Letter to My Boss's Boss

Dear Scott;

Thank you for scheduling this talk for our team. The SMS-Specific Circumplex in today's Corporate Culture meeting highlighted the most insidious source of unhappiness within our department, by showing that while we are rich in passive green, we are also high in aggressive red. This opposition seemed incongruous to me at first, but I believe I now have an explanation.

This email may be frank, but it is not intended to be bitter. I enjoy my job overall. I think you have probably heard from a very small sampling of people about their work experiences as SMSes, and I'd like to add my voice to theirs.

Members of our department work for an hourly rate and are expected to achieve a quantifiable product at the end of each and every day. We are not free to play video games. We are not free to attend extended informative meetings. We are not free to put people before the product. The product is King. I feel guilty just writing this email because surely I am "wasting time." The way in which we are monitored and assessed in our Portfolio performance and, newly, in our overall quarterly editorial output as well, only heightens the universal feeling that we are rats on a wheel, fighting each other for a way out.

But just as our daily work requirements can make us competitive and aggressive amongst ourselves, it also fosters a great deal of passivity. The same carrot is dangled in front of us day after day. We naturally fall into step with those around us, only doing as much as everyone else is doing, just keeping our heads above water. We don't want to do extra projects because we aren't allotted extra time for them. We don't want to elongate our meetings with questions or go to extra meetings because we have a certain number of things to do everyday and we are being monitored to make sure we do them. Such an environment does not foster creativity.

This would be all very well if everyone around us was in the same leaky boat. But they are not. We hear them playing darts and foozeball in the kitchen. There are people steps away from us who can come in at 11 and leave at 4 and make three times what we make and are intellectually engaged in their work everyday. Intellectually, we know why this is. We know we are just as smart and capable as they in our own fields. (Theater, music, literature, cuisine...) But it still rankles. I think it is this perceived inequity that is most disspiriting of all, exacerbating all the other problems and making us feel more overworked, more undervalued and less lauded than perhaps we really are.

I think our reticence as a department can make our internal politics a bit bewildering to people looking in. I hope my epistle helps in some small way to remedy this.

Sincerely,

My name

Juno!

This one is a little bit gushy. I guess that means it happens to everyone.

Romantic comedies are strange, amorphous creatures. Unlike other genres, their goodness or badness seems to hinge, at least for me, on how in or out of love one is at the time. This makes them almost impossible to judge objectively if one b) has a soul or a) is a woman. Being in firm possession of both b) and a), I feel obligated to inform my readers that I was in love when I saw Juno. Worse, I am in love with the person I went with to see Juno. Yep, he was sitting right next to me. I know, I know. It’s like saying you saw French Kiss on your third date with your current fiancé. OF COURSE you loved it. God. Get a room. Now that we’re all on the same page, I’ll continue.

I heard some people say that Juno was too talky, too smarty pants, too nobody-talks-like-that. True. No, true. Sure. No one does. Well, except for screenwriter Diablo Cody. I heard her on NPR. But no, yeah, valid. A whole town of people doesn’t talk in three-to-four syllable banter. Except on Gilmore Girls. But let’s not talk about that.

Basically, I don’t care. And no one else does either. Not Ebert, and not the Oscars. Why? Well, because Ellen Page, Jennifer Garner and Michael Cera are real people who we really care about, that’s why. I could give a fuck about the pitter patter dialogue.

We watch movies to see life in its best light. Moving pictures provide a forgiving veneer that makes every love story shattering and every death unforgettable. At least, all movies have this potential. And Juno does it. Juno takes first love, new love, young love, puppy love and reminds us how powerful and real and scary and….enormous it is, just as Shakespeare did in Romeo and Juliet. Yes, I just made that comparison and yes, it is that good. Maybe you need to be sitting next to someone who makes you feel…enormous in order to agree. But hopefully you just need to b) or a).