John Hattaway

Another day down. That is yesterday. Yesterday was another day down. Four days at Borders Books, etc., and I am still kicking – though a development has arisen that can have negative consequences.

You see, I was employed a bunch of years ago by Waldenbooks. This was the first bookstore I worked for and it was fun. Well, fun and stupid all at the same time. Working for Waldenbooks was an education into a lot of things, most especially myself since I had to learn some aspects to my personality I was not aware still existed (keeping in mind that this was between the ages of 17 and 19). The sins of our youth never really go away – I guess.

Anyway, the relationship between Waldenbooks and Borders is all at the corporate level. The relationship begins when K-Mart decided to acquire Waldenbooks for a database system that the bookstore used and that K-Mart wanted. Once K-Mart had the database system (this is actually quite common in corporate America) then Waldenbooks was let go and Waldenbooks successfully gained a majority share in their own company.

Then enters Borders. Borders bookstores, music, café, etc., was started by a couple of brothers in Minnesota (this was all in some news article back about the same time I was working for Waldenbooks) who had started a series of bookstores over the course of their lifetimes. Each bookstore failed and eventually the brothers would get enough money together to try it again. They finally succeeded when they came up with the Border’s philosophy and style. At about this same time the Border’s corp. opened a store in Dallas and I dragged all of my friends, in the middle of the summer in Texas, in a Mercedes without air-conditioning, to Dallas to see this bookstore.

So, I quit Waldenbooks to work full-time at Mobile Plastic, a local plastics plant in Temple, TX, and then to serve a mission. With that, I left Waldenbooks behind me (with one exception) and never really thought about it again. That was the past.

Somewhere between 1992 and 1993 Borders and Waldenbooks bought into each other. At the time it seemed as though Waldenbooks bought out Borders and then Borders may have acquired a majority stake in Waldenbooks (this part of the relationship is foreign to me) with the outcome that Waldenbooks became a part of the Borders Group. They have other bookstores, mostly outlets, but the primary relationship is Waldenbooks (principally found in malls) and Borders (principally found in strip malls or stand alone stores).

When I applied to Borders my mind didn’t really drift back eleven or twelve years to when I worked for Waldenbooks, even though I knew the relationship of the stores, because most companies purge employment records after three or five years. So, I applied to Borders, they are the only place that has interviewed me AND offered me a job, and where I have been able to work. This took an interesting turn the other day when, as I was sitting in the break room during my lunch hour break, the girl who does the paperwork for human resources walked in to ask me whether or not I had ever worked at a Waldenbooks or Borders before.

This floored me. Don’t people purge records after a while? It is common practice in corporate America to purge records after x-amount of time (x equaling three to five years). Isn’t it?

Anyway, Garth was standing there, he is the Operations Manager or the Store Manager, or something equally as fancy, and I looked at him and her and said, “Well, yes, ten or fifteen years ago I worked for Waldenbooks. It’s been so long I didn’t even think about the job until just now.” Which is true. I hadn’t really thought about that job or the consequences of that job.

Of late my mind has been working around a simple concept. Specifically, that we, as people, count and determine time based on events that have taken place in our lives. As a society we count time before and after the birth of Christ. Hence the Gregorian Calendar system. We are now, allegedly, 2004 years past the birth of Jesus Christ.

However, there are still other events that cause people to personally begin counting time. For example, when you get married you start counting time, as related to you, from zero to one. You have been married six months, one year, five years, thirty-five years, etc.

Cancer victims may begin to count their lives in respect to when they were diagnosed and when they were declared cancer free (five years after successful cancer treatment).

The list goes on. Maybe time restarted when a terrible accident happened, a child died, a spouse died, a parent or loved one died, the first time you rode a bike, drove a car, watched a space shuttle launch, wrote your first story, dreamed your first dream, whatever it is that is important to you is where time begins again. And there can be several areas where you begin counting time. Marriage AND cancer AND death of a loved one AND your first TV appearance. You instinctively have numbers for everything and you are counting time, anew, for each item.

Anyway, that is a lot to go through just to say that one of my restarts to counting time began in September, 1993. That was when I entered the Missionary Training Center in Provo, UT for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to begin two years serving as a full-time missionary. I even had, have, the card the certified me an ordained minister for the LDS church. The second such event, for me, happened in late August, 1995 when I came home from my mission and started living life again. Every other event has meant little or nothing to me (except for turning 26 and becoming an official Menace to Society).

To further illustrate this, it’s been eleven years and some months since I left on my mission which means it’s been almost twelve years since I worked for Waldenbooks and a little over nine years since I came home from my mission. Because of this I can say that it has been eleven years since I graduated from high school (not something I care about except in relation to other events that have taken place in my life) and just over eight years since I made the fateful decision to drive semis rather than go to school directly.

All ancillary items are associated to when I served a mission and not when other things happened. I only remember when I graduated from high school, when I drove semi’s, when I drove across the western United States with my dad, in relation to the mission. So, my remembering that I worked for Waldenbooks, since I choose not to live in the time before my mission (or for that matter within my mission) is not something that I do very often. And, since enough time has elapsed since then that I shouldn’t have to remember that stuff, well, it was a little bit of a shock when they wanted to know if I had ever worked for Waldenbooks and Borders before and I had to say “yes” and then apologize for not remembering it.

Garth waved it off. But then, Garth doesn’t know what I know and am now remembering. The girl who does the HR paperwork had to fax my paperwork over to Anne Arbor, MI so that the people there could handle the transfer of store. I am surprised, needless to say, that my social security number still exists within that chains database and I am a bit disturbed by it.

I am legitimately concerned over the nature of the world where data can, and is, stored over a very long period of time in a digital format. My bookstore career started at age 17 in Temple, TX, continued at a rival bookstore, B. Dalton, also in Temple, TX (post mission), and now continues back with the original chain in Concord, NH.

I think what is really getting me isn’t so much the retention of numbers within a database, but that those same numbers are associated with a part of me that I left behind a long time ago. That they have not been dissociated with Waldenbooks in Temple, TX at the Temple, TX mall and that I now have to wonder what the manager, whose name I cannot even remember, said about me when I left.

Like I said, I left on good terms… it was six months later, as I was in the MTC and preparing to head to San Jose, CA for two years, when I was feeling that I needed to take care of some aspects of my time at that store, that worries me. Those aspects are between me and the Lord and apparently a company I now work for again, and all are things that I had left behind me a long time ago on what seems, to me, to be a place that I left far behind me.

Here’s hoping I walk into work tomorrow and still have a job. My mind is still working through worse-case, best-case scenarios and I think the middle ground there may be me apologizing again for not mentioning my previous experience. Heck, a resume is only supposed to hold ten years.

Real Heroes Fly