Competitive spirit June 19, 2013

 


 

In re-reading my poetry journal recently, I was alarmed to find that the competition between me and her at the office began a lot sooner than I originally thought – as early as mid-April 2012 when the space shuttle arrived in the area to become part of the air and space museum in Manhattan.

She took an amazing photo from some point along the Hudson River waterfront, a shot to be proud of – only to get outdone by an accidental shot I took when the shuttle on the back of airliner – flew over a local bridge, making it look it was part of rush hour traffic.

After more than a year and all that has happened since, it is difficult to know if she took offense, or if she even considered it a competition, friendly or not.

Later on, the competition became obvious – at least to me, in regard to hits on the company website her stories achieved each week.

At some point, I started to notice how many of her stories became the top viewed stories, and I began to suspect they were being manipulated by having someone and perhaps others repeatedly hit on those stories to achieve that distinction. As an experiment, I did the same thing for several of my stories, using various phones and computers in order to vary the IP addresses.

Yet each time I managed to get a story on the top spot, in flooded hits that promptly pushed her story or stories above mine.

At one point, I began to think promoting my own stories was a little too obvious; so, I promoted the stories of another writer instead. Yet as before, as soon as one of these stories reached the most watched, in flooded support for one of her stories putting her back on top.

Finally, the owner – who tracks all these things – caught on and shut down the hits on her stories as well as those I was promoting, ending this apparent attempt to impress the owners as to how popular her stories were.

RR, of course, became a valuable sources for a number of her scoops, as did the stuff given to us by the Private Eye looking to bring down the Neighboring Mayor, although I suspect more went on between her and the Neighboring Mayor than I’ll ever know.

Her bringing down the congressman on behalf of RR was supposed to have been her crowning glory, even though others RR had approached with the same information said he never delivered on what he said he had. Even the owner questioned me about whether I thought RR worked for the FBI (and his involvement with her should have made him more receptive.) Other writers working for us in the past, believed RR had invented most of the things he said, myths he told to impress other people, especially women, about his working on secret missions (to explain his absences for weeks at a time).

RR and the Virgin Mayor may well have been behind her attempts to bring down others besides the congressman and the Neighboring Mayor, including the director of the Housing Authority, the chief of staff to the Small Man, the Freeholder, and others – part of a plot, too, to install one of RR’s henchmen as the county prosecutor.

At times, I suspected RR used her as a puppet. But as naïve as she sometimes seemed, she was far smarter than those who might use her, and it is more likely, she used RR and others in her campaign for self-promotion, looking to make herself look good and perhaps use one of these things as a platform to launch a more illustrious career with some institution such as the New York Times or NBC TV – to which she had connections.

Instead of being manipulated as I first believed, she may well simply have been exploiting them to achieve her ultimate goals and may well have seen me as getting in her way.

 

 

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