Workin' At Travelers Aid-ISS Revisited: (2)

 After so many decades later, I now can only visualize slightly the dictaphone-typist/transcriptionist area of the Travelers Aid-International Social Service [ISS]'s two-floored office in the many-floored East Side Midtown Manhattan skyscraper building, in which I spent most of my workday; or the basement area of the building, to where I would take the elevator down once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And there spend my 15-minute morning and 15-minute afternoon coffee breaks away from both the desk I worked at and from the three or four co-workers who were also working as dictaphone-typists/transcriptionists, at desks within a few feet of me.

What I can still remember and visualize a bit more than how the work space area and the basement setting looked are some other workers in the Travelers Aid-ISS dictaphone typist/transcriptionist pool, as well as the four ISS social workers whose dictation tapes I spent transcribing each workday.

Of the two dictaphone-typist/transcriptionists whose work desks, electric typewriters and dictaphone machines were nearest to my work desk, one was a white, culturally straight-looking woman, who always wore a dress to work each day and who seemed to be in her early or mid-50s. Occasionally, she conversed with me in a friendly way at the beginning and end of the workday; and during the rare times in the workday when there wasn't some social workers's dictation tape--of a prospective adoptive child's case history and report on the suitability of the prospective adoptive parents--or some social worker's correspondence, that needed to be transcribed and typed-up.

Although she was a liberal Democrat, New York Times newspaper reader who, by the 1970s was anti-Vietnam War as well as anti-Nixon, and didn't seem less friendly towards me, after I had let my beard and hair grow long again and revealed that, despite looking culturally straight when initially hired, I was, in actuality, some kind of hippy-freak guy in his 20s, I felt we had little common intellectual interests.

And since, besides not feeling, like I did, that working 9-to-5 as a dictaphone-typist/transcriptionist job under the U.S. capitalist economic system was a form of wage slavery, she was also a woman to whom I wasn't physically attracted; perhaps because she was the then-older white woman that most men at that time would likely have considered neither "pretty" nor "ugly", but just "plain-looking."?

The other dictaphone-typist/transcriptionist whose work desk was closest to my work desk was a young white woman with black hair, in her 20s, from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who possessed a face that most men would have then considered to be "pretty". And I might have come to be physically attracted to her, despite her still coming to work each day still only wearing either a skirt or a dress and never slacks or jeans, if she had indicated during the workday that she was interested in getting to know me or that she shared any of my values, beliefs, intellectual interests or political/philosophical views.

But by the end of the first week, my impression was that this white co-worker in her early 20s had quickly decided that I wasn't someone she wanted to know better, because she already had a boyfriend who was still living in Scranton; and, while now living alone in New York City, the only kind of men then in their 20s she would likely want to know better would be the culturally straight white business-oriented executive or future executive types or male professionals, who were by then earning more money than she or I then earned as dictaphone-typists/transcriptionists. And only white men who would also eventually be interested in marrying her, having children and supporting her, by filling some kind of job slot that produced a weekly salary check large enough for her  to be able to escape from the 9-to-5 office work world she found dull; so that she  would be able to just be a stay-at-home mother raising children, like her own mother had been.

So, many decades later, I can't recall having any particular conversations with this particular culturally-straight white co-worker in her 20s from Scranton, Pennsylvania during the whole time I worked at Travelers Aid-International Social Services in the mid-1970s.

 

Workin' At Travelers Aid-ISS Revisited: (1)

 After spending three or four days visiting a woman friend in the Midwest, who was then working for some Midwest campus town lawyer as a clerk-typist, I eventually hitched a ride with a white, short-haired, long-distance truck driver, who seemed to be in his 50s, at a break-down lane near one of the Ohio Turnpike entrances.

And the truck driver drove all night with me sitting next to him and keeping him awake by conversing with each other about our respective lives, his oppressive working conditions and the state of U.S. society in the mid-1970s--until we reached the unloading dock of a wholesaler in central Brooklyn, who resold meat and chicken to New York City supermarkets.

At the Brooklyn meat and chicken wholesaler's unloading dock, I ended up--in exchange for my free ride--unloading all the boxes of meat and chickens the truck driver had brought in his truck to Brooklyn from his Omaha, Nebraska pick-up point, while the truck driver stood and watched me unload his cargo for him, seeming to be grateful that he wouldn't have to risk hurting his aging back while unloading, himself, all of the heavy boxes which he had delivered.

And, afterwards, I got on a subway train and returned back to my slum apartment in Red Hook, by the Brooklyn waterfront, in late morning and quickly fell asleep for the rest of the day.

But by the next following Sunday, I had given myself a haircut, shaved off my beard and dug a thrown-out classified "Want Ads" section of that Sunday's New York Times newspaper out of one of the on-the-street-sidewalk garbage pails on Court Street in Brooklyn; because I needed to find a new 9-to-5 wage-slave job situation again, in order to obtain the money for the next month's rent.

Prior to late 1974--when the Wall Street bankers started to intensify their effort to push the City of New York's municipal government's eventual Fall 1975 drift into bankruptcy and subsequent cuts in NYC government city services, mass layoffs of NYC government workers, increases in NYC subway and bus fares and ending of free tuition for CUNY matriculated college students residing in NYC--a white male office worker could still get hired for some kind of permanent clerk-typist-related private corporate sector job, rather than just for a temp clerk-typist-related private corporate sector job. As long as you were still in your 20s, dressed-up in a suit and tie for your job interview, had short-hair and no beard, and falsely indicated on your job application that you were only a "high school graduate with a few years of college," rather than indicating that you actually were a college graduate with a B.A. in the liberal arts.

So when I noticed a want-ad in the Sunday New York Times classified want-ad section, which indicated that the Manhattan office of the Travelers Aid-International Social Services  [ISS] was advertising an available permanent job position opening for a dictaphone-typist/transcriptionist, I telephoned the Travelers Aid-ISS personnel office early Monday morning, from a Manhattan telephone booth inside Grand Central Station, to get a job interview at its Midtown Manhattan eastside office arranged later that same day.

And when I telephoned the following day, on Tuesday, the Travelers Aid-ISS personnel manager who had interviewed me the day before, to ask if Travelers Aid-ISS had decided to hire me for the permanent job position I had been interviewed for, the Travelers Aid-ISS personnel manager, in a friendly way, informed me that I was hired and should report for work on the following Monday.

The Travelers Aid-ISS personnel manager who hired me so quickly was a culturally straight-looking white woman who seemed to be in her mid-30s and whom most men would likely have considered neither particularly unattractive nor particularly attractive on a physical level.

But after I demonstrated that I could then type over 60 words per minute with no errors on my 5-minute typing test, and indicated that I had had some previous experience working as a dictaphone-typist/transcriptionist for a few months at one of the Downtown Manhattan courtrooms, transcribing probation/social worker reports, the Travelers Aid-ISS personnel manager related to me in an even friendlier way and appeared eager to hire me by the end of the interview; even without taking the time to check the references or accuracy of what I had written on the job application she had had me fill out, before I took the typing test.

Perhaps because I was either the first applicant she had interviewed for the dictaphone-typist/transcriptionist position and/or the first applicant for the permanent job position who had passed the the typing test and had some previous experience as a dictaphone-typist?

Or perhaps because I was not only the first qualified applicant she had interview, but was also an office work job applicant in the mid-1970s who may have then still possessed some "white skin privilege" in NYC, in relation to how some NYC business and non-profit organization personnel departments then still decided which people to hire as their office workers? (Despite all the then post-1970 U.S. liberal Establishment's rhetorical claims about how purportedly committed U.S. corporations and non-profit organizations were to implementing "affirmative action" programs in the1970s that would finally eliminate racial discrimination against Black office workers and Black professional white collar workers in their hiring practices by the and of the 1970s.)