The 250 Square Foot View

By Bobby Calise

At the end of senior year, my high school held an awards ceremony to recognize its students for various school-related accomplishments. And when I say “awards ceremony,” I mean something less like the glitzy red carpet Oscar night and more like the ones they give out the week before for the technical stuff that no one cares about. I was slated to receive an award for perfect attendance—not just for high school, but from grades 1 to 12. That’s right: for 2,160 straight school days, I raised my hand and said “Here!”

No one really cared much about my streak aside from my family. In fact, most of my fellow students were appalled when I told them I’d been to school so often. (Much like you’re probably thinking right now.) But nevertheless I was finally getting some credit. When they called me up to the stage, I couldn’t help but be a little proud of myself. I went up and collected my cheap fake wood plaque and studied it carefully. After all, it would be hanging from the wall of my corner office someday, right? And there it was, in writing: “Perfect Attendance Award, Robert Calise.”

As most of my friends know, my legal name is Bobby, not Robert. I am regularly mistaken for a Robert and I’ve accepted it. It happens, the same way Ryans are often called Brian, and Saras with no “H” hate when people add one. (Note: I have very much NOT come to terms with someone spelling it “Bobbi.”) The Robert thing was an honest mistake, but not a mistake I wanted to see on what was then a lifetime achievement award. It was then that I started to realize that no one was taking my perfect attendance as seriously as I was…and I couldn’t remember why I was.

Ultimately my perfect attendance started out of necessity. For my mom, as for many parents of New York City school children, the school system is a free babysitting service. This is why it’s news when the City schools close for snow days. If my brother or I stayed home, that meant she stayed home. And that meant using up a precious sick day. Sick days mean nothing children, of course. As a kid I had no concept of time off because I had so much of it myself. It was only when I started working that I realized that not everyone gets 200 days a year off, including the entire summer. (My mom would eventually become a teacher, so she actually would have off when we had off.)

Anyone who works in an office setting can tell you that most sick day policies are flawed at best. At my job, I get five sick days that I can use any time from January to December; if I don’t use all five of them, I lose the remainder and start back at five in January. This incentivizes me to miss work five times during the course of the year. Some companies pay their employees for unused sick days. This incentivizes people to come in when they are sick, because calling out means literally giving up free money. I’ve heard of companies that don’t count sick days at all—you simply take what you need and show up when you’re feeling better. Regardless of the system, every employee’s goal is to make the most out of his sick days, sick or not.

So how many sick days did I take last year? None.

One reason for my reluctance is that I’ve been conditioned to think that all sick days are fake. And so when I finally do take one, I feel like the other people in my office are assuming that I’m running all over town chiding a snooty maitre d’ for his rudeness, or joyriding in a borrowed sports car that is so choice. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve failed to recognize that a mental health day is as important if not more important as a physical one. At one point, I actually thought I’d be recognized for this mini-version of my original attendance accomplishment. Robert, I’ve noticed that you haven’t taken one sick day all year. Great job, keep it up!

In the end, sick days will always be about my own discretion and what I’m comfortable with, and I’d suggest everyone makes good use of theirs the way I plan to with my own. These days, the only fear I have when it comes to sick days is that if I take one, I may never go back.

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Note: This post was originally published in October 2012.

Twice a year I receive the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz alumni newsletter, the New Paltz Observer, via snail mail. Typically I spend a few minutes leafing through it to see if I recognize any of the names from the years I attended. I usually check out the pictures of the new additions to the campus. Sometimes I read up on what’s new in the tennis program, since I played on the team when I was there. But counter space is a premium in my tiny New York City studio apartment, so after I’ve read it I toss it in the trash and I don’t think of it again until six months later when the new issue arrives. Only this time a tiny paragraph in the sidebar caught my eye:

“Corrections: David Samuel, ‘82, was mistakenly listed in the Memoriam section of the Spring 2010 issue of the Observer. We apologize for the error and are happy to report that he is alive and well.”

Mr. Samuel, who graduated the year I was born, had apparently been pronounced dead in one issue only to be resurrected a year later in another! That’s when it dawned on me: My alma mater literally doesn’t know whether its alumni are dead or alive.

I suppose it’s an honest mistake and as a journalism graduate I’m just being nitpicky. And in the Observer’s defense, they did print a correction, albeit a year later. But then I thought, what if the same thing happened to me? What if I found my own name mistakenly printed in the Memoriam section? The truth is that I probably wouldn’t really care.

The best part about being crossed off of my alma mater’s “living alumni list” would be that they’d stop asking me for money (probably). I haven’t ever actually donated a monetary gift back to New Paltz, and I have no plans to do so in the future. I no longer feel a connection to this place where I spent four seminal years of my life. Some people stay loyal to their schools because it looks great on a resume. Others because their men’s basketball team always makes an appearance during March Madness. Or maybe they just look really good in the hoodie they bought from the school bookstore freshman year.

This post has taken me a while to write because I couldn’t really decide how I felt about New Paltz, and why I was so indignant at the idea of giving back. As a strapped for cash ex-student I might say, “Donation? I donated for four years and I’m still making donations. It was called tuition then and now it’s called student loans!” As a righteous do-gooder, I might say, “Of all the causes that need my money, I’m going to write a check to a college? I’d rather give it to people who actually need it.” But that’s not it. For me it comes down to one thing: did my four years at New Paltz put me in position to succeed upon my departure? Well, not really.

Let me qualify the above: the professors in my journalism program were outstanding. They were thought-provoking and experienced and eloquent and approachable. I could probably email most of them right now and they’d remember who I was. After four years of instruction classes about AP Style and nut graphs and the inverted pyramid, I came out of that program prepared do the job of being a journalist. But what I didn’t learn was how to find that job. And as a result, I didn’t.

I can’t recall a single occasion when career development training was offered to me while I was still in school beyond a couple of generic job fairs, so I really had no idea how to approach my job search after graduation. I bought the latest version of The Writers Market and mailed literally 20 resumes and cover letters per day inquiring about assistant jobs, with no response save for one rejection letter. I attacked Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com and JournalismJobs.com with ferocity. I spent a few months temping at my second cousin’s financial planning office at a generous $10 an hour; I managed to make $150 for a freelance article in a local Long Island newspaper which later folded; I worked as a substitute teacher during the week for about $100 a day in the middle school where my mom taught; I took some part-time shifts at The Sports Authority for under $8 an hour before they cut hours after the holidays; and finally I scored my first full-time office job in Manhattan nine months after graduation, where I made a mid-20s salary minus $267 each month for my Long Island Railroad ticket. I eventually moved to my current company, where I’ve been promoted twice.

I’ll have graduated seven years ago in May. I’m able to pay my rent, my utility bills, and of course, my student loans. I’ve been able to save a couple of bucks for a rainy day, and I can pay for a nice dinner with my girlfriend without wincing when the check arrives (or asking her to go Dutch). And I really like my life. I’m not wealthy, but I’m very happy. But does any of this mean I should write a check to SUNY New Paltz, just because my hoodie still fits?

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By Bobby Calise

A former coworker of mine, Sam*, once told me a great story about her mom’s early experiences with texting. Sam’s mom, Janet, had a childhood friend whose own mother had passed away recently. Janet, very new to the idea of text messaging, thought it would be the perfect medium for passing along her sentiments without being too intrusive. She sent her friend a text along these lines:

“Donna-So sorry to hear about your mom. if there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know. LOL. Janet.”

When she told Sam what she had written, beaming about what a great job she had done with her nascent texting abilities, Sam was appalled. “What??? Mom why did you write LOL? Don’t know know what that means?”

Bewildered, Janet replied: “Yes! It means ‘lots of love.’”

Depending on your age and the tech savvy of your own parents, you probably have a few stories similar to Sam’s. My mom recently expressed agreement via text message with two carefully selected words: “tru dat.” My father once responded to an email I wrote him by calling me on my work phone three days later, saying that email is “too impersonal.” And, he even corrects me each time I say that I “texted” someone, insisting that the past tense of the word text is text, as in “I text you last week. Did you get it?”

And while watching your relatives learning how to use email, texting, blogs,  Facebook, or Twitter is probably more painful than we’d like, I think they’re getting there. I’m willing to have more patience with my family and friends because, of course, I like them. But that patience doesn’t always translate to the office when time is, quite literally, money. One area I’m starting to lose patience with is voicemail.

I’ve had debates with coworkers for a while now about where voicemail fits into the way we receive information in the workplace. Sure, there’s no harm in picking up the phone and calling someone, exchanging a couple of niceties before getting down to the reason you’re calling. But is it really the most efficient way to send and receive information? What I’ve found is that when someone calls me to ask for something, they are putting the responsibility on me to ask the right questions on the fly, take notes, and then transform that conversation into exactly what they were hoping to receive in response.

Personally, I find a well-thought out email to be a much more valuable tool to me than a call. If done properly, an email lays out exactly what is needed, and if I forget a detail, I can always refer back to it. Rather than hoping I can glean everything I need from a phone call (or worse, replaying a voicemail two or three times), I have living proof of what was requested right there in an email. There’s no such proof after a phone call except for what you happened to scribble down on a piece of paper you may or may not have lost already.

Of course if a top-level executive stops by my desk and assigns me a project, I’m not going to say, “Sure thing, Bill, I’ll get right on that just as soon as you put it in an email.” But it might save me a little time if he had.

Ultimately it’s a little optimistic to ask that everyone in one’s social and professional circles is on the same page in terms of communication etiquette, but I can still hope. The good news is that if I do find myself on the wrong side of a communication mishap, I am already set with my response: “I text you last week. Did you get it?”

*All names have been changed.

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By Bobby Calise

I’ve always enjoyed writing in some form or another. To prove it, I have a desk plaque my mom made up when I was just six years old that reads: Bobby Calise, Artist-Writer, 1988. And while I ultimately dropped the “Artist” part—which was based on hundreds of mediocre drawings of KITT from Knight Rider, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Michael Jordan—I managed to keep up the “Writer” part up to now.

It’s a cool feeling to be able to say, “I’m a writer.” I’d imagine it’s even cooler if you actually write from time to time. I’ve managed to write hundreds of essays and term papers as a student, actively participate on my high school and college newspapers, intern at a daily newspaper for a semester, freelance a couple of articles since graduating from school, and yet, I can still feel the “Writer” on my childhood desk plaque starting to fade quickly.

This blog is an attempt to curtail that. It will make me accountable. If I have a thought, an idea, or a hypothesis I think is worth mentioning, I’ll post it. The themes I write about here won’t fit neatly into a niche that will have advertisers begging to buy ad space here. It may not be read by anyone at all. But the hope is that I will incite some response—even if that response is, “You suck”—and that whoever does stumble upon it can get something out of it before they go on with their day.

So if you have managed to find me here, welcome, and please come again.

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