Showing posts with label career. Show all posts
Showing posts with label career. Show all posts

Friday, June 19, 2020

Fini


My first real job was around age 15 or 16. I was not a very ambitious teen. Sure, I'd worked before that, but only fitfully -- running the cash register, answering the switchboard, and checking in guests at my parents' motel when circumstances demanded, if one can call that work. I didn't get paid to do that, but again, my parents did feed me, so I guess it was a fair trade-off. 

By the time it sunk in that I really, really needed money of my own, my mom reluctantly hired me as a motel maid, for seventy-five cents an hour in the summers and in March during the state basketball tournament. Shamefully, I didn't actually know how to clean. The maids worked in teams, and an older woman named Martha had the sad task of training me in. Training in the boss's daughter, a girl she had no option of firing, was no doubt a delight. Truth be told, she could have told my mom I was hopeless and Mom would have fired me. Mom was a no-nonsense woman. The first time Martha and I made up a bed together, she scornfully came around from her side and showed me how to form a hospital corner. I was mortified, and have never, ever forgotten how to do it.

Cleaning rooms was hard physical labor, and I was a teenager! At Martha's age, I would have quit after scrubbing my first room. The motel had 52 rooms. What that grubby job taught me was to dig in and just do it. I can't numerate the number of toilets I swished or the multitude of beds I stripped and neatly remade. Nor the countless steps I climbed with a heavy Kirby vacuum in hand. Once all 52 rooms were done, it was time to wash, dry and fold towels, inside a suffocating garage when the outside temperature was 88 degrees and the inside was about 99. But eventually I earned enough money to buy school clothes and record albums, and at last a decent stereo. Like all jobs, what seemed impossible at first ultimately became old hat. Martha even told my mom I was a good worker; the ultimate compliment.

I was enrolled in the clerical program in high school, after a doomed attempt at "college prep". Math and science were my downfall. If I'd cared enough, I could have squeaked by in algebra and physics, but I rarely cared about any of my classes, even the easy ones. Typing was something I was good at, and shorthand was simple to master. My goal was to secure a state job as a clerk-typist. State government jobs were plentiful and I lived right across the river from the capitol building. Thus my first non-parental job was working for the State Health Department, Division of Vital Statistics. I basically filed and sometimes typed up facsimiles of birth certificates for my director to emboss with her official stamp. Apparently I was a proficient filer, because I was approached to become part of a new project -- committing all the birth, death, and divorce records to a newfangled thing called microfilm.Scintillating work! All in all, my government employment lasted about a year, before personal conflicts convinced me to crawl back to my parents and guilt them into giving me a job, this time in the motel office - early mornings.

In late 1976 I became a full-time mom, which lasted for three years, until my dwindling bank account informed me that I needed to find a job. A new catalog store was being erected a couple blocks from my home, and as I would drive past, I'd mutter, "I'm going to work there". And I did. I'd never worked in retail, but I did know how to run a cash register, which cinched the deal. I liked the job, but I almost always found something to like in any job I held. Retail paid only a pittance, yet we employees still had to endure yearly evaluations. During mine, my supervisor chastised me for not creating an advertising campaign -- I hadn't even known that was an expectation! So I trundled down to a travel agent's kiosk and convinced them to hand over a travel poster, from which I devised a placard to place in the luggage section. I think it read, "for your flights of fancy". My boss argued that it should be "flights of fantasy", at which point I realized she was an idiot.

Scouring the want ads in the local newspaper, I found an opening for a "communications clerk" at the local hospital. I definitely knew about clerking. The RN manager who interviewed me, Laurel Sullivan, was kind and not an imbecile and she offered me the job. I stayed at St. A's for eight years. I loved it. I can't exactly pinpoint why, but it may have been because I learned so much that I'd never in my life known. I worked on Third Floor - Medical -  with the RN's and LPN's. I was the communications center of the floor -- scheduling surgeries and ordering labs and special meals. I became certified in CPR and I had to call a Code Blue once, which scared me to death. Code Grey meant tornado watch; Code Black was a tornado warning, when we'd have to wheel all the patients out into the hallways in their beds. I worked second shift, so in the summers greys and blacks were prevalent. I would have stayed at St. A's forever, but a hectic night's dust-up bruised my feelings and it was time to move on.

I transferred downstairs to the Admissions Department, but it was so dank and quiet, I couldn't endure it. I lasted a couple weeks and realized this was all wrong. The only job I could locate in the Tribune was a receptionist position at the Teachers' Retirement Fund. This turned out to be almost the most boring job I ever had.I daily worked the four longest hours of my life, distributing mail in the mornings and occasionally typing a letter on my IBM Selectric. Nobody actually spoke to me; I was the invisible front desk automaton. When I finally found a replacement position and announced my resignation, the woman who'd hired me said she was so satisfied with my performance she was about to offer me a full-time job. Kind of the wrong time to finally let me know.

The job I traded that in for was surreal. Mrs. Fortman ran a medical transcriptionist concern -- her most reliable customer was most likely her husband, Doctor Fortman, a grizzled octogenarian whom we'd all hated when he showed up at St. A's, stumbling around, slurring dictation into one of the nurse station telephones. All the eighty-year-old patients worshiped him.

Mrs. Fortman had promised me a transcriptionist job, but that dang machine just didn't show up in shipping. She had no idea why it didn't show up, but didn't seem concerned. She already had two transcriptionists ensconced in separate bare one-window rooms, huddled behind giant boxy green screens. I was to become the third. A couple months went by and still "the machine" wasn't delivered. Meantime I came into work each day and filed envelopes into mail slots and hovered about until lunch time; drove to McDonald's drive-thru and got a hamburger and fries and returned to hover about until quitting time.

Though I'd only been employed for two months, the big corporate blowout in Kansas City was imminent, and I and my two cohorts, the ones with "machines" were invited.I'd spoken a bit with each of them, and they couldn't have been more different. One was a brassy blonde who had an overflowing list of grievances; the other was meek, plain; a go-along-to-get-along prairie maid. The three of us boarded the plane and two of us proceeded to get sloppily sloshed. The blonde planned to corner the CEO of the company at the party and spill her guts. I was frustrated and had nothing to lose, so I agreed to ride shotgun. All went as planned -- we consumed sirloins and fat baked potatoes and more liquor and I found myself in a quiet room nodding along as Brassy vomited out her complaints. I remember the man nodding, but nothing else. Then the three of us, Brassy, Prissy, and me; convened to the hotel bar and poured down more booze. 

Returning to work the following Monday, each of us got a personal audience with Mrs. Fortman. I remember piping, you promised me a machine! and Mrs. Fortman replying, "We're still waiting for the shipping!" Then she asked me if I wanted to continue my employment and I said, "No, I guess not." And that was that.

Thus continued the slog of awful jobs. 

I went home and scoured the newspaper once again. I eventually zeroed in on an ad for a farm records secretary. I should clarify that the clerical ads at any given time in my small town never exceeded three.The job was located essentially in the country, several winding miles down the interstate highway, near an isolated inn and sagebrush. Nevertheless, I meandered out for an interview, which turned out to be awkward, as the hiring manager, Nancy, was supremely self-conscious and insular. That was supposed to be my role! The two of us, naturally, did not make a connection; yet, she called later that day and offered me the job. 

The girl who trained me in, Linda, was unnecessarily snotty. I asked what felt like pertinent questions and she haughtily flicked me off. Linda wasn't going anywhere; she'd been promoted, so I'd have to work with her every day; sense her peering over my shoulder throughout my eight hours, quick to chastise me for rookie mistakes. I hated her. The job wasn't an algebraic equation -- I filed a bit and typed letters and tried to interpret Nancy's Oklahoma accent on dictation tapes, rewinding and replaying; sometimes giving up and simply typing ellipses so she would have to fill in the blanks. And copies; hours and hours of making copies at the burbling IBM copy machine; copies of tax returns, three of each: one for the client, one for the file, one for the Federal government. Hole punching, dot matrix printouts -- baffles of printouts. 

The records department was situated in the basement of a three-story structure. We had our own bottom-level entrance, so I rarely tiptoed upstairs except to nuke an occasional lunch. Mostly I left the building like lightning as the big hand hit twelve; drove into Mandan and procured a dollar-eighty-nine-cent lunch at A&B Pizza. Nancy had a completely unnecessary rule that the entire department (about 4 people total; sometimes five) had to sit in the reception alcove every day at 10:00 and 2:00 and "enjoy" break together. I learned Nancy was a nerd who spent her evenings reading Stephen King novels. Conversely the highlight of my workday was listening to gags and song parodies on Y93, emanating from a portable radio perched on my desk-side table. 

It wasn't until Nancy took a two-week vacation to visit her kin in Oklahoma that Linda and I got to really know one another. We bonded over a mutual disdain for our boss. Linda eventually became one of my very best friends. Sadly for me, but happily for her, I helped Linda find a way out of the farm records tangle. I spied an ad in the newspaper for a ranch manager in a far-off town, which Linda's husband was scouring for; and soon my friend Linda was gone. I stayed at Farm Credit Services for about a year and a half, eventually making friends. Linda had always known how to mollify Nancy; I never did. My inward nature didn't gel with hers. I became frantic to get out.

I've written ad nauseum about US Healthcare, but suffice it to say when the opportunity to escape presented itself, I pursued it relentlessly. I had to scratch and claw to get that job, but somehow serendipitously I grabbed it. What US Healthcare taught me was that I'd undervalued my talents. At last I had something other than a "job". I had to dodge dynamite and seize the opportunity to get Evil Connie fired, and I have no regrets to this day. People in power should never run roughshod over subordinates. Vile tyrants should never threaten to fire someone for simply doing an exemplary job. Evil Connie eventually found employment as a receptionist -- welcome, Evil Connie, to the me of ten years before. At least I worked my way up, instead of tumbling down.

https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/05/my-career.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/05/my-career-part-2-evil-bosses.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/05/my-career-part-3-karma.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/05/my-career-part-4-phil.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/05/my-career-part-5-welcome-to-i-land.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/06/my-career-part-6-who-do-you-think-you.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/06/my-career-part-7-another-new-boss.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/06/my-career-part-8-everythings-great.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/06/my-career-part-9-cold-wind.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/06/my-career-part-10-thank-you-goodbye.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/06/my-career-part-11-breaking-news.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/06/my-career-part-12-loose-ends.html
https://www.richfarmers.life/2012/07/my-career-epilogue.html

I was a high school graduate, too lackadaisical to pursue a college education, though I could have had one. What my previous thirty-odd years of sometimes treacherous living had taught me, however, was that everybody blossoms from a kind word. Everyone wants to feel valued. Everyone has worth. One's employment position doesn't dictate that.

In 1999 I moved on. I started over, albeit with a satchel of collected wisdom. My aim was to glide through my last twenty years of employment. I'd paid my dues, wrestled my battles. It was my time to breathe.

It took three years of drudgery to reveal that I just couldn't do it. When an opportunity for promotion arose, I warily pursued it. The position was still a demotion from the old me, but it presented an opportunity to use my dormant talents. I somehow secured the position and eventually put my stamp on it. 

From 2003 to the year 2020 I served as my department's trainer and de facto substitute supervisor. I reveled in the diversity of challenges. I left my mark.

Work life is a cornucopia of ups and downs and ups. Every single work experience I ever had taught me something important, though I might not have recognized it at the time.

That's sort of how life works. One doesn't recognize or absorb sometimes painful, sometimes glorious lessons. But one's mind doesn't allow them to evaporate.

On June 12 my work life officially ended. 

I have few regrets. I think I probably did exactly what I was meant to do.








 










Wednesday, May 16, 2012

My "Career" ~ Part 3 ~ Karma


Our Bismarck branch had performed so well that the powers-that-be, as much as they disdained us, realized that they needed to find more people just like us.

This entailed a building expansion.  Because where would they put us all?  All us groovy, hardworking, competent people.  We may have been rubes, but we were smart rubes, and we didn't try to screw the company, not to mention any names or geographical locations.

So, voila, a whole new wing was added to the building!  That meant a move for us old-timers, up a flight of stairs (the new wing had two floors!)

My new best friend, Connie, kidded me as all us supervisors did a walk-through of the new digs.  She made little joshing remarks about where she'd put me, and I laughed and laughed, and thought about where I'd like to put her.

Connie had a new, innovative (i.e., "stupid") plan for transforming our business model.  She determined that it would be a wonderful (her favorite word) idea to place examiners in units according to their abilities.  In essence, Unit 1 would be all the really stupid people, Unit 2 would be the only semi-stupid people, and on and on, upwards, until we got to the really smart ones.  This, apparently, had some unforeseen logic that only dogs could hear, but I publicly applauded Connie's boldness.  I would have handed her a calligraphed diploma, if that would have kept her on my side.

We were all gathered in the conference room that day, when she had the director of operations on speakerphone, announcing her plan, that she assured him we were all on board with.  Yay!  Go team!  Idiot.

He (Dave) audibly sighed and said something to the effect of, "Well, I don't think that's gonna work, but if you want to try it, knock yourself out."

So, Connie began her stupid-ass game of musical chairs, ranking people.  Seriously!  Well, this one is dumb; let's put her in Unit 1.  How insulting.

And once she was done with the rankings, she also ranked the supervisors, although she wasn't quite so frank about our abilities or lack thereof, since we were all sitting there in the room.  But the bottom line was, she assigned the stupidest supervisor to the stupid unit, and on and on like that.

I think I was probably around #5 out of 7.  Not bad, considering our history.  We'd come a long way, baby.

By now, of course, I'd been chastised into not rocking anybody's boat.  My aim was to keep being employed.  And I had long since stifled my competitive streak.  Translation:  Didn't really care a whole lot, with the exception of advancing my employees' skill sets, which I kept on doing; Connie be damned.

One thing that always stuck in my craw was that there were two highly competent assistant supervisors who never, ever got a chance to advance.  Most likely because they suffered from "Shelly Syndrome", and forgot that they needed to play the "Flatter Connie" game.  They were so much more qualified than the lackeys that Connie had placed in positions of authority, and yet their careers were stymied.  I just kept encouraging them, and hoping.

One sunny August day, out of the blue, our director of operations, Dave, hopped a flight out of Philadelphia and appeared, unannounced, in our office.

He commandeered a spare room, called in our regional VP (I forget his name, so I'll call him "Charles"), and the two of them consulted behind closed doors for about an hour, much to the curiosity of us supervisors, who kept sneaking peaks, wondering what the hell this all meant.

Then my extension rang, and it was Dave calling!

"Can you stop in?"

Okay, I hadn't pissed off Dave, that I was aware of.  I hardly knew him!  Why in God's name would he want to talk to me?  I was the good, subservient employee now.  It had been a couple of years since I was threatened with being fired, and I was holding to the straight and narrow.

I meekly walked in to the little room, and Dave told me to close the door.

He, and Charles, commenced to grilling me about how things were going in the office.  I don't know what they knew, or how they knew it.  But they knew something.

Their questions were pointed.

So, I thought, all bets are off now.  You guys are asking.  And I'm telling.

I don't remember that I said anything derogatory about Connie, but I must have.  It's all kind of a blur.  I did say that there were two people who deserved to be supervisors, but they never had gotten the chance, and Dave asked me their names, and I told him.

That's the part that stands out in my memory.

I don't know what Dave saw in me, or why.  He didn't know me; I didn't know him.  But for some reason, he trusted me.  

And then I scurried off, back to my glass-walled cubicle.

It was 5:00, and I was sitting in my car, about to drive out of the parking lot to go home.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blonde head emerging from the exit, carrying a box of belongings.

It was Connie.

I slumped down in the seat of my car.

I watched her as she trundled out, emotionless, as if she had been expecting it all along.

I think I called my mentor, Carlene, that night, and told her what I'd seen.  Carlene had been the only supervisor besides me who had been threatened by Connie with the loss of her job.  We were quizzical.  We weren't celebrating or high-fiving.  We just didn't get it.

The next day, Connie's office was dark.  Connie wasn't coming back.

Dave called all the supes together into the conference room to announce that Connie was gone.

Dave held my gaze for a good long time as he was sharing the news.

He never explained it, nor should he have.  One doesn't do that.

But, damn!  I felt fine!

Sometimes you find a good guy in your professional life.  Dave was a good guy.  And he, for whatever reason, liked me, or saw something in me.

I had not heard the last from Dave.


To be continued............ 




My "Career" ~ Part 4 ~ Phil

My "Career" ~ Part 5 ~ Welcome to the I-Land

My "Career" ~ Part 6 ~ "Who Do You Think You Are?"

My "Career" ~ Part 7 ~ Another New Boss?

My "Career" ~ Part  8 ~ "Everything's Great!"

My "Career" ~ Part 9 ~ A Cold Wind

My "Career" ~ Part 10 ~  Thank You ~ Goodbye

My "Career" ~ Part 11 ~ Breaking the News

My "Career" ~ Part 12 ~ Loose Ends

My "Career" ~ Epilogue



Previous Chapters:

My "Career" ~ Part 2 ~ Evil Bosses

My "Career" ~ Chapter 1





























Tuesday, May 8, 2012

My "Career"

(Yes, I had a career impersonating Meryl Streep.)

I suppose all the upper-middle class gals in 1973 took it for granted that they would be going to college.  That wasn't the world I lived in.

I fleetingly considered enrolling in community college, as a journalism major, but I was semi-serious at best.  The people I hung around with didn't go to college.  We got married and worked as office clerks.

In high school during the dark ages in which I lived, there were three course majors one could choose:  general, something a step above "general", of which I don't remember the term, and college prep. I initially enrolled in the college prep program, and stuck that out for a couple of years, agonizing through algebra and geometry, and (gasp) science.  But things were only going to go from bad to worse in my junior year, at which time I would have to take chemistry and physics, and I thought, no. 

I excelled at the subjects I liked:  English, history, languages.  I sucked at math, and still do (thank God for calculators....and my ten fingers).  I hated science, and detested dissecting things.  I didn't really care about the chemical makeup of a leaf, although leaves are pretty, and I like to take pictures of them.  And therein lies the rub.  I have my head in the clouds, and not buried in the pages of a chemistry book.

So, I didn't go to college.  I got a job.  As an office clerk.  And then I got married.

I've written about most of my jobs in previous posts, and most of them in actuality (not all of them!), I enjoyed to one degree or another.

When I had the opportunity to work in the health insurance field (for $6.25 an hour!), I was just trying to get out of a bad situation, and I figured, well, it's another office job.  I've certainly done those!

Turned out, there were things one actually had to learn to be a claims examiner.  Technical terms and procedures.  My only leg up on the other 36 people who started with me was that I knew medical terminology from working on the medical floor of a hospital for eight years (and really, that's what got me the job.  I found out later that somebody else's references hadn't checked out, so they hired me.  I was the last hire, and I was a replacement.  Ahh, the ego boost!)

We started work on the vacant third floor of a bank building, because the company had made a commitment to open a branch in our town, but didn't actually have a building yet.  So, we all worked side by side, row by row, in that stuffy room for three months, being trained by impatient, less-than-tactful trainers from Philadelphia, who took every opportunity to denigrate the less-than-stellar recreational choices in our little town.  Bite me.

At some point during the training, the three supervisors, who had been hired in advance of the rest of us, announced that they would be promoting two more people to supervisor, and three people to assistant supervisor.  I applied, of course, for one of the assistant supervisor positions (I was no fool).

I didn't get it.

All five people chosen had insurance experience.  Because, you know, that's the only qualification needed to supervise.  But those in a position to hire can be stupid, and not to generalize, but they usually are.

Eventually, the spanking new building was ready for occupancy, so we all drove our cars down the winding parking garage exit for the last time, and at last moved to our permanent location.  I settled into my own little cubicle, put my head down, and did my work.

At some point, one of the original supervisors, Connie, got an undeserved promotion, to assistant manager, so that created an opening for a new supervisor, and thus a new assistant supervisor.  My quality and production were such that, now, when I again applied for the assistant supervisor position, I got it. 

My duties were to process claims (still) and to go around every day, from person to person, and sit with them to answer their questions.  Oh, and to do some kind of needless paperwork whenever the supervisor had the day off.

And the business kept expanding.  More processing units were added, creating more available supervisor positions.  Thus, having my foot in the door, so to speak, I got to be one (not a foot; a supervisor).

I had, I guess you would say, a novel approach to supervising.  I tended to motivate people; to train people; to believe in people; to give them the opportunity to live up to the expectations I had for them.  And I tended to want to have fun while doing all that.

Perfection?  Ahhh, yes, that was me.  Especially the wintery day when my mentor, Carlene, and I stepped outside to have a smoke.  It was frigidly cold that November day, so I said, "C'mon!  Let's sit in my car!  It'll be much more comfortable!" 

"You know," I said to Carlene as we were sitting there in the front seat, engulfed in a blanket of white,  "Maybe I should brush off the windows, so we can see out."

"My snow brush, of course, is in the trunk, but let me just go grab it and do a quick dust-off."

So, I switched off the ignition, grabbed the key, and ventured out to retrieve my trusty snow brush.  Since it was early November, I hadn't yet transferred my brush to the back seat, where it would be within easy reach for any snow-related emergency.

In fact, my snow brush was so far forward in the trunk, I, at five foot two inches, couldn't quite reach it.  I had to climb into the trunk to be able to grasp it.

And that's when the jolly Dakota wind decided to make its appearance.

Slam! 

Darkness overtook me. 

I lay there for a moment, prostate and stunned.  And then I just started laughing.  "It's kind of cozy in here," I remarked to, obviously, myself.

Feeling my way, eventually, I pushed up upon the inside of the trunk door, and, prayerfully, discovered that it wasn't actually latched; just closed.  I climbed out, sauntered back to the driver's side door (to hell with cleaning off the windshield!), climbed in, and casually mentioned to Carlene, "I was trapped inside the trunk!"  Her response?  "I wondered why you were gone so long."

We made a pact that we would never mention this incident to anyone.  That pact lasted, oh, two minutes at the most.  Once back inside, Carlene whispered it to her assistant, who then initiated the whole call train, passing it along to an examiner in her unit, who passed it along to the next examiner, and the next, and inevitably it made its way to the people in my unit.

I was gratified, at least, to be able to provide my "number one of all-time" assistant and good friend, Peg, with something to mercilessly tease me about for the next eight to nine years of our lives. 

Flash forward to the third week of December.  The unit got together and bought Christmas gifts for me and for Peg.  When my turn came, I stood in front of the unit and opened each gift, as everyone gathered in a bunch before me.  I opened two gifts, and they were both lovely.  I felt humbled and embarrassed that they had spent money on me. 

The third gift was oddly-shaped, so I was eying it warily all the while.  My group imperceptibly inched forward as I reached for the package.  I tore open the wrapping, and pulled out.......a long, flat object, that looked to be a paint stirrer.  Up one side of the stick, someone had lovingly etched in red, "TRUNK PROP". 

My folks, one by one, began to keel over in fits of mirth.  I looked at Peg, and she looked at me, knowingly.  She had been the main instigator, of course.  I cried so many tears of laughter that I could no longer focus my eyes. 

The laughter of 16 people spilled over the walls of our unit, sprinkling the corridors of Acme, drawing curious onlookers.

See, my people liked me.  They thanked me.  They respected me.  They made hilarious fun of me.

They gave me a trunk prop.

And all that, combined, got me into a whole shitload of trouble.


To be continued........


My "Career" ~ Part 2 ~ Evil Bosses

My "Career" ~ Part 3 ~ Karma

My "Career" ~ Part 4 ~ Phil

My "Career" ~ Part 5 ~ Welcome to the I-Land

My "Career" ~ Part 6 ~ "Who Do You Think You Are?"

My "Career" ~ Part 7 ~ Another New Boss?

My "Career" ~ Part  8 ~ "Everything's Great!"

My "Career" ~ Part 9 ~ A Cold Wind

My "Career" ~ Part 10 ~ Thank You ~ Goodbye

My "Career" ~ Part 11 ~  Breaking the News

My "Career" ~ Part 12 ~ Loose Ends 

My "Career" ~ Epilogue