The Greatest Job
My first job was working as Assistant to the Registrar at Luther North High School in Chicago. This job essentially made me the most powerful student in the school although no one else really knew it. I entered all of the grades into the computer. During the summer I worked with one or two others plus the Registrar and put together each and every student’s schedule for the year. I assigned lockers and locker keys and had access to every student’s master locker key in the office. I worked in the book store during the summer school days and took inventory. I took summer school payments from the public school kids who took summer school there. I answered the phones in the office at times and did other data entry work that the Registrar needed done. I even had an office although it was really just a kind of desk in a back room but it served well as a relatively private office.
The thing about it was that the Registrar, my boss, was such a great guy to work for. He had a great sense of humor. He trusted those he had chosen to take this particular job and then trusted his instincts. He didn’t stand over your shoulder and micro-manage you to death. As long as you did the work you were asked to do in a timely manner and to the best of your ability he pretty much left you alone.
I got the job through one of my longest and bestest friends, Tim. Tim’s a guy I have known for a long time and is a more valued friend than I can probably every truly convey. Tim’s a guy I trust. Tim had the job before me and we lived not far from each other and took the same city bus to school and we got to know each other. He offered me the job to work in that office with the Registrar during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. It was perfect timing because my father had been on me to find a job that summer anyway. My world was retail-bound before the grace of Tim and this wondrous job. They pay wasn’t a lot but it was steady work for the summer and it was good work.
My dad never quite understood my love for this job. It didn’t pay as much as working the summer in the candy factory where he worked. It didn’t pay overtime. When there wasn’t any work to do sometimes I got a day off and it was a day off without pay. I remember telling my dad that I would have a day off, a Wednesday I think, and my dad rolled his eyes and snarled, “with pay?” No, it wasn’t with pay but that wasn’t the point as far as I was concerned.
While there was sporadic work during the regular school year the busy time as the Assistant to the Registrar was the end of the year and the summer. The school would get hot in the summer. There were only a few places that were air conditioned and since the Registrar was like me and hated the heat he was always working in one of them. So, I was always cool no matter how much like an oven the rest of the school became during those summer months.
When we were working on the student schedules we would sequester ourselves on the far side of the building, usually in the English Department offices. We would hand-write each schedule. We would work by class. We used this strange system of cards with holes and punches and rods inserted into the holes and, well, it’s hard to explain. Only after we spent weeks plowing through and writing and re-writing each class onto each schedule card would we then enter those schedules into a computer to provide a student with a print out of their schedule when the year started.
We were isolated. As I got more experience we were left alone a lot more. There were times when we were left, Tim and I, to actually determine where a class would go and then sort and write them in all by ourselves. What Tim and I usually did was get the work done and then go down into the gym and throw basketballs around.
It was great because you got to know the teachers on a personal level. They would come into the office and talk to the Registrar about their lives and their students. You got to see teachers as people and not just teachers. Once they realized they could trust you they wouldn’t hesitate to talk about these things even if you were around. You were thought of as a kind of equal and that was very cool.
There was no back-biting and back-stabbing. There was little in the way of office politics. The teachers at a parochial high school do not make a lot of money. They are there because they have a deep-seating passion for teaching. They are doing what they love and they are not doing it for riches and getting to some middle-management position. Of course, I am a believer that all other careers come from being taught well so that teachers should be our highest paid workers.
The people I worked with back then never used words like “metrics.” They didn’t run performance checks. You showed up and you did your work and that was all that matters. If you did it well you got a compliment. If you didn’t you got constructive criticism that helped do the job better and not a threat that you would be served your walking papers. There was an effort to make things better and not just accept what was handed down to you. You were treated with respect even though you were maybe half the age of most of the people you were working with.
The problem is, of course, that this completely spoiled me for the realities of working in the real world. It did not prepare me for companies that expect you to sacrifice all that you are and every spare second for their behalf and then speak out of the other side of their mouths and talk about “work/life balances.” It did not prepare me for people so blinded by a desire to climb up a corporate ladder to nowhere they were willing to sacrifice family and friends along the way.
Corporate life is so empty. People work so hard to achieve so little. I long for those days during these hot summer months. To be making minimum wage and yet enjoying every moment of my job is something I yearn for at times. Rather than gray cubicles, complaining and whining employees and constant harping on performance metrics I long for a punch card and a metal rod.
Trust me, that isn’t as perverted as it sounds.
