My visit to corporate America

Upon discharge from the Army in 1962, I needed a job -- and immediately. I found one at Burroughs Corporation on the basis of my four terms at Cal. Tech. I worked in a section that oversaw the expenditures on various corporate projects. We kept records, did accounting tasks, kept statistics, and wrote reports.

I started hanging out with several older employees, perhaps because we all liked to get a drink after work at the bar just across the street. It catered to the corporate crowd. You drew a punch card from a machine at entry, which gave you your happy hour price for a drink.

This was my first exposure to all those characters in the fiction of Updike and Richard Yates and many others, those living "lives of quiet desperation," stuck in a job, stuck in the corporate world because they are so much in debt, working at jobs they don't particularly like. All of them had lost dreams. One, a tech writer, wanted to be a literary man, which I talked of becoming in a year or so, returning to college with this goal. Wayne wanted to be a writer. Now he wrote manuals. He was cynical, lonely, and stuck. I met a lot of guys like him in the corporate world.

My boss, however, was a smiling happy and religious man who seemed to love his work. He also liked my work and entrusted me with greater responsibilities. Nonetheless after a year at Burroughs I decided it was time to leave and go back to school. The section threw me a great going-away party with two presents: a case of selected imported beer to remind me of life with a paycheck; and a case of the cheapest beer they could find, to remind me of life as a poor student.

On my last week, on a day when my boss was home sick, an emergency situation demanded his attention. But he wasn't there. I asked if I could help and was virtually ignored but later I discovered what the problem was. On my own, I looked into the matter, which involved how certain corporate reports were distributed. I made a flow chart from what I learned and presented it to my boss' boss "as a going away present." A few days later, with my boss back, I was called into a meeting with him and the big boss. I was offered an attractive promotion, so impressed was the big boss at my scrawled flow chart that exactly answered his question. A considerable raise was involved. Here was my chance to be a corporation guy. No thanks. I became a poor student instead.

Another Burroughs story. I liked to come to work early. I got more done when nobody was in the section. I was on the time clock and many times I got so involved in work I forgot to clock in at the start of the day, so my boss would have to fill in a form to set it right. This got to be a pain in the ass. Even worse, arriving early, I was able to park in the lot near the entrance. I drove an old rundown Chevy. After a few weeks of this, I was told by the security folks that I had to park at the rear of the empty lot, far from the entrance. My car was a bad reflection on the corporation.

I learned a lot at Burroughs, mostly about how miserable so many people are in the workplace. Take this job and shove it. But most stay stuck.

In this regard, it is absolutely astonishing to me how few 9 to 5 jobs I've had in my life -- none since the mid-80s! I somehow survived -- even with a considerable bar bill in the old days, I survived. Wonder of wonders. The most fun was when I was living on grants, being paid to write without a deadline being attached to the money. Complete freedom. The worst was much of the rest of the time when I was surviving as a writer, mostly freelance work. The most stressful existence I can imagine.

Part-time teaching is a nice compromise, a bit of security with most of my time still my own.