Being a jerk with two phones

I am now a jerk with two phones. My general disposition has not changed and I don’t behave differently towards people now that this has happened. I remain polite and respectful to everyone unless they prove themselves unworthy of respect.

But by definition if you have two phones you are a jerk. I never wanted to be a jerk with two phones. I make it a point not to become too attached to one phone, but now I am attached to two.

I began a new job about a month and a half ago and along with the job came an additional phone. This wasn’t a choice. At my old job we were able to check our work emails on our personal phones and the company paid us a stipend for that. But I joined a larger organization that has its own rules and doesn’t mind spending the money to give a lot of its employees their own phones.

Now I can walk around with one phone on each hip like the Sherriff of Douche Town. I can be on three phone calls at once if I sit at my desk at work and dial into separate calls on each phone.

I try to keep my work phone in my bag with my work laptop (which I also take home with me each night), but sometimes I know I’m going to have to look at it more than I want to. But at odd times the work life creeps into the home life and I have had to get a lot of work done on the weekends, which I often consider a sign of personal surrender.

I recently found myself text my wife with one phone, telling her that I was on the phone with my boss on my other phone so I wouldn’t be able to speak with her. While holding two phones in one hand and speaking on one of them, I walked around my neighborhood looking like a crazy person. Seriously, 10 years ago if you saw an adult walking down the street holding two phones in one hand and a jumble of charging wires and car keys in the other, you would have thought that person was insane; well today I was that insane person.

I am glad I am not an unemployed Luddite and don’t want to disconnect from the world. But there’s got to be a way to be a more balanced person and live life to the fullest while still putting food on the table for your family. I will hopefully find this balance before dropping dead of a heart attack while talking on my work phone. 

The horror of finding yourself using corporate speak

Though I have been subjected to it for many years, it’s only been in the past year that the language known as “corporate speak” has been creeping into my vocabulary. I must make it stop.

I switched jobs a little over a year ago and moved from the thankless ranks of financial journalism to the thankless but better paying ranks of financial public relations. For years as a journalist I waded through corporate euphemisms and double talk. A journalist’s job is to cut through corporate speak like an explorer cuts through dense jungle. I didn’t loath public relations people, I just knew I could not sound like one when I spoke or wrote if I wanted to be taken seriously.

I vowed to myself that I would not let this nonsensical and vacuous vocabulary creep into my speech, but in some ways it has. There’s no prohibition from sounding like a corporate automaton because now I work in public relations and corporations pay our salaries. Corporations paid my salary when I was a journalist also, but those businesses were depending on me NOT sounding like a corporate mouthpiece in order for my work to me marketable.

Now I AM a corporate mouthpiece, whether I like it or not. None of the companies I serve through my public relations job are ominous monoliths that are trying to cloud the truth or cover up any wrongdoing; they are for the most part small entrepreneurial companies doing some interesting things, but they are companies that expect us to be their representatives to the media. We have to be the bridge between the corporate world and the jaded, skeptical world of journalists and we have to sound the part both ways.

Whenever you speak with someone, you want to sound like you belong, like you understand where they are coming from. If everyone’s slinging the same corporate bullshit, they’re establishing a rapport in some small way. In agency public relations, you are not only selling your clients to media, you’re constantly selling yourself to current and potential future clients. Thus you have to sound like you could fit in at a corporate board meeting, and that’s easier to do when you shovel two-cent words around like so much manure.

So as a writer who takes pride in my ability to find the right works for any situation and a human being who decided long ago to embrace reality-based life, it horrifies me to find myself using corporate speak in any non-ironic capacity.

It’s only happened once or twice, but no matter. Like Ebola or cancer, corporate speak must be wiped out entirely if you wish to survive in the reality-based world.

The one phrase I’ve been guilty of using is “next steps” as in “we’ll discuss next steps” instead of saying, “we’ll talk about what to do next” or “what steps to take next.” Another word that’s lapsed into corporate speak is “leverage,” such as “let’s leverage our resources to gain media traction.” In my own overuse of the word “traction” regarding how to get media attention, I risk making that corporate speak. Now both lever and traction are real words that wouldn’t be corporate speak at all if you were talking about pulleys, debt or driving over snow, but when applied to business situations and overused, they become corporate speak. There are damning lists of useless and pathetic phrases that comprise corporate speak. The list is always evolving.

There are a lot of things I am willing to do to provide for my family. I’m willing to read work emails on the weekend, endure mind-numbing meetings and phone calls that should have been emails, write trite crap about boring topics and be courteous to asshole clients. But I won’t become a corporate speak user. I have my limits.

So I resolve here and now to avoid corporate speak and expunge it from my vocabulary. I will be a better person for it. 

Legalize Prostitution Already

A German language professor from the University of Georgia was arrested in the Atlanta area last week for prostitution and running a prostitution ring. He was not accused of robbing or cheating anyone, threatening anyone or withholding cash from his working girls.

In fact his harem of working girls may not extend farther than himself. He was arrested dressed as a woman after arranging a meeting and exchange of “services” with an undercover cop.

It’s a sad sight to see a tenured professor from one’s alma mater caught selling their own wrinkled, transvestite ass for cash. But what’s sadder is that we as a society have not come to our senses enough to legalize prostitution already.

Like laws outlawing the use of drugs, laws against prostitution are not only an infringement on personal liberty, but are a bizarre relic of puritanical times that stands against human nature and individual freedom.

The places in the western world were prostitution are legal—Nevada and Amsterdam—manage it quite well and are fully functioning municipalities within democratic societies that have not collapsed into anarchy.

So why is prostitution still illegal in most of the U.S.? Isn’t this the land of the free? Aren’t we supposed to be champions of capitalism? How are contemporary sexual mores improved by prostitution being illegal?

It’s your pussy to sell, ladies. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially if you like eating pussy. It’s common wisdom that everyone pays for it one way or another. Why not just pay for it outright? Wouldn’t that make for more honest relationships between men and women? What’s the difference plunking down beaucoup dollars on drinks, dinner and other things we spend money on when we’re trying to get laid and simply paying a prostitute for the same services but none of the bullshit?

I know that many people who call for the legalization of prostitution have an idealized view of the industry. The sassy hooker with the heart of gold is a myth, and most prostitutes are not go-getting entrepreneurs boldly taking a stand against society’s conventions, but rather desperate people usually exploited by men for their earnings, often living in fear of violence or deportation or are addicted to drugs.

Legalizing prostitution, like legalizing drugs, will allow society to purge the criminal element. The worst gangsters in the country used to sell alcohol; and alcohol kills more people every year than all the illegal drugs combined, but no one in their right mind calls for it to be banned. And grocery store owners are not gunning each other down for the right to sell you beer.

When alcohol was outlawed, people still found ways to drink and criminals became rich. So it is today with drugs and prostitution. Gambling is becoming legal in more and more places as states and municipalities seize on the opportunity to improve their local economy and grab tax revenues that would otherwise go to other states. Why should a law-abiding American have to travel to Nevada to get a legal, paid-for lay? Let brothels thrive next to marijuana cafes. Every city can have its own red light district and regulate prostitution according to its own needs. Want to find the nearest hooker that’s certified disease-free and fits your budget? There will be an app for that.

Every city already has a thriving sex trade, and state and local governments could probably fill the holes in their budgets by taxing the holes getting filled by johns every day. We as a people could literally screw our way back to fiscal solvency. 

Male prostitution would be legal also, of course. I’m sure there are lots of straight guys who dream of being some kind of high class gigolo for rich hot supermodels, but like it is today, legal male prostitutes would be mostly patronized by men. Women just don’t need to pay for it and can get sex from men just about whenever they want and spend zero dollars. Even the infamous penis cutter Lorena Bobbitt found a man to have sex with her for free.

Like the legalization of marijuana, prostitution will become legal in our lifetime, and there is no shortage of real crimes for police to investigate. Let’s do right by our communities, countries and cocks and get the balls rolling on legalizing prostitution.