i am the blog

so long, suckers

First, my farewell email to the LA Times was excerpted in an LA Times article about farewell emails several months after I was laid off by the company. I made some “Superman II” references and likened Tribune/LA Times owner Sam Zell to an older version of Non, the mute Kryptonian with the bum heat vision. It was nice to get my name in the paper again, but the article had a sort of undercurrent of “gee, I’m not sure these kinds of farewell emails are a good idea.”

fire bad

Now, after relocating to New York and not finding work for several months and then deciding to volunteer some time at a non-profit bookstore that raises funds for homeless people with HIV/AIDS, I got a note from the volunteer coordinator that NPR was looking to do a video blog story about unemployed volunteers. I figured NPR was cool and, hey, you know, I might as well try to wring some kind of publicity out of my volunteering, so I volunteered to do the interview. I volunteer at the bookstore because it’s a charitable thing to do, plus the bookstore frequently hosts cool literary events featuring writers such as Jonathan Lethem and David Shields. And it’s a book store, and, well, I like books. Volunteering seemed like staying at least tangentially involved in the literary world. So after talking to one of the NPR producers for the NPR, the video crew — who turned out to just be Columbia journalism students — came and interviewed me during my shift. Here is the hatchet job.

cartoonish

I have worked in reality TV, and I have worked in journalism, so I know a certain amount of cherry picking goes into compiling and article or video. You put your trust in the producers/writer/editor’s hands. And these guys squished me like a baby bumble bee. I come off looking like some scoundrel who is dicking around the good people of the non-profit world, leaving them hanging at a moment’s notice. What the video didn’t include is that the bookstore’s volunteer program asks volunteers to agree to a three-month commitment. I have been volunteering there for about two and a half months, so if I did get a job at Barnes & Noble (a line that was basically fed to me by the interviewer and then taken out of context) in the next few weeks, I would have fulfilled my commitment. And there was another unused line where I said that if I did get a job, I would continue to volunteer, though I would probably have to rearrange my schedule (I currently volunteer on Tuesdays, but would probably have to shift to the weekends). Then, on top of that, there’s the part where the volunteer coordinator complains about us unemployed volunteers and how she doesn’t want to spend “five hours” training someone who will then only use that skill for “three hours.” Okay: one, of all the things I have been trained to do at the bookstore, none have taken more than five minutes to learn; two, the volunteer coordinator has never taught me any of these things anyway; and, three, a volunteer shift is four hours, so what is this using the skill for only three hours thing? The math doesn’t add up. Are blogs not subject to fact-checking? I thought this was NPR, not Fox 11.

off you go

Okay, so be crucified in the video itself was rough handling. But then this “Renee” woman gets in a few shots in the comments section under the video blog. She explains that, as a person who works in the non-profit world, it makes sense to her that “these folks [me] are not being welcomed as true volunteers.” “True volunteers.” I am an imposter. A poseur. A burden.

No good deed is left unpunished.

ouch