From the archives
April 2019 was the point at which I’d originally planned to retire, but as longtime readers of this forum may recall, BDS management started being mean to me early in the decade, and by late 2016 I correctly concluded that if I ran up a flag of truce and promised to bail in another year, management would cease heaping unwanted vegetables on my plate. It worked, although I was still obliged to consume the greens previously added to the menu.
Among these was the weekly BDS Bulletin, the editorship of which I inherited when the previous incumbent quit in a fit of rage on half an hour’s notice, after almost a quarter-century with the firm, following a really bad meeting (we’ve kept in touch. She avers that she’s never regretted it for a moment).
The Bulletin was, with all due respect to my old comrade, dull as ditchwater. This was largely dictated by its content, consisting largely of MS Word attachments, marching orders to the local workforce (so that management could say, when someone was to be disciplined or fired, “Well, it’s right here in that week’s Bulletin”), but the Bulletin itself was also a Word product, and visually unappealing, so the first thing I did was to tart it up: I moved the formatting environment to InDesign, created a front-page header against a photo background of a new piece of Northern California scenery each week, and exported the now-handsome product to PDF.
The change was well-received. It was my responsibility to get the thing out each week via email over over the outfit’s extraordinarily creaky LAN, and my custom was to include in each “covering” email a brief summary of the contents. During the last few months of my alleged career, feeling increasingly bulletproof—“What are you going to do, fire me? That’s going to tie you up in paperwork for weeks. You sure you want to expend that kind of time?”—my cover emails became ever more self-indulgent. I was constrained as to the actual Bulletin content, because nothing could go out until a rather timid middle manager had signed off on it, but the emails were, ah, unredacted (it seems never to have occurred to them to have the timid middle manager, and not resentful insubordinate me, handle the distribution. There’s a reason I called them “BrainDead Systems”).
Because part of my charter involved institutional history, I had a lot of accumulated material lying around the office, and toward the end I began to employ some of this as editorial filler. Sorting through old work files during the past week, I came across this prefatory email from summer 2017:
Among these was the weekly BDS Bulletin, the editorship of which I inherited when the previous incumbent quit in a fit of rage on half an hour’s notice, after almost a quarter-century with the firm, following a really bad meeting (we’ve kept in touch. She avers that she’s never regretted it for a moment).
The Bulletin was, with all due respect to my old comrade, dull as ditchwater. This was largely dictated by its content, consisting largely of MS Word attachments, marching orders to the local workforce (so that management could say, when someone was to be disciplined or fired, “Well, it’s right here in that week’s Bulletin”), but the Bulletin itself was also a Word product, and visually unappealing, so the first thing I did was to tart it up: I moved the formatting environment to InDesign, created a front-page header against a photo background of a new piece of Northern California scenery each week, and exported the now-handsome product to PDF.
The change was well-received. It was my responsibility to get the thing out each week via email over over the outfit’s extraordinarily creaky LAN, and my custom was to include in each “covering” email a brief summary of the contents. During the last few months of my alleged career, feeling increasingly bulletproof—“What are you going to do, fire me? That’s going to tie you up in paperwork for weeks. You sure you want to expend that kind of time?”—my cover emails became ever more self-indulgent. I was constrained as to the actual Bulletin content, because nothing could go out until a rather timid middle manager had signed off on it, but the emails were, ah, unredacted (it seems never to have occurred to them to have the timid middle manager, and not resentful insubordinate me, handle the distribution. There’s a reason I called them “BrainDead Systems”).
Because part of my charter involved institutional history, I had a lot of accumulated material lying around the office, and toward the end I began to employ some of this as editorial filler. Sorting through old work files during the past week, I came across this prefatory email from summer 2017:
The dust lies thick and undisturbed beneath the transom here at the Bulletin as we descend into another spell of the summer doldrums, so it is well that we have some filler queued up. There were three more adulatory emails received here after last week’s first “Flatline History Minute”—we thought at first there were four, but on a closer reading the last one turned out to have been a restraining order—and Friday morning a crowd of employees burst into the office, hoisted Soapy the staff historian onto their shoulders and, with many a lusty huzzah, bore him out the front door and dropped him on the sidewalk, where he was showered with affectionate cuffs and blows. Deeply moved and only slightly bruised, Soapy, a notably shy character, was initially at a loss for words, but when he caught sight of the bushels of feathers and the cauldron of simmering pine tar across the street, he uttered a heartfelt cry of excitement and took to his heels, appearing to be headed for the Outer Sunset by the time the guards lost sight of him. He hasn’t shown up at the office since, but we’ve been leaving saucers of gin near the Green Street steps overnight, and have every confidence that he will presently reappear. In the meantime, when the Bulletin’s crackerjack Internal Affairs team went through the missing man’s sock drawer (there have been irregularities in the petty cash account) they discovered, concealed beneath a stack of moldering, stained Police Gazettes, an old article from 1988 about the original public reception to our noble headquarters when the plans first came under public scrutiny early in the last century (spoiler alert: no one liked ’em), and this we have lightly edited and repurposed as the new “History Minute.” We hope our readers will find edification and entertainment in the tale.cordially,
