So I got a first generation Nook, and loved it. Loved (past tense) because I sold it again. I’d easily take another one. They’re great. I’ll tell you why I sold it shortly, but here’s what I loved:

• It does EPUB – get books from the library, or right off Project Gutenberg – it’s a nice open-source format for e-books
• It handles PDFs very well. If you’re reading documents (even Gutenberg has some PDFs, like Silvanus’ book on Calculus – to preserve the equations), I found it superb for this.
• It pulls Google Books. So I’m reading a book that refers to another book, like something from Upton Sinclair, so I yank Sinclair’s book off of Google Books and begin reading it too. What a nice deal. That’s the only value I can see for 3G, actually – the ability to do that anywhere.
• It has WiFi,  and I didn’t bother buying a 3G. I never found the need for 3G. If I’m that far away from a wireless connection, I’ve already got the books I need – I spend more time reading than purchasing or ‘browsing’. 3G, to me, is a gimmick to ensure people can buy instantly from anywhere – it benefits the store, not me. And it’s only good for buying books – don’t think E-readers let you surf the web for free on 3G – they don’t. But WiFi has been handy – not because I’m going to web browse – it’s just not a good device for that – it’s not really built for it – just like the epaper phone we reviewed (Motorola F3) does text messages, but you really don’t want to. Bring a netbook if you want browsing – this is a single purpose device and hopefully will learn to be prouder of it. Wireless is strong. I can quickly enable airplane mode to keep battery use to a minimum. Then it automatically finds previously selected WIFI points in seconds. It’s really best for syncing down books I purchased online, and then being turned off again.
• The fonts are nice – I can get a nice big typeface in a nice, readable sans-serif, to go without glasses.
• It remembers my spots. I can jump out of a book, do other things, then press “current reading” and it takes me right back. I can switch books, read a while, then go back to the previous book, and it remembers my place in both, any, or all. It does this even after power off/on.
• The microSD card slot helped. I found the clip that holds the card in to be a bit dodgy. They should have done a better job there (they seem to think people will drop an SD card in once, and forget about it, not switch it out a lot – why that assumption?). They should have just made a simple slot with no clip, to load a card easily from the outside without having to take the back off . Goofy. Sony beats them in this area. But there’s a place for SD – that beats Kindle.
• It’s just damned handy as a device. This goes for any e-reader, one assumes, that isn’t overly annoying in some way (e.g. screen glare on non-ePaper models). If your primary goal is to get reading ASAP, there’s nothing wrong with the Nook.
• By the way, I don’t really understand why people insist on getting “covers” for these things anyway. It’s like putting a book cover on a book – it *comes* with a cover. The Nook isn’t showing it’s guts, so why? I hear people saying it’s to “protect” it. From what? I suppose if you get enough cushion, it’s good for dropping it, but if you’re carrying it in a briefcase or something, isn’t that cover enough? I want something air-light to hold, not to bulk it up with armor, and have to bend a cover around backwards. I’d like to see some drop-kick tests on the Nook and the Kindle. With the Motorola F3, another e-paper device, you could throw it out of a plane and just about not worry – no cover needed. On the other hand, I once knocked an entire laptop off a desk, by catching the charger cord with my leg, so I suppose.
• The stats – 16-bit or 8-bit, how many megahertz, how much RAM, just don’t matter much to me. I’m looking at one book at a time and so are you. So just because it’s what those guys at the kiosk think is important, doesn’t mean it is.

So why did I sell the Nook and what did I get in its place? Well, I sold it very reluctantly. Frankly, I loved it. But I wanted the latest generation Kindle (3) in graphite, and was willing to give up a couple of features to get it. I’m still waiting for it to arrive, though, so I’m reading a paperback  in the meantime. The Nook helped restore my love of books in general. Here’s why I went for Kindle 3:

• Compatibility doesn’t matter – Kindle will always be around. You could focus on the ostensibly superior compatibility of Sony or Nook (both do EPUB format e-books, and both take SD cards), over Kindle’s proprietary e-book format and no card slot. Kindle, however, is more like Apple. Instead of striving to be compatible, it sets a standard with which others will strive to be compatible. It’s a proprietary format, technically, but it’s just a similarly cross-platform MOBI format with a special header added, and Kindle also reads ordinary MOBI format (so you can easily download books from Project Gutenberg, for example) without any conversion. So where Nook and Sony reach for compatibility with traditional libraries (EPUB format), Kindle reaches for compatibility with online archives (like Gutenberg) with MOBI format, and leaves libraries alone for now – possibly a prescient move. Where Nook seems to beat Kindle for real is direct access to Google Books, but you can easily download the PDF of the same book from Google and put it on your Kindle, just like you have to with Sony. Yes, so Kindle also reads PDFs, just like all of the e-readers. Better, though, if you want your PDFs to flow, you can convert them (free or for a dime, depending on how easy you want it) to make them “flowable” for easier reading and resizable fonts. There are free, third-party applications that will simply convert a PDF to MOBI, though, which is how I prefer to do it, and then you can just drop it on the Kindle via USB or e-mail it to your Kindle if you prefer. While I think Kindle may eventually support EPUB, simply because it’s the standard that traditional libraries have chosen, I think they were wise to focus on online archives that are accessible to everyone first, and set their own standard – it’s not common for large collections of e-books to be available at libraries yet, and selections vary widely by locale. Early adopters have some, but not a huge collection. The reason is the libraries have to purchase e-books just like regular books and they check out just like regular books (two people can’t check out the same copy at the same time). The only difference is that the book automatically returns itself when your time is up (though I think there’s online renewal available on some library sites). I expect libraries will remain conservative (at least in terms of funding e-books) for some time yet. Funds are limited, paper books are still in wide circulation, yielding no need to acquire older books in e-format, and people are already treating e-books like mp3′s on iTunes – purchasing new books in droves and skipping the library shuffle, not that libraries aren’t valuable – I think one day, they’ll be rediscovered as the savers’ source of e-books. Meanwhile, though, Google Books will make all the difference in old books, by making as many available as possible, as soon as the copyright expires or the owners give consent. The full text ones are already downloadable as PDFs and therefore readable on any e-reader. Then there’s the force of precedent being set by Netflix – currently streaming a percentage of their DVDs over the net, but working to eliminate sending out DVDs altogether and make *all* movies streaming – no more environmental impact from making DVDs, shipping them, no more paper, etc. It may be hard to imagine that books, the last bastions of paper, which draw much of their self-definition from the medium itself (authors are aware that how something falls on a page affects the reader in ways that flowable text cannot), will go the same route, taking the remaining big magazines and newspapers with them. At that point, keep in mind, either Kindle will read EPUB, or everything will be available in MOBI/Kindle. Besides, how long are you going to keep your device? You could wait years for the compatibility issue to be resolved, while the rest of us are reading contentedly – we’ll all be getting later model e-readers years from now anyway. 5-years from now, you’ll be using a different one than the one you purchase today, and the old one will have a simple hack that opens it up to freeware you can install to read anything, if you just like the old device. It’s not like in the days of VHS/Betamax where machines still costed more than $1000 several years later, and content from one wouldn’t physically fit the other – digital changes things. These things work themselves out in mere seasons, now. Amazon even gave away Kindles for a while – the device isn’t the point – the content is. Sorry to your Blueray guys, but regular DVDs will be around for ages and ages, and everything will play them. Worried about your library being stuck in the wrong format? No, there will always be both EPUB and MOBI readers, and you’ll be able to get them on any device. Your books are safe, at least for your lifetime, and then there will be a gazillion converters that will batch-convert them to whatever is the latest format, and  makers of that new device will give you the utility free to motivate you “upgrading”. You needn’t fear. That worry is like saying PDFs aren’t a safe way to keep your documents, because of Kindle’s format, or Google Docs, or Word. Besides, converters for all these formats abound – it just isn’t a big deal, anymore – the early days of computers were different – nothing reads Wordstar, anymore, but this isn’t like that. Read now, or wait until everyone’s in the pool. I’d rather be reading.
• While I like the Google Android OS on the Nook, because I love Google, and it has already been widely hacked (jailbroken) to open it up to run nearly any Android applications, also spawning a custom-Nook version of many Android apps to make user experience even better, Android actually slows the device down a bit – e-readers just don’t (currently) have the resources to run Android full tilt. Notably, page turns are a bit slower on the Nook. I really didn’t find that much of a problem – a minute annoyance. I developed a timing for turning pages as I read the last sentence or two on a page. But Kindle’s OS is proprietary, if faster. A lot of us want Kindle to open their operating system so we can install our own software. First thing I’d install is an EPUB reader, of course, so I can read both major formats as well as PDF, then a Twitter client. In its defense, though, Amazon has jumped out there to offer sharing passages in social media like Twitter and Facebook. Remember, the device isn’t the point. It hasn’t been, since the PC got more powerful, even fully bloated with poor maintenance and the garbage most users allow on their machines. Current PCs are more powerful than the average user can keep up with or bog down, assuming the OS is clean – Windows 7 sure has some hiccups in this department. We’re not counting gamers here – they will always push for faster everything. But business users only need so much, after which it’s just posturing. Kick the tires, ask what brand it is (like that matters anymore), throw out some words like Pentium and “quad core”, refer to the newest (=best?) version of something – like Word 2013 – sure, there will be one. But it doesn’t matter. The guy with Windows 2000 and Word 2000 is typing out the same document as the guy with Windows 7 and Office 2010 (and the former’s document is readable by more people in more places). Since the device isn’t the point anymore, it’s just what you do with it (yep, size no longer matters – we’re all huge), what a lot of us really want is for Amazon to separate the OS, the software, and the device (like Google has done with Google Docs), by simply opening up their operating system. I think the situation will evolve, as it did for Apple/Mac (there was a time,  you couldn’t run anything on an Apple that didn’t come from Apple, and they’d sue you if you tried). Kindle will learn from the history, and do it better and, before long, you’ll have options, of some kind, on Kindle. But maybe (and this is heresy to the rest of the PC crowd, unless they’re running Linux instead of Windows, which incidentally comes from the same UNIX parentage as the Mac OS) – maybe having a completely open system is not the only way to drive development as far and fast as possible. Linux is really doing well, especially since Ubuntu became a game changer – it’s almost, almost there – so close – but Apple can just jump up and do things, and not wait for a guy in his garage to build a better WIFI or sound driver. Maybe Kindle keeping it partly closed (and you can read into this an argument for social democracy over pure laissez-faire if you want to), will take us farther, in better time, than just saying “here’s another device, go ahead and create stuff for it” like you do with a PC and a Linux install. Maybe the monopoly with a gazillion garage software writers can’t push a thing as far or fast as a company that says, no we’ll limit access, but we’ll strive to be better than the competition, not bribe our way to hegemony. Maybe, in fact, letting it be the uber-hackers, the guys that break the thing apart anyway, restrictions be damned, and build anyway, face some challenges to do so, will result in better innovation than just tossing the key up in the air, like AOL did when it let all its users out onto the net in 1994 and SPAM was the greatest resulting innovation, among other things. It’s hard to say if Kindle staying more closed is better – I think they have to open some – but if they manage to be Apple-smart while being Intel-smart on price break point, I think they’ll trounce everything. And what matters here is not what’s rated most highly by someone else (you have your own mind, don’t you), or who sells more (Chevy sells more than Mazda, Subaru, and Mini, but it’s not a better-built car), but who drives innovation farther and faster. Don’t be a herd person who looks for sales numbers to decide what to buy – look at what it means, and buy vision, or you’ll end up with another borg device in your hand some day, trying to figure out how to update your virus signatures.
• The Amazon store is unparalleled. They are the original online big box store, but they don’t really act like a big box. They’ve got heart. They’re more like Costco than Walmart. Frankly, there’s just nothing like Amazon – they’re a trend-setter, not follower. And I think the quality of the online store is at least as important as the quality of the device. B&N or Borders or Sony won’t ruin your day with their e-store, but amazon will make your year. Anything major, from toaster to t-shirt, I buy from amazon, unless I’m getting it used, closeout, or mom and pop (E-bay, Etsy, and I really like morethanalive.com). User experience is subjective, as is what you value about a device or the software that runs on it, but I think they’ve got the right idea with the amazon.com aesthetic. They’ve picked up on the social media vibe earlier than most, too, which is smart.
• Aesthetics of the device itself is something, however, that Apple brought to technology devices in a big way, and Kindle is keeping the tone. Apple kicks a substantial share of Microsoft’s easily found butt for many reasons, all of which amount to stubbornness, obtuseness, pride, and lack of imagination on the part of Microsoft, but one of the ways that”s easiest to spot is the Apple aesthetic, feeling like something you’d hold on the Starship Enterprise, versus the Borg-like quality of a PC – especially infected with (er… installed, that’s the word we want – with Windows installed). I benefit, personally, from using a PC, because on a budget, you can run down the street with my box, and I’ll have built another one by the time the Doberman is starting on your other arm. I’ve got parts in the closet, or I can just rip them out of any machine. Borg. “We are compatible, and you *will* be assimilated.” Yeah, but the Borg ain’t exactly the girl you want to take to the prom. It’s a geek chick who’s been in a wreck and got Robocopped. She’ll bring in your mail, but she kind of gets twitchy and blue-screens once in a while. No, Microsoft has a purely cerebral aesthetic, an authoritarian one, and of course emphasizes compatibility (she ‘gets around’ in other words, and has the viruses to prove it) and she’s not immune to everyone in their garage throwing together a spare program like something out of Johnny Mnemonic or a really bad demo tape, but that’s because they enslaved Intel, and bilked most of the creative types out of their copyrights, and so on. And they still managed to suck – now that takes doing – they can’t even *steal* greatness. OK, moving on, PC users, we all know it sucks and we use it anyway. Google is the Gandalf galloping over the crest of the hill at first light to kick some Orc ass out in Redmond (to you non-Geeks, that means Google is good, Microsoft is bad). Google made the document virtual. It made everything ‘web’, separating more than ever the document from the device – it made documents work on anything. Google and Amazon are doing more to beat the crap out of the Microsoft model than anyone. Ubuntu, Netflix, and some others are putting up a good show, too. And the result is, we expect a damned good online experience with our devices, and the devices themselves are therefore less important, so then we aren’t willing to put up with klunky Borg guts anymore – we want to hold something that’s a bit Bauhaus, a bit Frank Lloyd Wright, a bit John Ruskin and William Morris. We want a little elegance and simplicity and *pleasure* in how a device looks and feels. Apple and Amazon are saying that design is important, design shouldn’t suck, design is aesthetic – they’re saying that users of devices aren’t extensions of those devices – users of devices are whole people – devices don’t just exist in the mind or the specifications, they exist in the eye and the hand and in our space – the device augments me, not the other way around. Not top-down, adjust for us – the all-wise makers of your OS, and if you get stuck just look up common fixes for “ERROR_LOG_APPENDED_FLUSH_FAILED 6647 (0x19F7)” or click here to report the error to those diligent researchers in Redmond that get another laugh every time the bell dings over Gates’ desk that means some poor user somewhere hollered from one tin can to another across some wax string and thinks the phone company is listening and will get right on that connection problem – that’s not how we want to live. We want beauty in our technology. I think Kindle is second only to Mac in delivering it. The Mac’s cube computer is in a major museum, I’d like to see the Kindle go next.
• The store is dead. At least, as originally envisioned, it is. Don’t get me wrong – the shop isn’t dead, just the store is. Blockbuster knows it. They’re peeing themselves and will be twitching their last soon – the disease is fatal. Barnes and Noble is the book version of Blockbuster. Yes, as a big box store, if you set aside a love for mom and pop shops, or you live in one of those sprawling roadside suburbs and small towns that have sold your small businesses into subjection just so you can get a Super-Walmart and a drive-through Starbucks (tithes and offerings, baby – but to whose god?), it’s not the most horrible place on earth. I won’t go there, as long as mom and pop are still open, but at least, if I do, I’m not dodging diapers in the parking lot, or listening to someone on a cell phone in line at the counter talk about how she hit her man with a hammer last night, oh girl, or watching some 30-year old father in hip hop baggies scrape his tattoo sores and piercings with his kid in the other arm. Walmart – it would be theatre, if so many people weren’t really like that – as it is, it’s just freaking scary like a George Romero film – “they’re coming to eat you, Margaret”. Anyway, I do think it’s a very exciting feature, in theory, that you can take your Nook into any Barnes and Noble and read ANY e-book they have for an hour. I like the social opportunities that makes me envision – a group of us deciding to sample a book a week and talk about it – how fun. But, in practice, B&N isn’t a very social place. Yeah, you get the twenty-something date crowd, and students huddled over their standardized texts, and the line of fat kids with parents buying them the Venti frap with extra syrup, extra caffeine, extra whip, but it’s not particularly social – not like Powells in Portland, where a feature like 1hr previews would kick ass. And also, you can download a sample of any e-book online anyway. So why go to the store to get it? They’re busy building Nook kiosks in there that promise to let you plug in and download books, but you can download books from anywhere. What they really are is little sales desks, like you find in an AT&T store, trying to sell you Nooks and Nook accessories. But again, just buy them online, if you want them. Use your Nook to buy your Nook accessories – it’s got a crude web browser. The atmosphere is starting to sound even less social: stop in to your  local AT&T cell phone joint – does it make you want to spread out and chat about philosophy with your friends over over-roasted espresso? It makes me feel like I’ve been sent to Hell, and all my minutes there roll over. Stores are dead. Amazon, Netflix – these guys get it. And Google should be getting the credit for driving the nail in the coffin of ‘stores’, who with Google Docs made documents share-able, social, collaborative entities on the internet (leading to video and e-books – think Youtube then Netflix, Google Books then Amazon – OK, so Google bought Youtube and Writely, the original Google Docs, but they made a mountain out of the vibe), instead of the arcane and not-very-human model of documents as device-possessions that you store, backup, and timeout while sending as attachments (Microsoft’s rubric of compatible but not collaborative, ubiquitous but not social, send-able and control-oriented but not share-able and cooperative) . Give me a store, and I’d rather have a search engine. Give me a shop, OK, then I’ll go sit down and take along my device that does Kindle, Netflix, and Google/Youtube/Google Docs, and I’ll have that espresso, if you make it with better beans and don’t bombard me with “kiosks”. Kiss your kiosks goodbye – they’re the pulpits of an outdated religion pandering for loose change in the back of the pews  – even the Geeks are starting to follow the crowd (they always follow) – the crowd that strangely, in it’s completely disinterested self-interest, has sense enough to recognize the amenities of the Enterprise Lounge fits better than the Borg charging station – if you’re still human anyway – that is, if the crowd doesn’t spend all its time listening to geeks. That’s the point, technology is normal now. And that too is killing the store. When’s the last time you walked into a store and bought a song in mp3 format? Have you ever?

So look, I think the Nook is a good purchase, and a great device, for years to come. I’ve no qualms with purchasing another one, and owning it, and using it, and reading with it. If you’re buying it to read, then buy it and read, and don’t worry about the other stuff. It’s likely that I won’t have my Kindle3 in five years and you won’t have your Nook either. The technology you use now is either optimum, or you need to optimize it, if you can. But for me, I made primarily a philosophical choice. It’s the same reason I bought a very small car. I’m trading a little comfort, and my payments are more than the gas on the one I traded in, but I was also buying an outlook on life. I guess I’m kind of a philosophical consumer. Philosophy isn’t enough of a reason for most people, I think, to care whether it’s a Nook or a Kindle on which they’re reading their Jane Austen or the latest bestseller. In terms of every day use, you won’t notice or care. I’m just describing my reasons, what I think is happening to the industry, and why I think beauty and non-geeky reasons are great reasons to make your own choice of device.

When my coffee shop closes, if it’s late, and I still want to work, I’ve been going to Borders. It’s a good place to buy notebooks and drink some passable coffee (if you avoid the “cold brewed” concoction that often sits in a pitcher for days, which they water down in your glass because it’s concentrated). There are enough electrical outlets, and they’re open ’til 11.

There are often the usual annoyances – the bitchy, older small businessman broadcasting his toughness and independence (vestige of the John Wayne era) for all to hear: “I told her that if she was going to… and if he does that, I’ll tell him…”, the gaggle of reading group types making sure they set up right in the center, so we all can benefit from the sharing (and cackling), the single guy who discovered religion or politics just yesterday and is lecturing the tolerating girlfriend about it (pro or con) with the passion of a zealot and the conviction of a sage, or just mix and match – put the single guy on the phone, and give the older one the political megaphone, and make the gaggle a screaming child who says he’s in charge and the parent that let’s him make sure we all know it. Add in the weird musical selections over the PA – one evening some guy is singing a gospel “thank you, Jesus” and the next it’s a bluesy “I’m burning in Hell”. I kid you not, those were the two most recent times I went. But in some ways, it’s still tolerable with a good set of earplugs.

They’re serious about running you out at 11pm. That sucks, but I get it – it’s a labor cost thing. So why the wall of shame?

Seattle’s Best plays a big role. Borders used to have good coffee – coffee good enough to be missed. Even in Seattle, no one drinks Seattle’s Best. But it’s really the policies of the cafe that suck. Look in the forums for the guy that ordered no ice and they filled his glass half full, because that’s the same amount of liquid. Wow. It’s not every cafe, but it’s not none of them, either. Tonight I ordered an espresso, and it was $1.80. I asked if it had gone up, and they said they have to charge for a small drink. In the past, they could charge what they charge just for a shot (because that’s what I ordered). Not anymore – “it’s corporate”, the gal explains. That’s an interesting premise – file that away. So a double shot is $1.95, if that gives you an idea (is that a large drink?). But yep, it’s even decanted as a small drink – no espresso cup – they put it in a small drink cup, way down at the bottom. Imagine – an espresso that’ll take a lid. If it’s a small, hot drink, though, shouldn’t it work the same way as the guy w. the ice? Fill it up, or you owe me the rest. I didn’t make a point of this at the counter, but it only seems fair.

The real straw came when they killed the internet at a few minutes before 11:00. I had just written a lot of crucial material, and hitting save on my cloud document no longer worked. No warning – just bam, you’re screwed. When I asked a passing clerk about it, he said they shut down the internet automatically at 11:00. When I pointed out that it’s not 11:00 yet, he held his hands wide and said there’s nothing he can do about it. Wow again. If I had just been told that the most valuable objects possible in the world (ideas written down) – at least that valuable to someone – were hanging in limbo, and an evening’s work (how’s that for value?) was getting lost because someone decided to to set the wifi to trip off before closing time, I’d go back and flip the switch so the file could be saved. Yes, it’s that easy. But no, there’s nothing he can do.

So I go to the manager on duty, and tell her I really can’t regard the place as a cool venue anymore. I tell her about the ice, the espresso, and the internet, and how it has made me reticent to consider them an acceptable place to return even with the notebooks, the coffee, and the many outlets. It’s that serious to me – I’m losing an evening’s work. Wow a third time: what ensues is a list of reasons why I’m wrong, and how much trouble it is that I am raising these concerns. She says everyone has a fill line on their cups – that’s just how every coffee shop does it – I just don’t understand how iced coffee drinks work, because (she tells me) Borders didn’t have iced coffee before Seattle’s Best. They did, actually, and it was excellent. I tell her I just came from a coffee shop, one of many I patronize, and they’re happy to omit ice on a cold drink. “That’s an independent coffee shop,” she says. “This is corporate”. Again that premise. Still interesting.

The internet she blames on the ISP – they “have no control over Verizon outages”. I tell her what the clerk says about the automatic cutoff, so she says she’ll go back and flip the wifi back on long enough for me to save my file (so it’s not Verizon, after all). But great – I might just change my mind about the place – that’s what I’m looking for – simple fix, and I’m out of their hair. But no, she can’t leave it at that. She launches into telling me that I should have come to her sooner. So I’m wrong again. Wrong about ice, wrong about the internet, wrong about not getting to her sooner (it’s 11:01pm – I discovered the dead internet at 10:58 as I was saving the file to go home – I tell her this, she still says I should have come immediately). She explains they cut off the internet because some people like to try to stay until 11:15. Imagine, customers who like the place so much, they try to stay there. In fact, she tells me, they’re closed now, and they’re trying to leave. So, I can save my file, but I should acknowledge that the system really makes sense as it is. In the end, I tell her the list of reasons why I’m inconveniencing her, don’t understand how things work, and am complaining in the wrong way, is growing really long.

I am indeed an inconvenience, she says – she’s trying to go home, and that I’m making her evening difficult. I can rectify that, of course, as I see what I really have to pay for my file is capitulation – I have to accept cubicle wisdom – things are what they are because they’re corporate and corporate is immune from correction – I tell her not to bother with flipping the wifi – I’m on my way to another wifi connection to save that file. She still can’t let it go – she needs to believe – she needs *me* to believe. She gets in a few parting shots that I won’t bore you further with (more things I’m doing wrong and should do better, more that I don’t grasp – it’s corporate, after all, more of how my complaining procedure is incorrect). At the door, I ask who were supervisor is, and she wonders why I’d want to trouble him with these things (I’m so much trouble), and finish up a Friday evening with a complaint. My evening isn’t finished, I assure her (for one thing, I’ve got work to go try and save – good thing I had that small drink… er… espresso).

So, wall of shame. And not because I want to get limp revenge on Borders. And I certainly don’t want to get individual people there in trouble, which is why I’m not naming them, and not actually going to that manager – corporate stores like this don’t learn or create learning for others – they punish people when you complain, instead of making them better. Those complaints are too much of an inconvenience, after all. It’s really just futile unless you’re trying to hurt someone for whom this is all there is in the world of work (like kicking a cripple), or unless it’s really worth the price of admission to go that far to analyze and understand how people in that kind of work milieu think.

That’s the biggest shame – that these folks are trained to regard consumer unhappiness as burdensome, a thing to be refuted and argued against rather than repaired with thinking outside the nametag – the need to defend and prop up corporate-ish-ness and make sure the customer knows he’s wrong – that “corporate” simply can’t be wrong in the same way – it’s above the person – it’s a self-justifying mechanism – a thing is so, and is rightly so, because “it’s corporate” – “there’s nothing we can do”.

I might indeed be wrong, I might be. The guy w. the half full cup might be wrong. But how would they know? Are we wrong just because they want to do things a certain way and our asking for it to be different is an inconvenience? What’s troubling is that they’re right about the independent vs. corporate thing, which they all seem to have down, including the guy that says “there’s nothing I can do” (translation: I have no empowerment in my job – I exist in a world of absolutes that cannot be changed). The gal that explains the price gouge: “it’s corporate” (pricing isn’t about rationally sensible to you, it’s about what works for us). And their manager, finally: “that’s an independent store, we’re corporate” (She’s right, of course – the independent person, right down to the lowly part time counter clerk, at any independent coffee shop I’ve patronized in the last 15 years would have imagined what it’s like to be in a customer’s shoes and would have said “That sucks to lose an important file, here let me flip the wifi if all you need is to hit the save button. Then we’ll get you on your way.”).  It would have been shameful for an employee at any independent coffee shop to think, live with, let alone say the words “there’s nothing I can do”. They just don’t want to work in a place like that – it’s why they’re not at Blockbuster.

The internet thing is stupid, sure – it’s like turning off the lights while someone is still reading 5-minutes before closing, or locking the bathroom so they can’t let out they’re espresso 5-minutes before they get on the road. It’s just dumb. 11:00 should not mean 10:55. Close 5-minutes earlier, if you want. If I know that’s coming, I’ll shut down then. Did I mention that there were several announcements over the P.A. system to the effect that the store closes at 11:00? Nothing said, “but at 10:55, we turn out the lights!” Spooky, but kind of fun if you just announce it. But come on, it’s more like a restaurant than the post office.

The coffee thing, well you can always work around stuff like that in a corporate store – they’re never quite clever enough to prevent all frugality (which seems to be the real moral crime in one of those places). You just learn to do things like order a double espresso, add twice as much half and half and some honey, and then ask them to fill your “small drink” cup with ice (ice is free, isn’t it?), after which you lid it and shake. I feel like Jack Nicholson trying to order a sandwich in Five Easy Pieces. “What do you mean I can’t get toast, you have sandwiches, you have bread don’t you?”

But the whole, ‘we’ll flip the switch rather than lost you, but you complained in the wrong way, and we’re not really wrong, you’re wrong – about everything, and we hate getting feedback like this – we only want positive feedback – because we’re a corporate store’ – all the way out the door – that’s really the “corporate” mentality writ large – and that’s almost worth a nights work to write off. There’s only one right kind of feedback in a corporate store, because there’s only one reason for things: “we’re corporate” – and that’s why I don’t complain to the GM – because there’s only one response in a setting like that – the patronizing “sorry you had a bad experience, that shouldn’t have happened” and then someone gets punished – not for a rational reason – they don’t get trained – they get punished – for one cause – “it’s corporate”. But it doesn’t change.

Sure I always knew that Borders was corporate. And yeah, I’m picky and all, and yeah – for those of you who avoid conflict like gonorrhea – I could have just let it go or adapted. But I *want* to interact with the world of other people’s work, too – even big box work. I *want* to engage it, even if it’s an unwinnable cause, because it fuels my own understanding of work. I suppose the first step to breaking free is understanding there’s a problem. Sure, you’ve gotta get beyond that, but it’s never really good to lose touch with the problem. As a colleague of mine says, “We’ll watch them, we’ll learn from them, and we won’t run our businesses the way they do.” I always smile and nod and say, “And that’s why we’ll outdo them with fewer resources. That’s why we’ll succeed where they fail.” So I admit, I’m not exactly the quiet type who just sinks his chin and goes off looking at his feet. Especially not after abiding by the rules, and still being unable to save a night’s work. That’s raping me, in my book. But it does provide an opportunity (I’ve got to get something out of it) to think about what those two pregnant words (“it’s corporate”) mean to people. What is it they think they are saying? I don’t know if you caught it, but they also think that my Friday ends when their store’s Friday ends. At 10:55. What does that say about the lens a corporate store uses to understand its clientelle?

1. Job boards are like singles bars – some people never keep that promised date. Ever realize that it was just a tease, that he or she is never going to call, or return your call? It’s amazing how many applications are filled out and quickly responded to, only to find that the applicant doesn’t really want the job after all. Why’d they bother? you might ask. Exactly – that fake phone number handed out in the hotel’s evening lounge might have been just to be polite, but hanging out verifiable contact information and then treating the contact like a call from a bill collector is just weird. Still, if Twitter has taught us anything, it’s that large numbers of people will do the weird thing, and the savvy – the businesses that thrive will figure out why, and respond to it. Personally, I think there needs to be a “no, I’m serious, I really want to have your children” feature on online job applications – something that specifically motivates people NOT to just check the box to be thorough. Are there any job boards that charge you for putting in an application? What about peer review – the same kind of effect you get from mistreating bidders and sellers on Ebay – a series of questions and answers after the engagement for both parties – yes, this employer contacted me in a timely manner (hold those corporations accountable for collecting resumes for months before they actually intend to hire) and indeed, this applicant responded to our response. You could even automate response tracking, so there is no chance of missed connections. But as things are, it’s like people who google for hair stylists. My wife is a hair stylist, and half the people that find her on Google and make an appointment don’t show, don’t call, and don’t return a call asking if they’re running late. Crass, trash people, in my book – worthless slobs who deserve to have their time disrespected by waiting with lousy magazines in Supercuts. But job applicants… you’d think… nope. Same people. The exact same people. Hi, I’d like to work for your company, I’ll be right back (and you never hear from them again). The truth is that an overwhelming number of job seekers in the US believe, even in a down job market with significant unemployment, that jobs will always be limitless – that you can burn contacts, blow off appointments, and still be in pretty good shape when you go looking again. Jobs, in the US, are effectively commoditized. So how do we adjust? I think the only answer, until electronic mechanisms for tracking get better, is to not take applications seriously until they show up at an initial screening. Most office places do that with a phone call anyway, these days. If you don’t make the screening appointment, it’s like you never applied. We give you one freebie – the application is tease – the screening is put up or get lost time.

2.  A lot of people are trolling the bottom, pitching anything that moves. Blanket cut and paste responses from India (yes, most of them are from India) “Hello, I’m confident that I can do any task if you select me for your position.” Not reading the posting (it says apply on the website, and they e-mail you an attached resume). The shotgun approach (getting the same resume that every posting got today).You can’t really avoid this, of course, but I think the answer is the same as for people that read the posting and apply correctly, and then vanish. Except that instead of screening (do you really want to risk that people who clone their efforts for everyone will actually move forward with an application?), you do pre-screening. Make every applicant do something unique, like sum up the position you’ve outlined – a kind of employment CAPTCHA (the place on most forms where you type in the letters/numbers you see to make sure you’re not a spammer).

3. Conventionality limits vision – the paradox of the jaded. Dinner and a movie? You have nice hair. That just doesn’t work for us. Our particular posting is for a unique kind of working arrangement, but we’re open to almost any position in any industry. The job boards, though, are rife with scams and gimmicks – attempts to rope people into sales gigs they won’t like, “business opportunities”, recruiters, and resume services aimed at separating out of work people from their last savings. Job seekers are understandably reticent to respond to anything new. The drawback of being jaded, of course, is that opportunities are missed. There’s no substitute for actually understanding what you’re rejecting or pursuing, but it’s easier to stay in the middle of the aisle and go down the well plowed path. In short, most job seekers aren’t bulls, ready to find new pastures – they’re cows who won’t do it until the pastures aren’t new – until the bull does it, and they seem him do it. This is good for bulls – they get to fill their bellies with the best, first – bulls always do that – they’re never scrounging, because they’re constantly exploring. So that’s great for employers if we’re targeting bulls – differentiate ourselves properly from the scam artists, and give them the things bulls need to hear (like we’re not going to charge you anything or pitch you – call us and we’ll explain – ditch us if you don’t like it). If you want the cows, they’ll eventually follow the bulls anyway. If you want the cows now, though, at the start, you have to come up with creative ways to get the message across right when they encounter that posting. A link to a Youtube video can do wonders. We did webinars, and they were great, but going forward I see the instantaneous value of videos being the first point of contact – the webinar is for those who want to go forward after that. Most job boards haven’t wised up yet to letting you embed videos in a posting.

4. Get beyond job boards alone. The singles bar may be part of the repertoire, but the search pattern has to be wider. Along these lines, job boards, on the whole, haven’t caught on to a lot of things. One marked us as spam right away – why? We didn’t fit a pattern they understood. That was Ebay’s jobs. You’re not conventional? End of discussion. Job posting options are inflexible, as well. There’s no way to list something like our openings – any job, any industry – nope, you’re required to pick one (accountant, project manager, IT professional). Sure, there’s often an ‘other’, but that gets you slotted into the oblivion that people check last. Why isn’t there a category like “any/all” – because it doesn’t account for how most people are working these days. Likewise, there’s often a selection of traditional employer, recruiter, staffing agency – but what if you’re none of these? A simple fill-in-the-blank option would correct these deficiencies in any pulldown. This seems to mean that, to really get sufficient airplay to attract job seekers, unconventional employers still need their own job openings page (as antiquated as that setup is), coupled with effective use of other media, including social media and PR to get their message out.

5. Unconventional seekers ARE reading between the lines. Be genuine and exceptional, and you’ll attract genuine and exceptional people. Despite all of the above problems, people get through, genuine people seeking genuine work relationships. What was interesting to me was not so much the number of false positives, nor even the size of the response (we’d like a lot more – or at least more that at least keep up the back and forth from application to interview request), but it’s that the ones that did get through were exactly the kind of people we were seeking – meaning we did it, basically, right. We gave the correct impression, said the correct things, and got a response from the correct audience. And out of those who responded, we learned that there are a lot of unconventional job seekers, in unconventional positions, who are interested in working outside the lines. Some want flexible work situations – in terms of hours. Some want a different pay arrangement. Some want to moonlight. Some want a different way to work in their current capacity. And these folks are looking, listening, and responding precisely to people like us who are trying to connect with them. I should say, incidentally, that I am one of the founders of Free Agent Source, and that’s the company seeking people interested in contract work in any field, any industry – or to adjust their work relationship, or their employment offerings (for companies), to reap the benefits of contract positions.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be using job boards again, and we’ll continue using the other media sources that work for us, especially as we  grow. In the meantime, it’s the processes of first contact, screening, and next steps that need to be refined. As job boards get smarter, which I hope our company will help inspire, we’ll get more mileage out of them. In the meantime, we adjust. The perfect match(es) are out there.

The clothing company, Anvil, offers lines of organic clothing that perform a similar function. They reduce the impact of the our consumption upon the world, transforming it in way that minimizes depletion of energy. The result is clothing of extraordinary workmanship that carries in it the symbolism of the company’s name – the anvil.

I recently bought some organic cotton t-shirts from Anvil. I love these shirts. One of them seemed to be off a bit, so I wrote the company. They immediately offered to send me another shirt. In short, the company is not only doing good in the world, it’s doing right by its customers.

So we think they’re good people to do business with – you can strike a stylish pose by purchasing Anvil Organic Cotton T-shirts on [amazon.com].

Someone said, ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’. That’s my life. But my life is also photocopying years’ old piles of napkins and post-its at staples, so I can scan them in, or pulling out less portable but dirt cheap notebooks, like the bound composition books that go for a dollar or less, ripping pages out, and scanning those. Those are great for studying Greek. They’re great for pursuing a subject. Not for what I need them for right now. Filofax (or Daytimer)? I switched off of that when I became so online with my business and writing that my google calendar is my daily friend. My office is my home, and I work in the virtual world, so I’m not carrying my Filofax to meetings anymore. I’d rather carry a netbook, and use many different kinds of online documents for work – calendar, docs, spreadsheets, e-mail, etc. And then there’s social media. A filofax isn’t social – it doesn’t collaborate. You have to offload it into something else to do that.

When I look at a moleskine, the miser in me says ‘too expensive, decadent, not sustainable’. But then I haven’t looked for knock offs. The moleskine is flexible in its cover. That’s huge. You get a kind of subtle portability off of a soft, flexible cover that doesn’t come from a hardback lined blank book, which is cheaper. The ribbon marker is hugely important. You might think it wouldn’t be, but it just is. The size is crazy important. The smallest bit too big, and it’s not going with you just when you need it. The smallest bit too small, and you won’t use it. Moleskine size variations are wonderful. It’s not that you might not find a blackberry useful, for instance, but it’s not useful for every kind of writing activity. The moleskine is very netbook like, as a paper object. It says ‘write in me’, not ‘play games on me, set me to vibrate, play with me on a subway’. Also, I could throw 10 moleskines into a manila envelope if I needed to move them – a moleskine doesn’t beg to be offloaded/scanned – it’s made to keep a record of your thoughts in between its covers and nowhere else. The kind of thoughts that either become something else in a different venue (like a book or blog) or aren’t meant to be shared – only used.

And if it’s used for what it’s designed for, it won’t be offloaded in that way. It’s designed for hashing up ideas that will take a different form elsewhere – at least that’s my take on it. You write out that bit of insight that must go into a book, but it’s not the book. So you don’t have to rip out the pages, and it’s actually kind of nice to think you could go back to your notes somewhere, and peruse or research them. Because it’s not a napkin or back of a business card or sheet of paper in my leather covered folio lined pad cover, it doesn’t pressure you to do something with it immediately, or threaten to pile up and become a fortress you have to demolish. It never becomes clutter – and filling it doesn’t make it an idea brick – something that you never really revisit that just takes up space in a file cabinet.

A moleskine says fill me, I can save these ideas for you as long as you like. I’ll be here. You might even enjoy flipping through me and reading me, even before you’re ready to use some of them. It’s OK, you can open up. Tell me. I’m a moleskine.

So I’m looking at this as a piece of technology, and I want it. B&N has them when I walk into the store, which is where I’m absorbing this out of the corner of my eye, not looking directly at them. But I need what they can do, and don’t have an alternative. I need a place to form ideas – ideas that won’t form unless I’m writing them in order to form them. It’s not a diary or a journal – it’s an idea clarifier and extractor.

Thing is – no matter how much you wish it, you just don’t always have an electronic device, and an idea won’t always come to you when you can use the device, and the idea won’t always stick around while you turn on and log in to the device, or while you’re fiddling with it. And then, importanly, where is the idea? It’s a file among many files, it might sit as an attachment among e-mails about your vacation or your dog or your day at the office. It doesn’t have a context that gives it the life of an idea. It needs to sit among other ideas in an idea context. It needs to live in a place that you visit to get your ideas back, review think, think about them and have more, and not just become a digitized, numbered file.

There’s something else. Nothing reads like a paper book. When I want to cram a bucket load of knowledge into me, I don’t want to use PDFs. I don’t want to scroll. There’s something about the rapidity and flexibility with which you can scan a physical page, and flip back and forth, mark something, etc. that no device, no device, can match. There’s something that tactile touch against the edges of paper won’t approach until someone loads up a truly leather-like flexible netbook-like cover with 250 individual e-paper pages (until the monitor is a series of paper thin physical windows), and gives you a stylus, and adds a ribbon marker. There’s something about the tactile communication with a book that can’t be improved upon, I think, or won’t be for a very long time. And this is coming from someone who loves his e-books, has an e-book reader (Nook), uses a netbook, and likes technology.

In the same way, for writing, for getting down an idea extremely fast, stream of consciousness, even a tablet and stylus can’t match paper of exactly the right size, width, situated in relation with other paper in a cover. Again – a moleskine. Handwriting recognition is really cool, but no matter how fast it gets, it’s not the same. Even with virtual lines on the virtual page, texture and tactile relationships to paper are so innately human, so grounded in the physical universe, that I think it’s safe to say that some ideas beg to be let onto paper, to dance at the end of a flowing, liquid, ink-pen, to receive pressure as part of their mental construction, so that the flow out of the ink actually helps shape the idea, to receive tactile inflection – gesture, before they’ll allow themselves to be dressed up for the digitized ball. I think that even the act of holding a pen in hand changes and contributes to the type and character and subtle dimensions of thoughts we have, in a way that’s perhaps not better than, but certainly different than hovering over a keyboard. I think one way with touching my chin and cheek in a thinker’s gesture, and another way when I’m typing – I just do – the inflection is different enough to change what I’ll say and how I’ll say it. I point this out as someone with a militantly paperless office who sees his computers as an extension of himself. Moleskine.

I’m looking at [alternatives] now to see if anything is more affordable, but if I have to get them off amazon.com at $10/each, that’s what I’ll do. A bundle of 5 will last a while. Alternatives would have to meet the subtle criteria for integrity (internal consistency), aesthetic feng shui, and the elements of tactile genius that make up a moleskine. Someone with a sense of what I’m talking about will have to have made them, or else just done a good job of copying. But I see genuine moleskines in my future, too. There’s no substitute for being able to grab another one of the shelf and keep going.

But for half the world’s population, traditions can be more complicated (or ‘rich’ if you prefer) than just one day off a week. There’s a need for time, space, differences of appearance, diet, habit, and there are other requirements. Not making room for them is shortsighted and undermines of the key things that contributes to talent, ethics, and creative and insightful thought for a lot of people.

Grooming and dress are one of the ways traditions are expressed. Whether it’s temple locks or a beard, a yarmulke, turban, or female head covering or veil, or something else, this is probably the biggest struggle with corporate life and contracting, because it’s visual symbolism, and people tend to be stupidly frightened or ridiculously biased about such things. If their fundamental premise is “what does hair, clothes, or food have to do with faith?”, then they’re biased and that bias will play a role. Corporations try to make their employees keep from annoying one another, even if they get annoyed because of their own prejudice – that’s been the pattern of discrimination – fitting in, in traditional employment, can eclipse competence and contribution. In contracting and self-employment, it’s still a challenge, but things tend to lean the other way.

Personally, I once didn’t get a national promotion that was pretty much being thrown at me after high performance at a regional level. I hadn’t met the team in person but, after I did, the atmosphere changed immediately. When I asked for feedback on what might have made the difference, when it seemed so promising, they said “the beard seemed unprofessional”. What was funny was when I said, “It’s for religious reasons. My people don’t cut their beards.” the response was “Oh, well that can’t be the reason, then. We’re not allowed to make decisions based on that. We just liked other candidates better.” You see how it is. My beard got pretty long at one point. When some of my leaders commented on it once, I asked them if they’d have still hired me if they’d known it would get that long. They said, “Probably not, but we’d have found a different reason not to have hired you.” I liked that they were honest about it, at least; pretense is so endemic in corporate life that you’re lucky to get that kind of response. This kind of thing has happened more than once, of course, over the years. I’m often given the sense that “clean” men don’t have beards, or more often that culturally compliant men don’t. I’m not culturally compliant, so they’ve actually got that part right. The beard is a traditionally distinctive sign of maleness in a culture that instead of redeeming men, asks that they mute their sexual characteristics, whether they want to or not. Ever worked in a place that required women to wear makeup and nylons? More than half the places I’ve worked do. We don’t need to pretend it’s not happening. But that’s just it – religion is not supposed to be culturally complient. Religion claims to have supremacy in one’s devotion, epistemology, and yes even in one’s work. So bias against the one, is really bias against the other.

Dietary requirements can face challenges, too. I once worked in a town where finding a vegetable was like finding a classical music station. Good luck! It was a sea of roadside fast food. Planning, forethought, and pilgrimages to the local supermarket for granola bars, nuts, and other amenities were a necessary component of on-site work and corporate life. Also, food is often a primary means of socializing at company parties, lunches, and other get togethers. If you’re Hindu and don’t eat meat, or Orthodox and fast from animals half the year, or have other dietary requirements (Muslim, Kosher, some Buddhists, etc.), you may find it easier being an independent than saying no all the time.

Prayer can be a challenge. Muslims, for instance, are required to pray several times a day. At some places, they’re accommodated, but it’s increasingly few. We were on an upswing of tolerance until people were queued to change their attitudes to be more ‘patriotic’ by being less tolerant. If your contract gig requires you to be on site most of the time, it can still be hard. But Free Agent contractors (those that bring their own contract) can often negotiate enough off-site time, flexibility in coming and going (it’s outcome based, not attendance based) or can arrange for a private meeting room, especially with a welcoming work facility.

Holy Days are different, too, among different faiths. Those of us for whom Holy Week, Ramadan or another religious time period is particularly important, can often put the business on hold for a week, or negotiate that time off from a contract gig – without having to deduct from a bucket of personal days. For employees above line level, or in a job that has some flexible time off, this can be easy enough if worked out in advance, but often it’s more of a challenge  For some environments, you only get 2-days for grief if your mom dies (lucking out if it’s close to a weekend), so time off for religious fasts or festivals can be pretty scarce.

A recent Monster article on this topic covered some similar points. We’re a long, long way from clarity on these things, when France is banning people from wearing head coverings in public and the US has a campaign against building permits for minarets. Wherever anyone is persecuted, trodden down, barred, and unfairly treated, then all of us are. Faith is nothing if it’s the hypocrisy of protecting my kind and persecuting others – and a business world cannot really survive institutionalized inconsistency on the basis of some undercurrent of majority faith and culture – it is eating away at the fabric of companies everywhere. Diversity is part of the core wisdom of successful companies – intolerant companies place ideology and conformity over long term success – they accept merely being good, not being amazing. In the meantime, smart companies are kicking their asses. When someone voices intolerance as a workplace norm, just look at your watch – it lets them know it’s just a matter of time before a company with equal resources realizes the competitive edge comes from diversity. For contractors and the self-employed, we’re already a few years ahead of some of our corporate competition in the form of traditional employees.

The Bootstrap Era: When I was young and jobless, seemingly talentless, and officially skill-less, my grandparents would describe the world of work: You go where they’re hiring, you do what they’re needing, you do what your boss wants, and you never bite the hand that feeds you. Those were the rules. If you got out of the military, like my Uncle, and “they were needing” computer scientists, you did that. You didn’t ask what you loved to do, you didn’t search yourself for the answer like all the morality plays of the time where the promising kid runs off to be an artist only to learn that his place was in his father’s footsteps. You asked what “they” were needing. It was never specified who “they” were, of course – “they” were the unacknowledged nexus of corporate, military, and political interests – but for my grandparents, loyalists who didn’t bite the hand that fed them in the great war, “they” were just “society” – or “the world”. If you were like me, 17 years old, your talents cast aside for the necessity of a job, any job, and when those talents surfaced – they had no explicable ‘resume’ of acceptable contexts to prove themselves, you went where “they were hiring” and “started at the bottom” and “worked your way up”. Supposedly, a job sweeping or tossing fries at a burger joint would result, with enough hard work, in a respectable position like assistant manager some day, and if ever “they were needing” managers, you might just, if you kept to the rules, become that (and get a house, wife, car, retirement plan, and all the things that give one’s life meaning). But the world *did not*, in fact, work that way. By the time that advice was given, the world had already changed. Fry cooks didn’t become managers. Managers came from a special centralized school, and needed at least a college degree. To my grandparents, college was for the well to do, the ones with trusts funds, so this just didn’t compute. Keep scrubbing those floors, and somehow loyalty will make you ascend. But the era of loyalty being rewarded as such had died with the pension fund.

The Authoritarian Era: When I was a bit older, I got a succession of jobs working in a business shirt and tie. My parents ‘ generation were the source of advice then: don’t make waves, please your employer, and give the corporation what it wants. But did it know what it wants? The mythical system of boss and bootstraps was gone, to be replaced by the near anonymity of the faceless attitudes steering a corporation. Reputation (which came from everywhere and nowhere) was everything, because it was a system of waiting for rewards in exchange for which you provided uniformity, nobody sticking out or sticking up too much, compliance, and moral ambiguity. The idea was to maintenance the career, maintain the resume, keep dirt off your name, and look for ways to climb. But the needs of the corporation are limitless, and demands often increase in response to the talent one brings, and they do not in fact necessarily allow one to remain uniform and quiet – they often sense and demand the exploitation of talent in a variety of ways that challenge character and potentially transform individuality and personality. The results, also, are not always clear cut. You might succeed at producing exactly the results requested, and wish you hadn’t. For example, you might be asked to educate internal execs on the use of a new software package designed for them by an outsource company, but those execs might find the software package they purchased does not in fact deliver much of what they had understood or been promised when they purchased it, and then the corporation is actually unhappy with the result, and looks upon the diligence and fulfillment with ill favor instead of appreciation and satisfaction. The moral ambiguity means right and wrong are relative to the outcome, not necessarily fulfilling what is asked. A corporation is often confused about what it wants can provide no assurance of the means of success. The corporation, too, had come to combine so many disparate communities and interactions that it could act almost like a body without a head. It could cry out for talent but reward mediocrity, only to punish mediocrity with layoffs shortly thereafter, retaining the talent and then demanding more mediocrity, which would be employment suicide. By the time the parental advice was given, authority had already become so ubiquitous that it was disconnected from purpose, and the system was taking on its greatest sources of talent from contractors who could draw the occasional firm, logical line in the sand: “Yes, we can do that; it’ll take more money or more time, which do you prefer?” But at least you got results – in the contractor, leadership – authority – came attached to competence and purpose. The system was already rewarding not people who did what they were told, but Free Agents it brought in from “the outside” – that magical place that the people came from that always seemed to save the day – people who thought less in terms of loyalty and authority than of competence, clarity, and excitement.

The Era of Free Agents: Daniel Pink, of “Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live,” has said that Free Agents are “free from the bonds of a large institution and agents of their own futures. They are the new archetypes of work in America. It used to be that the bargain between employee and employer was that the employee gave loyalty and the employer gave security… The bargain now is that the individual gives talent and the organization provides opportunities.” What’s a Free Agent? A Free Agent is a professional contractor. Don’t think of a staff agency temp, once again cowed and controlled by two companies not one, no benefits, badly robbed of more than half their billable rate. No, a Free Agent contracts to bring in expertise, buys his own health care, funds his own retirement plan, and negotiates his own rate, which has to cover his taxes, benefits, and the rest. He bills back expenses and, at some point, in a worst case scenario, he is able to cut the cord if the corporation doesn’t hold to their end of the contract. Free Agents can work for Fortune 500 companies, for another one-person shop, on-site, remotely, travelling, locally, part-time or full or flex, and at nearly any level or type of talent or expertise. There are variations on this: some companies hire “contract employees” which basically means project workers with full employee benefits that drop off upon completion without further obligation. But in a troubled economy, hiring in any capacity has its own risks and headaches. You can’t build the core of a project team out of staff agency temps, though.  There are risks and headaches to bringing in 1099 contractors – one example: a lot of them are suing – successfully, because in most respects they’re treated like employees and argue they should be entitled to benefits – and now the IRS is cracking down with new rules on the contractor/employee distinction. It’s a dilemma, all right. I make no secret that I’m affiliated with Free Agent Source, the company that connects Free Agents with Client companies but with a corp to corp contract (no 1099), and keeps contractors in benefits and provides them a W-2 without taking half of it – Free Agents set their rates with the Client and FAS keeps a small, transparent portion to provide back office services, legal, accounting, etc. You can bring in just about anyone in any capacity as a Free Agent that way, without the problems attendant regular employment, staffing agencies, or 1099 contracting. But regardless of that being our solution, there’s a shift of culture, here, as Pink was suggesting. Whether the fabled economic “Recovery” comes one day, or the Kingdom comes first, there’s strong indication that this way of working may remain the fastest growing trend. Why not? When you’re up, it still makes as much sense as when you’re down. The Bootstrap Era is gone, and the results of the Authoritarian Era are mixed at best, and just not practical anymore (if they ever were).

Your view of the legitimacy of each successive shift will depend on what era you personally are currently living in. One of the things I hope to achieve is to live always in the next era. As an entrepreneur (a solopreneur – another new skyrocketing trend well before the bust), isn’t that the goal? To live with vision, with insight into where we are going, not mistaking the past for the present, but staking (a little exhilirating risk, to be sure) on what works rather than simply on what is and what was? Well, that’s certainly a key to prosperity for a lot of people whose version of Free Agency is self-employment. It’s an exciting time for work. Maybe I always liked to drum to my own tune, but that’s getting rewarded a lot these days – it’s what companies (like Google) actually say they’re looking for. Look at Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. One of the many signals social media sends to business is that talent and conformity are often inversely related. This is good news. This is the work I wanted to do when I was a kid – work where the person doing it defines it as much as the recipient, and where the line between recipient and provider is a little fuzzier.

I don’t fault my elders, incidentally, for living in their time. It’s just that now a lot of us are taking apart the clock and asking whether it really was always the inevitable way that things worked. Time itself will tell, but some of us are already forging our own solutions.

It’s one thing to get a new cereal, a new TV show, or even a relatively new kind of car (like the hybrid). But there are areas of our lives where newness is almost unheard of, or even considered wrong.

When someone says there’s a new kind of marriage, or a new kind of religion, people get understandably a little cautious – these are bedrock institutions of the culture. But what about a new kind of work? Not as in the rising tide of social media jobs, or the growth of telecommuting. What if there were an entirely new way to ‘hold a job’?

That’s what Free Agent Source proposes to create for anyone who would like to explore it with them in about 20minutes (the length of their upcoming free webinars) – [Note: register now: web seats are going fast]. FAS, as its employees and clients call it, has wedded the best of both worlds of modern work — contract work and regular employment.

What do employees want? Lots of surveys and studies have been done to answer that question, but overall it boils down to the security of benefits (health care, 401K retirement fund, etc), and a steady paycheck.

Contractors want freedom and flexibility (whether that’s the excitement of travel for work, flexible hours, or changing projects without the fear associated with “losing a job”). They also enjoy the lucrative tendency for their worth to go up rapidly in the market, as they put projects under their belt, compared to the perhaps steady but less dramatic ‘pay raises’ of regular employees.

There are drawbacks to both types of work. Employees worry about getting laid off, or their job being outsourced, and ending up at a temp agency or staffing company, or paying a placement firm to help them compete against the zillions of other applicants for fewer jobs. Their benefits don’t follow them from job to job either, which may mean starting over every 3-5 years. Contractors may have to contend with spending a portion of their evenings doing paperwork and bookkeeping, from accounting for 1099 contractors, to constantly producing expense reports. Contractors also have to buy their own benefits.

But what if you could combine the best of both worlds? What if you got the freedom and flexibility of being a contractor, but the benefits of an employee? What if you actually went one better – you got full benefits like an employee, but they follow you from job to job (contract to contract). What if you could negotiate using a standard corp to corp contract, skipping staffing agencies, and opening more doors and perhaps better pay? And what if the company did accounting and expense reports for you?

Suddenly new job markets (as contractors) are wide open to standard employees that normally they wouldn’t touch, meaning they aren’t competing with just everyone, but they keep the security of being employees.

Contractors get to spend their days doing what they went to work to do (whether that’s IT, project management, or whatever) and spend their evenings doing whatever they want.

That’s the vision of Steve Pruneau, founder of Free Agent Source. He created the concept of a “Free Agent” as an employee with access to the lucrative, flexible employment world of a contractor, and a contractor that benefits from the security and freedom of an employee. It’s “the best of both worlds”, as he likes to say.

Steve founded his company, with a small circle of colleagues, on the notion that it shouldn’t be as hard as it is for employees to chase security, and contractors to chase freedom, but neither party rarely actually find it. Especially in the current economy, Pruneau sees an opportunity to change the definition of work for a lot of people – to revise how people think about the relationship of worker to company.

“HR professionals, hiring managers, and project teams will benefit immensely from putting people to work this way,” says Pruneau. “If they’ve laid off people, they can bring them back to work without the risk for traditional employment, but without the hassles of staffing agencies.” If they need to staff up, he says, in a tentative economy with an uncertain future, they can do so with a corp to corp contract that protects them, gives them flexibility, but actually invites the most dedicated and talented staff. They’re not temps, they’re contractors of the company, but they’re employees of Free Agent Source. They’re “Free Agents”.

Pruneau points out that this works well for everyone. Staffing agencies typically aren’t transparent – they can take up to 75% of a worker’s pay, and you can’t see how much they’re scooping out. They also don’t support their workers with a full benefits package that’s portable between jobs. That’s not how you attract the best and most devoted talent – it’s bad for workers, bad for companies. Contractors often return to the normal workforce after a few years of carrying the taxes, benefits, and paperwork on their shoulders, and lose out on the fun and freedom work is supposed to bring. Employees hunt for jobs and then spend their time focused on keeping them more than on excelling in what they do, and treating it as a profession.

“Free Agents”, says Pruneau, “are the future of work. What we’re providing with Free Agent Source is an entrance into something new yes, but also into the next normalcy – the next standard of expectations for both workers and companies. Why shouldn’t it be fun and free? Why does it have to be hard?” Their launch is in California, and those are the questions being answered by Free Agent Source in their webinar. Anyone seeking work in California, or looking to put people to work in California, are welcome to attend free. Register at: www.freeagentsource.com/webinar

The psychological analysis is fascinating. One of the checkboxes on the psychological report is “callous lack of concern for the feelings of others”. If an individual person – a free agent, not a collective like the corporation – seems to lack empathy, that person’s future is bleak in a society that has taken the corporation as its church. But when corporations themselves, who assume the priviledges of super persons under the law, wreak untold havoc that demonstrates a chronic lack of empathy (an absence the documentary charges is psychopathic), we laud as wise, respectable, and “good people” those who ‘achieve’ lucrative careers within that corporation. Sure, there’s the “bad apple” theory that it’s just BP or AIG, while Monsanto runs free (sure, a mere 80million for agent orange, which is pocket change, but nothing for the Vietnamese – that ‘charity’ is only for those at home). We won’t go into Monsanto’s RBGH (bovine growth hormone) and Fox News here.

When I went out on my own with my business, the person in my family one might think would offer approval did not say “Congratulations – this is what you were made for – you have invested in yourself, staked yourself on your own ethos, created your own brand, and you have a chance to do good and derive meaning from that”. No, I was patted on the back for the good job I’d done in completing a project with my last employer so that the corporation was “happy with me”. Concern, worry, skepticism about the implied hubris involved in hanging out my own shingle, but pat after pat suggesting that meaning in life derives from the approval of corporate entities.

Corporateness is the standard for approval. When a parent abdicates that duty in a society or in a family, it does so now in favor of the corporation – you’re supposed to get your approval from your boss and the company or from wearing a uniform.

It’s like that in all totalitarian societies – it’s just that we don’t like to admit that instead of a socialist collective or religious domination, we live in a corporate state. Another interesting feature, too, is that it’s presumed we don’t offer approval or disapproval of the corporation – how dare we – “that’s a value judgment” I was once told when I questioned one corporation’s instruction to deceive another – their client; no, we are meant to presume that the corporation is the evaluator of us, not the other way around. Corporateness is the moral evaluator, and individuals are the evaluated – that’s why there’s such emphasis on the clean-shaven, pastel-wearing, double-talker (how many ways can you finish a sentence with “at this time”). Want to offend a group of corporate types at lunch? If it’s your turn to pick, tell them you really don’t like corporate food, and prefer only mom and pop restaurants. There’s an almost “how dare you” for that heresy.

The documentary lists dozens of corporations we all know, from IBM to Sears, that have been found guilty as persons of federal crimes that killed and maimed countless people, and who paid criminal fines. They usually get off scot free for global crimes, of course. Now, if I did that, I’d be the black sheep of family, society, and I couldn’t get a job with the very corporation who had just done the same thing themselves. My rights to affect the legislative process in the U.S. and other constitutional rigts would be curtailed or stripped away. I would be, effectively, a lifelong banished heretic of the culture, listing felon status on every job application – relegated to having to become a better, more savvy, more cautious criminal (like corporations after their convictions) because even fast food joints wouldn’t hire me. The corporations, of course, don’t miss a day of work, and neither do all their employees who’d be pointing those self-righteous fingers.

I find the double standard interesting and ironic, and absurd in a Kafkaesque way. I’m a non-believer. I’m an atheist when it comes to the sanctity of corporateness. The doc ends up demonstrating, through ongoing psychoanalysis, that the corporation, in general, is “a prototypical psychopath” – that the “dominant institution of our time is created in the image of a psychopath”. Lack of empathy is just the beginning. As pervasive as a dominant global religon, more powerful than the most powerful nation, corporateness is in fact the underlying sense of reality behind the thinking of most people in my culture. Resisting it, spurning it, will get you shunned in various religions, doomed in politics, and attacked by the same people who call into radio shows and let ideas turn them into gun toters.

We live in a misguided culture. Today’s discussion on criminalizing “material support” to “enemies” which includes speech, is not only draconian, it’s a vindication of all those who’ve been saying it doesn’t matter which person or which party is in office – they all, ultimately, do the same things. As a general flies to the white house to explain himself for criticizing White House staff members in a context that cries out for criticism, it’s clear just one more time out of every time that we live in a culture that has subordinated the individual, the individual’s speech, search for meaning, and freedom for the mere convenience, pride, and profitability of institutions. It is not a society dominated by a single institution – it’s a society dominated by institution-ness. Criticizing in high school history classes the societies of presumably dimmer eras and climes controlled by religion, dictatorship, “czarism”, etc. – all the while a system of interlocking directorates wields a level of pervasive control never before attempted on such a scale, all in the “land of the free”. Yeah, free to choose between Coke and Pepsi. Freedom reconceived into the minimalized choice between one kind of cereal and another. You can just hear the top-40 country music drawling, “proud to be an ‘merican where at least I know I’m free.” Yeah, at least.

Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore appear in the documentary briefly, of course. It touches briefly on rather well known history of U.S. based multinationals and their support of genocidal totalitarian governments. I just love hearing companies like IBM saying an idea is “discredited’ and “you can’t always tell or find out” instead of saying it’s “untrue”. Yeah, it’s discredited by the corporation itself, and they got rid of what documentation they could – the rest is spurious, right?

It’s interesting to watch the system get its signals crossed. 51 US-based multinationals in one week alone were fined for trading with declared enemies of the US, including officially declared terrorist regimes. You’d know the names of almost all of those companies, and be hard pressed to find a home that doesn’t contain their products. Someone related to you works for them. Someone you know works for one of them – most likely a lot of people. The film discusses the transnational character of these corporations – the fact that their loyalties are not rooted in any one nation but transcend national boundaries – some of them are larger and more profitable than most nations. It quotes someone as saying, “a coup is no longer necessary’. A protest sign outside the a world trade conference of 34 nations reads “Bow your heads. The corporations will now lead us in prayer.” Police in riot gear launch an assault on the crowd. Moore talks about Flint, Michigan where the number one job of parents of the kids at Columbine is working for Lockheed Martin, maker of weapons of mass destruction, and wonders whether violence begets violence.

Ray C. Anderson, CEO of Interface, largest carpet manufacturer in the world gave an address to other corporate types where he said: “Do I know you well enough to call you fellow plunderers? There is not an industrial company on Earth, not an institution of any kind, not mine, not yours, not anyone’s, that is sustainable. By our civilization’s definition, I’m a captain of industry — in the eyes of many a kind of modern day hero. But really, really, the first industrial revolution is flawed, it is not working. It is unsustainable. It is a mistake, and we must move on to another and better industrial revolution. And get it right this time.”

Not everyone is so positive. One person said “I think people are losing.” Acts of resistance are crushed, people are killed, children are blinded (permanently) by tear gas. But resistance continues. The film points out that Arcata, CA “capped the number of chain restaurants at present numbers (nine) and banned their future development anywhere in the city. Licking and Porter Townships in Pennsylvania made history by adopting ordinances that eliminate a corporation’s ability to claim any consitutional rights as a “person”.

I think resistance to corporateness takes many forms, but choosing just one isn’t nearly as helpful as choosing several. Ethical consumerism is important, but it needs to be intelligent, thoughtful, cautious, and in the end you’re going to settle for some level of compromise. Buying soy milk to eliminate dairy, a worthy goal, makes you a consumer of Monsanto and seed picked by near slave labour. In order to truly be an ethical consumer, you have to be honest about having dirty hands. Don’t like what Fox News did to lie about Monsanto’s growth hormone and cancer, supported by zillions in the latter’s advertising? Most likely your internet provider filed a brief in support of Fox when they fired the whistleblowers, and the latter got nothing because of it. But you need the internet, don’t you? So do I. The moment I can get a similar arrangement without using big corporate fiber, I will be doing so. Can one get entirely clean? I haven’t seen it, but I’m not above using the tools of the problem against the problem if I have to.

Protesting is important. I’d almost say that if you’ve never carried a sign, you’re not an American – you haven’t really participated in the political process – but of course, we’ve reduced “participation” to showing up once a year and filling out a punch card, so a lot of people would crucify me for saying that, and this isn’t a political blog. Staying informed is important. I’m on the hunt now for some more consolidated information sources, and think I’ve about got them – it’s not like you can rely on the “news” (It’s what we say it is, Rupert Murdoch is quoted as saying about the Monsanto growth hormone coverup). Giving your wealth (and you are wealthy if you’ve got cable, and so am I) is pretty important – it’s hard to understand all the “I support this” and “Support our that” on t-shirts, bumperstickers, radio rhetoric, and casual coffee talk when support doesn’t involve putting your money behind it, or pulling your money away from it when you say the word “against” – that’s why, if you’ve never boycotted anything, the word “wrong” is pretty much just armchair talk – a hypothetical commandment affirmed in the mind in an auditorium of ethics with padded chairs where we ‘imagine’ reality together.

I do try to be ‘nice’ or at least, like corporations, appear to be nice in this venue. Any time you talk about anything other than entertainment you’re bound to annoy someone – and even then, it’s surprising what people will do to other people over a Donkey Kong score or a Chevy vs. Ford argument (corporations are such heroes we wear their t-shirts and put their decals on everything like religious icons) – Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, Caterpillar, Smith & Wesson, Abercrombie & Fitch, Old Navy… If you’re going to say anything against an affection that all-encompassing, an almost sexual preoccupation with corporateness, so much a part of us that it takes the form of intimate wear and tattoos – we want it ever with us – we want it as close as a lover – you’re going to tick somebody off. So, I’m resigned to it. It’s a film review – maybe I’ll be forgiven, and people won’t throw designer labels at me as I walk by. But yeah, I like this film and think it’s spot on.

Remember, though, the corporation is not work. Your work is something that only you can own. It can never be equated with corporateness unless that’s the way you want it, even if you work in a corporation. When I was a young man, I was in a line of work in which it wasn’t uncommon for the company to ask me to lie. Even people in my, then, religious group would ask me to lie, when they were involved in that business. I would refuse, even though it was argued that it’s just one corporation lying to another, but  it wasn’t just because it was wrong. It was wrong, and that was enough, but there was also a sense that I had to preserve that the corporation isn’t my life – it doesn’t own me – it doesn’t own my work. It doesn’t even own my time in that sense. It’s like a soldier refusing to obey an illegal order – that’s not insubordination, it’s justice. But in a corporate culture, it’s so easy to think a corporation can own even that.

I’ve nothing against you or anyone else working in corporate life; what I am against, along with the film, is a corporateness that presumes immunity from the same ethics and morality that applies to an individual person, while assuming all of the rights and privileges that belong to the same. I may make a “religion’ out of work” as has been charged, but making one out corporate culture takes more chutzpah than I can muster.

The DVD is on Netflix. Be sure to watch the deleted scenes.

Rule of Work: Your work is not the venue. Whether your work is best conducted as an employee, contractor, entrepreneur, or volunteer, pursue the venue where you can derive from your work all the meaning you are intended to have.

But it’s sort of like my friend who has a Doctorate of Philosophy in Patristics from Oxford. He used to get asked, as a professor, by prospective employers in the U.S. for his transcript. He was typically met with blank, inflexible stares when he informed them that Oxford is an 800-year old university – it doesn’t issue transcripts. 75% of the doctoral candidates fail – if you make it, at all, that is the transcript. The assumption was that education is everywhere and always has been mass education, and rather than having to write books to graduate, you need to prove yourself by appealing to grades. Oxford is pass fail – for the degree, not for classes. For those interested in this topic,  you don’t even have to attend lectures (classes) at Oxford. You can sit under a tree all week and read, if you like, or just stay drunk all the time. What they require is that you read everything in your field, and take a final exam at the end that lasts about a week and is 100% written (essay form), and that you defend your thesis (which is what your book is arguing – your dissertation). That’s it. Read everything, write for a solid week intelligently discussing everything, and defend your own original idea expressed as a book which takes into account your knowledge of everything, and you get your degree. No transcript. Is it accredited? No, it’s 800 years old… etc. It’s like pulling teeth getting past assumptions.

The assumption of employment, though, is similar. It’s already been elsewhere observed that employees can get a home loan lickety split with two paychecks under their belts, or one paycheck and a letter from their employer. A self-employed person has to show a history of substantial profits on past years’ tax returns. That’s how the mortgage system assumes employment as the standard. Conversely, the tax system rewards self-employed people only if they show the least possible profit and claim the maximum possible deductions. That conflicts with the mortgage industry assumption and leaves lots of self-employed people without access to a mortgage, while showing up for a job for a month results in a home loan. The system is geared toward assuming employment is the norm. What do all the forms say – government forms, bank forms, even forms at the gym? Employer. What do employment applications ask for? Past employer. Sure, you write in your own company, but most people don’t seem to be aware that the relationship you have to your own company, as an entrepreneur might actually not be that of employee. Corporate structures are varied, and you might get shares, not paychecks. You might contract for your company, etc. You might be a “member”, a “partner”, and so on.

A pronounced example I encountered was when the market ate half of my 401K, because I foolishly listened to the “stay the course” crowd (i.e. Vanguard and the traditional investor braniacs who couldn’t acknowledge reality, only throw out doctrine, and tell the rest of us not to be “immature” investors who pull out our funds too soon and don’t stay in for the long haul. In other words – the people who told us it’s better to go broke than to question the received wisdom.) Honestly, the amateur hour stuff was not smelling the brimstone in the Judgment Day that was coming down all around them. Little devils kept saying, “Nah, this is just a “fluctuation” in the economic climate.  Let’s say I had $9000 invested, and I lost half, so $4500. My employer had matched at least half of my contribution, so someone actually said to me, “Well then you didn’t lose $4500. You basically lost nothing, because you still have what you put into it.” Now THAT, my friends, is a blind, dogmatic assumption of employment as the norm. But wait, it’s worse than that. A person who sees his services as valuable, something he ‘sells’ an employer, at best, knows that the matching contribution is part of his COMPENSATION. It’s part of the package of remuneration for his work.

In other words, if your employer cuts health care, you’re getting a pay cut. If your employer assigns you added responsibilities without added pay, you’re getting a pay cut (or at least getting snowed). I like that phrase they foist off on people young enough and inexperienced enough to believe it (or just craven enough to pretend they do) – “you’re investing in your marketability in the company” . Ha. The only thing you’re investing in is your reputation for price cutting – selling premium quantities and qualities of work for the lowest possible compensation. You’re the Walmart of employees. Or there’s the similar one, “because you care about the company”. Hey, caring is a two-way street – it’s like a marriage. Would you ask your spouse to do 100% of the housework and keep a full time job, because the spouse “cares about the family”? Not bloody likely.

But this isn’t even a pay cut. My example is one of robbery. The abject, and outright robbery of the system by (well you know who is responsible, if you’re paying attention – sure it’s AIG, but it’s more widespread than that – it’s an entire sector of society stealing from the other sector) – robbery that resulted in a LOT of us losing half or more of our retirement funds. Losing all of it, for those who left their money in until it hit zero. What they stole is the same as if they stole my paycheck. That money wasn’t legitimately lost to the “fluctuations of the market” – it was robbed by the looting and devastation and plundering and pillaging of the market. I know pretty much where it is. It’s driving around the Eastern seaboard with European leather and a blonde trophy wife in the passenger seat. It’s stopping to refuel on the way to a resort and spa where I can’t afford to eat the moisturizing cream it took a bushel of rain forest plants and a dozen children making a penny a day to produce for 3000% markup and some penthouse-dweller’s name on it. And on top of that, someone has the audacity to say, “but it wasn’t really your money.” “You didn’t really lose anything.” “Your employer *contributed* it to you. Like a gift. You can’t get upset over a stolen gift, now can you?

Well, it’s not a freaking gift. It’s one of the types of paychecks. It’s part of the compensation, part of the deal. Keep in mind, it’s taxable. Now or later, but it’s taxable.

The assumption is so strong that employment is the norm, that one easily forgets that the lingo you hear around the office isn’t real. A contribution isn’t really a gift. Caring isn’t really caring, it’s working for free. Marketability means gullibility. And ‘market fluctuations’, if you happen to work in the financial services sector, means causing a blackout, then coming to your house and stealing your TV set, then kicking you out of your house and taking that too (we don’t have an ARM, don’t worry), selling your home, and then offering you a credit card with a mafia-like interest rate so you can “rebuild” your “good standing” with the financial services industry. Oh, and lastly, telling you that none of what you lost was ever really yours in the first place. Equity meets late fees and cost of foreclosure. Finally, you blame it on an act of God, vibrations, hiccups, tremors, and “fluctuations” that no one could have prevented. So now you can’t even go to Church and pray about it without looking at your priest suspiciously, and he’s thinking “What did I do?” Good thing he lost his house too, but you’re all going to be moving into his apartment because you just lost your job, and your 401K is so devastated that pulling it out should just about cover the government “penalty” for pulling it out. Prison is starting to look good, but your Priest doesn’t like that idea, and they just told prisoners they have to pay for their own healthcare. You take your unemployment check to the bank, but they won’t open an account anymore without pulling your credit, and you know where that leads, so you give a chunk of that to the check cashing place, fill up with gas at double the price when this started, and drive home to watch TV shows about people living “successful” lives (as though nothing happened in the TV universe), and you figure all those guys work for AIG or had stock in munitions. And you fall asleep hoping you’ll get that temp job you applied for, where they “try on” employees, one after another, without having to give you healthcare or retirement benefits. And your only hope is starting your own Youtube reality show, except that everyone else is in the same boat and what, ordinarily might be fascinating, is now just banal and taken for granted.

Ahem. Yes. Well, the point is this:

Rule of Work: Nothing is true if it confuses an exchange of value for value with a gift given to either party. See Ayn Rand. Corollary rule: If you got something as a result of honest work, taking it away from you without a fair exchange is always theft – calling it something else turns wages into slavery.

Yes, the assumption of employment as the normative form of work relationship prevails, but some of what comes with that assumption isn’t employment, it’s at best what the old South used to call “wage slavery” and, at worst, is just plain robbery, snake oil, machination, and exploitation. There’s nothing wrong with employment, if it’s honest, if both parties are exchanging fair value for fair value with their eyes open, in a transparent environment. But treating employment as a privilege, as though one should aspire to it independently of compensation, accept it as normal without reference to the entitlements governing every other form of trade (rhetoric venerating “the market” aside), is an additional set of assumptions that amounts to drinking the sacrificial Koolaid.

It’s bad enough to assume that life, ‘legitimate’ life, revolves around punching a timeclock or getting a salary, in contrast with the work itself. It’s unacceptable, though, to swallow down the notion that it’s really all about the love, and what’s in the contract is just Christmas gravy. Dunno about you, but I can get a turkey anywhere – I’m up for the gravy.