Garrett M. Vonk

Shady Pseudo-Telemarketing
A guy in our neighborhood got on the internet riches bandwagon the summer after my senior year, so he posted a flyer asking for part-time help. It was listed as something like “database maintenance and data entry”, which should have sent up some red flags from the get-go since these are highly disparate skillsets. Yup, it was basically telemarketing. He had bought a list of businesses across the country and I sat at an ancient credenza in his basement and called these businesses to “verify their contact info”. He was under the impression that if I fed a line a receptionist at XYZ Industries about how I “needed to ship them something” and asked them to “verify their address” for me, we would be in the clear to send them mail and it would not be considered unsolicited. It was really easy work because most businesses have no problem confirming their address and the call never took more than 60 seconds. When he explained to me that he’d pay $0.50 per phone number, $0.50 per address, and $0.50 per email address confirmed, I had cartoon dollar signs in my eyes and wasted no time in adjusting the headset attached to his second phone line and jumping right into Filemaker Pro without even questioning what the data were for.

It turned out that the ultimate purpose of my collecting/verifying this information was to try to sell these businesses a listing on a web site that was “about to become the premier shopping destination on the ‘net!” This was one of those buy-domain-name-first-ask-questions-later business ideas where the business owner thought that a great domain name was all you really needed to make it big. His killer domain name? Bestshopping.com.

You probably don’t have to be told that the business never took off, but how was the work? Relatively lucrative. I didn’t mind cold-calling since there wasn’t really any sales pitch involved. Of course, the pay wasn’t as great as the mental math I did on the first day (60*$1.50 = $90/hour potential). As it turned out, most businesses didn’t have an email address at the time, or wouldn’t give it out over the phone to a shady character like myself. In addition, between being put on hold, navigating phone trees, and all of the numbers that were no longer in service, I think I was able to manage closer to $10 an hour. This was still relatively excellent pay for a high school kid sitting in a rickety office chair in an air-conditioned basement, and I milked the job for as long as I could that summer. I think I ended up exhausting his initial list and his business never went any further beyond that initial phase.

Video Production Monkey
I did a few months of work on and off for a local video production company owned by a marching band parent at my high school. Since I already had loads of experience making video projects for school with editing tools on my friend’s Mac, I was proficient enough on day one to use the fancy non-linear video editing tools that the owner had set up for various jobs. I mostly loaded video from tape (DV, DVCAM, MiniDV, and Betacam) to HDD and did some basic editing/cleaning up. I also ended up using the source material to produce some DVDs for sale from start to finish, and one time, I directed and edited the Spanish language portion of a training/sales video for a construction equipment manufacturer. The hardware and software was easy to use and really pretty intuitive for me, and I think I produced some pretty good work.

Fascinating, I know. I loved this work, and Video Production actually became my dream career for a time, which was my initial impetus for getting a degree in journalism. A few summers later, I did a short internship on location with a company that produced extreme sports videos, too.

You may also enjoy:

• Jobs Rusty’s Had
• Jobs Sara’s Had
• Jobs Thomas’s Had
• Jobs Jen’s Had

Besides working a few times for the high school band, I also held a couple of part-time jobs while I was in high school (and the summer before college).

Software Duplication Monkey
A friend of a family friend owned a small business duplicating and packaging software, and at a church picnic, suggested that I come work for his business part-time. This was my “first real job” and I remember actually enjoying it at first, despite the incredibly repetitive nature of the task.

The facility was located in a technology park in Norcross that was convenient both to school and to home, which was especially good for my mom, who dropped me off and picked me up. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I was 14 when I started this job.) I was initially assigned to floppy duplication. You see, kids, back in olden times, software was distributed via floppy plastic magnetic discs that were encased in harder plastic outer casings instead of being magically beamed into your lap by invisible intertubes as it is today. The floppy duplication machines took several agonizing minutes to make a full copy, but there was a bay of about 20 of them, meaning that by the time I got to the twentieth machine, the first disk was about to pop out. Then, a stack of duped floppies would be loaded into the labeling machines, along with a roll of labels. The label machines made an insane amount of noise, and the clackety-clack of just a few of them running at the same time is still seared into my brain fourteen years later. Once the floppies were copied and labeled, I would have to cart the boxes of completed diskettes back to the big warehouse section where the manuals, packaging, and shrink-wrapping machines lived. There, a larger team of laborers would assemble the finished product, shrink-wrap it, and put it on a pallet for shipping. The major clients that I remember were Peachtree Accounting, Corel, and Microsoft.

Somewhere along the way, we started to duplicate Zip disks, which were positively futuristic at the time. (Really, the whole operation seemed pretty futuristic to me at that age.) Rather than taking a few minutes, though, the Zip disks could take up to a half hour to copy–y’know, because they held all of 100MB–so it was truly a soul-crushing task to duplicate them.

I don’t have too many good anecdotes from this job. I’m pretty sure I accidentally ran a batch of 500 or so floppies with upside-down labels once or twice, but this was easy to rectify with a new roll of labels. Oh, and since I was still well below the minimum age to operate the compactor/baler, I had to ask the overlord of the warehouse, a gruff (Jamaican?) dude, to kindly do it for me. Since I was afraid of him, I generally waited until the last possible minute and my trash was overflowing, and then I’d get chastised for A) interrupting him at the very end of the day and B) giving him a huge load of trash to compact/bale.

One day, I got pulled off of the duplicating workflow and was given the task of painting a huge wall. Like, this wall made up the entire backside of a big warehouse. About 5 minutes after I got the paint bucket to the top of the ladder, my pager vibrated (HA!). It was my friend, who said he could get me a job at…

CVS/Pharmacy Photo Lab
This job was a blast because I got to hang out with a good buddy of mine and run the one-hour photo machine. I worked at CVS for a few years in high school, and then a summer or two while I was in college.

This job, kids, was back in the day when photographic images were captured on emulsion-coated plastic and then had to be “developed” and “processed” using dangerous chemicals before they could be viewed. We dealt with all of the typical photo lab stuff: irate customers, lost negatives, and of course, the occasional nudie photo we snickered at and then were required to tear up and discard.

I think a man died in our parking lot. A customer ran up to the register one evening and shouted “Someone’s having a heart attack outside!” I sprinted out to find a middle aged guy gasping and panicked in the driver’s seat of a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I instructed one bystander to call 911 and another to run inside and bring me a package of CVS brand (Why not?) aspirin and a bottle of water. Then, I helped him get comfortable and administered the aspirin while we waited for the ambulance to show up. The rest of the story is unremarkable except the fact that a customer came in a week later and told us that she thinks the guy didn’t make it.

The store manager was a nice, funny guy who loved to repeat stories, jokes, and movie quotes. Many of his stories were lies. He seemed to get along better with the high school kids who worked there than the other adults. If we were working for a long period of time in the un-air-conditioned stockroom, he’d tell us to grab a drink out of the cooler on him. When he was a good mood, he’d call one of us up into the manager’s office overlooking the store to shoot the shit for a few minutes. He also never had a problem scheduling my shift alongside my friend’s shifts, wherever possible, which was a blast. My favorite time to work was the few days surrounding Christmas, when the store–open 24/7 year round– would pay 1.5x-2x your usual pay. The crowds would be hectic and crazy for the first few hours on Christmas Eve, but getting closer to midnight, it would be absolutely empty. After the other employees left (and our restocking/cleaning was done), we could play cards, watch movies on the display TV, and play games in the aisles. Good times.

I could also tell you the story about how my journey from Catholicism to Atheism was precipitated by my secretly skipping more and more of mass to go to Waffle House before my Sunday morning CVS shifts, but A) I’ve run out of space and B) I basically just did.

You may also enjoy:

• Jobs Rusty’s Had
• Jobs Sara’s Had
• Jobs Thomas’s Had
• Jobs Jen’s Had

Really? It’s been a month?

I would have sworn that it’s been just one single blurry, drawn out day. Everyone seems to greet me nowadays with “Getting any sleep?” and the answer is generally “Kinda.” We currently get a few hours of sleep at a time, and a bit more than that is possible with a little planning.

• I do have to laugh out loud to myself every time I’m attempting to get Maddie to burp and the patting/bouncing causes me to let out a good, solid belch well before she does. I’m just that good at burping.
• While I’m patting myself (and others) on the back, I want to mention that I feel good about the amount we’ve been able to leave the house since she was born. Madeline has been the beneficiary of the fact that Heather and I can’t stand to be cooped up for so long, meaning that we’ve dragged her to breakfast, lunch, and dinner all over town, with all manner of people.
• I’m not going to be that guy who grosses everyone out with my kid’s body functions and the like. But let it be known that I am supremely impressed with the functionality, capacity, and overall design of modern diapers. This is some technologically advanced, um, shit.
• Keeping olfaction as our subject matter, I will never forget how our baby smelled for the first 48 hours of her life. Some strange combination of hormones, evolution, pheremones, and uterine tendencies causes newborn babies to have an absolutely incredible smell right after they are born. It’s probably a little more complicated than “New Car”, but it’s amazing. If you ever have the opportunity to smell a newborn baby without being banned from a hospital or arrested, do it; it’s awesome.
• The advice from everyone on the web and in books is “Sleep when the baby sleeps.” Um, that’s fine if you don’t have anything to get done while the baby is sleeping. I don’t know about other households, but when we can get Maddie content and asleep during daylight hours, it’s instantly a rush to shower, clean, make phone calls, go shopping and generally just GTD.

Rusty wrote about his first job ever and it made for a pretty interesting post. I actually worked at American Adventures / White Water a few times in high school, too, but it wasn’t for money. No, I worked there for Band Bucks.

As programs that are a blend of both in-class studies and extracurricular activities, high school bands usually can’t fund all of their programs through school funds like, say, history class or P.E. can. Instead, like the football team, most schools have a booster organization that is comprised mostly of parents working to raise the necessary funds for trips, supplies, meals, uniforms, and other expenses that are not strictly curriculum-related. The way I think our high school band did it was to break down the additional amount owed for these expenses on a per-student basis and then parents could either choose to A) pay it out of pocket, B) ask the boosters for assistance (probably in low-income situations) or C) volunteer their own time, their kid’s time, or both for companies who would then donate funds to the booster organization.

It’s similar to Amazon’s brilliant gift wrapping scheme: the corporation gets labor at rates that can often be well below minimum wage, and they also get a tax deduction for the full amount of the “donation”!

My parents were always happy to pay for my out-of-pocket band costs themselves, but occasionally, my mom thought it would be good for us to do some of the volunteer work to defray the costs a bit. (And I do mean a bit… I don’t remember making more than $25-30 for a full day of work.) Mom and I mostly “volunteered” for an Atlanta-based event company that would do corporate events outside with tents, DJs, huge grills, water balloons, and the like.

I remember trying to help out a guy who was grilling hamburgers—a huge guy in a greasy apron—for about 90 seconds. His M.O. was to lay out a bunch of frozen patties on the grill in a line and then pour a little Worcestershire sauce on top of each. He could probably sense my awkwardness and unease at the task, but he tried to let me help anyway. I got the first line of burgers and then promptly drenched the first burger in the sauce. The cook grabbed the bottle back out of my hand, said “All right, I got this” and jumped in front of me, relieving me of my duty. I think he made me a runner after that.

I don’t remember much else about working for the event company, but I do remember my shifts over the summer at American Adventures and Whitewater. They staffed far too many volunteers, so there wasn’t always a lot to do. If you weren’t working a booth or assigned to a particular task, they had brooms and dustpans you could carry around and sweep up trash. This was the best job you could get because instead of slinging a tray of dirty dishes from the pizza wagon back to the kitchen, you could just wander around the park aimlessly, trying to look busy. If the supervisor rounded the corner while you were staring at the bumper cars, you could just pretend you found a Coke bottle or a Snickers wrapper in the bushes and move along.

Due to the fact that it was “volunteer” work for the band, I don’t really consider it my “first job”, but it was pretty close. Stay tuned for a recap of what I consider my real first job. I know none of this is really that interesting, but it’s a good excuse for a blog post.

Last month, during a performance of my twice-daily one-man show, Garrett Tries to Read A Book or Magazine While Remaining Upright on a Lurching, Unstable Train, The Week’s “Quote of the week” disturbed me. It was an excerpt of an article by Mark McKinnon entitled Twitter Jumped the Shark This Week.

Though I’ve never heard of The Daily Beast, I looked up the article, which dismisses Twitter, and by extension much of the social networking space, as meaningless diversion (at best). One of his colleagues wrote a similar piece.

It’s just madness. First email. Then instant message. Then MySpace. Then Facebook. Then LinkedIn. Then Twitter. It’s not enough anymore to “Just do it.” Now we have to tell everyone we are doing it, when we are doing it, where we are doing it and why we are doing it.

Who says? Just because some people use Facebook and Twitter to write a running play-by-play of their day, that doesn’t mean you have to use these services the same way.

Twitter works different ways for different people, so concrete examples of its utility transcending simple vanity or inanity aren’t necessary. Still, it’s useful to point out that there are probably thousands of examples of ways that Twitter has offered a chance at genuine insight or enhanced collaboration, including:

• Dozens of Atlantans Tweeted #atlgas during the worst gas shortage in years. (Griftdrift’s #3 story of 2008.)
• TV news anchors and other personalities use Twitter to reach out to their fanbase and solicit ideas and feedback.

And even if there weren’t great examples of Twitter transcending the realm of the what-are-you-eating and the my-cat-did-the-cutest-thing, this kind of small talk is the exact same conversation that people have been having forever, via IM and email, the telephone, telegrams, and even letters. There’s not much difference between a tweet that says “Test driving new cars at the dealership” and an letter in 1849 that said “I swapted 2 of my cows for a mule & one for an ox.”

Why does this particular criticism sound so familiar? That’s right, it’s the same kind of deaf condescension that traditional journalists employ to denigrate new media because it’s new.

I’ve decided to spend that time on the handful of people I really care about. I write them real letters.

The two implications that McKinnon just made without a hint of subtlety are:

1. If you have friends or acquaintances on social networks, you don’t really care about them.
2. Electronic communication isn’t good enough to count as “real” communication.

If I had to distill the essence of McKinnon’s down to a single sentence–fewer than 140 characters, it would be: If I don’t understand something, it can’t possibly be authentic or good.

She’s here.

Madeline Anne was born at 9:55 Eastern on April 17, 2009 at Northside Hospital.

Madeline and Heather are healthy and resting. We are hoping to all get to go home in the next day or so. At this very moment, both are sleeping and regaining their strength. I’m incredibly proud to be here with both of them.

Oh, and she has a lot of hair. Wow.

Plenty of photos on Flickr, more to come.

Well, here we are.

It is Day 258 of Heather’s pregnancy. The nursery is built, decorated, and fully stocked. We’ve had baby showers and shopping trips and we’ve moved a whole lot of our stuff to storage. Now, we are just making our best effort to relax as much as we can for these last few weeks and wrap up anything we forgot to do. Baby clothes, while small, have a tendency to pile up. If you’re not careful, they can blanket a whole room like fallen leaves. I am proud of us, at least so far, for our ability to reign in the chaos of adding so much new stuff to our collection by maintaining order and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. It’s like we played Condo Closet Tetris for four years and now we’ve graduated to the next level–with twice as much stuff to fit in the same amount of space.

April is going to be an interesting month. We’ll try to keep everybody posted.

Originally, there was no schadenfreude for me when it comes to the Dinosaur Media. These are industries that feed lots of real people, and as someone with a journalism degree–at least on paper–I have met plenty such people who, I must believe, don’t deserve to be thrown out on their asses as their respective industries implode around them. However, it becomes harder and harder to pity these businesses as we encounter more perspectives that amount to “If it’s not traditional media, it can’t be authentic or quality.”

Local blogger Drifting Through The Grift had a minor comments-feud over another writer’s assertion that blogs with staff lacking “journalistic experience” can’t possibly break “major local stor[ies]“. Grift offered a decent example that was predictably dismissed as unimportant, and the argument really didn’t go much further.

Now, Grift and others provided counterexamples to atlmalcontent’s argument, and you may be able to substitute your own (I like this great local [student!] blog coverage of an environmental trial in Montana). But as Rusty pointed out last time I brought this up:

Anytime people start opining about the editorial process, I just say Richard Jewell and leave it at that.

As it happens, gravedancing has been a pretty hot topic on the web this month.

• Steven Berlin Johnson gave a great talk at SXSW describing technology reporting on the web as “old-growth media” in that the oldest extant body of online journalism is tech news and we can learn quite a bit from the advances in the scope and quality of this news online in just a few decades. He then segues into a similar discussion of the revolution in political journalism, and there are several points salient to this blog post:
  

  The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. [...] But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a “citizen reporter” named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen’s Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.

  The loss of “credible” local coverage is often cited, as atlmalcontent did above, as one of the true tragedies coming out of the downfall of print journalism. But by all objective accounts, local coverage is exploding on a scale that would be absolutely impossible in a newspaper. According to Johnson, there are nearly a thousand local bloggers just covering the borough of Brooklyn alone. They write about “mayoral races, school cuts, and big snowstorms.” Of course, these kinds of stories would never appear in the New York Times or likely even in a more Brooklyn-focused publication. But this is what the web is best at–democratization of content. Enough people want to read about the various goings-on related to the City of Doraville that there is plenty of robust reporting and significant discussion of community issues there. And like many local blogs, the authors attend local board meetings and press conferences. How can they possibly gather mature, informed reportage on some crummy local blog?

• Paul Graham wrote a great article about Why TV Lost:
  

  Whether they like it or not, big changes are coming, because the Internet dissolves the two cornerstones of broadcast media: synchronicity and locality. On the Internet, you don’t have to send everyone the same signal, and you don’t have to send it to them from a local source. People will watch what they want when they want it, and group themselves according to whatever shared interest they feel most strongly. Maybe their strongest shared interest will be their physical location, but I’m guessing not. Which means local TV is probably dead. It was an artifact of limitations imposed by old technology. If someone were creating an Internet-based TV company from scratch now, they might have some plan for shows aimed at specific regions, but it wouldn’t be a top priority.

  [...] TV networks will fight these trends, because they don’t have sufficient flexibility to adapt to them. They’re hemmed in by local affiliates in much the same way car companies are hemmed in by dealers and unions. Inevitably, the people running the networks will take the easy route and try to keep the old model running for a couple more years, just as the record labels have done.

• Even though I don’t have a great segue, I implore you to check out live apartment fire, a great local blog covering the utter idiocy of local TV news. Not just covering, mind you, but performing primary research and deep, necessary fact checking.

Around Christmas last year, I remarked to an older extended family member that I didn’t think the local daily dead-tree newspapers in the top 100 markets had even a 50% shot at surviving the next 20 years. Of course, I pulled that prediction out of my ass, and of course, she took offense and retorted that a society without a physical newspaper is one she wouldn’t want to be a part of.

News flash: That’s probably what a lot of grandparents out there think. It’s understandable that people, especially older people, will be change-resistant. But change is coming. And I applaud those who realize that there will always be a market for information, even if it comes to you on a computer screen. Because consuming our media via the web represents the freest method of becoming informed that has ever existed. One last quote from the Johnson article:

But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.

I feel like I’ve written this post before, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so here goes.

My favorite magazine of all time is The Week. Their slogan is “All You Need to Know About Everything That Matters”, and I’d say that’s pretty close to accurate. The Week contains no original material. Instead, each article consists of a summary combining various publications’ coverage of that story as well as abbreviated snippets of editorial responses to the same story. If that explanation doesn’t make sense, just click over and read a short article and you’ll probably get a better idea of how it works. Reading The Week is like reading only the best articles from the best papers, magazines, and blogs around the world. This includes major political news, world news, business, health, science, and the arts.

Pros:

• It’s concise and thorough. I’ve recently discovered why I like this magazine so much. It’s essentially an aggregator, in print form. It’s all of the stories that US and international publications thought were important, distilled to their essence by the magazine’s talented editors.
• It’s not strictly US-centric. You never feel like you’re wearing blinders when you start out the week reading important news from Berliner Zeitung and The South Africa Mail & Guardian. The Week devotes full sections to “Best Columns: Europe” and “Best Columns: International”. There’s also a weekly feature called “How They See Us” that is, well, exactly what it sounds like. Even if you already try to read a broad cross-section of world news, this piece–with a rundown of how the foreign press reacted to a single issue–is a breath of fresh air. Can you imagine CNN or Fox News devoting a regular time block to “How They See Us” with any objectivity? This week’s collection of responses to Obama’s treatment of Gordon Brown on the British PM’s recent stateside visit is not necessarily the strongest, but overall, it’s a page I never skip over.
• They’re on Twitter. Their account @TheWeekMagazine serves roughly the same function as @TheOnion, posting stories from the most recent issue spaced out throughout the week. (Though it doesn’t cause me to laugh out loud as often.)

Cons:

• Two pages of political cartoons. I used to like these. When I was a kid and was just beginning to grasp some of the basic issues that I’d read about in my parents’ copies of Newsweek, I’d first flip to the political cartoons because, honestly, they were easier to quickly understand. Nowadays, these cartoons are really just a manifestation of everything I hate about partisan political bickering. There’s no cleverness or nuance to them; it’s usually just a metaphor or lazy name-calling. (No offense, cartoonists!)
• “Equal Time”. Most of the pieces on hot-button issues include multiple opposing perspectives, which is a good thing. However, seeking to always present “both sides of the argument” can be a detriment when a perspective doesn’t deserve equal time.
• Gossip. As one Yelp reviewer put it, “You can’t be Christina Amanpour and Perez Hilton.” Though the magazine’s coverage of celebrities and idle gossip is limited to a few paragraphs per issue, it still seems out of place. I really couldn’t care less that Emma Watson wishes she had never turned 18. Or that Snoop Dogg converted to Islam.

A one-year subscription (50 issues) is usually $50, but they discount it around the end of the year. (This year it was buy-one-get-one for $60 or $40 for a single sub.) I find that I read The Week cover-to-cover every week, soon after it arrives. You can check out many of the articles in the current edition on their site, which unfortunately keeps most of the better pieces behind a walled garden for paid subscribers.

If you’re reading this on my proper blog, you can see a random quotation up in the header. I only have a few because I regrettably have never really kept a good quotefile for future reference.

Anyway, you can help! If you have any favorite quotes, post them in the comments and I’ll add them to the rotation, including proper attribution and a hat tip to you. I prefer hilarious, irreverent, and clever.

Or you can go with something like this:

“I believe marriage should be between a man and a woman… and a woman…and a woman.”

— Mitt Romney