Oct
17

Director of Despair.

I didn’t accomplish much of value during my first two days as Lead Editor. My new boss was out of the office with an allergic reaction, which would have been fine (for me—not for my boss, who would probably have preferred less itching), except that no one had told me what to do, and I could not for the life of me figure out what my new job was. Not an auspicious start to my almost-management career.
On the second day—forgetting that I was now in a smaller office—I pushed my chair back from my desk and crashed loudly into the wall behind me. It is quiet where I work. I don’t know that you can hear a pin drop, but you can certainly hear an ungainly Lead Editor hitting the wall hard enough to knock things off shelves. I assured my new teammates that I was unhurt, and they all went back to their red-penciling. But I like to think that the crash energized them a little, injected a soupcon of the unexpected into their humdrum workday. I call this utilizing unorthodox strategies for employee motivation.
Another highlight of that day was cleaning out the file cabinet from my old office, in the back of which I found several pieces of a disassembled pregnancy test, an ovulation predictor kit, and a bottle of Vitex. Vitex! Oh, that took me back. Back to the days when I thought a plant might cause me to ovulate. Note to the dozen or so Googlers who will find their way here tomorrow by searching for “vitex induce ovulation pregnancy”: See a doctor, you poor sap. {Also: there is no Easter Bunny.}

So yes, the first 48 hours of my new job were slow. And then, Friday afternoon, my boss returned, hivey but resolute, and gave me my marching orders. And I have been marching ever since.
The first thing I learned was that my job title is grossly misleading. A Lead Editor, as it turns out, does precious little editing. A more appropriate title might be Lead OF Editors. Or Emailer in Chief. Or Principal Coordinator of Anxiety and Frettage (not to be confused with frottage). I do not edit, because I have others to edit for me. My job is to see The Big Picture (always grim), track the progress of two hundred simultaneous projects, beat my head against the wall of our wheezing automated systems, and most importantly, worry. Luckily, this last is my specialty.
I don’t mean to brag, but I have always been a bit of a worry virtuoso, and I suppose I should have suspected that I would one day go Pro. It seems obvious, now, that I was scouted. Someone noticed me scurrying through the hall with my brow furrowed and felt the palpable waves of unease emanating from my hunched and trembling form. There, they said to themselves, is a girl who can whip herself into a frenzy over the slightest production delay! Who can turn a misplaced apostrophe into the fall of a publishing empire! Who can leap to dire conclusions in a single bound! Not since Twitches McGee has there been such a worrier!
So yes, I seem well suited to the position. I like the thin veneer of authority, and the constantly morphing job description. But I do miss page flags. And sleep.

Now, if only I could work out a comparable arrangement for my creative work, wherein others do the actual writing and I merely sit around and stew…

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |