Things I have learned

I've learned a few things this weekend, which I feel are very important to pass on, so that other people can benefit from my mistakes.

1) Remember when you're supposed to be at work. I was an hour late yesterday for work because I forgot that on Sundays, we start work at 6:30 instead of 7:30 which is the norm for the other 6 days of the week. I've been working so much lately that I plum forgot. I got pass this time, but I need to remember for next weekend.

2) Don't drink before you're required to spend many hours watching television. I made this mistake by going over to a friend's house before work and having a Cosmopolitan plus a small glass of champagne. I was having such a good time, and the apartment was so divine, that I had a hard time leaving. I ended up having to take a cab to work which cost me $15. I ate two slices of pizza at work (they thoughtfully provide us overworked drones with food on Sundays), but I was still a little loopy and kept forgetting which products I was supposed to be writing about.

3) Don't have an overdraft. My bank charges the princely sum of $30.00 everytime, I'm a little withdrawn. So I had a charge for $7.75, had insufficient funds, and they charged me $30. The bank just made 22.00 off that transaction. I need to seriously find a new bank.

4) If you work for a prestigious magazine like the New Republic, don't blow your job by making up or faking most of your stories. I watched Shattered Glass, starring Hayden Christensen as Stephen Glass, the guy who was caught when he faked a story on Hackers, by Forbes Digital actually who wanted to do a follow-up piece, and discovered that the story had been seriously faked. The DVD thoughtfully provided a 60 Minutes piece with the real Stephen Glass, who's excuse for his first made-up quote was that he needed a punchy quote for the story and since he didn't have one, he saw no reason why he couldn't just make one up, and it escalated from there. Once he saw the reaction his pieces were gettting from his colleagues, not to mention other publications, he wrote more pieces that were fabricated.

Because he had once been a fact-checker for the magazine, he knew what they were looking for, so he was able to create a false paper trail for himself, including fake notes, fake emails, a fake website, fake phone calls. He had his brother pretend to be the head of this software company Jukt Micronics. He finally blew it when his editor discovered there was no way that the story could have been true (using AOL to create a home page for Jukt Micronics didn't do him any good).

After he was fired, he completed law school, but he's unable to practice in New York because there is an ethical question. Who would have thunk it? What he did was too outrageous for the New York Bar Association, although he would make a perfect defense lawyer, since he's willing to go to any lengths. He also wrote a book, a thinly disguised roman a clef about his time at the New Republic which didn't win him any friends.

What got me was that he didn't realize that not only was he screwing himself, but the magazine, all the people who worked there, and supported him. His apologies seemed less like they were genuine, and more to do with him wanting to be liked. I got the strong feeling that was an overriding concern for him.

It just left a very bad taste in my mouth. People kill for the opportunity to be badly paid, to write for a publication like The New Republic and he blew it. His old editor, Chuck Lane said that if it was sunny out and Stephen said it was sunny, he would ask two or three other people to cooborate before he believed Stephen.

That's sad.