Two or three people in their 20s who’ve been waiting outside, accompanied by their well-behaved dogs, climb aboard. Then the door eases closed and the bus glides away, heading 35 miles south to the immaculate town of Mountain View, to the Googleplex.
I keep on pedaling, going nowhere, nagged by the question that’s been dogging me the past several months: Was that the future leaving me behind?
The corporate perk I just witnessed has become an achingly familiar one in these parts, and a noisy, flashy metaphor for whatever we feel about the tech industry in our midst: annoyance, resentment, paranoia, even something like hate. In the Mission district in May, affordable housing protesters bashed a piñata in the shape of the Bus; in June’s Pride Parade, another group of activists leased a white bus as part of an elaborate, unflattering parody of the techies; and no less a social critic than George Packer in the New Yorker called the Bus “a vivid emblem of the tech boom’s stratifying effect in the Bay Area.” There is nothing like a shining white chariot sailing through the streets to remind us on the sidewalk that we are not the anointed. The implication pisses off a fair number of San Franciscans.
But what if you don’t hate, or resent, or self-righteously mock the Bus? What if you want to be on the Bus? What if, when you are pedaling madly at 6:45 in the morning and watching the Bus pull away, the emotion you feel is not anger, but envy?
My own fixation on the Bus began in April, when I lost my job at age 54. For more than 20 years I’d survived in the tempestuous media ocean by surfing jobs from reporter to critic to editor. For the last dozen years I had been a high-ranking magazine editor—first in the Midwest, then in New York, and ultimately here—helping steer some of the industry’s biggest and most lucrative powerhouses: Better Homes and Gardens, Oprah, Sunset.
I was a success in a profession that was growing less successful every day. Print media, as we all know, is on a downward trajectory, its audiences increasingly distracted, its advertising revenues diverted into all things digital, leaving us print people watching anxiously as our staffs shrink and our budgets crumble. When Steve Jobs held up the first iPad almost four years ago, I got editor goose bumps—that was where everything that I put together, words and images and ideas, would live. That was exciting. But rather than streaming me into a digital expansion, my job more often involved trimming line items and laying people off. Finally, unable to reinvent my calling fast enough, I was shown the door myself.
A New York recruiter I’ve known for years called me when she heard that I was job-free. “Now’s your chance!” she said, meaning that I now had the opportunity to exit the death spiral of print publishing once and for all. She sounded almost jealous. At the time, it made me feel a bit better about getting fired. But I still wasn’t clear on how to turn the situation into some kind of luck. In the old world, I had mastered the rules and the etiquette and the language of career advancement. Now all of that seemed less certain. All I knew was, I wanted to be on the side that is reimagining the new, not defending the old.
by Kitty Morgan, SF Magazine | Read more:
Image: Dan Escobar
