My first day of work at my new civilian job began quietly on the
morning of January 4, 1971. The bosses hadn’t arrived by eight o’clock. One,
the president Tom Hodges, was off on trip somewhere. The vice-president, Jim
Vines, did not generally arrive until later. The other employees ignored me.
Except for the receptionist, she got me a cup of coffee and
led me to a small office desk that had been squeezed into a corner of the
drafting room. Two drafting tables faced opposite walls of the room with a
larger layout table and map files between them. The receptionist asked if I
wanted to read the morning’s newspaper while I waited for Jim to arrive and
provide further guidance. Four years of military regimen caused me to tremble at the thought. Read the paper at work?
I told her I would look at one of the firm’s publications
that was lying on the layout table. She nodded and left. I took the document
and sat. On its cover I read, “Comprehensive Plan – Hope Arkansas.” It
was the first of such documents I had ever seen in my life, all snazzily set in
green ink on soft-colored paper. Large colored maps were folded neatly within
the pages. I began to read.
I hadn’t moved past the third page when I detected a typographical
error. It presented a simple misspelling, not the “mistake of doom.” The
latter, I was to discover, was the fatal mistake of typing the name of the
wrong city into another city’s document. There was a lot of what they described
as “boiler plating,” in planning documents back then. That’s an expression from the printing world,
referring to language that is standard enough to need to be repeated constantly
and often with no editing. In planning, it offered ample opportunity for the
names of cities to be switched, the deadly sin. Simple typos, such as this one, just
indicted sloppy work.
At any rate, it presented a dilemma. On my first day at
work, should I point out an error that I had detected in less than fifteen minutes
on the job? It sounded cheeky. On the other hand, this was my workplace now and
I must assume ownership of the bad as well as the good. I had accustomed myself
to the military approach of kicking blame for mistakes upward or downward,
never simply sitting on them and waiting for them to hatch.
The man beside me interrupted my wonderings as the lifted
his drafting pen carefully, swiveled around on his stool and asked, “Did you
find a place to park without any trouble?
“Park?”
“Where did you park your car?”
“Oh,” I said, “I walked to work.”
“You what?”
“I walked to work. I just live a little way up toward the
Capitol.”
“You walked to work?”
“I did, yes.”
“You don’t own a car?”
“Oh,” I said. “I do. It’s just more fun to walk, and I need
the exercise. I gained some weight when I quit …”
He interrupted by swiveling his chair and yelling across the
room. “Hey, Paulette, did you hear that? He walked to work.”
She swiveled around in her chair, apparently not having
been listening to us. “You walked to work?” she said, knitting her eyebrows.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you own a car?”
“Yes, but I walked.”
“Harrumph,” she observed, and swiveled back to her work.
“I bought me a new car,” the man said, “when they put me in
charge back here.” And he swiveled back to his work.
With some difficulty, I swallowed what would have been a
perfectly erudite and appropriate response in my previous life, “Why don’t ya’ll
just swivel around here and kiss my military ass?”
Instead, I stared ahead, dumbfounded. This entry into the
new world wasn’t going to be as seamless as I had thought.
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| Wonderment never ceases. |
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