Knows what she doesn't want
#wrightwritesnow 25
One of the things that occurred in the previous century was that I had an interview to be the senior secretary to the two founders of a blue chip company. Most of my work would be with the real boss. I was interviewed by the technical director, an engineer whose requirements for secretarial assistance were minimal. He asked me questions I believe he himself had formulated.
One was whether I would be bothered if the size of my desk was smaller than that of someone junior to me. I said no, as long as my desk was large enough for me to perform my function. The other question was about structure. Did I prefer a structure that was strictly hierarchical or something that was organic? I did not really have to answer that because he had already seen what my answer would be: organic. He asked why. I said that because an organic structure gave the freedom for new ideas to be implemented. In modern-speak, we call this innovation, which comes from thinking outside of the box. Neither of these concepts had gained much traction in business circles then.
He wrote a few notes during the interview in neat script using a red rollerball pen in a large spiral-bound notebook. There were a few more questions of the usual kind for this type of interview. I got the job.
A few years later, he died. I was given the task of clearing out his office, mainly because the cabinets in his office contained piles and piles of these notebooks, going back years and years, and I was, after all, his confidential secretary. Since I had observed that he dated every single note he made in his “day-book”, I chose to put them in chronological order before packing them away in boxes. this was easy, since when he had used up all the pages, he wrote the start date and end date on the front cover.
I did not look at the contents of these books, except when I came to the one that covered the month and the year of my interview. So I flicked through the pages, and found the five short lines of notes he had taken during this interview. Blah, blah, blah… it said, and then something that made me laugh out loud, all alone in his huge, opulent office, mainly because it was, and still is, true: “Knows what she doesn’t want!”
That’s a very long preamble to say that today, after over a week of sluggish page openings on Facebook (when every other app or programme on my computer is super-fast) that made me feel as if the latest tweak at Meta following the annoucement that fact-checking whatsits would no longer be operating in that space had not been properly implemented. A few of my friends had been banned from posting non-contentious items. One friend was banned from Messenger for three days, or something, because of remarks she made in a “private” chat with another friend. The sluggishness made me feel watched. A couple of others had their posts taken down, apparently because they were against “community standards”. All these things had been weighing on me, but I had a heavy workload this week, so left these thoughts in abeyance.
Then this morning, a friend in her seventies had a post taken town in which she said that she had been in the Brownies/Girl Scouts who met behind the Baptist Church, somewhere in England. I am guessing she might have said the Baptists were quite a nice lot, but that was not stated in her statement about her original post. It made me suppose that “baptist” has probably been flagged as a bad word that offends Facebook’s truth-free community standards, following the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Rudde’s appeal for mercy, and human rights and justice for all.
I don’t want to have to deal with that, or any of the above. I don’t particularly want to break this way of keeping in touch with friends and relatives from all over the world. My friends say they are going to miss my posts. I have told them to come to Substack, where I will post daily. There is a general reluctance on the part of most to shift to another space. As soon as I have collected more solid contact details for all of them, and downloaded my data, I will delete my Facebook account. Because I don’t want to subsist in an ecosystem where freedom of expression—and possibly other human rights—is randomly denied because a government on the other side of the world is in turmoil.
Truth matters. It is only by seeking the truth and living in truth that one determines what is worthwhile. And then, it is much easier to determine what one does not want.
The only thing is that a lot of people I am deserting on Facebook want to continue hearing about the progress and mini-adventures of my anxious dog, Bayeza. I might have to open a separate section here for that.