Hellish Jobs I've Had

My hell may not be your hell, but it's mine — let me have it!

From an old notepad I had in the 1980s. I kept one sheet from it as a reminder of what work was like for me in those days.

Last week, I wrote about the unsatisfying nature of my first full-time job. Beyond the now-murky, long-blocked-out details of my daily tasks — answering the phone, making copies, typing memos — what remains emblazoned in my brain is the tedium, pettiness, and lack of stimulation. I didn’t fit into the cloying, mainstream office culture. The job wasn’t for me.

That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been right for anyone. I’ll say more next week about the nature of work in our capitalist society, but let me be clear: Some people might be happy with your standard clerical office job. Some people might be happy working at a place that’s both a government agency and a bank. Some people might be happy in a peppy personnel office in the conservative DC environment. Not all office jobs or government jobs are alike. Not all people are alike.

But what I experienced at EXIM Bank, what was new to me in the context of full-time work, was the defeatist attitude of suffering through work to live only for the weekend. What I wanted to call out was my insight at the age of 23 that more people than I’d realized drifted into any old job by chance, not because the work interested or appealed to them. Maybe that wasn’t true of all EXIM Bank employees, but I certainly felt it in the Office of Personnel.

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Although that job held the distinction of being an eye-opener for me, a window into an office world that I’d never before seen firsthand, it was only the first in a string of “pay your dues” types of full-time jobs.

My next two were a bit better, but not by much. When I arrived in San Francisco in September 1985, I needed to make money while I looked for a job in publishing, and with my federal worker status in hand, it was easy to get another government job. This one was at the EPA, a much better fit for me.

But I was still a clerk typist. I still had to answer phones and perform other tedious office tasks. I still watched the clock.

My job was in the office of the Regional Administrator, a lovely woman whom a journalist once called “tough but fair,” which gave her a good chuckle. One day they sequestered me in her private office while I “forged” her signature on hundreds of letters, tracing her actual signature through the paper. My more usual daily tasks included downloading all the incoming emails, printing them, and delivering them by hand to their recipients.

But at least I was surrounded by people who were motivated to work there and trying to do good (despite being constantly thwarted in that effort by the Reagan administration). Some of them were even people I’d want to spend time with outside of work! It was San Francisco and not a bank, so I could dress more or less however I wanted to. Things were looking up.

With the Regional Administrator, at my desk. Still clerking and typing, but with better posters!

Still, like my first full-time job, this one wasn’t for me, and there was no way to move up at the EPA without skills and knowledge I didn’t possess. Many of the jobs there had a scientific bent, not my forte or interest. Plus, I hadn’t abandoned my goal of getting into publishing.

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Before long I managed that, but the trend continued of paying my dues. My first real publishing job was at Bancroft-Whitney, a law book publisher. I was an editorial aide in the most boring department, California Codes. While commentary on the law can be riveting, the legal code is not. If I got lucky, I’d be called upon to do such stimulating tasks as creating notes on the changes that had been made to the code, which included writing sentences like “A comma was added after the word ‘and.’” I am not exaggerating; the law has to be precise. More often, I was given tasks like sorting little slips of paper in boxes in numerical order. These were somehow used to generate the legal manuscripts.

B-W, as it was known, was a strange place. When I started, we were in an old building in a seedy South of Market area that was then full of warehouses and has since been transformed into a more upscale enclave of condos and startups. I had to ask to be moved to a different floor because the air on ours was so thick with the emissions of many dedicated chain-smokers. We had prescribed breaks at 10am and 3pm, which before my time had been announced by bells. We’d get in trouble if we took more than the allotted 15 minutes or spent too much time during any part of the day chatting with co-workers. The same boss who’d scold us for this, Betsy, claimed that she and her ex-husband had once owned a cafe in the Village and had turned down Bob Dylan’s request for a gig, before he was famous, because they already had too many folk singers booked. How times change.

There was a distinct hierarchy at B-W between the editorial aides and the editors. The editors had law degrees and complained bitterly and regularly about the three years of law school they’d wasted, only to end up at a job like this.

People tended to stay trapped at B-W for years in this bitter state, giving it the feeling of a prison. Marie Dean was the epitome of these, except without the bitterness. She’d devoted her entire working life, all 50 years of it, to the company. She didn’t seem to have anything else going on; B-W was her life. When we moved to a new building by Aquatic Park, near Fisherman’s Wharf, Marie and the other old-timers seemed traumatized by the change. No one was able to stop her from smoking in her cubicle in The New Building, though it was not allowed there.

Smoking in the office was such an integral part of B-W culture that the company deemed it necessary to include this note about the move to The New Building in JUSTUS, the employee newsletter.

Finally, Marie succumbed to dementia, but she couldn’t handle the idea of not working. Her sister, a nun, found her wandering outside in the rain one night, her purse gone, muttering that she was waiting for a ride to work but that people were trying to keep her from going there.

Marie’s sad story encapsulated the mood at B-W. Every time someone left the company of their own free will, we felt the excitement of witnessing a great escape.

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Just 14 months after I’d started the job, I was that person, escaping to a life of freelance proofreading and editing. This wasn’t easy for some to take. My friend Gramps, who’d come by that name by calling those of us in our twenties the “kiddie corps,” being 45, and actually becoming a grandfather, warned me it was too risky. Two decades earlier he’d gotten a new job he was excited about and had given notice, but before his last day, he suffered a brain aneurysm. He ended up staying at B-W for the health benefits.

His was a cautionary tale. I took the risk despite his warning — easy to do when you have nothing to lose. Sure, we had health insurance, but I was young, the job sucked, and the pay was low.

Although freelancing paid even less, I appreciated the freedom, flexibility, and somewhat more engaging work. By the time I was offered a full-time publishing position at HarperSanFrancisco a few years later, I wasn’t looking for a job and wasn’t sure I wanted one. That’s a story for another time; suffice it to say I was off the hellish job treadmill. But was I really free?