My Year in Personnel Purgatory

The valuable lesson I learned as an employee development clerk

EXIM Bank building on Vermont Ave and H Street in DC, just a couple blocks from the White House. Photo: Ben Schumin via Wikimedia Commons.

It was 1984. I was a recent college graduate with no real direction. I did have a rather vague, unformed idea about getting into book publishing, but I lived in the DC area, not exactly a publishing mecca; my parents had moved there the year before I finished high school in Illinois. I needed a job — preferably an office job — to make some money, get an apartment, and eventually save enough to move to another city.

DC is a government town, so the most plentiful white-collar jobs are government jobs. Luckily, I’d just become a U.S. citizen, a requirement for most of the jobs. All I had to do was go to the Office of Personnel Management, take a test, and wait to hear from a potential employer. The test turned out to be surprisingly, almost embarrassingly, easy — like the most watered-down version you can imagine of the SAT. I got a high score and was snapped up quickly by the Export-Import Bank, which needed a clerk typist in its personnel office. Yes, I am old — this was long before the days of “human resources.”

The job was an eye-opener. It revealed to me a world I’d hitherto been unaware of — a world in which people really weren’t into their jobs.

All my life, I’d been surrounded by adults who loved their work. Most were professors; some were doctors, teachers, or other professionals. The professors I knew, including my parents, were doing work they cared about deeply; while they worked hard, they had plenty of vacation time and seemed to lead fairly balanced lives. It didn’t hurt that life was pretty easy in Urbana, Illinois. There was no such thing as a long commute, unless you chose, for some reason, to live way out among the corn and soybean fields. My parents could walk to work in 20 minutes, and they usually drove in just a few.

My first full-time job, in contrast, came with a long commute for the first few months, when I was still living at my parents’ house in Potomac, Maryland. I had to drive to a commuter bus, which was always a race against time because it didn’t run very often; the Metro station had limited parking and was much farther away from us than the Montgomery Mall bus stop. When I moved into the city and walked to work (in 20 minutes!), people I mentioned that to looked at me as if I came from Mars.

But much more shocking to me than the commute was the fact that my co-workers weren’t even remotely following their calling. Most of them had drifted into their jobs by chance. As I had, but for me it was just a pit stop on the way to presumably better things. They were simply collecting a paycheck. They watched the clock. They lived for the weekend.

I could see why. The jobs weren’t inspiring or engaging, and that was especially true for the three of us who worked as employee development clerks, Clerk-Typist Series 0322.

I, too, became a clock-watcher and weekend-anticipator. My first day on the job made it clear what I was in for. Despite my clerk-typist designation, I wasn’t particularly good at typing. In rebellion against 1970s expectations for girls, I’d refused to take typing or home economics classes in high school. So imagine my delight when my first task, which took me all day, was typing the same rejection letter to six different job applicants. On a typewriter; word processors weren’t introduced to the office till the following year. I can’t recall if the rejection letters were for my job or for some other position, but I do know that a lot of Wite-Out was used that day.

Here I am in the EXIM Bank employee newsletter, more annoyed than embarrassed — I mean, large clusters of balloons couldn’t make up for the tedium and meaninglessness of the job. Check out the poster on the wall!

It was bad enough to be working in a government agency, but a government agency and a bank!? This Flower Child did not fit in.

I made perfunctory attempts to wear the right clothes, but my heart wasn’t in it — and it wasn’t easy for me in the conservative 1980s DC environment, where pantyhose and pumps were de rigueur. There was a certain uniform you were expected to conform to, and I couldn’t quite stomach it. So I skirted the edges of appropriate attire. More often than not I failed miserably, like the time when I wore clogs to work; I felt people staring at my shoes all day.

I had no illusions about fitting in. But if I had, they would have been shattered the day that I found myself in a large room filled with Xerox machines — just me and a conservative-looking secretary, one who wore the requisite high-heeled shoes and hose. Absorbed in struggling with paper jams as I tried to make stacks of copies of who-knows-what, I wasn’t prepared for her question. She looked me up and down and asked, slowly and quizzically, “Are you a … hippie?”

I was too taken aback by the question to come up with a good answer. Was there such a thing as a hippie in 1984? I now realize that there were indeed hippies then, and there may always be. But at the time, my narrow view of what constituted a hippie made me consider the question woefully out of date. I figured that the secretary, like most EXIM Bank employees, didn’t know what to make of me and was simply grasping for any possible way to fit me into some box — any box.

Me in the front row, now with shorter, less hippie-like hair, wearing a marginally acceptable outfit. Betsy Sims, to my left in this photo, may have been the one who asked if I was a hippie; I don’t recall, but it certainly would have been someone dressed like her, so she’ll have to take the rap. Sorry, Betsy!

The truth was that despite my halfhearted sartorial attempts, I didn’t want to fit into their boxes or be like them. The office environment and the people I shared it with for eight hours a day had me constantly cringing. Neither The Office nor Office Space had yet been made, but our office would have provided ample fodder for that TV show and movie.

There was the time when I was walking down the streets of DC with the head of personnel, Tami — a very white, rather conservative woman who in the evenings retreated to the suburbs, where she belonged. On spotting some homeless people, she blurted out, “I don’t see why they don’t just get up and do something!” There was the volleyball game I hadn’t wanted to join, during which my boss, Bert, yelled at me for not managing to hit the ball — like I really wanted to be reminded of junior high PE class? There was the time when Bert whistled at another clerk typist and then said, “Don’t worry, my bark is worse than my bite.” It was less creepy than it sounds, but still. There was the time when we had a male stripper in the office for Tami’s 40th birthday and the suburban women went nuts.

Then there were the posters. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a personnel office in the ‘80s had to be full of inspirational posters. Our office didn’t disappoint in that regard. Till revisiting the first photo above, I hadn’t recalled that decidedly uninspiring poster, but my brain could never erase the memory of one that depicted a kitten hanging from a tree, with the inscription, “Hang in there, baby, Friday’s coming!”

Not THE poster, but close — very close!

Needless to say, the “inspirational” posters had the opposite effect on me. Let’s face it — there was nothing inspiring about the job.

Now and then, the tedium was alleviated momentarily. Because we were just a couple blocks away and had low-level security clearances (a story for another time), we’d sometimes get invited to the White House lawn to help fill audiences for visiting dignitaries. It was actually interesting to see, from a distance, Ronald Reagan spewing out platitudes alongside whoever his guest was.

But more often I had to create my own entertainment, like when I wrote a “memo” to a friend toward the end of my EXIM Bank stint. What can I say; I was 23, bored, and blissfully unaware that the bureaucratic government-speak I was making fun of would follow me into the corporate world.

I was quoting a college PE teacher about runners. Apparently, I didn’t know about semicolons or proper American quotation mark placement.

A month after I wrote this, I was out of there — on to bigger and better things in my chosen city, San Francisco.

My year and four months at EXIM Bank (not that I was counting!) felt much longer, but at least my time there taught me an important lesson: Enjoyable, satisfying work isn’t a given; you have to seek it intentionally. Lots of people out there are trapped in dull, soul-killing jobs and live for the weekend. Who knew? I just knew I didn’t want to be one of them.