expect him to fly us to Hawaii at the end of the year.

That's the way most of us treat politics. We vote once every couple of years, if that, and pay our taxes, and promptly forget about it. Meanwhile, the object of our votes may be spending our tax money to send himself to Hawaii and lobby for higher tuition at the flight school. He's not obligated to warn us beforehand. It's our job to check. And if we don't like what we see, it's our job to let him know.

Of course, if we do like what we see, we might want to let him know that too. Even if we think that the only people who actually approve of Congress are either rich or crazy.

My Best Friends' Weddings

Years ago, when my good friends Tony and Angela got married, I learned that another good friend, Jonathan, did not like champagne. "That's okay," I assured him, "when my turn comes, I'll make sure you get to toast with a screwdriver!" We both could have used something a bit stronger than champagne by that point: I had tonsils the size of bowling balls, and he was recovering from a broken collarbone. And, as I told Denise later, "Because if I marry him, he can do whatever he wants at his own wedding, and if I marry someone else, he'll need the vodka!"

Ten years later, I find myself reconsidering those words with a sense of irony, because Jonathan is getting married-- and not to me. The same higher mental functions that let me be genuinely happy for him are also making me very, very grateful for my lifelong distaste for orange juice.

Interesting fact about me: most of my close friends are male, many of them are ex-boyfriends, and almost all of those are either married or engaged. By this point in my life, I've been to a fair number of weddings, and I have to say that watching an ex-boyfriend walk down the aisle with another woman is a whole different kind of bittersweet. Sometimes it's been a relief-- like when Aaron got married, and I was secretly grateful that I'd never have to deal with his advances again. Sometimes there's been a sense of rightness to it-- when Crane got married, I couldn't imagine anyone better for him than Anne (she and I have since become good friends). And sometimes, like when Andrew got married, I've wanted to bawl my eyes out-- despite the fact that he and I had broken up while still in high school, and had only recently rebuilt the friendship we should have had in the first place.

Another interesting fact about me: in high school, I was a Civil Air Patrol cadet with a semi-secret superpower. I would date a guy for a few months or a year the way kids do in high school, then we would break up-- and then the guy would get the state's Honor Cadet of the Year award. I seriously went three-for-three in three years-- just ask Andrew. I used to sit around at the banquet tables at the awards ceremonies, joking quietly with the other female cadets about what a fortune I'd make if I could bottle that ability. Looking back at that from an adult perspective, I realize two things: one, I had an uncanny accuracy for choosing rising stars; and two, at that stage of my life, they really were better off without my drama. Growing up seems to have cured that second part quite nicely, thank God. But now that I've learned how to channel all that passion for something constructive, I really wish I still had access to that first part.

At sixteen, it's easy to see the fire in someone's heart, and to know that they'll love us and their dreams with equal ferocity. But somewhere around our mid-twenties, we make of that fire something harder, like steel or glass-- something that will hold polish and an edge. Dreams become ambitions. Love becomes sex with security. Desires become necessities. The ethereal quality goes out of our lives, and any attempt to bring it back makes us look hopelessly naive and juvenile, as though we still sleep with teddy bears and write letters to Santa. Even the internet dating sites, which sell the idea of everlasting love, temper it with the advice that potential matches will be scared away by the mere mention of the word. We learn that anything that blazes forth had better be sex, innovation, or diamonds, because anything else is just a waste of energy. We become so hard and glossy and grounded that we shower Bridezilla and dismiss "happily ever after" as a wedding planner's tactic to get further into our wallets.

That is, until the day we're actually confronted with the impossible. Someone gets engaged or married, someone we knew back when love and dreams underwent nuclear fusion and gave us unlimited, burning energy, and suddenly all the years of glass and steel melt away before a force so hot and bright that we can't look directly at it without tears. Something has called out the fire in us.

The question is not what I would do if I could bottle that ability. The question is why we ever keep it bottled in the first place.