A Season of Discontent - a fictionalized true story

         

"It's done,” he said, his face expressionless.  The computer geek took his hands off the keys and turned to face me.
“That was fast,” I said stepping over to peer at the cantankerous laptop’s stupid screen now blinking its welcome.  “I have been locked out for three weeks.”  I said again more to express my frustration than to try to explain.  I pulled my checkbook from the desk drawer and wrote him a check for $100.  That is how much stupidity costs when you forget to write down your password.

The check put a punctuation point to the theme of the last few months.  Nothing has gone the way I planned.  Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.  Well, not everything, I suppose.  I still have my health but the stress is probably killing me.
              
During the summer I started training for a new position at work.  Along with the new position came the possibility of more money.  The excitement of learning something new and making some much needed cash kicked my motivation into high gear.  By fall I was raring to go but then the computer system that supports the new position crashed.  “We are working on it.  Hang on.  Give us another month.”  A month turned into six weeks and the new position was put on hold.  All this new knowledge is getting me nowhere.  I am working smarter but not faster. 
           
The work drama has been compounded by a string of silly accidents.  None of them were my fault necessarily which made them all the more exasperating.  The first one involved a shoe carelessly left at the bottom of a flight of steps by a young man visiting my house.  Boom, my foot hit the shoe and I went careening off to the left spraining my ankle.  The second incident involved volunteering at a horse ranch for autistic kids.  Another volunteer at the farm suddenly slapped my arm.  “A bee was crawling on you,” he said all proud of himself for his bravery.  I’m allergic to stings, you imbecile, and you don’t slap bees you shoo them.  I got over it but it took some time.

Since my mother died nine months before, I was in an altered state when my aunt asked me to drive her to Alabama to place roses on the graves of two generations of my mom’s family.   In retrospect, flip flops were not the best choice of foot attire for an old cemetery.  I took home a raging bout of poison ivy that required a trip to the doctor for a steroid shot.  To add insult to injury, I somehow gave myself a pulled trapezius muscle for Labor Day.  It is fun trying to balance a plate of barbecue while doped up on muscle relaxers.

I have found that nothing satisfies a bad mood more than buying something new, something expensive.  I had gotten a little money when my mom passed so on a whim I bought a new laptop during the back-to-school, no sales tax, weekend.  I didn’t do any research I just bought the shiniest, latest and greatest computer running Windows 8.  I had heard horror stories about the Windows 8 operating system but they didn’t register with me until they became my horror stories.  A problem connecting to the Internet necessitated me downloading a new driver from the manufacturer.  In a fit of rage and frustration, I changed my user name and password in preparation of returning the evil machine for store credit.  That’s when I locked myself out.

I would love to tell you that things are looking up.  The laptop and I are getting along but the job situation has not changed.  Sometimes the only thing you can change is your attitude.  I was due a big attitude adjustment so I made one.  Banging on a locked door doesn’t make it open any quicker.  Sometimes when the door is closed; there are no windows open either.  The only option is to wait and I am not a good waiter.  Being thankful for what’s good in my life helps even when it is a young man who is careless about his shoes or a shiny, new laptop.  I am practicing being thankful for the present and trying not to worry about the uncertain future.

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.