Meador Manor

One of the melancholy François de La Rochefoucauld‘s many maxims that he shared over 400 years ago can be translated: “We arrive at the various stages of life quite as novices.”

I have concluded 40 years of work, 37 of them for Bartlesville Public Schools. As a relatively fresh-faced and inexperienced retiree, I think back to when I was a novice in the world of work: my jobs before I began working for Bartlesville Public Schools.

Tourism Department in 1985

My first job was in the summer of 1985, at ages 18-19. I had applied for a few minimum-wage jobs at local businesses, but a family friend was a Bethany city councilman who knew a state senator who recommended me for a job at the State Capitol Complex.

The first offer came from the State Tourism Department to be a minimum-wage office assistant at $3.35 per hour. I accepted, and a few days later the Tax Commission next door offered me a job at $3.45 per hour. But I’d already accepted the position at Tourism, and I was never into accounting, so I didn’t pursue that.

I was shuffled around to help out in personnel, accounting, payroll, and data processing as needed. I was grateful to have a variety of experiences, never getting stuck in one position for more than a couple of weeks.

My favorite memories there are of technologies that even at the time were antiquated, such as punch card checks that were sorted by a huge mechanism, housed in a 12-foot-long alcove, that was so old that repair parts had to be custom-manufactured by a local machinist to keep it going.

The Xerox copy machines only worked when you plugged in a mechanical counter called an Auditron so that the appropriate department could be billed.

I used an old dedicated Wang word processor terminal hooked up to a noisy 10-megabyte hard drive about the size of an apartment-size washing machine, along with mainframe purchase order terminals. I also used a remote data entry terminal at another facility, working with two fellows for a couple of weeks keying in all of the subscriptions to Oklahoma Today magazine after the manager of the department’s mainframe, who had failed a certification test for a higher-level computer position multiple times, accidentally wiped out its database, leaving only a subscription printout intact.

For awhile I worked with a lady in accounting who had been convicted of embezzlement. But she was still working in accounting and having her pay garnished to pay back what she had absconded with. That was an eye-opener about the strange logic regarding accountability and consequences in some workplaces, especially state government.

While processing purchase orders, I followed procedures and flagged ones that appeared to be in error. On one occasion, my administrator ordered me to override my flag on what I calculated to be a ridiculous number of ceiling fans being ordered for one of the lodges, without a reasonable explanation. I wondered what that was about. A few years later, she was fired, then rehired, then demoted for failing to deposit checks and warrants found in her office, and eventually promoted to revise policies and procedures. The logic of it all again escaped me, but the shenanigans were far above my pay grade, as the expression went.

I learned that I disliked repetitive office procedures like data entry and processing purchase orders. One solace on such days was that in the Will Rogers building they piped in Muzak, and I could think about where we were in the service’s 15-minute cycle of Stimulus Progression. It was also evident that it was programmed to play foxtrots — smooth, melodic instrumentals with a consistent 4/4 time signature and a slow-slow-quick-quick rhythm — after lunch when the workers tended to get sleepy.

Some found the Muzak annoying, but when I spent a couple of weeks at the remote site keying in Oklahoma Today subscriptions, I missed it and resorted to listening to tunes via a cheap earpiece on a transistor radio.

For a couple of weeks that summer I was trapped in a windowless interior room with a lady who always ate a smelly lunch at her desk. I never ate lunch in the office, taking advantage of my 30-minute lunch break to escape the building. Sometimes I walked through a tunnel to the capitol cafeteria, where I might be lucky and get to sit near the venerable and colorful Frosty Troy, a firebrand journalist who was acerbically funny.

But I couldn’t afford to eat in the cafeteria every day, and at the time I had an ingrown toenail that made it painful to walk. So other times I would go out to my car and eat a sandwich, reading historical novels set in ancient Crete and Greece by Mary Renault, which I had to complete by the end of the summer in preparation for a seminar on ancient Greece at the university. I was an Engineering Physics major at the time, but I could count it toward humanities credits.

A low point was coming back in from lunch one day to work in the stinky interior office and, just as the smell from my office mate’s lunch was dissipating, having the door guy come in. He was a fellow with limitations whose job was to cycle through the entire capitol complex with a wire brush, scrubbing the ventilator grills in the countless doors. He appeared every couple of weeks, and he was rank. He was never around for long, but his scent lingered.

High points were any out-of-the ordinary missions. One I enjoyed was when the state had instituted changes in its liquor licenses, and everyone had to come to the capitol to get a new license. I was sent over to the Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission to get new licenses for each of the state lodges. There was a line of dozens of restaurant and bar owners stretching way down a long corridor outside the commission office, resigned to a long and tedious wait. They watched incredulously as I limped past, too young to buy a drink, gained immediate entry into the office, and came back out shortly afterward with a bunch of licenses. What a jerk!

Another time I was told to go pick up some boxes being delivered from the lodges via the bus. I was told to take a delivery van to the downtown bus terminal, but I discovered in the parking lot that the van had a manual transmission, and my only experience with a clutch and gear shift had been half an hour in a driver’s education simulator. I went back in and shared my dilemma. The lazy guy who had given me the task then came out with me and drove the van downtown, and we unloaded boxes out of the cargo bins of a passenger bus into the van. He was a funny and effeminate fellow who complained about my work ethic. “Jesus! Don’t you know that if you finish a job quickly, they just give you more to do?”

Another time a senior accountant asked me to create a table summarizing some data. They had no personal computers with spreadsheet software, and the Wang word processor was busy, so I sat down with a pen and ruler to create a table, and then I used a calculator and electric typewriter to arrive at and type in the many figures. When I gave it to him, he was so impressed that he wanted to hire me at a higher wage as his assistant, but I demurred, noting that I was heading back to college in a few weeks. I couldn’t imagine working in that inefficient and technologically outdated office for more than a few months.

Lessons for this novice:

• It is sometimes not what you know, but who you know, that matters.
• Antiquated methods can still work and may be preserved by people who prefer comfortable routines to efficiency or improvement.
• Accountability is often lacking, so set your own standards high and live up to them. Prepare to be disappointed, but not surprised, when others don’t meet your standards, but never let them talk you down to their level.
• Variety is the spice of life.

Scholars Programs in 1986-1988

My next job was as a National Merit Intern at the University of Oklahoma from 1986 through 1988. Dr. Steve Sutherland led Scholars Programs and had recruited me to OU.

My girlfriend and I were both in Scholars Programs, which had monthly events throughout our freshman year, and I enjoyed visiting with Dr. Sutherland and his colorful secretary.

One day Dr. Sutherland was griping about a fancy plotter he had purchased which neither he nor his secretary could figure out. I offered to take a look and created some transparencies with nice graphs and charts for a recruitment presentation. Steve was so impressed that he asked me to work for him part-time, arranging for me to receive a stipend each semester from the OU Foundation. Knowing my work ethic, he left to me the timing and frequency of my appearances at the office. I rewarded that trust by helping reprogram databases, creating charts and graphs with the fancy plotter, checking grades for scholarship renewals, and eventually serving as an enrollment advisor to members of the President’s Leadership Class and some of the incoming National Merit Scholars.

A former graduate student had set up a dBase III database of scholarship information, but he had left the university. Steve asked me to reprogram it. I had never used a database, so that was an interesting challenge since the world wide web didn’t exist as a resource. He was delighted that I figured it out.

A year later, he paid the university’s computer gurus a great deal of money to have a new database programmed on the university mainframe, which needed a four-letter acronym. He named it MERT, saying it stood for “Merit”, but I knew that Steve’s middle name was Merton, so he was having some fun.

Later, when he needed a health fee waiver database, he refused to pay for what he called “the Cobol priests” to create it, saying they drove him crazy charging him exorbitant fees to just make a tiny edit here or there. I remember him exploding, “Adding one @#$%ing field on that screen costs me $500!”

So he offered me an extra stipend to program a database for him, which he wanted to run unattended in the main library for students to access. I knew that would require something quite robust, so I subcontracted my best friend, a computer science major at OSU Tech in OKC, to help me create one. Steve bought a Compaq Deskpro computer, and we set it up on a table in the library. A decade later, when everyone was worrying about Y2K bugs, I realized our database would have been broken by the turn of the century, but I trusted that it was long gone by then!

Steve was a smart and funny gourmand with an outsize personality. He made a point of hiring the first man to ever be a secretary at the university, accepting that fellow’s sexuality, and when he was a student, Steve had been the first white member of the historically black fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, at his university, risking a much-needed scholarship. I always admired his acceptance and support of the socially marginalized.

One of the perks of being in Scholars Programs was getting to enroll before everyone except the football team. I never had to worry about a class being full, and in my internship role I guided new scholars through the enrollment process. Right after being named the Outstanding Sophomore in Engineering Physics I had changed my major to science education, and that would have meant losing access to the engineering computer network. However, with my mastery of enrollment, I was able to override the system and enroll in a zero-credit-hour Engineering Computing course and retain access.

One of the longest legacies of my time at Scholars Programs came about when the secretary was out and I had to type up some of Steve’s dictation. The secretary used WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS, and I found I loved the precise control it gave with its hidden codes. WordPerfect grew to have 50% market share by 1995, but it was then rapidly eclipsed by the inferior Microsoft Word for Windows. While I learned Word as well for when I needed to collaborate, I stuck with WordPerfect for my own documents for three decades, up through version 17.

Lessons for this novice:

• Try to hire smart self-starters who are intrinsically motivated and will independently do good work. When they’re performing well, stay out of their way. You don’t need to micro-manage people unless lived experience shows they need guardrails or guidance.
• Be real and have fun at work.
• If the system is biased, bend its arc toward justice. If it won’t bend, stop asking permission and just break it if that is what it takes to do what is right.

Work Lessons: Substitute Teaching in 1989

For the first five months of 1989, I was a substitute teacher at the three high schools in the Putnam City school district while searching for a full-time physics teaching position. I never knew if I would get an early-morning call to go sub, so every weekday I got up early, showered, and waited.

I’d had a marvelous student teaching experience in physics at Norman High School, but substituting in a variety of high school classes was quite different. I had to learn how to deal with students who had zero interest in a given lesson and acted out, being confronted hour after hour by classes with students testing how much mischief I might tolerate.

I had great success substituting in physics and calculus, and of course enjoyed various honors classes. I remember filling in for one of my former English teachers, who had no idea I was substitute teaching. I handed out various sample essays the students were to read and analyze as models of exemplary writing. I was surprised to see one of my own essays in the mix, and wondered if any of the students might recognize their substitute teacher’s name on it and inquire. I was amused that no one did.

The worst classes were the ones where a teacher left no lesson plans. I had never liked physical education, and I remember subbing in that one day with a gym full of kids and no plans. I gathered them together, stood up to my full 5’8″ height, squinted at them, and pointed at a rack of basketballs, the only thing in the gym with us.

“You’re going to play with those balls today, and the rules are: no bathroom visits, no hurting anyone with a ball, and if a ball even gets near me, you’ll all end up sitting silently in the stands hating me.”

I was pleasantly surprised when the entire day went by without incident, but I made sure to never sub in PE again.

Lessons for this novice:

• Be upfront about expectations and the consequences if they are not met, and always follow through.
• When a student acts out, isolate them from an audience and provide options.
• When you’re being challenged, try to stay calm, polite, and firm.
• Always leave a substitute with a good seating chart and clear lesson plans, and be thankful if they are followed.

I was glad to land a full-time physics position at Bartlesville High School in August 1989, and I learned plenty of additional lessons over my 37 years in the district, but what I learned from those first three jobs served me well for four decades.

Now I am a novice once again, so let the lessons begin!