I tried to create a meaningful, logical and yet sensitive back cover blurb. It is tough for such kind of a book, with space limitation on top of it all; yet, I believe I succeeded to catch the sense
of the narrative inside these two "blurby" paragraphs, one about the book, one about the author. However one single inevitable inaccuracy crept in, not by mistake or
intention but by the realities of life, and more about it after the following printed blurb quotations:
top blurb
This is a book about love. About the birth and growth of passionate love not to god, not to a human, not to an animal and not even to an inanimate object. But to a virtual entity - to a company.
Scitex. About the bigamous life of sharing the nights with the wife and the days with the company. About the tumultous ups and downs of a passionate relationship between a human being and a virtual being.
And about inevitable change. Fighting desperately, yet watching helplessly metamorphosis imperceptibly setting in, changing this entity - once hot and throbbing with vitality, into a cool, calculating,
dispassionate money making machine. And about love's final penalty - brutal betrayal... and death.
Wow, doesn't it give you goose bumps?... Probably not, yet it does that to me. Even today, six years plus after this "death".
The other part of the blurb, about the author, has an incredible built in sarcasm of which I was
completely unaware at the time I wrote it. The comedy life plays with us...
bottom blurb
Yossi Faybish joined Scitex in 1976. Moving up the technical ladder in the customer support organisation in Europe, 19 years later he reached the position of European Technical Support Director. Then, on official grounds of company
reorganisation, he was terminated. Since 1996 Mr. Faybish is happily married to another company.
What is the inaccuracy mentioned above? What is so funny and sarcastic about this last paragraph? You know, the print'a'book roads are long, and complex, and full of surprises at every corner. It took me about ten years to find a way to get
this book to print. And I succeeded to get some of the changes occuring along the way documented in the final version, since "luckily" - it wasn't yet in print. With one exception, meaningful, funny, sadly sarcastic: ...Since 2002 Mr. Faybish is happily divorced from another company...
I am not going to write another book about this other company. It's not worth it. It will be a scaled down version of the present one. With some slight differences of course, yet basically the same pattern when it comes to 'how we do things in good
times' versus 'how we do things in bad times'. And without the passion that linked me to Scitex, this other company being just an other working place, any narrative will be a flat boring waste of time. But I learned one important fact: my book has universal value. No matter
which organization, company, group or team you're in - the pattern is the same. With some slight statistical fluctuations. But essentially the same. The same slogans, the same colours... The same demise. So read this book and find out what tomorrow your company will do to you.
Or to someone you know. Guaranteed.
AuthorHouse Blurb
This is what I created as an "About the Book", the kind of bla (not much of it therefore not entitled to the bla-bla denomination) which is supposed to catch the reader's imagination on the AuthorHouse site, and to persuade him/her that this is as good a cause as any to put their money in. It's kind of a summary, kind of a pep talk, and kind of a sales talk. No, no double-talk,
thank you. I did my best, and now you can see why I got stuck in a technical position and never succeeded moving on to a marketing one. I have real trouble bull-shitting. Which is an un-pardonable shortcoming. So I'm shortcome (is it 'shortcomed'?), if you insist.
The book describes life in an organization, Scitex in this case, in a very special way - through the "eyes" of the daily internal communications of this book’s author, yours faithfully - Yossi Faybish. Company memos can be an extremely dull affair, writing a book based on these can be as interesting as writing a book based on a lifetime’s collection of grocery lists. Well, not quite. Not when they are written with the passion, compassion and fighting spirit these were written with. Actually some of them were defined as real miniature literary gems by some of their readers, and who am I to contradict such renowned and world-wide recognized connoisseurs.
The beginning is soaked with enthusiasm, with passion - the passion of starting, the passion of an act of creation, the passion of turning a boring job into a work of art, contributing to a big, bright, wonderful future. Corny? - well, this passion was really there, burning and consuming this writer’s life like a thousand fires. Followed by a slower move into the next stage, of keeping all that creation alive, the daily acts of courage and/or cowardice, the numerous tug of war events, with everybody - funnily enough - tugging in the same direction, through ups and downs, but always forward. And then the final act, like in a classical Greek tragedy - with everything falling apart, internal quarrels, betrayals, desperate moves and then, inevitably, the ultimate act - murder. Wait, ho, hooo, waaait - don’t rush away, nobody really died, we’re talking allegory here, the death of something one created, the death of a dream, the death of a lifetime of passion.
The book is "talking" to you, taking you by the hand from one event to another, from miracle to disaster, from disaster to miracle, from one memo to another, most of the time in a very easy going and entertaining style. And on top of it all you have numerous break-points sprinkled all over the book, with an ongoing very simple yet at times very challenging math quiz, many simple yet at times really stupefying travel jokes, and for each passing year an entertaining cartoon series representing the respective year. If you do not want to read all the text, you surely wouldn’t want to skip the cartoons.
To sum it up - if you work or ever worked in an organization, especially in a services organization (technical, medical, etc) you’re going to see much of what you live through in this book. And some of it is going to happen to you EXACTLY as described there. Promise.
Marketing Blurb
This is what the AuthorHouse personnel thought might sell the book to potential distribution channels. Since they are supposed to be the professionals I've left it up to them to phrase it the right way. I just hope they got it right.
How To Survive in the Corporate Jungle - "Memography" of A Tekkie
In the 1950's they were called the Beatnicks. The 90's gave way to Yuppies. So, what would you call the millennium generation of today? The "Tekkie's?" In The Life and Death of a HiTech Patriot (now available through AuthorHouse Library), Yossi Faybish, a technology expert, lets us hack inside his multi-wired life and offers us some useful tips on how to survive the corporate jungle.
Yossi is an engineering graduate who developed a knack for technical troubleshooting at an early age.
When he was hired by one of the world's biggest companies, Scitex, as a service engineer or troubleshooter life became a roller coaster ride. In The Life and Death of HiTech Patriot, Yossi dusted off old notes, letters and memos which he wrote during his long stay with the company and carefully picked out the ones that detailed how he survived the jungles of the corporate world.
Yossi considers each piece of his "memography" a literary form of expression that reflects his passion to share and turn an ordinary job to a work of art--an attitude that many employers seek from employees these days. Yossi admits the passion died after he came face to face with the inevitable office conflicts such as office politics, internal quarrels, betrayals and desperate moves.
At present Yossi still struggles to climb up the ladders of corporate success but, this time, with a more matured outlook. He works in a similar company doing the same job--tinkering with troubled machines. Life goes on he says - proof that that Yossi's youthful courage and determination did not die after all.
The Life and Death of a HiTech Patriot is an especially relevant book in today's volatile technology marketplace. With recent tech companies suffering from major woes, lay-offs and bankruptcies, The Life and Death is a must-read for the millenium generation.
