A Dark And Quiet Room

written on 7/20/2002

Whoops. I almost missed this week’s entry. No computer problems this time. I’ve just been very busy with work and school. What a contrast, too.

Work has been great. Wonderful. Awesome. Fill in your favorite superlative here. Busy, certainly. Stressful, occasionally. But still wonderful. I really feel as though I belong. In order to understand how important this is to me, I need to tell you about the last six months or so of my employment at my previous job.

I worked at Knox Law Firm for over four years, and I have no regrets about working there at all. Before I was hired as librarian and closed file clerk, I was working for a vending company in the kitchen, preparing the cheap sandwiches and reheatable soups that you can find in certain vending machines. I distinctly remember when the job offer came. I had just returned from work. I was tired. I was smelly. I was dirty. Also, I had been getting sick all day, but I couldn’t afford to stay home. Staying home means missing a day of pay, and we were already on the brink financially. So I staggered in the door and collapsed on the sofa. I wanted to give up. And just then the phone rang.

It was Bob Pagni, my old boss from Knox Law Firm from way back when I had been a messenger. They were looking for someone to be librarian. Was I interested in interviewing for the job?

I started two weeks later.

I put a lot of work into that position. When I arrived, everything was a mess. Most of the old files were kept in boxes instead of on shelves, making it difficult to clear space for newer files coming into the file room. The files were still tracked using a manual card catalog system. The library was not much better. The library bills were a wreck. Bills that were six months old were still not paid. My cubicle was filled with bins of unopened mail. I didn’t even have a computer.

And so I set about putting things in order.

I implemented a number of projects to organize both library and file room. I put up new shelves in the file room, exponentially increasing our available space. I proposed a database to track the closed files and continually tweaked and enhanced it to improve its performance and functionality. I proposed and implemented new procedures to streamline the entire file closing process. I headed up the firm’s move towards more electronic research. I researched various vendors, negotiated with vendors, scheduled training sessions, and made presentations to the attorneys. I loved it.

But there were still problems. Originally my position was still only a glorified messenger position, and as I continued to develop my skills and knowledge, the position did not develop with me. I still was on call to push the mail cart. I still had to haul my own files. I still had to assist with the delivery runs to the courthouse and other locations in downtown Erie. In the eyes of the firm, I was still only a messenger. (There are some members of my audience who are probably shocked now.)
This problem only became worse when Bob Pagni left the firm and another administrator took his place. Bob and I had our conflicts, but I had complete confidence in him. On the one hand I knew that he was keeping an eye on what I was doing, but, at the same time, I knew that I could go to him with a problem and that he would take me seriously and take appropriate action. I wish that I could say the same about this new administrator. She wasn’t cruel or overbearing; I just wasn’t sure that she really understood what was going on. And, after several glaring instances, I gave up trying to go to her with problems.

One fairly significant problem was my pay. When I started at Knox, I wasn’t making all that much more than minimum wage. It was an improvement from the vending company, but it still was very little to live on. And, as the family continued to grow and the paycheck stayed small, it became more obvious that I couldn’t sit around, doing nothing.

At one point, I went to the administrator, asking her for a raise, explaining that my family needed the money. After consideration, she told me that she couldn’t do it, that she couldn’t just give me more money because my family needed it. She said that I was making the regional average for a position of my type. She could only give out performance-based raises. She said that we’d see how my summer projects went. She said that the firm would consider a raise then.

The words burned. And they continued to burn as I heard other rumblings in the office. Employees moving on to other offices, citing substantial pay differentials as well as improved treatment. One employee levelling charges of shocking unreasonableness by management after asking for a small raise. Dissatisfaction quietly voiced by long-term veterans who just planned on keeping their heads down and slogging through, because there wasn’t anything else for them.

Everything came to a head at the beginning of this year. 2001 was a disastrous year for the financial health of my family, as several financial crises as well as an attempt to start a business drained our resources. Moreover, I was working my way through night school, trying to get a degree so that I could actually support my family. (More on this later.) But I wasn’t finished yet, and I still had nearly a year to go. Debt was rising, and the income stayed low. My wife wanted me to ask for
a raise, but I was too afraid. I remembered the rumors and rumblings that I had heard. I was afraid that, if I asked, I’d be on the black list or, worse, fired. Certainly a little bit was better than nothing. Attempts to find other employment failed to find anything. Forty resumes with zero response. School dragged on me. Work stressed me. We lost two messengers, one of them walking off the job after telling off the administrator. My duties suffered as I had to assist the messengers almost
full-time, while the administrator slowly worked towards hiring a new messenger. (It was two weeks after the first messenger quit that she actually began advertising for a messenger. In the end, it was six weeks before she found a replacement.)

My work began to pile up. I was burning the candle at both ends, trying to keep up at work, trying to stay on top of school, trying to be a husband and father, just trying…trying…trying….

And then in February I received my annual evaluation.

The evaluation procedure at Knox is almost like receiving a report card. You are sent a self-evaluation form, and two attorneys and the administrator each fill out a form as well. The form lists 25 areas of work. Some are general to all employees and the others relate to the job specifics. The ratings are as follows:

0—Terrible
2—Needs improvement
4—Doing fine
6—Above and beyond

Those aren’t the terms used, but it’s enough for you to get the idea. By doing the math, you can see that if you are “doing fine� in each category, your score adds up to 100. The scores of the administrator and attorneys are averaged (using a weighted average), and the final score is used to determine your annual pay raise. You are sent a document with the three scores as well as any comments from the three evaluators and then you have opportunity to discuss the reason for the scores at a meeting.

I got my annual evaluation form back, and I was crushed. The two attorneys had given my superlative marks and were clearly happy with me. However, the administrator had not done so. Certainly she had indicated that I went above and beyond in the performance of my job duties. However, she also indicated that I didn’t cooperate with the messengers in covering document delivery (which was not true) and that my office area was a mess (which was true but was not completely within my control). In fact, due to the way the form was set up, I was penalized for not assisting the messengers
twice. So I ended up with three “Needs improvement� marks and only one “Above and beyond� mark. Now, remember that the “Above and beyond� counted all the work that I had continued to do on organizing the library and closed file room. It included all my ongoing work on training attorneys with the new electronic research service that we had decided to use. It included my current awareness efforts, staying abreast of law librarian issues and discovering new resources for our use. It included my participation on the LAW-LIB email list, where almost any legal research question can be answered in hours (and would you like that document emailed or faxed to you?), which had already saved several attorneys literally hours of research time. All the attorneys loved and trusted me.

All of this is on one side of the scales. And on the other side, I don’t help push the mail cart and I don’t keep my desk clear. Two minor issues, one of which wasn’t even true.

Yet all my work, my efforts, my ongoing research, was nothing before these two points.

I was devastated. I felt like I had been slapped in the face.

The next week I became very ill. I never get sick. Never. Perhaps once a year I will have to stay home from work, but I am never sick for more than one day. This year I started feeling sick on a Monday. I felt feverish and weak. It got to the point where I begged God, “Just enough strength until 3:00. That’s only two more hours. Just two more hours.� I couldn’t even think of getting to the end of the day. That was too far off. And at 3:00 I prayed, “Just until 4:00, God. Just until 4:00.� I staggered through the day. Everything was a haze.

I became even more ill that night, but I didn’t want to stay home on Tuesday. One of the messengers was going to be out each afternoon that week, and I knew that meant that Bill would have been stuck working alone. I had once worked a day as a messenger alone, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. So, I called in and said that I would stay home for the morning and come in for the afternoon. I struggled through that afternoon, came home, and collapsed. I was feeling worse.
My wife wanted me to stay home Wednesday, but I refused. I felt like I had some sort of duty to Bill. There was no other reason. Any sense of loyalty that I had once felt to the firm was gone in the wake of that evaluation. I just didn’t want Bill to be stuck all by himself. That was it. I woke up in the middle of the night. My wife had put me to bed early and had accidentally awakened me as she came to bed. I felt awful. All I wanted to do was stay in bed and die. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, because I had to go to work. And I started crying. I was bawling because I couldn’t stand the thought of getting up and forcing my fever-wracked body to go back to that place, that place where they used me and sucked me dry and threw me back empty. I collapsed that night. My wife called me in sick that night. She made me stay home. She made me rest.

I returned to work on Thursday but something had died that week. My wife saw it. She said that I had been pushing and pushing but that getting the evaluation just took all the energy away. It was like my feet were kicked out from under me. And from that point I earnestly and fervently desired to be free of that place forever.

I had received a job offer in Illinois. I didn’t want to move, but I began looking into it. There were lots of reasons, but one that stood out in my mind was that I couldn’t bear to be at Knox any longer. It hurt too much.

I poured my soul into my work. And they gave me a cost-of-living raise.

Better to stab me in the chest, for they surely broke my heart.

But now……

But now I am at Samaritan Ministries. Now I feel like I belong. I have a fairly eclectic skill set. I am a computer programmer. I am a writer. I am fairly expressive in person and can be very friendly talking to complete strangers. I love computers. I love beauty.

And somehow my job is using all of these aspects of my personality. More than that, I don’t feel like a substandard citizen. I feel like I am a part of the group, not merely being employed. I feel useful and helpful. Moreover, I can totally give myself to the goals of the organization. At Knox I was just an employee trying to do a good job. Here I feel like I am ministering to fellow Christian brothers and sisters through my job. It makes such a difference.

Here, I love going to work.

There have been many struggles and stresses with this move, but work has not been one of them. No, not at all.

Still, there are other issues that are arising.

I started night school in September of 1999. Originally I was going to study to be a paralegal, but after receiving some vigorous advice to the contrary, I changed my major to computer science. It seemed like a good fit. My first exposure to computers and programming was in kindergarten and I have pursued my interest with varying amounts of vigor ever since.

However, it was such a struggle. I was attending a business school which thinks that it is important that all their students have exposure to various business topics, instead of, oh say, computer courses. I had three semesters of accounting. In total, I had five semesters of various programming languages (COBOL, C++, Visual Basic), and I’m still finishing up the last semester of COBOL. The worst sememster was January of 2001. Due to test-outs, there were only two classes available to
me during that semester: Professional Development and Algebra. Now, I did just fine in algebra in high school, thank you very much, and I didn’t fancy wasting a semester taking it again. However, I needed at least two classes. Even worse, both classes were scheduled from 5:30-7:00. So, Monday through Thursday I left work and went straight to school. I left home before the children were up and I got home after they were in bed. In my family we place great importance on eating dinner together, but four nights of the week my family ate dinner without me. And so, at 6:00 when the algebra teacher was explaining the multiplication of negative numbers, I thought of my family eating dinner without me and wondered why I was wasting my time.

Professional Development was even worse. This was a required course, so there was no way that I could avoid it. In a way, I’m somewhat impressed. Somehow, the school managed to come up with a course that insulted my intelligence, treated me like a child, showed a complete lack of understanding of the creative arts, and flew in the face of all my religious beliefs, all at that same time. We were told that we needed to be Peak Performers. Now, I don’t know what a Peak Performer is, since they never really explained it, but I think that it has something to do with being rich and famous. You know, “successful�. Of course, this involves things like avoiding drugs and alcohol (yes, they devoted a chapter to this) and thinking happy, positive thoughts. Like thinking, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me� was going to get me through school any faster. And so, as I sat through another lecture on how to write, or, even better, to read (yes! how to read!), I thought of my wife, eating alone, and my children, who I hadn’t seen for two or three days, and I wondered what in the world I was doing in this stupid class.

The only benefit of that class for me was that I better learned what I am against. I am against the concept of “professionalism� which really means ugliness. I am against a formulaic approach to the arts, which says that *this* way is right for all people for all times. I am against a cookie-cutter approach to people, which says that *this* method (developed by experts) is right for all people, regardless of differences of background, training, and personality. But most of all, I am
against the definition of a life well-lived as the pursuit of money or fame or “success�.

The programming teacher habitually made mistakes.

The admissions office never could return our phone calls.

Student records showed my major as “paralegal� for several semesters after I changed to computer science.

And all the time, I was missing parts of my family’s lives. Because I wasn’t home. Because I was learning cost accounting and the three steps to effective writing.

At the end of April, I walked out of Erie Business Center for the last time. My last assignment was giving a speech for Oral Communications. I spoke on the samurai, dressed up in a hakama and wearing the daisho (the two swords of the samurai). It was better than business casual. I walked out of that building, got into the van, and yelled in exultation. I was never going back. Never.

Aside: one of the big no-nos for reading and writing was listening to music. As I write this journal entry, I am enjoying listening to Counting Crows and was previously listening to Linkin Park. I may soon change to something else. Somehow my listening to music isn’t interfering with my writing. Funny how that works.

Another aside: the school had an attendance policy. At one point, you could miss three classes. On the fourth skipped class, you dropped a letter grade. Missing seven classes meant that you failed the class. During my last year, they revised it to get rid of the letter grade penalty, which was good. However, the beginning of the attendance policy said, “Erie Business Center expects that its students understand the importance and benefits of class attendance.� To which I say, “Baloney!� If the school *really* expected that we understood the “importance and benefits of class attendance�, they wouldn’t need an attendance policy. Such draconian policies were necessary because the school didn’t expect that any of us put any value on class attendance. For someone who was missing time with his family and placing stress on his marriage in order to attend school, the policy was upsetting and offensive.

I’m still not sure if I want to write a nasty letter to the administration about that policy. I may yet do so.

Anyways, when I decided to accept the job in Illinois, I still had a semester’s worth of work to do. I still needed to complete my last semester of COBOL and I still needed to complete my internship. Now, the internship is a touchy matter for me. Basically I am required to complete 170 hours of computer science work at a real job. This counts as a three-credit class. Of course, when I started, I raised a concern about this, saying that I couldn’t stop my full-time job to complete this internship.
When I started, I was told that this wouldn’t be a problem, that I could just complete a different course instead for the three credits. Well, lo and behold, as I approach the end of my schooling, I find that I do need to do an internship. At best, someone was mistaken. At worst, someone was lying. Either way, it did nothing to improve my assessment of the school.

But, salvation! My new job was partially a computer science job. I could use it as my internship. Happy day! Even better, I would be able to do my last COBOL class by correspondence. I could take this job and finish my degree at the same time. Hooray!

So, when we moved, I brought my COBOL book and a packet of assignments to complete. (I had burned my Professional Development book at the family’s annual Tax Code burning. But that’s another story.)

Now, if you have been reading my journal entries with any level of comprehension, you know that my life has been just a bit crazy recently. Maybe a little emotional. Maybe a bit stressful. Maybe the last thing that I needed to be doing was COBOL programming. Maybe taking care of my wife was more important. Could it be? Nevertheless, I knew that I needed to finish my COBOL and contact the school about my internship.

So I must confess that when the school contacted me to nag me about my COBOL and intership, I did not accept the news with good graces. I had a plan and I was going to follow it. At the risk of sounding snooty, I had maintained a 4.0 GPA until my last semester. Maybe, just maybe, I could be trusted to get my work done when no one was watching.

My wife reminds me that there really is no way for the school to know all of this, and she is right. Nevertheless, given the history of my relationship with the school, my emotions are getting the better of me a bit. It doesn’t help that my internship supervisor responded very rudely to a request *by my boss* that the time for the internship be extended.

Earlier this week I took a run at starting my COBOL. I had technical issues, due to the reformatting that we did last week. By the time I got the compiler up and running, I was in no mood to do any work. The plan was that I would devote a large portion of the next several Saturdays to doing COBOL.

I didn’t sleep well last night, so I ended up getting a late start on the day. I didn’t begin COBOL until after 12:00. And as I sat down and began the work, all the frustration and pain that I had slogged through back in Erie rose up before me. While I was in school, I was used to it, although my wife tells me that it did wear on me a lot. But now I’ve gotten used to not having to deal with it all. It’s like I was wading through razor blades for so long that I was used to the cuts. But now that I’ve had a break, I realize exactly how much it hurt.

Right now I feel like I’m in danger of bleeding to death in full view of the finish line. Because I don’t want to go on. Work is good. We’re starting to settle into Peoria. Life is good. Why should I wade through the razors anymore?

The only answer that I have is this. Although I don’t even remember it all, I already bled into the river of razors. I have suffered heartaches and pain and agony as I bled out myself all over school. And, in my mind, somehow, if I don’t finish, it will have all been for nothing. So I’m going to slog on just a bit further. And when I get to the finish line, I might just
turn around and tell the blades exactly what I think of them. I might vent to the administration a bit, tell them how much blood they took.

Given the reaction of both my boss and my wife to the letter from my internship supervisor, I just might have to get in line.