When I first began to job hunt I always hoped I wouldn't get the job. I had to nag and bribe myself into office buildings: Go on in, you coward, I would say, go in, you slob, and when you get out you can have coffee and something fattening at the drugstore.
Because whenever I faced a prospective employer the prospect was utterly implausible. Had I been born, lived through chicken pox, measles, adolescence and a B.A. degree to spend the rest of my life in the office of the Better Bundling Blanket Company, shut up with this stranger and concentrating on his or her weird little preoccupations? I would be there forever - or a year, which amounted to the same thing. Could this type across the desk really give credence to such a fantastic notion?
This was not conceit. I knew I couldn't do most of the things they expected of me. It made me feel sincerely humble, in fact abysmal. And the last thing they wanted was me. They wanted something else, which, I gathered from reading magazines, was neat and alert in a linen-look, color-secured, Askron-and-Wonderlon, Stretcherized, Testerized, crease-resistant, water-repellent, novelty-weave suit, which wore a light floral cologne and colorless nail polish and washed its hair, its girdle and its powder puff at least once a week. It had written a job-hunting letter saying it wasn't interested in money but in learning about the Better Bundling Blanket Company and how to promote its interests. But they might have to take me for some good reason such as they weren't offering enough money to get the something else, and if they did I knew they would gobble me up, snap their jaws shut, and I'd be lost forever.
Psychic states communicate themselves. It was not a bit surprising that without fail I didn't get the job. I helped. When they said, "Do you think you would be able to _________?" I said, "No."
Out I would come, knowing I had failed again, happy as a clam in my relentless unemployability.
I might have made a life of never getting jobs if job hunting hadn't been so uncomfortable. It rained. My feet were tired. I had no place to go. People asked me and asked me if I had a job yet. I got broke.
There came a moment when my guard was down. Before I knew it, just like everybody else, I had a job.
The first week is awful, like being married but with nobody making love to you. You don't know what anybody is talking about or where anything is, or who the people are who call on the telephone who get mad if you don't, and your desk chair snags your stockings, and nobody is ever going to have lunch with you, and there you are, the lowest rung in the Better Bundling Blanket Company, and you are nothing, nothing, nothing.
But time passes. A certain ease creeps over you. You have a definite place to go when you get up in the morning. You begin to get mildly interested in that special high-ply wool they use in Better Bundling blankets. You're nothing, but so is everybody else.
This might be called Phase Two. Phase Two can last for years, and many people live out an entire life in it. Employers should do their very best to keep them there, even to getting them new desk chairs.
But sometimes, after a variable lapse of time, you switch to Phase Three. You begin to sense that your original instinct, like most original instincts, was right. Before you got into the Better Bundling Blanket Company you were Jane Doe, nothing special, but yourself. Now you are something else: Miss Doe in the New York Branch, or Miss Doe, J.B.'s secretary, or-the end- Our Miss D. In spite of social security , collective bargaining and the suggestion box; in spite of clean washrooms, the office Christmas party and the Billing Department Girls' Bowling Team - your employer owns your soul.
Don't argue. Of course he does. For instance, when does your day start? Not at 7:00, when the alarm rings, but at 5:00 p.m., when you leave the office. It's a very short day, which stops around 10:30, when, in the most uproarious gathering, something begins signaling to you and you realize it is the B.B.B. Co. needing your sleep. There are Saturdays and Sundays? Saturday, you wash all those things you're supposed to wash if you're a nice, clean girl - I mean career woman. Sunday is a day of rest, and besides you have all that ironing to do. So they give you two weeks' vacation? Anyone who has ever had a two-week vacation knows it is very cleverly timed: it takes at least one week to stop being Our Miss D. and another to get ready to be her again. There's barely time to sandwich a set of tennis in between.
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