Monthly Essays

My Old Job

While dusting the pigeon hole desk I inherited from my mom, who inherited it from her mother, I made the time-draining slip of looking at the contents. Stored here are letters Dad wrote Mom when he was recalled for the Korean War and also 115-year-old postcards from my grandfather to my grandmother. (Back in the dark ages, we used the post office to communicate.) All the letters Jim ever wrote me are here, as well as a few of my letters to Jim that he’d kept, and like Alice, I fell down that rabbit hole.

I read the letters I’d written about humdrum day-to-day activities and in some of them, I mentioned work details in the office, and that whisked me back to Tulsa. It’s been a long time since I worked in an office. I rarely think about my life as a single working girl, dressing for success, driving to work, and eating lunch with other people.

Jim was a soldier in SE Asia when I started at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oklahoma in the Statistics department and was quickly promoted to Research. In that position, I had to give a presentation to sales staff at an off-site retreat. (I remember this anecdote and even recall the lime-green print dress I’d sewn, although I didn’t include that fashion statement in my letter.) I was in front of the group (some 30 men and 1 woman) struggling to manage the flimsy posterboard charts I’d made using smelly Magic Markers. (This was before PowerPoint was even imagined.) The president of the company saw my balancing act, stood up beside me, took the charts and held them.

I was quaking inside, but I faked it in a confident voice. “If my capable assistant would switch to the other poster, please.” Those salesmen nearly fell out of their chairs with laughter at my audacity. Mr. Rhoades’ eyes widened, and then he slipped right into the routine as if we’d practiced, giving me deference with eyes downcast and the “Yes, ma’am” treatment. I was 25 at the time and looked 19, even in my lime-green-suede open-toed three-inch heels.

Within a year, I was promoted to assistant manager of Actuarial Services. I went to night school at TU for more math and also received in-house training. As I wrote to Jim, now a civilian working in Missouri: “I graduated from my management class yesterday. We had a luncheon and the president of the company presented us with certificates. He called me the ‘little giant’ and hugged me, said I was ‘huggable.’ I didn’t know what to do. I’m afraid they have a much higher opinion of my ability than I do.”

Later I wrote Jim about my boss calling me to his office. “Steve asked me what was wrong. Said I was making logic errors and just generally didn’t have my mind on my work. That’s the first time anyone has criticized me at work, and I did deserve it. I just haven’t cared lately. I live for weekends.” Of course, weekends were when I saw Jim. (I was awfully sorry I was a bad employee and vowed to do better, but that didn’t deter us from keeping the state of Oklahoma budget afloat with our turnpike fees.)

Part of my job was developing rating formulas. In yet another letter: “My vice president and Steve the same as called me stupid for a trend method I had used. So yesterday I spent part of my day proving to them that the two methods came out to exactly the same answer carried to 8 decimal places. I was so mad I almost quit on the spot.” (I have no memory of this.)

As it turned out, I gave notice a couple weeks after that, not from anger, but because I became engaged. At Steve’s request, I worked two more months to hire and train a man to take my position before I married Jim and moved to Missouri. And that was that. I never worked in an office again.

Except in a home writing office, which at first was in a bedroom with a typewriter on a desk made of a solid-core door resting on two homemade sawhorses. Eventually, I got a huge promotion to the penthouse corner office (a.k.a. empty upstairs bedroom after the boys all flew the coop).

Who was this young woman who worked in that high-rise office building? I barely recognized myself. I could no more develop a formula now than I could compute the distance to Mars in centimeters. (Oh, yeah, I could Google that.) And forget about those three-inch heels!

Reading those letters made me think of all the choices I’ve made that led me to become the person I am now. I fondly recall the people I met at BC/BS who influenced my thinking. And I smiled for days remembering that long-distance courtship.

One thing for sure. My dive into those letters pointed out how technology has changed life—for the better (instant communication) and for the worse (lost art of letter writing).

Got old letters tucked away somewhere in a drawer? Read them again. They are gold.

Your 15 Minutes: a novel

At the 130-year-old mansion in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, nine writers have checked into the writers’ colony for a two-week stay. Among them are a romance author of 50 books, a recent MFA grad, a sitcom actor, and the former secretary of the treasury. This is not the quiet retreat they expected. They will bond as a strange family, influencing each other in odd ways, and one will die tragically before the two weeks are up.

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2024 essay