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.)
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