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A few years ago I was finishing college and working at an airport. It was an interesting job, and one I wouldn't mind taking again if the opportunity arose. I was working with people who were doing what they wanted to do for a living: they were flying, and for the most part they were happy, intelligent people. The job paid slightly more than I could have made elsewhere, and I liked the atmosphere... it was an atmosphere of travel, of people going places, which was really pleasant. Our hours of operation would vary. At times we closed at 9:00 pm, at other times as late as 11:00 pm. Eventually we went to a 24-hour operation. I'm thinking that during my senior year of college we closed at 10:00 pm. There was also a beeper; we were on call. Maybe about once every two weeks a plane would fly in at two or three in the morning and need fuel. There was a big hospital nearby-- the kind of place that had become famous for its super-brainy doctors and surgeons-- so we would see lots of transplant organs going through in the middle of the night. Most often we would see styrofoam coolers with big stickers on the side that said, "HUMAN EYES". Just before I left the airport for the second to last time, (I was leaving to spend more time at school; I would work there again after I finished college), one of the airlines started paging me every night at around midnight. There was some sort of change in their schedule; one of the planes which previously terminated at our airport was now flying to an airport about 60 miles north and staying there for the night. Sometimes the plane needed a little extra fuel to make the trip, other times it didn't. It was the last flight of the day for the pilots and they were anxious to get home. When I was home, it took me about 45 minutes to get to the airport. The pilots caught on to this and started having their dispatcher page me about an hour before they landed. It sounds reasonable, but they never knew until they landed whether they would need fuel and so about half of the time I would get to the airport just in time to see the plane flying away and the ground crew sort of shrugging their shoulders and saying, "I guess they didn't need fuel after all." Other times the crew would page me before they even left the ground-- their flight was just a little more than an hour long-- and then there would be some sort of delay, some kind of mechanical difficulty, so I would have to sit in the terminal for hours waiting for them to show up. My workload at school during this time was intense; I was sleeping an average of about four hours a night, and so to spend three of those hours riding out to the airport and back was somewhat painful. After three or four nights of this in a row, my view of the world often became pessimistic. And so one night, sitting in the terminal, waiting and waiting for the plane to arrive, sleepless, depressed, thinking about what I wasn't getting done in school, unsure even of what I wanted to get done in school, I scribbled on some post-it notes. |
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The airport job, however, is not the job from which I got canned. It's now three years later, and I'm doing computer button pressing work through a temp agency for a giant telecommunications company. In my spare time, at home, I have decided to start posting my sketchbook pages to the web. I'm flipping through one of my older sketchbooks, and I come across these post-it notes. They resonate with me, because I've been in turmoil about this same kind of indecision lately. Plus, they are in a sequence, which I think goes well with what is already posted. So, I upload them. |
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A few days later I get this message on my voice mail: Hello this message is for Jay Jansheski, this is Sandy* with (temp agency). This is a reminder for you not to report to the (giant telecommunications company) today for work, your assignment there has been terminated, and if you have any questions you need to call me here at the office, at 555-5555 extension 555*, um and uh from my understanding Linda* and Chuck* pretty much terminated you last night or yesterday, uh, from your assignment so please do not come, or actually go, to (giant telecommunications company) again. And if you want to you can pick up your check here on Thursday, after 2.00. Thank you. Huh? So I call Sandy, and Sandy says that she doesn't know exactly what's going on, but something about my doing web pages at work. I say, oh, there's just been a mistake... they think I've been working on the web pages while I'm on the clock, but I haven't. I do all my web stuff from home. She says, call me back in 10 minutes. I say, ok. About two minutes later she calls me back and says something like, "Well, Linda says there's a web page, and your picture is on it, and you know you're not supposed to make web pages or make personal phone calls from work." I say, "Personal phone calls? What are you talking about?" and she says, "So do you want to pick up your last check, or do you want it mailed to you?" and I say, "Um... mailed, I guess." Next I call Linda, who works for (giant telecommunications company) and who is the boss of (temp agency). Linda will say only, "You don't work for us, you work for (temp agency), so you'll have to talk to Sandy". She says this over and over; it is her response to everything I say. So I say, "So you're just not going to talk to me, then?" and this gets a response: "Well why would you want to stay here if your job is so crappy?" I say, "There's been a mistake; I wrote this years ago when I was in college at a different job." "That's not what I heard. And it hit the floor today, and it was a totally inappropriate thing to be at work." "What you heard?" This confuses me, because I haven't been discussing my web page with anyone except to say that I had been reworking it and putting up some new material, and I really haven't been discussing my sketchbooks with anyone, and I can think of very few people who even know that I'm interested in keeping sketchbooks, and I can think of nobody who cares that I'm keeping a sketchbook. I say, "It wasn't at work, it was on my personal website." "Everyone at work saw it, and it was really damaging to morale." I say, "How is my attitude toward a job I had years ago related to morale at (giant telecommunications company)?" but she goes back to saying, " You don't work for us, you work for (temp agency), so you'll have to talk to Sandy." We go back and forth a few times with this, and after a minute I can see that my window of opportunity for having a discussion has closed, so we both say goodbye and hang up. I'm stuck. Sandy will only say, "I just do what Linda tells me to." And Linda will only say, "You don't work for me, you work for Sandy. Talk to her." |
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You may be left with questions. I certainly am.
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