« Flotsam and Jetsam | Main | …Not to Be »

Communication Problems

Here’s the deal: this is the first free time I’ve had since my last post. Now, I had some free time prior to that post, but not much. The combination of work and my own writing led me to abandon you, lovely readers, and then, approximately 30 seconds after I published the last post, a deluge of horrible scripts forced me to work, on average, 850 hours over the past 10 days. I have not had time to do anything that I enjoy. Okay, technically I enjoy scripts, but only when they’re good, and of the 738,243 scripts I’ve read this year, four of them have been good, and one of those was not a script I read for work.

In other words, over the past 10 days I’ve been busy exclusively with work, but over the past few months, I’ve divided my time between an increasingly busy work schedule and writing projects that I hope, someday, will lead to me getting paid. That’s the key part of the story I’m about to tell: I need money, and I’m sick of doing shit for free. You guys are lucky I need to vent, or I would have abandoned this blog two years ago.

First, you need the background. Occasionally I’ve bitched and moaned about “working” for a guy I call The Webmaster. I don’t think I’ve ever gone fully into the absurd history of our “working” relationship, but it’s required for this rant. In fact, much of this rant will work better if I write it in a vague, chronological order to separate it into bite-sized chunks.

January 2004

The Webmaster started out as my college professor. I took an awful class with him in the spring of 2004. He had zero control over the class and had a thinly veiled contempt for the subject matter, but he was a reasonably nice guy. More importantly, he bragged about this film-review website he had created that “really took off.” Many of us took him at his word and saw this site as a brass ring to cling to, tailoring papers to impress him in the hopes that he’d ask us to write for it. Ironically, none of is ever really looked much at the site. If we had, it would have spared us all a great deal of embarrassment and wasted time.

July 2005

While browsing Craigslist for jobs, I saw a posting from this film-review website, looking for a “web guru” who might contribute to the site in addition to helping him handle the backend. I e-mailed The Webmaster personally — again thinking this was a semi-legit pursuit, I wanted to use what little traction I had to guarantee the job — and he laid it all out: in addition to what was written in the ad, he would also require me to spend a great deal of time cold-calling to get banner-ad sponsorship. Also, the job didn’t pay anything. Like so many jobs appealing to college students and fresh graduates, this paid in “experience.”

I told him I’d be willing to go along with the job, but I’d still be pursuing a real job and, once I did, I would not have the time to devote to his site and not get paid. The tone of his response changed suddenly: he had no interest in an arrangement like this and figured we should just consider me the wrong man for the job. Ouch.

October 2006

After not hearing for him in over a year, I received a surprise e-mail from The Webmaster, saying his “web guru” had “moved on” and asking if I still had any interest. To sweeten the deal, he made the job seem extremely relaxed — no cold-calling or corralling writers. I would only have three responsibilities: edit and post articles by a contributor with a weekly direct-to-DVD horror column, take over for him for a few weeks per year in editing the full site when he vacationed, and — if I wanted to — sign up to write reviews of my own. As it was the year before, I would not get paid, but it wouldn’t take nearly as much of my time/effort, it wouldn’t require me to be a salesman, and it would offer a semi-legitimate place to gain some exposure as a critic. Oh, also, The Webmaster promised he would use his extensive contacts in the film industry and Chicago’s extensive advertising industry to get me a decent job.

I accepted the position.

March 2007

At my urging, my friend Mark started reviewing for the site. Since he saw movies on a weekly basis and usually sent me condensed reviews anyway, he, too, figured it would be a nice place for exposure with a minimal time commitment.

Once Mark started writing for the site, he immediately started me on the disillusionment train by confirming much of what I’d thought since joining the site: the reviewers, largely college students, were almost exclusively horrible, the site’s design was pathetic and outdated, and he suspected it didn’t have nearly the wide readership that The Webmaster claimed. His meager yet plausible evidence: when was the last time anyone quoted one of this site’s reviews on a poster or a news story? It was not exactly Ain’t It Cool News, a site neither of us liked but grudgingly admitted had a legitimate media presence. What did we have? College students and five different reviews of the same big summer blockbusters that all said the same basic thing.

This disillusionment continued to grow through the rest of the year, as did my dissatisfaction with “working” for nothing. All of it was intensified by suffering in a dead-end job without The Webmaster coming through on his insistence that he’d help me find a job. Instead, he merely forwarded CareerBuilder results for jobs that were mostly spam. (No joke: you try searching for jobs in advertising, and it’s almost wall-to-wall temp concert-promotion street team bullshit or pyramid schemes.)

September 2007

The Webmaster pitched a concept to me: lots more work, but possibly some payment at the end of the tunnel. He wanted to create a YouTube competitor that would allow independent filmmakers to showcase their shorts. A good concept, except for the part where he wanted to charge people $30 to upload and $10/month to keep the film on the site. When I casually pointed out that YouTube is both free and extraordinarily popular, so how did he plan to unseat them with a startup he couldn’t afford to promote that would cost them money?

He had no answer, so I decided to divert his focus to the actual film-review site. I made him see it needed a massive design overhaul to bring it into the 21st century, and I was the man for the job. Further, I demanded the opportunity to write a weekly television column to enhance my exposure on the site. In the meantime, he could come up with a sound business plan for his video site, and I’d gladly work on it if he could afford me some guarantee that, at the end of my hard work, I’d see some money.

I’m sure it will shock nobody to discover he never mentioned this video website idea again.

January 2008

I quit my dead-end job, so I didn’t even have a dead end to hurl toward. I had nothing. With few job prospects, I decided to concentrate full-bore on redesigning the website. Using a CMS engine, I came up with design templates and began to frantically import articles. The site had existed since 1999, so at the time I started importing, there were nearly 3000 articles to post.

March 2008

I got a script-reading job, which started to eat up time but not enough to keep me from continuing to import articles. It did slow me down quite a bit, however.

September 2008

Fed up with what he considered a sinking ship — the quality of the writing had gotten worse as some longtime writers left and were replaced with horribly incompetent students — Mark “quit” writing for the site. We both felt pretty much the same: where we once optimistically believed our reviews would rise to the cream of the crop and garner attention, we realized not enough people looked at the site to take notice. I decided to stick with it in the hopes that the redesign would help me luck into some kind of web-design job. This was very hopeful, since any prospective job would have to ignore the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing.

October 2008

Although I hadn’t yet finished importing articles, I felt I had enough posted for us to launch the new design, with a rough goal of December 31st to finish the remaining articles.

December 31st, 2008

Work, then life, caught up with me, and I didn’t come close to meeting the deadline. Fortunately, The Webmaster had already forgotten I had more to import.

January 2009

Priorities continued to shift to endeavors that paid in actual money. Despite sending lengthy, detailed, step-by-step instructions to keep the new, CMS-driven site neat and tidy, The Webmaster ignored them, making a mess of my painstakingly created templates. When I had the time, I’d clean up after him.

February 2009

By February, the combination of script reading, writing, and importing articles had taken such a toll on my injured wrist that I had no choice but to see a doctor. The doctor shot me up full of cortisone, and I spent most of the next six weeks unable to type at all. Fortunately, the economy had taken such a toll on everything that I had no scripts to read from around mid-January to mid-March.

In Mid-February, I decided to bail on the site, but I decided I’d wait until the end of March, which would mark six months from the relaunch, more than enough time to let The Webmaster sink or swim on his own.

Now, we get into the nitty gritty…

March 12th

The Webmaster took on a new writer who pitched to him absolutely the worst concept I’ve ever heard: a Twitter site that creates digest-sized reviews of movies…for some reason. This writer wanted to spearhead the site himself, somehow thinking he’d make money off it, of which our film-review website would receive 25%. The Webmaster e-mailed me, asking me to add a link on our website.

Oh yeah, I guess I should mention something in case you didn’t read my other Webmaster posts: although he’s run a website since 1999, he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about web design. I’m no genius, but I cut my teeth in the halcyon days of Netscape 2.0, when SimpleText was the best web editor out there. I still need a lot of reference material to help (fortunately, there’s stuff all over the Internet to provide that), but I hand-coded the entire redesigned site, from scratch. The Webmaster can’t even create a simple HTML link himself. I’m not saying this to brag about myself or denigrate him. Okay, I sort of am, but mainly I’m trying to explain why he’d come to me for such a simple task.

Because I’d grown so wary of the site, I’d developed a “correspondence” strategy that was simple yet effective: The Webmaster would e-mail with some sort of problem, and in lieu of a direct response, I’d simply fix the problem, letting the work be the answer.

Things were different this time, though. Allow me to go on a sub-rant to explain why:

Ever since Twitter became a phenomenon around, I dunno, a year or so ago, I wondered why. Maybe keeping a blog makes me a dinosaur, but I have no tolerance for such meaningless communication. I enjoy long-form prose, and I know that’s just my opinion, but my opinion is right, goddammit. What information can one glean in 140 characters? I’ve seen enough Twitter pages to know that I don’t care about most of the content. If it’s not a generic, commentary-/context-free link, it’s a mundane statement of action or purpose. I don’t want to know that you’re going to the grocery store — I want to know why. What are you buying, what’s the shopping experience like, what the fuck is wrong with every shopper who’s not you?

Short-form film reviews adds insult to injury. It’s bad enough when people obnoxiously criticize people like Roger Ebert for giving X movie Y star rating. The context of the rating is in the review. A 140-character “review” can do little more than state an opinion. Opinions barely mean shit as it is; in order for them to have any validity, they require something resembling support. Even if people disagree, they can understand why you drew the conclusions that formed the opinion. It’s pretty basic.

So when The Webmaster e-mailed me, I conveniently ignored me, assuming he’d forget about it. (He has before.) A few days later, I got over myself and added the link, exactly where The Webmaster told me to: replacing the sidebar link to the now-defunct blog. Per usual, I didn’t e-mail to tell him. I figured he’d just see it when he loaded the site.

March 28th

The Webmaster e-mailed again. Ugh, all I can do is quote it and parse the obnoxiousness. Summarizing it does not do it justice:

To: Stan
From: The Webmaster
Subject: Where’s Stan? What’s up, yo?

Hey, Stan,

I need to add a link to a new [film-review site name] Twitter site but my meager attempts have failed and now I don’t know where Stan is! Egah!

This makes a number of irritating and unfortunate presumptions:

1. That I have no reason to be pissed off after what amounts to wasting two and a half years on something that has gotten me nothing. Although I put most of the blame on myself for sticking with it and trying to make something out of it, that whole “I’ll find you a decent job doing something at least remotely related to what you love!” lie really stuck in my craw.
2. That I’ll continue to have a sense of humor about his ineptitude, when his ineptitude is the only reason I’m still shackled to the site. (I feel small pangs of guilt for saddling him with a design that he’ll never, ever be able to change unless he gets help elsewhere.)
3. That I’ll believe he made any attempt to make a link himself.
4. That he’s expended any effort to contact me other than this one e-mail, right now.

So yeah, I’m pissed, and my skin has thinned to the point that I don’t find playful e-mails like this amusing, especially when the subtext is, “I’m a fucking retard. Drop everything and do this for me.” He doesn’t want to learn. He just wants it done. I’d honestly rather him be a dick than cutesy.

The tone of the e-mail bugged me, so I ignored him again.

I also decided to delay my “notice” e-mail. I didn’t want him to think I was quitting over Twitter, or a minor responsibility to updater the site, or whatever. I wanted to let time pass where he didn’t bug me at all, then quietly send him an e-mail.

April 1st

The Webmaster sent me a text message, asking first if he had the right cell phone number and then how I’d been doing, since he hadn’t heard from me at all. This annoyed me for three reasons:

1. I don’t have texting built into my plan because I don’t use it (it’s as retarded as Twittering, to me), so one text costs me 20 cents.
2. I don’t have him programmed in my address book, so when I saw the local but unfamiliar number from what I assumed was an old friend, I got a little excited. I received the text message while driving, so I had 15 wonderful minutes of anticipation before Googling the number and finding it attached to The Webmaster’s personal site. I know that’s not his fault, but it still pissed me off.
3. It had only been four days since his e-mail.

April 2nd

The Webmaster sent another e-mail, forwarding a press release advertising new seasons of Law & Order: Criminal Intent and In Plain Sight for my TV column. The TV column I hadn’t updated since January, which he apparently just noticed, but even then, he may not have noticed at all. After all, he didn’t notice that I’ve never, ever, ever covered either of those shows in the 16-month history of the column. His personal message at the top of the forward said, “In case you’re still around?”

I don’t know why, but this e-mail annoyed me, too, and I put off my response yet again, because he was pissing me off.

April 3rd

I finally gave in and responded, saying I’ve been busy and I’d add a link if he tells me where and what website.

April 7th

The Webmaster wrote back, telling me the link is for the Twitter site and that he wants it to replace the blog link on the masthead.

1. Note the same amount of time elapsed between his March 28th e-mail and his April 1st text message, yet he thinks nothing of it. Hell, I think nothing of it except for the part where he started getting all needy and weird in his efforts to seek me out.
2. The sidebar and the masthead are two different things. In the earlier e-mail, he never specified the masthead, so I only changed the link on the sidebar. Know why? THERE HASN’T BEEN A MASTHEAD LINK TO THE BLOG SINCE THE FUCKING SITE RELAUNCHED SIX MONTHS AGO!!!

Despite it pissing me off, I decided to placate him by swapping another redundant link in the masthead for the Twitter site. Per usual, I “replied” by doing the work. I figured this would be enough, he’d leave me alone, and I could give it a couple of weeks, e-mail that I was quitting, and be done with it.

April 14th

The Webmaster called my cell phone, leaving a wounded puppy-dog message asking—in a seemingly shocked manner—if he’d managed to upset or offend me in any way.

When I got home, I discovered an e-mail timestamped an hour after his call, with a snippy, passive-aggressive note to me, followed by a lengthy reply history. He was actually CC’ing me and primarily e-mailing a sponsored who had queried him on April 1st about trading links. The Webmaster’s response whined that he doesn’t know how to make links, and his “web guru” is “unavailable,” so his hands are tied.

Keep in mind: HE DIDN’T CC ME ON ANY OF THIS UNTIL APRIL 14TH. If he’d CC’ed me on the first response, it would’ve been done already.

April 16th

The Webmaster did all of the following:

1. Called me around 1:15. Didn’t leave a message.
2. Sent an e-mail around 2, CC’ing another writer, forwarding the opportunity to interview the star of In Plain Sight, along with a note asking the other writer if she’d heard anything from me in awhile. (This made me laugh because this particular writer is someone I can’t stand on either a personal or professional level. The fact that he thinks I’d ever associate with her for any reason is one reason I’m so pissed off at him.)

3. Called me around 6:45, from a different phone number (I assume his home number).
4. Called my parents’ home phone — a number I didn’t give him.
5. E-mailed Mark and possibly others, wondering what happened to me.

More than anything, it was the “bring other people into it” aspect that bugged the hell out of me. Asking around is presumptuous, whether I’m friends with the people or not. It’s even worse to call an unlisted phone number that I am certain he gained access to by unethically snooping through my college records. He later told me he dug out a phone sheet from our class five years ago, but I parsed the wording and decided he’s full of shit. I can’t recall giving my parents’ home phone number to anyone, for any reason, since maybe 2001. I never had reason to, because a cell phone is always better for reaching me. If — and this is a pretty big if — I put down that number on a phone sheet, I would have also put down my cell phone number. Except my cell phone number in 2004 is different from the one I have now.

So when The Webmaster writes things like “the phone sheet had a number I didn’t recognize, so I tried calling it” — bullshit! It either had two numbers, or it had my old cell phone number.

Here’s the other thing: look at the dates. Less than two weeks had passed between me e-mailing him and him going nuts and trying 500 different methods to contact me. If you want to consider my adding the Twitter link a “response,” then it had really been nine days since he’d “heard from” me. So what the fuck?

April 17th

I sent a polite but stern e-mail, explaining I’m working two jobs (true) and have almost no time to myself (almost true), but that I did the things he’s asking (true), so why is he sending out a stalker search party (yeah, why?)? Then I raked him over the coals for calling my parents’ home phone number, implying that a call from him both confused and concerned them, as they were worried about me (not true).

An hour later, he responded, apologizing all over himself and announcing that he’d be “on set” all weekend but urging me to call him so we can touch base. By the way, he was “on set” working on student shorts. Look, when I was in college, I tried to make myself sound all important by saying things like that on my student shoots. The difference? I was 20, not 50.

Confusingly, he sent another response 20 minutes later. It was a similar response but not exactly the same — the tone was less apologetic and more rigid. I sort of thought it was funny, but then I was a little pissed. Like I was privy to his emotional state: at first wounded and apologetic, then obnoxious and defensive.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t call him. Not only did I not have time, what the fuck is up with him trying to act like he’s deeply concerned and wants to know what’s going on with me, but only if I squeeze it into his busy schedule?

April 26th

The Webmaster sent a follow-up response I can only describe as “bitchy”:

To: Stan
From: The Webmaster
Subject: Stan

Stan,

You vented quite nicely here. But I had no idea what was going on with you since you did not tell me what was going on with you. I have no idea what I did to upset you other than to be concerned enough to try calling an old phone number I had to dig through class archives to find.

Are you through with us? It would be great to actually know and not have to guess.

Thank you.

Love the passive-aggressive tone and the attempt at a guilt trip because I got offended by his “concern.” Look, what can I say? I know I haven’t been communicative, but it’s not because I feel like I don’t need to explain myself (after dealing with him for this long, I have absolutely no delusions that he really doesn’t understand why I’d be pissed) — it’s because I don’t feel like there’s anything to explain. For six months, he’d send me e-mails with problems, I’d fix/change them. He never made frantic, desperate attempts to contact my friends or call random, possibly disconnected numbers in search of me.

And, really, what am I getting from him or his site? Not a goddamn thing. Does he really think acting like a prick over e-mail will encourage me to open up and explain my annoyance and disappointment with the whole experience?

Instead, taking the tack once again that actions speak louder than words, over the next few days I took what little free time I had — very little — and dedicated it to finally finishing the article import. Then, I thought, when things slowed down, I’d take more significant time and clean up the messes The Webmaster had made over the past few months. Finally, I’d give my notice leaving the site as good as I can possibly make it look, and I’d have fulfilled my promise to complete the redesign — simply making the designs isn’t enough.

Cut to: this morning.

May 2nd

I thought I had a lull in my weekend reading, so I loaded up the CMS to start importing and discovered…

The Webmaster stripped me of my access privileges. Not only did I not have administrative access — I had no access. To anything.

Now, look, I know I didn’t respond to the April 26th e-mail, and I know I should have changed my “ignore him and he’ll go away” policy before he went nuts. I know that now. I didn’t know it a month ago. But, really… Less than a week later, and he’s already thrown in the towel and removed my privileges, instead of waiting in good faith for a response?

Per usual, the question is: does expect that acting like a dick will make me stand by his side? He’s not paying me, he didn’t live up to his end up the meager bargain. If I were in his position, I’d kill everyone with kindness if they had even a small amount of talent. His dickishness caused Mark to leave. I’m sure it also caused plenty of other good writers to leave. What he’s left with are the dregs.

And that’s fine. I tried to help, even after he got creepy and needy and stalkerish, but now I’m done — forced to be. And I’m fucking pissed. However, while I am pissed enough to vent on this blog, I’m getting it out of my system. I don’t care enough to fight with him, especially not to fight to stay affiliated with a site I no longer have any interest in, a site and a Webmaster that’s given me nothing in return for loyal, unpaid service.

The Webmaster can go fuck himself.

My tentative plan: wait a week, then ask him to remove every single word I’ve written for that site. Once he does, I’ll put them up here. Because why not? I didn’t get a goddamn thing having my actual name in pseudo-lights. Why should I leave his shitty site with what I think are some pretty solid movie reviews and pretty middling analyses of television shows?

And yes… I don’t get passive-aggressive. I play it passive until I reach my Billy Jack-esque breaking point. Then, I take off my shoes and get fucking aggressive. So I will not let him keep my material without a fight. He can blow me.

End rant.

Incidentally, I don’t want to be one of those bloggers whose all “you should be lucky I’m gifting you with my brilliance and wit,” but… You should be lucky I’m gifting you with my brilliance and wit. Ninety minutes ago, I thought I was done with my weekend reading. While writing this post, I got an a metric ass-ton of scripts. Yet I didn’t drop everything to read. I finished this post. For you.

xoxo

Tags: Ain't It Cool News, college, Craigslist, film criticism, film reviews, invasion of privacy, Mark, money, obnoxiousness, text messages, The Webmaster, time, TV coulmn, Twitter, websites, YouTube

Posted by Stan on May 2, 2009 4:06 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Job Shit | Digg It