The Crossword Puzzle

From Menletter Month 2004

By Tim Baehr

What happens when you pick up someone else's work?

I got on the subway on my way home from teaching an evening class. On the seat next to me was a newspaper I don't usually read, and it was open to the page with the crossword puzzle. The puzzle had been partly completed; it even had check marks next to the clues that had been solved.

I'm a crossword puzzle junkie, not on an expert or competitive level, but OK. So I picked up the paper, and for the next two stops - my entire ride - I tried to see how far I could get.

At first I took the first person's solutions as correct. And why not? He or she had been working in pen, and there were those check marks. This was a confident solver!

But then I started to notice that some of my solutions weren't fitting in. I was pretty sure the words I was coming up with were correct, so something must have been wrong. And it was. The original solver, for all his or her supposed self-assurance, had gotten several words wrong.

So I made corrections as I went along, writing over the first person's words. About five minutes and two subway stops later, I had the puzzle about two-thirds done, and as the doors opened I stood up and tossed the paper onto the seat. The next crossword junkie could finish it.

This got me to thinking. There has been at least one other instance in my life, many years ago, when I took over someone else's work.

The prolific writer

I was in educational publishing, working on language arts books for an elementary-through-junior high series. Typically, each editor was in charge of one or two grades, writing original exercises and rewriting materials provided by freelancers. The work was demanding: We worked from outlines and education plans that had been devised by educators and educational consultants with years of classroom experience. We had to edit or write so that the material fit the page layouts. And of course we had to be accurate.

There was some room for creativity. We might be given a certain educational outcome to cover, but we had to come up with the exercise sentences, short comprehension paragraphs, and the like.

My colleague Bud was always at the office early, and he often left late. During the day, behind his closed office door, he would type. And type. And type. His typewriter (I did say this was many years ago) rattled on almost constantly.

I felt a bit intimidated by Bud, and more than a little jealous. I simply did not have his work ethic. Moreover, the rattle of my typewriter alternated with long periods of silence as I thought of the next thing to write. Not only that, Bud was a very nice man, always pleasant, never complaining. (He had a lot of chances to show this quality; we had a mercurial boss who was subject to temper tantrums.)

One day Bud left the project. I don't quite remember, but I think he transferred to another department or found another job. I do know he wasn't fired. The boss asked me to take over Bud's work. As if I had a choice. So I went and got all his manuscripts and started to go through them.

His work was horrible - riddled with careless mistakes, not following the typographic specifications or education plan. I spent the next couple of months rewriting or reworking just about everything he - this man I had feared and envied - had done on the project.

Lesson learned

In each of these episodes, once I got over the irritation and disillusionment about my view or expectations of the other person, I realized that I had been selling myself short about things I had a fairly deep investment in. Just doing my own thing, crossword puzzles or kids' textbooks, I had no points of reference. Well, I actually did have points of reference, but they were imaginary. As far as I knew, everybody was better than I was, and I was just another poor schlep barely getting by. We men may be particularly prone to this kind of thinking because we're brought up to compete.

In a way, its kind of sad that I sometimes need episodes like these to point out that my lack of self-confidence is a self-made illusion. On the other hand, I'm happy to take this kind of reality from any source.

There's a flip side. There will always be things I do that other people can do better than I can. And if they follow me into a job and discover that they're better than they thought they were - well, that kind of competes a circle.

Now the task is to generalize the experience into what Christopher Robin told Winnie the Pooh: "There are plenty of times when you are going to be afraid. You are going to be uncertain. You're going to have self-doubt. You're braver than you believe. You're stronger than you seem. And you're smarter than you think."

And so are we all.