TRANSITION

 VOLUME II, Chapter 15, Part Eight.

Transition between Fireman’s Fund and Marsh & McLennan

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev

1984 was fast approaching.  None of Orwell’s fictions appeared on the horizon; neither Ronald Reagan nor Nikita Khruschev were Big Brother.  Another guy, Marxist/Leninist Mikhail Gorbachev would become General Secretary of the Communist Party in early spring.  I couldn’t be concerned about nuclear war or the “evils” of Communism.  I was worried about money.  I was spending it too fast.  I'd have to start job hunting soon.  Something I wasn't looking forward to.

When I wasn’t performing mime shows or working with Annette Lust on her lecture demonstrations, I took temporary receptionist jobs, proving my ineptness when it came to pushing the right buttons when transferring calls.  The best job I got was as a “floater”- administrative assistant, a fancy name for secretary- with a software company RAND, not to be confused with the Rand Corporation.  RAND designed computer programs for small businesses. The partners were two youngish guys whose first names were Chip and Dale, but woe to anyone who referred to them in that order when speaking of them to others or clients.  We had to say: Dale and Chip.  (Chip and Dale were chipmunk animation character detectives on TV in the early ‘80s before the show became syndicated.) They couldn't have been more different: Chip was voluble, tended to hysterics over minor issues.  And he was over six feet tall with close-cropped black hair.  He dressed in jeans and T-shirts.  Dale- little over five feet, light brown hair, slight build, calm demeanor, usually wore suits,

Chip & Dale

The atmosphere was casual, including dress.  I was to work for programmers who needed letters, documents, or anything typed, even though I really couldn’t type.  I had an IBM Selectric and depended a lot on correction tape and white out. I filed, distributed mail, and whatever.  When I mentioned that I was an artist, they had me do illustrations for their flow charts, too.   I was with RAND for about six months.  Two of the most charismatic employees, Chet and Marie, kept trying to talk me into joining LifeSpring, an EST type consciousness raising organization.  They were tall, slim, dark haired and funny.  Marie bribed me with a dinner-Greek pizza-on Polk Street.  From there, we walked to the Holiday Inn Hotel on Van Ness to attend a free LifeSpring introductory seminar. I stayed for an hour listening to a guilt-inducing lecture; then, lying flat on my back on the floor with the other attendees with my eyes closed, listened to a woman “guide” me through an active imagination exercise. Afterwards, we were asked up to talk about our experience. I found it eye-opening and magical, still not enough to cough up a few hundred dollars for a six-week course, then be guilt-tripped into an “advanced” session, so I left.  Marie chased after me through the lobby of the hotel and caught up to me,

“Why are you leaving?” she asked.

 “I’m just not interested, Marie.”

“Hon, I think you’re psychologically blocked.  You need the program to become unblocked and find your true self.”

“Sorry,” I said, and walked away.  The next day at work, she was friendly and never again pressured me to join the organization.

Attendees at consciousness raising  seminar

I couldn’t take dictation; and not only did I not know shorthand, I had absolutely no secretarial skills. My handwriting was and is terrible. I was happy I could type a decent letter, had a good vocabulary, and knew how to spell.  A result of my horrible handwriting ended up in a misunderstanding with one of the designers I’ll call Glenn.  He was a newly married, short, cute, stocky, curly-headed guy who wore rimless glasses.  I'd heard talk of him looking like an Ewok from Star Wars.  He’d just bought a motorcycle, a little Honda 250.  One day his wife called when he was out, so I wrote on a message slip, “Your wife,” and left it on his desk.  Later that day he came up to me and said,

“You really think so?”

“What?  Think what?” I asked.

            “Your note.”

            “Your wife called.”

            “Oh, oh, God.  I’m so embarrassed,” he said, “It looks like you wrote, ‘You’re cute.’ ”  He showed me the message slip.  Sure enough.  Even though “Your” was decipherable, the word “wife” somehow looked like I had written “cute”.  How? I don’t know. He must be really needy, I thought.  Still he was cute. I was miffed that he didn’t catch that I would never have written “Your” for the contraction: “You are.”

 Glenn called me at home early New Year’s Eve 1984: I had left RAND and by then had landed a permanent job.  Glenn said he was “Riding my motorcycle around” and “found himself in my neighborhood.”  (He lived way across town.)  He’d bought a couple bottles of champagne and wanted to celebrate with me.  We sat opposite each other in my living room in wing-back chairs and drank both bottles.  He never came on to me and I deflected any conversation that would’ve led to anything physical.  The second bottle drained, I told him to go home to his wife and celebrate with her.  He had no business being at my place on New Year’s Eve.  Sheepishly, he left.   I hoped he’d make it without getting into an accident.  I never heard from him again.

RAND wanted someone full time.  I liked the job and the people, so I applied.  A RAND secretary got the job.  So I went back to being on call for temp jobs.

All were pretty awful.  It should have been obvious to the recruiters at the agency that I had no secretarial skills and could not operate phones with multi-button key pads.  My experience was in commercial insurance, and yes, I could answer phones for clients wanting information about claims and coverages.  For one, a stockbroker wanted “a girl” to answer phones.  I was warned never to give any information nor answer questions from newspaper reporters calling about stocks and or prices.  Why then was I entrusted to even answer phones?  What did I know about the arcane practice of researching stock prices and entering their ups and downs into computers lightning fast?  Yet these were the jobs I got.  I made supervisors and co-workers livid because I caused “important “calls to be dropped.  The act of transferring calls -in-house to outside; in-house to in-house, outside to in-house- baffled me. People on the other end screamed at me, called me names despite my profuse  apologies.

Telephone key-pad

   Still, I dressed the part- professional, was cheerful and willing to learn and people liked me.  But except for RAND, no job lasted more than a day.  And law firms- three or four names of partners that I read off a sheet when a call came in.  I was coached on the rhythm of the delivery and where to breathe and where to pause briefly between names:

(Ring-pick up receiver, inhale, exhale slowly, steadily) “StaufferJonesMitchell (Pause) SiefriedHeffenbergerandRankle (Inhale, exhale slowly).  May I ask who’s calling please and your party?” (Inhale, hold breath while listening.  Exhale)  I’ll transfer you.”  Ha ha, if you’re lucky.

I got so few part-time jobs, I started to worry how I was going to pay my rent.  My unemployment checks were ending, I had only a few dollars left from my severance pay.  Time to look for full-time work.  I searched the Classifieds (In those days, at least two pages of Classified ads-everything from home rentals to farm equipment to Personals (people looking for lost people) appeared daily in the SF Chronicle and Examiner newspapers.  One day, I came across an ad for Home Insurance.  It was looking for a personal lines property “rater,” a position I’d held twenty years back.  It was a starter job, a bottom rung that could one day lead to Underwriter, which I’d been for at least fifteen years.   My boss would be an underwriter I had known from Fireman’s Fund.  I applied but wasn’t hired. I was “over-qualified.”  I kept looking, even applying for data entry jobs.  I blew one interview at a small shoe distribution company.  They wanted someone who could maintain a database of their products.  My interviewer, a man, asked me to describe my closet.  I started out okay, explaining the order in which I hung my clothes.

“How about your shoes?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your shoes.”

“My shoes?”

“Yes.  Where do you keep your shoes?”  An image of my shoes leapt into my mind and I started laughing. 

            “Well, they’re- they’re,- Oh, well, they’re in my closet . . “

“Okay, in what order?”

“Order?”

“Yes, go on.”

 “They’re not in any particular order.  They’re just sort of jumbled on the floor,” I blurted.

“I see.  Well, thank you for coming in.  It was nice meeting you, Mrs. Smith.  We’ll be in touch.” I thought not.

I kept looking, buying a paper every day.  Besides perusing the ads, I read short articles hidden in the back pages about a strange, undiagnosed, deadly disease that affected mainly gays.  It was said to be transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids, especially during sex.    One day, my twenty-something downstairs neighbor, Ann, a nurse at SF General, told me that the hospital had set up a special ward to handle the increasing number of patients, mostly young males.  She said the yet unnamed disease had to with the depletion of the white blood cells to fight off infections, rendering immune systems drastically compromised.  Deaths were mounting daily.  She went on to say that one sure symptom was the appearance of purplish blotches on the face, soon to be labeled Kaposi’s sarcoma.  No one I knew had it- yet.  I felt that a solution would be found soon, so refocused my attention to finding a job.

  The Home Insurance ad was still running so I wrote a letter to the former Fund Underwriter whose name I don’t remember, so I’ll call him “Bill,” who was now manager of the underwriting department.  I said that since Home was still looking for a rater and I was still looking for a job- Hire me.  Which he did. The Branch Office occupied the main floor of an high-rise on Kearney, catty-corner from the B of A on California. Creepy, weird, Gothic-like sculptures hovered on ledge near the roof. 

The rating department staff consisted of Filipinas, though my boss, Marilyn Fuqua, was a hip white woman, married to a black dude. (They went every year to the Monterey Jazz Festival.)  She was tall and slim with long light brown hair.  We were the only two Caucasians in the mix.   Around this time, I had been a vegetarian for almost two years.  I’d read articles on the damage cows and pigs do to the environment and how much land they destroy with their waste and hoofprints, land that could be used to grow crops.

A cattle factory farm

Most everyone smoked so the air in the break room was unbreathable. I brought unshelled peanuts, bananas, and oranges to work to eat at my desk.  For lunch, I would walk up the hill to St. Mary’s park.  I came back after lunch one day and found my department bereft of the staff.  Even Marilyn was gone.  I felt strange sitting at my desk alone.  I wondered if I’d missed a memo about a meeting I was supposed to go to.  Bill was in his office but I avoided asking him what’s up, feeling stupid.  I concentrated on rating and coding the risks I’d been working on.  Soon, my co-workers filed back to their desks; some smirking, darting their eyes at me.  At the end of the day, Marilyn asked me to stay and talk.  Is she firing me?  The gist of it was that there had been complaints of favoritism, feeling Marilyn did not assign me as much work as she did them.  She had called the meeting while I was at lunch, she said, because she didn’t want me feeling left out. Airing their grievances settled the issue, she said.  Lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke to the side, she added, “They don’t think you like them because you never use the break room.”  I sensed it was more- having to do with Marilyn favoring me because we were “white”.

  On one of my first days on the job, I got up from my desk.   I sensed eyes on me, but went on with my mission.  I stood beside underwriter’s desk; he ignored me until I said, “I have a question on this account.” 

            “What?” He barely looked up.  I explained the problem, shoving the file under his nose; he responded; satisfied, I went back to my desk.  Amy, who sat next to me, whispered,

            “We don’t talk to them (meaning underwriters).  We tell Marilyn if we have a problem and she’ll go to them.  So don’t bother them.  They get mad.”  Oh, I thought, so that’s how it works around here. Marilyn told me that to the underwriters raters are “Untouchables.”  The underwriters-all men-came off to me as being as dense as stone.  I overheard one of them on the phone say, “Oh, don’t worry, he has a snowball’s chance in hell'   So we'll get this to fly.” 

People began leaving me alone.    A file landed on my desk.  Seems one of our insureds had a boat.  No one knew how to rate boats except me.  Marilyn gave me the okay, so I went ahead and put it through.  From then on, I rated all the personal marine insurance risks. The distinct chill from my co-workers increased.  At least I wasn’t hassled and underwriters relaxed their macho stance towards me.

            Day by day, I felt myself getting tired by mid-morning.  I could barely stay awake in the afternoon, despite many cups of coffee.  I felt weak; my hair and nails were splitting and breaking.  I went to a clinic for tests and found that I had a B-12 deficiency.  Back in the day, it was called pernicious (deadly) anemia.

            “Are you a vegetarian?” my doctor asked,

            “Yes.”

            “You need to get B-12 shots, eat liver or red meat.  You don’t have the enzymes, the physiognomy to sustain a vegetarian diet. If you stick to it, you risk organ failure and death.”  He suggested I go on disability until I get back my strength, then shot me up with B-12.

            “Eat red meat!  Your body needs those amino acids,” he exhorted.

(Continued) 

Volume II, Chapter15, Part Nine:  I go on disability; lose my job.  Back to Square One. Yet before long, I land a permanent job, my last: with Marsh & McLennan, Inc. which lasts thirteen years.