For one year, I worked as a web designer at a newspaper.

This paper, which we’ll call

The Daily News, was in a little logging town, which we’ll call Bumpkinville, about 40 miles
north of the town I live in. The drive was mostly a stretch of 70 MPH freeway, so my
commute was only about 35 minutes each way. Now, driving to Bumpkinville was like
driving through a time machine that took you back 40 years. So it was a lot like the 50’s
there, minus the good parts. Remember the movie Pleasantville? Well, this was
Unpleasantville.

Bumpkinville, being a logging town, had paper mills. Four of them. So the entire town
always smelled like an old person’s armpit. Therefore, anyone with any ambition or
brains tended to get the hell out of there, meaning the city was basically made up of
retired people, most of them nearly deaf from working in the mills for years without ear
protection, and uneducated idiots just too stupid for life in the big city 50 miles to the
south.

I was hired as part of the three-person internet department at the paper. It became clear
early on that my boss, Kirk, knew nothing about the Internet. He had been the paper’s
owner’s son’s best friend all through school, and after stints as a Marine, a firefighter,
and a financial controller for a southern California airport, Kirk wanted to move back to
Bumpkinville. The owner’s son offered him a job as online manager despite Kirk’s
complete ignorance of the Internet. After all, the owner’s son was here on a free ride, so
why not get his best buddy in line for the gravy train?

However, Kirk had one skill, sort of: The gift of bullshit. He could make the yokels
actually believe that he knew what he was doing, despite much evidence to the contrary.
He could lie all day long without stopping to take a breath. When he hired me, he told me
that 200 people worked there. I found out later it was more like 110. One day, I asked
him why the Advertising Department was still stuck with Photoshop version 4.0 on their
machines while our department had 5.0. He went into a big speech about he really took
care of things in our department, while the other departments were lax in this area. A few
minutes later, I realized I had gotten it backwards. Advertising had 5.0, and we only had
4.0. When I told him, he gave me a blank stare, which is what he always did when he got
caught in a big lie, which was often.

The other person in our department was a bright young girl named Karen. Being bright
meant that she was overqualified for nearly any job in Bumpkinville, including this one,
which was running an internet service provider with 1800 customers. Since we were
actually just an agent for a real ISP in the big city named Transport, and Transport was
an incredibly unreliable provider, she spent most of the day on the phone with angry
bumpkins. But she did her job well, and even went well beyond the call of duty at times.

Once, Karen agreed to represent our newspaper at a local “safety fair”, manning a booth
from 9 AM to 1 PM on a Saturday. Kirk was supposed to relieve her at 1 PM. He never
showed up, so she was forced to stay there until the fair ended at 4 PM. When she
asked Kirk what happened, he said, “Well, I looked at my watch and it was 1:30, and I
figured you were out of there by then, so I didn’t bother.” This was typical for Kirk, an
irresponsible, lying piece of human garbage with rich parents, who had basically spent
his whole life avoiding education and actual work. I remember he always spent Thursday
afternoons golfing with the owner’s son before the new management took over.
Kirk was full of ignorant ideas befitting someone born and raised in Bumpkinville. At one
point, he decided that we were going to “sell” our older, archived newspaper articles to
the locals, like the LA Times does. He had me copy all the web pages relating to this
from the LA Times website, changing the name of the newspaper to make it our own. He
honestly believed the yokels would be willing to pay for past articles from our little
turdtown newspaper. Naturally, that idea sank like a stone.

And it’s just as well, because the paper never did get a secure server running to deal
with e-commerce transactions anyway, despite Kirk always telling the customers that it
was forthcoming. The information systems department at the paper was, of course,
staffed by a bumpkin too.

Jay, an ugly, zit-covered loser from the IS department, had his own problems. Born and
raised in Bumpkinville, Jay had made only one attempt to get out of town, which failed
miserably. He was quite an accomplished computer geek, and a web related company in
the big city hired him. He lasted less than a day, returning to Bumpkinville in the
afternoon and begging for his old job back.

Jay was one of only two people in the IS department and before long the other person
left, making almost everyone in the company dependent upon Jay for computer support.
He used this “power” to bestow favors on people who pretended to like him, while putting
off those who refused to pretend. Naturally, I was in the latter group. One day, I had
trouble with a Jaz drive in my computer at home. I removed it and needed to test it on a
computer with a SCSI bus. I asked for Jay’s help, but he told me he didn’t have the time.
I knew this would take all of about 5 minutes. After Jay dropped by our office later that
day to talk to Karen about nothing in particular, and hanging out for 20 minutes or so, I
began to understand what a lying little asswipe he was. So, later on, with Jay about 40
feet away in another department, I popped the top of my own computer and did all the
testing myself, right behind his back. He never found out. Which was a good thing,
because Jay was weirdly possessive about all the computers, and he would have
freaked out. He considered himself my boss, which he wasn’t, but he was such an
incredible kiss-up to Kirk that he could get away with anything.

Jay had a complete lack of social skills. There was this really creepy way he’d get all
giddy and excited every time he was around Kirk. You expected him to go down on Kirk
at any moment, and he’d laugh out loud with this mulish braying every time Kirk said
anything even halfway funny. This, combined with he and Kirk going out for long lunches
together a lot, made a lot of people think he was queer. No wonder he lasted less than
half a day in the big city. Here at The Daily News, he was hot shit. Once outside the
building, however, he was just another lonely zit-faced freak. It was hard to believe that
he had been married at one time, until you found out that he had impregnated his bride
first. Not long before I started working there, she left him for some German guy she had
met on the web but never met in real life, dropping off their daughter at Jay’s mother’s
house and just disappearing. I don’t blame her. A judge, apparently recognizing Jay’s
many social handicaps, granted custody to Jay’s ex-wife despite this.

Now, like all ugly losers who had been made shunned by nearly everyone while growing
up, Jay had fantasies of being a policeman. When the paper was bought out by a
conglomerate shortly after I was hired, they put up a firewall which was programmed to
block any and all websites unsuitable for anyone under 18. This cut everyone in the
building off from about a quarter of the web. I pointed this out to Kirk, and he laughed it
off. No lazy little shit on a free ride like Kirk was going to make any waves with the new
management. That was when I started looking for a new job. Eventually, reporters in the
newsroom got the ban lifted by pointing out that they couldn’t do much research with a
huge chunk of the web off limits. The new management, which owned 11 other
newspapers and should have known better, was amazingly stupid to have ever tried this
in the first place.

This bothered Jay immensely. He hated the idea of not being able to control what his co-
workers could or couldn’t see on the internet. But the new management still had a partial
firewall in place, sort of a “net nanny” that could log when one of their workers went to
certain types of sites. They had it set to notify Jay whenever someone went to an adult
site on their computer. Now, the program was capable of informing on all kinds of sites –
entertainment sites, racist sites, religious sites, gambling sites – but the management
chose only to inform on adult sites. I remember Jay showing me the two dozen or so
types of sites that could be selected, and bitterly informing me that if it were up to him,
they would ALL be checked. What a voyeuristic, ignorant freak. After all, it didn’t affect
Jay in any way where anyone surfed to on the web. He just loved the idea of playing web
cop. It was an opportunity to get back at a world that made fun of him throughout his
childhood. He’ll make a good Republican.

One day, Jay and Kirk called me into their office to have a talk with me. I had visited one
of the banned sites! Horrors! Now, “having a talk” with me was basically their only
recourse. Firing me meant I could collect unemployment, so they were unwilling to do
that. So they got together beforehand and made up some stupid story that was supposed
to scare me. Jay went on about how at some places, anyone caught visiting a forbidden
website was simply marched out of the building between two security guards and never
allowed to return, no chance to tell his side of the story, no nothing. Right. It was a lot like
two farm-boys telling me that I’d get mugged if I ever dared to venture into the big city.
They could tell I wasn’t buying it, which I’m sure bugged them to no end.

The thing about Bumpkinville was, it was such an incredibly undesirable place to live,
you wondered what the problem was with people who chose to live there. But you didn’t
wonder for long. Nearly everyone I worked with had some odd quirk or nutty problem that
made them unfit for the big city.

There was Kirk, with no work skills whatsoever, an irresponsible human leech. His best
friend, the owner’s son, left the company after the conglomerate took over, leaving Kirk
with no future at the paper, which is a good match for his no skills. Even his wife, born
and raised in Bumpkinville, wanted to move back to California, showing that she has
better sense than Kirk. Kirk was still working at the paper as of this writing although the
Online department was supposedly going to be folded into the Marketing department,
making him just another salesman instead of a department head. Apparently there was
nobody for Kirk to leech off of in California.

There was Jay, who both looked and acted like a weasel, the company’s digital Barney
Fife. He was working 12 hour days when I left. Hey, why not? After all, at home there’s
nothing for him to do but pop zits and masturbate.
Their top ad salesman, a really nice and personable fellow named Scott, had this quirk:
Whenever he laughed, he’d repeat the last thing he said while he was laughing. This
would cause people who had never heard it before to look at each other with an
expression on their face that said,”Did you hear that? What the hell is wrong with this
guy?” It was just weird, and the type of thing that would make him a social outcast –
except in Bumpkinville.

This sort of thing was not limited to the employees of The Daily News, however; the
yokels who signed up for web access were pretty much the same story. A normal looking
guy would walk in, and you’d be glad that, finally, someone intelligent-looking was about
to sign up with the ISP. Then he’d open his mouth to reveal missing teeth, or a harelip, or
he’d express what a relief it was to finally be out of prison. Most of the women over 30 in
Bumpkinville had long since given up on trying to look good, and mostly consisted of
waddling, obese, stringy-haired hosemonsters with masculine facial features. Often, they
would come in to cancel their account because their husband or boyfriend was headed to
jail.

Just before I left The Daily News, the marketing manager left and was about to be
replaced by a 26 year old squirt who was about 5 feet 6 and looked like he was 19. Most
of the employees were calling him Doogie behind his back before he was even hired, but
I saw Doogie walking around with the publisher one day wearing the same suit, which
naturally caused me to label him with the moniker “Mini-Me”. On my last day there, which
was about three days before Mini-Me was to take over a department wherein everyone
was much older (and taller) than he was, I saw that a box of business cards had been
delivered to his desk. I took one out, crossed out his name and replaced it with the name
Mini-Me, and carefully placed it back into the box.

After nearly a year of employment in Bumpkinville, I finally got out of there. I was the 58th
person to leave the company, out of 110 employees, since the new management had
taken over 6 months earlier. So desperate was I to leave that I took a job as a temp for
an internet start-up named iChristian.com. But that’s another Unspeakably Stupid Story.