StandingWater Creations

You know, sometimes you hope for the best in people and then realize that "the best" just isn't there. Yes, I am talking about what happened to Erin over the weekend.

Before I get into that, I have been fired before - as a result, I empathize with Erin; on the flipside, I have had to fire before and have tried to figure out what her ex-employers were thinking.

What is important is how someone picks themselves up and moves forward. My comments are observations based on (nearly) a year of watching Erin deal with her ex-employers. I have never had positive feelings toward these men and will offer personal observations and relay some examples of why I dislike what these men.

You see, I have had to sit at the sidelines for months watching as Erin dealt with the problems and issues of her employment.

The men she worked for drove her, nearly, insane with guilt and shame at what she was doing. They claimed that what she did for them would directly translate into future work and future goals, and as a result, often very late at night, she would sit in my arms and cry about what had happened over the day or preceding few days. She was told if she "failed" at this job she would fail in the future. Talk about manipulation.

Having worked in industry for a lot of years, I know that you succeed and fail all of the time. A person who claims to have an MBA should know that current literature actually talks about how people rebound after a failure and often succeeds as a result; and that many Fortune 500 companies actually look for people who failed in business, the "why" to the failure, and what was learned so that those mistakes are not made at their companies. This is an aspect of the MBA and you didn't get one in the last ten to fifteen years without this theory coming out in class.

The office she worked in had a very manic attitude. If her office (environment) were a person it would literally be manic-depressive - and I am not convinced that her employer(s) are not manic-depressive. Her bosses often wanted her to show emotions that, as someone from New England, and Erin just being Erin, were not available to be shared. Emotions are personal and to understand that, and to realize that people should be allowed to be themselves, her employers were asking for something they had no right to ask for.

I consider myself lucky to understand, in her stoic way, when she is happy and sad, excited or depressed. I get to see more of the emotions, but that has been a long time coming. When we were dating and even through large portions of our engagement, I had to guess a lot of times what kind of emotion she was going through. Unfortunately, I am pretty blank and stoic as well.

One of the reasons Erin was fired was because she was not 100% about the success of her employers company(ies). Yeah. 100%. What does that mean? Really?

In my mind, 100% is an impossible number for anyone. You cannot give 100% to anything. Not the church, not your family, not your job, and not school. Anyone who tries, or tries to convince people that it is possible is lying. You have to prioritize and I agreed wholeheartedly with Erin's priorities. Family, church, school, and work. And you know what, when she got done at school it was family, church, and work. In that order.

You cannot be a father and family man in one life, and a businessman in another life. It is not possible. You are both a father and family man and a businessman all at the same time. Conversely, you can not be a wife and mother and an employee at different times or simply because you wear different hats. You get to divide your 100% (not possible to have more) into the areas of your life, church, family, work; and to expect a different standard of buy-in from an employee is hypocritical.

I consider these men hypocrites.

As an employee Erin has a work ethic that really makes me want to work harder just being around her. She is given assignments and does everything she can to get those assignments accomplished - even when she doesn't believe in them. As a wife and homemaker (on top of being a student and an employee) she does everything she can to make sure the house is comfortable and the environment is one she would want to be in. These are proper divisions of loyalty and proper divisions of her 100%.

I remember the day (not so long ago) Erin came home after having to speak to her employers about her lack of presence at the office. At the beginning of Fall semester she sat down and spoke to them about her schedule and when she'd be in the office. Conveniently, this conversation was not remembered (repeatedly) throughout the semester and at the end of 2007 when they wanted to speak to her about a full-time position with the company.

In return, going to work for Erin has been a trial. The work environment was very corrosive and poisonous. Her employer(s) wanted her to be there and available all of the time. He wanted her to do what he wanted even when she wasn't on the clock or being paid by him. I got the impression that he wanted her to be so sold into this company and his vision of entrepreneurship that everything else should be set aside and she should dedicate her life to the altar of business.

That is not Erin.

What she was hired to do was to edit a book so that two men writing it would have a better chance of getting it published. What she was (initially) hired to do was work as an admin, and when these same men decided there was more work in the book and in the admin position than Erin could handle alone, they hired an office manager-slash-admin.

Erin's job was to focus on the book. And, because I watched her and was a part of her deciding what was best for her and her employers (e.g. what she could offer) that is what she fretted about during the week, that is what she wanted to see happen. Erin's priority was the success of the book. Even when I would listen to aspects of chapters or ideas that were being bandied about, the things that were bring written... and even though I have a tendency to read business books for the sheer enjoyment and pleasure of it, and even though I knew without having to be in the industry that what was being shared did not fly in the face of any of the literature that was out there, Erin stood up for her bosses and looked for ways to defend what was being written. She was dedicated to the success of what her job entailed: She was dedicated to the book.

What was frustrating to watch was the continual need to remind her bosses (as a student) that her first priority was school and her second was work. At the beginning of the semester this was a conversation - and her bosses kept agreeing that her priorities needed to be in graduating and then the job. They were willing to take from Erin what she could offer.

And yet, a week or two would pass and she would come home crying about her day because she was not offering enough. What she had to offer wasn't enough for these men.

The real frustration, that I continually had, with her job was not so much the frustration of two men who would agree (verbally) to things and then backtrack, but that they insisted that the weight of writing needed to be on Erin and not on them. Instead of being an edtor they wanted Erin to write the book for them. When chapters turned out well, Erin was praised for making their writing work for them; when chapters turned out poorly, Erin was berated for failing to do her job.

My problem is that an editor does not rewrite. An editor looks at the work being done and tells people what needs to happen to fix it and then waits for the people to fix it. Her employer(s) didn't want an editor. They wanted someone who would come in and do the job for them. They wanted someone who would take their idea and ghost-write a book that they could publish under their names.

An even bigger frustration, though, is the talk of voice. Voice, for those who don't know, and her ex-employers don't know this is the way in which an author tells a story that is distinct to that author. Both of her employers are going to have aspects of voice, and yet neither of them are very good at what they do. They constantly had mistakes, spelling mistakes, re-used words that made no sense, used way too many words to describe something, and then expected that, magically, the work would be sufficient to attract an editor.

Erin had to rewrite. When things worked, it was because she rewrote the hell out of her employers; when it didn't, it was because her employers insisted on making changes they didn't know the first thing about. Their success in interesting potential agents and publishers is not a result of their voice or ability to write, but because Erin was able to do a very difficult job and make two different people with two radically different writing styles sound like they had the same voice and were telling the same story.

The outcome to her losing her job is that anything these men do, from this point forward, will be sub-par and will not impress the people they have made relationships with. Eventually, her ex-employers will have to go back into the writing community and find someone to replace Erin... and since I am a member of that community, and they pay crap-wages, the outcome will be that no one will come on for any length of time and put up with the *shit* they dole out.

One of the things that caught me off guard was a verbal agreement (well, email agreement) I with her main boss to do some web writing. Instead of using me, he went out and found a cut-rate writer who was willing to do the job at next-to-no-money. The outcome was that this writer plagiarized his work, stole from websites, was caught in the act, and then (if her ex-employers are actually intelligent individuals) let go and sued. However, as I understand the writing community, finding someone with the talent and skill necessary to coherently write content for websites and customers, and who is willing to do it at a cut-rate is next to impossible, I doubt that they actually let this guy go, that they sued him for his work, or that they found another writer to come in and fix the problems that do exist with his writing (e.g. re-write the material and give it to their clients because of the plagiarism).

Instead, when their publisher comes back to them (after the book proposal) and says, "This writing isn't as good as the original manuscript," her ex-employer(s) will go out looking for someone that will take the same crap wages as Erin, the same crap wage they were willing to pay a contract writer, and try to get them to come in and deal with the drama that is put out everyday.

The process of writing, even for someone who has done it for the majority of their adult life, is one that is complicated and cannot be disseminated down to a simple set of equations or processes. Erin and I took a class from a man who thought that you could teach people how to write a novel by creating a Poetics of Novel Writing (Screenplay writing) and then teach people how to break that down so far and so much that anyone can write a book (based off of a screenplay, actually). The outcome was that most of the class didn't get the idea of what it meant to write and they failed at the assignment. One reason people fail at writing is because they think, without practice and without dedicating large portions of their life to the process, they can just sit down and write something.

Writing doesn't work that way.

That is why actual acquisition of voice is essential to the writing process. That is why you have to struggle and write hundreds of thousands of words and fail repeatedly before you are going to have the voice necessary to actually write your book.

I have yet to read anything that either of the men she worked with that I, as a consumer, would be willing to purchase and want to read. They don't have the ability to sell me as a consumer, me as a reader, in their background or skills.

The thing that makes me the angriest in all of this is that they had to trump up reasons to fire Erin. One of the reasons that was used was her going home (to work) for an afternoon. The main employer sent his wife to talk to Erin. She, allegedly, spent an hour and a half waiting, canceled two appointments, and then called her husband to inform him of her experience. At no time was Erin informed that she had an appointment and, as a result, lost her job. This is not only dishonest on the part of her employer(s), but unethical to boot.

You see, I would come home at 11 o'clock at night and have Erin telling me that her boss insisted that she make an appointment to speak with him about his *damn* book. Only to have him cancel the appointment or answer the phone rather than speak to her; and then when Erin didn't take the entire time, get mad because Erin was wasting his time. This happened frequently. And then to have his wife, WHO IS NOT AN EMPLOYEE OF THE COMPANY, come to talk about the writing with Erin and not give her the courtesy of saying, "I am coming, so-and-so asked me to speak to you about the manuscript," is completely unprofessional, irresponsible, and unethical.

Moreover, the way Erin was treated has led me to believe that these men are not honest or ethical men. Sure, they know how to manipulate the law to side with them, they know that if they don't hire more than X employees certain laws don't apply to them; but at the same time, this does not a good employer or businessman or member of the LDS church make. Just because you know how to manipulate the law does not make you an honest person.

One of the largest frustrations over the past year that I've experienced is for these men to insist that Erin is better off owning her own home than to rent. And, in different economic circumstances I would agree with them. However, we are college students. We don't make a lot of money. And housing prices in Utah are insanely high. The cost of a house, if we were both employed and out of school, would still be too high (in Utah) for us to want to agree to enter the housing market. Moreover, and this was evident more than 18 months ago, the housing market is about to enter a very severe shift where house prices have to drop radically.

If Erin and I had the intent of staying in Utah beyond the undergrad (specifically my undergrad) than I could see the prospect of buying a house. Our landlord has told me that the best market for us, in the coming days, and I trust him on this, is houses that are about 2 years old in relatively new subdivisions. Granted, we are not in the market in Utah as we are both planning on moving elsewhere to live, graduate school, have a family, and etc., but to think that you buy and then rent as an option is not logical or viable.

I have watched friends and acquaintances fall into that pit and watch as they struggle to make sure that the rental is always okay, and that they actually have the money to do what they are trying to do. Owning, right now, is idiotic - for us.

And yet, her employer(s) also informed her that she should be a millionaire by the time she is 28 and if she is not she is a lazy individual.

I mean, what kind of people are we dealing with here? If Erin wanted to go and start a business I have no doubt that she couldn't accomplish that task, handily. And be successful. I am under no illusions about what my wife can and cannot do, and business is something she has a talent for, and something she has not desire to pursue. And you know what, I appreciate that as well.

Where Erin was hired, and employed, to edit a manuscript, she became a member of an office that was toxic and destructive to her self-esteem.

Where Erin could've had a great experience editing a manuscript, and by doing, determine whether or not it was something she actually wanted with her life, she was told (at one point) that if she failed these men, she would fail at publishing.

Where Erin could've gotten a good opinion of members of her own church who run businesses and are entrepreneurs, what she saw was the number one complaint of members of the LDS church dealing with other members of the LDS church. They are dishonest, deceitful, liars who are self-serving and will look out for themselves and step on the backs of those they can manipulate.

I wish Erin's experience with these men had been different. I wish that she would've had a good experience. I wish that when it was time for them to end their relationship with her they would've done so in a way that would've been beneficial to both parties. I wish that when they got to this point they would've been honest in their dealings.

However, I will never trust these men. I will never accept them as men of authority. I will never support them in their endeavors. And the best I can hope for, for them, is that they find whatever it is they think they are looking for; because, what they've shown this past weekend is that they a) don't know what they want; b) certainly don't know how to deal with people; and c) don't really know what they are trying to accomplish.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

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