sometimes, each day is …
making shoes for dead people
who no longer walk
I had a job I loved but changes and more changes in management made doing the job more and more a frustrating nightmare.
I worked managing local TV news websites.
I had been doing this from day one when this company decided to go online an I was hired to design their first website for TV station in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Online school closings?
I made up, literally made up, the code.
Online High School Football Scoreboards?
I created the process.
Online election results?
I was part of the team that invented them.
But the job was changing because the managers were changing.
We went from people who did things to people who managed things.
One of the changes that caused so much frustration was the decision to separate the team I was on to be further and further from the news content that we worked to put online everyday.
When I started the job, the people on the web team were part of the creative effort for the content that we put online.
Under new management, we were told we were technicians and that was it.
Not that I added to the news that much but my opinions had been worth something and when I wanted to, I could contribute and write the occasional story.
When President Ford died and his funeral was in Grand Rapids we were ready on air and online.
I worked 24 hour days that entire week it seems like.
And I was able to reserve for myself the privilege of writing the final story that wrapped up the station coverage of the event.
Now I was told no more being a part of the news.
Just get it online.
I needed a creative outlet.
Buy this time I had moved from a local station to a corporate web team working with all the stations owned by this company.
My office was in ATL.
And I needed a creative outlet so I started scribbling down haiku based on words I saw or heard on my daily commute to work in downtown Atlanta.
Instead of saying hello to people at the TV Station where my office was, I would greet them with a haiku.
Sometimes I got a friendly nod.
Most times I got a shaking head.
Then I decided I would take advantage of my background and launch a blog!
A blog were I would publish my haiku on a daily basis.
I started in January of 2019.
On February 6th I wrote this one.
It was, and is, based on a passage in the book, The Short Timers by Gustav Hasford.
Short Timers is the book that Stanley Kubrick turned into the movie, Full Metal Jacket.
In the chapter, Body Count, Mr. Hasford writes:
Rafter Man and I stop by the USO and exchange a few off-color jokes with tie round-eyed Red Cross girls, who give us donuts. We ask the Red Cross girls if they expect us to satisfy our lust with a donut and they explain that a donut hole is all we rate.
In the USO there are barrels and barrels of letters which have been written to us by children back in the World:
Rafter Man reads the letters out loud. He can still be touched by them.
To me, the letters are like shoes for the dead, who do not walk.
That last line, To me, the letters are like shoes for the dead, who do not walk, stuck in my brain and the next morning after reading it, feeling blue about my job I wrote:
Sometimes, this job is …
making shoes for dead people
who no longer walk
I wrote it up and published it on my new blog and posted it on Facebook..
Later that day, Dave, a good friend of mine over in sales who followed my adventures working for a company that wanted to be online without really wanting to be online, stuck his head in my door.
“Good one“, was all he said.
And he left.
Better than any A I ever got.
Not that I got that many A’s.
And I thought, let’s see how long I can keep this going.
That was five years ago today.
No Haiku For You 