Jessica Thompson: A Remembrance

With a heavy heart, I revisit these words from a blog posting just a few days ago.

With Demand I truly feel like I’m part of a company and a community, and I’m not talking about getting the warm fuzzies over corporate America and a shameless march toward the almighty profit. I’m much more talking about the relationships I have with some of my fellow copy chiefs and a small handful of the editors in my charge.

After the minor fecal storm that my year in review created, I’d planned on treating Demand once again with the anonymity typically afforded to my other clients. I was likely going to do that anyway.

In retrospect, however, the above paragraph inadvertently made the posting into something meaningful.

One of my fellow copy chiefs died yesterday.

Jessica Thompson, whom I knew only through the series of tubes, died in an accident at her home in Cambodia. She’d gone there last fall for a bit of adventure: a six-month copyediting gig at the Cambodia Daily.

I only knew Jessica through a bunch of email exchanges--mostly of the snarky, informal kind that circulate among a group of friends--and then some side emails that spun off from that. Such is workplace friendship in the virtual world.

Jess came across as a lively, curious, intelligent, very funny woman. I’m stunned to think I’ll never have the pleasure of meeting her in real life. I believe in my last side email to her, I’d told her that if in her worldwide travels she ever found herself driving up I-81 through Appalachia, we were only two miles off the interstate and there’d always be a place for her here.

She spent some time writing for the Times of India, from the perspective of a young, female American in New Delhi. When we first started working together, I checked out some of her posts. Here’s an excellent example that generated a lot of comments. More are available by searching “Jessica Thompson” “Times of India”:

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/chandnichowktochicago/entry/eve-teasers-back-the-off

Her bio on that page reads, “Jessica Thompson is an American journalist living and working in New Delhi as an editor for Times Internet. She is not from Chicago, but says she is sometimes because more people know where it is. She is actually from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jessica lived in New Delhi for four years in the 1980s as the child of a Foreign Service Officer, and returned last October to pursue her dream of escaping the American media collapse.”

The news is still coming in on what happened to Jessica. I think I can speak for all the copy chiefs by saying we miss her already.

Getting What You Pay For

I do some work for an Internet publisher that has a help desk for its writers and editors -- and wannabes. This missive came in today.

Message: This my second massage to you.I have read your contribuors articles which is very informational and intrested contribute my knowledge through but i am from india.Indians also have good knowledge in all areas & one of the biggest English speaking country in the world other wise our mother tounge is HINDI.If possible give a chance to indians including me to share our knowledge through you around globe . Thanx and regards.

A friend passed along an interesting article a few weeks back relating to the fear of the coming hundred years being the Chinese century. One of the article's points was that the next ten years might be the Chinese decade, but that the century will belong to India because it is an English-speaking country, and 5 billion people don't want to learn Mandarin. Not that one person's email in search of employment to a help desk halfway around the world should serve as a proxy, but this person obviously feels his English is good enough to write for money. That's telling.

what did i tell ya?

This just in from a client:

"There are problems with the art throughout (as you could plainly see). XXXX is having India redo and the book will have to be reproofed."

at it again

I've sent a few folks here recently, and it probably doesn't look good that the site's not been updated. So, I'm checking in.

To say that I've been too busy to post is not an exaggeration. I really have not had the time. Potential clients, take note: Don't use this admission as an indication I don't want to hear from you. I always want to develop new relationships, because the old ones can come and go. I came damn near to firing perhaps my best client today because I just can't continue to accept the invariably impossible jobs they routinely send me. Admittedly they don't put out many easy ones, but when I look at their catalog I think, Hell, they could have sent me that, for a change. I just finished indexing another book from them that was right over my head, and I'm embroiled now in reading a dictionary that's like the vegetables your parents gave you growing up -- the more you chewed, the bigger they grew in your mouth. It seems like the more I work on this book the more I have left to do on it. And it's not a particularly difficult one. Just . . . so . . . damn . . . long.

And I've had some contact lately with potential new clients for whom I'd like to make some room, and then there are those to whom I have emotional ties, and then there are actually some where I enjoy the reading. I shouldn't have reason to complain, as I'm busier than anyone has any right to be, but, well, I'd like to see my family once in a while. Both my boys are home, and I feel like an absentee father, while they're walking around on the floor above me. However, they are the occasional source of relatively inexpensive labor for tedious tasks. And they're not bad at it. I'm not trying to give them career advice at this point by any means. For all I care, they can become indie rock gods or CIA agents or both or neither. I did tell one of them the other day though, that if he remembers nothing else that I've told him over the last 18 years remember this: Don't ever get yourself into a position where working 24 hours a day is not enough. That's about where I am now.

But, hell, I'm not in a coal mine or being shot at. I did have a potential new client ask how I got to be doing what I'm doing, and I explained that it's this or working at the Amoco station down the street. I have no other marketable skills. Thankfully, I have a market. I know at least one designer who is out of work, and a good friend is hanging on by the skin of her teeth as a newspaper reporter. I've received 2 newspaper articles in the last 2 days about papers either getting rid of copyeditors or outsourcing the task to India. An author I know (the father of a friend of my son's) who writes law texbooks when he's not lawyering says that his company has recently begun outsourcing copyediting to India. When I asked him how it was going, he said that they queried or tried to change all the jokes or puns because they didn't understand them. He finally told them just to let it slide and to trust him. The readership will understand.

I could go on, but my 24 hours are slipping away. Thanks for reading.

India: the rant rising

Around our house, we have a name for customer service people from India who we end up talking with on the phone: Priscilla. If I tell my wife or sons that I had a long talk with Priscilla today, they know exactly who I'm referring to. In the past it's usually been representatives of CompuServe or Delta Air Lines. And it's always frustrating.

These people are taught how to interact with Americans . . . sort of. They are fed some warm and fuzzy catchphrases that if you're lucky will jibe with the time of the day you have called them. They are coached in losing their delightful accents, and sorry to say, they probably have to stuff a good bit of their IQs to deal with the folks who call. But some things still just don't get across.

Mostly with me it deals with my name: Bob. Not a hard one. Pronounced almost universally through the contiguous United States as "Bahb." When I’m speaking to Priscilla or her boyfriend, usually it comes back to me as “Bawp.” Kind of like the Ramones when they’re singing “Blitzkreig Bop.”

OK? So why "Priscilla"? Because invariably these obvious South Asians do not have names that go with their country like Aruna or Swaminandahili or well, anything else that’s fourteen syllables long with a vowel for every second consonant. After their scripted spiel, it’s always, “This is Priscilla” or “My name is Oliver Wendell Douglas” or “Hi, I’m Joseph.” And they will meet every one of my requests perfectly and I will leave the phone happy. I was actually told exactly those words one day. I hope they have since discarded that script.

So, I’m on the phone with Joseph one day, and he has my account information in front of him as I’m reciting my name, rank, and serial number. Over the thousands of miles and dozen time zones, I can tell that Joseph is having trouble processing the information. He stops me and says, “You say you’re name is Bawp. So who is Rawbert?”

Quickwitted as I was that day, I put on the friendly downhome American voice and say, “C’mon, Joseph. All your friends call you Joe, don’t they? It's the same thing."

Silence.

I really like my current Internet provider because they are 24/7, and they are almost literally right up the street here in Bristol. The best time to call them is about 4 in the morning. You have their undivided attention, they always know the answers, they don't give me any guff for being an idiot (because you're always an idiot when you're calling), and not a freaking one of them is named Priscilla.

India

Libera nos, domine.

I think I've got my Latin right there. What I'm trying to say is "good lord, deliver us."

Most of the last five days were spent proofreading a 920-page psychiatry manual. Not only was it 920 pages, but it was also in 9/11 type. For you nonproduction folks, that's got nothing to do with terrorist attacks, but means 9 point type on 11 point leading. And on a 7x10 page, and did I mention 920 pages of it? Well, folks, that's a lot of damn reading. If I had to guess, it'd probably be in the 300- to 400,000 word range. And 9/11 type is, well, small for the task.

I'd have been bitching a whole lot more, except for the roughly 60 percent markup for rush charges.

This job comes to me courtesy of a company that lays claim to being the first in the US (about 40 years ago) to deliver outsourcing services for publishing company production. That is, proofreading, copyediting, typesetting is not done by the publisher, but by an outside firm. This is common practice today, and that 40-year-old innovation allows me now to do what I do in the friendly confines of my own basement.

Problem: the company I'm working for did not handle the typesetting. That particular task was parceled off to India.

Good god.

I had heard some months ago that work done in India comes back sloppy, and that's what happened here. They do exactly what they are told to do and not a centimeter more. No extra thought goes into the process. The queries come back in some form of pidgin English. The tabular material looks like hell.

I have no doubt it's cheaper to do business there. Will it in the long run remain that way? What about the charges for printers' errors? Directions lost in translation? Frustration trying to interpret queries?

I'm too tired to work up much of a rant on this topic. I've got three indexes to get done by next Wednesday, on (1) Catholic Social Justice, (2) the psychological effects of terror and trauma, and (3) the history of Christianity in Micronesia and Melanesia in the late 19th century. Who says this stuff isn't exciting?

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Side note, speaking of excitement: one of our neighbors was arrested Thanksgiving morning for attempted murder. There's much more to the story so it's not as lurid as it seems. Frankly I'm happy to have him close by.