Leon digs a ditch

Originally uploaded by Brother O’Mara

Remember those eyewash units in science class? The ones you used to get acids or whatever out of your eyes, sorta like twin drinking fountains? Imagine leaning over one of those for a quick ocular rinse and realizing that they’ve been swapped with fire hoses.

That’s what work’s been like for the last several weeks.

Everyone loves to talk about how important it is for businesses to engage with customers on blogs and Twitter and whatever. And it is. There are legions of bald-headed honkies with glasses who love to advise people on social media strategy, but I’ll tell you this: very few of them actually do it day in and out.

If they do, there’s one thing that they’re forgetting to mention: sometimes it really sucks.

Everyone loves to talk about how Twitter is the new conversation platform, and it is. It’s not the new platform for nuanced, intelligent conversation, though. It can be a river of dashed-off half-baked ideas a lot of the time.

For me these past few weeks, it’s been a steady source of unsolicited performance reviews in 140 characters or less.

My savior here is this: Muay Thai training. After wallowing in a digital shit-rain all day and fighting online, I go to a gym here in Midtown, strap on the gloves and actually practice kicking real human beings.

Which may come in handy the day some bozo from the Internet actually tries to punch me in the dick.

So the blog’s suffering a little at the moment. It’s not gone, though.

And there’s this, too. My immediate coworkers are really great people. For real — I get a lot of leeway, lot of freedom and trust. Also it is totally cool to cuss very loud in my office as long as it doesn’t get into someone else’s phone call. It’s kind of like a cross between Mad Men and BoingBoing around there.

Keeping a job is what it’s all about these days. I know so many people out of work, so many people just terrified and scrambling right now, and for now, maybe just only for now, thanks to grace and good fortune, I’ve got a job. I’m hanging onto it with both hands and all my teeth and digging that digital ditch every day.

And sure, yeah, it’s hard and exhausting and whatever, no free time, cry me a river, right? I know where my food’s coming from and for that I am incredibly, unbelievably grateful.