Thanks
I’m grateful and completely humbled by the response to my last post.
The overwhelming kindness I’ve received from so many people has made
an awful time much more bearable. I’m truly touched and amazed.
Thank you.
Dad’s funeral is on Tuesday. It will be a simple, private service, as he wanted. Those who were close to him will help each other deal with the shock of his death, and, more importantly, celebrate his life. I’m thinking of telling a story about Dad’s running. He was a mad keen runner for the last 20 years of his life, even completing a bagful of marathons. But the memory that sticks in my mind is when he competed in a fun run around what I think was a national park. I was about ten, and course the most important thing in the world at that age is that your Dad is better than all the other Dads. So I loitered around the finish line with a certain trepidation. And then, bursting out of the trees—there he was! Pounding toward us, scattered applause breaking out, he crossed first… and kept running. He’d decided the course was too short, and he went around again.
To me, this was the most heroic thing that had happened in the world ever.
I was enormously lucky to have this man as my father, and on Tuesday I will give thanks for that.
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Thanks
HTB
This is my Dad. He died yesterday. I can’t begin to
describe what that means to me, so won’t try. But I want people to know
about him; to know that he was a good person and good father.
Dad was the most practical person in the world. “When I go,” he said, “just put me in a cardboard box.” Today my brother and I had to choose him a casket. The funeral director handed us a page with a list. They started at twelve thousand dollars (metal, lots of gold) and worked their way down to four thousand (solid wood). “Then if you flip that page over,” she said, “you’ll see our particle board caskets.” They were one thousand dollars. I laughed. I knew what Dad would be saying.
Still, I can’t put him in particle board. He’s getting a solid wooden one.
I love you, Dad.
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HTB
Of course she has
Maybe it’s just me, but I found the following little story in my local
newspaper hilarious. If only I could write satire like this.
British pole dancer Donna Cleeve has been forced to quit her job because she’s allergic to the metal pole. The 20-year-old from Portsmouth developed a red rash after each show before she realised nickel used in the poles was to blame. “It’s hard to look sexy when your legs and body are inflamed. I tried to ignore it, but in the end it wasn’t worth the pain,” she told London’s Sun. She’s now given up her dancing and taken a job in sales.
Retrospective #2: Mary-Kate, Ashley, and a rabid reader
We return now to some stories we were following earlier. Again.
Yes, see, from time to time I go back and write little follow-ups.
It gives a sense of continuity and closure. It does too.
My web traffic soared on the back of my review of a Mary-Kate and Ashley novel, partly because quite a few people liked it but mostly because there are an awful lot of internet searches for “mary-kate and ashley”. In fact, that phrase quickly became the #3 search people used to get to my site, coming right after “jennifer government” and “max barry”. (Alas, “max berry” is #6.) For a few days Google actually listed my site in its first page of results for “mary-kate and ashley”, which, if I have this right, makes me one of the world’s foremost Mary-Kate and Ashley experts. This is awesome. Now if this novel-writing thing doesn’t work out, I have something to fall back on.
In response to my Everybody just left the room post, I received an emphatic e-mail from a guy named Jason:
just fuck off with your boring egotistical ramblings… if you cant reply to your email you can go fuck your self.. silly marketing c—t pretending to care…
fucking stick to the marketing, you do it better than writing books
you have the time to write bullshit about 9/11 but not answer your emails… wat the fuk?
There was more, but it became repetitive. I was surprised; I hadn’t realized that visiting my web site was compulsory. Also, while I am a long way behind on my e-mail, so is the Pope and people don’t write him hate mail. Or at least not just about that. And I was a little confused about the references to marketing. I do what marketing better than writing books? Was he talking about how I promote my novels, like on this web site? If so, wouldn’t it be self-defeating to stop writing in order to concentrate on promoting my writing?
I searched through my In Box in case there was a previous message from Jason and found two. One was from a week ago, in response to my True Love & Drool post (I’m better now, thanks), and it said:
i know your a good writer and all, i did read your book.. but having a pissy throat infection is not a good enough reason to not reply to my email. Maybe your too important and your time is too valuable to deal with “readers”… i maybe a low life, uneducated skum bag.. but at least im more enlightened and “educated” than the people who have marketing degree’s and PHD’s and all this truly meaningless “education”…
I was beginning to sense a theme. I opened up Jason’s original e-mail and was surprised to see it was a mere 4 weeks old. For most people, sure, that’s a long time to reply to an e-mail. But for me, that would be lightning-fast. That’s why the page with my e-mail address lets people know I’m running several months behind.
In light of that, I felt Jason was being a touch unreasonable. But I also felt guilty about my pile of unanswered e-mail, so I decided to reply to his original question. Here it is:
hey Max
Iv just started reading ur book, its great so far! Im just interested in what made you see the light? ie. realise that marketing is fundamentally evil… and turn towards a more satisfying and creative career?
thanks, Jason..
Well, Jason, there were a few reasons. But partly it was so I could reach out and touch people like you.
Everybody just left the room
The commission investigating the September 11 attacks
has
released tape recordings of some of the conversations from that day.
Among them was one of the most powerful pieces of dialogue I’ve heard in
years. I have no jokes or political points to make here; I just want to
talk about the actual words.
The situation was this: within the last 50 minutes, two hijacked airlines had struck the World Trade Center in New York, a third had crashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and a fourth was being tracked. The national Air Traffic Control System Command Center contacted the FAA headquarters to suggest military jets be used to intercept this fourth aircraft.
Many people have said that 9/11 felt like a Hollywood movie. If it had been, the scene would have gone like this:
TRAFFIC CONTROL GUY
Do we want to think about scrambling
aircraft?
FAA OFFICIAL
Way ahead of you.
PULL BACK to reveal out of man's office window,
two F-15s screaming off a runway.
Or, perhaps, this:
JACK RYAN
You guys need to scramble aircraft,
now!
FAA OFFICIAL
You don't run the FAA, Mr. Ryan. I do.
And I'm not spending twenty thousand
dollars in jet fuel just because you've
got a point to prove!
CLOSE UP on RYAN as his jaw clenches with
frustration.
This is popcorn entertainment, escapism. There is nothing wrong with that; I often enjoy a good dose. But what I love even more are tiny moments of realistic human failing: when a person does something unthinking, or gets confused. These are touching simply because they’re real and recognizable. Humans make a lot of mistakes. Our lives are not scripted, and if we could yell “cut” and do over every bit of our lives we weren’t happy with, we’d all still be in our teens.
That’s why this little exchange is, for me, almost heart-breakingly tragic.
Air Traffic Control: “Do we want to think about, uh, scrambling aircraft?”
FAA: “God… I don’t know.”
Air Traffic Control: “That’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.”
FAA: “Uh… you know, everybody just left the room.”
Max vs. Telstra
The other day I lost my internet connection. All the lights on
my cable modem turned off except one, the Receive light,
and it just blinked at me. I wasn’t worried because this has
happened before and each time it turned out to be a
general fault in my area: koalas chewing through the cables,
for example. Well, actually I’m just guessing there. It could have been
koalas. I never bothered to get into the specifics.
I called up Telstra, my ISP, and after wading through layers of “Press 2 if you want to express your frustration with automated telephony systems,” I got a recorded message saying there was a nationwide problem. I was invited to press 0 to speak to a human about it, and since I wanted to know when it would be fixed, I took them up on this.
Now, I knew this wouldn’t be easy as it sounded. Telstra has an excellent “Network Status” web page that displays problems with its service; if you visit this, you can see if there’s an area-wide outage at a glance. But if you can’t visit this page—if, for example, you’re suffering from the effects of an area-wide outage—you have to call them up, and they refuse to tell you anything until you have exhaustively checked your own computer. Their attitude seems to be that while they accept it’s possible that there are koalas chewing on their cables, it’s much more likely that koalas are chewing on your cables. Or have crawled inside your computer. Or, I suppose, the problem is the result of some more technical issue unrelated to koalas. Anyway, at first I used to have conversations like this:
Max: “My modem’s doing that blinking thing that means there’s a problem with your network, can you tell me when it’ll be fixed?”
Tech: “First I need to confirm everything’s working at your end. Can you tell me what error message you get when you try to connect?”
Max: “No, because I don’t use Telstra’s connection software. It kept crashing so I use the open source replacement. But that’s not the problem; the problem is the modem doesn’t seem to be getting a signal.”
Tech: “Uhh… okay. Can you check that the cable connecting your modem to your computer is plugged in?”
Max: “Well, I could, but whether it is or not, my modem’s still not getting a signal.”
Tech: “Can you check that cable?”
Max: “Hang on… I have to crawl under my desk… ow! What the… so that’s where my favorite pen got to. Okay, yes, the cable is plugged in.”
Tech: “Can you check the cable from the modem is plugged securely into the wall?”
Max: “Fffffff…fine. I just have to move some furniture… urrrrrrghhhh! Arrrrrgh! Okay. Yes it is.”
Tech: “Okay.” (keyboard sounds) “There’s an outage in your area. It should be fixed by two o’clock. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Then I got smart. This time, when Andrea the tech support person came on the line, I shamelessly lied. “I already checked my cables before I rang, and they’re all plugged in.”