jonberger

At my last job, I was constantly being graded,
and I was not doing well enough.
I was running averages of 92 percent.
and I needed to maintain 94s.

I had supportive leaders
who were trying to help me get to the issue
with why my scores weren’t higher
and I kept trying to approach the issue
by looking into where I was getting marked down
and what kind of problems I was having.

One consistent issue was that
the house style required paraphrasing
– insisted upon it, not just when it seemed organic.
I find reiteration too often reads as condescending
and robotic in practice,
and hate to see it used in correspondence,
so it took me a while to get used to the practice.

The bigger, more frustrating thing
took me much longer to solve.
That was so obvious,
it pisses me off that I didn’t fix it sooner:
I didn’t check my work.
If I just read over what I was sending out
I would have gotten better scores almost immediately.
Idiot!
I’m a writer. I’m an editor.
Why wouldn’t review occur to me sooner?

I was able to turn the numbers around
but it didn’t save the job.
Someday, I’ll find something else.
I’ll take the lessons on with me there.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll check my work
at the new job.

I don’t remember exactly why Frank yelled at me.
I’d done something wrong, I know,
but whatever it was, I assumed it was a small thing,
an easy fix,
something that I couldn’t imagine being such a big deal.

Frank did not see it that way
which is why the short quiet man raised his voice
so that the entire office could hear.

I was bemused.
I was embarrassed.
I figured it was over as soon as it occurred
but my supervisor said
that it wasn’t cool what Frank had done
and if we didn’t address it now
problems between us would just get worse,
so I reported the incident.

I assumed either Frank would be disciplined by his supervisor
or I would be asked for more details
by a neutral party.
Instead, I was told that a meeting was arranged
so that Frank and I could discuss our issues with each other.
Alone.

“So the guy who publicly attacked me and the guy who finked on him
get to meet behind closed doors
with no one else around…”
My supervisor apologized. She had not expected this turn of events.
I tried to get in Frank’s shoes before our meeting,
to understand his POV.
I understood my own point of view,
and wished nothing had ever occurred.

Frank was a QA guy with limited attention to detail.
As Quality Assurance guy, he would definitely catch a lot of errors,
but his communication skills were lacking
and was pretty officious with me.

My attention to detail was not great,
and since I provided the assignment he’d been working on,
Frank could get frustrated when the parameters would not be exact,
which was probably the problem.

With no one to moderate our meeting, we were heading into a shitshow.
Still, orders were orders.

We sat together for a minute or so
before I tried to initiate a discussion.
While I spoke, he never took his eyes off his phone screen.

Luckily the CEO’s right hand came in
and opted to chair the meeting,
effectively saying “Why can’t we all get along?”
Frank and I ended up shaking hands
and tried not to work on projects together
for the rest of our time at the company.

It wasn’t a great solution
but it made the best of a bad situation
and I wasn’t yelled at again
in that office.

My ancient phone will not do what a phone is supposed to do:make calls, receive messages, turn on.
It is just as well that I have a new phone
which does all those things
and much more.

I still want to use the old phone, though,
because I have attachment issues.
I am not ready to say goodbye.
It really looks like the old phone is dead.
I have not been able to find any activity
from the old faithful device
in days.
No signs of life whatsoever.

When do I unplug it
and give it up for lost?
I think there have been three days
with no signs of life so far.
We have to have passed Jesus levels
of inactivity.
Should I wait a Noah-length
just to be sure,
or are Biblical measures irrelevant
in these modern times?

It’s just so hard to tell.

The doors were closed at the late night hourand the windows shuttered.
There was no entrance into the place
and the winds were picking up
on the cold empty street.

There was an alley nearby
with bottles rolling in the wind.
It seemed a place to stay
but it, too,
appeared to be locked up.

There might be a park nearby.
There might be a riverside.
There might be somewhere
to rest a weary head.
It would take some time find
these places
but there was nothing but time
at this late night hour
and nothing to do
but search.

I went to a new open mic today.
There was an interesting feature of this open mic,
in which the regulars seemed to sit in the seats
closest to the performer
and chat away,
even through the acts they seemed to know
– the acts they were just chatting with
during the last performance
a minute ago.

I was surprised when the audience behavior diminished a little
when I went up.
They were still inattentive and rude
but they seemed less so with me.
I used some of my tricks:
moving around with the mic
changing volume levels
approaching the noise makers,
getting in their space so that they are being observed in their actions.
It mitigated the noise a tad.

The open mic was not a successful experience
but not as bad as it could have been.
I’m a little surprised by the regulars’ behavior.
Why would they do that to each other?
Couldn’t they serve each other better than this?
I could totally understand treating strangers like trash,
but why be assholes to your friends?

They had my favorite shot available, though,
so all’s well in the world.
I shall return.

I had a tie-dye t-shirt when I was young,
but I don’t think it was what my uncle was talking about.
He was in hospice, with not many visitors
because of a disease with a growing population
but few letters in its name.

My parents thought he didn’t have long
and what did I know?
I kept my mouth shut
and kept my distance
because my uncle
had been increasingly sick
for a while.

He said people had stopped visiting him.
“Friends have dropped from my circle.
The smell of dying keeps them away.”

I heard this the day I was wearing a pale blue tie-dye design
that had been made in class,
so I shrugged.
He must have meant something else again.

We were some of the last visitors he had,
he said.
He wasn’t an uncle by blood,
but we loved him just the same,
for a while.

I’m alive, so it all worked out
but it’s been a week,
I’ll tell you what.

First, there was Monday,
and I don’t have to tell you about that!
Then came Tuesday,
which features the sound of Two,
making it two times as bad.
Really. Look it up.
Wednesday’s the Hump Day
and it felt like my Shih Tzu was trying to hump my calf all afternoon.
Not a recommendation
but she seemed to appreciate it.

Thursday is Thor’s day, which is why
my room-mate pulled out the Thor DVDs
after work.
They’re not a consistent bunch of flicks.
They take a lot of time.
It left me kind of unprepared for Friday
– which normally, would be a kind of cool day.

I was bleary-eyed and empained all day long.
I think I hit a kid on the way in
in the morning.
Don’t quite recall.
By workday’s end, I just collapsed
until midnight
when I retrieved my messages
and discovered the pope was looking for me,
and I missed it.
I missed the pope!
Damn it (sorry, pope)!
Apparently, he contacted my friend Kali
to get in touch with me,
but she couldn’t get through since I was knocked out.

When I tried to reach the pope after midnight,
his security did not take it well.
Didn’t appreciate my failure to capitalize pope, either.

Anyway, I survived it all,
like I said,
but not a week I’d care to repeat.
Very frustrating that despite it all,
next week starts with a Monday, anyway.

I called the radio service
to see if they could play
that favorite song of yesterweek,
but they could not recall
the hit of which I spoke.

Yesterweek was so long ago,
it seems, so one knew
the hit parade that far back.

I remembered it, of course.
I loved it so.
I would love for the world
to take that crucial song back into its arms
and appreciate it like it used to.

Ah, yesterweek.
Difficulties dissipated soon as we would speak.
Now it seems like life has passed its peak
and things are looking pretty bleak.

New sky.
New trees.
New town.
New faces.
New people who don’t recognize you
who don’t know you
who don’t know what you’ve done.

Maybe it’s best to keep it that way.
If anyone asks about the past
keep to the shortest answers:
Yes, no, I don’t recall…
that sort of thing.
Don’t let them know anything.

It’ll just keep things easier
if no one hears
about who was the turkey baster king
of Whackamole County
and why.

When you blink, the world just passes you by
and the guy you thought was a newbie has mysteriously died
and you do a little research and no one knows why;
he just took a dirt nap after closing his eyes.

I’ve been rolling along, just living my life
when I wondered, “What happened to Nicholas Knife,
the theoretical mixologist at Snapper’s Retreat?”
I hadn’t seen him for a minute. Now he’s under six feet.

The Internet could tell me that he died years ago
and though I asked what happened the reportage workflow
provided no real details, and he wasn’t real old.
In fact, he was about my age, or so I was told

so the cause could not be natural. I mean: how could it
occur for someone of my years? The logic mis-fit.
It had to be an accident – or murder! Or drugs!
Or he got mugged or plugged or hit by the assassin bug.

Or maybe, possibly, I blinked, and years have passed
and in all that time, I never got off my ass.
And Nicky just died, and I could be next.
Shit, I’m wrecked.