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Friday, August 24, 2012

8-23-12 Survival Jobs for Writer-Musicians -- Starter Job #187 (Working Temp in NYC: What is so goshdurned great about TYPING, anyway? Pt. 2)


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!



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