When I look back on what passes for success in my 60-year-old life, one ability seems to pervade my faded tapestry of achievements: the ability to write on a deadline. I learned this valuable skill as a senior in high school, and it has served me well ever since in business and in my personal life. I've written everything from limericks to affidavits, standard operating procedures to employee performance appraisals, marketing materials to technical reports, political talking points to conference presentations, magazine articles to song parodies, web site content to a novel.
Our Massachusetts high school put together a weekly newsletter with articles on sports, extracurricular activities, local news, and other riveting content. Every week, a motley crew of students researched the information, wrote and edited the articles, typed, mimeographed, and collated the week's issue, then distributed it to each of the homerooms by Friday afternoon. The possibility that our meagre writings could be read by a captive audience of over 700 students and teachers was enough inspiration to keep us at this thankless task, week after week, month after month.
We weren't that ambitious, of course, or that naive. We'd seen our fellow students skim the newsletter and toss it into the nearest wastebasket... or omit the skimming step altogether. The more inspired readers turned it into paper airplanes or creative forms of Origami. Nobody was getting a Pulitzer out of this. Still, we learned how to write on a deadline, even if there was little of consequence to report.
Mrs. Hernandez managed this effort, to her eternal credit. Inspiring a bunch of high school kids to give up two afternoons a week to labor in relative anonymity could not have been easy. She sweetened the deal by hosting a Friday afternoon get-together at her home, where we munched on potato chips and dip and listened to our latest vinyl LPs and imagined that for an hour or two, we were hip and cool.
Those of us who worked on the newsletter were not anyone's idea of the "in crowd". After all, anyone who was anyone had plans for Friday evening that didn't involve preparing for the festivities by hanging out at some teacher's house. My afternoons and evenings would otherwise have been spent holed up in my room at home, reading Thomas Hardy or Eugene O'Neill or Carlos Castaneda and brooding over some imagined romance or rejection, so spending time constructively in the company of others was probably a very good idea.
For that matter, Mrs. Hernandez wasn't one of the cool teachers, either. She didn't dress in a mini-skirt and low-cut sweater like the immensely popular Mrs. T, she wasn't especially pretty, athletic, or outgoing. A middle-aged woman, modestly dressed, she moved through the world unnoticed, except to those of us who joined her inner circle. To us, she was a visionary, bringing out the best in a few reclusive and uneasy kids who inhabited the fringes of high school society. She saw something in us that remained unseen to the other adults in our lives: some spark of talent that could be turned into a marketable skill.
In my case, she was right. My ability to churn out quality text requiring minimal editing has served me well ever since. When clients or managers imposed absurdly aggressive schedules, I was ready to go. While others were dithering or lamenting the impossibility of the task, I was halfway through my work, and soon ready to take on some of theirs.
When my boss decided to skip out on the office for hours every day to oversee his home renovation project, I ghost-wrote all of his memos, taking care to embed his characteristic grammatical errors ("if your going to be out of the office...). When a colleague took weeks to finish Chapter One of a major report and the client's deadline was now in the rearview mirror, I was asked to help out. I finished the entire report in a week. When a client compressed an already aggressive project deadline from a month to a week, I led the team that got it done, completing 22,00 pages of document reviews, field work, and preparation of the report in a week. I wrote all of the performance appraisals for another manager who just couldn't bring herself to get them finished. When our internal major proposal review teams demaded "rewrite!", I was called in at the 11th hour to camp out in a far-away office and get the job done.
Writing on a deadline is my quirky superpower. I can't save people in a burning building, fly through the air, see through walls, transform myself with bionic parts, or catch up to a speeding train, but I can write whatever's needed, whenever it's needed.
Ironically, English was not my strong suit in high school. For two years, I labored under the soul-crushing tutelage of Miss A. If the Borg Collective had offered English writing classes, she would have been the dean. To her, there was only One Right Way in which any work of literature could be interpreted. Every week, we read a short story or other Famous Work By Someone Famous Unlike You, and wrote an essay on its meaning. I would write that it exemplified "man's inhumanity to man"; Miss A. would reply that, no, it was an example of metaphor. Or Irony. Or satire. I was the C+ kid, just another waste of Miss A's great literary talent.
Then there was Mr. N. whose educational credentials included Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and several other Better Schools Than You Will Ever Attend (oddly, some of which he attended for only a semester or so). He would look out across the room with dismay and sigh, "well, tonight I want you all to read this passage from Milton's Paradise Lost, but frankly, I'm afraid it's above your heads." Well, geez, Mr. N: ain't you got any easy stuff with pictures or somethin'? We did exact our revenge on Mr. N, though. In response to his penchant for requiring but never grading or returning our lackluster little homework assignments, we went on strike. We all agreed: no more homework turned in until he graded our previous work. So we did learn something: a classful of determined students could get Mr. N to storm out in indignation.
So, Mrs. Hernandez, wherever you are, I salute you. You used a simple, thankless task to turn some reclusive kids into productive writers, able to share their abilities to make the world a better place. Today, I will devote myself to finding out whether you are still alive out there, so that I can write to you and thank you for honing my teenaged superpower into a skill that powered my brilliant-enough career and brought joy to my personal life.