It was twenty years ago and I had one summer left before I would be gallavanting off to a SUNY campus to continue with my college education. I was twenty-one years old and thanks to a two year stint that I lovingly refer to as my period of WHAT THE HELL? I was a little late with my higher learning.
My days as Assistant Manager of Shed House were over and while I contemplated another ride on the retail express with all of its perks like minimum wage, $0.15 raises, working nights and weekends, no health benefits and two week notice of sick days, I ultimately decided against it. I wanted to make good money during daylight hours at a grown up job. I signed up with an employment agency and spent a couple of hours interviewing with them and completing their applications and questionaires.
.
Do you smoke? No.
Do you drink? Define “drink”
Can you type? No.
How many words? None.
Can you work on a computer? No.
Do you know shorthand? No.
Can you operate a multi-line phone? No, but I’m very good at talking on the phone for hours. Does that count?
Can you operate a fax machine? What’s a fax?
Have you ever done transcription? Not on purpose.
Do you have any skills whatsoever? No.
What kind of work are you looking for? Anything where I can earn a lot of money in a short period of time.
What is your strongest attribute? I look smokin’ hot in a mini skirt.
.
In less than a week, the agency called me and surprisingly enough, did not place me in a strip club but instead, found me a position as a secretary in the front office of a machine tool and die company. When I asked my placement counselor whether my lack of experience in typing and stenography and dictation and computers and all things office related would affect my employment, she had a coughing fit, told me she had another call waiting, wished me luck, hung up on me and I never heard from her again.
I was nervous. I had never worked in an office before and had no idea what to expect. I tried to dress conservatively, which meant I wore a skirt that did not go up all the way up to my thigh, I only unbuttoned the top two buttons on my blouse and my high heels were three and a half inches instead of four.
In my defense, I was young and stupid and had taken full advantage of my mall employee discount at Lerner’s and G&G when buying my wardrobe. And it was the eighties. And did I mention I was young and stupid?
Anyhoo … I got lost on the way there and my nerves were shot to the point that I wanted to throw up by the time I stopped at a Friendly’s to call them and clarify directions. The woman with whom I spoke was very nice and told me not to worry, everyone got lost their first time driving there. She was laughing and so friendly that I decided to put off throwing up until at least lunchtime.
When I finally arrived at the building, I walked into the lobby and tapped on the window of the front office. I saw two women sitting at desks and they both looked up at my arrival.
Kathy greeted me with a smile and I knew immediately it had been she who had been so nice to me on the phone. She was a gregarious, bubbly, married woman in her forties who took me under her wing right away. She was known as “Mom” to everyone who worked there.
Kathy and I clicked.
Joan was known as Grotesque Resentful Bag Lady Who Smelled Like Stink and Ate Small Animals When No One Was Looking. She was in her fifties, single, obese, homely and an all around bitch who took one look at me and wasted no time in calling the agency and loudly demanding my replacement immediately as in NOW. She didn’t even know I couldn’t type yet. When she found that out, she about had a seizure. When I asked her how to turn the computer on, she sucked in her breath so hard she swallowed her tongue. When I asked how to put someone on hold, the veins in her forehead exploded and for the rest of the day, I had to avert my eyes to the blood running down her face.
Joan and I didn’t click.
Kathy led me back to the shop to meet “the guys” and I can sum up my experience of meeting one hundred young, sweaty, good looking blue collar workers that day in two words. EGO BOOST.
I have to say, I enjoyed working there, even if it meant I had to deal with Joan and her ugly personality and ugly toes that stuck out of her ugly size 12 orthopeadic shoes. I had always lacked self-confidence and while my days working at Cavages Record Store and then at Shed House had boosted my self-esteem when I was younger, I was now coming off of a two year detour in my life in which any inkling of self-confidence I had ever had had been stomped on and ripped to shreds. But that summer I blossomed into a twenty-one year old knock out which opened up a whole new world of possibilities and I was working in a place where testosterone literally seeped out of the walls and ran amuck and my estrogen was more than willing to jump right into that muck and see what was up.
The door from the front office to the machine shop turned into a turnstile as one by one, workers found some excuse to stop by, whether it was to copy a blueprint, fax a part order or stand at the front window beside my desk because he could have sworn he saw some vagrant hanging out by his car so he better just stand there and keep watch for awhile to make sure nothing happened to it and by the way, what was I doing that night?
It would drive Joan crazy. Just batshit crazy. And that made Kathy very happy.
Kathy and Joan didn’t click.
And because I was born with not only a gene that caused me to inflict all sorts of mental and emotional anguish upon myself, but also a birthmark on my forehead that said “Attention losers, line up here” I didn’t date the nice guys. No, that would have made life easy. I never did easy. I always looked for the quickest way to make my life excrutiatingly hard. So I dated Asshole and his brother, Jerkoff and his other brother, Dickweed. And Kathy would just sigh and steer Perfect Catch in my direction and I’d bypass him and jump into Douchebag’s car. And Kathy would shake her head and I would moan “I know! I know! I’m such a moron” right before I walked out the door with Waste of Air.
And Joan would just sit in her corner and molt and watch her feet grow and gnaw her fingers and every so often she’d call the agency with her bloody stumps and demand to know when my replacement was coming.
Believe it or not, in my spare time I actually became good at my job. I was a quick learner and because I also had the gene that caused me to be a perfectionist that moonlighted as an overachiever, I did my job carefully and I did it well and once I mastered one task, I moved onto another. I did so well that the owner asked me to stay on and as tempted as I was to keep earning money and dating good-looking scum, I declined. I wanted to go to college – I wanted to learn stuff and live on my own and have the opportunity to date collegiate scum for awhile and see how they measured up.
So I only worked there for that one summer and during that time, I broke a computer, an adding machine and a couple of toner cartridges. I learned how to work a fax machine, how to compile and enter data, how to prepare invoices, how payroll worked and how to sound like a sexy 1-800-ALL-PORN operator on the intercom when announcing the arrival of the lunch van.
Hey, Joan? You know that “little hussy” you treated like shit? The one you thought was too stupid to answer a phone, the one you constantly berated and insulted and patronized until she cried, the one you knew perfectly well was within earshot when you declared to the room that she would be pregnant and on welfare inside of two months? She went off to college and wound up with a 4.0 GPA and graduated Summa Cum Laude and become a responsible and productive member of society before marrying and producing two little future responsible and productive members of society.
And she learned how to type.
28 thoughts on “Another pit stop on the employment highway …”
Another great story!
When I first moved out to the great state of PA, the first job I found was in the office of a blue collar factory. And I remember that ego boost of going back to the shop! You described it pretty darn well!
wow did that really happen? I gotta learn some tips from you then! I will be finishing my course and looking for a job soon, so I better remember this for the interview 🙂
Great story, loved reading it!
Hilarious! Sounds like a number of similar experiences I had.
There would always be some festering woman in the corner with her blouse too tight and feet swelling well beyond the capacity of her shoes who would snarl each time I’d walk by -I’d usually swing wide around her desk, treating her like the rabid dog on the short chain that I did.
I had the body but didn’t know how to use it, but I guess the blue collar dolts didn’t care. I did, however, almost cause a 2-car collision by bending over in a skirt (couldn’t use my knees because I was reaching into my car) -does that count?
Oh, and I can definitely type.
oh my goodness this is funny… Wow u remember everything w/such clarity 🙂
Maggie
http://mphoinix.blogspot.com
That is fabulous. I think you should invite Joan onto one of those talk shows, you know the kind that do the whole “look at me now sucka” shows! LOL
This is doubly funny to me, because I worked as a secretary in a mechanical construction company, so I know exACTly what the guys are like, the good and the bad women (my bad one was of course my co-worker the receptionist, who had been angling for my job). I did kind of the opposite of you, which is to say that this was a job of last resort after I left teaching at the university level and moved the the West Coast and found out that nobody speaks French here; I was a fabulous typist, but I’d never answered a phone, I suck at math (difficult when you have to work with a bunch of engineer estimators), and the only time I’d ever heard of a business was when I went inside of one to buy something… Awesome re-creation, Andy!
This is an awesome story! I love the way you describe Joan. LOL Too funny! Congrats on your accomplishments. 😉
Hey, I dated Dickweed too!
OMG…this had me ROTFLMAO. You have wonderfully descriptive writing style! 🙂
Loved your story! Congrats on getting it all together. Growing up sure is hard, huh?
I dated all those losers too, plus I worked many a shitty job where I was treated like dirt by some miserable person whose only joy in life was frying ants under a looking glass.
You go girl!
And THAT is what they call “Suck on that” or my personal favorite – “Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Joan!”
This has given me the best laugh I have had in a while. And by the way – you are a great writer. So very clever.
Debbie
click, click, clicking away!
What a story!
rofl! I think we all know a Joan!
And now look what you can create with a computer… 🙂
Amazingly enough, I was born with that same birthmark on my forehead! Were we twins separated at birth?
And a resounding wave of :You tell ’em sista: was heard coast to coast after reading this blog entry. 🙂
I think I worked in this shop office. The only difference was I didn’t wear the miniskirts and all the buttons were done on my blouse except the top one, and my boss still talked to my chest. I lasted there 2 weeks because it was either quit or poke his eyes out.
Oh man. I can so relate. Joan is common in almost every workplace and schoolplace and all over the place. She might not be named Joan, but she’s everywhere. Joan Joan Joan. What will we do with you?
And the dating of the not nice guys? Are we not all guilty of that at some point? It reminds me that I should probably put one of my better stories in my Shot Through the Heart column. I’ve been thinking about it and I might just call it “Dumb”.
Thanks so much for the laugh, Andrea 🙂
This is quite funny. Sounds like you and Kathy gave Joan a run for her money at work…I absolutely love it. Can’t say I was ever in that situation, but I definitely see part of me in that story.
I found you thru dysfunctionalmom…I really like your blog!
Great Stories!
Have a wonderful day!
~K
ah, i think every office has to have a joan. and i’m giving her the bird right along with you! 🙂
That Joan, I’ve met her somewhen over the years. Perhaps from when I was small furry rodent delivery officer for my area.
Thanks for visiting Trash Towers today.
I loved your story. I’m going to print it and hand it to my 24-year-old granddaughter. She can type (sort of), she can use a computer (sort of), she knows how to answer a phone (sort of), and there’s always someone at every job that she just can’t stand. She’s looking for a new job and she wants to be paid a LOT OF MONEY, and she persists in dating Dickweed, Jerkoff, and all the other scuzzy brothers. Maybe she can learn from your experience — but I’m not holding my breath.
Thanks for the entertainment!!! Lovely writing it really drew me in and kept my attention the whole time.
Wish I had fun stories like that!