Old times

How many of us have jobs we love? Jobs that we wake up for and go to with joy? Jobs that may pay little but reward us more than anything we do in our free time?
I had such a job in the late 1990s. I was a reporter for a suburban Philadelphia weekly newspaper, and most of what made the job I had that kind of job was my editor.

"Is he nice?" my mother asked about him. Well, no. No, he wasn't "nice." But if he were he wouldn't have been good at what he did and what I wrote would've been closer to PR copy than to journalism. So fuck nice. He—his name was Dan—was an experienced who'd been out of the field for a bit so was working for a paper he was overqualified for. 
My first eight months of doing real journalism were months in which I learned more than I did while getting a master's degree in it. I also learned that the anxiety of writing for publication is the kind that makes you lose sleep and that somehow I could function for months at a time getting no more than four hours of sleep a day, total, on a good day. Usually closer to three. 
Dan died last month at age seventy-one. We'd kept in touch by email over the last nineteen years but if he had a list of people for his survivors to inform of his death I wasn't on it. (I have such a list held onto my refrigerator with a magnet.) 
How do such people die without generating a wave of some kind that alerts us to their deaths?

Mystery building

A future indoor skydiving facility.

One of the reasons the Complete and Total Loser failed in his attempt to be a working journalist was his lack of natural curiosity. That cropped up yesterday when he and a friend saw a building near the movie theater the two had seen a recent release (Hail, Caesar!: Not bad, not great; not worth a trip to the theater). It was an odd looking building and the Loser's friend was intent on finding out what it was. The Loser, while mildly curious, was just as happy not knowing. He'd find out soon enough, when it was completed and signs went up or its purpose became otherwise apparent. The friend drove over (they had met at the theater and used separate cars), the Loser followed. The friend asked some construction workers who were taking a break from working on a Sunday and they told her. The building will be for indoor skydiving. 

ISIL and the Loser

The Complete and Total Loser put himself through graduate school to be a journalist and worked as one for five years before failing miserably at it, as he has in everything else in life. 
Hearing the news today that another journalist was murdered by the idiotic savages purporting to have a god on their side, however, the Loser can't help but think that if he'd been successful, it could have been him.
(By the way, have you noticed that it's freelancers getting killed? That's because they're paid so little that they have to take risks journalists employed by large news organizations don't. You don't see any of the big name people really getting out there. They phone it in from air-conditioned bureaus, shower regularly, and eat in restaurants. Cowards. 
The Loser's respect and sympathy go to the family of Steven J. Sotloff, as well as to the man himself.)

Steven J. Sotloff, about to be murdered by a complete and total asshole.

Questions for the Loser #1

1. Why did the Complete and Total Loser fail in his career?

He failed because:

• He started too late. He first dreamed of being a reporter after seeing the movie "All the President's Men" when he was a teenager. He loved how it showed people working hard, asking questions, investigating and then writing about it. Sometime after it came out, he read about an uptick in journalism students. "Great," the Loser thought. "There go my chances." The Loser is the type who can't imagine winning any kind of competition, ever. (More men than women at his college? Forget about having a girlfriend, Loser!) As a result, the Loser didn't consider seriously a career in journalism until he was in his mid 30s. People start careers and do well in them, but only if they're good.
• He was bad at it. When he worked with the pros, the Loser noticed that real reporters conduct long interviews with their subjects before writing their stories. It amazed the Loser how long, sometimes. An hour, and they'd use just a few sentences in a 700-word article. But those quotes would be good ones and the rest of the piece would show a deep understanding.
• He was arrogant. Doing something wrong? Not him! He'd get defensive when his superiors told him he was in error. He often began his defense with, "I just thought ..." Be wary of workers who say that. They are invariably a pain in the ass. 
• He didn't put in the extra time. If there's a job you really want to do well and it's worth having, you have to stop thinking in terms of 8-hour workdays and five day weeks. Coffee, drugs -- whatever it takes -- you have to work many more hours than normal people to make it in a career you've entered late. The Loser didn't get this. He liked leaving at five, going back to his hovel, having a beer with his dinner and watching television. To be fair to him, he was old, in his 40s, and even when young he didn't have a copious amount of energy.
• He was dense. The Loser was considered the office "knucklehead," a word he heard his manager use to describe him when he was thought to be out of earshot. At his time in his dream job, the Loser had two evaluations. He eventually passed the nine-month probationary period, but barely, and when a coworker half his age was promoted over him he saw the signs: They like you as a secretary. He timed his quitting to the day before the coworker started in the new job.   

 

It's 9/11

Unsuccessful in everything, the Complete and Total Loser was an unsuccessful journalist from the mid 1990s to 2002, when he pulled the plug on his career, having reached as his highest level the position of editorial assistant for a wire service. 

On 9/11/01, the Loser was hard at work, doing his menial tasks like cutting his bettors's stories from regional newspapers to put in their mail boxes, a morale-building duty. One of the bureau's four televisions was tuned to CNN, which carried early footage of the first plane's hit. (Over the next 20 minutes the other televisions would carry the same feed.) The bureau chief was on the phone talking to the service's headquarters, which is in New York.

"Amazing, this plan hitting the World Trade Center, isn't it?" he said to a head news editor on the phone he called daily to touch base with regarding stories they may take from the Loser's branch. The woman hadn't heard. She stuttered and hung up.

Not long after the second plane hit, the Loser's superiors told him to go to the airport and phone in quotes from stranded passengers and airport PR. The Loser boarded a train, rode it for fifteen minutes, and spent the next twelve hours at the airport, wandering the long corridors until his feet ached. He got no information of any value, but he was not called back to the branch. The staffers were probably glad to be rid of him for the day.

A few hours into his stint, a woman pushing a cart bearing bottled water and snacks came by. She was handing them out to trapped travelers. The Loser asked her about her task and she told him such things were done by the airport when planes were stalled due to bad weather. 

Reporters are not to take gifts, even small ones, from anyone involved in something they're covering. The Loser was good about this, but he did accept a small bottle of water from the woman. He put it in his jacket pocket in case he got thirsty later. He didn't, and he ended up taking it home, where he put it in his cupboard. The events of that awful day tainted the water, and the Loser never drank it or disposed of it. 

What happens to bottled water over a decade? The water escapes through osmosis and the container begins to collapse. 

A ten-year-old bottle of Poland Spring bottled water on a windowsill much older than it is.

Regrets, he's had a few

You'd think someone calling himself the Complete and Total Loser would have a longer list of regrets than he does, but he really has just two, though they have defined his life and always will.

They are:

1. Not figuring out girls, which would have led to figuring out women. The Loser wishes he'd summoned up an iota of courage as a teen and gone to a few parties so he could meet girls. (He went to an all boys school from third grade on.) He'd have said dumb things, sure, but he'd have learned from them and maybe have kissed a girl before he was 21 and be married now at 52.

2. Not figuring out what he wanted to do in life before he was in his 30s. There are those who make career changes much later than that and have great careers, but they are talented and smart. With the Loser's mild abilities he'd have had to start earlier to succeed in the only job he ever really liked, which was journalism.

In this video, 50 people talk about their regrets. The Loser found it via wimp.com, which he thinks is a thousand times better than Youtube, which is like sifting through a boxcar of newspapers, books and magazines to find something you're interested in reading.

Frank Sinatra

The Loser Waits on a Superior's Mother

The Complete and Total Loser is at work, doing his pointless retail job. A woman, in her late sixties perhaps, comes in and buys a few items. The Loser takes her credit card and, before swiping it, sees that she’s written “Ask for I.D.” on the signing strip. He does so and notices that her driver’s license shows that she has the same hometown as the one he grew up in.
“I grew up in W_____ myself,” the Loser says as the sale is processed. The woman asks which part. The Loser tells her and agrees with her when she says that’s not really W____ but the fringe and that the primary similarity was the ZIP Code. Then he mentions that the center of W____ was nonetheless close to him and that he worked at the local movie theater for several years while in college.
The woman says that her son, too, had worked there cleaning the theater after closing and, with a mother’s pride, adds that “Now he’s a successful journalist.”
The Loser puts her name together and realizes that her son is more than a successful journalist; he’s among the top tier of American journalists working today, a well regarded New York Times staff columnist, author of a well-reviewed book on current culture and a frequent guest on the Sunday morning news shows. He's known for being a conservative but who sees the liberal point of view. He is pro gay marriage, pro Obama. 
The Loser was a journalist, too, but not a very good one. He worked for a local weekly and did well enough at that level but failed to get promoted reporter after a year as an editorial assistant at a larger news organization. Sometimes he tells himself it was because he started that career too late in life (38) or didn't play the political office games well or lacked confidence in his ideas. But he knows that ultimately he just wasn't good enough.  

The Loser Can't Sleep

It's nearly 2:30 a.m. and the Loser is awake. His fault. He got home from work at the usual time, ate the usual meal, watched a DVD (Woody Allen's latest. Sucked.) and then made the mistake of lying down, which led to a nap which led to this—awake in his stuffy, humid apartment.

He has insights on nights like these. The path of his life of being a loser becomes clear. He wakes up and scribbles these insights in a notebook he keeps on his bed table. Later, he reads them again and is chagrined to find that rather than the nonsensical writings of an insomniac, the sentences make sense.

A digest.

The Loser had a childhood bone disease which ruined a leg. He has worn a ridiculous, huge shoe since he was seven to make up for a leg length discrepancy of over half a foot. Yes, there are those with far greater afflictions who have lives filled with love and success. There are also those with no problems of any kind and keen minds who live lives as miserable or more so than the Loser's.

The Loser had neither a body nor mind that could compete with those of others. He has no artistic gifts, significant writing ability, knack for magic tricks or passion for learning about something, anything, that would set him apart. His ability to tell jokes is mediocre.

His dream job since early high school was to work as a journalist, but he was too shy and afraid of the taunts of his peers to ever pursue a position at his school papers in both high school and college. He assumed that he would fail at it as a profession too, that those with sharper writing skills and greater confidence would outperform him. It wasn't until his mid-30s that he enrolled in a low-tier graduate program to get his master's degree in journalism.

He worked as a journalist for five years. The stress at first took a toll. There were months, literally months, when he slept no more than two hours a night. After that, for a year or two, all went well. He knew what he was doing, mistakes were few and mild, the money was good enough. The circulation of the newspaper he worked for, a suburban weekly, went steadily downhill but this was hardly his fault. He was the primary reporter, true, but people buy such papers for other reasons, like the society page and coverage of local school sports. The paper followed the sliding trend of all such papers in the late 1990s.

In 2000 the Loser, over 40 and tired of covering zoning board hearings and store openings, went for a job in the city. He applied for and got a job as an editorial assistant at the Associated Press.

He did not do well there. What confidence he had gained at the weekly drained in the big time. He made mistakes. An editor yelled. He overheard himself referred to as "the knucklehead." He left work each day with the self esteem of a wet paper towel on a mens room floor. After a year, it was time to go.

The Loser is a 51-year-old cashier now. He makes far less money than he did at the AP and his feet hurt all the time.

The physical gifts we have or lack can nudge our personalities. The Loser wonders now that if he had been physically normal and able to run, perform in plays, wear unaltered trousers, go a year without once being mocked by others, if he would have pursued his goal at a younger age, taken his lumps then and had some measure of success.

The Loser Meets a Semi-Famous Dude

David Brancaccio

Being awful at everything, the Complete and Total Loser has been working in a gift shop for the better part of a decade, despite his master's degree, which is in something he's no good at doing. Sometimes notable people visit the store, as it's in a building with objects worthy of perusal by those interested in beauty and culture. Such notables have included actors like John Lithgow, Willem Defoe and Demi Moore, the movie director John Landis, musicians David Byrne, Judy Carne and David Crosby, and the odd visit by his city's mayor and other political figures.
On a recent Sunday, David Brancaccio visited. The Loser, who has seen him host NOW on PBS, likes Brancaccio and waited on him four years before. This time, he approached him when he saw him in the store and greeted him, welcoming him back. He did something he seldom does to anybody: he thrust out his hand and shook Brancaccio's.
Journalism, the Loser's failed career, is the best job there is. In no other job are you paid to get away from your desk and go out to meet people and learn new things, after which you turn those experiences into short, written pieces that, if you've done them at all well, strangers will compliment you on. Journalists frequently complain about their low pay, yet they're paid a salary that one can easily live well on; an Associated Press reporter at a bureau makes in the mid 50s -- not bad for a job that requires no specialized training and is one that an honest journalist once said he'd "do for free."
In the Loser's dreams he's achieved Brancaccio's level of success. He's doing well enough that his worries are about deadlines and getting stories, not about paying his bills and retirement, but he isn't so famous that he can't go on a cultural outing with his wife and teenage daughter without an entourage or special arrangements. He works hard at his day job, but has time to write a book, in this case "Squandering Aimlessly," which is about "money and values in America."
His beats are those of a Renaissance man: politics, human rights, national security, the environment, health care and science policy and, at his level, whatever the hell else he wants to cover. He and his staff have won awards—the George Foster Peabody Award and the DuPont-Columbia Award, an Emmy for a story on an innovative way to deliver health care in Africa, and the 2009 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Coverage.
A nice life.
A meaningless aside: In nearly all of the photos the Loser found of Brancaccio, he looks gay. When you meet him, however, you don't get a whiff of that.
November 23 update: The Loser read two days ago that Brancaccio's show has been canceled. Sorry to hear that, David.