My Favorite Job

TGIF!  I hope you had a good week.  All is well here, with the exception of the temps being a wee bit chillier than I would have liked.

I took Miss Debbie out for a belated birthday lunch to Il Bracco.  The food and service were exemplary.  We ordered an Olive Oil Sundae, my favorite dessert in the world.  

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting it up with a friend when we landed on the subject of our favorite jobs.  We traded war stories with plenty of giggles in between.  She thought that my story warranted a blog post, so here goes. 

One Summer, a friend and I worked in a massive vault in the basement of the Judge of Probate office filing wills.  We would go hours without seeing daylight.  This was difficult because we spent most of our waking hours slathered in baby oil while baking in the sunshine.

We may have misfiled a few wills and codicils, but we sure had a lot of laughs. 

Another Summer, my father got me a job packing Bic Bananas.  He wanted to teach me the value of a good education.  My coworkers consisted of about a dozen women in their fifties dressed in colorful smocks.  We would sit in chairs surrounded by large boxes filled with individually colored pens.  It was like a sewing circle for pens. Our mission was to pack the pens in the yellow pouch.

That Summer, I would fall asleep at night repeating my mantra of the day... red, yellow, orange, green... I even dreamed of our irritating boss dressed up as a Bic Banana. 

The ladies were very kind to me.  They would throw pieces of advice and words of wisdom my way.  My favorite was from Angela.

  

If you don't want to spend your life on your knees cleaning the bathroom floor, don't marry a hairy man.  

The ladies would eventually forget I was there, which was when the party got started.  I loved hearing these ladies candidly chat about their families, marriages, sex life, and menopause, or as they called it, the change.  Whenever they would talk about a sensitive subject, such as cancer or divorce, they would never say the word out loud.  They would mouth the word a few times around the circle for everyone to see. 

 

I think my father expected me to come to him in a Hallmark moment at the end of the Summer and tell him that I learned a valuable lesson.  I learned a lot of lessons that Summer, none of which included the importance of a good education.

  

Through my coworkers' conversations, I learned the value of female friendships, the power of unconditional mother love, marriage is not for sissies, and the secret ingredient that makes any chocolate dessert taste better (coffee).  

 

Years later, after graduating from college, I attended the Katherine Gibbs Entre program, which was a 6-month course geared toward the college graduate with absolutely no skills.  That was me in a nutshell.  

I graduated from Gibbs with less-than-average typing skills.  I was a crackerjack at steno, provided the person who was dictating spoke verrrrrry slowly and stuck to two-syllable words or less.

I took my razor-sharp skills to NYC. 

 I was ready to turn the world on with my smile.

  

I signed up at an employment agency, and they kept me busy running around all over NYC interviewing.  The only interview I remember took place at a large publishing house on Broadway.  The interviewer was a VP and was in his early forties.  He greeted me with a nod and asked me to sit down. 

The first words out of his mouth were:  

Tell me a dirty joke.

I froze.

Needless to say, the interview continued on a downward spiral, and I practically ran out of the creep's office.  I reported what happened to my employment counselor, and she red-flagged him.

A few weeks later, I was working as an admin for a subsidiary of a big advertising firm on 60th and Madison.  I made very little money and had over an hour commute each way to Connecticut.  I loved riding the train to work and grabbing a seat in the smoky bar car on the way home. 

Every evening I was welcomed home by my parents with the same greeting:  you smell like a brewery. I took that as a compliment.

  

I loved my job.  The best part?  I had a TV on my desk.  The advertising firm bought ad space for their clients.  Or at least I think that's what they did.  When one of the clients had an ad running during All My Children, I had to verify that it was shown. 

So when I wasn't misfiling or typing at my desk, I was over at one of the studios watching a preview episode of a TV show.  If there was a "questionable" scene, such as an animal or person being abused, or a sex scene, I would write up a report for my boss, who would pass on buying the ad space for that particular episode.

During those glorious days, I was privy to the next stunt Alexis would pull to keep Blake and Krystle apart on Dynasty.  I was in the know as to the next scheme JR was planning on Dallas.  Btw... no one was allowed to screen the most famous episode, Who shot Jr?

My most vivid memory of my dream job occurred on 7/29/81.  Let's just put it this way... not a lot of typing or misfiling was done on that day.  My buddies were green with envy, knowing that I was soaking in every moment of the royal wedding. 

I worked two fun-filled years on 60th and Madison.  

I left to seek fame and fortune in Chicago.

Spoiler alert:  

I never found it, but I had an awful lot of fun looking for it!

Now it's your turn.

What was your favorite job?

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