Portions of the internet are buzzing with the topic of plagiarism. The center of the storm is here, but I heard about it here. For those of you so dedicated to my site that you are loath to click away to those links, allow me to sum it up: some asshat has been lifting whole entries from other peoples' blogs, and posting them as his own work.

Why not name him and publicly shame him? Because he apparently has no shame. Yes, I know the name of said asshat, but posting it here would give him more of the attention he craves, so I'll not use it.

Reading about the controversy, though, has reminded me of two things: my own fantasies about this website, and my own incident as the victim of plagiarism.

First, the fantasies (And I mean fantasies. I have no delusion that they would ever happen). When I started this site, I dreamt of 2 things happening as a result:

1) Someone would find this site and be so impressed that they would hire me as a television writer. Hey, why not? M. Giant became a writer for Prairie Home Companion...

2) That somebody would plagiarize me and I would get righteously, but quietly, indignant. Then the plagiarist would be exposed as a fraud and I would be discovered as the true source of the material, becoming a cult sensation. Oh yeah, my mind is a weird thing.

You may have noticed that my site, unlike most blogs and diarys by actual professional writers, does not carry a copyright notice. There are a number of reasons for that. First, I would love to catch someone using my stuff (see #2 above). Second, a part of me thinks it sounds arrogant to copyright the drivel I write here. Third, there is no third reason. Fourth, I'm not above stealing a good joke or two myself (see reason #3). Fifth, I heard somewhere that material doesn't have to be explicitly labeled as copyrighted to be protected. That may just be a myth, but it would certainly be easy enough to prove the origin date on my material if it came down to a dispute.

And now, the story of my very own plagiarist!

I worked my way through college as a graphic artist in the HUB Sign and Print Shop at Penn State. We were a rag-tag bunch of eccentrics and artists, and it was a great place to work. In between talking music and politics, we painted banners and designed flyers and signs for on-campus organizations and departments. This was the 80's, and it was all hand work. The highest tech devices we had were a Kroy machine and an Embossograph (illumination without moving light spots!).

We were once asked to design a flyer for an on-campus multi-cultural organization. I don't remember the organization or even the gender of the person who was our client for the thing (for the ease of telling the story, I’m going to use the pronoun: “he”). I do remember that there was some kind of globe in the upper-left corner of the flyer. And the client was very picky about it. So picky about it, that after being forced to redo the thing twice, my boss washed her hands of it. She told me that either I could finish it, or it wouldn't get done, but she wasn't touching it again. So I did it, doing what the client asked for, even though it wasn't the way we would have done it. At least it was done, and that client was out of our hair. We hoped to never see him again.

But we did. A few months later, that client came back to apply for an open position at our shop. Now, having previously pissed off the manager, his chances weren't very good. But we had to give the impression that every qualified applicant would be considered, so the boss asked this person to leave his portfolio for review, and he would be contacted for an interview if we were interested. He left it, and lo, there in the portfolio was the flyer that had caused our shop so much grief!

This was beyond the pale to my boss. She took the work we did very seriously, and was as protective of her employees as a mother bear. She wasn’t content to just turn this person down. She actually called him in for an interview. She also made sure that the interview was scheduled for a time when I would be in the shop.

She confronted the person with that particular flyer and said, “This is exactly the kind of work that we do. So much so, that the person who did it already works here!”

He knew he was busted, but he had a defense. He said that the portfolio was representative of the type of work that he could do. Yeah, right. He apparently didn’t understand the concept of a portfolio. Needless to say, he didn’t get the job.

There are a lot of other things I remember about that job and my co-workers. Like the model, Cindy, who liked to wear strange outfits (like a BMX outfit as fashion statement, or see-through white pants with tiger-print panties). She posed nude with the Nittany Lion Statue for a famous photograph. And Ken who used to tell us stories and jokes in his heavy Scranton accent. And Renee who was my companion at Earthtones concerts, and the Kims, and the twins who worked at the 50’s diner. Oh! And the graduate student who didn’t know how to use a ruler and threw out a stack signs because they were upside down (they were fine, she was just taking them out of the press and holding them upside down). It was my boss there that introduced me to 10,000 Maniacs, Melissa Etheridge, and Tracy Chapman. Good times.