The Life and Death of a HiTech Patriot

by Yossi FAYBISH


Formats

Softcover
£16.50
£11.75
Softcover
£11.75

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 01/06/2002

Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 376
ISBN : 9780759648463

About the Book

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 desccribed there. Promise.


About the Author

Hello there, all you intelligent, wise, adorable people. This is I, the author, writing about I, the author, and if the sickeningly sweet introduction sentence won’t get you to throw up all over your PC or newspaper or whatever you read it from, then it will surely get you to buy my book. And this is the whole idea of this pre-mortem eulogy.

My real name is actually Ioji, and where I originally come from, the Far-East (of Europe, i.e. Romania), it’s not as uncommon as that. However, after moving on at the unripe age of 13 to the Middle-East (of Asia, i.e. Israel), some funny local official decided my name sounded too funny and re-baptised me (lucky he didn’t re-circumcise me) into the non funny sounding Joseph. Which, with the only other Joseph known me at that stage in my life being Joseph Stalin, wasn’t really funny at all in my eyes. Therefore I moved very fast into the realm of assorted nicknames and the native version of my Joseph being Yossi – so Yossi it was. I won’t bore you with stories of my childhood, my hoodloomhood, my studenthood, my lovelifehood and the rest of the hoods. I won’t even tell you about my dogs and their hoods. It just so happened that at a certain stage in my life I suddenly woke up with BSc in Electronic Engineering, a wife, two kids, and an insatiable desire for writing. But as all of you millions of seasoned readers of this note ("...optimistic the bastard, isn’t he...") out there know, it’s only the Stephen King’s of this world that have a right to quench this thirst. The rest of us have the unalienable right to queue up and wait. So I queued up and waited (I was number 223,451,093 - today there are an additional few billions following me which doesn’t bother me except for those that barge straight in the front). With absolutely no chance of reaching the ticket distribution window before I wither of old age and die – I decided for this sideways move and let’s go self-publishing. You think that the bible scribes had a publisher? And look where they are. So let’s go and self-scribe.

Enough bla-bla, some less artistic facts. Well, with the university degree in my hand I could choose to go several ways – commercial, managerial, educational... It so happened that I went a completely different way – I discovered, more or less by accident, that I have an incredible sense for technical troubleshooting. A real talent. Give me a problem, any problem on any machine, if I know the machine or not it doesn’t really matter, and either by myself or by working with someone that knows the machine perfectly but doesn’t know to solve the problem I would find the solution in 100% of the cases. And this is the job I was hired to do in Scitex, the company which is the subject of my book. With actually not the company itself covered in the "story" but rather Yossi Faybish in the company, in Scitex. For those of you with a technical background it will sound more than familiar, for all of the others you could very easily imagine the cycle of events that followed; because removing the "electronics" from the system you could easily adapt it to the life cycle in any other big organization be it a hospital, a law firm or even an army unit. It always starts with a bang – enthusiasm, falling in love with the job, with the company, striving to improve. Then follows the growth period, you growing in importance, in achievement, the company growing in size, in power. Then there may be some ups and downs but nobody gives up, all united in preserving the achievements, advancing further, and further. And then one day Neron comes on the scene, lights a match, and pooof – Rome is in flames. The organization tumbles, the horses run away, and a few of the falling stones hit you on the head. And you die. Wondering with genuine incomprehension – how the hell did it come to that. Which is the long and short of my life in Scitex. And which, for the needs of the book, can be taken as a generic name. Because this is the life of many of you in whatever company, organization, or any other kind of outfit you are in. Read this book, you may be just looking in the mirror.

The present? Life goes on. At a certain stage and age one just joins the stream, because there is unfortunately not enough time depth left to do it all again. Which I would if I could yet I can’t. I joined another similar company, I work in a similar job, I act in a similar way – it is all so similar. But it is only similar. It is not the same. And as I say at a certain stage in my book – Don Quixote is dead, long live Sancho Panza.

If you were wondering, this ‘About the Author" thing is written in a certain style, my own. This is the style the book is written in. So if you like it... hmmm hmmm it and have fun.