NOT IN A MILLION YEARS!!!

21 June 2002

Bob called tonight.

I can't remember the last time I'd heard from him. Years and years ago.

Bob is an attorney here in town for whom I worked part time back in the early 1980s, when I was doing fill-in part-time work whenever I could get it. It was a step up from working at The Argus a give-away newspaper, which was owned by a shady character who just up and left one day, leaving the two employees without a job, and holding bad checks.

After The Argus (or more properly the Arrrrrggghhhh-us) went belly up, I answered an ad that Bob placed in the local paper. We hit it off right away and it seemed like a nice congenial place to work.

It was a dark wood-paneled office, with deep plus carpeting, a large "liberry" (as he always pronounced it), and several secretary desks scattered around. I was hired to do transcription (surprise, surprise).

His field was subrogation --insurance work. We did a lot of cases of accidents where there were uninsured motorists involved.

And we did the tar kettle case. The tar kettle case went on for years, and resulted in new court rules established for this county.

Briefly, a shoe store (I think) was having a new roof put on. The guy who owned the tar kettle parked it between the shoe store and the next store. The tar kettle caught on fire and resulted in many thousands of dollars in damage. I can't remember now which side Bob was representing. But the brief he submitted to the court was over 300 pages long -- we'd worked on it for months -- and after it was submitted, the judge in the case made a rule that after that time, no brief could be more than 100 pages.

I never did find out what happened in that case, but I sure learned an awful lot about the quirks of tar kettles!

But Bob was an interesting character to work for. He epitomized the term "male chauvenist pig." Oh, it was all very polite and things like that, but there are tales of the secretaries he would chase around the "liberry" table. Whenever you had to meet with him about anything, you would be called into the "liberry" with the door closed. I suspect I escaped his attentions because of the amount of extra padding I had. People didn't make a big stink about things like that then. I don't know that he'd know what to do with someone if he actually caught her.

When he wanted to do something nice for an employee, he would never give cash. He would send you to a store to pick out a nice outfit for yourself. Then you had to come in and model it, give him the bill, and he'd pay for it.

He never tolerated chatter among the employees, "the girls" (he never thought of us as women. even the women who were close to retirement age). It sounds like a nice thing to do when you hear that whenever someone came back from a vacation, he would send us all off for lunch, on his dime. Actually, the reason was that he'd rather pay for lunch for 10 women than to have us exchange personal comments during the work day.

For some reason he let me get away with murder.  I remember the day I told him off.  It was the day of his first grandchild's christening.  Bob was at the office (it was a Sunday--yes, he would call me to work on Sundays.  The man worked 7 days a week), and he was grumbling a lot about how he had to go to the damn christening.   I finally couldn't take it any more and exploded.  "This is your first grandchild and this is a big day for your family.  Now you GO to that christinening and you SMILE!"  And by golly, he did.

I didn't have regular hours. I was an on-call transcriptionist and the day I finally told him "thanks, but no thanks" was the day he invited me to his house to give me my assignment for the day. He was going to be in court all day and he was afraid that in his absence the other "girls" might talk to each other. He wanted me to sit in the office, pretend to work, and take down the name of everyone who made a personal comment to anyone else. I told him I couldn't do that and I didn't work for him for a long time after that, my choice.

I did go back to work for him briefly. I had started another on-call job with a typing service and Bob asked me if I could work for him again, on call. I knew it was a mistake from the get-go, but I said I'd do it (I was even worse about saying "no" in those years than I am now). I lasted about three days. Being back in the "liberry" and in that tomb-like environment under all his quirky rules just made my skin crawl. I managed, somehow, to find the nerve to tell him I just couldn't do it any more. When I walked out of the office, it was into a sunny day and I felt like I had just had the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders. I never worked for him again.

He supposedy "retired" several years ago, but as a workaholic, he could never give up work completely, and so he kept his office open and did...who knows what...

Periodically I see him around town and we smile at each other. I never heard a word from him after the kids died, though he always read the paper from cover to cover, so it's unlikely that he would have been unaware of their deaths.

Tonight, out of blue there he was on my phone. Not so much as a "how are you?" or a "what's new?" out of him. His life has been turned upside down, he says, because his part time help had the nerve to fall in love and decide to get married, so he's looking for someone who can work part time.

He gave me a long lecture about how he realized that most women either didn't want to work ("they want someone to support them") or wanted a career. He was looking for that rare woman who would be interested in only working part time, who might like a little more money to put in her purse, etc. He hoped that I'd have some suggestion for him.

I listened politely and told him that I'd give it some thought. He told me that he didn't want to insult me, but that if I found him someone, he wanted to pay me a finder's fee.

When we hung up, I thought about it all right. For half a second. In the first place, I really don't know anybody who is looking for a job, and in the second place, even if I did, unless I really disliked that person a lot, there is no way I would subject her to Bob, his liberry, and all of his quirks.