SOUNDTRACK: LUTHER WRIGHT AND THE WRONGS-instrumentality (2006).
I loved Luther’s Rebuild the Wall, and I kind of thought of him as country, but not really country. A sort of punky country (his song “Broken Fucking Heart” lead me in that direction, too).
But this album is all instrumentals (hence the title) and it’s very traditional bluegrass/banjo-fueled tracks. Eleven tracks in all (totaling about 22 minutes). There’s even a cover of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Listening to this I realized that I like banjo music (not as my favorite type mind you, but certainly more than a little). Steve Martin (an excellent banjoist himself) once said:
“You just can’t sing a depressing song when you’re playing the banjo. You can’t go– [grins, plays and sings] “Oh, murder and death and grief and sorrow!”
And there’s something to be said for that. With this fun collection of mostly 2 minutes songs, you’ll smile for twenty minutes or so. (And the playing is top notch, too).
[READ: September 11, 2010] Handle Time
When I wrote about One Night @ the Call Center, several readers said I must read Handle Time, that it was the consummate Call Center novel and that it was much better than One Night. So I tried to find it. No libraries in New Jersey carried it. And although I could get it at Amazon, there was precious little other information about it. Well, I finally decided to add it to our library collection (so I didn’t have to pay for it) and to read it for myself.
My first surprise came when the first line of the text has the word embarrassed written in a super large font. The font is so large in fact that it put a pretty sizable space between the lines of text (that’s called leading). My second surprise came when I saw that littered throughout the text were a whole bunch of large words and crazy fonts and a bunch of clip art pictures that showed what was happening. (I was especially surprised when one of them turned out to be Mr Burns from The Simpsons!).
So it turns out that there are different fonts throughout the book, some of them large and crazy, others fancy and scripty. But the long and short of it is that this book is really only about 50 pages long (I mean I read the entire 188 pages in about 2 hours).
Okay, but what about the content. Well the plot itself is fairly brief. Chase gets a job at a call center. She sits through orientation, begins working, gets demoralized and has a panic attack about her job. That’s pretty much it. But really what you read the book for is for the side bits, the comments, the snark, the sympathizing with call center workers.
Except that I’ve never worked in a call center and yet I have experienced many of the things in the novel. So, this book, much loved by call center workers, could be about pretty much any shit job (except for the part about keeping your numbers up (and the part about not actually helping people because it skews your average handle time)). But bad cafeterias, microwaves, bizarre HR nonsense, stupid powerpoints, they’re part of any corporate job. And she does a good job in skewering them, they’re just not specific to call centers. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 