Writing Boots

My friends and close readers know my car is a Scout—a 1964 International Harvester—and my daughter, by a coincidence that arouses suspicion in the suspicious, is also named Scout. (She's a 2003.)

I've decided to sell the truck after nine years of pure joy and mostly reliable utility as the service vehicle for Murray's Freelance Writing. I'm also selling my other "mostly reliable" car, a 1992 Volvo.

Why?

Several years ago I took a teenage protege of my inner-city art-teacher wife for a ride in the smelly old Scout. I was introducing Bryant to golf, and Bryant was introducing local golfers to hip-hop golf togs.

"Dave, can I ask you a question?" Bryant asked politely as the car coughed and wheezed down Division Street. "Why do you drive a car like this?"

"Well, Bryant, I just think it's fun to drive—you know, kind of an adventure every day."

He hesitated, and then said with a quiet smile, "You know, sometimes I think white people just don't have enough problems."

Well these days, white people have enough problems.

Updating categories for the second annual E2E Communication Awards (enter now, deadline May 22), I was corresponding with the founder of Communitelligence.com, old communication hand John Gerstner.

He suggested we strike "upward communication" off the category list, because no one would know what it means anymore. With great reluctance, I agreed with him. This term's currency up until about a decade ago demanded an answer from organizations to the question: So what apparatus do you have in place to deliver employees' ideas and opinions to management?

But just because communicators stopped using the term—and stopped ensuring that employees had an official vehicle by which to communicate "upward," to management—doesn't mean employees stopped having pungent opinions.

This devastatingly well-written e-mail to AIG's CEO appeared in today's New York Times.

Might these ideas have been vented earlier and more quietly if AIG had a communicator who knew what "upward communication" meant? We'll never know.

Postscript: Upward communication is the subject of my personal all-time favorite Onion headline:

"Best Buy's Employee Suggestion Box Brimming With Urine."

You ever read Nelson Algren? As I say in my latest Huffington Post piece, the late Chicago novelist is taking over my mind these days, and I'm not entirely pleased.