betty began to read novel #1.
bob was a human being.
he got up in the morning and went to work five days a week.
he occasionally got a holiday, such as the fourth of july or thanksgiving or christmas day.
his hours were from eight a m to four p m every day, with a 45 minute break for lunch.
when bob got up in the morning he usually had a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, and a toasted bran muffin for breakfast.
then he dressed and went to work. there was no dress code at his job, so he wore the same thing almost every day - black pants, and a blue short sleeved shirt. he never wore a tie, although he did own a red one and a yellow one. occasionally he wore a white shirt instead of a blue one.
it should be mentioned that bob lived and worked in a metropolitan area that did not have much divergence in the weather throughout the year. occasionally bob would have to wear a jacket or a sweater when he went out outdoors. he owned a blue jacket and a red sweater and a green sweater.
he took a bus to work, the bus ride took approximately forty-five minutes - the same length of time , as it happened, that he had for lunch.
bob worked for a company that produced advertising brochures for small and medium sized businesses.
bob worked in the editorial content department (the department changed its name every six months or so). his title was editorial technician (this title also changed every six or eight months).
bob’s job was to produce the words that went into the brochures. the brochures were not written from scratch - there were sets of templates that were used, and into which the particulate attributes of the customer’s business were inserted.
a single template rarely sufficed, so they had to be combined in some way.
the hardest part of the job was avoiding mistakes in describing the customer’s businesses. this involved researching the jobs on google or other information sites.
the other hard part of the job, for bob, was prioritizing the different assignments he was given. different “producers” - the sales and marketing reps who obtained the jobs from the customers - would give him assignments and each wanted their own given priority, so keeping them all happy was a problem.
in addition, bob had to deal with the “product department” - which oversaw the final determination of each brochure’s combined visual and verbal content. the verbal content was considered secondary to the visual, so the “editorial technicians” like bob felt they were treated like inconsequential drones who were always slowing things down.
on bob’s forty-five minute lunch break, he almost always had two slices of plain pizza and a diet dr pepper at a hole in the wall place across the street from the office building. to venture any further away involved risking being late getting back.
although no one ever made a big deal if he was a few minutes, or even five or ten minutes late…
betty could not read any more . besides being totally boring, it sounded exactly like her own job. she put down “novel #1” and picked up “novel #2”.
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