Nessa's List of Arcane, Obsolete Job Skills

This morning I was pondering the many ways I've made a living over the years, and I realized that I have acquired a bizarre collection of skills, not one of which is practicable or useful in this post-post-modern world. Because many of you reading this were but oocytes when my work life began, I thought I would share the list with you (kinda like, "Gee, Grandma, what DID you do before TV was invented?!" Please note that, in fact, television was invented and adapted into a large, viewable screen size before I was born. However, I did live through the Wizard of Ozian transition from black-and-white to color...and dang it, I still like black-and-white.)

Herewith, the list:

1982: Laundress. Yes, laundress. Every Saturday morning, I was paid $25 for five hours' toil in the basement of a Manhattan restaurant. I washed and dried four loads of tablecloths, napkins, and (no shit) the owner's shirts in silvery industrial machines...and after they were all dry, I had to iron each and every one of them by hand. Which is why, decades later, the palms of my hands are pretty insensate to heat. And why I can still iron a man's shirt like a pro. There's a job skill for the ol' resume.

1982: Supermarket cashier. Polyester three-quarter-sleeved jacket with store logo, a foot pedal to move the groceries forward on the black belt, and here's the real dilly: no scanners. I had to ring up every single itemon a keypad. Throughout that summer, I would wake up in the middle of the night to find my right hand ringing up independent of my conscious mind: 1.99 Grocery, 5.50 HBA, 9.98 Meat, 4.99 Txbl Item....

1983: Operations Assistant. I spent a summer working with my older brother and a hilarious crew of co-workers in a Wall Street computer room. We were responsible for data processing financial transactions for numerous high-end firms (geez, now that I think about it, that's scary). The room was a byzantine array of whirring, humming IBM hulks, exactly like this:


It was windowless and glaringly lit, and every day we went through the same exact paces, as dictated by the mainframe's programming. My mind was constantly racing from the monotony...but luckily my co-workers were inventive (they used to make a baseball bat out of rolled-up greenbar paper, and a ball out of a wad of tape, and voila--instant diversion!)

This job taught me how to operate a punch card reader, a 1960s contraption that endured for a surprisingly long time as a data storage and retrieval method:


I was also the tape librarian, collecting plastic, circular "scratch tapes" from big tape drives and refiling them in numerical order on massive storage racks:


The awesome thing about this job--besides the spontaneous baseball games--was getting paid more than I'd ever made in my life. I bought scads of records at Tower on 4th Street that summer, plus my brother and I had a crowd of friends who worked downtown, so Friday nights were a guaranteed blowout at the Raccoon Lodge and other Tribeca haunts.

1984: Database developer. Another obsolete computer system--the DEC-10--and another repetitive, summer-long task: catalog every single photo in Bowdoin College's Office of Public Information. I actually had a blast doing this; among the hundreds of photos were 19th century glass negatives, pics of every faculty member as a novice, and relics from the protest-laden 1960s. I still use the archivist skills...only, not on a computer with a tiny black screen and glowing, dot-matrixy orange letters.

1985: Film projectionist. Yup, I was the shadowy figure in the flickering little window-box, high above the theater seats, loading huge film reels onto creaky equipment and hoping my manual transitions from one reel to the next would be seamless. I also ran filmstrips--BOOP!--in classrooms. Doing this job made me feel invisible.

1985: Disc jockey. Two turntables, a microphone, and moi, broadcasting jazz over the airwaves. Bowdoin College had a massive vinyl LP collection, and I never tired of fingering the spines in the shelves and finding new/old music to play. Three years later, the station went digital, and hundreds of LPs were ignominiously disposed of, upended into trashcans. Oh! my heart! I salvaged some, but the station managers chucked them faster than I could rescue them. Heathens.

1985: Telephone operator. Ever see those Movietone films of ladies with a clunky headset, seated at a big console full of plugs and holes? That was me, every weekday lunch hour, when I would cover for the college operator. I developed an operator patois: "MmmmmBowdoinnnnCollege," I would say as I picked up the incoming calls. They'd ask for an extension; I would pull up a thick plug, find the corresponding hole with the extension number, and ram the plug home to connect the callers to their party. And even better--once I plugged in, I had to manually ring the extension with a toggle switch. Once the call ended, the line would emit this irritating errrrrnnnnn noise to remind me to pull out the plug. If I fell behind, the console became a befuddling, crisscrossed maze of flexible wires. It was all very I Love Lucy. 

1985-86: Secretary. Smith-Corona typewriters, keys jumpy with electrified juice. Liquid paper and Correctype--lots of it. Index cards. And phones with flashing hold buttons shaped perfectly square.

1986-94: Editorial Assistant. Yet another useless computer skill: laying out a tabloid-size newsletter on a minature Macintosh screen. You learn how to scroll, squint, and cross your fingers when you hit "print".


This job also trained me in manual layout of newspaper advertisements, which required use of a waxer: a handheld metal roller with an electric plug. Inside the roller is a block of wax that's heated to sticky goo (which means it's hot as a mofo. See above for iron-acquired hand insensitivity). To do newspaper layouts, you'd scissor little paper images into the desired shape, run the roller over the back of the paper-bit, then press it into place on the master page. 

I am a master of lost arts, of machinery that clunks and whirs, plastics that are hard and inflexible, metals that gleam with the patina of use and the sheen of oil. My fingers have been smudged with typewriter ribbon, reddened by unsafe levels of heat, and numbed with keypad entry. My first dalliance with minimum wage saw me getting $3.25 an hour.

The world turns.

Sister Grace Agnes

One of the strongest influences in my life, apart from family members, was a woman who routinely bullied and occasionally whapped kids; whose eyes burned with thwarted ambition; whose demeanor was 85 percent sour; whose intentions were simple, if difficult to divine: to elevate her charges whenever and however possible.

You couldn't say that Sister Grace Agnes went about her intentions the right way. In this society, harassing and haranguing students in your classroom is completely unacceptable. Not to mention the open-palmed smacks in the face that she delivered when a student misbehaved.

Moreover, if Sister Grace had taught math, I would not be writing this piece about her. I would have had no reason to seek anything admirable in a tyrant who ruled mathematics, because I despised that subject. But Sister Grace clutched golden keys to the land of my ambition: English grammar. And so, in sixth grade, when I was assigned to her homeroom, I was kind of glad--in a flinching way, because she was definitely the most feared nun at Most Precious Blood School [pause to insert laughter over ironic school name here].

Sister was in her late fifties when she taught us, not much taller than we were, with a dollop of steel-grey hair peeking out of her white-rimmed veil and a piercing gaze. She had a slight limp when she walked, and while she wasn't large in girth, her shoulders were squared off enough to be intimidating. Legend told us, and experience bore out, that she would not hesitate to take a swing at anyone, even the roughest students in the class. And she kept even those kids off-balance, so that order reigned in her classroom. There were times when she smiled or chuckled, and her face would be transformed into someone's daughter, someone's friend. But when that light moment faded, she was all business. As the old-fashioned saying goes, she brooked no foolishness. 

Sister Grace's teaching method never varied from year to year. From Day One, she possessed a set of index cards upon which she had written (in her flawless penmanship) the names of each student. In your hard-bound, black-marble-cover notebook, from Day One, you would transcribe the definitions of every grammatical rule. Sister dictated; you scribbled furiously. And then, you memorized. If you knew what was good for you, that is. Because within a few days of those scribbles, you would be asked to recite the rules she had dictated. "Asked" is not the right verb, actually...demanded. Sister would stand at the front of the classroom with the afore-mentioned index cards held firmly, at viewing distance from her bifocals. And she would bark the surname of a student, randomly, followed by a part of speech. As in: "Martinez. Predicative nominative." And Martinez would be expected to immediately say the definition of that rule, word for word as it was in the notebook. (Only, without the notebook.) "The predicate nominative follows a verb of being and refers back to the subject." (See what a little fear will do for you?)

If Martinez faltered, Sister would flip the card and bark the next name...noting the faltering, so that grades could be rendered later. It was Grammar Boot Camp. And for me, it packed all the thrill of a game show, because I adored the subject matter and strived to know it.

Sister Grace's other major task in sixth grade was teaching us to diagram sentences. Universally, everyone groans about this seemingly pointless exercise, and guess what? I loved it. I was, in fact, exhilirated by it. To me, diagramming was a puzzle that I relished solving, each new sentence a challenge to my burgeoning writer's mind. I never, ever got less than 100 percent on a diagramming test (and we had them at least once a week).

Despite such successes, did I fear this intimidating nun? Indeed, frequently. I dreaded the thought that some minor motion of my hand, some facial expression, some lighthearted glance at another student might cause Sister to barrel down my row and wallop me silly. I saw it happen to many others. My abject terror was such that Sister Grace assigned me a classroom name: Nervous Nellie. Boy, was that fitting for the geeky, jittery kid I was.

So you're wondering where my admiration for this bizarre creature comes in. Well, at the rear of Sister Grace's classroom was a little library. I don't remember any other teachers at Most Precious Blood maintaining a library such as this. It held Scholastic books of the day (nothing too topical, mind you), as well as numerous older books of the Cherry Ames, Student Nurse variety. In a previous blog, I mentioned that my mom resisted my incessant pleas to buy books. "You already have plenty," she'd say. I know now that we were pretty strapped for cash, but it never made sense to me then. Anyway, Sister Grace, for that year, supported my insatiable reading habit by allowing me to take her books home. This was a privilege, and I was extremely careful, never allowing those books to dog-ear or get grease spots at the kitchen table. 

After school, there was a tradition that kids would throng around teachers they liked and walk them down the block towards the avenue, where everyone went separate ways. Someone would volunteer to hold the teacher's bookbag. It wasn't a brown-nose thing, it was more like an informal way to end the school day. Needless to say, Sister Grace had only a smattering of students who ever wanted to walk with her to the convent.

One afternoon, Nervous Nellie found that Sister Grace Agnes had fallen into step alongside her. "You've been reading the books about student nurses," she said to me. A flat statement it was, delivered in her strident voice.

"Y-yes, Sister," I said. "I really like those series." (I did.)

"Are you thinking you might like to be a nurse someday?"

"I don't know...I guess I've thought about it," I said, not accustomed to having adults ask me things like that.

In the slow walk to the convent, Sister proceeded to tell me about how she had wanted to be a nurse as a young woman. (Pre-nun, this was!! The sisters never talked about pre-nun days.) Unfortunately, she contracted polio and became sufficiently weakened that it was deemed she would not be able to handle the rigorous life of a nurse. Thus...teaching.

Thus...the burning ambition that I thenceforth saw in her eyes, thwarted and dulled. 

Thus...my appreciation that she tried, albeit not in the best manner, to at least give her students something: proper English. Which, Lord knows, the streets of Queens were not offering to us on a regular basis.

I found it impossible to defend Sister Grace Agnes to my peers. But many times after that, I walked with her to the convent door. And as the year went along, I came to understand that she had ambitions for me. That was a secret that I held like a jewel. It buoyed me to an excellent high school, and an even better college. Brought me out of Queens, which was a transition I needed to make. More to the point, her support helped me believe in myself. Family members can reassure you all they want; you're never sure if they're just saying that because they love you. But when the woman who rules class 6-305 makes it clear that she knows your worth and expects you to fulfill it, you are persuaded.

Before I launched into this, I googled "Sister Grace Agnes" and actually found a fellow alum of Most Precious Blood who cited her influence:
http://trafcom.typepad.com/blog/2005/11/break_some_rule.html

My fellow alum, Donna, is a writer and an editor. What do you know...Sister Grace nurtured at least two of us. I've e-mailed her, of course, because what are the odds? In the meantime, her blog provides the ultimate capping line for this piece:

"You have to know the rules before you can break them. Amen."