The Millennials

I am part of Generation Y, also called the Millennial Generation. We are described as having been raised by cajoling parents who have coddled their children too much. As “narcissistic praise hounds,” as the 60 Minutes episode notes, we lack responsibility and often still live at home with our parents while in our twenties.

This episode, which first aired in 2007, does not take into account the economic woes of the times. As a twenty something who lived with my parents for a year after college, I feel that it was the only plausible and affordable solution as it took me 6 months after graduating to find a full-time job; this was in 2005 prior to the official announcement that we were in an economic recession and long before 60 Minutes covered the story.



Although our generation spends time “playing computer games at work while (they) wait to grow up,” there is also a lot of good in our work ethic. Millennials have a can-do attitude, want a variety of assignments, and easily multi-task, taking on more than one can handle but succeeding in completing all tasks. (Taking on more than what is asked of us sounds a bit grown up to me.)

However, we approach a job wanting positive reinforcement and praise from our superiors, and with all of our new technology knowledge, (again, despite the economic climate) we have the attitude that we can move on to another company if our structural needs and praise-seeking are not being met.

When someone else describes this generation, it sounds like we are pretty whiny and unlike our grandparents we are unwilling to accept situations the way they are; instead, we want it all from a job. So, I understand that I fit into this type in many ways, I too want recognition for my work (doesn't seem too much to ask for) and I enjoy the social aspects that accompanies a job. I do not necessarily, however, have the best technological skills compared to my peers. 

I always had support from my parents, although I wouldn't necessarily define it as coddling. I succeeded well in school, so my parents were never the type to have to call up my high school teachers and complain about a bad grade until the teacher gave-in to some sort of extra credit, although I did hear about this happening growing up. I’ve always been able to measure my merits through grades, but in the work force the way to really do this is by achieving a raise.

My first boss quit and now I am reporting to his boss, the Editor-in-Chief, in the interim. However, the Editor-in-Chief is so wrapped up in her own workload that I have to keep on top of all our books. I develop the five-year-plan for the book list and the revision plan for our Mathematical Proofs text.

The marketing manager for our book team is out on maternity leave and her assistant also quit, so I am in charge of completing the feature walk-through (a marketing tool shown in the inside cover of the book that demonstrates how to use the book’s features). I coordinate the e-mail campaign to market our newest books to our current customers.

Olivia, the boob-exposing, self-loathing Editorial Assistant gets fired a few weeks after HR put her on probation but not soon enough. I am left to take over her book lists and fix her mistakes like collaborate with Accounts Payable to redo the $1,000 purchase order she put in for a photocopy job. How the common sense that photocopies would cost that much money escaped her, I do not know. (Annoyingly enough, she is now in a Creative Writing program at NYU.)

No one ever stops to thank me or asks if I need help with all of these projects. I thought by doing all of this work it would get me somewhere, but I seem to still be on the first rung of the ladder.

So, I go to the VP of the company, who I had also been working for as an administrative assistant part-time, and tell him that I deserve a raise.

I explain all of the jobs I am currently doing, and the ways in which I succeed in performance, like bringing in a $170k sales order by being on top of the book adopters needs, and representing the company at the JointMath conference.

He informs me that he isn’t quite sure if I am ready to be a full on Editor, and there is no money for a raise at this time.

For the first part of defending myself, I am able to hold back tears, but after being shut down, my eyes start to swell.

I leave his office defeated; I know more than ever that publishing is just another business and I am just another expendable worker-bee in the trade.

Perhaps, I should move on as Millennials do when they feel unwanted.

Business Casual

In the office our attired is business casual, but on Fridays and during the entire summer, we get to go completely casual.

Most of us during the year bend the rules of business casual anyways; I often “forget” to take my sneakers off when I get to work and put on my heels.

Olivia (see Merry Christmas and a Happy Blue Year blog post) has ostracized herself socially from our social co-workers because every time someone asks her a work related question, she ignores it and asks us about our relationship status. She has issues with not being on the marriage-track at the age of 23. And she probably won't be with her blind dates that I've heard all about from her like the guy who dresses up as the Boston Baked Bean for a living.

My friend Tracy, the brain of the company with the librarian eyeglasses to boot, is in Olivia’s cubicle, explaining yet again how to use one of our databases.

Olivia, wearing a skirt not near knee-length and a v-cut tank top with no cardigan like most of the rest of us don, lets out “I still don’t get it.” And as she says this, her left breast flings out of her shirt. She scoops it back in with ease and continues on without mention of the incident, “can you show me that again?”

Later in the day Olivia was called down to HR (not sure if it was Tracy or perhaps the misogynist, tattle-tail Tiny Tape, see blog post called Tiny Tape, who put in a complaint), and when she returned she was wearing someone else’s cardigan.

Supplement Disaster

I was given my first opportunity to project manage a supplement for our math for elementary teachers textbook. For an assistant, project managing is the next step up to getting promoted to an associate editor.

We chose to contact the author team that worked on the highest revenue pulling activities book from our book list. We figured the material from that ancillary could be re-purposed.

The authors agreed to our terms and the payment we offered on the initial teleconference we had with the female author, who was married to the other male author.

Weeks later I was looking forward to my vacation to Costa Rica. I was going to leave early on Friday, when I received a telephone call.

“We are not going to do this. What does this mean in the contract that we have to do this by a year? It’s going to take much longer,” the husband and author, who over the phone sounded like a grumpy, miserly old man, maybe like Andy Rooney.

“But we told you that the main textbook was to be published in a year and you all agreed to write this.”

Complain, complain, complain. “No, we won’t do this. It’s off.”

And what did they want, of course, like most of the need-to-be-coddled type authors, the group wanted more money and more time.

I called up my boss in a panic, showing my inexperience (forgetting that in publishing although we have due dates, rarely are they strictly adhered to). "Don't worry about it," he said, "we’ll figure it out when you get back from vacation."

The Business of Publishing

There is an informative discussion on the move from print publishing run by a high class culture to smaller companies being taken over by conglomerates in “An Archipelago of Readers: The Beginnings of Archipelago and International Publishing on the World Wide Web,” the typescript of a lecture given by Katherine McNamara at the University of Trier in 2005.

There is constant shifting of companies, where the big names, Random House, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Harcourt, and Houghton Mifflin, are buying and closing subsidiaries. The industry is quite incestuous with employees moving up the ladder by transferring over to competitors.

While most people might think of publishing, whether educational/academic or trade, as cultivated by the quality of writers and intellectual minds, it is forgotten, as McNamara reminds us, that publishing has developed into an industry and a business.

I mentioned it in previous blogs, but I feel the need to hit this point again. Publishers are businesses and for-profit.

Books are driven by the market, in textbook publishing this means having a close connection to educational trends and knowing what would be useful to professors.

In recent years, we’ve seen trade books published by the likes of Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean, both former beauty contestants and both with by-lines (ps- these books are ghost written). However, because of the publicity surrounding both of these women in recent years, these books, not necessarily with any sense of quality-control, will sell.

The types of books that are out there, the price of your textbook, the information contained within your books, these are all factors controlled in an effort to make money.

Pi Day

I notice grammatical errors everywhere, like walking by a piano bar with an “open Mike” night or wanting to order a Cobb salad sans “blue cheese”. I feel the innate need to correct mistakes.

However, I don’t work for authors trying to sell the next best fiction novel, who might share in this obsession for perfection.

Instead I am surrounded by mathematically inclined folks, including both the authors and customers. This is the complete opposite of my creative minded co-workers, who in college tried to avoid math courses.

Yet, we all connect with variations of the dork factor.

I fully came to realize this on Pi Day. What is Pi Day you may ask?



Well, it’s not the celebration of pizza or the success of Don McLean.

It’s in celebration of pi, the mathematical constant, 3.14159 (and as the cartoon expresses, most normal people, including us editors, know it to be 3.14).


At work, we e-mail icons of celebratory pi like the image below to our authors and the VP springs for pizza and someone bakes a good old apple pie for all the employees. The technology division decorates the halls with posters of the symbol. There is all out recognition for the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

I thought perhaps this was a specific holiday that the mathematical division of the textbook publishing world would have interest in; but last year days before the big celebration, Congress approved a resolution to make March 14th (3/14) officially National Pi Day.

Acronymania

No, my workplace isn’t exactly full of IM jargon, but as the readable portion of the cartoon above notes, it is getting “acronymious.”

You probably know what an ISBN is, but you may not know what it stands for.

In case you are wondering, it’s International Standard Book Number.

In my first week of work I had an RTP meeting. I quickly learned that this meant “release to production,” and basically it was the first of several status meetings on the progression of making the textbook.

I furiously took notes when I was given the BBD and asked to get the CIP data and make copies of the MS that had AC and marks like tr, lc, or wf on it.

Translation: I was given the estimated book bound date. My co-workers wanted me to order the Cataloging in Publication data for the Library of Congress and make copies of the manuscript with author comments and proofreader’s marks.

I used to think that nothing was as irritating as being required to come up with the work login password that must require a capital letter, number, symbol, must be at least 13 digits long, and cannot be anything close to any of your last five passwords.

How are we supposed to remember all of this without writing it down?

And if I have to write it down doesn’t that take away from the confidentiality element of a password when this secret is written on a stick-on note attached to my computer.

I spent an entire week creating a binder for new-hires that includes a glossary of terms that are abbreviated or given an acronym, so no one would have to go through the guessing game of what these things mean like I did.