THERE ARE NO SMALL JOBS

In 1992 I was fired -- they say “non-rehired” in order to dodge things like unemployment compensation -- from teaching in Heart Butte.  The basic reason was that I was a trouble-maker.  In fact, the MEA rep I talked to about it said that with my personality I should never try to teach in a small place, but only in a large sophisticated city system and at the highest grade level possible.  I had been certified to teach 7-12 but had taught a class or two at the Blackfeet Community College where many students in those days were still at 7^th grade skill levels.

So for the second time I had to go home to my mother’s house where I grew up, this time also occupied by my brain-damaged brother who did not want me there and tried to terrorize me with made-up stories.  My mother was in the earliest stages of a blood cancer that takes five years to kill a person.  The two sat smoking and drinking coffee through every waking hour while the television dinned along.  For eight months I searched for a job all day every day with no luck until I finally did temp work at an electrical company that rewound industrial transformers.  It was a destructive semi-legal place that OSHA would have closed down.  The workers were Vietnamese, possibly illegal immigrants.

Finally, haunting civil service, I was hired as a clerical specialist for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings and moved to a one-room apartment.  In the evenings I prowled Powell’s bookstore and on the weekends I “preached” as “pulpit supply” at a small UU fellowship.  My computer in those days was a LISA, very early machine, but enough for me to respond to the prompting of Robey Clark, a former student in Browning, who was now the Indian Education Specialist for the Northwest Education Labs.  He was supposed to be monitoring “bulletin boards” in which Indians talked to each other, but he didn’t have time so he talked me into pretending to be Blackfeet.  All I did was say I was from Browning, which was true.  The flame wars were well underway and some folks will be chagrined to know that I’ve kept many printouts.  Strictly for blackmail.

At Powell’s the Native American books that publishers had thought would sell like hotcakes but didn’t (the public was romantically involved with Indians, but not enough to buy their books) were being remaindered for about $5 each.  I bought three copies of each: one for me, one for the Browning library and one for the Heart Butte School library.  The Browning librarian created a special shelf with a poster thanking me.  The Heart Butte School librarian hid the books in a locked cupboard because, she claimed, the students will just steal them.  Louise Erdrich read just after Michael Dorris died and Greg Sarris read just before he became chief of his tribe, the Miwoks.

These were the years that I collected my brain into writing mode and also the years that I developed diabetes II without knowing it.  My drug of choice was brownies.  And Starbucks coffee.  Plus aspirin.  Pretty soon I had vague symptoms and as one doc put it, “You’ve got the best health insurance in town, so let’s use it!”  Test after test -- NONE for diabetes, but the testing of the time (this was the Nineties) probably wouldn’t have picked it up anyway.  I sat in the waiting rooms, weeping, but no doctors said, “See here, woman!  You are depressed!”)  Meanwhile back in Browning with an alcoholic and childish fourth wife, Bob Scriver was beginning to die.  If he had lived he would be 99 years old next week.  There was nothing I could do to help anyone, including me, and no one reached out.  Mostly they didn’t know.

It was a terrible time but I was earning a bit of pension, offering slight support to my mother and brother, and gradually upgrading through a series of computers and computer programs.  I took classes, both on the City’s time and in the evening, though I was so exhausted that one night I sat helplessly in front of the machine I’d been using for a week, wondering how to turn it on.  The young woman next to me saw my brain freeze and simply reached over to press the button.

At work I moved from one department to another.  The first was a killer: taking nuisance complaints on the phone.  There were eight of us.  The person next to me was a young Maori guy who listened to didgeridoo music on a Walkman while he did data entry.  If he needed to leave his desk, he would park the earphones on my head. (I love didgeridoo music!) He had many adventures with the cops at night because he rode a motorcycle.  The manager was a small enraged hen of a woman who terrorized us all.  I created a set of binders for each of us with reference phone numbers for entities who could help with problems.  When I left, she collected them all and trashed them.

Then I was the cashier for the Permit Center.  Bureau of Buildings takes applications to build and examines the plans to see whether they meet the codes, sends out inspectors to make sure building is happening as planned and in compliance with other laws, and develops zoning strategies like discouraging people from building on flood plains or unstable ground.  Each of these functions is supported by fees.  One of the contractors who came in often was from Quebec -- a glowingly healthy handsome man who wrote out his checks with a Mont Blanc fountain pen -- and when I saw him, I loved pumping my fist in the air and shouting “Vive la Quebecois!”  This puzzled him, which I enjoyed.  The other cashier whored on her lunch break.  (Yes, turned tricks.)  She insisted on keeping the combination to the safe taped above it, because she said otherwise if someone came in with a gun to rob us, she would be too scared to remember how to open the safe and would be shot.  She was found dead in her “boyfriend’s” bed when he returned from a three day absence.  Not shot.  Probably drugs.  Then we hired a small smart person who could balance tills.  She was married to a Marine Sergeant and shaped us up in a hurry.

My best transfer was the next one, to the Site Development team.  Six soils engineers with an intelligent, patient manager who was able to explain planar fascitis to me when none of my battalions of docs could figure it out.  A week with an Ace bandage, and I was healed.  I had torn the fascia in my foot sole by walking fast and hard on my lunch break, going through bead shops and smoke shops (they sold magazines) and luxury stores where I never bought anything -- just used their luxury marble bathrooms.  Except for one man, who was actually a landscape architect and who rode his bike to work which earned him a series of collision concussions, these men were sensible, dependable, respectful people.  In season Mike brought me a handful of roses from his garden every morning.  When I left, he and his little boy made me a bird house which still swings from my big cottonwood.

At the desk butted up beside mine was the clerical specialist for field officers investigating serious nuisances.  This specialist was a middle-aged black woman with advanced diabetes.  One transplanted kidney had failed.  In major pain, she did peritoneal dialysis on herself at lunch time by hanging up a bag of electrolytes that dripped directly into her abdomen.  I don’t know how the liquid got back out except by peeing.  We ate lunch at our desks in order to give her privacy.  I gave her half my vacation time every year.  She was still alive when I quit but still didn’t qualify for disability.   

When my mother’s estate was settled, I gave two weeks notice and was out of there.   Everyone kept singing:  "Movin' to Montana!"  The engineers gave me a $100 parting gift which I spent on CD's.  None were Frank Zappa.  Classical and a little Miles Davis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ialhaxhr7iA

A HORROR STORY WITH A HAPPY ENDING

When I was working for the City of Portland in the Nineties, every time I moved to a new clerical desk, I got a 3-ring binder with a set of dividers and created a new desk book. I left the one for the previous desk to the person who switched into that position. Clericals were supposed to be interchangeable, but actually each desk handled a slightly -- sometimes radically -- different set of procedures and relationships. In the worst job, a department run by a woman named Nancy, the boss was so insecure that she changed the rules all the time, couldn’t remember what she had already told us, and blamed us for everything that went wrong. One of the city commissioners asked if Nancy could be required to take Valium as a job prerequisite. (Not.) A super-complex system that had developed like kudzu actually amounted to job security because no one else could understand it. Much of the job was referring people to other departments, so I put all that information in my desk book. Then the others asked for copies. When I left, Nancy went around, collected all the desk books, and threw them out. A few people were alert enough to hide theirs. I’m quite sure she was related to Dilbert’s pointy-headed boss.

Then I transferred into being the cashier for the contractor permit center where the booming city was overrunning the supply of inspectors and clericals. The cashiers handled quite a lot of money. Two women shared the job so there would be no gap at lunch time and also, I suppose, so that the likelihood of skimming money would be less. I was replacing a former minister’s wife, a gentle soul. (He divorced her so he could marry his church secretary -- not at all an unusual event.) She was highly conscientious but easily confused. She had not been able to balance her cash drawer at the end of the day in time to go home to supper, so the management solution had been to allow her to keep two drawers: one being used and one being balanced. This only increased the confusion, so she had grown increasingly desperate until her doctor made her quit. It took me two days to figure out her system and get rid of that extra drawer.

The other cashier was a woman I called the Texas Mermaid. Actually, her name was Joy. But her long hair was crimped until it floated in all directions and she had a deeply honeyed accent. I’m pretty sure she was making money off some of the rougher contractors during her lunch break. Since she never got any lunch, she brought in a big tray of greasy steaming food to eat at the cashier counter, slopping soup here and there. I banned that and luckily the actual manager -- who had a soft spot for her since she’d been beaten up by a “boy friend” and the manager and his wife were active in an organization for opposing violence against women -- this time backed me up.

A statuesque blonde with a voluptuous mouth, she had previously been working in the water department on the street, flagging or actually digging or raking asphalt, but mysterious fights broke out around her so someone had the bright idea of putting her behind the cashier counter. She kept the combination to the safe taped to the wall above the safe because she couldn’t remember it. When I took it down, she was genuinely in terror and protested that I would get her killed because someone was sure to come in with a gun to hold us up and she would be too scared to open the safe, so she would be shot. The safe was so balky that even WITH the combination it didn’t always open. I asked for a security camera or a panic button, but it was considered unnecessary.

I always expected to open the newspaper and read that Joy’s naked body had been found half-burned in a dumpster in some remote clearing in the West Hills. At the time exactly that was happening now and then. (The Portland Chamber of Commerce will not give you this information.) In the end she was found dead in her former boyfriend’s bed. He had been gone for several days and had not invited her, but evidently she had never surrendered the key. At least that was his story. I never heard the autopsy report. She was in her thirties. I never thought of her as a drug user, except maybe pot.

Some young male bright light convinced the Bureau head that we needed to update and that he could convert our computer system though he had no real training and had never done it before. Two or three parallel systems on different operating platforms meant three screens had to be reconciled in order to record a payment for a permit. For two days we worked with the equivalent of muffin tins since this guy, in spite of staying overnight at least once, couldn’t make the transactions record reliably. Money and permits were in piles everywhere. In the end we simply declared every permit issued in that time frame to be paid, regardless of whether it was or not. This confused people who came to pay for their permit and were told it had already been paid, but they didn't protest.

By this time I was as addled as the computer and there were supposed to be two cashiers anyway. We struck gold. A tiny brunette woman, married to a long-time Marine boot camp officer and trained overseas by a German bank, came in like a blitz of precision. In short order, she had designed a form for balancing the money, established dependable routines, sterilized and organized the cashier’s booth, and become my savior. OUR savior. Happily, I put it all in my three-ring binder.

One page was always devoted to “the rhythm of the day.” To me it was one of the most important factors. The preparation before the doors open, what happened when the door actually opened so people rushed in, when the most likely first lull might come, and so on through the surprisingly regular surges of demand and slack. Then the best sequence of sorting, computing, securing and closing up after everyone else left. One day after another went quickly and smoothly. The manager had nothing much to do with it, but he was grateful since it preserved his job.