Communications

The Scenes That Stick from a Chaotic Job

July 15, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for eight months. It was the position I worked for the least amount of time in my entire career, the most chaotic job I ever held, and the one that likely remains the most vivid in my memory.

Perhaps it was the political battles inside the district, the arrests at school board meetings, the ongoing protests, my boss getting doused with a pitcher of water by a member of the school board, the typical chaotic day of an urban school district. It might have been the constat media exposure, starting my first day (eight separate interviews on a teacher sick-out) and continuing until my last day. I did more media meetings and discussions in those eight months than the rest of my career combined.

A lot of scenes have stuck with me; a few even got worked into my five Dancing Priest novels.

One came very early. I’d quickly gotten to be good friends with one of the three people from the outside management team hired to fix what had become a huge, and bankrupt, mess. This guy was brilliant, the kind of person who gives consultants a good name. One evening, he rode with me to my first School Board meeting (the one with only one arrest). And he said something that floored me. When the 10 candidates for the position were being evaluated, the people doing the evaluations came across my religious affiliation. At the time, I was attending an Evangelical Free Church in St. Louis County. They had looked into the church. We were still in the parking garage when he said it. I looked at him and said, “But that’s illegal. You can’t do that.”

He agreed. It turned out to be important, he said. The evaluators saw it as a positive, because there were so many practicing Christians at headquarters and in the individual school administrations, and they figured I would be better able to work with them.

It rankled, but it turned out to be true. The word was actually spread as a kind of rumor or gossip about the Christian guy in communications. People who might have kept me at arm’s length (“part of that horrible group wrecking everything!”) did give me the benefit of the doubt. People would talk to me when they wouldn’t be as forthcoming with Board members, the management team, or helpful advisors from the Mayor’s office.

Another scene concerned a single school. Someone had organized a site visit by administrators to an elementary school in north St. Louis. It was not an upscale area; in fact, the neighborhood included a considerable number of abandoned buildings.

The entrance was a steel door; entry required approval by video and the familiar buzzer sound of the door being unlocked. A tall fence surrounded the property. The first-floor windows were barred. The second-floor windows were blocked with barbed wire. The building looked like a prison, but it was more of a fortress against break-ins and vandalism.

The annual student turnover was 110 percent. The school served an area dominated by transients and the homeless, who would enroll children for a few months (or even weeks) and then move on. The student body was mixed, with no racial group predominating.

When the visit ended, I left shaken. How do you teach when your classroom was constantly in flux? And yet, for many of these children, this might be the best experience of their young lives, because they at least got to eat lunch.

*Photograph by Chuttersnap via Unsplash.*

A third scene involved another School Board meeting. I had been working at the district since October; this meeting was in March. I remember it because it was still cold. I don’t remember what the controversy of the day was, because there was always a controversy of the day. But for this meeting, it had attracted people who were angry. The members of the Board and ket staff people had been bused in, escorted by police and taken through a back door. The middle school auditorium where it was held could hold 400, and you had to pass through an x-ray check. The room was filled.

I didn’t rate police protection or the bus ride, so I drove and parked at the very back of the school’s parking lot. The lot itself was filled – about 2,000 angry, chanting people. I stopped for a moment, knowing that to reach the entrance, I was going to have to navigate that crowd. And it was almost entirely a Black crowd, and I was going to look more than obvious.

I stood at the back of that chanting, shouting crowd, and I decided to make my way through it. I might have been praying. As I said “Excuse me” and began to make my way through, something unexpected happened. People recognized me (thanks to all those media interviews). The chanting stopped, and the crowd literally parted to let me walk through. People nodded in recognition. No one smiled; there were no warm greetings. But they parted and nodded, a sign of respect.

I still don’t know how that happened. As I walked up the back steps to the door, I turned and looked back. The crowd was still watching. I nodded. The police officer at the door looked at me and simply said, “Wow.”

Wow was right. And I was over-wowed.

Related:

Communicating Through the Chaos.

The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building by St. Louis Public Schools.

Communicating Through the Chaos

July 8, 2026 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

If I had any doubts from the job interview, the first day on the job was confirmation. The next few months underscored it. If I could summarize it one word, my job as Director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools was all about chaos.

Every day was chaotic. Little if anything could be anticipated or planned for. I often looked at the office telephone (and my Blackberry; that was the phone we used) as the enemy. You answered a call, and your day instantly changed.

I learned that I wasn’t the only one dealing with chaos. The man brought in to take over the district’s finances (which were a train wreck; the district was not only technically but actually bankrupt) was a former corporate CFO. He dealt with impossible tasks every day. His wife later told me that she worried most about public meetings – Board of Education meetings, town halls, outreach meetings – because anything could and often did happen. She would look for me making a statement on TV news, and then she knew her husband was okay.

The district had all the problems of an urban school system – money problems, crime, declining educational standards and test scores, dropping enrollments, school consolidations. An outside management firm had been brought in to try to transform the district; school closures, budget reductions (the communications budget was reduced from $1 million to $20,000, and that had been spent by the time I arrived).

*St. Louis Public Schools headquarters.*

The problems had been developing for decades; now they were being addressed, and sometimes eliminated, in weeks and days. The entire system was experiencing an ongoing series of shocks. It made for unhappy people. Lots of unhappy people. Board members fighting change. Th teachers’ union. School principals. Headquarters people. People whose jobs had been eliminated. Parents furious over school closures. Vendors who’d lost lucrative contracts.

Yes, it was chaos. And I had to figure out how to communicate into it. And in spite of it.

I had no budget. No ongoing publications. I knew next to nothing about electronic communications. Fortunately, at that time, there was almost nothing to learn. This was the pre-social media era; no Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (or X), TikTok, or anything else. We had a web site that was seriously out-of-date and a television studio (the district had its own channel) that could barely afford to function. What had been a communications staff of 12 was now me and one-half of a headcount shared with another group.

So, we improvised. First was a newsletter.

We started a weekly email newsletter from the superintendent to top HQ staff and school principals. When I first mentioned the idea, it was met with serious opposition from the outside management firm. “It will be leaked to everyone,” people said. And I said, “Exactly.” And to make sure of it, we included this statement at the top: “Private and Confidential. Do Not Distribute.”

Yes, it leaked. To parents, the public, the news media, everyone. It was one of the most unusual ways to communicate I’d ever participated in, but it worked. People were gleeful that it leaked, thinking they had foiled the management team. One rather venomous critic even caught me at a school board meeting, saying triumphantly he received every weekly issue from multiple sources. I expressed shock and indignation. When the reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch figured it out, he simply said. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” I was properly aghast at the thought.

Second, I made myself available to the news media. I was never not available. I never handed out prepared statements written by attorneys. I provided background when asked. I answered calls from 7 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. I was interviewed one night in the den of my house. One Saturday, I did an interview at the car dealership where I was getting some maintenance work done.

What helped was that reporters had never experienced that kind of cooperation, and they knew I had what was close to the worst job in the district. They cut me slack. They gave me background information of their own. They knew I would always give a straight answer, and I would talk in English, not jargon.

I also made sure to treat all media the same. It didn’t matter whether it was a small independent radio station with a very limited reach or even Newsweek. It was something I’d learned from corporate communications. You might think the New York Times is more important than anything, but that small trade or neighborhood publication just might turn out to be the most important call you make.

Third, we did outreach meetings. When it was time to present the new budget, we took the proposals out to the public. We let people see what the problems were and make their own suggestions.

When this effort was being planned, it almost strangled at the beginning. At a meeting in the superintendent’s office, with what must have been 50 people, the acting superintendent walked the assembled group of administrators through the plan. One person said, “I am not going into that high school. It is not safe.” Heads nodded in agreement.

You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. I was sitting on the floor, because it was the only place to sit. And I said, “If it’s unsafe for us to go into that high school, then why are we sending children into it every day?” Silence. The objection was dropped.

As an aside, I went into a multitude of schools in the district, many during the day but also at night for outreach meetings. Yes, some schools had security procedures; one elementary school had barbed wire on the windows on both the first and second floors. But not once did I ever feel unsafe or threatened.

And we fought back with facts. One journalism teacher published a long article in the St. Louis Journalism Review, attacking the management firm and the changes that had been made. When I read it, I had to three times to make sure I understood it. In addition to a multitude of factual errors, the article was filled with grammatical errors and misspelled words. The article had never been edited; instead, it was published unedited.

I wrote a response. A list of the errors (it was long). A list of the grammar and spelling mistakes (also long). And then I asked, did any editor at the St. Louis Journalism Review even read it before they published it? My response was published. One notable correction I remember was that the writer had referred to me as a “district flak;” I pointed out that what he meant to say was “district flack.”

I learned letter from a friend who was on the Review’s editorial board that my letter had landed like a nuclear bomb. He told me it was the longest editorial board meeting he ever participated in, and, while the errors were bothersome, what was even more upsetting to some of the board members was that the lack of editing and oversight was publicly embarrassing. (To be fair, the St. Louis Journalism Review was run by former reporters and editors, and while they were usually reliably liberal in their biases, they did try to be factually correct. (And they usually edited their articles.)

The teacher who wrote the original article caught up with me at the next school board meeting. He was not happy. He felt humiliated. He said a response was being prepared. I told him that was fine, but to make sure someone edited it before publication. He was not impressed with my response. And then I said, “You need to understand. I am not your enemy. The management firm is not your enemy. They’re trying to save the district from a financial and structural implosion.” He didn’t believe me.

Not everything that we did worked. If we had known then about the term “derangement syndrome” we all might have understood it better. Some people simply could not acknowledge facts. The one advantage I did have, in a sea of disadvantages, was relative freedom. I could move quickly, respond quickly, and know that my back was covered. I learned to trust implicitly one of the management firm’s people; he had a mind like a steel trap and a command of facts and issues that was rather phenomenal.

But it was still chaos, served daily.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph by Wayee Tan via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other

July 1, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for seven months. I’d gone through the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and I had a first day on the job unlike any other I had had or anyone I knew had had. But I figured that, after that tumultuous first day, things would settle down.

I figured wrong.

Things would never settle down. Every day would be unlike every other day.

One ongoing source of turmoil was the Board of Education itself, the seven people elected by voters to oversee the district’s operations. Four had been elected on a reform slate. Three had not. Most of the turmoil generated by the Board came from those three.

One constantly leaked confidential board information to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, especially if it might embarrass or “expose” the reform members. One day she went further. She showed up at a middle school with reporters in tow, announcing she was firing the principal. I had to drop what I was doing and rush to the school, deal with the reporters, and explain that Board members could not fire staff members. But she got the coverage she wanted on the 6 p.m. news; she wasn’t happy that I did, too.

Another Board member had been a perennial candidate for every elected office in the city of St. Louis and had managed to get on the school board because of a lack of challengers. He called me one day and asked me to set up a press conference; he was going to demand that the acting superintendent resign. I explained I couldn’t do that.

The third was likely the most intelligent member of the board. It was amazing to watch her focus like a laser on misstatements, inconsistencies, and contradictions form the administration. She also didn’t leak to the media; she said whatever she had to say publicly.

But there was a problem. One day, I was sitting in my office when I heard a splash. I saw the board member, who thought she has disguised herself by wearing a baseball cap, rush from my boss’s office next to mine and carrying an empty water pitcher. She had thrown the water on my boss at her desk.

I called security. They responded immediately. So did the police, because the board member had barricaded herself in her small office. The administrative area was evacuated. It took several hours, but the police eventually prevailed and removed her for charging and booking for assault. Yes, I had to hold an impromptu press conference to explain what had happened. I also had to give a witness statement to police. There had been rumors she had a bomb; she didn’t.

It was the reporter for Channel 5 who explained why the Board member had done it. She’d been inspired by a scene in The Wizard of Oz, and she believed my boss had become a witch. The reporter did not make that up. It was true.

A second source of turmoil was the public anger over the district’s restructuring. Downsizing had occurred across the district, with hundreds of people losing their jobs. The third floor of district headquarters in downtown St. Louis had been full of people six months before. Now it was empty and unused, except for the broadcast studio and the Board’s conference room. A major chunk of the second floor, the area adjacent to where I worked, was also empty.

Several schools had been closed, angering parents and teachers like. School bus routes had been consolidated and removed from influence by the Board and top district officers. Food service contracts had been consolidated and removed from political oversight. The nepotism rule was being enforced. Full-time activists were drawn to the turmoil.

All of it would coalesce around Board meetings. Thy were held at a middle school near downtown, because it had been built with the largest auditorium. Every Board meeting saw a filled room – 450 people who were not shy about screaming. Another 500, often more, would be outside in the parking lot.

I had attended school board meetings in my own suburban school district. Feelings might run high at times, but meetings usually stayed calm.

Not with St. Louis Public Schools

I sat next to my boss at the first meeting I attended in October. The room was packed. The crowd had to be continuously warned to calm down or be expelled. Board members yelled at each other, and at members of the crowd. People were often shouted down. It was a circus of noise. One activist charged the stage where the Board was sitting, and was wrestled to the ground by the police, handcuffed, and arrested, literally two feet from where I was sitting.

When the meeting ended, my boss smiled. “You must be a good luck charm. This was a good meeting.”

Shocked, I stared at her. “This was a good meeting?”

She nodded, smiling again. “We only had one arrest.”

The third source of turmoil was the normal workings of an urban school district. All the reporters covering the district had police radios. There would be reports of weapons on campus, gang fights, campus intruders, school bus incidents, and other problems.

Once, I was at a meeting hosted by the school district and held at the high school that specialized in information technology. Hundreds of people were attending a presentation by the State Board of Education. I received a text message – food poisoning at an elementary school near the city’s old and famous food market. The incident was odd because only one class had been affected, and the children had eaten different things in the cafeteria. But the teacher had also been affected, and that moved the situation from possible hysteria to serious issue. The food service vendor was sending people to collect samples and provide a statement to the media.

The vendor’s representatives showed up, collected samples, and promptly slipped out a side door. They would not be providing a statement. Reporters turned to me. I had to invent a response on the spot, explaining what we knew and didn’t know and expressing our surprise that the vendor had not made a statement as promised.

The vendor was not happy with my response. That made us even. I wasn’t happy with their response.

Like I said, no day was like any other day. No such thing as a “typical day” existed. I might try to plan, but I always had to be prepared to junk the plan and go by the seat of my pants. That was the only typical thing about the job.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building. All photographs via St. Louis Public Schools.by St. Louis Public Schools.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had

June 3, 2026 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I lived. It was something of a new experience. I hadn’t driven in rush-hour traffic since leaving Houston 25 years earlier. The apprehension wasn’t about traffic; I had stepped outside my career experience and accepted a job with St. Louis Public Schools. And I was early; the hours were 8 to 5, but I decided to be there by 7:30.

Except for nine months at a newspaper straight out of college, my career had been exclusively corporate communications: employee communications, crisis communications, media relations, environmental communications, and speechwriting. Especially speechwriting. Even for the three years I had had my own consulting business, I worked for companies, doing mostly speechwriting.

Corporations have their moments of craziness and crisis, but they pale in comparison to urban school districts. And yet, here I was, driving to my first day on the job at the largest school district in the state of Missouri, a district that had been in crisis for years and was now in hyper-crisis.

An outside management team has been authorized to take over and try to fix the massive problems the district faced – financial, academic, structural. The management team had been tasked with smashing an entrenched bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy – and all the outside people supporting it – was fighting back.

I was allowing myself to walk right into it. I’d already had the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and now I would have the strangest first day on the job I’d ever had.

*Photograph by Charles Deluvio via Unsplash*.

I parked in the district’s garage, a short walk across a plaza from the headquarters building. I followed my instructions, introduced myself to the security team at the entrance, and accompanied one of the armed guards to a small room off the lobby, where I had my picture taken and badge created. Then I took the stairs to the second floor, where my office was said to be. Someone directed me toward the side of the building overlooking North 11^th Street. The office was quite nice, just like any corporate office, and with a door. It was next to my boss’s office, but she was in an offsite meeting with all the other senior officials.

The secretary told me that I was supposed to go to Human Resources to fill out the required forms, but she said there was something else I needed to do first. Channel 5 News had asked for an interview about the teachers’ sickout.

“The teachers are having a sickout?” I said.

She nodded. “I think it has to do with changes to pensions. But they say it’s not a sickout, only hat a lot of teachers have called in sick.”

I went looking for someone to give me the background and find out what the district’s response was. I found the HR department down on the first floor, but no one there admitted to knowing anything. Someone in the academic department might know something, they said. I started looking around the building. That’s when I began to see some of the changes that had arrived.

The part of the second floor near my office was empty. There were fully equipped desks in cubicles, with tape dispensers, staplers, paper, and other office supplies, but no people. This had been the 12-member communication department. Now it was me and a half-headcount I hadn’t met yet. The people in Finance couldn’t help. No one in the academic department could say anything, because the top officials were in that offsite meeting.

The third and top floor was entirely empty except for a broadcast studio; the technician told me he was glad to meet me, his new boss. No one had mentioned that I was responsible for the broadcast studio. I would shortly learn that I was also responsible for the photography studio and archives, housed in one of the schools that had been closed. I found out that day when the district’s photographer showed up in my office to meet his new boss.

Back on the second floor, I stopped by the secretary’s desk to ask a question everyone had been vague about. What was my discretionary budget? She rather cheerfully told me that it it had been close to $1 million, but that had been reduced to $20,000. “But don’t worry about it,” she said. “The $20,000 has already been spent.”

The budget was zero. My job had become even more interesting.

I finally found someone who knew about the sick-leave policy and the issue, but they would not go on the record and never in front of a camera. I would soon learn that tended to be the official position of virtually everyone who worked for the school district – people universally saw the news media as one-way tickets to dismissal. The person did say the policy was that sickouts were illegal; people participating in them were subject to dismissal. I was warned that the principals would likely protect their staff and deny anyone had called in sick. I tested that with two principals. The assessment had been correct.

As my first hour on the job ended, I walked downstairs and outside to do an interview with Channel 5. Channels 2, 4, 11, and 30 followed. Then the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis American. The St. Louis Business Journal. The Riverfront Times. Several radio stations, including two independents.

That morning, I learned that I had to help TV reporters find a different location around the building so that televised reports wouldn’t look the same. That, as part of his job covering the school district, the Post-Dispatch reporter possessed and monitored a police radio. (The Post-Dispatch building was half a block away.) That School Board members, administrators, principals, and teachers all leaked like sieves to the media, parents, critics, protestors, and anyone else who’d listen.

*Photograph by Scott Graham via Unsplash*.

In between interviews, I received my first phone call. It was from the St. Louis Mayor’s office, providing my “suggested” instructions for the day. I would discover that this would happen three or four times a week. The Mayor’s office was not connected in any official way to the school district. I suppose it’s okay to note now that I received my instructions politely and then ignored them. But I appreciated the effort.

By noon, I had a little time to go to HR and fill out my forms. I completed them in a small conference room and returned them to a secretary. It would be weeks before anyone owned up to those forms getting lost. The people involved knew the forms had been lost, but they were afraid to say anything. I figured it out when I didn’t receive my first two paychecks.

More interviews followed. Lunch that day happened around 3 p.m. when I found a vending machine that I had to get Security to operate because there had been too many break-ins and thefts. Yes, right there in the headquarters building, presumably by people who worked there. What had been the district’s small cafeteria had been closed in one of the restructurings that had already happened.

Toward the end of the day, the secretary brought me a catalog to order office supplies. I mentioned that I’d seen the fully supplied cubicles nearby, and couldn’t I simply take some of what was there? She looked almost horrified. “But don’t you want new supplies?” she said. I said I would scavenge first, and if I needed anything else, I’d let her know. She looked at me like I was a graverobber.

By 5 p.m., I was exhausted. The administrators had all returned from the offsite meeting, and I was able to greet several of them, including the acting superintendent, the man who’d yelled at me in the interview. He had a small team of two or three people he’d brought with him; one of them would become an island of sanity in what was clearly the craziest workplace I’d ever walked into.

If I’d only known what was ahead, I might not have come back after what had been the stranngest, most hectic first day on the job I’d ever experienced.

Related:

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph by St. Louis Public Schools.

How Scott Adams Made Me a Hero

January 14, 2026 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

In the fall of 1995, I was helping the company’s IT function plan for its annual conference in March. They needed a keynote dinner speaker, and they looked to me to see if it were at all possible to get Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic.

It’s hard to understand now, but the Dilbert carton was growing in popularity, and Adams – himself a former IT person – was considered the patron saint of IT. He wasn’t as well known outside of the function, not yet, anyway. But he soon would be.

How I came to be on this committee is a story in and of itself. Earlier that year, I’d asked IT for help in setting up a company web site. I was told they couldn’t help, and by the way, the web was just a flash in the pan, because the future was – I am not making this up – Lotus Notes. So, I’d gone to an outside firm.

We were a week away from launch when the company hired a new VP of IT. At his first senior staff meeting, he had everyone introduce themselves and what areas they were responsible for. When they finished the roundtable, he asked, “Who’s in charge of web development?” No one said a word, until one person volunteered, “Well, there is this guy in PR.”

I was descended upon by IT people suddenly anxious to help. I remember saying, “Please, just stay away. We’re ready to go live.”

I mention that story because it’s a Dilbert cartoon if there ever was one.

As a result, the new VP made sure I was on the planning team. And they were looking to me to see if we could get Scott Adams as the keynote dinner speaker. Everyone agreed it was a long shot.

In late October, I contacted his representative, who in turn passed me to a speaker’s bureau, which did call me back. He had had a cancellation for the time we were requesting in the spring, and he would do it. I couldn’t believe it; it had been relatively easy, and the fee was well within our budget. They faxed the contract, which I quickly signed and faxed back.

The people in IT were overjoyed. They thought I was some kind of magician, but it was really only a combination of circumstances.

Then, on Nov. 9, 1995, Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, announced he would be discontinuing the comic strip at the end of the year. As newspapers everywhere looked for a replacement, the choice was obvious – Dilbert.

Scott Adams and Dilbert suddenly rocketed to household names. At first, I worried that they might cancel, but, no, it was full steam ahead.

We arranged for transportation from the airport to the hotel, and he said he would find his way to the convention center. Dinner was at 7, and he arrived at 6:15. I met him in the lobby and introduced myself. I then took him into the dinner room, where servers were still setting up. He had requested an overhead projector, and he checked the equipment and the microphone.

At dinner, he sat with the Chief Financial Officer, who was over the IT function, the VP of IT, and several other senior executives who had apparently arranged to attend the dinner to hear him, including the company’s CEO. I worried a bit about the CFO; he was a stern, dour figure, not known for having a sense of humor and often frowning at anything not connected to the business. I was sitting nearby in case of an emergency, and all seemed to go well.

As dessert was served, the chairman of the meeting introduced Scott. A senior IT manager, the man was literally bubbling with excitement. In the room were almost 500 people.

Scott’s presentation was “The Cartoon Strips That Didn’t Make It Past the Censor.” He showed the strips, telling the story associated with each one. I don’t think anyone on the room stopped laughing. The dour CFO was laughing so hard I thought he’d fall off his chair. When Scott finished, he was mobbed, and he spent at least an hour autographing Dilbert books people had brought to the speech. Including me, and you can see my personalized one above. (I still have the book.)

The CFO made a point of congratulating me for the arranging what he called “the best after-dinner speech I’ve ever heard.”

I walked him back to his hotel. We talked about Dilbert, drawing cartoons, and the presentation. He said that when Bill Watterson made his announcement, he and his cats did a conga line to celebrate. I told him that his cartoon strip had managed to capture the idiocies of corporate life (and corporate life in the 1990s was saturated with idiocies). I also said that a few months ago, I had stuck a Dilbert cartoon on the door of my office, and it had become something of a shrine, with people sticking up their favorites on the door. (HR tolerated it. Barely.)

That was Scott’s genius: He captured corporate life as millions of us were living it.

People said afterward it was the highlight of the conference. Scott Adams was the perfect speaker, and a perfect gentleman. He was funny, and he knew how to use self-deprecating humor (the only safe kind). He struck me as someone who loved his work, and he was still somewhat bewildered by what seemed like instant fame. And as the years went by, he never lost it that sense of surprise and wonder.

And now he’s gone. The creator of Dilbert, the Boss, Catbert, Dogbert, and Ratbert belongs to the ages.

The Scott Adams School 01/13/26 – Scott’s final message.

A Year Away from Twitter / X

June 26, 2024 By Glynn Young 5 Comments

Twitter was the first social media platform I joined, way back in 2008. I was far from being an early adopter, but I was one of the first people at work to sign up.

Even that early, you could see the enormous potential for good and bad that a social media platform like Twitter could have. What we know as cancel culture developed early.

From 2008 to 2023, I had a consistent strategy in how I used the platform. I tweeted positive stuff. I didn’t engage in politics or controversies. I highlighted good things people were doing or writing. And I have to say I was steadfast from the beginning to the end.

At one point, Twitter changed its algorithm, and I discovered my account had been suspended, caught up in some automatic change (I wasn’t alone). But I had a friend who had a friend who knew someone who was a developer at Twitter, and within about two days, my account had been restored. The suspension had been a mistake by the design of a heavy-handed algorithmic change.

That was then. Elon Musk eventually bought Twitter and fired a whole bunch of people. If your account got suspended, you were going to have to deal with algorithmic bots, and a bot is never wrong.

I was continuing on my merry way, when, on June 12 of last year, I discovered my account had been suspended. I appealed. Several times, in fact. The length of the reviews of my appeals could be measured in nanoseconds. My remaining option was to write a letter to Twitter / X headquarters in San Francisco.

And I said to myself, “No. I’m done. I am not going to waste my time on a letter that will likely be trashed before anyone reads it. I’m done with Twitter.” And I walked away.

I have not regretted my decision. Not at all.

Here’s what has happened because of that.

I have more free time. Like up to 90 minutes a day.

The craziness that the platform has always embraced is gone, leading to a quieter life.

I began to add links daily to my blog for interesting articles, stories, and poems that people might like to read.

My time on Facebook and Instagram has decreased as well. I haven’t increased my time on LinkedIn.

I’m writing more. I’m writing better.

Substack has become a more important social platform for me. I don’t have a column or site on Substack, but I follow favorite authors, writers, photographers, and artists, and it’s all positive. Negative stuff can creep in, but I ignore it or unfollow the account.

I also discovered that journalism is still being practiced in the United States, at least on Substack.

I miss the people I regularly communicated with on Twitter, including a lot of poets. Tweetspeak Poetry, the site I write weekly for, was born on Twitter. We hosted numerous poetry slams with the use of Twitter hashtags, but that’s long in the past. You might say Tweetspeak outgrew Twitter, or it grew in a different direction (Tweetspeak is celebrating 15 years this year.)

Overall, the suspension of my Twitter account has been a good thing. I could have created a different account and started over, but I decided it wouldn’t be worth it.

I got some of my life back, and I’m going to keep it.

Top photograph by David Paschke via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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