After leaving CBS, I loafed for a year and then spent several years working as a copy editor. Shortly after arriving at the office one day, a manager came over to my desk and declared, “We need to discuss your goals.” I was 66 years old—past retirement age, damn near old enough to be his father—and he wants to discuss my “goals.”
“Go away,” I told him. Preparing to take over the main desk was always a hectic part of the day. I was reading in, looking at the stories the desk had edited that day. So much ground to cover, so little time. It was impossible to read every story from start to finish, so you skimmed some, skipped some but made sure you thoroughly read the big ones, the ones you knew would be changing throughout your shift.
"Well, we’re not doing it now. Go away!”
Floyd was both dense and tone deaf. He wouldn’t leave. If only Floyd were as dogged in fleshing out a good story. The Performance Review had to be done, he said. I wasn’t going to budge either. It was a crock—something dreamed up by the stiffs in Human Resources who had nothing to do and, worst of all, absolutely no experience in newsrooms. They all ought to be fired, I told Floyd, several times in several ways. This back and forth continued, with the volume of each exchange rising, until the magic words came out.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said.
Why does anyone say that? It’s a physical impossibility for most of us, isn’t it? It has to be or otherwise every country in the world would have a jobless rate of over 98% because most everyone would be home—fucking themselves.
Floyd reddened—a condition associated with self-fucking—and accused me of being incapable of a civil conversation and suggested it was time to retire. Then the squirrel left without finding his nuts. Perhaps he went looking for them elsewhere. He didn’t come in for the next two or three days.
I concede I was out of line, but if he felt he had a chore to do—and I’m sure he did—then there had to be a better way to alert an editor about to take charge of the desk that sometime soon they needed to set a time for the two of them to sit down and talk about the Performance Review. The next time Floyd showed up a date was agreed on.
We met in the conference room with its breathtaking view of parking garages, and, while I was admiring the scene, Floyd handed me the damn thing and said my overall rating wasn’t just his opinion but the collective judgment of every TOM (Turkey of Management) in the unit. After only a glance at a couple of pages, I let him have it. My editorial skills got the highest possible marks, 5s, but right below those was a two and the word “outbursts.”
In the language of the TOMs, “Larry must control his outbursts.” Hello? If you “control” an outburst,” it isn’t an “outburst.” It’s whining.
A second two caught my eye. “Larry must work on his people skills.”
“You think everything’s fine here, don’t you. If I’d just shut up, things would be perfect.”
Floyd was quick with a “No, no. We value your judgment and want you to point out problems but try….”
“Bullshit. You want a newsroom full of wusses. You don’t want to hear it when one of our reporters or AP butchers a story or misses the point completely. And it happens all the time, all the God damn time.”
“That’s not true,” Floyd said, reddening again. Was he doing himself again? If so it wasn’t my fault.
I began a running commentary on a few of the other evaluations.
“Listen to this: ‘Invests time in developing and coaching staff.’ And I get a three. That’s not my job. That’s your job! According to this piece of shit you gave me, I’m supposed to do your job and then you call me in and tell me how well I’m doing, doing your job. Right? That’s insane.”
An anxious chirp was all I got from Floyd whose eyes looked glazed. Not surprising¸ if he took the least bit of this foolishness seriously.
“And how about this one? ‘Moves others to action without a reliance on positional authority or proximity. Builds consensus through give-and-take, and facilitates win-win business outcomes.’ What the hell does that mean? I don’t understand a word of it.”
“Well, yes, that is a muddle, isn’t it,” he snorted while shaking his legs.
“What the fuck does it mean?”
“I don’t know either, frankly. Some of this language is standard to all departments and comes down from the human resources people,” Floyd said.
“Ahhh. You inherit language from someone else, give me a grade on it and then admit you don’t know what it means. That’s one hell of a wonderful system.”
I was worse than he was. I was digging for nuts, his.
“Here’s another good one, Fuh-LOYD. I get a two for ‘Keeps supervisor appropriately informed.’ Isn’t it the supervisor’s job to keep up, to know what’s going on? Why would any intelligent journalist tell a supervisor here what was going on? The one sure way to make sure something doesn’t get done quickly or doesn’t get corrected is to tell a supervisor about it like I stupidly did the day Dale Evans died. AP called her ‘Queen of the Cowgirls,’ so of course that’s what we called her instead of ‘Queen of the West.’” We had it wrong, but management claimed there was no need for a correction. Why not? It wasn’t wrong enough?”
I could have gone on for days, but it was like yelling at a four-year-old for wetting his pants: even if you have a point, it doesn’t help the situation. “If we’re done here, I’d like to finish reading in and get on the desk.”
Floyd nodded, tried to smile and pointed to the box where my signature went to acknowledge that he and I had discussed my Performance Review, but, of course, not his performance. I actually felt sorry for him. Imagine, a grown man being told to waste time on such crap.
Later that evening, after all the TOMs had gone, Wally, my favorite person in the newsroom because he frequently was the only one on the rewrite bank who had any clue what to do with a complicated story, asked how the Performance Review had gone. Although I had a feeling he already knew about my “go fuck yourself” comment, I told him about it anyway. It was only then that I realized Floyd and I had never discussed my goals. What were my goals outside of trying to do a good job and finding good stories and interesting angles others may have overlooked?
Wally, who is at least ten years younger than I am, said Floyd had approached him earlier in the week about his Performance Review and the need to discuss his goals.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“World peace.”
I laughed. “World peace is your goal. I like that. I’ll remember it for next time.”
“Yeah, when he asks you, you can tell him, ‘World peace. Now go fuck yourself.’”
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(This is a chapter from “Everyone Needs an Editor (Some of Us More Than Others)” published by Sunstone Press.)
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TEN TIPS FOR YOUNG SKIERS
This kid from Indiana had never been on skis until he was 37, living in West Germany, and only an hour away from a small ski place, Spitzingsee. After many falls (some of them painful), I got hooked. There’s nothing like a good day on skis.
I’m looking forward to a trip to Vermont next month with my son Jack and his two daughters, Daniella and Cristiana. The girls have been skiing for a few years, and it’s time for them to know how to handle certain situations on and off the slopes.
1. You don’t have to talk to people on the lifts if you don’t want to. Even the friendliest person can find it tiresome to be asked by 40 strangers in one day, “Where are you from?” You can either ignore the question or say, “Kurdistan, Kurdistan. No English.”
2. When you order chicken noodle soup at lunch and the counter guy sneezes into his sleeve as he lifts the lid off the pot, tell him you’ve changed your mind and will take the chili, without onions, please.
3. When the visibility on a steep run in Vermont suddenly deteriorates to zero and you discover the only ski map you have on you is for a small mountain in Pennsylvania, don’t panic. Not immediately anyway. Forget about using your cellphone to find a map. There probably won’t be enough light to see whatever pops up on the screen. Your choices are (a) waiting for another skier to come along who knows the easiest way down, (b) prayer or (c) both.
4. If the counter guy sneezes into his sleeve near the chili pot, speak up right away and tell him you’ve changed your mind again and check out what’s available in the way of wrapped sandwiches.
5. Accept the fact that some skiers never open or close the safety bar on chair lifts. They wait for someone else to do it, and you are that someone.
6. Regardless of how spectacular the scenery is, there are those who will be constantly staring down at their cellphones or talking up a nonsensical storm on them, never bothering to enjoy the views. Rather than be upset, accept the fact that numbskulls are everywhere. If you can’t bite your tongue, then I suggest talking out loud and saying something along the lines of, “Resigned. He just up and resigned. No warning at all. The president resigned. I don’t believe it!”
7. If you drop a ski glove in a toilet, leave it. Don’t try to retrieve it. It’s not your fault that ski lodges insist you leave your ski poles outside when they could be so useful sometimes inside.
8. Drink a lot of water when you’re in the mountains. Should you forget this tip, remember there’s a lot of water in beer.
9. Snow boarders can be annoying. They make loud, scraping noises coming down a mountain, and you never really know how close behind you they are. To save yourself from temptation, always ski in a state where the NRA is weak and firearms on the slopes are illegal.
10. On a bitterly cold, windy day, you will ride up a lift with your face stinging and your extremities freezing and you will ask yourself, “Why in the world am I doing this?” Once off the lift and speeding down the mountain you will find your answer: it’s one hell of a lot of fun. There’s nothing like it.
10 a. After a couple of visits to a ski resort, you will know if the wise thing to do is to skip the chicken noodle soup, the chili and the sandwiches and bring your own lunch.
Enjoy yourselves. And anyone who tells you ski boots are supposed to hurt is full of it.
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The picture is from St. Anton, Austria.
