Friday, May 1, 2015

I need a word that means: the feeling of annoyance and loss that comes from reading all the way to the end of a NYT article with one thought foremost in your head...

... I can't wait to see what people say in the comments and then seeing that this is one of those NYT articles without a comments section. The little comments icon � a cartoon-style speech bubble with a number on it � appears at the bottom of the page, increasing the risk that you'll keep reading and assuming that various problems with the article will already be articulated by NYT readers. Then you hit bottom and see, no, if you're going to blog that, you're going to have to do the reactions yourself, or just set it up so that comments on your blog might possibly do what readers at the NYT might have done, except that they won't, because my readers tend not even to like the NYT in the first place and to skew way more right wing.

The article that wracked me with that feeling this morning was "A Woman-Led Law Firm That Lets Partners Be Parents." Excerpt (buried deep in the long piece):
One reason Ms. Simon and Ms. Geller don�t feel they have to sneak out of the office is that there are no offices. The firm shuns a permanent home in favor of a shared work space managed by a company called Metro Offices, where it rents a conference room for an hour, an office for a day, as needed.... They did this partly to encourage their employees to work from home and on their own schedules....

The other advantage is to hold down expenses, of course, which allows the Geller Law Group to maintain reasonable profit margins while charging less than competitors with higher overhead.... To keep track of one another, the lawyers and a paralegal meticulously update their shared Google calendars and communicate constantly through Gchat.

Ms. Simon delights in the guerrilla-style logistics of a mostly virtual firm....
Delights? Guerrilla-style? This is unswallowable. They found 2 women who have been struggling to do something for a short time, show little sign of success, and are somehow celebrated in the NYT with head-slappingly unbelievable puffery. Now, I know my readers will attack this article, but that's not the same as comments at the NYT, which is serving up material like this because it thinks its readers will lap it up with pleasure. Did they? I bet they didn't! Show me the comments!

By the way, in case you're wondering if fathers appear in this article, the answer is yes. Once:
Ms. Geller wanted to spend part of her daytime hours around her children without giving up on a legal career. �I saw no role models who didn�t have a husband as a stay-at-home dad,� Ms. Geller said of the partners at the large firm she left before starting the Geller Law Group in 2011. Ms. Simon wanted to be home for dinner and attend school events without worrying about how it would affect her annual review.
There is one other cameo appearance by a man in this women-having-it-all puff piece:
The firm�s lone male associate, Michael Munson, told me he left the firm in February because he craved the camaraderie of colleagues.
Oh! It's the man who wants more real, flesh-and-blood relationships and the women who delight in the guerrilla logistics of living on line? Pay no attention to that problem, lady NYT readers! Ms. Simon gets lots of face time with one 4-year-old boy. She's able to leave meetings early and fight through an hour of "punishing rush-hour traffic" to get to that child whom she rewards with a smile when he says "Mommy, I have an idea... Why don�t we eat noodles and watch superheroes?"

Now, lady NYT readers, isn't that just a dream of the way the world should be? Silence!

UPDATE: 5 minutes after I put up this post, I saw that the NYT opened a comments section on the article. I am positive that it was not there before, because there isn't one comment on the article yet. (And I'd searched the page scrupulously for a comments icon before writing this.)

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