Memories

Statistics

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The newspaper’s weekly circulation was a closely guarded exaggeration. The circulation manager knew the number, the editorial department knew it, the advertising manager knew it. The newspaper’s circulation was about 2000 copies per week. Now you know.

The pliability of the words “circulation,” “copies,” “newspaper,” and “week” was tested regularly. This is because if the advertisers had been told the 2000-per-week number, they might have asked the newspaper to pay them for the honor of placing their ads; thus, they were given a number 10 times larger. More often than not, they were told that over 20,000 pairs of eyes “saw” any given issue of the newspaper. Actually, in an effort at a specificity that would grant legitimacy, they were given a figure of “21,000 readers.”
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Don’t Dream It

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In one dream, a dream encountered once each month or so (last niht!), a password to an email service or the passcode to the office desktop itself can not be remembered. His hands don’t work. Did they ever? Or interruptions prevent him from typing it in within a fifteen-second countdown, and the entire screen is taken up with 1-5, 1-4, 1-3 … .

He has been away from the office for so long—a decade—and he sees the voice mail light flashing on his phone, but he can not remember the four-digit access code. How many messages? he wonders.
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The Night I Stole …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The ludicrous amount of paperwork is what saved us. Or the fact that possibly no one at the yard had created the documents that would have been needed to handle the situation, or no one would have been able to find them if they did exist, to be the paperwork that I just mentioned.

We were up to no good, but in a harmless way, so no harm had been done, so nothing was done about us the night I stole a train.
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