Telecommuting and Writing

Or, What Happened To My Blog?

Yesterday I finished up my two-week contract telecommuting for PhoneMonkey. It's hard to believe two weeks have passed--they went by in a blur, and the whole thing seems to have taken just a second. I know that my blog pretty much ground to a halt during those weeks. I could easily and justifiably blame that on working from home, the setup where after a long day in my small studio tik-takking away at the desktop PC, the last thing I want to do is STAY in that studio and start tik-takking at something else. I could also point the finger at my dead laptop, which otherwise would have been happily blogging the evenings away with me down at Zoka's, Urban Coffee Lounge, Kahili, or other great Eastside coffeehouses.

I COULD say that...but I think the real reason is something else. Something to do with working again, specifically with telecommuting again.

I haven't always telecommuted for PhoneMonkey. In fact my history with that company is a long, tangled one; I realized the other day that this contract is the FIFTH time PhoneMonkey has taken me on.

The history goes like this: I was first hired circa 1995, in Tucson, then laid off in 1997. Just before the layoffs I'd been doing some work for their new branch in Cambridge, and lo and behold the Cambridge branch hired me. So I was "laid on" again, keeping seniority and benefits etc., and in fact the company paid to relocate Sara and me to Boston. (And Sara's horse, but don't tell them that.) I was then a PhoneMonkey employee in Cambridge from 1997 to 1999, at which point I quit. Why? To move to Seattle! The grand adventure, I was cutting all ties. But not so fast, said PhoneMonkey. They proposed that I stay on staff as a telecommuter from Seattle. Adventure or not, that was an offer I couldn't refuse. So I "unquit," moved to Seattle, and took up the telecommuting stint, which lasted from 2000 to 2008, when they laid me off. (The fourth instance was two months ago, when Sharon and Susan couldn't get the old online Help to compile and called me up in desperation to troubleshoot. I solved the problem and they paid me for 4 hours work. That greased the wheels for this latest contract.)

I need a mnemonic or something for my PhoneMonkey history, like for the wives of Henry VIII: "Hired, laid off, laid on, quit, unquit, laid off, contract, contract." As long as it ends with "survived" I'll be happy...

But back to the telecommuting. During my years working from home I was the envy of everyone I knew, and I won't deny that the situation had its perqs. But it also drove me crazy in a way. Sitting at home, all day, every day, for nine years had the effect of coccooning me in introverted comfort; it took a toll on my sociability, my energy, and above all my writing. I created many catalysts to get myself out of the house, meet people, and do things; I couldn't create a single catalyst to write. It's funny that I wrote my whole first novel back when I was commuting to offices, but here, with theoretically much more "free time" at my disposal, I couldn't write a thing. Writers will I think understand that.

Writing is such a solitary, introverted activity. When one's workday is solitary and introverted, one can't then "play" in the same solitary cell. Oddly, the best thing for a writer, at least for me, is a life that otherwise surrounds me with loud people and changing scenes.

So about this two-week blur, back at PhoneMonkey, back telecommuting again. I liked the work, I liked the people, I put in 10-hour days because I wanted to get as much done as possible, and I enjoyed doing it. But in many ways I felt the same telecommuting coccoon wrap around me. Coming out the end of it, I look back and see that in those two weeks I hardly WROTE a thing. The blog has been the measure.

Food for thought.

Points North

So, OK, a full week after going back to work, I've finally changed the name of my blog. "Unemployed in Seattle" is no more (at least for the moment); in its place we have "Points North."

Why "Points North?" Well, first of all, I just like the way it sounds. But also because I think it captures what will be the blog's new focus.

See, I originally intended this blog to be a chronicle of jobhunting in the neo-Depression era; I thought it was a great idea for a blog; and when I got so peremptorily re-hired it was kind of a staggering blow. Yes, I'll take the money, and thank you very much, eating is a wonderful thing--but what on Earth should I write about now? True, the other crisis in my life, Sara's mom's cancer, is still ongoing, but I can't very well name the blog after THAT, and really, I don't want this space to become just a diary of my personal life. Over this last week re-employment has sunk in: my days have become normalized around the eight or ten hour bloc of hypnotic work; I don't have much energy left over afterwards. From a person full of panic and energy I've suddenly reverted to being a boring drone. What would the diary of such a person even be about? What, in such a life, is WORTH writing about?

Over the last week I toyed with alternate focuses for the blog, like making it political, or devoting it to reviews of Seattle cultural events (not that I've had time to go to any)...

But here's the thing: I'm not done. This success--getting rehired at another tech writing job--is not the be-all and end-all of my ambition. I am, first and foremost, an aspiring writer with a novel in progress, and despite derailing blows of every kind, that have shunted it aside these last two or three months, I remain defiantly on track with my goal of finishing it by the end of the year. Then, as regards my "career," I still intend to assault the fortress of freelance writing. I don't know how it's done, but I want to prove to myself that I'm capable of getting a byline for even one actual, literate article in a subject I enjoy. Finally, and this ties in with the above, Sara and I both want a life with more travel in it.

My life is still a crazy place, dominated by looming death, shaky finances, and emergency patches of every kind to keep it afloat. But in all respects my compass is still pointed North. I want to somehow get, in the face of all odds, from Here to There. And that's what this blog is going to be about.

Interlude - Last Sunday

Despite being already hired (twice), I went down to my scheduled interview at the bookstore. I couldn't help myself.

Half Magic is a chain of used bookstores -- and if there's anything better than a bookstore, it's a used bookstore. The local one for me is in the faceless mega-franchise sprawl of Redmond, WA, a world of Cost Plus, Red Robin, Claim Jumper (and yes, Borders) in their sea of parkinglots. Half Magic, though, is off in a forgotten little corner of town, where you park on uneven dirt by a wire fence near the railroad tracks. You open the door and there's the homey musty used-bookstore space, with creaky carpeted floors ramping gently from room to room at slightly different heights, poetry and travel sections big and central, the inviting display of old LPs in their original covers pulling you in. Tall slouched guys with interesting beards stand behind the counter, and soft frizzy-haired girls in aprons and nametags wander the aisles...

I followed a steeper sort of ramp downstairs for the interview, in a tiny windowless niche office with books and papers everywhere amid wall posters and humming computers. The manager was named Holly and was in her late twenties, a thin, intense, friendly girl with long brunette hair and heavy rectangular glasses--sort of the Laura Veirs look. We sat in tiny chairs almost side by side; I told her I was already employed, alas, but might be available for occasional weekend work; she needed someone who could do Mondays, alas; we wound up having a long fun conversation about our lives and histories. Then I browsed a little and headed home, as I knew I would.

Ah, to work in a bookstore again. She warned me that the job entailed lifting boxes and cleaning bathrooms; I tried not to show how much my computer-chair body rejoiced at the words. It paid $9.00 an hour: for a moment that sounded like a lot.

Elderly Parents on the Other Coast (Part 1)

I'm employed again as of today--back with PhoneMonkey communications, the company I was with for 14 years. I'm back in the same setup, working from home, and even on the same desktop PC, that still has all my old work folders, waiting where I left them. I've added a new folder to the list of projects and I'm back to work on the same tech manuals I remember well, that in fact I helped write. I have the shortest learning curve of any tech writer they could possibly have hired; maybe I should have charged more! But it's nice to be working from home again, to shuck off the awful commute, and I'm sorry that it's to be only a 2-week hiatus before I begin commuting once again, Woodinville to Ballard.

So the blog's title is now formally obsolete, but as I struggle to come up with a new one I can finally turn my attention to the other earthquake dominating our life in Seattle, which has received scant mention so far: the fate of our elderly parents on the East Coast.

This is obviously a more dicey subject to write a blog entry about, given that my readers are likely to be some of the very people involved, and it's a test of my ability to move this kind of writing from my private journal into public. Of course it's been a severe emotional rollercoaster ride for Sara and me, combined with krazy Tilt-a-Whirl and Bumper Car games between Sara and the rest of her family, a noisy amusement park that's been open nonstop in our house for three months, and it goes without saying that most of these domestic moments, like photos taken by rollercoaster riders themselves, are unpublishable. But having thrown out the primary, subjective reality, which would have filled pages of the private journal, the blog entry about dying parents may, I think, continue, inasmuch as a long-lens view of Coney island can communicate more of the shared experience (and it IS a shared experience), and even photos from far out in the cold Atlantic, where the shouts and bells of the island appear in silence as a string of lights along the far edge of darkness, twinkling at the last lip of the curved world, are among the most evocative.

Sara's mother is dying of cancer of the gallbladder. Her entire case has been mismanaged by what passes for the health care industry in this country. What's more, since she's on the East Coast and we're here in Seattle and basically broke, there's been little we can do except follow the events by phone, trying to put doctors in touch with social workers and hospitals in touch with hospices, struggling to arrange visiting care, researching Medicaid paperwork, etc. Sara's sister, who's also on the East Coast, has been forced to bear the brunt of the hands-on care, a situation designed to cause familial imbalances just when harmony should most reign. Sara did make a trip East for a week, but right now it's time for another and we don't know if we can afford it, given that we're soon to make yet another for the funeral. Being far from a dying parent in a capitalist world is a special kind of nervous, frustrating, heartbreaking ordeal.

The hardest part, though, has nothing to do with money. It's the illusion that, since we're so far away, we don't care as much. Nothing could be further from the truth. Losing a parent is losing a parent; that pain knows no distance; in fact it's made worse by distance. But an aura descends on us out here in Seattle, as if we bask in sunshine while they slog through blizzards, as if our grief and frustration were somehow a liesurely dismissiveness. Maybe the illusion comes from back there, maybe we cast it on ourselves; either way it turns to guilt, false as everyone knows it is...

The medical mismanagement goes like this. In December Sara's mother went into the hospital in Vermont for a bile blockage, whereupon they found the cancer at such an advanced stage that after sewing her back up they were afraid to touch her. She was very close to a puncture event that would be swiftly fatal; they told us she had precious little time left, and recommended that she go straight into a rehab or hospice situation. For the moment, however, she was still fully mobile and mentally alert--which meant that she fell through the cracks. Rehab wouldn't take her because she was in such immediate danger, and hospice wouldn't take her because she wasn't obviously sick. After a few days in the hospital, the hospital suddenly changed its tune and decided that she was perfectly safe and they were releasing her home. The revised verdict had nothing to do, of course, with their running expenses...

So Sara flew East, picked her up in a snowstorm on Christmas Day, and took her home to her third-floor walkup in small-town Vermont. She spent a week caring for her there, all the while scrambling to arrange a next venue. We looked into assisted living situations both here in the Seattle area and in New York (where Sara's sister lives), but filing the requisite Medicaid paperwork took forever, and Sara had to leave her mother at home when she flew back on New Year's Eve.

We shall pass over the blurred photograph representing the unseemly family tug-of-war over which State should get her; during this time we arranged visiting nurses, while the Vermont neighbors proved heroic in their kindness and attentiveness, and Sara's sister travelled up from New York virtually every weekend. Still, the longer their mother lay in that third-floor walkup in the snowbound New England winter, the more untenable the situation got. During the blizzards of '10 we had only one visiting nurse who actually made her visits...

Finally arrangements were made to bring her to a hospice care place in New York. Then--the hospice lost the paperwork. The arrangements had to be made all over again, and more weeks slid by. Sara's sister moved up there for a week and assumed caring duties. The time where she could be safely driven to NY (if there ever had been one) was long past, and yet we couldn't afford anything other than just putting her in the car and having Sara's sister drive her. Sara and I tried extensively to hire a nurse or even a skilled caregiver to accompany them, to no avail. At the 11th hour, a friend of Sara's sister donated, as mentioned, the funds to pay for ambulance transport, and three days ago she arrived safely at the NY hospice.

However, the Medicaid paperwork STILL hasn't gone through. She's been accepted on a basis called "Medicaid pending," which means basically that the State can shaft us for the bill.

And now Sara and I are trying to scrape together the funds for another trip East, so that Sara at least can see her mom one last time...only to find that airline prices have skyrocketed.

Dog With Two Bones

Welcome back! When we last left our hero, he was in the discomfiting position of having said yes to two overlapping employment options. What happens next gets even wilder. But first let us describe the contestants (using fictional names of course):

First: PhoneMonkey Communications, an old favorite, the company I belonged to for 14 years ending in October of 2008. They're a nimble, friendly little telecommunications software outfit with the knack of shifting habitat and popping up in unexpected States; originally encountered in Tucson during my years there in the '90s, they've since spread and can now be found in Massachusetts, California, Florida, and (coming full circle) Phoenix. When I moved to Seattle in 2000, PhoneMonkey experimented with letting me continue full-time as a telecommuter; the arrangement lasted nine years. (Probably they wanted to claim Washington as another habitat.) Yes, they laid me off in '08, but I can't complain, since in '99 they let me take unpaid leave to finish my novel.

Alas, the novel didn't sell. Not PhoneMonkey's fault.

Second: a local manufacturing company here in Seattle which I'll call Ballard Pterodactyl. They occupy a rambling series of factory floor spaces and dusty fluorescent office niches, upstairs and downstairs along half a block of an old blue-collar street of which they seem the original occupants. Defying the neighborhood gentrification, they persist in their wooden building that dates from the '40s, and inside one can find preserved a vanished Seattle: dim hallways that remind me of the back passages at Pike Place Market, narrow stairways like the ones aboard Puget Sound ferries. Nevertheless, they do a global business with clients in Europe and assemblers in China.

We return to our story. On my cellphone, in the car, I'd said yes to my ex-manager at PhoneMonkey to return for a four-week contract, telecommuting as before, starting on Monday. The car was pulled over to the curb mere yards from the Ballard Pterodactyl building, where I had an interview at 3:00 (and finalizing the PhoneMonkey details with my ex-manager ran the clock to 2:59). I dashed across the street in my jacket and nice shoes, and interviewed from a position of such undesperation that I demanded $5/hr more than I'd be getting from PhoneMonkey--and they agreed to it. The contract would also be for much longer, maybe most of a year. I tend to suck at interviews, but to my vast surprise they seemed all but ready to hand me the job on my way out the door. We agreed on a start date of April 1, and they promised to contact me with their decision soon.

This much you already know.

Now here's the twist: I didn't tell Ballard Pterodactyl that I'd just accepted a contract with PhoneMonkey. (Why spoil a perfectly good interview? They still might not even offer me the job.) HOWEVER, at the interview I dutifully handed over my page of references--on which was listed PhoneMonkey! Indeed, I'd just handed Ballard Pterodactyl the number of the very same ex-manager with whom I'd just finalized the contract.

This literally didn't occur to me all day. I came home in a tizzy of double success, thinking that even IF Ballard Pterodactyl offered me the job it didn't start till April 1, so I MIGHT be able to squeeze both contracts in...and I worried about the East Coast trip...and I had dinner and went to bed...and then in the middle of the night I came bolt awake. Ballard Pterodactyl is going to call my PhoneMonkey manager, I thought, and they're going to LEARN that I've already been hired, and I won't get the offer. What's more, my manager's going to LEARN that I committed to an April 1 contract elsewhere, and I might LOSE the contract I already have.

I've recently been reminded of the parable of the dog with two bones (thanks to the TV show Farscape, which Sara and I have been revisiting on DVD). A dog with a bone looks in the water and sees another dog with another bone. Wanting both bones, he opens his mouth to seize the second one, and plop, the first one falls in and disappears, leaving him, in the words of Ben Browder, looking at himself, with nothing. (5:45 here)

Oops.

So I got up at 4:30 in the morning and sent an email to my guy at Ballard Pterodactyl, saying "You should I know I've been offered a job elsewhere (at PhoneMonkey, in fact, one of my references, ha ha, how ironic!). Of course I'd prefer to work for YOU, but you'll have to let me know soon so I can turn the other company down."

That morning, still in a cold sweat, I tried to reach my ex-manager at PhoneMonkey. I called her home office (she usually telecommutes) and reached her husband, who said, "Oh YOU'RE Matt! Um...you should get in touch with her right away...there's...well, I shouldn't be the one to...you just should contact her real soon."

My cold sweat now positively arctic, I tried every number I had for her, to no avail. Sent her an email--sat there miserably waiting for her call--hours went by--and of course she called just as there was a knock on the front door from some salesman. Thankfully Sara was there to handle that; alive to the situation and her own financial peril, she chased him off with the polite equivalent of a howitzer.

And--my manager wasn't mad! She wasn't canceling the contract, she hadn't talked to Ballard Pterodactyl yet, she still wanted my services. Apparently her clueless husband got me mixed up with some other PhoneMonkey employee. What's more, she had a VOICEMAIL from Ballard Pterodactyl, in which THEY admitted to HER that they were offering me the contract.

So that's how I officially learned that I had two jobs. With reluctance I told my ex-manager (whom I like a lot) that I would have to take the more financially-beneficial offer, and we agreed that my PhoneMonkey contract would be reduced from four weeks to two. She was disappointed too, as they really need another tech writer for the four weeks--and suddenly we both realized we were in a unique situation. She could HAVE my full contract...by giving me a bad reference when she called Ballard Pterodactyl back!

Ulp. There was a long moment of silence on the phone. Then we both laughed. "As if I would do that," she said. "I owe you a steak dinner!" I cried.

Good, friendly PhoneMonkey!

A short while after hanging up with her, Ballard Pterodactyl called and made me the official offer. And so, ladies and gentlemen, SOMEHOW, after just one week of unemployment, I have two contracts lined up, the first one starting Monday, WITH a week off between them where the East Coast trip can theoretically fall. I am--the dog with two bones.

What a Day

Wow, what a day. I don't think I've ever had a day quite like this in my life.

First of all, the most important matter: today was a big and risky day for Sara's ailing mother back East. This morning she was transported from her home in Vermont to a hospice care center in Riverdale, NY. The journey, in her extremely delicate condition, had us biting our nails and waiting by the phone, until the news finally came through that she'd arrived safe and sound. As of tonight she's ensconced in her room, comfortable, and finally, for the first time, under constant professional care. Sara and I could let out a huge breath that we'd been holding all week. It wasn't until two days ago that an ambulance was arranged for the transport (thanks to a friend's amazing philanthropy); for a while it looked like Sara's sister would have to drive her in her own car. At some point I intend to describe the absolute dysfunction of the health care industry that has surrounded my mother-in-law's decline, an all-too-timely subject. But for now we can breathe a little easier, especially Sara's sister, who's put her job and life on hold for the last week to be in hard-working attendance 24 hours a day in Vermont.

This alone would have made for a big day. But it also just might be the day on which my unemployment ended--from three directions at once!

All right, this is almost embarrassing to relate. I mentioned, I think, that my motto for jobhunting this time around was "try everything quick." In that spirit I had launched three different harpoons in three different directions, with varying degrees of desperation. (1) The first day after my layoff, I actually got in the car, drove down to the local bookstore, and filled out an application. At the time, the idea of slouching at my computer sending endless resumes into the ether seemed the picture of despair; I wanted to pound the physical pavement, to have at least one real human being know that I was looking for a job. I used to work at bookstores in my twenties and loved it. (2) I slouched at my computer and sent resumes into the ether. Can't skip that step, and it's actually required for collecting unemployment. (3) I hit up contacts, namely my old company that laid me off in 2008; I'm still friends with my ex-coworker and manager there.

So, today, first, this morning the bookstore called and invited me for an interview on Sunday. Second, I went into Seattle to interview with a company that had called me the day before, having actually been hooked by one of those vaporous resumes. (I took the call incongruously at a horse farm, where I was accompanying Sara on her equine massage rounds.) Third, ON THE DRIVE TO THAT INTERVIEW, my cellphone rang and it was the manager from my old company, offering me a telecommuting contract job.

I proceeded to the interview anyway, and we all seemed to hit it off great. They're eager to make a decision soon and I might hear back from them as early as tomorrow. Now, to both places I explained (with great chagrin) that I'm due to make an emergency East Coast trip at any moment, possibly for a week or more, assuming that at least one of them would say, "Ooh. Sorry. See ya." But lo and behold, both places accepted the situation without blinking an eye.

So tonight I have a terrible dilemma, in that I've said yes to both parties! The Seattle place hasn't actually made me an offer yet, so I might be safe...but even if they do, it might still work out...I told them I couldn't start until April 1, and I might be able to complete the other contract before then...IF I don't go to the East Coast...

But at this point I've stopped blogging and am just cogitating aloud. It's after midnight, what do you want? My head is still reeling, and Sara and I spent all evening dizzily discussing the day's events and their ramifications, until we had to throw our budget overboard and go out for Thai food. Now I'm dizzy and stuffed. I also feel like I'm suffering from an embarrassment of riches, to the point where I probably shouldn't even be posting this in public under the titular format I've chosen, which I expected to remain in force for a decently extended and hopefully populist interval. Not least among my whirling thoughts is worry for what's going to happen to my blog, which is fair to being blown off course, Jupiter II-like, mere minutes into its track for the stars. But we take whatever comes our way...

...and I think I'm stil going to interview at the bookstore on Sunday!

Blogger issues

Sara's told me that she's unable to post comments on my blog. I see some of you are able to do it, but is anyone else having trouble commenting? At this stage I think most of you out there know me, so if you run into problems email me, or contact me on facebook, and I'll try to resolve the issue.

I'm brand new to Blogger, so I'm still getting used to it. You might notice I've tweaked the font to a sans serif; I think it looks better. One thing I DON'T like is, when I post, it reduces my "two spaces after a period" to one. Ms. Hutchinson, my college English teacher, would be enraged.

An Editors Meeting

I mentioned that I went to a meeting at Hugo House, back on Monday evening. This was a gathering of a local guild of freelance editors, that I was alerted to by my friend Nina, a member. See, with this layoff has come the desire to change my status a little bit, and explore the world of freelance work, both writing and editing. In part this is due to my panicky jobhunting motto of "try everything quick." Last time I was laid off, it took me four months of sending out resumes and interviewing in my field, the old-fashioned way, before I landed another job. But mostly it's because I WANT to try freelance writing. It's the same urge that has made me start this blog: something about this layoff has made me turn a corner, and suddenly I want to get my REAL WRITING out into public. Somewhere out there are people who make money writing articles about culture and travel and interesting things. I know I can do that.

But freelance writing is also a very scary proposition. And, for an aspiring novelist, it has a bit of a feeling of taking my virginity down to the street corner. In my research I've become aware of a vast, undiscriminating hunger for "content" out there, a kinky shadow-world where "PLR packages" are bought and sold to provide anonymous websites with bite-sized info-chunks on trending hot-topix. Is that the life of a freelance writer? Do I really want to take my talent...there? Do I have to...wear those clothes?

Thus Monday evening found me walking up the familiar wooden porch steps of Hugo House for a meeting of freelance editors. Freelance EDITING, now, that strikes me as a good, safe end of the pool to start with. I can copy-edit with the best of them, and it's somehow more respectable, an activity I can do to my utmost without removing my spiritual bow-tie, so to speak.

Ah, Hugo House. Living in Woodinville I love any excuse to come back into the city, and especially to this weird and venerable Seattle institution. For those who don't know, Hugo House is a self-described "center for the literary arts," a kind of permanent creative writing workshop in a big, creaky, grey-shingled, gabled building on Capitol Hill. It's located on a tiny street with a sports field on one side, a college on another, and a strip of cheap bars on a third--and if there's a better location for a creative writing nexus, I can't envision it. I've taken a few of their writing classes over the years: some have been mind-blowing, others have simply blown, but they've all been friendly and well-attended. Hugo House has its fans and its detractors in Seattle, and the divide basically boils down to this: sometimes, the best thing for an unpublished writer is to be immersed in a welcoming fraternity of like-minded souls; other times, it's the worst thing.

I had no idea, however, that the world had so many freelance editors. I arrived early, due to the demise of my laptop at Tully's, and tried to keep count as the room filled up. By the time it climbed over 30 and they started making a ring of folding chairs around the big table, and standees began peering in from the doorway, I gave up. By far the majority of the editors were women, mostly in their 40s and 50s, wearing sweaters and nice scarves, eyeglasses, and sporting shoulder-length hair in beautiful textures and colors. The few other men, who all arrived late and were relegated to the periphery, were either bearded and silent, or nerdy and chatterboxy.

The topic was Marketing Oneself, which explained the attendance, and I realized this was yet another incoming wave from the economic tsunami. The close, overcrowded room, and the preternatural intensity of focus on the presenters' ideas for generating business, didn't exactly fill me with confidence about the secure life of a freelance editor in today's marketplace. But I diligently took notes, and learned a few things about using LinkedIn and the ethics of posting before-and-after editing samples of clients' work on your website.

In the end, though, the piece of advice they stressed most was simply to "get yourself out there": promote oneself persistently and unabashedly. They joked about how this point needed stressing because editors as a group tended to be shy and introverted, and I realized, heading back down the porch steps into the cool night, that it had been a typical Hugo House class after all.

The Layoff

For the moment (literally, the moment) things with Sara's mother in Vermont are stable. She's at her home, attended by Sara's sister and regular visiting nurses. We're trying to gauge the best time to fly East; right now there'd be nowhere for us to stay, but the phone could ring at any point and we could be off. That story too has its miasma of chaos, but this morning I can afford to put it on hold for a minute and write about the layoff.

"Fight for my job/Hate it anyway," sings Anne McCue. I've been laid off from companies before--in fact it happened to me as recently as 2008 (though I'd held THAT job for 14 years)--and it always carries the mingled taste of liberation and panic. This last company, which I will fictionally call C3PO Inc., for its tendency to fall apart and propensity for clueless speech and behavior, was, let's say it bluntly, a terrible place to work. Technical writers are always to a certain extent exiles in a foreign land, hired to carry the English language into the domain of technogeekery, but nowhere have I felt that torch sputter lower in the feeble oxygen at the back of the cave than at C3PO. This company had no idea how to use me. Well, heck, they barely knew how to use their assemblers and engineers, as the assemblers and engineers told me themselves. (I tend to get along with technogeeks, hence my career as a technical writer, and with underpaid workers, hence my socialist outlook.) Having a writer on staff was about as comprehensible to them as having a circus rider.

It was a small company, owned by the typical genius Guy Who Knows Everything, grown to the typical stage where he can no longer manage everything himself but doesn't know it. I could go on and indulge in character sketches...but the fiction might rub riskily thin. And I guess I'm trying to avoid talking about The Layoff.

They let me put in a ferocious last month in the rush period, where I worked two weekends (all while Sara's mother is dying in Vermont), down to the final day, where I worked intensely and got the big project finished. Just before 6:00, when I normally leave, came the summons from my boss, the closed door in her office, she and another company higher-up in attendance. The sad, serious faces. "We're having layoffs...and we have to let you go." "I need your key-card." "I'll see if I can find a cardboard box for your personal things, and then I'll escort you out."

I'd had a million hints. I'd even started sending out resumes a few months before. But I swear it hit me like a car doing 70 coming out of a footpath in the woods. I stood in a daze; I could barely speak; I had no idea how I was going to go home and tell Sara, in the final crisis of her mom. I did mention that situation to the bosses, and I was at least able to enjoy seeing the sick guilt on the higher-up's face (my own boss KNEW of the situation, damn her). Then came the last walk out the front door, which I'd often dreamed of, and the strangeness of driving that familiar hated commute for the last time.

"Fight for my job/Hate it anyway..."

The scene at home I won't describe, except to say that Sara is fabulous.

Walking around town after being laid off, the last few days, I'm reminded of Solzhenitsyn's description of arrest. You're in your usual clothes, walking down your usual street, but suddenly you no longer belong to that world. You're as if in a different dimension. You can go to the grocery store, and spend money like everyone else...but theirs is renewable and yours isn't. The other shoppers don't see the difference--yet--so you can fool them, but eventually the divide will become known. You're not in their world. And even as you stand among them, you're embarked, to continue the Solzhenitsyn theme, on a dark train into the fathomless gulag of the unemployed, with no advance knowledge of your final destination, only a sense of remoteness and cold.

(My socialist outlook, by the way, holds not the slightest brief for Stalin or his Ism. Important to say that).

So the object here is to somehow be plucked from the crowd boarding the train--to be hired at a new job quick--to have someone run from the station crying, "Wait! There's been a mistake with that one." So I'm feverishly jobhunting, and Sara probably would be too, except--at any moment we'll have be leaving for maybe two weeks on the East Coast.

Timing?

Bad Omen

I meant to write that first post even sooner after being laid off. On Monday I was in Capitol Hill two hours early for a meeting at Hugo House, and I took my laptop to the little Tully's with the wooden door on Broadway there. Got a coffee, sat down at the table, booted up the laptop--and it immediately crashed. I tried rebooting two or three more times--same result. Now pressing the power button doesn't bring anything up on the screen at all. My laptop is dead.

Timing? Perhaps this was the protest of my handwritten journal, sitting in another pocket of the same pack, against it's high-tech usurper...or perhaps the first pebble of the infrastructure avalanche that begins now, with the layoff. Things that go, and can't be replaced. I'm going to look into the cost of getting it repaired, but for now I'll be writing blog posts on my desk PC at home.

Why a Blog

So! Greetings, and thanks for checking in. You've arrived at a particularly exciting part of the program, if you're into cataclysmic drama; in fact we run a sort of danger here in that the sheer LEVEL of ridiculous cataclysm in my life might seem, by reasonable dramatic standards, overdone—-a trifle purple, a little too deus ex machina (or is that diablo ex machina?), in short, not believable.

But let's state the case. Three months ago, my wife's mother was diagnosed with incurable cancer of the gall bladder. Now, in March, she's reaching her final days back in Vermont. Sara's already spent a week East caring for her, and we've been in the process of planning the next trip. Then, two weeks ago, my elderly father in New York had a medical breakdown (accompanied by some extreme side effects which I may go into later), and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where he spent a week in the crisis ward. And just last Friday, I was laid off from my job.

Today I'm starting a blog.

So! Meet our main character, me, Matt Waller, until recently a fairly prosperous technical writer, aspiring novelist, happily married, a Seattleite temporarily living in the suburb of Woodinville Washington. Now: out of work, with almost no savings, thrown into the spiked pit of the jobhunting arena while simultaneously STILL preparing to fly East for his mother-in-law's funeral and father's assistance.

Why am I writing this blog? Several contradictory reasons. I have an urge to chronicle the process of jobhunting amid the ruins of our crashing and burning economy, and my attempts to strike out on my own as a freelance writer and editor. Along the latter lines, since I have no existing portfolio of freelance writings, I figure a blog might be the next best thing, especially if travel is on the immediate horizon. Expect to see some "travel writing" posts on the places we visit and the experiences we have in New York, Vermont, and elsewhere.

But mainly I'm writing this because I'm a writer, and in the collapse of everything that used to pass for "my life," the only thing that actually makes me feel better—-is writing. I've kept a private journal for many years, but something about the current straits demands more: it's time I tipped that engine out of the housing and put the propeller in the water. I'm going public—-watch out world—-and any and all are welcome aboard for the ride.