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