Announcing Another Life Blip for a (Difficult?) Person
I’m sitting in Pete’s Café at the San Francisco Art Institute in North Beach—with great views of Alcatraz Island and the Bay—writing this. On Friday—not my customary day off. Two extremely large American flags are whipping horizontally in mid-distance, partly blotting my direct view across the strait of the remaining, defunct prison cellblock and the still extant lighthouse on
The Rock.
They’re playing vintage Neil Young as I’m writing, here, on Friday, in the middle of a city walk, to process what happened yesterday, when I was made
redundant (in the British term) at Wilderness Press. If my layoff had happened two years earlier, shortly after Mike Jones took over as publisher, I wouldn’t have been taken by surprise. While I supported his goal of making WP more profitable, I made little secret of my dislike for his method for growing this small family-owned outdoor book publisher: instituting a midlevel management to carry out his decisions, inevitably also creating a barrier to preexisting friendships and eroding the variously skilled craftspeople of their self worth, former internal company input, and reasonable expectation that hard work would be rewarded with commensurate salaries.
While Mike identified me early in his tenure as one of four key employees to help implement his design, after my negative reaction to his summary write-offs of other long-term employees, for whom I had (and have) great respect, he sidelined me. Had it not been for my pleasure in editing some interesting outdoor manuscripts, my friendships at WP, my delusion that I’d found a more-or-less comfortable niche coupled with a certain middle-age inertia, and the more pressing need to find other housing while my coop neighbors were suing to evict me, I’d have looked for another job.
But, in the intervening deuce of years, I’d responded to what seemed positive in Mike’s challenge to editorial and design to work more efficiently and handle many more manuscripts simultaneously. I believed that I was meeting or surpassing management’s expectations for my workload, which I delivered with my signature high level of quality in tandem with imaginative solutions. The authors I’ve worked with have almost universally valued my work. In the last year I made significant contributions to five or six of our best-selling books, including
Stairway Walks in San Francisco,
101 Hikes in Northern California, and
Backpacking California.
Though I recognized that my grousing over lousy manuscripts reaching my desk—really a bald plea for having serious input into the acquisitions and marketing processes—wasn’t appreciated, I never guessed that the downturn in the economy would provide the rationale to eliminate my position—no cause given—after seven years’ service.
Change is the law (and a paradox). There is no lasting stay against chaos—no foundation of such integrity it can last very long. Given this perception, it seems appropriate to embrace the flux itself. What I first experience as setbacks could be seen as gifts of God. The trick, then, is to understand how a setback can morph into something more positive.
So much for thoughts and meditations. Perhaps I’ll take a short vacation before I settle down in earnest to find a better job. If you have any ideas for me—either a suggestion for a great, short vacation or about future employment strategies—please drop me a line.
posted by Paul at 8:08 PM
