Monday, March 23, 2020
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
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.
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.
Sunday, February 23, 2020
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
I complain a lot about my English degree
I complain a lot about my English degree and how people with English degrees don’t get paid like engineers unless they get a law degree too, but to be honest I have met or heard of dozens of successful people who incidentally happened to have an English degree. I believe that if you’re a tiger and a go getter you can do well no matter what degree you earned, but if you’re not a tiger or a similarly type-A animal, you should study engineering. I’ve actually toyed with the idea of abbreviating my degree as “Eng.” on my resume, just to get by HR keyword searches.
I’ve developed my own theories to explain why English degrees might be undervalued by businesses. Most people would tell you that business managers want to be lean and want results, and hiring someone to just write things when technically any college graduate should be able to write, and when there might not be a business need for cleverly worded essays every day, seems like a waste of money to most of them. Why not just hire an engineer who can write?
And many people in the sciences definitely believe that English degrees are easy degrees, and that therefore the people with English degrees haven’t worked hard or learned to problem solve like the science majors have, so that a bunch of soft-headed poets with no grasp on reality have glutted the job market.
To clarify, no engineer or manager has used those harsh and judgmental words in my presence, I have interpolated their formless, nonverbal twitches and mutterings and as an English BA can form those thoughts in a more verbally direct manner.
Forgive me, I mentioned that I have my own theory: Humanities studies have suffered an evolutionary reversal similar to what peacocks might suffer if wild dogs developed a lasso. Previous to this hypothetical lasso, young people of the upper classes invented English and other Humanities degrees to learn art and poetry, in order to impress potential romantic partners or spouses. Nobody saw any actual utility in an English Degree, it functioned like a magnificent peacock’s tail to impress other young people by its utter uselessness, back when a person’s uselessness signified
At this point you may believe that I am about to say, in agreement with prevailing belief, that the job market was the lasso, but I believe it was the Civil Rights movements of the 60s. The purveyors of English and Humanities degrees, like High Priests, had used the so-called Dead White Males of British Literature as their Idols, and used the DWM’s Works as their Magic Totems, in order to add the facade of sanctity and seriousness to the peacock’s tail. The egalitarian values of the Civil Rights movement eroded and discredited the DWM’s authority, and so destroyed the romantic magic of the English degrees. Young people sought out alternative forms of magic; rock music and beat poetry, sourced by the new Idol of Social Activism. Some High Priests stayed true to the old idols, but the rest switched to align their teachings with the new egalitarianism. They escaped the worship of the DWMs, but in the mad rush to Social Activism, they unhinged the bread and butter roots of the degrees, the utilitarian mechanics of writing and textual analysis, unfortunately associating them with the old hierarchy. They trained a generation of English BAs with uplifted values and sloppy, unfocused writing skills. The orthodox High Priests denounced these methods, but even more unfortunately, associated them with the new Social Activism. The engineering faculty, who respected the old
Humanities DWMs as the gods of a neighboring tribe, viewed the new, lose, free wheeling Humanities curricula with contempt.
So the state of the humanities at the time of my own studies. I took classes with both sects, and as you might expect I did not take a side. I chose a Creative Writing emphasis, as you might expect, but I enjoyed the disciplined critical analysis classes, as you might not expect.
The University of Utah offered a creative writing MA, which I did not pursue, because I believed, and still believe, that you need to find something to write about. The people who believe that you need to find something to write about will usually, after arriving at this decision or realization, boldly go off to Antarctica or New Guinea, offering up their mortal frame to the tribulations of unpleasant weather or unpleasant people in order to compile a database of sufferings to spin into lucrative, matter of fact accounts that readers like me will devour appreciatively in the comforts of the suburbs. I didn’t do that either, so I followed a third alternative, listless pursuit of unpleasant careers. So that’s what I have to write about.
I’ve developed my own theories to explain why English degrees might be undervalued by businesses. Most people would tell you that business managers want to be lean and want results, and hiring someone to just write things when technically any college graduate should be able to write, and when there might not be a business need for cleverly worded essays every day, seems like a waste of money to most of them. Why not just hire an engineer who can write?
And many people in the sciences definitely believe that English degrees are easy degrees, and that therefore the people with English degrees haven’t worked hard or learned to problem solve like the science majors have, so that a bunch of soft-headed poets with no grasp on reality have glutted the job market.
To clarify, no engineer or manager has used those harsh and judgmental words in my presence, I have interpolated their formless, nonverbal twitches and mutterings and as an English BA can form those thoughts in a more verbally direct manner.
Forgive me, I mentioned that I have my own theory: Humanities studies have suffered an evolutionary reversal similar to what peacocks might suffer if wild dogs developed a lasso. Previous to this hypothetical lasso, young people of the upper classes invented English and other Humanities degrees to learn art and poetry, in order to impress potential romantic partners or spouses. Nobody saw any actual utility in an English Degree, it functioned like a magnificent peacock’s tail to impress other young people by its utter uselessness, back when a person’s uselessness signified
At this point you may believe that I am about to say, in agreement with prevailing belief, that the job market was the lasso, but I believe it was the Civil Rights movements of the 60s. The purveyors of English and Humanities degrees, like High Priests, had used the so-called Dead White Males of British Literature as their Idols, and used the DWM’s Works as their Magic Totems, in order to add the facade of sanctity and seriousness to the peacock’s tail. The egalitarian values of the Civil Rights movement eroded and discredited the DWM’s authority, and so destroyed the romantic magic of the English degrees. Young people sought out alternative forms of magic; rock music and beat poetry, sourced by the new Idol of Social Activism. Some High Priests stayed true to the old idols, but the rest switched to align their teachings with the new egalitarianism. They escaped the worship of the DWMs, but in the mad rush to Social Activism, they unhinged the bread and butter roots of the degrees, the utilitarian mechanics of writing and textual analysis, unfortunately associating them with the old hierarchy. They trained a generation of English BAs with uplifted values and sloppy, unfocused writing skills. The orthodox High Priests denounced these methods, but even more unfortunately, associated them with the new Social Activism. The engineering faculty, who respected the old
Humanities DWMs as the gods of a neighboring tribe, viewed the new, lose, free wheeling Humanities curricula with contempt.
So the state of the humanities at the time of my own studies. I took classes with both sects, and as you might expect I did not take a side. I chose a Creative Writing emphasis, as you might expect, but I enjoyed the disciplined critical analysis classes, as you might not expect.
The University of Utah offered a creative writing MA, which I did not pursue, because I believed, and still believe, that you need to find something to write about. The people who believe that you need to find something to write about will usually, after arriving at this decision or realization, boldly go off to Antarctica or New Guinea, offering up their mortal frame to the tribulations of unpleasant weather or unpleasant people in order to compile a database of sufferings to spin into lucrative, matter of fact accounts that readers like me will devour appreciatively in the comforts of the suburbs. I didn’t do that either, so I followed a third alternative, listless pursuit of unpleasant careers. So that’s what I have to write about.
Saturday, February 8, 2020
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Crossing the streams, a Hagenart fiction
I’d like to say that we will now resume the CS Lewis HP Lovecraft series, but I still have not performed the re-read. A wise man once said “Character is Fate”, and another person, a reasonably intelligent person, has said that character is 98% of any story.
If both statements are true, then Fate is 98% of the story too. Or maybe Fate is the story, and there really there is no 2%. Or maybe the fellow who wrote “character is fate” really meant character is 98% fate, but just rounded up, in which case we’ve identified the missing 2% and it’s whatever of character isn’t Fate, or is it a tiny bit of Fate that isn’t Character?
I believe both are true and as a result this blog is fated to unreliably planned, and I personally won’t ever get to direct “Star Wars / Star Trek: Crossing the Streams”. Which I have already written as the sequel to “Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet”, as written by George Lucas if he were the son of HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis and married Gene Roddenberry and they had a son who was me and I grew up rich and got to sleep in all the time.
Crossing the Streams Act 1:
A spaceship glides seductively across a dazzling field of stars. The camera pans in to a huge window on the front of the spaceship, the windshield if you will. A man in a form fitting black suit stands looking thoughtfully at the starscape. It’s actually me, I’m playing the Captain as well as the director. I’m not sure if I’ll be wearing a hat for this scene. We might do a steampunk thing where I’d be wearing a stovepipe hat and a monocle
The scene changes, to inside the spaceship. An alarm goes off, with flashing lights. A crew member in a snazzy uniform turns to the captain and says they’ve detected an ancient radio signal coming from an older quadrant of the galaxy. I indicate in Trekkie that they should play the message on the spaceship’s dope holodeck. I go into the holodeck with my holodeck crew. The Trekkie holodeck actually recreates reality, it’s like stepping into a video game that you can touch and experience with all your senses. The holodeck plays the ancient radio message, which is the whole Star Wars saga, except that I play a taller and better looking version of yoda. In this magisterial role, I recognize the badly written plot elements and use my magic powers to edit them out. My crew members play my acolytes, and they applaud my rewrites. The emperor and I fight a light saber duel. I win, but he tries to cheat with force lightning. He removes his mask. It’s George Lucas. He condemns my rewrite, but I counter that as the original creator of Star Wars he can not exist in this reality and is therefore without power here. Either he exists and it’s all a badly written fantasy, or it’s reality and he cannot exist. He disappears. My acolytes applaud. I declare myself supreme space admiral. They look wary and confused. I mow them down with force lightning.
Well that’s just a taste, I envision the full series will cover several volumes and possibly a plot with characters
If both statements are true, then Fate is 98% of the story too. Or maybe Fate is the story, and there really there is no 2%. Or maybe the fellow who wrote “character is fate” really meant character is 98% fate, but just rounded up, in which case we’ve identified the missing 2% and it’s whatever of character isn’t Fate, or is it a tiny bit of Fate that isn’t Character?
I believe both are true and as a result this blog is fated to unreliably planned, and I personally won’t ever get to direct “Star Wars / Star Trek: Crossing the Streams”. Which I have already written as the sequel to “Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet”, as written by George Lucas if he were the son of HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis and married Gene Roddenberry and they had a son who was me and I grew up rich and got to sleep in all the time.
Crossing the Streams Act 1:
A spaceship glides seductively across a dazzling field of stars. The camera pans in to a huge window on the front of the spaceship, the windshield if you will. A man in a form fitting black suit stands looking thoughtfully at the starscape. It’s actually me, I’m playing the Captain as well as the director. I’m not sure if I’ll be wearing a hat for this scene. We might do a steampunk thing where I’d be wearing a stovepipe hat and a monocle
The scene changes, to inside the spaceship. An alarm goes off, with flashing lights. A crew member in a snazzy uniform turns to the captain and says they’ve detected an ancient radio signal coming from an older quadrant of the galaxy. I indicate in Trekkie that they should play the message on the spaceship’s dope holodeck. I go into the holodeck with my holodeck crew. The Trekkie holodeck actually recreates reality, it’s like stepping into a video game that you can touch and experience with all your senses. The holodeck plays the ancient radio message, which is the whole Star Wars saga, except that I play a taller and better looking version of yoda. In this magisterial role, I recognize the badly written plot elements and use my magic powers to edit them out. My crew members play my acolytes, and they applaud my rewrites. The emperor and I fight a light saber duel. I win, but he tries to cheat with force lightning. He removes his mask. It’s George Lucas. He condemns my rewrite, but I counter that as the original creator of Star Wars he can not exist in this reality and is therefore without power here. Either he exists and it’s all a badly written fantasy, or it’s reality and he cannot exist. He disappears. My acolytes applaud. I declare myself supreme space admiral. They look wary and confused. I mow them down with force lightning.
Well that’s just a taste, I envision the full series will cover several volumes and possibly a plot with characters
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