Missive #20
With every new decision he must make — despite contemplations born of the most dedicated introspection, every one, every decision, has proven itself wrong. The Spectacular Failure has washed up once again — on a favorite, familiar shore — Desolation. This time, the receding tide has left behind for him a new stench — life at The Call Center.
The daily abuse — easily being the oldest of the new trainees at the call center, and treated like the only ‘streaming service’ I understood was my aging urinary tract — no way did I consider a failure. Protecting — in silence — the truth of my years in tech, my experiences, everything I’d done, became my new favorite drug. The hit I needed to get myself juiced for the next great failure of my life!
Yet…that familiar excitement builds. A blend of I Know I Can and Fuck You — the fumes on which his engine fires and sputters and coughs —to try and turn over this failure into something else. Something that looks painful — like success.
I see clearly the multiple paths before me. I have a decision to make. I see now, I am back inside a tech company, on the ground floor. I can use this! I am using the same software tools I once spent twenty years designing for monkeys — the very kind I am now training to become! In learning these tools, I see a vision that reflects a decision I made long ago. To prove myself as more than what they see. I am a designer and will show them!
I see the UI & UX flaws in the tools I am learning. I see the many improvements and changes that I can suggest — that I can sketch out solutions to! And when the time is right, I can present my brilliance to just the right people. The important people! To impress upon them my fantastic design skills. Skills I have honed in the halls of Gates, Jobs, Ellison, and Iger — even that overblown used car salesman Ballmer — all once knew my name. They will see that I am a Professional, with patents, awards, and the bruises from elbowing past people running something other than their mouths. That I would, when an opening presents itself, position myself back into the UX world that has since exiled me to do to age and acrimony, and find my proper place in the ‘business casual’ world of the call center.
I am reminded of my start in tech as an interactive coder at my first job at Microsoft. Translating that into my first real design job, by hard work and waiting patiently for the right door to open. This is an opportunity! I can use this door-stop of a job as a tire iron — when the opportunity arises — to pry it open to a decent-paying job while staying at a company that provides outstanding benefits!
I am on the inside now and not having to get past an AI resume scrubber or a phone screen from some intern lackey. If I were to show my dedication and humility by not rushing it, by being a compliant monkey and completing my call center training, to show my sincere approach to making a success for myself within them, certainly I would get noticed by the team that builds these very tools!
This is how the Spectacular Failure’s mind clicks into gear, assessing opportunity and crafting sure-fire strategies for success.
Or so he tells himself.
Is this, though — the internal debate continues — the right choice for the Spectacular Failure? The time and energy to do that ground work and ass kissing, as well as the hours of homework, would be all-consuming. Especially considering the preciousness of whatever free time and remaining energy he might have left after his brain and soul spills out through the ears of the Spectacular Failure all over the desk with the never-ending catatonic repeat of: “Thanks for calling. How can I help you?”
A second choice emerges, as his brain spins on. Maybe look at the hard truth — the honest analysis. Perhaps the more painful path must be finally accepted. Maybe he needs to realize and accept that his software design career has backed itself into his life’s station, all ready to be decommissioned. Certainly, that is what the absolute absence of job interviews over the last year suggests. A ‘job is a job’, he forces himself to repeat from some “hard conversation” from long ago — from some well-meaning but clueless overachiever.
Why not just bear the headset burden and spend the free time writing? Like this soon-to-be-forgotten collection of field notes of the Spectacular Failure. There are also several other writing projects he could apply himself to. There is never a shortage of ideas. Never have been.
The brutal truth, however, is also as obvious as the pain: he cannot do both — the day-to-day wilting grind of the call center, and the soul-sausage act of writing. As said, there isn’t much time left. Energy is finite, and a decision must be made.
There is another choice the Spectacular Failure could settle into — like a body bag. The Ferris wheel of rumination continues and only stops at the top long enough to scare you into wanting it to start spinning again. To do neither of the first two — not to rise back in UX, or to tolerate the job and write —and to simply accept the fate of Now. Work the headset cubicle sharecropper farm. To be a good boy, plan and try to move up from twenty dollars an hour to that true mark of American success, thirty. It would only take ten years or so. But there would be employment and the great American Handcuffs: employer-provided health insurance. This is the course that an ordinary failure would take.
Echoing Mother Courage’s epic cop-out, the Spectacular Failure hears from deep within: Capitulate!
Something must be done. All three carefully examined, re-examined, and considered. A choice must be made. UX back door man long game? Tolerate and write, hoping for a late-life Bukowski Hail Mary? Or, take a bow and simply accept the final act of a life forever to be incomplete. How to decide?
If The Spectacular Failure knows anything, it is himself. His is a life spent paying attention — applying introspection scientifically. Socrates would toast his hemlock to such a self-examined life. In his life, all paths, all decisions, no matter how clever, intent, or perfectly scripted — always and only — lead back to despair, loneliness, and failure.
Yet — he must choose.
And he will, as always, Go All In — like with every decision. Exposing himself to a new audience — for all to witness the Spectacular Failure, fall from the clouds, and crash back down to earth — as the stars had no need for him.
Clouds, like his dreams, can only be seen from a distance. Standing within, the fog reveals only an emptiness, a hazy mist, with zero visibility. The Spectacular Failure does not belong there. He is lost with no place to go but down.
Ah…but here is the beauty that is the source of my beatific calm. The magic guiding this decision requires no Magic 8 Ball. No ‘Reply hazy, try again’ needed.
While he must make a choice, all options deliver the same result — failure.
I will never get a UX job within the call center, no matter how impressive a collection of improvements I were to assemble and present. At best, I would get a pat on the back, an ‘atta boy’ printout to pin to my cube, and someone else would get the credit.
All my time and efforts would go unanswered — like an ‘Unknown Caller’ at 2 am. I would most certainly be always and only taking calls in the circle of hell where a man-child walks the rows of cubicles, like Satan’s mastiff, leading chants of “Smiles everyone,” and the never-resting AI listening agent dutifully reporting every sigh and mutter to the Sentient Performance Matrix.
No matter the choice, the Spectacular Failure would always be left to sit the rest of his days with the company, headset on, migraine pounding from a clenched-tooth grin, on a path that most definitely leads to no further success — anywhere. “But so what?” most hard-working Joes would say. “Hey, you are at least able to keep the job you have.” The American Nuremberg defense: “I have got a mortgage to pay.”
No can do. That is not the way of the Spectacular Failure, who is all about failure! The writing projects do most certainly lead only to continuing disappointment and failure, yet are more familiar and comforting territory. A failure he can live with.
Well, if I am going to fail — and I will fail — I might as well do it my way. Not chained to some cubicle farm, strapped into a headset, and whipped by my inner child. No. Writing it will have to be.
Starting with a letter of resignation.
So it begins.
