How a change in attitude changed my life

All I ever wanted to be was a secretary.  Maybe I was influenced by the always professional Della Street on the TV show, “Perry Mason” or Lucille Ball’s silly character in “The Lucy Show.”  The roles of women in the 1960’s were changing ever so slightly.  I wanted to be more than a wife and mother.  I wanted to work.  As a teen, I remember seeing women emerging from high rise buildings in Nashville with newspapers under their arms after a day in the “salt mines.”  That was what I wanted to be.


General Accounting Department, 24^th floor, National Life Insurance Company, 1970.
  My spot is the second desk, left side, covered typewriter.



I took every secretarial class offered at my high school – typing, shorthand, and accounting. By the end of my senior year, I had already been hired by National Life Insurance Company who, by the way, had the tallest building in Nashville at the time, 31 floors. I was given a typing test and because of my quick fingers and accuracy with numbers was given a 10-cent per hour raise before I even started work. I was assigned to the General Accounting Department on the 24th floor. The minimum wage in 1970 was $1.60 per hour. I made $2 per hour to type 4-part, carbon-copied journal entries all day on an IBM Selectric. I was living my dream as I streamed out of the National Life tower in the afternoons along with a thousand co-workers. (Now called the Tennessee Tower.)




Carla at the Royal while Kelly has an in-depth conversation on the push button phone.
  This is why Jerry was able to retire with a year of sick leave. Probably summer of 1983.

 

Several jobs, many years and a couple of kids later, I was still a secretary although the politically correct title was administrative assistant. I was working for Philips Semiconductor. That is Philips with one L, the largest electronics company in the world at the time. When I say I was a secretary, I mean I made my boss’s coffee, added cream and placed it on his desk every morning, handle facing right. I transcribed letters using a Royal electric typewriter which I liked better than the Selectric because the keyboard was flatter. I could fly on it. Something was happening though. I started thinking about what it would be like if someone served me coffee every morning.


About 1987 Philips decided to add a person to handle inside sales to our two-person sales office.  This was my chance to move up.  I had been there for six years.  I knew everything there was to know about our products and our customers.  The only thing I didn’t have was a diploma.  As it turned out, it was the only thing I needed.  Philips transferred a college-educated young woman from the California home office to take the job.  I was crushed and went into what my boss called a “snit.”  This is when the change of attitude happened.

Wanda sitting at first personal computer at Signetics in 1985. I was amazed at how quickly Lotus 1-2-3 could sort a list of part numbers.

During a conversation with the California HR department, I was encouraged to take advantage of Philips’ degree assistance program.  They had probably got wind of my “snit” and were afraid I would quit.  My husband, who had a Master’s Degree in Education by this time, also encouraged me to take some classes at our local community college.  “Why not get an education at their expense and then quit?” was my thinking at the time so I started taking one class a quarter and testing out of work-related classes.  What started out as taking revenge on my company for what I saw as an injustice, turned out to be just what I needed to get me out of my “snit” and change my attitude.  As it turned out, “Miss College Educated” quit after two years and guess who got the job?  Me.  I even got an office with a door and we hired a new administrative assistant who, I must say, wasn’t much of a typist.

It took me five years but I finally got a diploma with an Associate’s Degree in Business.  I worked for Philips eleven years before I moved on to outside sales.  It wasn’t until 2005 as a District Sales Manager with Aflac that I rented my own offices and hired my own administrative assistant.  I had learned to like coffee by then.  It was an occupational hazard of being a salesman on the road for so many years.  My assistant did everything I asked her to do but I never asked her to bring me coffee.  I’ve come a long way, baby.
 

Julie Templeton, Coordinator-in-Training, and Wanda Holt, District Sales Coordinator, in the conference room at Wanda’s office on Peabody Street in 2006.