First Professional Job

I was never much of a dancer, but the redhead in my arms insisted, so I found myself on the dance floor.  It was my first company Christmas party and they had paid for a great get-together.  It was yet another first from my new dream job.

My dance partner was a new friend from work.  I was still a new guy on the manufacturing floor.  I was a PC board tech, a scope guy, who used oscilloscopes to find and correct problems on PC boards.

She was a Quality Control auditor, and her various tasks brought her to our team to validate that our boards worked as required before moving them on to final assembly.  She was spunky, friendly, very helpful (which is important to us newbies) and very much of a flirt – kinda like me, so we got on wonderfully.

She snagged me as I arrived and dragged me onto the dance floor.  The floor was packed with couples, most of whom had already spent too much time at the bar and their dancing showed it.  Because my 21st birthday was still months away, I had to stay sober but agreed to let the company president buy me one drink.  I’ll never forget how he paid for my two-dollar drink with a fifty dollar bill – and that was in 1975 dollars mind you – gracious!  I’d never seen one before.

So, we danced – well – at least she did until suddenly, a guy from a nearby couple, disengaged and turned to yell something at her. Between the loud music and the moving mass of well-alcohol-lubricated humanity around us, I didn’t understand a thing he said, but he was clearly angry and yep, very drunk. With his back to me, his arms flaying, a fist appeared at the end of his right hand, this got the attention of two larger guys nearby and, with no more warning that you would get from an action-movie scene, I was in the middle of a fight.

Seriously? A fight? Here? Have any of you even graduated from High School?

His vitriol and wrath were focused on my dance partner, Great! Just great, which meant that now I was involved. For the moment, she was in my care, so it was time to man-up and protect my damsel-in-distress.  I had no clue how to manage such things but awkwardly grabbed his arms from behind and tried to hold them while pulling back to put space between him and Redhead, who now had a look of shear panic.

He was more than angry, and his strength surprised me. It had to be mostly adrenaline because he had way more strength than his small-man body should have possessed, so I tried to kick his knees forward to drop him to the floor. It partially worked and he struggled to regain footing. I was about to lose him when those two guys, who clearly knew what they were doing grabbed him, got him under their firm control and dragged him away.

Whew! We were both saved by these strangers who I’d never met or saw again.   Thanks guys!

This first real job provided me with all kinds of “firsts”. My offer had a very short fuse between acceptance and start date, so I had to move from small town Petaluma to the still-emerging world technology center of Silicon Valley in less than 2 weeks. My life went into fast forward, and I was surprised to wake up that first morning in that first apartment where just as suddenly, I owned my first batch of kitchen utensils, bath towels and (mostly passed down) furniture. Equipping the kitchen and bathroom were fully under my control. If I dropped my underware on the floor while changing – it stayed there until I picked it up.  Shocking!

As my first real job, I had to parse my first HR benefits package. I had my own power and phone bills to pay. My ‘dream job’ was just full of ‘firsts’.

You may have read elsewhere how I transitioned from trade school to this company making computers – well, it was my dream job with my best friend, Joseph. We learned a lot about this new thing that was not yet named ‘adulting’. We even had a contest running on who could open the most buying power in credit cards. Could there be anything more adult to do?

On the other hand, juvenile stunts still had their appeal. I was really enjoying Redhead’s attention and one morning, I found myself with an empty container of Quaker Oats, one of those big cardboard tubes and thought to have some fun with it.

At work, there was a gal who did the daily mail distribution with a small pushcart. Normally, it was full of those big multi-use yellow envelops where you crossed off your name and added a new one when you wanted to send something to someone else.

But today, I thought it would be funny to anonymously address the Quaker Oats tube to Redhead with a note inside that read, “Nothing is better for thee than me,” the tag line used in all their commercials, and I signed it, “The Quaker”. She’ll never track it back to me and we could enjoy her confusion searching for the sender.

Joseph was standing with me, when I saw Mail-gal, running across the floor well before her normal arrival time, with my cylinder in hand. I paused our conversation and told him to watch. He had no idea what was going on, “Just watch.” I said. Mail-gal found Redhead and gave her the package. From across the large room, we watched as she opened it and the two of them burst out laughing, then paused as Mail-gal shrugged and shook her head. Redhead lowered the package and yelled out, for the whole floor to hear, “GARY WILSON – WHERE ARE YOU?”

Joseph turned and asked, “What did you do this time?”

“How did she guess it was me?” I replied – deciding to ignore his question. And just that easy, I was known to the whole floor. Mail-gal then ran over to me, laughing as she described what a great joke that had been, how no one had ever mailed a Quaker Oats tube before and how Redhead knew immediately that it had to be me.

That epic Christmas Party was only about 4 months away. I would have been wise to take vacation or go backpacking instead. My best friend, Joseph, resolutely proclaimed, “You deserve any fallout you get from that stunt.”

That floor provided me with lots of more normal friendships. One great guy taught me how to melt Styrofoam with solvent and then hang-dry to produce the most convincing, drippy, non-real boogers imaginable.

There were also some rather spooky folk running about. One short pudgy guy was given a rolling desk so he could move to wherever he needed to be. It was never clear to me what he did because he mostly studied his Jehovah’s Witness bible. He was friendly enough, but kinda creepy because, while I expected him to vigilantly try to convert me, he preferred to always guide any discussion to women’s breasts. I recall one afternoon when he was completely taken with some movie he AND his wife had watched where a well-endowed female character took an arrow to her left boob. He went on and on and on about how realistically it had been filmed. Okay – I think it’s time to get back to work.

There was another gal, a peer to Redhead and kind of a wild nut. One day she brought brownies to share and several of their group made too big of a deal to get me to enjoy one with them. I’m not a big fan of brownies but took one to be polite. Satisfied, they wandered back to their area, I downed the brownie to be done with it, and wondered what the big deal was. They seemed to have singled me out for this gracious sharing rather than offering brownies to everyone. It’s probably nothing. Need to get back to work because I’m really stumped by this dysfunctional board. Finally, one honest soul stopped by and asked if that gal had indeed given me a brownie. “Yea, why?”

“I wouldn’t eat it if I were you. They were laced with marijuana.”

“Ulp! You’re kidding right?”

Other than this assault, I’ve never consumed a recreational drug. Who does something like this? I questioned. Sigh — yet another first. . . I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering if I should be angry and worrying about what weirdness I was going to experience and just prayed that it would not be public dancing or singing. Brrr! But nothing happened. So, I started worrying if I was so non-normally that a dose of marijuana made no noticeable difference. Maybe she just lied to everyone about doping those brownies to see if anyone acted out. Hmm.

After several months I began to fit right in with the ebb and flow of work and fun. I learned from someone else’s mistake about hard boiled eggs in one of those early microwave ovens and how to almost get thrown off the employment roll, by accidentally disrespecting the guard gal who stood watch over the employee-only entrance.

Back in these days, our badges were simple clear plastic sleeves into which a hard company card with our photo was inserted and sealed in.

I noticed how easy it might be to open up that sleeve with an X-Acto knife and replace the photo. So, I cut out a near match headshot of a young buck deer and secured it over my own picture. Then I ran around with my badge on my collar for at least two months.

We were always friendly with the guard gal. She had, I thought, a great sense of humor until one day I tired of waiting for her to notice my doctored badge and made up some excuse to wave it in her face and – wow – you should have seen her eyes double, nae – triple in size.

Our friendly guard gal transformed into a storm of angry woman voice, hair and uniform. I quickly promised to undo my deed and reported back to her within the hour with a fully restored badge. Surely, I thought she would get the implied joke of what a “dear” I was. Perhaps she mistook my joke as mockery of her job – hmmm. That was the first and last time I tried that trick, but I did notice, with a grin, when newer badge technologies made this stunt impossible by printing the photo right onto the badge. Note for future reference, security people have a limited sense of humor.

One of my final stunts still brings back warm memories that underline what friends are for, was one day when my buddy, who smoked at the time left his cigarette burning while he walked off to do something. I’ve never been fond of smoking and was always on him to quit.

By the time he returned I had disassembled the computer he was charged with testing and set that still-burning cigarette beneath the open card rack and rebooted the system. By the time my friend returned, there was a barely noticeable trail of white smoke rising from his system. We chatted and progressed our work quietly until I heard him explode with a loud, curse-laced outburst.

I turned to watch and enjoy his scramble to power-down the system and begin the search for whatever had caught fire. There were several PC boards that used a type of capacitor which, if installed backwards, would explode, spreading their innards over a 12-foot burn-radius and stink up a lot more space than that. They were not too dangerous, but the protocol was, if you didn’t catch the problem before one exploded, then you got to clean up the mess. So, Joseph had good reasons to find what was happening and quickly. He began yanking boards from the quiescent system. As the fans spun down, the smoke kept coming and with no fans, it was now coming up in earnest. He finally all but stripped that system to bare metal and finally got down to discover that someone had duped him with his own cigarette. By that time, he was pretty worked up and sweating with concern – illustrating once again the value of good supportive friends. We were all gathered in the next test bay laughing at him.

I may well have been the first to try that stunt and it kinda made him famous for a while which got me out of the spotlight for the whole Quaker Oats stunt.

Oh, and about that big fight at the Christmas party, shortly, we were back at the table with our teams, Redhead was directly across from me – looking almost as rattled as I felt. “Who was that guy?” I asked.

“He’s – (suspicious pause) my husband. . . ”

“W-what?! Your husband? Seriously?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joseph grin with satisfaction. Was my best friend really going to abandon me in my time of distress? Yep – it’s what friends do for friends.

So, this is how my best friend supported me through learning yet another first lesson.

Always check for a ring.

When I complained to him about his lack of support he mocked me with , “Nothing is better for thee than me. . .”

Queue a long sigh of relief for having survived the whole experience.

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