Judy's New Job

After we finally settled into our new apartment in Austin, I went to the campus to see what the deal was with my job as a teaching assistant.  Someone in the English Department office told me that there was a place to apply for jobs on campus, so Judy and I checked it out.  She decided to apply for a job in the Computation Center.  

If you click the link, you might wonder where the building is.  That's because you can't see it.  It's under the mall.  Or it was when we were there.  They needed a place to keep those giant computers cool, you see.  The picture on the left gives you sort of an idea of what the big computing room with the mainframe was like.  You can see more pictures of the old days in the computing world here.  Times have changed.

Judy didn't work in that room, however.  She was a secretary.  In those days you had to sign up to get computer time, and there was a waiting list.  I'm not sure what Judy's duties consisted of, but one of them included keeping tabs on computer time, scheduling it, and billing for it.  There were other duties, but that was the big one.  When she took over the job, she discovered that her desk was covered with stacks of paper.  The woman who'd left had been three months behind in the billing.  If you think Judy was daunted by that, you'd be wrong.  In two weeks she'd cleared the desk and caught up with the billing.

In a rational world that feat would have endeared her to everyone, but we don't live in that world.  Some of the other secretaries resented it because it made them look lazy.  According to Judy, some of them were lazy.  Two of them became her friends, but one of them never cared for her, and the feeling was mutual.  This one, let's call her Ann, might have been lazy, but she was clever.  I admired her for one trick in particular.  On Fridays about three o'clock she'd turn on her desk lamp and spread some papers artfully on the desk.  She'd put her reading glasses and a pen on top of the papers.  She'd light a cigarette and put it in the ashtray (you can tell how long ago this was).  Then she'd go home while everyone else had to stay in the office until five.  The bosses never caught on.

One of the others I liked for a different reason.  She was from one of the little German communities to the southeast of Austin and had grown up speaking German.  Let's call her Estelle.  She had an interesting accent and manner of speaking.  For one thing she was very literal about her hair.  She didn't talk about getting her hair cut.  She said she was getting her hairs cut.  Accurate but not idiomatic.  

One day Judy told me not to pick her up until after five.  She wanted me to park and come in the office because she had something to show me and didn't want to do it when anyone else was around.  I didn't know what was up, but I went by the office a little after five to be sure everyone else was gone.  Judy took me into the copy room and showed me a sign over the plug for the copy machine.  It seemed that the cleaning team had occasionally unplugged the machine to plug in their vacuum cleaners or something, so Estelle had put up a sign to solve the problem.  It said, "Do Not Unpluck This Cord."  I wanted to cross out the "Un," but Judy wouldn't let me.  We laughed about that sign from time to time for more than 40 years.