Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (12 page)

 

Trying to feed my family and make my house payments—which was very hard. My wife worked a little bit and we managed. The union gave us thirty-one dollars a week, Workmen’s Compensation gave us sixty-nine dollars a week. And after I was off for six months, I received $180 in Social Security.

The work I’m doin’ now, sewers, water mains, and such as that—dirt work—there’s no chance of hurting anybody. If I was doing the same work as before, set irons, such as that, there’s a chance somebody could be killed. Your hands and feet, the pairs of them, have to work together.

You take other crafts, like an ironworker, he needs a belt, two spud wrenches, a knife which costs him fifteen dollars, and he makes more than a crane operator. The crane operator, he’s responsible for a machine that cost over a quarter of a million dollars. Regardless of what kind of machine it is, they all costs anywhere from thirty-five, forty thousand dollars and up. So why isn’t he worth as much money?

In the wintertime, sometimes you’re off several months. People will say, look at the money this man’s making. But when other people are working, he’s getting nothing. In the steel mill, when they get laid off, they get so much money per week for so many weeks. When I get laid off, there’s nothing more than to get another job. We have no paid holidays, no paid vacations.

We can’t go out and get our own jobs. When we get laid off we have to call the union hall and they send you to a job whenever it’s your turn. But there’s so many people work for a contractor, say, for twelve, fifteen years, these people will do anything to keep their job. They don’t think of the safety of another operator, of his equipment or anything. They’re doing things to please the contractor. You have some contractors that’ll try to get an operator to work below scale. But not like you used to. The majority of contractors are pretty good.

Instead of asking for more money, the union should ask for better conditions. Conditions are being improved, though. Our union has hired a man, he can call a man out on a job if he thinks it was unsafe. Years ago, if you said it was unsafe, they fired you.

Oh yeah, every union has a clique. I don’t care what union it is, their own people are going to work more. I mean their brothers and their son and such like that. And as the machinery gets more complicated, you have to learn how to read them. Somebody has to teach you. But if you’re just another person and have no pull, why then you’re not gonna have an opportunity to learn it.

Sure, there’s a lot of colored boys do real good work. You set down with ’em and you have your lunch and there’s no hard feelings. But there again, they hate you because you are something. You didn’t get this just through a friend. You got it through hard work and that’s the only way you’re gonna get it. I was an apprentice and I worked my way up.

My father was a crane operator since 1923. We lived on a farm and he was away from home a lot. So I said I’d never do this. When I got out of the service, I went to school and was a watchmaker. I couldn’t stay in the pack. It was the same thing, every day and every day. It was inside. And being a farm boy . . . So I went to work with my father, construction work, and stayed with it ever since.

I have one son doin’ this work. But this youngest one, he’s pretty intelligent, I’d like to see him be a professional man if he will. Of course, I wanted the other one too. But . . . there’s so many changes now. When I started, to build a road a mile it took you two or three months. Now they can build a mile a day. The work is so much more seasonal because they can do it so much quicker. Your chances of being off work in the wintertime is a lot greater now than it was years ago.

When they put up this new strip on the Dan Ryan,
¹³
they had one machine there that did the work of five machines fifteen years ago. It did it faster and so much better. It would take one man to do that. Fifteen years ago, it took five men and it took all summer. They did it now in three months. I just don’t know . . .

There’s a certain amount of pride—I don’t care how little you did. You drive down the road and you say, “I worked on this road.” If there’s a bridge, you say, “I worked on this bridge.” Or you drive by a building and you say, “I worked on this building.” Maybe it don’t mean anything to anybody else, but there’s a certain pride knowing you did your bit.

That building we put up, a medical building. Well, that granite was imported from Canada. It was really expensive. Well, I set all this granite around there. So you do this and you don’t make a scratch on it. It’s food for your soul that you know you did it good. Where somebody walks by this building you can say, “Well, I did that.”

In coming of age, communications has become an end in itself. . . . We are all wired for sound. . . .

—Wright Morris

A receptionist at a large business establishment in the Midwest. She is twenty-four. Her husband is a student. “I was out of college, an English Lit. major. I looked around for copywriting jobs. The people they wanted had majored in journalism. Okay, the first myth that blew up in my face is that a college education will get you a job.
”

 

I changed my opinion of receptionists because now I’m one. It wasn’t the dumb broad at the front desk who took telephone messages. She had to be something else because I thought I was something else. I was fine until there was a press party. We were having a fairly intelligent conversation. Then they asked me what I did. When I told them, they turned around to find other people with name tags. I wasn’t worth bothering with. I wasn’t being rejected because of what I had said or the way I talked, but simply because of my function. After that, I tried to make up other names for what I did—communications control, servomechanism. (Laughs.)

I don’t think they’d ever hire a male receptionist. They’d have to pay him more, for one thing. You can’t pay someone who does what I do very much. It isn’t economically feasible. (Laughs.) You’re there just to filter people and filter telephone calls. You’re there just to handle the equipment. You’re treated like a piece of equipment, like the telephone.

You come in at nine, you open the door, you look at the piece of machinery, you plug in the headpiece. That’s how my day begins. You tremble when you hear the first ring. After that, it’s sort of downhill— unless there’s somebody on the phone who is either kind or nasty. The rest of the people are just non, they don’t exist. They’re just voices. You answer calls, you connect them to others, and that’s it.

I don’t have much contact with people. You can’t see them. You don’t know if they’re laughing, if they’re being satirical or being kind. So your conversations become very abrupt. I notice that in talking to people. My conversations would be very short and clipped, in short sentences, the way I talk to people all day on the telephone.

I never answer the phone at home. It carries over. The way I talk to people on the phone has changed. Even when my mother calls, I don’t talk to her very long. I want to see people to talk to them. But now, when I see them, I talk to them like I was talking on the telephone. It isn’t a conscious process. I don’t know what’s happened. When I’m talking to someone at work, the telephone rings, and the conversation is interrupted. So I never bother finishing sentences or finishing thoughts. I always have this feeling of interruption.

You can think about this thing and all of a sudden the telephone rings and you’ve got to jump right back. There isn’t a ten-minute break in the whole day that’s quiet. I once worked at a punch press, when I was in high school. A part-time job. You sat there and watched it for four, five hours. You could make up stories about people and finish them. But you can’t do that when you’ve got only a few minutes. You can’t pick it up after the telephone call. You can’t think, you can’t even finish a letter. So you do quickie things, like read a chapter in a short story. It has to be short-term stuff.

I notice people have asked me to slow down when I’m talking. What I do all day is to say what I have to say as quickly as possible and switch the call to whoever it’s going to. If I’m talking to a friend, I have to make it quick before I get interrupted.

You try to fill up your time with trying to think about other things: what you’re going to do on the weekend or about your family. You have to use your imagination. If you don’t have a very good one and you bore easily, you’re in trouble. Just to fill in time, I write real bad poetry or letters to myself and to other people and never mail them. The letters are fantasies, sort of rambling, how I feel, how depressed I am.

I do some drawings—Mondrian, sort of. Peaceful colors of red and blue. Very ordered life. I’d like to think of rainbows and mountains. I never draw humans. Things of nature, never people. I always dream I’m alone and things are quiet. I call it the land of no-phone, where there isn’t any machine telling me where I have to be every minute.

The machine dictates. This crummy little machine with buttons on it—you’ve got to be there to answer it. You can walk away from it and pretend you don’t hear it, but it pulls you. You know you’re not doing anything, not doing a hell of a lot for anyone. Your job doesn’t mean anything. Because
you’re
just a little machine. A monkey could do what I do. It’s really unfair to ask someone to do that.

 

 

Oh sure, you have to lie for other people. That’s another thing: having to make up stories for them if they don’t want to talk to someone on the telephone. At first I’d feel embarrassed and I’d feel they knew I was lying. There was a sense of emptiness. There’d be a silence, and I’d feel guilty. At first I tried to think of a euphemism for “He’s not here.” It really bothered me. Then I got tired of doing it, so I just say, “He’s not here.” You’re not looking at the person, you’re talking to him over the instrument. (Laughs.) So after a while it doesn’t really matter. The first time it was live. The person was there. I’m sure I blushed. He probably knew I was lying. And I think he understood I was just the instrument, not the source.

Until recently I’d cry in the morning. I didn’t want to get up. I’d dread Fridays because Monday was always looming over me. Another five days ahead of me. There never seemed to be any end to it. Why am I doing this? Yet I dread looking for other jobs. I don’t like filling out forms and taking typing tests. I remember on applications I’d put down, “I’d like to deal with the public.” (Laughs.) Well, I don’t want to deal with the public any more.

I take the bus to work. That was my big decision. I had to go to work and do what everyone else told me to do, but I could decide whether to take the bus or the el. To me, that was a big choice. Those are the only kinds of decisions you make and they become very important to you.

Very few people talk on the bus going home. Sort of sit there and look dejected. Stare out the window, pull out their newspaper, or push other people. You feel tense until the bus empties out or you get home. Because things happen to you all day long, things you couldn’t get rid of. So they build up and everybody is feeding them into each other on the bus. There didn’t seem to be any kind of relief about going home. It was: Boy! Did I have a lot of garbage to put up with!

One minute to five is the moment of triumph. You physically turn off the machine that has dictated to you all day long. You put it in a drawer and that’s it. You’re your own man for a few hours. Then it calls to you every morning that you have to come back.

I don’t know what I’d like to do. That’s what hurts the most. That’s why I can’t quit the job. I really don’t know what talents I may have. And I don’t know where to go to find out. I’ve been fostered so long by school and didn’t have time to think about it.

My father’s in watch repair. That’s always interested me, working with my hands, and independent. I don’t think I’d mind going back and learning something, taking a piece of furniture and refinishing it. The type of thing where you know what you’re doing and you can create and you can fix something to make it function. At the switchboard you don’t do much of anything.

I think the whole idea of receptionists is going to change. We’re going to have to find machines which can do that sort of thing. You’re wasting an awful lot of human power.

I’ll be home and the telephone will ring and I get nervous. It reminds me of the telephone at work. It becomes like Pavlov’s bell. (Laughs.) It made the dogs salivate. It makes me nervous. The machine invades me all day. I’d go home and it’s still there. It’s a very bad way to talk to people, to communicate. It may have been a boon to business but it did a lot to wreck conversation. (Laughs.)