The Museum of Lost Work Skills

The other day at work, I found myself pulling Post-it flags off of a big stack of papers and sticking them neatly back on the dispenser. This is an embarrassingly frugal bit of busywork that I do from time to time, both to save my employer money and to give my mind a rest when I’m particularly busy.

As I sorted the green flags from the yellow ones, a memory flashed through my mind: At my first job, back in 1979, I used to sort paper clips—a lot of them. I was 17, working as a receptionist for a magazine publisher. And when I was bored out of my mind, which was often, I would open my top drawer, pull out the week’s accumulation of paper clips, and sort the big ones from the small ones and put them in separate little bins. Thinking of this the other day, I had to laugh—I mean, there were times at that first job when I genuinely had nothing to do. This never happens now; even when I’m sorting Post-it flags, it’s just a pit stop in the middle of a racing workday. And that got me thinking about other things I did at that job back in 1979 that I never do anymore. Such as…

Typing mailing labels

I must have typed a million labels back then—truckloads, busloads, shitloads of them. The company was forever sending out sales letters, so day after day I’d sit there with mimeographed lists of addresses propped up next to my IBM Selectric typewriter. I’d set an accordioned ream of blank labels behind the typewriter, thread the top end of the strip into the platen, and type labels for hours, mindlessly copying names and addresses—probably full of errors, since I was a crappy typist. To this day, I can still remember the abbreviation for every state in the union; I know Alaska from Alabama, and Missouri from Mississippi*.

Telexing

This was one of the more glamorous parts of the job. A telex was a clattery, heavy machine that, through some technology that I still don’t understand, sent typed messages over the phone system—a sort of distant, overweight cousin to the fax machine. The telex machine stood on its own steel pedestal in a corner of the office far away from people’s desks, presumably because the vibration of the thing could knock your coffee cup across the room. The beauty of it was that it transmitted messages overseas instantly—a revolutionary concept at the time, much faster than mailing a letter and much more convenient than trying to phone people in Europe or Asia in the middle of the night. We had a lot of overseas customers, and I got handy at typing messages into the stiff keyboard and calling up telex numbers on the big rotary dial. I made some unusual penpals this way, foreign businessmen whose missives I would find printed out on the big roll of paper when I arrived in the morning. At a trade show I later met one of them, a charming Englishman who thanked me for all the helped I’d given him by presenting me with a bottle of my favorite perfume, White Shoulders (hey, I was a teenager). Another regular telex pal was a guy who worked for the government of a Middle Eastern nation**. I also got to meet him in person once, when he made a business trip to the U.S. It turned out that we were about the same age—a surprise to both of us—so we had dinner and went to a disco. It was fun. He was tall, wore a strong cologne, and had a great accent.

Using a postage machine

To mail all those letters that I’d typed labels for, I had to go into the back room and use the gigantic mailing machine—a Rube Goldberg contraption about the size of a refrigerator laid on its side***. It was festooned with belts and pulleys that hurtled your envelopes though a chamber, where it stamped the postage in red ink and shot them out the other side. But all those belts and pulleys turned out to be an OSHA nightmare: One day when I was posting a big stack of letters, I leaned over the machine to reach for something. Before I realized what was happening, a thick strand of my hair—waist-length, blond—got caught in one of the belts, disappeared down into the running machine, and began pulling my head in, closer and closer to the maw of the mangling gears. Finally, somebody had the presence of mind to pull the plug out of the wall and the whole thing stopped. But then I was trapped there, bent over with my head a couple of inches from the machine, until we figured out how to disentangle me. One co-worker gleefully grabbed a pair of scissors, but we held her off long enough to get the cover off the thing and loosen some of the belts, backing my hair out of there an inch at a time. It was all a good laugh; it wasn’t until much later that I learned that people used to lose their fingers, limbs, and lives all the time in industrial accidents just like that.

*AK, AL, MO, and MS, respectively. This is one of those vanishing skills, like long division and sock-darning, that only come in handy once in about 10 blue moons.

**My company published two magazines about aviation and the defense industry, and we ran a trade show. Our advertisers and exhibitors were everybody from major defense contractors to people who paved runways to government employees who bought Lear jets as gifts for dignitaries.

***One of my fondest memories of that job was taking the brain of the machine—the postage meter, a heavy control panel about the size of a lunch box—to the post office every couple of weeks to replenish its postage. I’d box up the meter in its protective plastic case and haul it down there, along with a check, and wait in line. Then a postal clerk would open the meter using wire cutters and a special set of screwdrivers and would reset the little dials inside. Then she would lock it up again using some steel wire and a lead slug that she’d squeeze with a tool that looked like a gigantic hole punch, pressing it into a seal with the U.S. Post Office emblem. It was almost always the same clerk, a Hispanic woman who had fantastically muscled forearms.

Personal Belongings That I Brought Home from Work After I Quit My Job Two Weeks Ago

Sis-Q Rollerz roller derby button

Oakland A’s button

Ugly avocado-green tape dispenser that I bought in 1981 so people would stop stealing tape dispensers off my desk

Nolan Ryan action figure

Page-Up paper holder with fake goldfish inside

8-ball keychain

Vegemite coffee mug

My grandmother’s brass letter opener with Pisces fishes on the handle

2 houseplants

6 notebooks detailing everything that happened in my last two jobs since May 2005

Post-It with the phone number of a man I like

Rusty railroad spike

Voodoo doll

Mechanical pencil

Glass jar for mixing protein shakes, with Italian sticker on it so people wouldn’t throw it in the recycling bin

Jar of Zinke Orchards almond butter

Jar of almonds

Button that says “Screw the e-book”

Button that says “Pet a Yorkipoo”

Bag of Stress Less herbs

Can of WD-40

Wonder Woman stamp

Take This Job and Gently Put It Somewhere

 Oh, how I wanted to be Jerry Maguire. How I wanted to put a goldfish in a bag, tell the boss to shove it, right in front of the whole staff, and spirit myself and that innocent fish out of there into the open air. But of course Jerry Maguire didn’t quit; he was fired. And of course I wouldn’t put a goldfish in a bag unless it was in imminent danger.

But still, there were so many times, on so many jobs, when I wanted to make a scene and storm out the door. I wanted to shout “I quit!” and throw a sheaf of papers on the floor. Or buzz into the intercom system and sing, We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when… and walk away, all hips and swagger, giving the finger to the building on the way out.

Oh, how it has not gone like that.

I’ve quit a lot of jobs in my life, and not once have I made a scene. It’s not that I wasn’t tempted: The boss who patted my butt and tried to French-kiss me in the mailroom certainly deserved it. And the über-Christian co-workers who grumbled when I dared not to read the Bible in the lunchroom were good candidates. And as for the crazy-making, exasperating managers—I’ve worked for more than my share of those. But in spite of all that, when it came time to quit, I just couldn’t make the big exit. Instead, my quitting usually amounted to a short meeting with some paperwork exchanged, or a strained phone call with me telling my nit-picky, overbearing boss that it had been a pleasure working for her, and I’d send her a Christmas card. (I did.) In my dreams, I’m a bad-ass. But face to face—well, my mother would be proud. Good manners trump drama every time.

Except for once…almost. It was my dream job—I’d landed a gig as the manager of a riding stable, handling a small fleet of horses, teaching lessons, and greeting customers from a window cut into a very rustic tack room. There was no electricity, no running water…and, most of the time, nobody working there but me. This last bit turned out to be a problem. The owners were a young couple who fought a lot, and when they were mad at each other, they went their separate ways—often for days at a time. So, again and again, I found myself having to run the stable alone, with customers streaming in all day, and horses to be watered and rested and re-tacked, and the phone ringing, and the cash box never coming out right. It was a gigantic juggling act, way too much work for one person. And the pay was terrible.

So I started rehearsing a little talk I was going to have with the owners about this. And one day, it was the right time to do it: I won’t go into the story now—suffice it to say that my day featured a rampaging pit bull, an injured child, and a hungry chicken, and it still ranks as my Worst Day Ever, on Any Job. And when the wife-owner returned late that afternoon, mellow and dreamy after a day of hiking or shopping or whatever the hell she’d been doing all day, I was ready to shoot off like a Roman candle, and that entire speech that I’d been rehearsing flew out of my mouth at about 200 miles an hour, right in her face. I think I may have actually spat on her a little. I ended my tirade by saying that the job was not what I’d signed up for, and I didn’t even like it anymore. That last part came as a surprise even to me.

The effect wasn’t what I expected. In my rage-addled brain, I thought she’d be chagrined, that she’d admit she’d been a bad boss and had made a terrible mistake. Maybe she’d give me flowers or something; certainly a raise. But, to my surprise, her face darkened and she hissed, “If that’s the way you feel, how about if we make today your last day?” Bewildered, I said, “Fine.” She peeled a few bills out of the cashbox and handed them to me as my last day’s pay. Then we busied ourselves with putting away the tack and letting the horses out to their pasture, all in silence. Eventually, her husband arrived, and he was solicitous and kind, as he often was. Then the wife explained to him, with a fake cheery smile, that I’d decided to move on. “Gosh,” he said, “that’s too bad. Well, let’s have a drink.” Then, to my amazement, he whipped up a batch of margaritas in the RV that sat next to the tack room, and the three of us sat down in patio chairs in the dusty canyon and drank to each other’s health. We had a long, slow talk about nothing in particular. It was nice. I was reminded that I liked these people. And I felt bad about the yelling. But the die was cast, and it would have been awkward to change my mind just then. And I got the sneaking feeling that it wasn’t the first time they’d done this—that people had quit suddenly on them before, and they knew the drill.

So that was my sort-of big scene. The music didn’t swell; the crowd didn’t cheer. I drove home and tugged off my boots and took a long, hot bath. I didn’t regret quitting—I knew they’d taken advantage of me, and I was proud that I’d spoken my mind. It just wasn’t a Hollywood ending; it was…complicated. Later, I found another job that, like that one, was not simple and was not perfect. And since then, I’ve found that they’re all like that, to one degree or another—even the best ones, the ones I kept for a long time. And even in the worst ones, I still remember the look on my boss’ face when I reamed her out. And more than anything, I remember those margaritas, that quiet talk with two other human beings while the sun set over the canyon.