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.
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