The problem with teaching

The last piece about the newspaper that canned me, long ago, was a rock in a pool of collective memories. The ripples touched on hard times, hard work, pride in our own ability or that of friends and siblings.  I had an awful time keeping it in my plus or minus five hundred words a post range, probably because of the facts that Mark Twain lets me leave out of a good story.  

My life has been the tale of getting into, through and out, one chapter at a time. Some ironic, some ending with sincere gratitude for having a page to turn, and some with sincere appreciation for being helped along.

The last fifty years of seven plus decades are the result of the chapter called “How your father and I came to be married.” It’s the ironic chapter, the foundation of the rest of my life. The writing needs some thought.

I left off the last post earning a master’s degree in American Literature and nailing my dream job, teaching freshman English at our community college.  I didn’t intend to carry on from there, but it’s an interesting story, so, editing by Mark Twain, here it is.

The teaching gig was night classes; a hopeful start at low pay. I kept my day job. There remained a scarcity of money, so I added a weekend job, cashiering at the local drug store. My husband was immersed in getting his sales career up and running, but he was available to watch the girls while I was teaching and on weekends.

And so things went on for two years. I know it was two years because I just made a time line. Funny how some things come together as one. Way over in Washington D.C., Congress was not funding liberal arts budget items. All over America PhD professors were out of work at universities and flooding the bottom of academia, community colleges. My contract was not renewed.

Back at my day job, I took a phone call from a collection agency threatening to garnishee my wages. After supper that night my husband went off to sell insurance, as he did almost every night. I put the girls to bed, and began going through the bill desk.  I was unfamiliar with its contents; my husband handled that end of our partnership. You can guess the reason.

Everything was months behind. There were credit card bills in my name; there was a loan in our names that I found had my name forged. I made a tidy list and hired a lawyer. The next time our paths crossed, after the children were in bed, I told him I had filed for divorce. His reaction: “You sure know how to hit a fellow when he’s down.”

Thanks to Mark Twain I can exclude the anguish, how awful divorce is for children, and skip to the part where I realized my day job would not pay the bills. I opened the newspaper to the want ads and looked for a profession that earned decent money. I found it, midway down the first column. Accountant!

Back to school again for a degree, Bachelor of Science Accounting. And I had just paid off my masters’ loan! 

To tidy the loose ends, my husband married my best friend and lived happily ever after. Sadly, for him, and for the girls, ever after ended a few years later; he died aged 44 of a massive heart attack. He was his wife's second husband, and she buried him in a single grave, for the reason, she explained to his parents, at graveside, she expected to remarry.  Love those little tidbits.

The end. I believe I’m off the nostalgia train for the time being.

Delivering newspapers

Long ago, when I was married, our household finances continually collided with the truth that my husband was chronically underemployed, beginning the day he left his job as a purchasing agent to become self employed. No more desk jobs for him! 

Sadly, the idea of being self-sufficient came to him just as I left a good secretarial job to go back to school for a master’s degree. I did have a plan; with the degree I could begin teaching English at the local community college. He and I never were on the same wavelength, although I also have learned the definition of passive-aggressive. I didn't know those big words back in 1969.

I took my toddlers out of day care when I started back to school; I could arrange my schedule to accommodate them. My husband became a commissioned salesman of industrial equipment. But, he never sold enough in a month’s time to draw more than his base. Rather like servers today depending on tips, except he never earned commissions.

So, I looked around for a job that would accommodate my children, fit my school schedule, and put food on the table. I found one, delivering newspapers.

Way back then newspapers were delivered by paper boys and girls. They picked up the papers at an assigned place, removed the binding, packed the papers into their bags or their wagons, in the case of the little entrepreneurs with multiple routes, and delivered the papers to subscribers’ homes.

My job was to load all the News Herald bundles for about half of Painesville, Ohio, into my car, and with my two children in the passenger seat, take the bundles to their assigned corners after the papers were off the press and before the little paper deliverers came home from school.

The pay was not great, but the best I could come up with on short notice, and off we went. My route manager hired the paper kids, arranged for the homes the paper bundles went to. My last duty was to collect the cost of the papers weekly from the paper carrier.

Like my husband and his commissions, I failed at this part of the job. My route was the poorest side of town; I wonder if the customers even paid the kids. I collected from the parents; the children were in school.  A mother would tell me her child hadn't collected enough for the week to pay for the papers. Worse, tell me the money bought a gallon of milk.

I told my supervisor he could add collections to his job description. He told me to collect the money, or make the parents sign cognovit notes. I refused. He fired me.

In thinking back on it, I decided everyone should be fired from a newspaper job. Nice resume material. So, I found another secretarial job, put the girls back in day care, finished my masters degree at night, and then was hired to each English at our community college.

A job I had in 1969

Although my Social Security record showed employment every year of my life from age seventeen, some months of my working life I was unemployed.  Good reasons like pregnancies and babies; other reasons like layoffs, or telling them “take your job and ……”.   

Turning the help wanted pags one day during a period of unemployment I found a temporary job whose description seemed innocuous.  Delivering soap samples.  Several times a week I drove to the warehouse district of Cleveland and loaded cases of 144 one pound boxes of Tide detergent into my Dodge Charger.  What ignominy for such a great car.  Boxes of plastic bags and accompanying literature went in the front seat. 

At home I unloaded the cases, unloaded the boxes, put each in a plastic bag, along with the coupons and flyers, and stacked them densely in the Charger.  Then I took my trusty red and yellow Commercial Survey map book, turned to the neighborhood assigned for the next day and figured out my route.

In the morning I would arrive at my neighborhood, and park my car ten houses down the street.   I loaded up with soap samples.  The bags had holes for hanging over a doorknob, and I could get maybe fifteen or twenty on my fingers.  I started at the house by my car, worked my way up to the cross street, crossed and went down. Back at the car, I loaded up and repeated the process.  Then I moved the car where it had to be and started again.

Whatever company was in charge of this advertising campaign kept us honest.  There were “checkers” who drove the neighborhoods, looking for yellow boxes on front doors.  My neighborhoods passed every time.  I was offered a promotion to supervisor; I turned it down flat.

There are neighborhoods in Commercial Survey Company maps that do not exist except in city planners’ dreams.  Not to be caught flatfooted when the development might actually be built, the Commercial Survey Company and city planners, in cahoots, put them right in those books with no disclaimer.  This neighborhood soap deliverer was mighty unhappy to be deceived so.

Dogs often accompanied me as I delivered soap through neighborhoods.  I could not understand the attraction until a lovely lab adopted me for a morning.  He often nudged me turning up a sidewalk, but I didn’t understand him until he would physically block me.   Then I realized we were on his newspaper route, and that house was not a customer.

At the end of the job my clothes no longer fit; I probably was twenty pounds lighter.  An engineer at a subsequent job I took laughed at the tale of the job I had for a summer, and calculated I had walked I don’t remember how many hundreds of miles, carrying an average of ten pounds.  I wish I could recall how much we were paid per box.  That would be really amusing.

Wacky Pages

I was looking for a Tide box from 1969 and found the 1974 Wacky Packages Series.

Vermont weather stick and other signs of spring

You remember the weather stick I gave the road department.  It was just pitiful last December, when the road super reminded me it had rained since spring:

You will notice the weather stick reigned alone last December!

It’s been a perky fellow for a while now; so I took my camera to work today to take some pictures.  Here it is about nine in the morning.  Notice the skepticism of the road crew; they’ve added a beat up old thermometer to the mix, just to be sure of what they’re seeing.  It probably is about sixty degrees.

Noonish.  I’m about to go home.  The stick thinks it’s warm and sunny.  However, it’s not eighty degrees.

I went around the building to get the outdoor view.  I guess Vermont knows the weather.  It’s not a hundred degrees, I assure you.  I need to mention to the road crew that thing is ruining the view!

It’s such a beautiful day, here’s the town hall.  1887.  The remaining example of stick architecture in the Western Reserve.  I think the windows are sublime.

On the way home.  The golfers glared at me.  Lighten up.

I passed a bicycle.  The road will be packed with them later in the afternoon.

Daffodils starting up in the field.

A volunteer crocus.  Some squirrel forgot.

Daffodils in the woods.  Another squirrel forgot.

Where’s Betty

I worked for a couple of years at a small manufacturing company.  I was secretary to a vice president for a while, then moved out to the front reception area where I typed invoices and answered all the phones, as well as the previous secretarial duties.  All that occurred because there was an ownership battle going on, but way down the line we just did our job and got our paycheck.

It was the job where I met my best friend, Carol.  She was a temp, so concerned about arriving on time that she arrived an hour early the first day.  She walked around the building, wound up at the shop door and the foreman brought her through to wait in the lobby, where I found her when I unlocked the front door.  The shop foreman was so impressed by Carol’s work ethic he went to the president (it was a small company and a long time ago) and said Carol was the kind of person the company needed; she should be hired.  And, she was.

Working in the reception area in the front lobby I got to know Betty the woman who handled personnel and was the purchasing agent. Her office opened onto the lobby. She was much older than I; a motherly kind of woman.  I always was up for fun at a job, and Betty was plenty of that.  One time all the men had gone out for lunch, the president driving.  They weren’t gone long when a bad storm threatened.  In those days most cars weren’t air conditioned, and all windows in the parking lot were down, against the hot summer day.

Betty came into the lobby hollering for those of us left to help her roll up car windows, which we did, moments before the big storm broke and poured cats and dogs.   When it passed Betty took us all out again to wind down the men’s windows.  When they returned from lunch and checked their car interiors, they were puzzled.  They asked.  We all denied closing their windows against the storm.  That was fun.  But it was Betty at her mildest.

One day one of the men came down the hall, whistling.  He had a hand full of papers and stuck his head in Betty’s door to tell her something.  Popped his head back out and asked me “Where’s Betty?”

“I don’t know.  I didn’t see her leave.”

“Well, tell her I’m looking for her.”  He went back to his office.

Half an hour later, Betty called to me from her office to come in for something.  I went in and was curious; I hadn’t seen her return.  “Oh, I was here all along.  I didn’t want to talk to him so I hid under the desk.”

 Picture

It’s been raining since spring

I was cleaning drawers a year or so ago (and not since!) and found a Vermont Weather Stick I hadn’t given away or put up.  I took it to work and gave it to the road guys.  The road super was skeptical, the assistant cynical.  “When it rains, the stick is wet.  When the sun shines, the stick is dry.  Ha Ha.  We get it.”  I had to nag them to hang it up, but eventually the super went out the door, around the corner, and nailed it to the window frame.

The weather stick is real science, but you have to take your choice among several theories.  My favorite is the balsam fir adapts to climate, drawing in when conditions are dry and reaching out for moisture when it’s wet, producing a layer of cells that do just that.  The best part of this theory is we hang them upside down so the stick points up in dry weather and curls down in wet.

I looked out the road garage window this morning at the stick, drooping, drips falling from its tip.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  “Poor thing,” I said.  “It’s hung down for weeks.”  “Actually,” said the super, “It’s been raining since spring.”

And it has.  I drive by a loop of the Cuyahoga River going to work every day.  It’s not a violent river down in the meadows, plenty of flood plane for the water.  One peninsula near the road provides good shelter at the tip and unless the water is out of control I often see ducks breasting the current, looking quite content.  Today the water is over the banks, spreading out in the meadow.  The mallards don’t have to hop to the top of the bank, they just  stand up. And, as someone else observed today, it could have been a foot of snow.

7 things

Susan Kane at thecontemplativecat tagged me for a Sassy Blogger award, wherein I reveal seven things and tag seven more bloggers. 

 First, my definition of “sassy.”  I don’t quite like the word; it’s what my dad called my youngest daughter.  Dad was too old and too frail to have a deal of patience with a too independent minded three year old and their relationship is my first thought about the word.  Currently it means lively and bold, as well as impudent.  It’s a “cool” word, but I don’t see it that way.

When I was very young I was much like my youngest daughter with the bond hair.  Mom said I told the wind not to blow in my face. 

When I was less than kindergarten age I used my dad’s mechanical pencil to cut an O and an X into the headboard of my brother’s bed, which was in the same room as mine, and identical.  Dad asked who did it.  “Walt,” I said.  Dad said my brother couldn’t read or write, so explain how he did it.  That was an epiphany; I learned O and X were writing and I put together they spelled ox.

I don’t cook.  I did enough back when I had to, but was mediocre.  Then my sister taught my girls to cook and it was their regular job to have supper made.  When I am asked to provide a family recipe for a new bride this is what I write in their book:  Bread Sandwich.  One piece of bread.  Fold in half.  Eat.

When I was the controller of a subsidiary, etc., at one annual review I told my boss it was time I earned $40,000 a year, still less than a male manager in the company.  He agreed, and gave the increase to the payroll clerk.  She came in the next day and said the monthly salary he indicated worked out to $39,999.99 annually.  When I asked he said he just couldn’t bring himself to pay a woman $40,000.  I turned on my heel and walked away.  He came in my office and put a penny on my desk.  It was still there when I left, several years later.

Once my sister told me she never doubted we would succeed at our weaving business because I got out of bed every morning and went to work like it was as good and important a job as any I ever had.  I count that as the best compliment I’ve ever received.

I can’t imagine not working or having something to do.  I’m thankful I’m able. 

That’s seven.  I won’t tag seven.  If you read this blog, and write a blog, and are sassy, feel free to cut and paste the medallion and write seven things about yourself.

Reaching way back

I spent almost twenty five years in corporate America.  When I left I was the controller of a subsidiary of a division of a very large corporation.  My company was chewed up and spit out by the very large corporation.  In classic “what goes around comes around,” that very large corporation was chewed up and spit out by an international conglomerate.  The brand remains, the corporate identity doesn’t. I rather enjoyed the very public annihilation of the corporation spit out by the conglomerate.  Sadly, the original little company was the leading edge of the takeover game and not even a footnote in the current “too big to fail” scene.

When I was the young whippersnapper, I worked in companies that valued employees, and for people who mentored those of us coming up.  Looking back to fifty years ago, I was not naive, as some cynics have suggested, or working in some Shangri La, or too friendly with the boss.  The president of my company actually earned fifteen times as much as a new hire on the line.  When a new plant was required and built, the factory was air conditioned.  Major decisions involved doing the right thing.  We really asked that question in meetings, and meant for our company, for its employees.

We built a cutting edge product and sold one important component of it to other manufacturers. This led to us being purchased the first time by a company that wanted to develop that component further.  Although we were the smaller fish in the bigger pond, our contribution was important.  But the company who bought us had something an even bigger company wanted, and there was another purchase.  The story is up to the mid eighties by now, and take over’s were becoming common.  These buyers spun-off those unnecessary bits that once provided jobs and products, but were not structured to stand alone. 

So, the tuna that swallowed us was swallowed by a whale.  They didn’t want us for our product, or even our ability; they wanted us for our great big factory that could make zillions of pc boards for their product.  They didn’t need our engineers, they didn’t need our sales force, they didn’t need our support staff.  It took a couple of years to come down to that; the original principals of my company struggled to keep their product viable.  Over that period of time all the employees wondered what would become of us every time someone from corporate showed up.  We were destined to be another spun-off.

I learned valuable business skills when I was in corporate America.  I loved my jobs, until the last year. I loved looking out for the bottom line.  I loved running a department.  I loved going to work every day.  I loved dressing the part.  I invented organized closets before California Closet existed.  When I took off my suit each night it went to the end of the line.  I wonder how many I had.  Then there were the shoes.  Three inch heels, minimum.  That brought me up to five foot nine, back then, and I could look anybody close to in the eye.

Imagine the recollection when I found that picture.  That’s me.  In my office in corporate America.  In 1988.  What is she wearing, you ask.  Well, I’m sure I had on Dockers, and I see I had on a Big Shirt.  This was a work day, not the week end.  Most of my department would have been in similar attire.  Most of the staff in all the offices and cubicles could have blended in with all the service and factory workers. 

It was toward the end of the last year I worked there.  No one was happy, smile notwithstanding.  Every drawer was full of candy or change for the vending machines.  There may be a week’s worth of candy in that bag. Every one of us was gaining weight from the constant snacking. Morale was rock bottom.  There was no pleasing corporate, especially when we reported to a new boss weekly.   At some point I realized everyone was in sloppy clothes, myself included.  Oh, well. They fit.

One day I went down the hall full tilt, shirt tails flapping, around the corner and straight into the head of HR, on an unannounced visit from corporate.  He looked me up.  He looked me down. He said, “Well, well.  Joanne.”  I greeted him and shook his hand and kept on going.  The next day the dress code arrived from corporate.

All women will be attired in suits, maximum; skirts, blouses and jackets, minimum.  The men had to smarten up, too.

I went shopping that night and bought two men’s suits, white shirts, ties, wing tip shoes and socks.  Oh, and a man’s belt.  That’s what I wore for the several months I remained a good employee.  I apologized to my staff; I still feel personally responsible for that dress code.  I am also very proud of the subsequent careers of the staff I mentored as they too left. 

And, thanks to everyone who taught me how to run a good business.  That’s what Jan and I did for the next twenty years.

I love my job

I didn’t intended to meander to my “job” as a subject here, but reading Pearl this morning, and all the comments, I feel like writing about mine.  It’s close to the best job I’ve ever had.  I only have to show up, do it right, go home. 

When I retired from weaving, I knew I’d need to work a few more years, but figured I’d get on that after I had the new hip installed.  My last show was in October, my new hip came in November.  I opened the monthly township news letter one day and found the current clerk of my township had not sought re-election at the general election; the position was vacant and the township trustees would accept resumes in order to appoint a candidate to the unexpired term.  I put my resume in the mailbox on the way to the hospital.

The trustees interviewed all the candidates in January.  I was just off the walker and left my cane in the car.  Long story short, they appointed me.  I took office on April 1^st.  I thought it would be a good cap to my career; after so many years in manufacturing accounting, construction accounting, general accounting, I’d go out with government accounting under my belt. 

Government “accounting” has a deal more to do with Ohio Revised Code than accounting, but it’s no tougher than a topping out ceremony when the last floor of a building goes up.  Just like being a self-employed weaver, no one can set my hours of work.  Of course I make sure I’m on time for meetings, appointments and the bi-annual audits by Auditor of State.

On that April first, eight years ago, I showed up at 8 am.  Well, the mail isn’t even sorted at our post office at 8 am.  For several months I hit the snooze alarm until maybe 7:30 (half an hour to get ready, ten minutes to get there).  Now I don’t even get up until 8 and leave at 9.  The post office now opens at 9 and often isn’t sorted until 10 or 11.  Fine, I can do my job, even with yesterday’s mail.

According to Ohio Revised Code, I stood for election at a general election two years from taking office, and then two years later for a new four year term.  Eight years ago I was thinking two terms would be fine.  This summer I was at a meeting of county fiscal officers.  I’m probably twice the age of any of those great young whippersnappers.  As we were leaving one of them said she was stopping for petitions on the way home.  Was I going to?  Oh, what the hell.  That’s how you get on the ballot in Ohio; get petitions from the board of elections, walk them door to door, chat with the people, get enough valid signatures.  Nice way to spend a couple of August weekend afternoons.  So, I’m on the November ballot.  Unopposed.  As previously. 

When I started the job was called clerk.  The title has been upgraded to Fiscal Officer.  Not the pay.  Pay is set by Ohio Revised Code.  It went up once, six or seven years ago, but that was it.  Don’t let on, but if I could afford it, I’d probably pay them to do the job.  Well, I suppose it’s part of the whole $10,000 in general fund taxes the township collects for operations, so I’m paying some.  It keeps me out of trouble.  I get to do things I think should be done, like make a great website for the township. Get two hundred years of records sorted out.  Help plan a great bicentennial celebration.  I work with nice people.  When I go to breakfast with Carol tomorrow and don’t get in until 11 or 12, the road super will grin and say “Second shift, again,” and I’ll say “Yep!”

I could never give up days like this morning.  It’s Columbus Day; the road department has a holiday.  When I pulled in (after collecting Saturday’s mail), the road garage door was coming down and our front end loader was in the yard!  There was a strange truck parked in the lot, and between the truck and the pine tree in the middle of the lot I couldn’t see who was driving it.  That’s a $180,000 piece of equipment; it will be twenty years before we can afford a new one!  I got out of the car as pronto as a hobbled up old lady can and started hollering “Who’s there!  What’s going on!”  The fire chief came around his new truck, grinning.  He was taking it up the hill to work on the fire department driveway.  Yep, only in a township population 707.  Not a bad job, if you can get it.

I could not have imagined it

In 1979 the president of my company lugged some dirty shop equipment into my office.  “You’re going to learn to use this,” he said.  He was my boss’s boss, so I listened up as he put a no longer beige colored, oversized typewriter on my desk and added an even dirtier TV to the top.  He announced it a computer.  He wasn’t fooling me.  I knew he took it right off a test bench out there in the factory, where the quality control folks poked probes into parts off the line and watched green squiggles on the screens.  Our computer was huge and lived in an air conditioned room.  The manufacturing guys used it; one of the clerks spent part of the day inputting data.  I took a computer class in college and we made punch cards to make a simple program that typed out “The Quick Brown Fox.”  No, he wasn’t fooling me.

“Frank, I’m not touching this; it’s filthy.”

“Get some Windex and clean it up.  Don’t squirt the keyboard.  I’ll be back with the rest.”

He returned with a box with an instruction book and a 5¼ floppy disc labeled VisiCalc.  I fell right down the rabbit hole.  From that day to this I have never encountered a software manual written with such clarity.  Here’s how to add numbers in this program.  Here’s how to subtract, divide, multiply them.  Put them in columns.  Perform big calculations with them.  Whoops, don’t make a circular reference. Always remember to save your work.  Frequently. /fs.  It was like magic. 

Soon after I found the director of manufacturing looking over my shoulder.  Then the purchasing guy.  Then sales.  I taught them what I knew about VisiCalc and we had a room with a long table with several Apple II’s.  We could carry a box of floppy discs in the room, take a computer and get to work.  We shared operating secrets such as using the reverse side of a disc when the first side filled up.  It made perfect sense; the whole disc was dipped in the same solution, why couldn’t we use the back.  Of course the second side eventually crashed and we went whining to engineering, who sneered at us for using that uncertified side, and recovered the data for us (or not).  Eventually technology caught up; discs became double sided.  Then little hard discs that went in the A drive. We all learned that leaving the monitors on burned the menu screen into the monitor face.  We left the monitors on anyway.  But I’m getting ahead of my 8 bit beginnings.

I’m an accountant.  The nastiest things we dealt with in the olden days were ledgers.  I could just see my twenty eight columns of depreciation schedules on that screen, and started right in.   The queen of the ten key adding machine did some serious tooth gnashing and some muffled swearing over the absurdity of entering numbers from the top of the keyboard.  One day I looked in PC World and there was the nicest little ten key add on key pad.  “It’s not the initial cost, it’s the upkeep,” my boss muttered as he approved my requisition for key pads all around. Then technology went around again and we had keyboards with key pads.  Oh, yes, and separate arrow keys.  Lotus bought VisiCalc.  Computer memories got bigger, computers got smaller. 

We got IBM PC’s; we networked; we could reach into the big computer in the air conditioned room and find data we needed for reports.  We could type up our own memos on something called WordStar, instead of finding a secretary to do it for us.  And I got the ledgers I used up and running so lickety split that my boss sent me around consulting for business acquaintances who hadn’t got the hang of computers.

I bought our first home computer shortly into the 1980’s.  A Tandy from RadioShack which cost the enormous sum of $2,000.  I doubt I’ve paid more for the several home computers that replaced it. I discovered ShareWare.  Software advertised in catalogues or in PC magazines.  I found my first accounting program that way, FinanceManager.  It became Bottom Line Accounting, which carried Jan’s and my business for years until I finally made my tax accountant happy and switched to the ubiquitous QuickBooks.  I prefer to call it QuackBooks.

Last fall I sucked it up and upgraded to my first new computer since Y2K, learned Windows 7, the new Word and Excel.  About a month ago my sister replaced her computer.  It doesn’t even have a tower. My kids do it all on their smart phones.  I could not have imagined any of this thirty odd years ago, when Frank put that dirty piece of shop equipment on my clean desk.