Recharged For the New Millennium

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?
-- Elizabeth Janeway

Friday, June 6, 1997

When I went to start my car this morning -- dead battery! I had hit a dial on the dashboard by mistake, and left the interior lights on Thursday afternoon. So I took the bus to work.

On the bus back to Seattle, I met up with S---, a former coworker from Book Publishing Company, the legal publishing firm I worked for in 1992. This place was a pit! We had a great group of workers, but the manangement was insane. They had made some bad decisions in converting from their old computer system to a new one, and this meant that the work that the proofreaders and editors did had increased greatly. The company couldn't charge their clients for this work, so they did the equivalent of speeding up the assembly line.

This resulted in a strike, since we were a union shop. The union lost the strike, and about half of us went to work at Microsoft. Book Publishing was a good place to develop speed and accuracy, since if you could proof plumbing codes and zoning ordinances you could proof anything. Losing the strike was really the best outcome for us, although it was stressful at the time. If we hadn't struck, we might still be there!

Just two more days of the festival! I still haven't made my mind up about going to the closing party. It's at the Showbox nightclub, which is downtown. I'm not as fatigued this year as I have been other years, but I may still be too tired.

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