I worked at IBM for 2½ years.

When I hired on they encouraged new employees to be bold. Think outside the box.

Question the received tradition, challenge authority, stand up for your beliefs.

They told about Kierkegaard saying you can make a wild duck tame, but you can't make a tame duck wild again.

They encouraged us to be wild ducks.

In my writing I called a character Canard Sauvage. He was a wild duck.

I wrote about him working as an information developer for a computer manufacturer that made a small, desktop computer called Big Red. The Snapping Pussy of Doom.

Did you hear the one about the woman who went drift-fishing with 27 guys the other night? All she got was a red snapper.

Big Red was also known as Vagina Dentata. People had a fear of computers. They associated computers with Big Brother, Nineteen Eighty-four, domestic surveillance, without a court order.

I said that PC didn't stand for personal computer, it stood for pubococcygeus, the muscle women contract when they squeeze their pussies shut.

Is that wild enough for you?

When I hired on permanent, I promised myself to give the company 100%.

If they didn't want 100%, I wouldn't sull up, I would keep importuning them until I found a receptive ear.

I showed them the books I was writing, after work, and asked them to publish them and sell them in the stores where they sold the hardware and the software.

Underware, I called the books. A new product line. Books that sought to get at the infrastructure, or underlying form, of what the small, desktop computer was going to mean in everybody's life. How the PC would affect individual psychology, the sociology of work, economic arrangements, management strategies--the full magnolia.

They told me they weren't in the publishing business.

At the time, they were the second largest producer of printed matter in the United States, behind only the Government Printing Office, and ahead of any individual book publisher.

Then I asked them to name me an IBM Fellow and let me write them for my job. Have somebody else publish them.

I said that if they gave me five years I would write a series of 25 books called Explorations in Communication, after the anthropology journal Ted Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan published up in Canada.

They declined.

Then I asked them to let me publish a newsletter and circulate it among my fellow information developers. I gave them an example, the short book Common Sense.

Common Sense was done on the system, at work, and had a glossary and index, ordered headings, a judicious mix of text and white space. It was about how to write technical publications better. Any publications, really. I corresponded with my mail art pals. Desktop publishing was not a big use for the PC yet. They were used for spreadsheets and database management. Number-crunching.

Word-processing, of course. I said they were going to be used for text-editing. They were going to enable people to publish brochures, booklets, fliers, themselves, at home, or at their desks, at work. Indeed, that artistic people were going to use their computers at work to produce their own work, in addition to their work assignments, and exchange it with each other. As I was doing. This should be encouraged. Exploited.

What I was doing was discouraged. Punished.

It was against the rules.

This was like trying to get people not to use a business telephone for personal calls.

I thought I was being underutilized. I thought it was a waste. I tried to get the company to change its policies. They wouldn't.

One day I read a summary of opportunities for information developers in the computer industry. In the Journal of the Society for Technical Communication.

It said that, to get ahead, a technical communicator could:

1. Become a manager.
2. Retrain as an engineer or a computer programmer.
3. Transfer into a related field, like Training, and still do a little writing from time to time.
4. Remain a writer, forsake advancement, fight burnout.

I went Open Door with a Speak Up, to the Vice President, Personnel, at Corporate, detailing my history of trying to get my managers to listen to me and asking if that was indeed the future I faced, at IBM.

If it was, tell me, and I would leave.

But I wasn't going to stay and watch myself burn out.

He appointed a special marshal to investigate my beef.

She read everything I sent, the book manuscripts, the memos, my minutes of Employee Satisfaction Feedback Survey meetings, skip-level interviews, performance plans, my Career Development Plan.

She flew down and talked to me, and my managers. She flew back and talked to her manager.

She flew down again to give me the verdict, in person.

No.

If I did what my managers told me to, I could stay. But I could not keep doing what I wanted to, and pestering my mangers to let me do it full-time.

So I left.

When I went back to my office, and told my manager I was leaving, she talked into quitting by mutual consent, so I would draw 2½ weeks pay.

She didn't tell me that by doing so I was admitting that I was being asked to leave because I could not bring my performance up to their level.

I was leaving because they would not bring their standards up to my capability.

She didn't say she was going to tick Do Not Hire on my exit interview and damn me with faint praise to potential employers.

She didn't even inform me that we were negotiating the terms of my separation.

I was (1) naive, and (2) stunned. I thought I was going to win. I was in shock. I was walking wounded. I had a thousand-yard stare.

I would have agreed to anything. Just let me out of there. They had worn me down.

The no was just the coup de grace.

What more could they do to me?

They could blacklist me.

They could bear false witness against me.

They could deal with me in bad faith, deceive me, behind closed doors.

You know: the usual thing an employer can do to you if you don't toe the line.

If you aren't a tame duck.

If you don't caponize yourself.

Bite your own nuts off, with your own teeth, or nubs, if that's all you have left.

They take even what you have left, and leave you with nothing, nowt, naught.

Zero, zed, zilch.

The fact that I had a paid-for house didn't help.

It made me too big for my britches.

What did I think I was--independently wealthy? Above a job?

When I found out later what my manager had done, and asked her why she did it, she said, as if it explained what she did, "Some of us have to work, you know."

I said, "What kind of a place do you want to work?"

People like that aren't going to see eye-to-eye. They live in different worlds. Not the same world with different names attached.

I refer you to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Education is the process of teaching you to see things like a business major. Or pretend to, as a matter of survival.

The artist is the hardhead who didn't get the word. Or got the word and wouldn't heed it.

Fuck that, Skippy.