CMP: Confusion Central
Larry King (not that one) regularly regaled a reporter with email from “Confusion Central.” I have altered some details in order to maintain the humor without making it too easy to figure out who’s involved in these stories. These messages were often written in response to emails which have been lost. In most cases, the nature of the originating message can easily be deduced from the response.
Publication History: Private email circa 1989-1991 (via the Atex message system).
Report From Confusion Central
If you think of yourself as endlessly shoveling coal down a chute–i.e., copy onto the desk–I am the chute endlessly transporting coal. You assume the chute needs coal; I assume the coal must go somewhere. Beyond that, we cannot say what purpose we serve, where the cycle begins or ends. Where does the coal come from? Where does it go? Is it used for anything? Is it perhaps the same coal, sliding down the chute and back onto the pile from which you shovel, so that I merely serve as the means by which you can continue to enable me to serve as the means by which you continue?
I keep forgetting you have never worked in the Headquarters office, or Confusion Central as its inmates call it. No, there is no OED in the library. There is nothing in the library that might prove useful to a journalist preparing a story, a writer writing a story, or an editor searching desperately for a stray fact with which to leaven the fanciful prose of reporters whose idea of research is calling the same industry analyst they have consulted for the past three or four hundred stories.
There is, instead, a shelf of hardcover books of truly stupendous irrelevance not only to our work but to our personal interests. There is a dictionary of impressive size and slapdash definitions, published by a company whose usual line of work is surgical-implement catalogs. There is an apparently random collection of back issues of PubCo publications, containing whatever issues you are not attempting to find. There is a Xerox machine for copying pages from any of the above; it works about as often as a Soviet Ministry of Agriculture bureaucrat and about as well.
Also in the library are a few attendants perpetually occupied by obscure clerical chores that seem unrelated to any of the published materials. Their collective literacy level nudges close to that of a first-grade class in an elementary school in the South Bronx. Requests to them for specific materials are met with dull glowers that indicate not only ignorance of but hostility toward the concept of the printed page.
Personally, I regard correspondence such as this as part of the ongoing effort to sharpen my prose, which in an all-encompassing sort of way is exactly what PubCo is paying me to do.
Startups and The Law of Project Details
On other things: TheNew Magazine lurches towards liftoff with all the effortless grace we have grown accustomed to in startups where PubCo’s whimsical disregard for foresight and planning prevails. That is to say, it makes a gut-shot pterodactyl fighting bad crosswinds look like the Concorde ascending from Heathrow. As things now stand, we will get a final design, a working page grid, a style for art and graphics, and some idea of how many stories are on hand, all about the same day.
Matters are complicated by the usual tendency of all management to conceal whatever planning may have been done from each other and any subordinate who might be involved. It is entirely possible that all of the above decisions will have been made by publication day, and no one will have been told what they were, unless he has no reason to know. I think an aphorism is hiding here, something akin to Parkinson’s Law or the Peter Principle: Knowledge of the details of any project increases in direct ratio to a person’s lack of day-to-day involvement in that project.
Management’s goal often seems to a sublime state in which the only people who know everything about a given thing are those who have nothing to do with anything. And conversely, one in which the only people who know nothing about anything are those who are responsible for everything. While you fight your way through my thicket of pronouns, I am going to a meeting on the subject of TheNew Magazine, where we will distribute our ignorance equally.
The Role Of Art Directors
More color illustrations and the occasional photo are okay. It is a trend that will have to be carefully watched lest it get out of hand, but at the moment it is not a true threat. The real problem with elaborate illustration, particularly when it involves large-scale color photography is that it virtually requires that an art director and a photo editor be hired and that photographers be allowed into the editorial offices. Art directors do vast damage to a magazine’s intellectual coherence, not to mention its editors’ sanity. The only people who can hurt a magazine more are publishers and corporate management, and they usually are too busy pretending they have a reason for being allowed to live to actually do anything that affects the publication. Art directors come right into the office, most days, for an hour or two. Photo editors and photographers are merely an aesthetic nuisance and occasionally a sanitation problem.
The Death Of Facts
One of the senior, managerial-level editors here consistently spells “a lot” “alot.” He will argue vehemently and on the basis of absolutely no authority whatsoever that the phrase is one word.
But you touch upon a phenomenon that seems recent and leaves me truly puzzled. People no longer pay the slightest attention to actual knowledge. They seem not to regard learning–hard facts, ascertainable by reference to impeccable sources–as any more authoritative than wild-eyed opinion based on sheer nonsense. I don’t know why.
By the way, when I played backgammon in an organized fashion, a favorite saying at tournaments was: “Any four-year-old idiot could play this position. Quick, find a four-year-old idiot.” I don’t know why the idiot was specified as being four years old.
The Things Up With Which He Will Not Put
The Osgood piece that ended each sentence with a preposition showed up. It was a telling blow against that prohibition old-maid schoolteachers are so fond of. I wonder how many of them found anything in it to quarrel over. A tour de force like that is hard to argue with.
I wonder, though, how long it took him to work the whole thing out. A preposition is not generally a natural thing to end a sentence with. I suspect that is the underlying reason for that old taboo, arrant pedantry aside.
Incidentally, Osgood reports a different version of the Churchillian anecdote and Churchill’s retort from the one I’ve heard of. In my version, some pedant in an anonymous ministry wrote a memo concerning the promiscuous use of sentences with prepositions at the end and sent it out and about. Churchill got it, snorted, scrawled “This is the kind of nonsense up with which I will no longer put” on it, and sent it back.
The advice that Pittsburgh is a bad town to get something in your eye in but a good town to get something in your eye out reminds me of the old dictum that New York is a great town to get in trouble in but a hard town for those in trouble to get out of.
Actually, it’s not that old; I just made it up.
IT Knows How To Keep Its Secrets, But Why?
I am trying to find out about sending messages, but apparently the particulars are closely held secrets. The computer guardians seem to feel that if the information got into the wrong hands — by which they apparently mean anyone who might actually use it — hundreds of employees would immediately abandon all pretense of useful work and hurl themselves into a veritable orgy of inter-publication messaging, no doubt soon to be followed by an actual orgy as heretofore taboo connections are established and consummated, with all the usual breakdown in order and hierarchy attendant upon unbridled sensual activity.
The thinking is akin to that which once led the purchasing department to announce it would no longer procure Postit pads and distribute them freely, because employees were using them too much. In other words, if too many people show a marked tendency to make use of a product or service, don’t provide it.
Presumably, there is a corollary rule, to the effect that products or services which no one can find a use for should be made widely available. The latter rule may account for the proliferation of plastic vertical files in our offices, which at one time were stacked so high and had consequently become so unstable as to constitute a danger to the unwary pedestrian.
Now that I think about it, some version of the latter rule might also explain the relentless succession of company picnics, as no evident benefit attaches to the practice of forcing hundreds of people who can barely abide one another’s presence on their best day to commingle and consume bad food ineptly prepared, standing up, outside.
A Bit Of Parody
From “The Boss: How OldMag’s Editor-in-Chief Reinvented an Industry–and made his publication America’s Foremost Trade Newsmagazine”
Schindler worked to make OldMag’s PC operations a model for visitors–a “PC Temple,” as one Atex diehard called it with a sneer. In an attempt to teach OM staffers how to operate PCs, Schindler offered seminars and telephone help. But The Boss didn’t care much about that, telling Schindler that the Microsoft package Windows was “the biggest bunch of junk ever. There’s no MIS angle to it.” Schindler would patiently explain why people used the environment and what OldMag could learn from it. But somehow Schindler’s quiet style didn’t put him in the Smart Guy league as far as The Boss was concerned, and he could never quite manage to crack the inner circle of an editor-in-chief whose magazine seemed to run perfectly well with but a single PC on the premises.
(with apologies to p. 394 of Gates by Manes and Andrews)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Computer Magazine: Top Ten Friday Afternoon Activities (1991)
This one came from a field person who got a call from headquarters at 5:20 on a Friday afternoon. It has been edited slightly to disguise the company about which it was written.
Publication History: Broadcast e-mail, April 5, 1991
Sounds like Friday afternoons are slow. It got me thinking, and so I offer you now…
Top Ten Friday Afternoon Activities
* Call the bureaus at 5:20 and see who’s still at work.
* Make crank calls to the company president’s office.
* Form debate teams and tackle the thorny problem of “Headshots: File by Name or Company?”
* Lambada!
* Co-ed skins vs. shirts Nerf basketball.
* Listen to live recording of “Free Bird.”
* Browse through the copy editors’ magazine collection.
* Clean beige substances off cafeteria floors.
* Mail-order expensive gifts with editor’s credit card number.
* Change all the hallway office signs.
Paul E. Schindler Jr.
