Tape, Glue Stick or Rubber Cement?

At this point in my life, I've been in the workforce for twenty-five years and have witnessed wondrous technological advances.

The fax machine, for example, was still making its awkward debut when I was indentured (I mean hired) by the Moore County Citizen News-Record to work as a newspaper reporter. To say budgets were a little tight at the Citizen would be like saying Ted Cruz is only slightly power hungry. A nickel didn't get spent without full consent of the managing editor, the editor-in-chief and my Mother giving written approval in triplicate. Consequently, the pricey thermal paper of early fax machines was a highly coveted item. You didn't dare scroll a superfluous inch of it unless you wanted to be violently chastised by the office controller.

When the fax machine started clicking, whirring, buzzing and bleeping to life, all activity in the office skidded to a halt. We stood around the fax room -- yes, the fax machine had its own private room -- like extras from "The Music Man" waiting for the WellsFargo wagon to start a comin' down the street.

"A fax came for me! I got a fax! Did you get a fax? No? I did!"

These days, the fax machine is looked on as a quaint and nearly irrelevant relic of bygone days, like the PalmPilot or handwritten thank you notes. The fax machine barely lasted as long as the lifespan of a really healthy cat.

Since 1990, workplaces have moved from clunkily networked computer terminals all linked to an outdated mainframe and one overworked laser printer, to everyone having their own laptops routed via wifi to dedicated Bluetooth printers. And if you needed to touch base with someone back then, you couldn't pull a smartphone out of your pocket for a quick video chat. You reached in your pocket for a quarter and found a pay phone.

Now, I'm not one of those curmudgeons who bemoans the loss of carefree, technology-free days. I like my smartphone, and my laptop, and my Bluetooth printers. I love carrying around eight days of music on a single device and being able to watch Harry Potter movies on my iPhone while traveling by plane from Raleigh to Columbus. If anything, I'm wondering why all processes and functions haven't embraced the advances of the past few decades.

Perhaps my greatest hope is to see technology impact the way I submit monthly expense reports, specifically the turning in of receipts.

At the beginning of each month, I sit at my desk and gather scraps of paper of various sizes that should match up to all the purchases I made during the previous month. At least one is usually missing, and sometimes five or six. In twenty-five years, I've probably submitted only one expense report for which I managed to find all the corresponding receipts.

Once gathered, I take out a pair of scissors and trim the excess edges from the receipts.

Why? Because when you have to tape all those little receipts to sheets of printer paper, you want to get as many on one sheet as possible. Why, you might ask, is it necessary to tape all those little receipts to printer paper and mail a huge bundle of papers halfway across the country? Because the expense report accounting process is stuck somewhere between Byzantine and kindergarten finger painting lessons. Even the antiquated fax machine is too high-tech to be part of this process.

In a day and age when my son can FaceTime his friends using a smartphone connected to high-speed internet via wireless router while sitting on the toilet, it amazes me that I am required to complete an important administrative task for which I have to make a choice between tape, glue stick and rubber cement.



© 2015 Mark Feggeler

The Benefit of Being Downsized

Since 1990, when SUNY Plattsburgh decided it’d had enough of me and awarded a diploma with my name on it just to get me to leave, I’ve worked for 12 distinct corporate entities. That’s an average of one new employer every 1.9 years.


In fairness to me, not every one of those new corporate entities involved a job change. For instance, I was employed by three different corporate entities in the same year while working as director of sales of one hotel in Durham, NC. The hotel’s first management firm was bought out by a second management firm which was, in turn, let go by the hotel ownership which created its own management firm. Simple, right? That’s the kind of year you keep your butt out of the wind and hope nobody more than one level above you knows you even exist.

Having worked for 12 distinct corporate entities, it’s easy to categorize them by degree of enjoyability. On a scale from 1 to 5 (1 being “Made My Spirits Soar Like an Eagle” and 5 being “Made Me Pray for the Sweet Release of Death”) the breakdown is as follows:

1. Made My Spirits Soar Like an Eagle = Two Companies
2. Put a Little Spring in My Step = Three Companies
3. No Impact on My Life Whatsoever = Three Companies
4. Caused Me to Reconsider My Stance on Assisted Suicide = Two Companies
5. Made Me Pray for the Sweet Release of Death = Two Companies

Of the bottom two, one was particularly bullying and disrespectful to its employees. You know something’s wrong with your place of employment when you enter the office each day amazed at the fact none of your coworkers has been arrested, or at least investigated. Abuse of power, conflict of interest, unethical business practices, unjustifiable business expenses, questionable investments – the place was a training ground for all of the things you shouldn’t do when running a business if you want to avoid jail time.

Amidst the humanoid detritus that mostly ran this soul-sucking company were a handful of decent people struggling hard to remain decent. Every now and then, one of them would fall victim to the corporate axe, or worse, divest themselves of the virtues that made them decent and join the scheming backstabbers in their game.

I thought, naively, I could remain impermeable to the never-ending parade of injustices perpetrated at that company. “I am one of the decent people,” I would tell myself.

The problem was the decent people huddled together in a cowering mass to bitch and moan about the backstabbers. We became an underground army of gossipers, whisperers and kvetchers. Even when the backstabbers weren’t giving us something to bitch about, we could pull from a vast catalog of past offenses to rile our indignation. We were unhappy, dissatisfied, bitter as tonic water, yet convinced we could hold on to our humanity in spite of every effort of the backstabbers to break our spirits.

Near the end of my sentence, I ran into a former coworker who had been fired some months earlier. He was one of those pleasant, honest people who knows what needs to be done and how to lead by example to motivate others to help him achieve it. I had felt poorly for him when he was let go. He had been wronged, which I expressed to him as we spoke. He smiled contentedly and gave me one of the best pieces of advice anyone has ever given me.

“Mark, get out,” he said. “You think it doesn’t affect you, but it’s corrosive.”

Not long after that brief encounter, I was restructured out of my job. The powers that be called me and six other people into a meeting after lunch and gave us two-hours to clean out our offices. It was the first time I lost a job, and it was frightening, but looking back at it now I am able to appreciate how much of a gift they gave me.

Like an abused pet, I had come to believe I deserved the treatment I received at the hands of those soul-suckers. What was I, anyway, other than a simple drone scurrying this way and that at the whim of its queen bee? Had they not restructured me out of the organization, I might never have moved on to better things.

© 2013 Mark Feggeler