Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

A line in the sawdust: Bartenders can’t be bartexters

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About 11:00 last Thursday night, I and two of my mates were assertively asked to leave a sleepy local bar called the Happy Village Tavern, by a bartender who must be competing for a title I wasn't aware of: Chicago's Very Worst Barkeeper.

He asked us never to return.

As if.

The bartending barbarisms that led us to an inevitable boiling point were so many that listing them is tedious. But the first is potentially instructive to bartenders everywhere.

Paul and I arrived first and got our drinks. Tony arrived soon after, and I told him to have a seat and walked up to the bar to get him a beer.

The bartender was at the end of the bar, texting. I sidled into his peripheral vision, until, after an interval, he said grimly, "I see you there. I'll be with you in a moment."

So I stood there another minute or so, watching this guy compose his text while my pals, seated at the table across the room, were warmly catching up with each other. I was too astonished to say anything.

"Hey David," Tony finally yelled. "Tell him to text me a beer!"

Which led to a series of escalating bartending faux pas, which were met with increasingly robust customer feedback on our part, culminating in our unhappy ouster from the Happy Village Tavern.

A few years ago in Chicago some alderman tried to pass an ordinance forbidding taxi drivers from talking on their cell phones with passengers in the car. I was against the ordinance, because cab-driving is dreary work and it seemed to me that if talking on the phone got the driver through the day, it didn't inconvenience me too much.

But bartending, though it too is a dreary job, requires even for its minimum standard of practice, that the practitioner be immediately and agreeably available to customers—indeed, ought to be constantly scanning the bar looking for thirsty people.

Bartenders, don't make me propose an ordinance forbidding bartexting.

Just knock it off, will you?

What was your happiest moment as a communicator?

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The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, gives more speeches per year than I do, and I'm counting the ones I give to my daughter.

Four writers help with his speeches. They all sit a one row of cubicles, with two assistants right around the corner. I spent time with them last week before my talk. A more congenial crew I have never met. Three men and three women, all sophisticated, thoughtful, hard-working, funny, candid—and, apparently, happy.

Actually, more than apparently. I actually asked a couple of them them. Yes. They are happy. They each can rattle off the particular strengths of the others, and though I'm sure they're aware of one anothers' weaknesses too, they don't seem at all inclined to dwell on them. The work itself means too much to them to waste time infighting. And the work—which occasionally involves all-night writing sessions on trips around the world with the Secretary General—is demanding and usually stimulating too.

"Everybody," said David Simpson, whose (wonderful) title is First Officer of the Speechwriting Unit of the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, "is on top of their game."

The whole thing almost—almost—made me want to work in an office again.

More importantly, it got me thinking about times in my career when work has been play.

But there were a few stretches at Ragan: When I took over as editor of the weekly Ragan Report, after years as an understudy. And then I became a managing editor there, thrilled to teach the young kids all the skills that I'd learned only a few years before. I was happy when I went off on my own and found myself writing communication commentaries one day, reporting magazine stories the next. And these days, come to think of it, as I write and speak about communication, saying and writing things that could only have come from a son of my writer mother and adman father, I'm pretty happy too.

There have also been down years in there, of course. Times at Ragan when I wanted to leave but couldn't figure out where else in the world that eccentric place had prepared me to work. (Happily, the answer was, "anyplace.") Times later in my freelance career when I realized with great anxiety and sadness that some of the journalism that I once felt privileged to do, didn't even stimulate me anymore. And times all along the way when I allowed myself to think: Goddamn, this world demands a lot of energy from its workers. And wonder, about that energy: Do I have enough?

This is all a way of asking you to tell me: What was the best stretch of your career? And remembering how good you felt then—how might you go about feeling that way again?

Seen in my daughter’s bookbag

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First-grader Scout is on the honor roll, and home comes a "Certificate of Achievement," signed by the principal and the homeroom teacher, with a Wendy's logo on top.

Scout is a member of "Wendy's All-Stars," and the certificate is good for "a tasty reward that's better than any other!"

A fast-food hamburger.