8-02-12 Survival Jobs for Writer-Musicians -- Starter Job #166 (The Early Stirrings of Yuppie Culture in NYC, Where It All Started Pt. 4). . .

So. Thanks to my close personal Yuppie friend, Kris Skrinak, I was able to get into word processing as a temp. He'd invited me to join him at the Goldman Sachs office where he worked, afterhours, to try my hand at this program (on early PCs of course) called MultiMate. It was pretty primitive and involved a lot of F keys and shifting on the keyboard, etc. etc. A little laminated template on the keyboard was helpful because only if you used it all the time could you remember how to do everything necessary to create good looking, well formatted documents. I learned just enough to get my foot in the door and work jobs where I'd learn to do even more, on the job.

In the 1980s, when you worked in an office as an administrative assistant, we were called secretaries, still. And because I was on the road so much, I had to work, for years, as a temporary secretary (like the Paul McCartney song). My temp agency was called Accurate Temporaries (they're still around, on lower Broadway I think).  

Accurate had a little office in Two World Trade Center on the 21st floor. This was before the high security measures instituted after the first (in 1993?) and second, fatal, attacks on the World Trade Centers on 9/11/2001-- so getting around into almost any building was a breeze. Nobody was stopped on their way here and there -- we had so much more physical and mental freedom. Getting places was so much faster without all the mishigas of the security stops we experience post- 9/11, in 2012.

To get into Goldman Sachs after the workday, I thought, would be difficult -- but Kris figured it all out. I liked the scofflaw aspect of him having his boho writer-musician friend, me, come in and benefit from using the corporate equipment without their knowledge. I admired Kris for possibly putting his neck (and job) on the line to give me a helping hand. If I didn't learn word processing, I wouldn't be getting work in offices. I had to constantly learn and keep up with technology the whole time I did the part time office work gig.

And that's key: always keeping up with modern technology when you want to be useful. Again, I have to thank Kris S. for helping me get to the point where I could go to my temp agency and say to Denise at Accurate: "Yup, I know MultiMate -- I'm available to work for the next three weeks," and get work. Because from then on, it was all word processing -- typing into computers.

Don't recall the exact pay rate, but it was probably around $8 or $9 per hour in the mid '80's. . . and as my rent was between $300 and $400, it worked all right. Not great, but all right. . . . 

8-01-12 Survival Jobs for Writer-Musicians -- Starter Job #165 (The Early Stirrings of Yuppie Culture in NYC, Where It All Started Pt. 3). . .

** FLASH to loyal readers: I'm on the road again now so it's been difficult to keep up with the blogs, but here we are again!  I'll fire off another few & hope it'll keep you in good stead . . . **

Former Yippie leader, Jerry Rubin, morphed from being a '60's idealist to an '80's capitalist, starting a business networking group in 1982. Newspaper columnist Bob Greene wrote an article about Rubin and called it "From Yippie to Yuppie." Even in the pre-internet days, this, of course, did not escape our notice; Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were very big in our eyes as radical type people who also wanted political change in the world.

The fact that the Yuppies as a rule weren't concerned about others who weren't just like them -- who weren't like the rich democrats who had a social conscience -- really irked us. Say what you will about the envy factor on our parts: we at least were working with a social conscience and cared about the have-nots. That whole trickle-down economic theory nonsense sounded ridiculous to us, and we really were hoping that there WOULD be a "New Generation" of people and leaders who cared about all of us, the Yuppies as well as the Poverty Jet Setters, the down-and-out and broken spirited who needed a little hand up as well as the others who already had it all. . . 

One of my yuppie friends who really did care about me was my boyfriend RIck's friend, Kris S. A Business major from King's College in PA (graduated '83), Kris moved to Manhattan with his girlfriend, MaryAnn (or moved with Rick, then MaryAnn joined him). 

Kris had the merriest soul, the best laugh, and a very lovely way with people. He was kind of silly at times, but young -- and one of three brothers: Kim, Kris, and Kyle. Of the three, he was the middle son, and the destined Yuppie. Kris didn't talk about it, but you could tell he was ambitious and wanted to make a mark on the world. He had a job at Goldman Sachs whom he called, "Golden Socks" with a peal of laughter. Sometimes Kris would meet us after work -- he worked in the downtown, Wall Street area. 

One night, we were talking about the newest thing in offices: word processing. The almighty IBM Selectric Typewriter was on its way OUT, forever. Kris said to me, "Lauren, we have computers and word processing at work. I could get you in afterhours* and you could learn it. . . want to?"

(Almost) always say yes! That's the way I live, so of course, I jumped at the chance to learn some MultiMAte on my own. Kris set up a few nights when he was working late, called me up, and invited me down to work on learning word processing so that I would be worth more to my temp agency. . .

* After Hours was also the title of a very funny 1985 Scorcese black comedy movie with Griffin Dunne as a young word processor in downtown Manhattan who went on a ridiculous but scary adventure one night, in Soho. . . almost like life imitating art for me because, except that I was a female, that movie could have been about a nutty night on the town that happened to me. . .