BLOCK LETTERS

How a seemingly innocuous decision changed a life.

Stable Diffusion illustration by the author

I sat across from a man named Kelly Duncan, staring at the piece of paper on his desk. It was my resume. It listed zero film experience, zero photography credits, and provided absolutely no reason for him to hire me as his assistant cameraman.

This interview had the potential to launch a career of creative opportunity, high pay and global adventure. My success hinged on a seemingly unrelated decision I’d made over a decade before.

In grade 11, I decided to forego cursive writing. From that day on I’d print everything. Block letters, upper case. I took pride in good draftsmanship and my class notes, correspondence and school work all looked much better.

It’s proven a durable decision. Today, nearing 80, I still print everything. I couldn’t do cursive writing to save my life.

A few years after that fateful decision, then in my late teens, I worked on a land surveying crew in northern British Columbia. It was hard, physical work and I was near the bottom of the pecking order. My job was to clear away any foliage that interfered with the line of sight of our surveying. My tools were an axe and a machete.

I noticed that the Instrument Man, the leader of the crew, always carried an important little book. Hard bound, yellow, waterproof and expensive, this document even had its own bespoke pocket on the surveyor’s vest. In it, the Instrument Man recorded the data we generated. It was the focus of everything we did as a team. I envied the status of his position, the lack of hard, mindless physicality in his work and the importance of his little yellow book.

One morning we were all called into the Party Chief’s office, where he assigned us a task, a trade test. He made each of us copy a long and complex series of numbers into one of those little surveyor’s notebooks. The finished task filled an entire page of the little yellow book. We weren’t told why, but the reason for this exercise soon became evident. It was a test of our penmanship and accuracy.

I won.

I was assigned to a newly-created team and my job title was “Booker”.

In the field, the Instrument Man would take measurements, call them out to me and I recorded them in the little yellow book. I took my job seriously, meticulously recording endless strings of numbers in perfect characters. At each location I repeated the measurements back to the Instrument Man, reading them back with military clarity.

I loved my new position. The other crewmembers had to carry the tools of their jobs - long, heavy measuring tapes, surveyor’s rods, chainsaws and axes, fuel and the instrument itself, including its tripod and protective case.

I carried only my little yellow book. And my lunch.

I thought it was the best job on the crew. They worked hard all day, carrying tools, clearing bush, moving stuff around, advancing across the landscape. I wrote numbers in my book. Unexpectedly, my printing had moved me up the ladder and into a better world.

Years later, I sat across the interview desk from Kelly, right at one of those hinge points where life changes abruptly. My fate was about to be decided.

“The reason I’ve called you in for a second interview was your resume”, he said. This was an interesting observation, since my resume showed precisely zero experience with movie cameras.

“Your still photographs show promise. I think that someday you’ll be a good photographer. But I need someone who’s meticulous, precise and has demonstrated attention to detail”, he said. “Your resume was the only one of nearly a hundred that was hand-printed.”

“And that’s why you’ve got the job, if you still want it.”

Kelly was to be my colleague, mentor and boss for the next decade as we travelled the world together, making films and being paid to have adventures.

I’d landed the best job in the world, not because of what I knew, but for the same reason I became Booker in the survey crew: I printed clearly.