About Work

In the Stories book exercise on work, I list several of my previous jobs, including mailroom clerk, secretary, waitress, social worker, and college instructor.  Having thus been around the career block a lap or two, I’ve thought a lot about work, especially as I wasn’t raised to do it.  What the fine nuns at my all-girls Catholic high school hoped for was that we’d all graduate into good Catholic marriages, becoming good Catholic wives and mothers in the process.  If we had to work until that happened, it was expected to be of a short duration and in one of three pink collar ghettos: teaching, typing, or nursing.

Of those, teaching seemed the least objectionable, so off I went to college to be an elementary school teacher.  I lasted only a year before I began my slow descent into Dante’s Nine Circles of Career Hell.  There I drifted far longer than I ever imagined, the good-Catholic-wife-and-mother thing never quite materializing. 

The default of course was always secretarial—which I think is the Eighth Circle—since I typed an insane number of words per minute and liked to organize things.  What I didn’t like was sitting for eight hours a day, the blandness of the work, and not using much of my own creativity, unless it was to figure out how to better arrange the supply cabinet. 

But a default is a default and it came in handy whenever another of my many jobs or careers went poof.  Which happened quite frequently until I returned to graduate school in my forties and finally found myself as a writer and teacher.  There are likely several explanations for this inability to “settle down,” as my father said on more than one occasion, including having grown up with drunks. 

But that’s another story.

This is all to say that I may not have always been the perfect employee, harboring as I did great expectations for what a job is supposed to provide, other than some money and a place to be eight hours a day, five days a week, for an unconscionable number of years of one’s life.  

The huge chasm between what I expected and what I got became clear during my recent stint at the bookstore.  Ideally, work, even part-time, should be meaningful and fun, calling forth the best of one’s gifts and talents.  It should allow for variety and initiative, and promote a sense of well being.   Work, even part-time, should also provide a reasonable wage, an easy commute, and more than a half hour for lunch.

So there I was, out of touch with reality yet again.  For retail is not work, really; retail is a job, and one I turned out to be lousy at.  Not because I couldn’t find the “merchandise,” shelf it, take it off the shelf, ring it up, put it in a bag.  But because working retail means doing what the Corporate Entity says to do, and in the precise order It says to do it.   Individual initiative is not encouraged, at least among the worker bees, though hewing to the party line certainly is.

Which makes me think of those fine nuns all those years ago.  Though they aimed to teach us to be good Catholic wives and mothers—speaking of hewing to the party line—and good typists, teachers and nurses until we got there, they quite overshot their mark.  By a lot.  For those nuns gave us the tools to think , to value independence of thought, to do more than hew. 

Those nuns whooshing quietly down the hall in their black and white habits, hands tucked demurely beneath their starched nun-bibs.  Sister Kathleen, Sister Adrienne, Sister Lawrence, even old and blind Sister Paul with the Coke-bottle glasses.  This, in the ‘50s, when in my mainly blue collar family thoughts of sending girls to college were dim to the point of absent.  Those nuns, wittingly or not, let that wily snake back into the Garden.  And some of us learned to love the taste of the apple.