Writing and Publishing a Memoir

To commemorate the completion of my memoir, Behind the Codeine Curtain, I decided to post the first very first paragraph of the prologue.  Narcissistic? I know.  Self centered?  Yes.  But I wanted to see them up there on the screen since it my be months, years, before they finally appear in print and - who knows? - by that time all we may have in any event are e-books.  So here goes.

I line them up before me on the marble counter, an orderly regiment of small brown and yellow cardboard boxes emblazoned with red Cyrillic letters that read Terpinkod.  Each box contains 10 little white pills neatly arrayed like soldiers standing to attention.  I sigh with relief as I look down at the familiar, comforting sight.  Eight packs, enough to get me through the afternoon.  With practiced fingers I quickly free the tabletky from their confinement with a satisfying pop that reminds me of the childhood sound of bubble wrap squeezed between thumb and forefinger as I helped my dad unpack wood stoves from their shipping containers at his store.  A miniature pyramid several inches tall rises quickly before me.  I fill a weighted, leaded glass cup with water and shovel the pills into my mouth in handfuls.  Shovel, drink, shovel, drink.  “You can do it,” I think to myself as I swallow, fighting the urge to gag that threatens to upend my careful efforts.  I reach out my hand to steady myself on the porcelain sink, count to ten and down the stragglers with a satisfied gulp.  I glance about the spacious bathroom, taking in the porcelain bidet, the rich red and gold wallpaper, the silver spigot, and the blue eyes underscored by dark smudges staring dimly back at me from the gilt-edged mirror. I wipe the sheen of sweat from my forehead with a thick cotton towel, paste a brave smile onto my face and open the door.  “Who’s ready for the Eiffel Tower?” I ask as I cross the room to hug my son and daughter. 

It is a warm, sunny spring day in April 2011.  My two children and I are enjoying a long weekend in Paris while my wife sits in Moscow, recovering from the hell I put her through over the past year.  In Paris we stay at the Plaza Athénée, a luxurious but child-friendly hotel steps from the Seine and Champs Elysees.  Vanya, my vivacious eight-year-old daughter, is most impressed by the ornate floral arrangements in the lobby; Teo, 4 and going on 15, falls in love with the viscous, European-style hot chocolate.  

And much more to come.....

Did you find everything ok?

We’ve all been asked it, probably more times than we can count, that innocent sounding but oh-so complex phrase, “Did you find everything ok?” 

But it hit me particularly hard, and not because I am some overly sensitive shopper attuned to every slight.  You see, I spent 10 years abroad and have, like Rip Van Winkle, a big gap in my cultural knowledge (thank god for Netflix).  Cultural changes that undoubtedly seemed gradual to permanent residents were to me more sudden  (Where did all those Subway restaurants come from?; What the hell is a hipster?).  When I left back in 2001, I had never been asked that fateful question but when I returned in 2012 it was suddenly everywhere and I was left bumbling at the checkout counter like a cultural idiot, unsure how to respond.

Since then, I’ve heard it in New York, and heard it in LA and heard it (all the time) right here in the Midwest where people at least try to be friendly.  Judging from this post, it is even asked in England.  Yes, there are some variations, mainly grammatical, from the proper “Did you …. you were looking for?” to “Did you … alright/ok?” But the basic approach seems pretty much the same from coast to coast (and beyond).

So I decided to do a little research, delve into the history of the phrase, figure out where it came from, why it is asked, how it became so ubiquitous. 

I knew I couldn’t be the first to address the issue online, as a Google search quickly confirmed.  But most of the posts grumble about the inanity of the question or ask what happens if you respond with anything other than a yes.  (I’ll get to that in a minute.)  There was little to nothing on how the phrase came to be, who invented it (can Wal-Mart take the credit?  Target?), why it became so ubiquitous.  It seems no one really knows; the phrase was nowhere and then suddenly it was everywhere.

Luckily, there were a few posts on why it is asked, such as this one which theorizes that it is a marketing statement “meant to project a customer-first attitude amongst a store’s employees” but is really just a “façade of customer-first thinking” designed to project interest and understanding without actually eliciting a response. 

The problem is that the question is asked too late, at an inconvenient time (in a line full of harried customers anxious to leave the store), by someone who doesn’t care and who lacks training or resources to address an honest response.  The result is that the asker appears disingenuous and the customer is left fumbling for a response to what is, for all practical purposes, a rhetorical question.

That begs the question – how best to respond? Advice abounds on the internet: people who always say no, those who go off on existential rants upon hearing the phrase and even those who feel the urge to murder the sales associate.  

My default response is a grunted Yep or a more polite Yes, thank you (depending on my mood).   But when I heard it yesterday at a Target checkout after having searched in vain for a SodaStream CO2 refill (followed by a vain search for a sales associate on the floor) I glanced apologetically behind me at the long line that had formed and decided to try something different. 

I looked at the associate, smiled, and said, “No, I didn’t,” and described what I was looking for.  She looked nonplussed as I imagined the various possible responses swirling through her brain – based on her facial expression, my guess is that what she wanted to say was screw you, I have no idea where that is and have no intention of doing anything about it.   But, to the chagrin of the customers behind me, she pasted a strained smile on her face, picked up the phone, and had a colleague bring it to the register.

Online Reputation Management Does Not Work: My Futile Attempts to Fix Negative Online Posts

One warm Spring afternoon in 2012 I was sitting bored at work when I did what most of us have done at one time or another: type my name into Google and press enter.  When my results appeared on the screen my mouth opened and my heart dropped.  I tried again, this time with quotation marks, hoping, praying, that this was some kind of mistake, a momentary glitch in a programmer’s algorithm.

But it wasn’t.

First I cried.  Then I panicked.  I closed the door to my office and, after I managed to stop pacing, looked again.  There, at the top of my search results, was a negative blog post, biased and one-sided but which referenced me and contained some nuggets of truth – enough, I knew, to get me fired if my employer were to see it.

Although I am occasionally tempted to bury my head in the sand, I have always been a man of action and, by the end of the day, had a plan.  I would write to the author of the post and ask him to (a) remove my name from the post and, failing that (b) offer to provide him with my side of the story in an attempt to correct the bias and inaccuracies.  So I sent off an e-mail and waited.  And waited, and waited.  I tried again.  Weeks went by and no response.

By that time, I was coming in to work each morning expecting to be called into my boss’s office for a little ‘chat’.  I felt the onset of paranoia as I wondered to myself who might decide to Google my name.  Every meeting and introduction became, for me, fraught with overtones as I carried on this inner analysis, trying to keep my head low and not attract attention or curiosity. 

Finally, I began to research internet reputation firms in the hope that they could rescue me.  As if to prove that they are good at their jobs, this can be a difficult task.  Type in a name and hit after glowing hit of (self-posted?) rave reviews is the result.  But after heavy digging I did manage to find one of the most reputable and picked up the phone with trepidation.  Would they delve into my past, asking uncomfortable questions about the subject of the negative post?  Would they grill me for personal details that could be used to combat the negative post?  Would they tell me my case was hopeless?

Well, I was soon on the line with a hearty young man who did none of the above.  After a cursory introductory Google search he made no specific mention of the post.  Rather, in a jovial, reassuring voice he assured me that they could, through proprietary methods, either remove posts entirely or push them so far down in the rankings that no one would ever find them.

So, after forking over $3,300 for their least expensive, month-long ‘campaign’, I found myself the newest client of a leading firm in this fast-growing industry.  The first step in the campaign was to fill-out a lengthy questionnaire containing personal and professional touchstones that could be used as content created by the firm and posted online.  I returned the completed questionnaire that very same day and, soon after, was given a raft of shoddily-drafted articles and blog posts prepared by their in-house (and clearly half-illiterate) journalist.  I edited the content (heavily) and then waited and waited and waited.

Each morning, to start the day, I Googled my name but saw no evidence of any of the posts.  The negative blog post had, in fact, moved up in the ratings from third to first.  I wrote e-mail after e-mail to my ‘manager’ at the firm but received only glib reassurances that everything was progressing as planned, that the posts took time to appear.  But as the end of the month (and the end of my campaign) approached, no positive posts had appeared. 

I wrote a scathing e-mail and sent it off to my manager who, amazingly, forwarded it up the food chain.  I was soon on the phone with his manager, who apologized profusely and offered me a free month, a continuation of my campaign.  Since I was still desperate for results I accepted.  This time the campaign proceeded more smoothly.  Within days I saw the first evidence of positive posts and soon after that, a search under my name returned page after page of ‘puff’ results.

The only problem?  The negative post, the target of all this effort, remained the number one search result for my name. It never budged, except to move up in the rankings.  Needless to say, I was upset, and it was at this point that I was introduced to the dark side of reputation management companies.  “Sorry,” I was told.  “No guarantees.  There are some results that we cannot fix and this is one of them.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me this at the start?”   The response was, “Well, we were hopeful that we could do something.”

Yeah, right.  They wanted my money and they got it.  Results were secondary.

I’m sure these firms have helped some customers.  Unfortunately, I was not one of them.  The moral of this story is that they peddle (expensive) miracles but offer, at best, a palliative, a couple of aspirins, when what the patient needs is a full-blown, life-saving operation.  What they do is time consuming and labor intensive but hardly rocket science.  They generate content, post it online, and then link it all together in a lame attempt to game the algorithms.  Sometimes they get lucky and manage to ‘fix’ results by pushing negative posts lower in the rankings.  More often, I suspect, their efforts are in vain.

As for me, that negative post is still out there, still appearing as the top result under a search of my name.  So far I have been lucky – apparently no one at work has searched my name.  But I go into work thinking that each day will be my last.  And it very well could be.