No Job Too Big Or Too Small by Margaret Maher McConnell

No Job Too Big Or Too Small

Like my cousin, Billy, I recall the excitement of finally moving to a “paying” job after lots of (non-paying) baby-sitting stints watching over my nieces and nephews!

So, at 15, I find myself holding my first adult badge of honor….working papers, a document required by the Department of Labor for underage students working during the school year.  Papers in hand, I’m a proud employee of Alexander’s department store on Fordham Road. I will be paid the grand sum of $24 a week for working 6 nights a week, 4 hours a night.

I am assigned to basement shoes where hundreds of pairs of clearance shoes lay in a jumbled mess on big square tables.  Large drawers below the table hold even more.  My job is to stack the shoes neatly on the tables and to make sure the correct size shoes are in the inventory drawers.   By the end of my first hour on the job, I realize this is simply impossible.  My arms are just long enough to reach to the center of the pile and it is the era of spiked heel shoes.  I no sooner stack a line of stiletto heels when a harried woman storms over and tosses half the shoes to the side looking for what she wants.   During one extraordinary lull, I manage to align the shoes as straight as a Chinese army.  Moments later, chaos reigns.  To this day, I cannot try on shoes without placing them back neatly in their box, re-stuffing the toes if that is the way I found them.

My career in basement shoes lasts only three months.  I naively inform my boss that I will not be reporting in on Thursday night because I will be out celebrating “ring day,” the day high school juniors receive their senior rings.  I am promptly fired, never having made it out of the basement.  However, I considered it a moral victory that the store called me back to help with inventory after the holidays.

My vast credentials in retail springboard me into more of an upscale shop named Plymouth’s, also located on Fordham Road.  Again, I work the night shift.  My only eye-opener comes when a handsome older man comes in asking to see some negligees.  I place a white one on top of the display case.  He likes it.  He asks if it comes in black.  I say yes.  He says he’ll buy both but when I go to put them in the box, he tells me he needs two separate boxes and two separate gift cards.  Then he winks.  Uh oh.

Time marches on.  Because I have no car, I spend my freshman year of college either taking the NY Central to White Plains or carpooling with various classmates for 25 cents a ride each way.  With the summer approaching, I decide waitressing could be profitable, particularly at a Howard Johnsons or a “Ho Jo” as it was called.  I am accepted at the Ho Jo’s on Fordham Road, but the day before I am to start, I’m told to report to the Ho Jo in Yonkers on Central Ave.  After a hefty investment in white rubber-soled tie shoes, I don my seafoam and orange uniform, stuff my hair into a full-head hairnet and take the city bus to yet another bus that drops me off on Central Ave.  My bus fare is equivalent to one hour’s pay.  But of course, I will be getting big tips.  Not so fast!  I start on Fish Fry night, an all-you-can-eat affair where people spend hours downing unlimited amounts of fried food until you would think they’d vomit.  The tables don’t turn over, so no big tips.  By the end of the night I am like Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory, stuffing cole slaw with one hand into little white Dixie cups and wiping ash trays with a rag with my other hand.  When the restaurant closes, I’m hoping to catch the last bus for home.  But, I had failed to realize that I had an additional hour of working after closing time to help clean the tables, etc.  Without a car, I cannot work this shift.    A kind waitress and her husband drive me all the way home to the Bronx and my waitressing career is over.   My biggest fear is that my mother, always so practical, will make me wear the ugly rubber soled shoes.  She does not.  I am forever grateful.

By sophomore year, I have finally migrated from Fordham Road.  My summer job is on Lexington Avenue working for Reuben H. Donnelly, publisher of all the telephone companies’ yellow pages.  My job is to count the ads in each of the yellow page books.  I don’t know why they want to know, but they are interested in how many full-page, half-page, quarter-page, full-column, half-column ads each book has.   I sit at a table with two other summer hires in an otherwise empty room, Josh from Dartmouth and Jonathan from NYU.  We have legal-size yellow pads on which we put stroke marks for each ad… half-page?  1,2,3,4, slash….quarter page?.…1,2,3,4, slash.  All summer long.   I tackle some sizable city directories but am in dread fear that they will toss the Manhattan yellow pages at me.  There are no real productivity measurements for a job like this, so Josh, Jonathan and I devise a system where each of us will take turns napping while the other two work and play lookout.  It works out marvelously.  By the time September rolls around, I have earned a good share toward my tuition, but have learned nothing more than to count to five.

Wow.  One year to go and one more summer job to tackle before graduation.  I have an “in” at the Kennecott Copper Corporation on 43 St. in Manhattan.  Marie Clarke, a close friend of a second cousin (Catherine O’Brien,) works there and can get me a coveted summer job by telling her boss that I am actually her cousin.  I arrive that first day to work all summer long with “cousin Marie.”  I know this is ungrateful of me to say this but Marie is a sour puss.  A pill.  We have never met so on my first day I wait to see who will come up to hug me.  I am like the office mascot as everyone is well over 50.   A few of them quietly tell me on the side that they can hardly believe Marie and I are related.  They very much dislike Marie.  So do I, but I remain tight-lipped.  Even fake blood is thicker than water.

I am fortunate the staff likes me because my skills are atrocious.  I am assigned to type short, simple letters such as “Enclosed is your dividend in the amount of blah blah blah.”  I had no commercial classes in high school save one typing course that I barely passed.  Every letter I type has a minimum of 9 carbon copies so with each mistake, I must erase each lower carbon.  My ineptitude is obvious to the staff so I am quickly transferred to the statistical typing group.  I guess my boss reasoned that I’d only need to type numbers.  But, the worksheets are almost 18 inches wide….. like huge excel worksheet created by Fred Flintstone. The typewriter carriages are enormous and you must set all the tabs exactly so it hits the right columns on the preprinted sheets.  You must roll the bar up and down with each line to make sure the numbers settle precisely on the lower line of the box.  It takes me one business day to type one page.  I am transferred back to letter typing.  The Kennecott Copper Corporation would have done better to assign me to work in the copper mines.

Graduation approaches.  My brother, John, is in data processing (in today’s world (IT) at Dollar Savings Bank.   At his urging, I take a programmer aptitude test with IBM when they come on campus.  I have finally found my niche.  When I interview with IBM, I tout my skills in retail, merchandising, the restaurant industry, statistical typing and telephone number counting.  I am hired despite it all.