After a long time of waiting, the day is finally here and I am officially “retired” from the last of my pro-bono obligations. I am not sure how I feel yet but relief is certainly a word that applies. I know there will be a few weeks of residual “work” that will have to be signed off on but at 65 I hope I can look forward to a few good years of productive idleness. That is a goal I have had since I was a small child. I remember that I used to look at “old” people and envy the fact that they sat around and looked out the window at nothing and no one bothered them. For them, the days might have been lonely but I was unaware of that, why would a young child ever think about that?
I just got off the phone with a person who works for a company called “Publishing Concepts”. From what I can surmise, they were hired by my alma mater to contact alumni for two purposes. One is to update information and the real other one is to ask questions and record (permission requested) the answers. I had no problem with either one though I admit I objected to the “urgency” of the email I received and the lack of information actually given originally. Yes, they said something about an oral history project but when the actual end of the conversation came, I realized that it was a pitch to sell me (much like those dreaded and awful graduation pictures) a “package in two installments of 199.99 each..(.come on, just say $400 total!) that included a yearbook, a CD of the oral histories of alumni (I can’t remember a single person I went to that school with because I was a night student), a t-shirt, a mug, and they will throw in a baseball cap.
Fortunately, I did not have my credit card information handy. I don’t blame or get mad at the person on the other end of the line, after all, she is just doing her job but this kind of thing makes me think deeply about a lot of things. Not the least of which was that I can make an actual oral history myself and giving to my children without it costing me $400.00
In the end, I asked for an email to be sent to me so that I could then decide without pressure how I was going to handle the whole thing. I am glad that I did that. The email was sent to me less than a minute later and I now have all the information I need about the company that has been hired by my alma mater. It is not a bad project but the communication used to “sell” it was not what I would have done. Oral histories have their place and these days people listen to recordings more readily than they are reading so there might be something to it. In any event, food for thought.
Exploring writing by writing 