Craig Lancaster - 600 Hours of Edward

At 3:38 p.m. and 10 seconds, twenty-one days ago, on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Mr. Withers fired me from my job at the Billings Herald-Gleaner . I know it happened at that time because as Mr. Withers said, “I hate like hell to have to tell you this, Edward,” I looked directly at my Timex watch on my left wrist, where I always keep it. Its display read 3:38:10, and I made a mental note to write it down as soon as possible, which I did exactly 56 minutes and 14 seconds later, as I sat in my car. A phrase like “I hate like hell to have to tell you this” is a precursor to bad news, and I think the fact that I recognized this is what caused me to look at my watch. I was right about the news. Mr. Withers finished by saying, “but we’re going to have to let you go.” He said a lot of other things, too, but none of them are as important. I couldn’t listen very closely, because I needed to concentrate on remembering the time. The time is now logged, but that’s purely academic. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, although I hesitate to say that definitively. I can think whatever I want. It doesn’t mean things will happen that way. It’s easier to stick to incontrovertible (I love the word “incontrovertible”) facts.

That I needed 56 minutes and 14 seconds to get to the car can be attributed to the fact that getting fired is no simple thing. In the movies and on TV, getting fired never seems complicated. Some boss, generally played by someone like Ed Asner, comes out of an office and says, “You’re fired,” and the fired person leaves. But Mr. Withers doesn’t look like or sound like Ed Asner, and he made me sign a lot of papers—things like the extension of my health care benefits through something called COBRA and the receipt of my final paycheck, which included the hours I had worked in that pay period and what Mr. Withers called “a severance,” which was two weeks’ pay, or 80 hours at $15 an hour, minus taxes. The severance check came to $951.01. When I asked Mr. Withers why I was being fired, he said that I wasn’t being fired per se (I love the Latin phrase “per se,” which means “in itself”) but rather that it was what the company liked to call “an involuntary separation.” He said that often happens when a company needs to cut its costs. Labor, which is to say people, is the biggest cost any company has. Mr. Withers said it was an unfortunate reality of business that people sometimes have to endure involuntary separations.

“So, Edward, don’t think of it as a firing,” he told me as he shook my hand, after he took my key and my parking pass. “You didn’t do anything wrong. If we could keep you on board, we would. It really is an involuntary separation.”

I think Mr. Withers wanted to believe what he said, or maybe he wanted me to believe that he believed it. I don’t know. I veer into dangerous territory when I try to make sense of subtext, which is a word that means an underlying, unspoken meaning. I would rather people just come out and said what they mean, in words that cannot be mistaken, but I haven’t met many people who are willing to do that. I will tell you this, though: Another word I love is the word “euphemism,” which is basically a nice way of saying something bad. The incontrovertible fact is that “involuntary separation” sounds a lot like a euphemism to me.

Getting fired, or involuntarily separated, from the Billings Herald-Gleaner has made it a real shitburger of a year. Scott Shamwell, one of the pressmen at The Herald-Gleaner, taught me the word “shitburger.” Scott Shamwell was always coming up with odd and interesting word combinations, and most of them were profane, which delighted me. One time, the press had a web break—that’s when the big roll of paper snaps when the press is running, which means they have to shut everything down and re-thread the paper—and Scott Shamwell called the press a “miserable bag of fuck.” I still laugh about that one, because the press is almost entirely steel. There’s not a bag anywhere on it that I’ve ever seen, and now that I don’t work at the newspaper anymore, I’ll probably never see the press again. I don’t know. Again, it’s hard to be definitive about something like that. If I ever get a chance to see the press again, I’ll take one last look and see if there’s a bag somewhere. I don’t think there is.

One of the things I learned from Dr. Buckley before she retired—and that is another thing that makes this a shitburger year—is that when times are difficult, I need to work hard at finding stability and things that bring me pleasure. Dr. Buckley is a very logical woman, and in the 11 years, two months, and 10 days that I worked with her, I came to learn that I should act on her suggestions. On that note, I guess I should focus on the brighter news that I continue to maintain my daily logs of the high and low temperatures and precipitation readings for Billings, Montana, where I live. I started keeping these logs on January 1, 2001, when it occurred to me that Billings, in addition to having wildly variable weather, has poor excuses for weathermen. Their forecasts are notoriously off base, so I’ve come to distrust what they say. I prefer facts. Every morning, my copy of the Billings Herald-Gleaner provides me with the facts about the previous day’s weather. I then write it down, and my data is complete.

For example, yesterday, December 6, 2011, the 340th day of the year, saw a high temperature of thirty-four and a low temperature of sixteen in Billings. There was no precipitation, meaning we held steady at 19.34 inches for the year. It’s been a bad year for precipitation in Montana, and a lot of places have had floods, although not Billings. Scott Shamwell lives in Roundup, which is 49.82 miles north of Billings, and his town flooded badly. He said one time that he was going to start driving “a cocksucking rowboat” to work, but I don’t think he ever did. I wasn’t there every day that he was, as our schedules didn’t fully align, so while it’s conceivable that he would have driven a cocksucking rowboat to work, I have to believe that he or someone else would have told me about it. Belief can be dangerous, of course. I prefer facts.

We did have an oil spill in the Yellowstone River, which mucked things up, and last year a tornado blew down our sports stadium, so it’s not like Billings is getting off light as far as catastrophes go. I guess everybody is having trouble these days.

Anyway, tracking the weather data is how I maintain stability, as Dr. Buckley suggests. She also suggested that I find something that gives me pleasure. That has been more difficult, especially since I was involuntarily separated from the Billings Herald-Gleaner . I should just try harder, I guess. But how?

Craig Lancaster is a journalist who has worked at newspapers all over the country, including the San Jose Mercury News , where he served as lead editor for the paper’s coverage of the BALCO steroids scandal. He wrote 600 Hours of Edward —winner of a Montana Book Award honorable mention and a High Plains Book Award—in less than 600 hours during National Novel Writing Month in 2008. His other books include the novel The Summer Son and the short story collection Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure . Lancaster lives in Billings, Montana, with his wife.