Novel Writing Night 4

After only writing a hundred words yesterday I managed to get my 500 written today. I’m awake enough and on a roll so after a little break I’m thinking about diminishing the 400 I didn’t get to yesterday, and maybe even more while I’m at it.

I’ve never felt like I’be actually been making writing progress before, and even though I’m only doing little chunks at a time it’s really cool watching the first chapter come together on paper.

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The End of an Era and the Dumbing of Society

Down by where I work a Toys r Us is in the process of shutting down. Big signs in the front windows say that there’s only seven more days left. Until recently, I had only been inside one time. This was back shortly after Star Wars: Episode I came out in 1999 and it had every Star Wars book, toy, and collectible imaginable filled the shelves. Every other commercial back then seemed to remind us all that we were Toys r Us kids, and just about every child’s favorite animal from the earliest age was a giraffe.

Walking through the store almost twenty years later, it’s shelves bare and no employee seeming to give a damn about their jobs as the end drew near, I almost choked up. It had never been a big part of my life; I remember my brother and I every time we passed by the giant building growing up if we could go, but our parents never did. Yet somehow I knew that the death of this once-great company, the one store around solely for kids, was another blow struck in the side of society.

A year or two ago, in Woodland Mall directly across the street from the Toys r Us, the Sears that had long been the go-to spot for shoppers in that part of town, was one of countless Sears’ to go out of business. It had been a fixture of the mall for so long that it was not kept up to code, now that entire side of the mall has been completely demolished. Thankfully they decided to expand it into a bunch of smaller stores instead of waiting hopelessly for a new tenant to lease a giant department store, but it was still depressing to watch one of an ancient line of stores fall to its knees and leave the Kentwood area for good.

People say that the rise of Amazon and other online retailers is to blame for the closing of all these long-time outlets. I don’t believe that. I believe it all comes down to people wanting to be lazy and always looking for the easy way out. Why go out and actually put forth some effort shopping and socializing with people when you can just log onto your phone and buy whatever you want with a debit card? This attitude causes the on-site retailers to lose money and go out of business and all their employees to lose their jobs. And eventually to replace all these closed stores a new distribution center will pop up somewhere in the country, which will do absolutely no good to the dozens (if not hundreds) of newly unemployed cashiers and stockers. All of that retail and customer service experience gone to waste. Some of them will be able to find other retail jobs nearby. Some might have to move or travel further for work in other stores. A lot will have to enter the various factories, usually as temp-to-hires, which might pay a little bit better and weekly but be the polar opposite of what they were doing before. Some might not find work for a long time. If they’re old enough, their store closing is just another sign that it’s time to retire. But sadly most retail employees are young and have many years left before they can even begin to plan for retirement.

I hear a lot of people nowadays say, “McDonald’s is always hiring.” It might be true, but the question I ask myself is “what position are they hiring for?” The days of people taking your order at the front counter are drawing to a close. Already in my hometown the kiosks have started taking over, with three registers reduced to a single one with only one employee monitoring four terminals in case a customer needs help figuring it out. Now the only way to gain cash handling skills and perfect customer service, particularly as a minor who might never have held a job before, is the drive-thru window. And soon it will only be a matter of time before kiosks replace the loudspeakers and the role of the window person would only be to hand out bags and drinks. Then where is a young employee supposed to learn?

In the old days, when you dialed a number to a business an operator or store employee picked up. Today, even some of the smallest mom and pop joints have converted to automated voice answering systems. Instead of taking a second or two to transfer a call or answer a question, employees rely on a computer to do much of the work for then. Again, where is the customer service experience in that? Those who are lucky enough to be allowed to answer phones and field questions usually have zero customer service skills at all and don’t know how to handle themselves in social situations. The corporate response? Provide prompts for each and every kind of situation imaginable.

Prompts. Sheets of paper with lines and phrases, questions and answers on them that you either have to memorize or read off of verbatim to whoever is on the other end of the line. And you’re usually not allowed to deviate from them, either. Not even by a word or two. The corporations think that this is a way to make sure their employees are setting a professional example, when to those of us who do have A LOT of customer service experience and who have working brains with ample amounts of brain cells it is just insulting.

How dumb and lazy have we gotten, humanity? How worse are we going to get? As a science fiction writer I love to fantasize about technologically advanced societies with marvels the likes of which most people never could even dream of. But with each passing day, I think we will be more like the fatasses in Wall-E. Lazy beyond all get out. Needing machines and technology to do every single thing while we just lay back and be tired, lazy, and useless. Then when we are too busy satisfying our own wonton desires our machines will become smarter and smarter until eventually they wipe us out before we even know what is happening. We’d be lost without it.

Some people will think I’m just a nerd over-exaggerating, but I’m not. It’s already happening. There really are people out there that can’t exist without technology. A house full of teenagers who grew up in the iPhone Age with WiFi and xBox and PlayStation would seriously not know what to do with themselves if the WiFi goes out. My own kid brother always looked like a fish without water if one of his days-long CoD matches ended because someone’s WiFi got cut off, even for a few minutes. Many of these kids who freak out and don’t know what to do with themselves are surrounded by books, drawing pads, balls, bird games, and many other things to do that don’t require the internet. But their minds are too shallow too realize it. They’re too stupid to understand that it is possible to communicate with someone over the phone while using your brain to assist them, or that it’s possible to physically take an order and punch it in on a register screen instead of the customer having to do it themselves.

These examples don’t even count the people who cannot add one plus one together, or subtract five by ten. Multiple any number by one or divide something by two. God forbid someone try to learn a foreign language without Siri translating it for them. It’s even becoming an inconvenience for people to plug in headphones into the jack of their phones; they all have to be wireless. The minuscule physical effort needed to insert the headphones alone has become too much for some people to handle. I would not be surprised if the same people stopped wiping their asses, because that is even more of a required effort.

Again I ask you, what the hell happened, World? Why the hell did we all become so damn useless?

Happy Friday!

It’s been one crazy week, that’s for sure! Long hours at the factory, lots of reading for the Bradbury Program, my blog is a month-old as of yesterday, I got my requested time off for the week after next so I can fly to California to visit my girlfriend, and I (finally) began work on my novel!

And I’m typing this after only four hours of sleep because, like most adults, I have too much stuff I have to get done.

Hope you all have a wonderful day, and I will have something good for you on here later tonight!

Busy Night

I managed to write a quick hundred words while waiting for dinner tonight, but I spent well into the week hours of the morning helping a friend at work and then hitting the gym, followed by a two-hour walk home. Will try to make up the missed 400 words tomorrow, or do an extra hundred next week while I’m on vacation.

One way or the other, I plan on my average 500 a night no matter what. Bay steps, baby steps…

Hollywood Distancing

When Bill Cosby got busted for his many years of sex crimes, the first thing networks did was pull re-runs of The Cosby Show. When Roseanne Barr tweeted that racist rant of hers, the entire revival of Roseanne was canceled. Morgan Freeman lost a public service announcer gig in Canada because of recent allegations of misconduct from years ago. It seems like whenever a scandal hits Hollywood immediately tries to wipe out any association with the defendant (for lack of a better word) and publicly distance itself from the alleged wrongdoings. But is this really their best course of action?

In my opinion, no. Not only is it pointless but it does more harm than good. Let me explain.

Bill Cosby might have been the face and name of The Cosby Show, just as Barr was the total inspiration behind Roseanne, but they were still mere pieces to the pie that were both of their shows. Not only were many talented and famous actors and actresses involved, including some legendary guest stars, but the crew and production companies invested a lot of time and money into making these classic programs. This isn’t even counting the huge costs invested over the years. To pull them off their air over the actions of a single person is slapping everyone else right in the face, and throwing money down the drain at the same time. It’s not fair to the rest of them to have years and years of their life snatched from TV over something they had nothing to do with.

It would be more appropriate for any existing contract or work done by the wrongdoer to be suspended pending the outcome of investigations or criminal cases. Mere allegations are just that–words. Without proof or law enforcement involvement there is just nothing that can be done without the actor threatening slander litigation. We must remember that at least in the U.S. you are innocent until proven guilty. Until a court convicts, as it did with Cosby, or publicly outing yourself like Roseanne, pulling a show off the air is paramount to convicting without proof. And what if the allegations are eventually recanted? It’s dangerous water to walk on, particularly with someone’s life work on the line.

The show does not belong to one man or one woman. Studios need to stop making rash decisions and pulling shows that end up hurting everyone involved and wasting the companies’s money. Trying to solve victim’s pain by causing more pain to other actresses and actors not involved is like trying to put out a fire with a flamethrower.

Keep the damn shows on TV.