Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

Best job ever, well.  I exercise my right to interpret this assignment broadly.

I am happy to be retired now.  I was never a good fit with my federal employer, for a lot of reasons.  However, it was stable, relatively well paid, and I never could not find a parking place, especially in the last three years, when I took a lot of liberties with marked spaces at NBP 304.  During those last years, I also took on technical writing and editing (which I should have done long before), and my attitude then was markedly better.

But you know I worked elsewhere before I went federal.  That place was College & University Press in Falls Church, and I don’t remember now how I got there — probably through a help-wanted ad in the paper.  I wanted to get into the publishing industry in some way, but I knew nothing about it or even what my role could be.  However it was, they brought me in for an interview at their office at Seven Corners and offered me an entry-level slot “on the phones”, which I found out was where everyone started, except the boss’s girlfriend.

This was phone sales, but we had a legitimate product.  The company contracted with academia to produce alumni directories, which we would then sell directly to the alumni over the phone.  I was very hesitant about that at first, but my reluctance evaporated after I got started.  There was a script we were to follow, and some of my colleagues did all the things we hate about phone salesmen — “Hello, Mr. or Mrs. Customer Name Here how are yew today good good.”

I didn’t do that.  We had to get sales out of these people, and they were more or less willing to talk to us.  We indulged in a polite fiction, that we were calling to “verify” the information they had sent in for their entry in the directory, even if it was letter-perfect (it was easy enough to claim their information had gotten smudged on its way to us, even if we had to do the smudging).  Once we had established that we were looking out for them, the alumni were generally ready to listen while we persuaded them to order.

This is an acting job, I realized (like my confrontation decades later at the Georgetown Financial Aid Office), and I quickly adopted a persona.  I wished to create in the customer’s mind an image of me, a tweedy professor at old Wassamatta U., smoking my pipe while I reviewed Mrs. Veeblefester’s information, when Damnation!  I have encountered an error!  I shall call her up right now and sort this out!

That worked!  I was near the top in sales in the office almost from the beginning, and when a management slot opened up, I was asked to apply, and I got it.  That job entitled me to a small office without a window, but with two doors, and I quickly found out why there were two.  It was the ultimate assignment for anyone who has ever said, “I have detailed files”.

Did I ever.  At its height, the company had about 100 active contracts, and we pushed most of them through about 300 production steps, from the signing of the contract to the opening of a shipment of books from the printer to find the wrong typeface used in the index.  That is why I had “Building a Rainbow” on the wall.

It fell to me and one assistant to monitor all that, with no automated tools beyond adding machines and typewriters (what I could have done with Microsoft Project!).  We devised a 6-page paper checklist that more or less described the status of each contract, and all day long my colleagues came in my two doors with updates and inquiries, or to muse on “Building a Rainbow”.  My predecessor in that job had had a nervous breakdown, but I was able to avoid that with a little more organization.

One problem we were never able to conquer, in those simple days, was that once we had received an alum’s information card in the mail, we were never able after that to locate that card except by happy chance, and we must have had a million of them in trays and boxes all over the place.  Just the other day I thought of a way we could have kept track of everyone, and I proposed it as a thought exercise to a colleague I still have contact with.  “Great, Mr. Carnahan,” she said.  “You’re only about 40 years late with that one.”

Daily the bosses came by, looking for information that only I could give them.  By and by I acquired a sense of how long it would take to shove a particular contract through our system, and could give a heavily-hedged estimate of when the finished product would arrive in the mailroom.  I was just starting to discover traditional PERT methods used in project management, although I had to do it all with big sheets of graph paper and colored pens, and I took that knowledge to the feds with me.  Even lately, with Xerox, it was my pleasure to cross out someone’s garbled prose and explain what a “critical path” really is.

So it was heady stuff for me in my first management role, but underpaid, and after 18 months I had to move on.  By then we had a mortgage to pay and April was on the way, and I could no longer ignore the 43% pay increase the feds were dangling.  I left in February of 1979, with keen regret, leavened a bit by the later news that the company had literally been sold down the river — it was bought by Southern Publishing and moved to Alabama, with some of my weeping colleagues in tow.