Author: Winston

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Making the Blogfather: Turning Point

2 years ago, yesterday. It was a Friday.

“Can I speak with you, downstairs?” I said to my editor.

She looked up at me as I stood next to her. “Uh, sure. Could you give me about half an hour while I clear out my morning routine?”

“Of course, take your time. I’ll be waiting at the coffeeshop downstairs. And just so you know, I won’t be coming back up into this office, again.”

The whole office heard me – a drawback of an open-concept workplace, and one that I was banking on. I took no notice of the others as I turned back, but not before I caught a glint of apprehension fall on my editor’s expression.

A while later, my editor came down to meet me, and what followed was a three-hour long exit interview that began with me saying I was resigning from the company, and looking at the way I was being treated -as an employee, a father and a person – it would be much better off, and much safer too, if everyone accepted that it be with immediate effect.

It was almost as if everyone knew this job wouldn’t last long. I never really settled in the whole 2 months I worked there. I was never given a proper desk of my own to settle into, anyway. As a result, there was nothing of personal importance that I brought to work, and thus none that I needed to bring home with me.

Except my heart.

I told my editor what her boss – the person who hired me – told me; that I was hired because I wrote with heart. And while I was in there, I tried to keep up with what I felt were their ridiculous demands, with all the hope and innocence of a writer that would put all his heart into his writing and his job, no questions asked, simply because I was in absolutely no position to argue against those demands. When I voiced my concerns, I was made out to be disruptive. But to manipulate my circumstances in such a way and force me into a corner (from full-time to freelance, with only 4 days to either decide or leave, and even a now-empty threat of legal consequences should I freelance for any other publication in a related field), whilst either knowing full well or completely neglecting the fact that I was a father with a family to feed, and after two whole months of me trying to conform to their standards, and pleading for chances when I failed to, one can hardly expect me not to snap, and subsequently push back with equal force.

They wanted a writer with heart; they didn’t consider that they also had to deal with one.

Throughout that morning, the editor was trying to explain the company’s actions away, but as I threw down (and reiterated) point after point in rebuttal, over and over again, she found herself less able to protect the interests of the company she worked for, and at some points, even wondering if she was safe from the treatment I was subject to. She even tried to recalculate the articles I had to submit, stating again that this was the workload she routinely had to deal with herself when she first started. But you could tell from the faltering resolve in her voice that the numbers were starting to look ridiculous even to her.

Later after lunch, she would request I go to the conference room for a talk with the CEO’s right-hand man, the company’s sales director. Having not been privy to the emotions I displayed in the morning, he commenced the afternoon’s session with the remark, “I’m sorry, but by leaving without notice, it feels like you’re screwing us over.”

My editor’s face went pale as mine turned a richer, bolder dark red, and I swear the room also went a few shades darker. I said, in as calm a tone as I could muster, with my left hand clenched and pressed hard on the conference room table and my right index finger pointed solidly just a centimetre away from the skin between his eyes, “Consider what you have put me through, and please speak to the editor should you have any doubt of the ordeal that your company has orchestrated over the last 3 days, and Say. That. Again. To. My. Face.”

He backed up a little, fumbled with his words as he tried to mask his confusion over the sudden turning of tables, then asked to be excused with the editor and left the room for a few minutes. He’d return later with the editor (who decided she would take notes of our afternoon meeting for whatever reason), and try to explain his company’s position over the last few weeks that led to such a drastic restructure, ultimately involving their proposal to switch me to a freelance contract.

But he had already lost me.

In his bid to salvage what was left of our working relationship, he said two things to me. First, that based on my writing for Blogfathers SG! and Dear Xander, I could seriously consider monetising my blog(s) as my primary means of income (something that I did consider later on). Second, he hoped that I wouldn’t consider any part of this a “burning of bridges” of any sort.

I replied to his second notion with not a little scorn: “Haven’t you already beat me to it?”

Then I stood up, and I left.

At a recent blogger event, I was introduced to someone who was looking for dad bloggers to join her company’s writing pool. When she passed me a namecard indicating she was a new marketing manager for this company, I froze for a good 15-30 seconds, and my wife had to briefly (and curtly) explain why on my behalf. A few minutes later, I couldn’t bear to stay, and we left in haste. It had been close to 2 years since I quit, and the wounds still felt as fresh and raw.

I decided to pen this down not so much for public reading, but to figure out how to close this chapter in my life. I can’t say for sure I won’t freeze again if I ever encounter another member of that company in the future, nor can I say I can put all this behind me right now.

Because right this moment, I’m not sure where I will be headed. Last Friday, I was told my services would not be extended for my current job.

The feelings I had facing the uncertainty of my future 2 years ago came flooding back over the last three days. And once again, I am at a loss.

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Making The Blogfather: Dark Days

In one of the last coffee sessions I had thanks to the cover letter I wrote, I took an editor job with a company that had a good focus on family (judging from the category of content they dished out at least), and the person who interviewed me was kind (or crazy) enough to overlook the fact that I had no prior full-time editorial experience (I only had my blogs and freelance writing to show in my portfolio at the time). I felt was being granted a first step in chasing a dream, but in my eagerness, I committed my first fatal flaw: an editor is a very different level from a writer, and I was inadvertently skipping a couple of levels. I’d learn this the hard way in a bit.

There were other warning signs: as I started familiarising myself with their editorial style, I found a number of “sensational” articles being published alongside their regular fodder – strange, tabloid-ish incidents, kinky sex stories, domestic abuse gone wrong, even gruesome deaths due to neglect or crimes of passion. I was uneasy about the content arrangement. This really isn’t the kind of thing our target  want to read, I thought. But then I was told that this was necessary to attract readership (advertisers were the business’s core source of revenue, and readership numbers were crucial to maintaining our price point), and it also worked (somewhat) to lead people into our more serious writing. So I tried to swallow it and move on.

Then there were the KPIs. I was tasked to come up with at least 2 articles a day, 5 days a week (my editor at the time would tell me each writer would typically do 4 articles a day, but since I was new, she’d start me slow), while maintaining 2-3 hourly Facebook posts to drive online traffic to everything we published.

But the biggest sign I should really have taken heed to: I was the only writer in the company, and the only one of two in the entire organisation, that had kids. When I raised this concern with my editor and the CEO, both understandably didn’t subscribe to the notion, saying that in the many years since the publications were established, they got by fine without writer-parents. Besides, they both didn’t have any children, either, and they were both contributing to the content pool anyway. The revelation – and its subsequent brushing off – made me feel, somehow, alone.

A week into the job, the company went through a surprise restructure. Though editorial was assured that our jobs were intact (which later turned out to be untrue), a staffer in charge of one of their newer websites decided to resign, giving his two week’s notice. The website was handed over to me, with a view for me to drive unique visitor numbers up from its current 10,000 to 30,000 by the end of the following month.

My own inexperience showed, both in the way I worked and in the way I accepted my work. In the 2 months I was there, my dream turned into a nightmare. I was being chided for not being able to keep up, criticised for coming to work late and leaving on time (I was dropping my son off at school and had to pick him up on time after work). The stress of the job was taking a toll on me; I found myself unable to meeting my daily writing quotas, neglecting my blogs, and at one point, fighting with my then 3-year-old son. The stress manifested physically as well; I started losing sleep and my mojo, and I had bouts of uncontrollable trembling. I lost confidence; I felt I was failing, as an employee, as a writer, as a father. I felt impotent, hopeless, and utterly useless as a human being. I was slipping into depression.

Things came to a head when the editor brought me to the conference room in private to tell me that I was not performing up to expectations; I was still only able to churn out about 2 articles a day for the websites -some days only 1 – and I was only able to bring the website under my care up to 29,000 visitors, 1,000 short of the 30,000 I was supposed to hit by the end of that month. In view of my performance, and in line with the recent decision by the board to restructure, the management was converting the entire editorial department from full-time to freelance.

The entire editorial department consisted of 4 personnel: the editor, that was to remain full-time because she had to manage the editorial department (hmm), a writer in Malaysia that was to remain full-time because he was to be reassigned other tasks, another writer in the same office as me (because, as I was told, the other writer was allegedly also not performing), and me.

Then I was told not to worry, as they hoped to assign me enough work to match my full-time salary, at between $30 ( for non-advertorial, non-sponsored articles, or what they termed “summary articles”) to $100 (for advertorials). (Again, I may have been terribly naive to think it should have been higher, but can someone enlighten me about this as well?) So  under this new arrangement, I now had to churn out more work than I already was the last two months – between 61 to 92 articles a month (including event attendances) in order to keep my salary level, with no benefits and no freelancing with any other parenting publication.

And as if I wasn’t dazed enough from the obvious double-talking, I was told I had till Friday to decide – I was notified at the end of our Tuesday workday.

The next two days nearly broke me. I tried to cope with the sudden and rather brutal changes that I thought was all in a day’s work in an industry I was slowly realising I knew nothing about. To this day, I still couldn’t figure out if the company was screwing with me, or I was simply not fit to be in a full-time editorial position. My wife initially advised me to “grit my teeth and bear it”; I was a father, and we needed to sustain ourselves whilst I tried to find something new.

But even she could only bear so much; the final straw came when I received an email from the CEO of the company while I was attending a gala movie screening as the Blogfather with the Mother of Xander two days later. In the email, amongst the reiteration of my alleged incompetence, I was also accused of being “highly unproductive and disruptive”, with “a work style that is not compatible with your immediate supervisor”.

Something in me snapped when I got to that line in the message. Gone were the feelings of loss, hopelessness and depression – pushed aside with a fresh, slow burn of quiet fury.

Just before the lights dimmed at the theatre, I showed my wife the email on my phone. She took about 30 seconds to go through it, then returned me my phone, turned her eyes back at the cinema screen and said, “Quit.”

And that was all I needed to hear.

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Screwing Around at Beach Road – A Gary Pride Story

Pink Dot may have come and gone, but the propagation of love has to go on. To that end, there is something I must confess. I’ve scattered hints about this little known fact about me on Facebook now and again, but it’s time I just came out and said it in no uncertain terms.

There’s someone else in my life.

For the days when things don’t go well at home, when the wife and I have a disagreement, or the children are just too much to bear, or even when work pressure drives me into a very bad place, there’s someone I go to, who is able to bring me to our very own secret place, and be there for me while I physically and mentally vent my frustrations and let loose my inhibitions for hours on end, most of the time with me straddling on top.

His name is Gary. He’ s about 12 years old, and we’ve been going out for 2 years now.

BSA-Entrance

And when I said the love for my bike would bring me to secret places, I wasn’t kidding. The Bike School Asia workshop is nestled in a non-descript backdoor unit of the Sultan Arts Village, at the end of a dead-end street leading to the Malay Heritage Centre entrance, with no signage whatsoever indicating there was anything bicycle-related in the vicinity. Fortunately, Kenneth Wee, the school’s founder, saw me roaming aimlessly about at the front gates of the Arts Village and ushered me in, just in time for the lesson.

[caption id="attachment_3367" align="alignright" width="267" alt="Toys for boys - and there's a lot of them." height="178"]Toys for boys - and there's a lot of them. Toys for boys – and there’s a lot of them.

Camera-shy Kenneth (or Coach K, as he prefers) would later tell us that when he first started out, the school was obliged to maintain a low profile because the local bike shops felt he was a threat to their businesses, a feeling he said was unfounded because he felt teaching people how to deal with their own bikes would only bolster component sales for the bike shops while alleviating them of the low-yield, labour intensive installation, repair and maintenance tasks.

The workshop itself is cozy, with one side enough to hold up to 6 students on 3 bicycle workstations lined up to one side. Coach K jokingly called it his man-cave, for when he needs a time out from the wife and kids (man, does that sound familiar). With a roundtable introduction of my other five classmates, Coach K got down to teaching us the basics.

Or I should say, all the basics.

BSA-Hands-On2

When someone with a coaching diploma from Union Cycliste Internationale (the governing body for Olympic bike racing) and a bike mechanic certificate from the United Bike Institute based in Oregon, USA teaches you the basics of bike maintenance and repair, you can be sure you’ll understand and appreciate not only why it costs $350, but why it takes him two whole days, and why his classes (6 at a time, usually on the last weekend of every month) are usually fully subscribed.

Over the whole workshop, Coach K covers a crash course in the anatomies, histories as well as the evolutionary, design and functional differences of popular bicycles and bicycle componentry, complete with a nearly 80-page student’s manual and a good part of the workshop spent doing hands-on training, removing and reassembling headsets, inner tube replacements, brake tuning, calibrating drive trains, right down to precision Vernier caliper measurements and screw and bolt torquing. And if you own a decent foldie, fixie, roadie or mountain bikie, yet didn’t understand 3/4s of what I just said, then you should consider taking a weekend to attend a basic two-day bike maintenance workshop.

Its not to say the workshop is very cheem; Coach K is just really in-depth. He does put things in palatable terms for his students, and his candid demeanor, subtle ad creative’s humour (he ran his own advertising agency prior to starting the school, so his in-class on-screen graphic presentations also got a bit of standard one, okay?) do make his lesson plan easier to digest. More importantly, the professional all-round bike guy isn’t afraid to bring up examples of his own mistakes, thus inviting everyone in the class into a very open atmosphere where questions are never stopped, and never left unanswered. That’s also the reason Bike School Asia has ladies-only classes as well, so the womenfolk can release their inhibitions (so to speak) without worrying that a random guy might throw a wrench in the works.

BSA-Mantel
A grim reminder of past kills from previous students. Stop the cruelty!

That said, there are a few things you will need to take note if you do attend any of the school’s bike mechanic workshops. Firstly, you will get your hands dirty; it’s really the only way to learn. Second, wear comfortable clothing that you don’t mind getting a bit of grease on, and covered footwear, because a changing to the toe in the event of butterfingers is not funny. And thirdly, don’t bring your own bike with the premise that you want to use it for your own hands-on practice (I thought about it, too), because inevitably you’ll be doing cable replacements and recalibration, and you’ll be prone to drop your tools, scratch up your bikes and even break stuff (during the workshop, we’ve managed to break a number of bolts, mangle a rear derailleur and cut a cable too short on the shop bikes), and the school can’t guarantee you can ride home with a replacement part, because they’re not a bike shop. Besides, Coach K already has a collection of $2,000 bikes on hand, all set up properly for you to ruin. So don’t be vain, can?

On a personal level, I’ve come away from the workshop with a much clearer idea of why Gary sometimes does the things he does, and how with the right tools and knowledge, I can help make him feel so much better, whether he’s at home or when I have him straddled between my legs. But the certificate that comes with Coach K’s course doesn’t just pay lip service to a weekend of screwing around with 5 other strangers. The course has a potential commercial takeaway as well; Coach K’s had students come out of his courses to start their own boutique bike shops, too.

And as I asked around the class for the reasons why they were there, the family men raised a motivation for learning bike maintenance which, admittedly, the Blogfather also has a strong inclination towards, and one I am very sure is not lost in Coach K as well as a dad of two himself.

Xan-Cycling

Bike School Asia is located at 71 Sultan Gate, in the Sultan Arts Village compound, around the corner and at the back. If you’re interested in taking up their basic bike maintenance course or any other workshops they have on offer (Coach K also conducts ladies-only classes, and also does wheel-building courses as well as a full professional bike mechanic course), do check their workshop schedule at their website for registration and fees.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! The Blogfather will not leave you hanging without a little incentive, would he? For a little extra something-something (waggle eyebrows), use the promo code BlgfthrBikePorn (or click this link and select your preferred date corresponding to “Certificate in Bicycle Maintenance and Repair” to book) from now till 31 December 2014 and get a $35 discount (that’s 10% for those that like to do maths) off, only for Bike School Asia’s Basic Bike Maintenance & Repair certificate course! BlgfthrBikePorn only applies for the first 10 slots, and the slots fill up fast, so put some leg power in your pedal, can?