I was not prepared for the man who showed up to fix my sink, because I hate confrontation. But in this case, something I’d read made avoiding it impossible.

I walked onto the front porch as soon as the plumber pulled up in his truck to let him in before he could knock. Knocking, of course, is the conventional and acceptable way of requesting entry into the modern-day home. For our terrier mix, however, knocking is the cue to explode the moment knuckles touch wood. We disabled the doorbell, because that was even worse. We provide therapy vouchers for people who need professional help telling the difference between a live hand-grenade and the sight of a common terrier after visiting our house.

If I’m honest, part of me feels the same way. I hate having to let strangers into the privacy of my dwelling, which makes service calls for home maintenance very uncomfortable. When someone I don’t know and don’t expect shows up at the door, I want to howl and bark too. But once you’ve used all the clean dishes in the house while delaying the repair of your dysfunctional sink, you have to open the door to a pro you don’t know.

On the other hand, it’s nice when a pro actually shows up. And you never know these days what you’re going to get. A kid who read a manual last week or a seasoned veteran. And you can always tell who the pros are. It’s the way they walk onto the playing field of their expertise, how they handle their tools, the air of confidence they carry approaching the job. So, when the plumber reached over our white picket fence for the first time, manipulated and threw the gate latch like he’d been here a hundred times before, I knew we were in good hands. If only his hands could have done his talking.

“How’s it going?” I said brightly, happy to see him at 10:40 am in the morning, because I’d been promised an arrival time of between 11 am and 1 pm and I had a business call at noon.

“I’m working,” he snapped back.

Yikes. I suddenly had a service worker on my front steps who was barking at me before we even got started.

I’ve never outgrown the primal fear I experience in the face of conflict since getting punched in the mouth in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago on a school field trip in front of the replica coal mine. I was bullied frequently growing up, and those incidents likely all had an impact. But being culled off and cornered by a small gang of inner city hoodlums who pushed an incisor through my lower lip that left me bleeding the whole bus trip home left an enduring scar—on my lip and my psyche.

I had no idea what provoked this plumber to treat a customer like a disobedient dog, but I immediately retreated into my shell and considered my strategies for minimal contact. A normal person would have told him to go back to the shop and called a different one immediately. But as I said, I’ve got a lifetime track record of getting small and invisible in the face of bullies, so I prepared to step aside.

Then I thought, “Wait a second. This is my house!”

I walked down a few steps off the porch and I said, “Seems like you’re upset about something.”

“Eleven o’clock means eleven o’clock,” he said, like I was an employee of his that had shown up late for work. Except I was paying him, and he was early.

At 10:30 I had phoned the shop and asked for an update on our plumber’s arrival time. I just wanted to know when he was coming so I could plan around it. Somehow, my request for information got passed along as a demand that I, the customer, wanted him to come right away.

“I think you got the wrong message,” I said meekly.

“How about we just get the job done,” he said angrily, now walking up the steps to go around me into the house. Contrary to my usual character, I found myself suddenly stepping in front of him.

“Hold on,” I said. “I didn’t tell anyone to send you right away. I just called to find out what time you were coming. This is a misunderstanding. I’m not in a rush and I don’t have a problem. Do you?”

I never expect confronting a bully to go well, so I was in flight mode. But to my surprise, he noticeably de-escalated his tone and curtly said, “Well, let’s just focus on the job.”

Seeing that I’d made some version of a successful boundary and that he responded, I showed him to the kitchen sink, let him set up, and told him that I’d check in before the start of my noon meeting.

I’d been quoted approximately ninety minutes of labor to remove the broken garbage disposal at issue and re-plumb the underside of the sink, but when I came back down fifty minutes later to check in, he was putting the last of his tools into the bag, wiping up the floor, and gesturing to a spotless workspace and the new shiny pipes.

“Please check my work,” he said “and make sure it’s to your satisfaction.”

That’s when it all clicked for me. I’d suffered through DIY plumbing projects and worked with enough contractors to know at first sight this work was top tier. In his sixties like me, I understood this tradesman was damn good at his craft. Probably he’d been enjoying his favorite candy bar on some side street which he’d perfectly timed to savor before arriving at 11 am sharp, like the pro that he was, at my doorstep. Feeling rushed, and as though his professionalism had been called into question before even getting a chance to demonstrate it, his pride had been tarnished.

I bent down and took a good look under the sink.

“Wow,” I said. “Looks great. Good work.”

He gave me a small, almost imperceptible, old-world bow, and said with true pride, “Always good work.”

Suddenly he was soft, contrite, and shining with pride again in his leather belt and overalls.

The remaining business of payment, preparing a handwritten invoice on a clipboard, needing to correct an error that I pointed out, and then taking the numbers off my credit card were all done in the most cordial and respectful manner. He had now fully digested the reality of the situation, retracted the misfire of his mood, and regained the footing of who he intended to be with his customers.

Earlier that morning I had run a Zoom session to onboard three new members of a memoir writing program I’ve started in my Write Hearted community.

I’d been explaining my passion for reinventing the genre of memoir. Rather than thinking of it as a stuffy, elite record of achievements that a person authors at the end of life, I want to empower memoirs that document the active discoveries of people who are just getting started with their life’s work. We’re writing memoirs that are bold claims about human potential that each author has proven possible through their experience.

After closing the community session I went back to review some of my favorite essays written by these new members. One of the essays emblazoned in my mind was “I Got a Raise for Slapping the Boss” by Dana Allen.

Here’s the first paragraph of the essay.

Mostly out of feminist outrage and, I admit, somewhat out of fear that he would try to touch me, uninvited, I turned to Mr Franklin and said, pointing to my bottom, and calling him, disrespectfully, by his first name “Jackson, do you see this? I only allow THIS to be touched by my HUSBAND and no one else. If you ever touch or pat me on my bottom…no, wait. If you even pretend to touch me there, I promise you that I will slap the shit out of you, faster than you can draw a breath. Do you understand?” With that, he laughed at me as if to say ‘silly girl’ and turned and walked away. Patricia and Susan stared at me in disbelief that I would have the guts to threaten the boss with a repercussion such as a slap. I looked at them and said “Mark my words. I will carry out my promise.

The rest of the story details how she did, indeed, carry out that promise, in a day and age where standing up for sexual harassment in the workplace was a rare phenomenon.

But here’s the thing.

It was only having just read that essay before my plumber arrived that ported some of this spirit of self-respect and dignity into my veins—over-riding my childhood bullying trauma and avoidant conditioning—and allowed me to step forward, just a little bit, and transform the experience I had with the tradesman.

This is the true power of memoir and why I started The Memoir Project.

Its focus isn’t to necessarily produce finished full-length books as literary products, but to help more humans make their highest contribution to others by being willing to talk about the biggest challenges they’ve faced.

Stories, essays, speaking and of course books can all do the job of communicating human potential to others, and the spirit of memoir is to convey that potential through what we have lived and experienced first hand as a human experiment of one. And every last person has something of value in this respect to share.

If you’re interested to learn more about this new vision for memoir writing, I’m hosting a few free Q & A sessions in the next few weeks to talk about how anyone can approach the format, whether you feel like you’ve lived enough, or written enough to even consider authoring a memoir.

JOIN THE MEMOIR Q & A

Obviously, I’m very glad that I didn’t have to slap my plumber. My big win was just that I didn’t let him slap me, and I have to thank for it.

Here’s the full essay, I Got a Raise for Slapping the Boss.

Leave a comment

Share

I brightly trotted downstairs for breakfast where my wife had already started her workday. She was sitting on the couch editing a manuscript, sunshine bouncing off her shoulders and chickadees swarming the laurel bush outside the window—but with an aggressive scowl on her face. I immediately assumed that she had been notified of a terminal illness, been charged with a criminal offense, or was reviewing the average price of gas in our neighborhood.

“You don’t look happy,” I said, hoping for an explanation.

“It’s all the same!” she burst out, stabbing at a paragraph on her laptop.

“These authors hire me to edit their books, assuring me that it’s ‘all my voice with just a little grammar check by AI.’ But it’s mind-numbingly flat. Even across vastly different topics, the writing all has the same cadence and tone. I don’t think they even know what AI is doing to their words.”

As a professional editor my wife loves language and everything involved with helping an author to shape and deliver ideas. She asks questions, makes suggestions; there’s dialogue, collaboration, and once finished, they have a clear communication in their own voice. That’s a human editor’s magic1, to work with an author to preserve their style in service of a meaningful expression.

In the case of my wife’s client, however, the LLM assisted text was making it extra difficult to locate a human signal in the word jumble, leaving a frustrated and unhappy editor on my couch.

As a writing coach, it triggered my frustration with LLMs being used for personal expression.

I felt pissed that humans are currently being duped into strapping algorithms to their brain to make a point, heartbroken that the rhythms and textures of language that make communicating a delight are being abandoned, and bewildered by the lack of widespread public outrage as we drown in linguistic sameness and mediocrity as a result. This feeling has been building in me over the last year, but I’ve said little about it, because I’ve felt like a lone, cranky, senior citizen who is complaining about the youngsters who are trampling the flowers of his good old days.

As my frustration peaked, I involuntarily sat down and loaded a rant into Substack Notes and hit the publish button.

“Got that out of my system,” I muttered, while privately anxious about the flak I might catch for being such a curmudgeon.

But I didn’t get much flak.

(Well, a little.)

Like this comment that showed up on my Note from “a seasoned journalist and astrologer,” a curious hybrid of expertise.

Given his qualifications, I was left wondering if I’d already been “pompous and laboured” in my note, or if he was predicting the future likelihood of it based on my horoscope.

But mostly, I got encouragement, comments and support from thousands of writers.

Many of you are new subscribers, here for the first time because of the note. Thank you and welcome!

More than two weeks later, my phone is still lighting up every few seconds with comment after comment by passionate authors in the Substack community.

Here’s just one of over 1,400 comments, from 73-year-old .

These testimonies have been coming in for days. Here’s two from and .

I’d accidentally created a pop-up community of devoted communicators who rallied together to collectively shout . . .

Real voices MATTER. Give us the unwashed, preciously fresh, grammatically aberrant, biologically backed, run-on sentenced, sun-ripened, spit-covered human word!

My plan is to double-down on the profound impact that authentic human stories have when vulnerably shared, and to remind you (if you’re a writer, coach, leader, artist, or creator) that there are people out there crawling through a desert of content who need the oasis of you.

Like the kind of thirst-quenching word crafting that comes through in this essay written by my friend .

Or, if you crave writing that’s so original you’ll lose track of your pomposity then try .

The slop wave is coming in. In the face of its relentlessly rising tide it’s now our job to stand as guardians of the human signal with courage, consistency, and joy.

So write your giddy, glad, chocolate-covered face off and hit publish before the robots can sterilize, pasteurize, normalize, and circumcise your god-given syllables for automatic enlistment into the enshittification2 army.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go respond to a selection of 1,400 comments. One commenter, in particular, will be the recipient of a special reply that is designed to be pompous and labored.

Free MEMOIR Q & A

Write a Memoir That Gets Coaching Clients

When it comes to original, authentic writing my top vote is a Bold Claim memoir.

A Bold Claim memoir is a process for writing a memoir that helps you find the most inspiring stories you have to tell and communicate your hard-earned wisdom with people who can most benefit from your life experience.

I stumbled into writing a professional memoir myself years ago and that book still brings me opportunities to help thousands of people through speaking and coaching.

If you have something to teach, a passion to coach and want to magnetize the right clients with your personal story, I’m hosting a free Q & A session next week called . . .

How to Write a Memoir That Gets Coaching Clients

Would you like me to include you in the calendar invite?

Just reply to this email and say, “save me a spot” - or message me directly here.

We’re returning from an unexpected cross-country trip following my father-in-law’s passing.

I’ve been sitting in the passenger seat working on this week’s story, stressing that I’m right up against the deadline this week. I started wondering how long I’ve been doing this. Checking the archives, I see that I’ve published my newsletter …

Read more

“Opa died!” I heard my wife call from the hallway outside my office.

She had texted him as usual that morning, but received no reply across the 1,494 miles between us and the front door of her father. The last message my wife had received the previous day was a short video of the wind chimes on his front porch making …

Read more

I’m kind of a weird case. I was a very scared kid. Wet the bed until I was ten because I was afraid to get up and walk down the dark hall to the washroom. I was a chronic nail-biter as a teen. My parents found this chili-pepper liquid to paint on my fingers, designed to deter nail biting by making it a very unpleasant experience. I got used to having my…

Read more

My wife’s a professional editor, but I rarely share my drafts with her because we’ve got a good thing going after twenty years and why would I jeopardize that to get a little free editing advice. Writers are not an easy breed to work with when it comes to providing feedback on their words, and I’m no exception. So we co…

Read more

The gray plastic chairs were cold, hard and unforgiving.

It was 8th grade and typing class was mandatory at Greenfield Middle School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If the school administrators had declared they were going to mandate nuclear fusion experiments to be conducted in soda cans it wouldn’t have been a more absurd idea. Big energy in small spaces is a…

Read more

If you run any kind of business for yourself, or even a side hustle, I suggest you consider an alternative to the FAQs on your website, landing pages, or product and service pages.

Far more informative and entertaining are RAQs, Rarely Asked Questions.

The beauty of this format is that you get to ask yourself questions you actually want to answer and pose…

Read more

My wife had a look on her face that I’d seen while shopping for furniture. It was a focused expression that showed up just before a purchase.

The problem was, we weren’t shopping, and she wasn’t looking at furniture. We were in our own living ro…

Read more

The passenger to my right was really getting under my nerves.

It was bad enough that I’d barely slept before the four-hour flight across the country to deliver a speech I hadn’t finalized yet. But the focused flying time I’d been counting on was punctuated by heavy sighs, frequent coughing, and the near constant movement of the g…

Read more

I walked into the performance hall which was more full than I expected, glad that it conformed to the usual arrangement for a theater show—the stage in full light, the audience anonymous in the shadows.

I saw empty seats in front, but decided instead to squeeze into the back, thinking I might escape before the end of the…

Read more

I didn’t feel ready.

As a result, I couldn’t sleep in the fancy hotel room that my client had paid for, certainly hoping I’d get a good night’s sleep before speaking to 300 of their leaders the next day.

But this was my first full-pay speaking gig and I was so anxious to make it go well that I left my room at 1 am, took the elevator to the conference leve…

Read more

Every person who’d gathered around the bulletin board had the same dream—to perform on Broadway. But I couldn’t see the latest department notice because Terry Fletcher’s beautiful shiny-black hair was blocking my view. As hard as it was to admit, everything about Terry Fletcher was beautiful. A head taller than most of …

Read more

I’m writing a new book this year.

It’s called . . .

The Life Story Method — Reach Your People

It will teach you how to confidently share your notable life experiences so you can write, speak, lead, teach and coach with natural authority.

Here’s the opening story of chapter one of the book.

Read more

I was twenty-six and living paycheck to paycheck, though in those days I didn’t actually get a pay stub because I was self-employed, paid in coins and wadded up bills directly into my hat as a street performer.

When the alarm went off before sunrise on a Sunday morning in July, I imagined the crowds of tourists that would soon descend on the public marke…

Read more

I was seated at the dining room table with my parents. Coffee and a spiced holiday tea made by my wife plumed rising steam over a pile of family photos, birth certificates, old phone records, love notes, and Christmas cards—some of which were a century old. We’d unearthed them from a remote closet during my parents’ last move, but m…

Read more

I was flying back home from a speaking presentation that I had given the day before to a corporate leadership group. The theme of the conference had been “getting out of your comfort zone.” I’d been hired to present my incompetent waiter routine to help attendees challenge their thinking, but it was my own habits that une…

Read more

I pulled the rental into the driveway and left everything in the car so I could proceed directly into the house on the muted, late October day. The New England fall colors had passed and a light fog was settling in over the wide Thames river alongside my grandmother’s home. I was the only thing m…

Read more

Now we can get started.

AHEM!

Hello everyone.

It’s come to my attention that many writers have been feeling despondent and hopeless about their writing progress, down on themselves for doing less writing than they imagine is required for success. If that sounds like you, read on, because there’s a good chance that what you…

Read more

I was supposed to be leading a scheduled Zoom session, but I took a last minute trip to Kenya instead. Not in real life, but in my imagination.

Several times a week we come together in our writing community1 to discuss writing ideas and personal experiences that might be worth sharing. A good measure of what our members write only gets published because t…

Read more