Flashes of Panic

Last night there was a celebration, at the office, of the company’s 35th anniversary. By “celebration,” I mean about a hundred people (the office is 28 when everyone’s in) including families, part-timers and freelancers, pretty nearly everyone who’s touched the company and is in driving range. The back yard of the office was mowed back to the property line (only about half of it is mowed regularly) and a big tent put up, next to volleyball nets and horseshoes. Caterers dug a pit and baked lobsters and steamers on hot stones, in seaweed. More than one person compared it to a wedding reception without the hassle of a wedding.

I came to this company expecting a relatively brief stay, after five years at my previous company. I had my eye on graduate school, and thought it would happen a lot faster than it has. It will have been three years at the end of the summer, and might go close to four. It has gone much faster than I expected, and it’s been a much better job than I expected. When I signed on, there were a bunch of things I needed to learn just to do the job. Now I’m pushing projects because I think they offer me a chance to learn more. (Buying our own web server was one such. I had to learn to set it up and run it, and in turn it’s allowed us to handle sites and tools we might not otherwise have attempted.) People tend to stay with this company for a long time; even now, I still feel like a newcomer among them.

This company has few things in common with the one I left, probably beginning and ending with generalities: they’re both publishing companies which took the name of their founders and were started with fairly high ideals. It happens that one became a massive multi-media behemoth and the other stuck to its niche and and prospered. I’ll leave the question of which still maintains its high ideals as an exercise for the reader. I’ll also leave out the question of which paid me better.

The summer clambake was a regular tradition at the old place, but it never felt like the party last night; it was “the company picnic.” This was very, very different. And there was the president, talking to everyone, meeting everyone, with his daughters and his grandson there, telling us how we’d had one of the toughest years we’d ever had (in terms of scheduling—we’ve sent new editions of three of our biggest titles to the printers in the last six or eight months) and how, even after thirty-five years, he still looked forward to coming in to the office in the morning. His office is two doors from mine; he still intimidates me in a lot of ways, I think because I want to do a good job for him. He seems to have such a strong vision of what needs to be done, I want to stand behind him and hand him tools.

I know I will outgrow this job if I stay long enough, but I don’t think it will ever be easy to leave this company. It’s not something I look forward to.

Now playing: 1974 from Rock N Roll by Ryan Adams