Bad job offer in 1981

[Lillith_Fair]

I was looking for a job in North Carolina back in 1981 while my husband was going to graduate school. So I had this interview at a place where the job would have been sitting at a computer screen and selling carpet. I mean, I guess the call would come in “I need 36 square yards of such-and-so carpet” and I would have had to look at a diagram to see what was available and if it could be cut up and used for that room.

Besides the fact that I would have been a disaster at it because of shapes and measurements and stuff, these people were in a small, window-free room and most of them smoked. You know, North Carolina, a great home of tobacco, way before laws about smoking inside.

Of course, I did not even consider taking the job, but now I wish I has asked a few more questions.

“Do you cover the pain and suffering that will come along with the cancer and emphysema, or just the medical expenses?”

“Have you hard of lung cancer?”

“Do you know how to read?”

“How expensive could it be to rent a place with freakin’ windows?”

Jerks.

Also, in the interview there was all this banter about sports. The job was in Raleigh. I had just moved to NC. I did not know that “Carolina” meant “The University of North Carolina” and “State” meant "North Carolina State University. When she said “Carolina” I didn’t know what she meant, and I didn’t care.

Loved Valvano, though. And Dean Smith. Yeah, those were good times. But it took awhile for me to figure all that stuff out. Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Brad Daugherty…

Pretty pointless post…

[Tripler]

Actually, I can relate. . . I had a pretty good job too back in '81: free room and board, plenty of fresh air and exercise. Work consisted mainly of reading “See Dog Run”, trying to learn the alphabet, and flinging cheerios in random directions.

Kind of low pay, but when you get to watch as much Big Bird as you want, I guess it really wasn’t all that bad.

Tripler
Great job, but it was just one of those ‘resume builder’ jobs.
[sub]Sorry to bring it down a notch, Lillith. Just had to post it. :D[/sub]

[Chimera]

Graduated from computer school and got my first computer programming job in June, 1981; programming Cado minicomputers in CADOL, a very stunted form of BASIC that had a pre-defined working storage of less than 2k. LESS THAN 2k, people! And yet we were doing the big 5 apps for small businesses in that!

They offered me $12k a year, which was shit, but I didn’t have any other offers, so I took it.

The first week, the asshole owner pulls me and the other new guy into an office and gives us a lecture on why companies are in business. Allegedly, there are 76 reasons companies are in business, and the first 75 are to make a profit for the owner…HIM. If we can’t do that, we won’t be working there.

Great business man that he was, he initially owned the entire building, which was about 5x more space than we used. So he sold half. Then the whole thing, because it was good money. Then dumbshit found out that the new owners wouldn’t lease him more space when he wanted to expand. Way to go!

His company had one female employee, who had already successfully sued the shit out of him and was really only staying because she had federal protection and thus, ample opportunity to sue the shit out of him in the future because he and his “top guy” were such sexist pieces of shit. They just did not learn from their experiences or “get it”.

What does he do next? He buys an Electronic Typewriter Sales company. IN 1982! PCs have just been introduced, typewriters are fucking doomed!

Not only that, but they had 30 employees, all of whom were women. Every last one of them quit when he bought the company, based on his reputation alone. ALL OF THEM. He only managed to keep one or two of them around on promises of big bucks, and he screwed that up.

We ended up with seriously expensive space (leased by the former typewriter sales company) in a building several miles from our main office, where he couldn’t expand. So he moved us programmers over to the new space, with all sorts of negative admonitions and conditions about us being there.

I got fired shortly thereafter, because I was young and stupid and I deserved it. But man oh man, was that a bad place to work.

For the two (owner and “top guy”), I seriously hope that there is an afterlife in which, for them, there will be no women. When they complain to TPTB, the answer they’ll be given is that since they obviously hated women, they are henceforth spared any contact with women…

for all eternity.