Never Done: I attended the Park Slope Food Coop general meeting
The Park Slope Food Coop has 16,000 members, and each of us does a monthly work shift that lasts 2 hours and 45 minutes -- unless you do a maintenance shift (2 hours) or a really early morning receiving shift (2 1/2 hours.)
16,000 members. When I was growing up my entire hometown had 2000 people in it. Now it has 6000. My hometown was governed by open Town Meeting -- a form of democratic rule in which most or all members of the community (residents of the town) come together to legislate policy and budget for the local government. I used to love to go to Town Meeting with my parents and watch the Town Moderator (first Mario Barba and then Dick Cronin) keep the meeting civil, respectful, and somewhat efficient. As a little kid, I think I loved it most when that townsperson that everyone has -- the one who has an issue that they are going to bring up no matter what the actual agenda is -- the one who gnaws at that issue like a dog gnaws its bone, no matter what verbal and non-verbal clues they get from the Moderator and an entire auditorium full of people -- I loved it most when that person got up to talk.
People would shift in their seats. The people in the back would get up for water or a bathroom break. My mother, who would be covering Town Meeting for the Harvard Post (town newspaper at the time), would lean over to explain to me who this person was and what they really were on about, while discreetly (?) rolling her eyes to her friends nearby. I loved it. Drama! Conflict! Inappropriate public behavior! But in a context of community that transcended the conflict. A sense of community that says, "they might be the town fool, but they're OUR town fool."
I don't lack conflict and inappropriate public behavior in Brooklyn, but I do lack it in a small-town way, so imagine my delight when early in the proceedings in the ornately wallpapered room at Congregation Beth Elohim, two candidates for Coop Board of Directors spoke to us, and one of them was one of those people. Here he was, running for a seat on the Board, and all he wanted to talk about was how the Coop is a sham of a democracy. I felt the shift happen -- people got it that he was a little nuts, but nobody heckled and everyone listened while he spoke. One person even got up and asked him a question -- Could you give us specific examples of ways the Coop is not a democracy? -- and his answer was that the Coop's entire history is a specific example. And still, if people thought he was a little Looney Tunes, they didn't show it publicly.
I myself split my time between paying close attention to the general meeting, working on a writing project, and gabbing (until the woman in front of us asked us to stop whispering) with Tony Fanning, the boutique realtor who found us the apartment we're living in. I was most interested in a heated conversation about Membership Point of Sale Integration, which (and I quote here from a yellow flyer) will enable a person's member status in the Membership System to "talk" with the POS system, prohibiting members who are suspended with expired grace periods from purchasing groceries or making member payments.
The deal is, you have to work in order to shop. If you miss a work slot you have to do a make-up before your next regularly scheduled work shift. If you fail to do that, you might get two make-up shifts. People fall epically behind in their work shifts, and end up suspended from shopping (but still able to work themselves out of the hole.) But the thing is, people get around this all the time. They're supposed to be stopped at the entrance, but it's easy to get into the Coop some other ways. The way things are now, if you're suspended, the computer will still allow you to purchase food if you can convince a check-out worker to sell it to you. The new system would not allow the checkout worker to override the system.
Reactions were strong. We can't allow technology to override humanity at the Coop. It is unfair to would a person to come in and shop and get all the way to the checkout before being told they cannot. The onus is misplaced -- checkout workers, ill-equipped to deal with angry, frustrated, confused people, and facing lines of people waiting to check out, shouldn't have to deal with this. There are thousands of Coop members who do the right thing, so why shouldn't we get a system that deals with the ones who don't? In essence -- this was an ethical debate about privacy, technology, humanity and responsibility, with the membership overwhelmingly opposed to the new policy. I found myself somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, for a Coop with 16,000 members to function, we actually do all need to do our work shift, and I go to great lengths to do mine. (For years I commuted from Hoboken to do my Coop shift.) On the other hand, I don't think a mechanized solution is necessarily better than a human one, except where it might be. Could a mechanized system remove bias from the process? If you are suspended, you are suspended -- no matter your race, charm, or hotness. And it's not like the Coop has been immune from charges of racial bias.
But I didn't make my opinions known. Instead I sat in the back and listened, and read over the minutes from the last board meeting. Minutes that started with the wonderful summary: "A member raised a question concerning how price fluctuation affected the Coop and a question about kelp." The Coop might be the town fool, but it's MY town fool.
Showing posts with label Park Slope Food Coop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Park Slope Food Coop. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
I'm the one who does the hard thing
Never Done: I changed the labels in the weighing labeling machine
Full disclosure: this post is an unexpected appetizer to the Park Slope Food Coop post which will come on Wednesday, because Tuesday night I am going to go to my first ever General Meeting. I'll explain then what it means to go to General Meeting but today I want to write about why I'm the person everyone assumes will do the hard thing, whatever the hard thing is. I love my Food Coop shift. I work in Food Processing, which means I pack nuts and seeds and dried fruit and candy into little bags, weigh it and label it, and put it on the shelves. Sometimes I cut and wrap cheese, and sometimes herbs and spices and tea. I have never done the olives. Ooops. That's means now I have to.
We have new weighing/labeling machines. Well, not so new, but new within the last year or so. New enough so that I have never been there when the labels ran out. Like they did when someone was packing mango slices. Apparently nobody else had been there when it had happened either, because nobody moved to replace the labels, but instead looked to me, as if I would (of course) be the one to figure out how to execute this maneuver. And the thing is, I did it. I looked around, I found the labels, I opened up the area where the empty spools were, I studied how the spent label sheets sat in their carriage. You get the picture. I basically figured it out, and I made it work.
I am proud that I am a person who knows how to figure things out and get things done. I think it takes about 99% persistence and 96% confidence, and only about 64% actual physical know-how. But I think confidence grows with know-how, and so maybe the correlation among these qualities is relative, and the percentages shift as each of them increases. In my case, I think I have always had a pretty high level of confidence, but maybe not persistence or know-how. But I was always a physically-oriented person -- coordinated and active, so I had an innate physical know-how, even if I didn't have specific mechanical skills. And then I became a carpenter. Every day I had to figure out how to do things I had never done before, and every day I started out thinking it (whatever it was) was impossible, and every day I came home having accomplished it.
I learned two priceless lessons in my carpenter years. One: step by step. Just like Anne Lamott writes in her wonderful book on writing, Bird by Bird, I learned that the only way anything gets accomplished is by doing it step by step. Whether you already know how to accomplish each step or not, you still need to go step by step. As a carpenter, if you have to build a book shelf, you look, you think, you draw, you plan, you measure, you shop, you measure again, you draw some more, you cut, you nail or glue and clamp, you sand, you stain. It's really not nearly as intimidating when you think about step by step, rather than thinking I have to make a bookshelf. Lesson number two: Ask people who know how to do it. (Humility: Seek wisdom from others.) I spent way too much time pretending I knew more than I did because I thought people would respect me less if they knew what I didn't know. But it turned out that as soon as I started asking seasoned carpenters for advice, they started to respect me more. And I learned all sorts of good ways to do things, and I became more seasoned.
And, of course, as I became more seasoned, I became more persistent and more confident, and now I am a person who will take apart the label machine and figure out how to replace the labels, so the People's Republic of the Park Slope can eat its dried mango slices.
Full disclosure: this post is an unexpected appetizer to the Park Slope Food Coop post which will come on Wednesday, because Tuesday night I am going to go to my first ever General Meeting. I'll explain then what it means to go to General Meeting but today I want to write about why I'm the person everyone assumes will do the hard thing, whatever the hard thing is. I love my Food Coop shift. I work in Food Processing, which means I pack nuts and seeds and dried fruit and candy into little bags, weigh it and label it, and put it on the shelves. Sometimes I cut and wrap cheese, and sometimes herbs and spices and tea. I have never done the olives. Ooops. That's means now I have to.
We have new weighing/labeling machines. Well, not so new, but new within the last year or so. New enough so that I have never been there when the labels ran out. Like they did when someone was packing mango slices. Apparently nobody else had been there when it had happened either, because nobody moved to replace the labels, but instead looked to me, as if I would (of course) be the one to figure out how to execute this maneuver. And the thing is, I did it. I looked around, I found the labels, I opened up the area where the empty spools were, I studied how the spent label sheets sat in their carriage. You get the picture. I basically figured it out, and I made it work.
I am proud that I am a person who knows how to figure things out and get things done. I think it takes about 99% persistence and 96% confidence, and only about 64% actual physical know-how. But I think confidence grows with know-how, and so maybe the correlation among these qualities is relative, and the percentages shift as each of them increases. In my case, I think I have always had a pretty high level of confidence, but maybe not persistence or know-how. But I was always a physically-oriented person -- coordinated and active, so I had an innate physical know-how, even if I didn't have specific mechanical skills. And then I became a carpenter. Every day I had to figure out how to do things I had never done before, and every day I started out thinking it (whatever it was) was impossible, and every day I came home having accomplished it.
I learned two priceless lessons in my carpenter years. One: step by step. Just like Anne Lamott writes in her wonderful book on writing, Bird by Bird, I learned that the only way anything gets accomplished is by doing it step by step. Whether you already know how to accomplish each step or not, you still need to go step by step. As a carpenter, if you have to build a book shelf, you look, you think, you draw, you plan, you measure, you shop, you measure again, you draw some more, you cut, you nail or glue and clamp, you sand, you stain. It's really not nearly as intimidating when you think about step by step, rather than thinking I have to make a bookshelf. Lesson number two: Ask people who know how to do it. (Humility: Seek wisdom from others.) I spent way too much time pretending I knew more than I did because I thought people would respect me less if they knew what I didn't know. But it turned out that as soon as I started asking seasoned carpenters for advice, they started to respect me more. And I learned all sorts of good ways to do things, and I became more seasoned.
And, of course, as I became more seasoned, I became more persistent and more confident, and now I am a person who will take apart the label machine and figure out how to replace the labels, so the People's Republic of the Park Slope can eat its dried mango slices.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Everything bad is good for you
Never Done: Randomly met the author I've most relied on to validate my midlife career change
At the food coop.
Packing apricots into little plastic bags.
I knew that my food coop mate is married to an author, and I knew that he had most recently written a book about innovation, which I once tried to find at the local book store but since I didn't have his name, and I was asking one of the less experienced people at the store, we didn't come up with it from just the word "innovation" and my saying that he's a local author who had done many readings in the store -- which now that I know the title (Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation) I find ridiculous.
I had been looking forward to seeing all my coop shift mates, since we hadn't seen each other since late November (many of us missed our New Year's eve shift) but Alexa, Lucy, and Rose weren't there, and instead there was a room full of subs along with me and Justine. Nice, smart, friendly subs. Subs I enjoyed talking with. One of whom turned out to be Steven Johnson. Which you knew already because I already told you about Where Good Ideas Come From, but put yourself in my shoes. You're hanging out for hours in a chilly room, packing dried fruits, nuts, and candy into little bags, and you're shooting the shit with the other people in the room. If you don't already know each other, then all you know you have in common is that you (probably) live in Brooklyn, and you are members of the Park Slope Food Coop. So you slowly find your way to points of common interest. You move in and out of conversations with the people packaging cheese and olives, and the people packaging tea and spices. You overhear someone talking about "lunch freedom" at public middle schools, and you jump into a conversation about good TV shows. You realize that one of the subs is the husband of a wonderful playwright and TV writer friend, and you start talking with him and another guy. You discover you have a connection to NYU. The other guy went to Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and then taught in the department. They ask if I'm writing plays. I say I'm more writing screenplays and I mention my new web series. The other guy asks particularly smart questions about this. We find out he's a writer when he talks about questions of creative license in regards to the treatment of a book of his that was optioned.
Hey, this is what it's like down in food processing.
More and more of the room's attention turns to him as he talks about the optioned book, The Ghost Map, which is about the 1854 cholera epidemic in London, and how one physician, John Snow, deduced that cholera is water born and not air born -- and in doing so, changed science, cities, and the modern world. People started to ask him what else he had written. Among other books, he mentioned a book called Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.
Wait, what? I love that book. No, seriously, I love that book. It came out the year I came out of grad school, with an MFA in dramatic writing, and hopes and goals of being paid to write for the big and small screens. Having left the non profit social justice world for the world of film and television, I was feeling a little vulnerable. Vulnerable that I wouldn't actually get paid work, and vulnerable that if I did, that that I'd end up writing for Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (which I did try to write for, which I would have been thrilled to have done, but which would have made me feel like I was less of a contributor to society than if I was still, for example, working with low-wage, immigrant workers.)
And then I read Steven's book, which proposes that as TV, video games, and film evolve, the level and complexity of their narratives also evolve, giving us, the viewer and the player, more opportunities for cognitive development and narrative engagement than ever before. (I wish my books weren't in storage, or else I'd go to the source and give you some quotes. Or at least filch some blurb language.) But really, you should go read it, and I'll stick to the part that's most important to me: this book made validated my career choice, and also made me more open-minded about video games. I have several young friends who are extremely into video games, and I don't think I would have respected their interest if it weren't for this book.
From a mussar perspective, I think this one falls under the category of Humility: Seek wisdom from everyone, including the guy sitting next to you, packing apricots into little plastic bags, and including fourteen year-old gamers.
Also, I feel like I should tell you in advance what my next post will be about. I am going to try to go an entire day without saying anything negative or pessimistic, which although I probably did it as a very little child, I have probably never done it in, say, the past 45 years.
At the food coop.
Packing apricots into little plastic bags.
I knew that my food coop mate is married to an author, and I knew that he had most recently written a book about innovation, which I once tried to find at the local book store but since I didn't have his name, and I was asking one of the less experienced people at the store, we didn't come up with it from just the word "innovation" and my saying that he's a local author who had done many readings in the store -- which now that I know the title (Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation) I find ridiculous.
I had been looking forward to seeing all my coop shift mates, since we hadn't seen each other since late November (many of us missed our New Year's eve shift) but Alexa, Lucy, and Rose weren't there, and instead there was a room full of subs along with me and Justine. Nice, smart, friendly subs. Subs I enjoyed talking with. One of whom turned out to be Steven Johnson. Which you knew already because I already told you about Where Good Ideas Come From, but put yourself in my shoes. You're hanging out for hours in a chilly room, packing dried fruits, nuts, and candy into little bags, and you're shooting the shit with the other people in the room. If you don't already know each other, then all you know you have in common is that you (probably) live in Brooklyn, and you are members of the Park Slope Food Coop. So you slowly find your way to points of common interest. You move in and out of conversations with the people packaging cheese and olives, and the people packaging tea and spices. You overhear someone talking about "lunch freedom" at public middle schools, and you jump into a conversation about good TV shows. You realize that one of the subs is the husband of a wonderful playwright and TV writer friend, and you start talking with him and another guy. You discover you have a connection to NYU. The other guy went to Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and then taught in the department. They ask if I'm writing plays. I say I'm more writing screenplays and I mention my new web series. The other guy asks particularly smart questions about this. We find out he's a writer when he talks about questions of creative license in regards to the treatment of a book of his that was optioned.
Hey, this is what it's like down in food processing.
More and more of the room's attention turns to him as he talks about the optioned book, The Ghost Map, which is about the 1854 cholera epidemic in London, and how one physician, John Snow, deduced that cholera is water born and not air born -- and in doing so, changed science, cities, and the modern world. People started to ask him what else he had written. Among other books, he mentioned a book called Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.
Wait, what? I love that book. No, seriously, I love that book. It came out the year I came out of grad school, with an MFA in dramatic writing, and hopes and goals of being paid to write for the big and small screens. Having left the non profit social justice world for the world of film and television, I was feeling a little vulnerable. Vulnerable that I wouldn't actually get paid work, and vulnerable that if I did, that that I'd end up writing for Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (which I did try to write for, which I would have been thrilled to have done, but which would have made me feel like I was less of a contributor to society than if I was still, for example, working with low-wage, immigrant workers.)
And then I read Steven's book, which proposes that as TV, video games, and film evolve, the level and complexity of their narratives also evolve, giving us, the viewer and the player, more opportunities for cognitive development and narrative engagement than ever before. (I wish my books weren't in storage, or else I'd go to the source and give you some quotes. Or at least filch some blurb language.) But really, you should go read it, and I'll stick to the part that's most important to me: this book made validated my career choice, and also made me more open-minded about video games. I have several young friends who are extremely into video games, and I don't think I would have respected their interest if it weren't for this book.
From a mussar perspective, I think this one falls under the category of Humility: Seek wisdom from everyone, including the guy sitting next to you, packing apricots into little plastic bags, and including fourteen year-old gamers.
Also, I feel like I should tell you in advance what my next post will be about. I am going to try to go an entire day without saying anything negative or pessimistic, which although I probably did it as a very little child, I have probably never done it in, say, the past 45 years.
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