Maybe
keyboarding reminds me of piano playing. . . how I long to be a boogie woogie
piano player. . . I’ve always had a piano around, just hoping it’d beckon
sufficiently for me to get good at it, but then, that keyboard on the computer
beckons even more beguilingly and. . .
Anyway,
when I worked tempjobs in offices, it was the last hurrah or the last gasp of
the old school executives, the ones who’d bark, “Take a letter, Joan!” or
whatever. Most of the older guys or the senior executive officers had no typing
skills, so they’d write out drafts on yellow legal pads and just hand the
writing to their assistants -- like me.
I’ll go
into detail about him later, but probably the guy with the nicest handwriting
-- or the easiest for me to decipher -- was Norman Mailer. But, he wasn’t an
Accurate Temporaries client. That’s another story -- related, of course, but
later for that.
Even
though some men had horrendous handwriting, I am very good at deciphering
handwritten script (it’s like a puzzle to me) so I did well at drafting copy
for bosses who couldn’t -- or wouldn’t -- type their own.
Not so
when it came to female executives; they’d invariably type their own stuff. The
women bosses were few in number but towards the end of my temping in NYC they
definitely were a force (maybe 1/3 of my jobs were with female bosses by the
end of the ‘90’s.). And then, the younger generation of male executives
(starting with guys MY age) were proficient on the computer; they didn’t need
assistance with typing, either.
Now,
when I first started the word processing/computer typing, I wasn’t so great at
formatting (on WordPerfect, then MicroSoft Word, all versions). But after
years, I got pretty good. . . also on Excel and PowerPoint. But then, I learned
everything on the job and couldn’t have been happier to be working and
learning. . .
But
then, every job I’ve ever had has been a learning experience!
No comments:
Post a Comment