CHAPTER 13, Part Six: The office is moving to Lucas Green. Watch out! Tricky wording on severance documents for employees unwilling to relocate.

It’s happening.  It’s official.   The Laurel Hill Fireman’s Fund office is moving to Lucas Green.  Tricky wording on severance documents.   Fred takes a tally of those of us resigning and those who will commute to Marin or relocate.   Those of us unwilling to commute or relocate attend a job retraining seminar to help  determine what position we are best suited for if we prefer not to continue with systems analysis or commercial insurance.

Wes and I are leaving.  Jerry is staying and will commute rather than relocate.  He and his partner (now husband) just bought a house in Noe Valley.  Wes had accepted a position at Marsh & McLennan Insurance Brokers where he will head up an in-house Fireman’s Fund  Property and Casualty Insurance  Company  (where I eventually end up in a couple of years).

It was June, 1982.   Fred and Don set up severance interviews.  Wes clued me in on a tricky question having to do with my exit date. 

 “Be careful," he warned, "Don't tell them when you want to leave.  Once they know you aren’t staying, let them set the date. “ 

“Why?”  I asked, anxious to split as soon as possible; in fact after my next paycheck.

“You won’t get your severance package," he said, "because you, in effect, quit.  So it’s up to them.  Again, be careful.”

I had saved some money through the company for several years; that, along with the severance package, I’d walk away with about ten grand- enough, I hoped to last a year and allow me to focus on my performance art.

While on my day job, I had been working with Annette Lust who was an expert on the art of mime (Annette died in 2014 of a massive stroke.  She was 89).  She had studied with the master, Etienne Decroux, in Paris.  Also, with a Ph D in Foreign Languages from the Sorbonne, she was a  French language professor at Dominican University in San Rafael, California.  She had encouraged me to volunteer to teach a night class in Beginning Mime at Dominican University, for continuing education.  I got the gig and taught one night a week, taking Golden Gate Transit  to Marin right after work, grabbing a bite in Cow Hollow first.   Annette had lectured at Bay Area schools and colleges on the art and history of mime , from early 19^th Century French to Marcel Marceau to the more modern techniques with masks and abstract physical movement.   She wanted me to join her as an unpaid assistant to illustrate her lectures with the physicality of the art,  an experience I could include on my resume when I auditioned for paying gigs.  

                During my years on Laurel Hill, from about 1980 to 1982, MTV launched the first 24Hr music video cable station in 1981.  There was much talk about it around the proverbial water-cooler when fans  rushed home after work to watch.  While MTV launched its thing, the US launched the space shuttle Columbia.  Its first return to space since 1975.  And Sandra Day O’Conner became the first woman on the U. S. Supreme Court.  Hallelujah!  Bad things happened that year as well: the collapse of a hotel walkway in Kansas City, Mo where 114 people died and 200 were injured.  Called “the deadliest structural collapse to occur in the US until 9/11".  And between 1981-82  people became aware of scores of missing children which began with the killing of 7 year old Adam Walsh and the disappearance of 12-year-old Johnny Gosch. 

  Fred called me into his office.  Don Pearce was there.

 "What are your plans?  Are you coming with us?" he asked, leaning back in his chair, arms straight, hands splayed on his desk.  His tie to one side revealed a couple of buttons undone on his shirt.  The gap opened slightly on smooth caramel skin. Don sat with his legs crossed, socks collapsed on grimy ankles;  a smug smirk on his face.

"Have you decided when you're quitting?" he interjected.  Quick on my feet, I said,

"Oh, I'm not quitting.  I am willing to work as long as I can until the move. "  Don moved his chair back, and tucked his chin in his neck.  Fred turned to look at him, eyebrows raised.

"Okay," he drawled, "We'll let you know."

A schedule of tasks to be completed prior to the move was passed around.   Logistics of handling off completed and unfinished program tests,  dates to shuttle to Lucas Green to test them.  Wes and I were ignored except to give Don names of those to whom we'd give work-in-progress; though we told him that we could take care of it, go over the work with them ourselves.  Jerry and some others had already left. Wes, too.  The office was almost deserted.  Our voices almost echoed in the emptiness.   

A team consisting of a perky, red-haired woman about  40sish and a taciturn all-business, balding man wearing thick-framed glasses, showed up and set up their screen, slides and boxes of forms in the conference room for the job retraining seminar, which lasted a whole day.  We answered questions about our goals, discussed our responses, watched slides of interviews with people who'd had successful career changes,  then checked boxes on a form the results of which would point to our new careers.  I recall one of the questions had to do with whom you would hang out at parties.  Choices were business types, artists, laborers, entertainers, educators, literary-types, sports-figures, politicians, etc.  Other questions hinted at whether or not one was suited for politics, social services, fundraising, etc.  I found it exhausting.  What my results boiled down to was that I should seek work as a photojournalist!  

Once again, in late June, Fred called me into his office.  Though Don spent most of his day in Lucas Green, there he was, smug and smirking, sitting next to Fred.  I sat down,  Fred spread a stack of forms in front of me. 

"We've set your termination date as the first Friday after the 4th of July.  Please review these forms from the Personnel Department and sign where there's an "X" and and initial where noted, then take them up there.  You'll have to see them about your severance package," he added.   

"Don't forget to apply for Unemployment Insurance," Don snarked, leaning to one side.

All the paperwork was done.  I'd receive a check which I would immediately deposit in a money market account.  I would need unemployment checks for a while as I doubted I would find work as a photojournalist.  I could write but had no photography skills, and no equipment except for a cheap, 35mm camera.  I hoped I could earn a bare bones living with my performances.

 

Next up: CHAPTER 13, Part Seven:  I am on my own.  A year of promoting my performances to organizations and education faciities, a vacation to Mexico; and assisting Annette-she, in effect, acting as my boss- in her lectures on mime.  Dr. Annette Lust (pictured left) from an item in The Dominican University Notebook, 1982.

 

Chapter 13, Part Five: A co-worker's tragedy; another's birthday celebration; a run-in with the "back office;" culture clash, and more . . .

A tragedy befell a beautiful, popular Project Manager who visited our department often to discuss her projects with Fred.  She was friendly and engaging and treated everyone equally.  Quick to laugh, she'd often stop to chat.  We all loved her.  The event shocked everyone.

In my new position, I would still be working with Don Pearce.  It had opened up because the woman, Jeanne Chapman, Don's assistant, had accepted a job as a permanent member in the test unit in Lucas Green.  I talked it over with Fred, explaining my conflict.  I came to realize that Don's thinking is linear whereas mine in circular. Still the results were the same.  I had not yet decided to take it; so I told Fred I'd let him know in the morning.  One thing about being able to get your work done is depending on the cooperation of those who do the copying, typing and filing.  I had a run-in with the woman who's in charge of reproduction: i.e. copying.  She complained to me that if I wanted my project done quickly (Pearce's orders) it would tie up the copiers.  I explained that she'd have to take it up with my boss.  She said that's what she'd do.  I forewarned Fred.  He laughed, waved it off.  "Don't worry, I'll take care of it."  Whatever transpired, it worked. The result, the repro supervisor and I ended up working well together making both our jobs easier.

Tying up the copy machine

Birthday parties, anniversaries, retirements, whatever- leavened the ongoing, everyday, hassels.  I'd stopped by a department to pick up some finished work.  They were celebrating someone's birthday and invited me to stay for cake and coffee.  I had fun talking and laughing with the mostly Filipina and Latina women who do the grunt work for us.  When I got back to my unit, Don asked me where I'd been, and scolded me when I told him.  I didn't react to his ravings.  I went to my desk and caught up on phone calls. Why get all turned around over something so trivial, I thought, as long as we get our projects to the program managers in time.

Employee birthday party held in the cafeteria

            Once, I had gone with a woman on another team  I’ll call Sheila  to pick up some work from Reproduction.  She had very short reddish hair, and usually wore elbow-patched, tweed, hip-length blazers with pencil skirts and clunky heels.   Repro was about to break out a cake for a co-worker’s impending wedding and invited us to join them.  I said, “Sure!”  Sheila gave me strange look. “I’m leaving.”  “Okay,” I said.  “Bring me back a piece,” she walked away.   Later, when I gave it to her, I said, “You should’ve stayed.  It was fun!  They're so sweet.”  As she dug into her slice, her mouth full of cake and cream frosting, she told me she doesn’t like to waste her time being friendly to those “people”.  The longer I worked in the corporate world, I began to realize a definite under the radar “class” system in force.  Anyone with any sort of title disdains communicating with the people who make up what the corporate world demeaningly (in my opinion) labels, “Back Room.”  Then they would  wonder why “those people” always came through for me whenever I needed a rush job on anything. 

Jeanne Chapman, who wore oversized glasses, cotton print dresses and pastel hoodies, was in her 50s, her greying hair tightly curled.  She was a woman whose face constantly bore a wimpy smile but you never knew why.  Before leaving for Lucas Green, Jeanne told me horror stories dealing with Pearce.  I said I thought I could handle him.  Because of a hiring freeze, they looked to hire internally, so Fred and Don interviewed  me to replace her.  She’d left a lot of her work unfinished due to her spending so much time going back and forth.  As it was, I ended up finishing what she'd left, and was already taking orders directly from Don.  I hadn’t decided yet to take the position.  So if I did, I had to adjust my psyche to adapt to working with him full time; my strategy as more demanding and assertive, hoping he'd be humbled.   The next day I told Fred that I would accept the job.  If things didn’t work out between Don and me, there was nowhere else for me to go unless I made it my goal to become a full-fledged Systems Analyst, which I figured I could do in a couple of years.

One morning I showed up wearing a black, fitted, cotton knit blazer over a red silk blouse, a black A- frame skirt, and low-heeled black open-toed shoes.  Don Pearce said, "I see you're already dressing for success.  You look very professional today. You should wear those outfits more often."  Since I bicycled to work just about every day, I wore natural fiber clothes (there were no showers, except most likely for executives) and flats or low-heeled shoes. I didn't want the extra hassle of bringing a change.  Both Don and Fred often remarked on what I wore to work.  I had no umbrella and when it rained, I wore a long coat, and a heavy-rainproof fedora.  Fred saw it on the coat rack, looked pointedly at me,  and said aloud, "Who wears a hat like that?"   I said nothing, but shook my head in incomprehension.  Another time, it was really cold and I wore a sheep's wool-lined leather coat imported from Afghanistan that Beau Hickory had bought for me, coats which became hugely trendy a few years later.  This time, Don stood, arms akimbo, in front of the rack, and asked no one in particular, "Whose animal is this?"  Then fingered the wool.

About this time a tragedy struck a systems manager I'll call Theresa who was based in Lucas Green.  She came by every so often to discuss programs.  She was tall, gorgeous with movie-star looks, always beautifully dressed, and had long, wavy, light-auburn hair.    She had recently married a San Francisco cop- a single dad who had two kids.  She had shown me pictures of them in their new house in Marin, and of their vacation.  She told us that for their honeymoon they’d gone to a motel on Big Sur that specialized in honeymooners.  It boasted different themed cottages, with beds of all sizes and shapes, including heart-shaped, and water-beds.   He was as handsome as she beautiful; he had coal black hair, a mustache, and great cheekbones.  She was a delight, laughing easily and making us all feel happy in her infectious glow.  Still, there were times when she came in feeling down.  She confessed to me that her husband suffered from severe depression which led to drink and abuse.  We thought it odd when we hadn’t seen nor heard from her for a few weeks.  It wasn't like her to leave projects hanging.  A rumor spread that Theresa's husband had committed suicide.   I neither heard nor learned anything more about her from then on.  The tragedy became the focus of  conversations and gossip on Laurel Hill and Lucas Green for some time and the office took on a dark ambience of mourning.

My costume and mask for "A Man by the Name of Ziegler."

After a while, Jerry and I resumed our spontaneous reactions to co-worker's sentence fragments, usually finishing them with lines from movies and cracking each other up, not giving a fat rat's ass if anyone thought we were funny.  We got weird looks from Don and Fred, of course.   Once, when the coffee break bell rang, he and I simultaneously rose from behind our desks, singing, "There are bells all around, but we couldn't hear them ringing. . . .  . . . "  Our mind and heart in sync, we came together,  arms outstretched, in the open space between groups of desks, and launched into a waltz, stopped, parted, and went back to work as though that never happened, leaving co-workers, except Candyce, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes.  I happened to be producing a lot of mime performances then.  Jerry narrated the Hermann Hesse short story, "A Man by the Name of Ziegler," to which I had choreographed movements.  It showed along with several other pieces in a dance studio on Van Ness and Geary.  Jerry told me he had once been an actor and a model in Europe until a car accident left a scar across his forehead.  After that, sadly, he said he gave up; he could no longer get work.  Yet I thought of character actor George Macready whose own scar seemed to get him great parts in movies.  I think it bothered Jerry, who was leading-man handsome,  for it kept him from being cast in those roles.

Once I accepted my new position, I passed the oversight of our test unit on to Candyce, with Don and Fred's approval.  She was a hardworking, beautiful, young black woman who reminds me now of  Octavia Spencer from the film "The Help."  She and another woman of Indian heritage, whose name I've forgotten, often clashed over tasks given them by Don Pearce.  I was to monitor their progress.  A lot of it had to do with reading specs and entering "1"s and "O"s into long sheets of graph paper.  So dedicated, Candyce would often take her work home if she didn't finish it.  Their clashes had more to do with cultural differences than race.  I would call them into a conference room and talk with them about their issues, avoiding talking about heritage but stressing that the only way they were going to get along was simply by respecting each other.  They walked away agreeing and things would settle down for a while until the next flare up.  Candyce got pregnant and was offered a leave of absence, but left the company a few months after her baby, a girl, was born; a perfect replica of Candyce. 

Turns out, I didn’t have to work for DP or Fred much longer.  Our unit was permanently relocating to Lucas Green. I did not want to commute so decided to leave the company.

Next up: Chapter13, Part Six.  Wording on the resignation papers would have denied me my severance package unless  . . .   My results of a questionnaire we who were leaving took as part of retraining sessions for future positions.  The conditions of my departure and my year away from the corporate world.