Above: Illustration by SergeyNivens/DepositPhotos.

BitDepth#1324 for October 18, 2021

A month ago, I wrote the story of one of the great journalism experiences of my life, the creation of the tabloid daily, The Wire (the whole long story is here).

I left much of what happened out of that account, but there’s one experience that’s worth mentioning, the lessons it taught me about digital asset management.

The system was crude by digital asset management (DAM) standards, but it allowed a small newsroom to move pictures around fluidly and fast.

Headshots acquired by the all-digital photography team, something of a local innovation in 2001, were filed into alphabetical folders, along with press release photographs sent for promotional use from every source.

The paper made use of big photos on every page, and we needed to move those pages early.

It was a problem to solve, but it resonated well beyond that experience.
The lessons in managing a large photo archive guide me to this day, when I manage terabytes of digital image assets spread across multiple digital storage units.

I now think of problems, particularly the big, insurmountable challenges, as a degree-level education opportunity, although it’s probably never going to be one you’d willingly sign up for.

Life-long learning has become important enough to earn a proper name, heutagogy.

Every job, no matter how stressful, difficult or distressing offers education, but the world of business is designed to lead you away from that schooling.

Bosses want to keep you ‘on task.’ Trade unions advise against engaging in work that’s off job specifications.

You are supposed to do what you are supposed to do, not drift off into intriguing little gyres of problem-solving.

In that horrible cycle, you can spend ten years at a job but earn only one year’s worth of interminably repeated experiences.

The most useful lessons in the workplace are usually in the dark alleys and dead-ends that litter most workdays.

I learned to type on my own, using a beat-up old Pitman’s handbook and a typewriter that punched holes in copy paper.

So at my very first job, doing PR work for CLICO in their library, I brought my own portable typewriter to hammer out text.

It was there that I was coached in using a proper typewriter by another organisation structure refugee who taught me how to address the IBM Selectric that sat in that space.

A few months ago, Newsday asked me to narrate this column for the website. That particular adventure rekindled old lessons in voice presentation I got from an unforgiving Jimmy Maynard while contributing to AMPLE’s The Week at a Glance radio programme some four decades ago.

Today’s colleagues cheerfully pitched in with advice on phrasing, tone and adding colour to my delivery.

YouTube helped me sort out recording and editing problems using Garageband.

My very first narration job was actually reading science fiction novels onto a portable cassette recorder for Archie Edwards, the blind history teacher at Trinity College almost fifty years ago.

I didn’t learn much during his General Paper classes, but he told me something I’ve never forgotten, that “We go to school to learn how to learn.”

It’s been the most important lesson of my life, coming to an understanding early on that my future would not be in certification and diplomas, it would be an endless cycle of submitting to ignorance and learning new skills that stomped roughshod over old knowledge.

Sometimes new skills aren’t work-related, at least not directly.
I’ve emerged from terrible workplace scenarios with a better understanding of the dynamics of power, ego and race-first behaviour.

With that came the importance of empathy, not just understanding the perspective of your nemesis, but accepting that they are, despite all evidence to the contrary, being heroic and committed to their own worthy ideal.

I’m currently enrolled in another course I hadn’t planned for; this one in zen-level patience tutored by a ten-year-old.

The illusion of our education system is that learning is a race with elimination rounds and pole positions, but the successful practice of life is a marathon, a continuous acceptance of our limits while powering into the next stage.