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| The Wall near the entrance on California Street. Notice the holes where a plaque had been removed. |
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| Plaque designating the site as a cemetery. |
The illustration is of the wall fronting the company's California Street side. The other is of the plaque designating the site as a cemetery that had been removed from the wall, is shown on the right. In 1924, three cemeteries started relocating south. All Laurel Hill burials were eventually moved to Colma after 1937, when the Supervisors successfully passed their ordinance. WWII slowed efforts, which weren’t completed until 1948.
Early one week, we trainees were told that we were moving down to the first floor to join the rest of the systems analysts, to have our desks packed up by Friday, and report to our new (to us) department on Monday.
Monday morning, a woman from the human
resources department (formerly “Personnel” ) met me.
She introduced me to my immediate boss, Don P. (whom I'd described in a former post). I would meet Fred Hyndman
later. To my surprise and delight I saw
that Wes Schultz would be sitting right behind me. His face lit up when I walked up to his desk.
“I thought you
went to that brokerage company,” I said.
“Well, these guys-“ he waved a hand at
Don and Fred, “-got me more money than
they were going to pay me, so . . . I’m used to it here. I like it. Even more now that you’re in my
department"- he laughed, “ again!” Jerry
Nelson ended up at a desk catty-corner from me, across the room. As I was
unpacking my box and arranging things on top and in drawers, Don P. stopped
by. He leaned over, and said, quietly,
“You understand that this move is
not a promotion. You’re still a trainee
in the program testing division.”
“No,” I said, “Bonnie, who
recruited me, told me I’d be hired as a systems analyst trainee and that the
testing was part of it.” Don leered,
then said,
“You were misled, dear. This is a two-year job and only then will you
be eligible for that position.” Shit!
I thought. “Sorry,” he said, ambling off. My compensation was that I was paid so much
more than any job I’d had so far. I
figured as long as I’d be working with Wes and Jerry, I’d be fine. Wes was on his phone while all this was going
on. I could tell by what he was saying
that it was a personal call. It seemed
he was on his phone more than actually working.
His conversations were suggestive and sexual and I was uncomfortable
overhearing them. Then he’d say
something clever and I’d end up laughing.
Fred Hyndman welcomed me to the department. He was a tall man with what used to be called
an “olive complexion. “ He wore a brush
mustache and had straight black hair in a traditional corporate haircut. He seemed approachable and affable and I
found out that when I couldn’t work things out with Don, I could go to
Fred. I sensed he was on my side. He later told me his father was German, his
mother was from South America (I don’t remember which country). He stood rather than sat behind his desk in his office . One day as I passed by, he said, more musing, talking over me and looking off into the distance. He imparted the following wisdom: “You know? When you take vitamins, you don’t have to
throw your head back to swallow gelatin caps because they float.”
That first week, we took a shuttle
to Lucas Green, our branch office devoted to the writing, development and
testing of dedicated computer programs. When for some reason I had to go there alone, I'd get off the bus on 101 at the Lucas Valley stop and walk across on short weedy underpass to the other side. Rather than trek around to the entrance on Lucas Valley road, I'd jump across a water-filled gully, climb up the bank (see below) and weave my way through the shrubs to the walkway leading to the entrance. George Lucas's Skywalker ranch was further down the road, hidden from view among rolling hills and trees. In 1978, Lucas began buying the land, named for the rancher, John Lucas (no relation, despite rumors) who inherited the land from Tom Murphy, in 1853.
At the time, I took a break from reading “The
Art of War,” intending to utilize some of the strategy at work, and started on
a book of fairy tales from The Violet
Fairy Tale Book. I was reading it on the
shuttle. Our driver, I’ll call him
Glenn, was just that- a driver on contract. He was a short, 40ish guy with
waving graying, brown hair. He had stuck
a rose stencil on the van’s dashboard. When
he saw me reading fairy tales, he asked if I’d mind reading aloud as a sort of
entertainment on the way.
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| Lucas Green location |
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| Cover of The Violet Fairy Tale book. |
Later, back on Laurel Hill, Don
asked me what was the significance of Glenn’s rose stencil “It’s some kind of cult symbol, isn't it? What does it mean?”
“I have no idea,” I said, “Why
don’t you ask him.”
“Me? Why should I?
I don’t talk to service employees.
Could you find out?”
“No. If you want to know, you ask him. I couldn’t care less what he’s involved
with.”
“That’s because you belong to it.”
“What?” From then on, I made sure I had very little
to do with Don. Yet, in order for him to explain a program
we were going to test, he’d pull up a
chair beside my desk, lean over to show me diagrams and flow charts. That close, I could see the dandruff flakes
in his reddish-grey hair and on the shoulders of his windowpane brown plaid,
wool sport coat . His teeth were yellow
and malformed. Often he’d reach down to
pull his sagging socks up from his scuffed loafers, revealing ankles ingrained
with dirt. And he smelled sour, like
he’d slept in his clothes. He was
married, he’d told me. I guessed
his wife either must not care, be just
like him, or, had lost her sense of smell and had bad eyesight. He had two kids. His thirteen year old daughter, he confessed
to me in a candid moment, kept running away from their Novato tract home. (I would actually meet his entire family later.)
At Lucas Green, we were given a
tour of the mainframes which were housed in a huge temperature controlled room
with a paneled floor beneath which ran bundles of wires. Behind glass paneled cabinets we saw what
looked to me like giant revolving tape recorders. The head of that department explained to us that
every single bit of program information was on those reels as was every
keystroke that entered data into the computers.
It was mind-boggling.
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| A mainframe computer room |
We were to test the accounting system so were
shown which pre-loaded computers we’d use.
There were people there from other branches, too. We were given hard-copy manuals of
instruction of what we were supposed to find when we executed specific steps,
entering certain characters and figures into labeled fields on the screen. If what we entered came up with a different
result than what was in the manual, we had to write out an “error message” form,
which, at the end of the day, a programmer would collect to figure out what
went wrong and correct it. A woman from
another branch kept calling them “air” messages. “This don’t make no sense to me at all!” she
exclaimed, “why the hell they’d say these’re “air “messages.” Among us we decided to let the programmer
explain, but still, we couldn’t help sniggering to ourselves every time she’d say, sighing and shaking her head, “Another damn air message!” Needless to say, testing was really pretty brain-deadening and it felt like there were more errors than not. Still we were told it was great that we were
finding "bugs" so the accounting system could be reprogrammed.
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| Late 1969 Lucas Green computer programmers |
On Laurel Hill, the work was both boring and
detailed with a lot of down time which made me, Jerry, Wes and some others a little crazy. Early December, we put up Christmas
decorations. A short, sandy-haired, nondescript man in our department, who came and went so I
never really got to know him, decided to hang mistletoe from the
particle-board, paneled ceiling. He
chose to stand on a desk half-way between mine and Jerry’s. He climbed up, holding his mistletoe, reached
up, realized he couldn’t reach the ceiling, jumped down, grabbed a chair, put
it on the desk, climbed back up with his mistletoe, climbed on to the chair and
immediately came crashing down with his mistletoe and all the other red and
green crepe paper, holly, poinsettia cut out decorations that had been put up
previously. Words escaped from my mouth, “The Man Who Fell to
Earth” (The film had been out for a couple of years). Jerry, Wes and a few others laughed,
or choked trying not to. The man,
embarrassed, struggled to his feet, laughing at himself. “I will not try that again.” Wes, who was over six feet tall went over to
him, took his mistletoe, asked him if he was all right, then standing on a
chair, hung the kissing herb and re-hung all the rest of the fallen
decorations. We all clapped and hooted.
Often, Don would
walk over to my desk with the excuse that he’d forgotten to tell me something
important. He’d sit there, watching me
prepare test data to bring to Lucas Green.
At break time one morning, with him sitting beside my desk, I went up to the
cafeteria, one floor up, for coffee. When I got back, Don told me that there was
too much work to be done for me to be taking breaks, and that I was to report
to him, ask him if I could go on break and let him know when I returned. The next break time, I uses a tactic I found in "The Art of War" to let Don know I had some control. I surprised him by instigated a meeting over coffee in the cafeteria and read him our rights regarding breaks from the company employee manual. He quit hassling me.
I ended up staying in that
department for over two years. During
which, in the outside world, Iran had invaded the embassy in Tehran and held
hostages; an American Airlines plane crashed at O’Hare airport, killing almost
300 passengers along with people on the ground.
At the time it was said to be “The deadliest aviation incident on U.S.
soil.” US Government lent Chrysler
enough to keep the auto company from going bankrupt. The US boycotted Moscow’s 1980 summer Olympics
to protest its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and enacted a grain embargo against
the Soviet Union, supported by the European Commission.
During my summer vacation that
year, while visiting my brother in La Jolla, we heard about the eruption of
Mount St. Helens, killing over fifty
people, some brainless enough to stay in their campsites even though warned to
evacuate. 1980 was a horrible year in
which John Lennon was assassinated and Ronald Reagan was elected president- the
Iran hostages were released when he was
sworn into office in January 1981.
People suspected some behind the scenes machinations, which were later
revealed to be true.
Next up: Chapter 13, Part Four. Over Don P., Hyndman
promotes me. The branch moves to
Novato. A tragedy occurs in the life of a popular employee.
I leave The Fund permanently
with a severance package that allows me to focus on theatre for a year.
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| The Novato location which encompasses both Laurel Hill and Lucas Green operations. |
