Chapter 13, Part One: I’m back on Laurel Hill as a systems analyst trainee. I meet my co-workers one of whom happens to be Wes Schultz.

As I start a new chapter in my life, I now ride up Arlington Street in Glen Park to San Jose Ave; left to Valencia to Market. Cross Market cutting diagonally across streetcar tracks to Franklin, up Franklin to McAllister, right on Webster to Sutter, left on Sutter to Fillmore; left at Pine and on up to Presidio (getting off and walking when the hills get too steep); right at California, left into Fireman’s Fund’s parking lot, lock my bike to a post under a cantilever corner of the building.  Bonnie meets me on the second floor, shows me to my desk on the end of the second to the last row of about four rows of 4 or five desks, and leaves.  I rarely see her again. Seems she goes to other offices to oversee setting up their systems analyst departments.   A supply guy shows up with an assortment of desk accessories: In-Out baskets, desk calendar, paper, pens; waste basket.  A mid-western looking blonde with a Farrah Fawett hairstyle, who sits behind me, dumps a couple of thick, heavy, black, 3-ring binders on my desk.

Farrah Fawcett

                “Hi, I’m Barbara (Not her real name),” she introduced herself.  I did the same.  “Just start reading these,” she continued, “and someone will come and tell you about the training.”  Turns out, the someone is the guy at the next desk who happened to be away.  I open a binder which is filled with technical information about the job, and start reading, flipping past the first couple of pages to the contents pages: several of them.  I’m about to fall asleep when I hear and smell the coffee cart trundling down the aisle.  It’s only nine-thirty yet it feels like I’ve been there for hours and wonder if I can last the day.  Unlike the Auto Liability department on Front Street where Pete spouted bad puns, Laura and I enjoyed conversations about abalone fishing, North Coast beaches, and our personal disclosures about our lives outside of the office; there was Ivy’s startled snort as she woke at her desk, and looked around, embarrassed this department was eerily quiet; the silence broken only by the occasional ringing of a phone followed by a muted conversation.  I felt as though all eyes were on me as I noisily turned pages in the binder.

                Slowly, people meandered over to the cart manned by Rosa, a motherly, middle age Latina.  I got a cup and a bear claw pastry and went back to reading.  The coffee was horrible, smelled acrid.  I thought I could mask the taste with the pastry, so took a couple of bites.  That night, I felt sick and vowed I would go on a three-day vegetable juice cleansing ritual that I’d been putting off for months.  I cooked up a bunch of veggies- carrots, beets, celery, etc., and strained them.  The next morning, I poured the reddish, gray-green liquid into a glass bottle, set it in my bag and took off for work.  I disciplined myself to follow through no matter how hungry I got. 

                Jerry Nelson, the someone who was to walk me through my job, had returned.  I felt self-conscious about drinking my concoction so I turned my back so he wouldn’t see me.   He was a handsome guy in his early 50s with riveting blue eyes.  His wavy brown hair receded from a forehead from which an intriguing scar traced a thin line from his hairline diagonally to just above his right eyebrow.  He had a great sense of humor so we were simpatico and ended up friends.  He went on to narrate, live, a short story I adapted for one of my mime pieces and recorded it for future performances.

                “What are you drinkin’ there, kiddo?  It looks vile,” was the first thing he said after we introduced ourselves.   He spoke in a mesmerizing James Mason voice sans accent.  I explained and went on about how the coffee here made me sick, so I wanted to clean my digestive system. 

                “You wanna taste?” I said, smiling as I proffered the jar.  He rolled his chair backwards, held up his hands and laughed,

                “I don’t think so.  I got used to the swill they pass off as coffee here.”  He paused, then said, “I’m supposed to give you some idea of what we do here.  Okay, what we do is test and analyze prototype accounting software to weed out all the bugs before it goes live.”

                “Here?” I asked him, “I don’t’ see any computers.”

                “We have to go to our Lucas Valley branch office up in Marin,” he said.  “I was there all day yesterday.  That’s where all the computers and mainframe are, and the programmers who write code for the software for just about every job in the company.”

                “Wow!” I said, “Do we take a bus?”

                “No, there’s a shuttle.  We check in here first.   Then if we get called to test some software, we go.”

                “Oh, good,” I said, “a chance to get out of this place for a few hours, anyway.”   He didn’t say a word.  I wondered if he was going to report me to our boss, whoever he/she was because I hadn’t met her/him yet, for not being all gung-ho about the job.

                It wasn’t until I attended two days of women’s seminars on assertiveness and career planning that left me depressed that I realized again how unsuited I was for the business world.   A woman named Andrea P.  led the talk.  She was short, stocky, with long wavy black hair, and wore a grey, sharkskin suit.  She climbed up on a stool and crossed her legs; her skirt, slit on one side up to mid-thigh, rode up almost to her hip.  She talked about how to handle sexual harassment.  I could only think, “Yeah, right!” then heard myself blurt out something that made everyone laugh.  A woman, Garilee L., from the in-house media department, video-taped the whole thing.  She told me afterwards that she couldn’t believe I was brave enough to speak out like I did because “I didn’t look the type.” A decade later, she would make a video of three of my mask pieces.

                One day I came to work and found Barbara at her desk, sobbing into a Kleenex.  I asked her what was wrong.

                “It’s my husband.  Bruce.  It’s my husband.”

                “Oh, what happened?  Was he in an accident?  Is he hurt?  Is he okay?”

                “I wish oh, I only wish?”

                “Barbara, what is it?  What happened?”  Maybe he lost his job, I thought.

                “He told me he wants a divorce.  Oh,” she wailed, “He’s gay!  He told me he’s gay and he’s in love with this man he’s been seeing for years.  He was Best Man at our wedding!”  Barbara pushed away from her desk and we watched her stumble down the aisle to the hall, crying.  A woman went after her.  Barbara left the office and never returned.  She had shown me pictures of her and  

Ken & Barbie

Bruce: a perfect Barbie and Ken couple.
 I wondered what happened to her.

                Our department soon moved down to the first floor, very close to the entrance I used coming in.  I was happy to see that Wes and I are again in the same department and he is sitting behind me; Jerry Nelson is across the room at a diagonal, within talking distance.  Here, I would at last meet my boss, Don P: a strange, misshapen, freckle-face man, whose head, with its Trump-like coif, appeared larger than his body, and when he turned, he had a Charlton Heston profile.  Someone must have pointed this out, because he purposely positioned himself so that it was prominent.  The head of our department was a Mr. Sanchez (I think that was his name).  He was  affable, and a head taller than Don P. and handsome, olive-skinned, in his 50s, with a mustache and coal black hair.   He seemed ineffectual and deferred to Don.   Until I left Fireman’s Fund after a few months when the company was going to move to its headquarters to Novato,  I not only met Don P.'s family, I discovered that he. had a beautiful singing voice and was a member of a Marin County Light Opera company.  Still there were some very unpleasant, if not disgusting aspects  to this man.

Next: Chapter 13, Part Two.   Shuttling to Novato; “Air” messages;   I use tactics described in Sun Tzu's  "The Art of War” to confront Don over a disagreement.  I leave Fireman’s Fund permanently to concentrate on theatre.  I had to be very aware of the wording I used when I resigned otherwise I would have lost my payout which would finance my so-called career until it afforded me a living.  If not, I'd have years of job experience to fall back on.  At my going-away luncheon, I acknowledge Don's mastery of "lifemanship" (look it up) which he took as a compliment.