Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

In other news, I’m getting a divorce.

Yes, after 20+ years with the same company, I’m finally so weary of the booshwah that I’m going to risk a re-entry to the job market. It’s not often you find someone who’s been with the same company for 20+ years, nowadays, but it happens. To be frank, it’s the way I’ve always thought it should be.

Growing up, I watched my father work long and steady hours for only two companies. He was a lithographer, and there weren’t too many shops back then, even in San Francisco, but there were enough that he could have switched jobs every few years. But he didn’t. Few people did. Longevity was the norm, back then. You found a place you liked; you stayed there, and your tenure was respected.

For many years my father worked at Gordon & Falk, a shop he loved and to which he took me regularly. I loved the place. From the outside, it was unimpressive; a box of faded brick down by the Embarcadero, a dirt-and-gravel car park, vestiges of old paint and advertizing vaguely visible above the dust-grimed windows. It was an unlovely, sway-backed old thing, but on the inside it was magical. It smelled of solvents and inks, paper and film, with top notes of acrid developers and metallic photo plates, and base notes of leather, dust, and stone. The distressed wood floors creaked with every step as you walked through the warren of rooms that connected, one to the next, without the benefit of organization or a hallway of any kind. Within these rooms, the sunbeams lighting up the dust and cigarette smoke, there were slanted drafting boards, dark-wood desks, and shadowed rooms with flourescent light tables that made you wince, they were so bright. Every surface was covered with a picture or a negative, sketches and drawings, cups of pens, pots of ink, green French-curve stencils, boxes of Xacto and single-edged razor blades, yellow pencils, and clear rulers. In one room was a camera, like the old fold-out Polaroid land camera we had at home, only of gigantic size. As tall as my father, its extended bellows longer than a man could reach, it was a behemoth that took pictures nearly as tall as I was. The place was alive, pulsating, and the air was filled with a palpable atmosphere of passion and vitality that emanated from the sharp-eyed, irascible men who rushed and argued and chided each other from room to room. It did not feel like a business or a factory or a workshop. It felt like a family.

After some time, my father left G&F and went to a competing shop. Walter Landor Associates kept its offices in a ferryboat down on Pier 5. My visits there were never as interesting. This place was bright with electric light, bright with walls painted yellow and white, bright with the smiles of clean, clear-eyed people, but to my 9-year-old eyes, it was not a magical place, it was not a place of creativity. It was not a family. It was a business, and I never liked it.

Some years later, my father left Landor and returned to Gregory & Falk, where he remained for many, many years. Though I do not recall ever returning to that place—perhaps I was too old by then—I remember feeling glad that he was back there. It seemed to be the place he belonged.

I’ve never known a workplace like that, and I never will; I realize this. But when I started with my present company, over two decades ago, we had some of it. We were smaller, and thus more tightly knit. We all did almost every job in the process of developing software—something that, ironically, modern corporations are trying to recreate with their misguided Agile methodologies—and when we were designing solutions or reacting to disasters, we thought on our feet, thought outside the box, and created innovative solutions.

But as the company grew, as it was absorbed by entities distanced by geography and philosophy, it changed. Quality lapsed. Innovation withered. Personnel became Human Resources and thence became Human Capital. Employees became contractors. Long-established teams were split up and multi-functional staff members were given arbitrary titles and segregated into pools. Hours extended into evenings, into weekends. Respect for the person, the family, the life away from work, disappeared. Individuals became resources. Resources became interchangeable parts. Parts became cogs in the factory machine.

For the past four years, I’ve been trying to make it work, and this last year has been the worst of all. Then, on Monday, after a brief discussion with management, it became clear that there was no hope. I do not have any illusions that I’m going to find a magical dream-shop out there, my Gordon & Falk. I know it’s bad all over. I just hope it’s not as bad, all over. We’ll see.

k