Abusing The Curtain'd Sleep*

Ever have anxiety dreams about your job? Not nightmares necessarily but, all the same, you wake stressed to the max and exhausted. Me, I wake up angry from these. That may be my default setting though.

Over this past week I’ve risen in the middle of the night, no fewer than four times, from the specters of one particular pressroom past. In the dream, I’m desperately struggling to mend, make sense of, fix, organize the rabidly dysfunctional print shop where I worked throughout my 30s.

That’s right meine Freunde, I’ve not worked there in more than ten years, I’ve held four different positions and jobs since then but for some crazy ass, fucked up reason, I’m back in the basement of 815 Boylston attempting to mend the unmendable.

Warum and WTF?

This is a place that I worked for ten years. Ten! Jen, The Amazing Bob, Oni and I labored there together. For most of that time, I was the Production Manager. You’d think, given that lofty, powerful sounding title, that I wielded bucket loads of power. Yes and, most assuredly, NO.

I went through no less than four managers in that decade. Of them, only one was worth a damn.

Lisle came on board late in my first year in the place. He’d come from the sales department which, if you didn’t know his background, made the appointment seem radically and insanely stupid. The sales team was notorious for promising the seriously impossible, being utterly dismissive of us lowly blue collar types and playing wickedly jejune power games.

If/when we had to say, for instance, ‘no, I’m sorry. We really, truly can’t print, bind and deliver 5,000 of your customer’s 40 page, full color with flood varnish, saddle stitch books by 9 AM tomorrow. It’s not physically possible,’ the typical response was for them to call the CEO, complaining to him that we said no **gasp!** and it was, assuredly, because we just wanted to split early in order to hit The Pour House on the way home to watch the Sox/Yankees game.

Lisle was different though. He’d worked in pressrooms before and had even gotten a degree in print tech from Rochester Institute of Technology. He knew what was possible and what wasn’t. On top of this, he was organized, smart and calm.

Why didn’t he stay? He and his wife started a family -- they decided that it made the best sense for him to stay home and care for their twin boys. It made loads of sense -- for him, for his wife and most especially, for his boys.

Not so much for us though.

The managers who followed were all seat-of-the-pants management style nimrods. Just so’s you know ‘seat-of-the-pants management style’ translates specifically to ‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I’m just going to stand here, wear a tie and yell a lot.’

I was trying to manage the production process using the Deming Cycle -- you know with  solid identification of our current and desired states, fact gathering, data analysis and planning. I created teams of press dudes and dudettes who were psyched to be a part of making the place better, more successful.

How did our Nimrodian Management Overlords respond? With the wearing of ties, going all shouty face and then heading out for their lunch time ‘meetings,’ from which they usually returned reeking of Altoids and Listerine.

Hmmmm. Gee, wonder what they’re trying to mask.

So why am I stress dreaming about this now? Beats me all to hell and back. TAB occasionally has these nocturnal anxiety rides too.

*‘Now o’er the one half-world/Nature seems dead and wicked dreams abuse/The curtain’d sleep’
MacBeth -- Act II, Scene I