Hagenart comic 08/28/23

 

List of great blog posts that I haven’t finished

 I haven’t posted an actual written passage in a while because I’ve been working on a long historical post about Aethelred the Unready (or Redeless), and then I lost interest in that. The experience taught me that while I enjoy reading about history, I do not enjoy writing about history.  And I can apply this personal rule generally, with any serious subject. So I’ve decided to make a post, this post, about all the posts I began and then gave up on

1. Aethelred the Unready. Saxon King of Wessex circa 978. Generally blamed for the collapse of the house of Wessex, founded by Alfred the Great. Winston Churchill despised him but I saw myself in a distant mirror.. That’s all, haven’t finished it. 
2. The Pharmaceutical Industry, an insider’s perspective, based on my years of working in a pharmaceutical factory. Kind of an expose of waste and inefficiency based on fifteen plus years of irregular entries in my work journal that I sometimes kept up on and sometimes not. The regularity and level of detail in the journal entries usually depended on how frustrated or irritated I was on a particular day, usually with management, and over the years I’ve slowly lost my ability to respond emotionally to work. I call it lab rat in a cage syndrome. Recently I came up with a great idea for a horror movie script based on my work but I only think about it when I’m at work and don’t have much time to spare on the script. 
3. Growing up Mormon. Based on my years of growing up Mormon. I’ve already posted an incredibly well thought out proposal for a restructuring of the Mormon church. Or was it a restructuring of the Mormon church service? I don’t mind doing another one. 
4. An extensive re-write of the US constitution. Based on my disappointment with the US political system. Another topic that I’ve previously posted, where I discussed the serious problems with the presidential election, or as I call it, the single greatest threat to American democracy. 
5. My theory of literature, based on years and years, fifty years to be specific, of reading books and comic books. I’ve had some great thoughts about this and I’m eager to share them in blog format where people can’t talk back except in comments that I don’t read unless I know the person. 
6. My ideas for restructuring of corporations, based on years of working in a corporation. These ideas may sound a little communistic to people, hopefully. 
7. My ideas about community radio stations and how completely the internet has eclipsed them except with old people. Based on five years working at a community radio station. 
8. Now that I’ve listed these terrific blog ideas I’m feeling pretty motivated to finish one of them! Maybe

Hagenart comic 07/29/22

 

Hagenart comic 07/28/20

Hagenart comic 05/27/20

Hagenart comic 03/11/20

Hi I’m John, I work in Quality Assurance

 I recently posted something about unpleasant careers, which reminds me that for the past decade or so, even reaching back into the time before IPhones, I’ve worked in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, in Quality Assurance. Why Quality Assurance? Why Pharmaceuticals? Entirely by accident, of course. I was working temporary jobs, which I rather enjoyed actually, and had an assignment to go work at a pharmaceutical plant, and eventually got a permanent job there. It could easily have gone the other way, if I hadn’t gotten that particular job I would probably have moved to other assignments and maybe stumbled into some other career, and I’m betting that if I hadn’t gotten a push from a Manager there who happened to view me with second hand approval (I was a friend of their star employee), the position would have gone to someone else more deserving. But here I am, working in a heavily-regulated, science based industry where management prefers humanities degrees with a minimum of two years Creative Writing experience. Haha! Gotcha! They’re actually pretty easy-going about the creative writing experience.
And yes, I do some writing for this job, mostly emails of one sentence or less - and they are spell-binding, I assure you! I mock myself, but I would love to teach a college course in emails, procedures, and investigations; the only reading and writing I’ve done in pharmaceuticals, and they probably comprise over 90% of the professional reading and writing performed by English majors in the pharmaceutical industry and possibly anywhere. Humanities Professors would probably prefer to completely ignore the existence of this kind of English, but I can’t think of a better way to gain appreciation for “literature” as we call it, the English designed to tell a story, than to study it alongside the everyday English, the English that organization people use to avoid telling any story at all. I would call it “camouflage writing”. It’s actually a lesser form of fiction, meant to bore and repel rather than enchant and distract. You may write it to hide your lack of knowledge on a subject, or to avoid telling people all you know about the subject to safeguard your job, or like the greater part of working people you may have never really learned to write except in the organization where everyone writes in camouflage and you don’t actually know how to write in any other way.
And of course, in a regulated industry, the regulating authority will read your procedures and your investigations. Maybe they will read them in front of your managers. Maybe their eyes will glaze, and they will stifle a yawn, and the managers will sign you a thumbs up, and offer them a blanket and a pillow.
People ask me; “What is Quality Assurance? What do you do exactly?” And I answer...
Gotcha again! Nobody has ever asked, literally ever, in all the years I’ve told people that I work in Quality Assurance. Not only have they not asked what it is, they usually stop asking me anything, as if my answer was so awful, so surprising in a very bad way, that they don’t dare ask anything more, as I might construe the slightest hint of interest on their part as a signal to vomit forth every nasty dribble of information on quality assurance that I’ve been holding in all these years and they so do not want to hear about it that they are conversationally frozen with fear.
I completely understand, of course. The name “quality assurance” was devised by the same people who devised standard operating procedures and please believe me when I say that they are not interested in being interesting. See notes on camouflage writing above.

Hagenart comic 02/23/20