Episode 15: On Being an Underling

I spent a lot of years in college to get away from being the “underling” in an organization.  I’d experienced that subtle apartheid as a secretary in a corporate DC law firm, and I did not like it.  Here I am experiencing it again, some twenty-five years later after two master’s degrees, and I still do not like it.  But the question is:  How important is my ego?  Not nearly as important as it was when I was twenty-eight, naïve, and idealistic—important enough then for me to enroll as a freshman at a state university when I was thirty.  Now, I have to be practical.  I can’t tell them to kiss my rosy red ass and quit.  Obviously, the “Little Me” inside me is annoyed and somewhat aghast.  The “Big Me” sees it as an interesting point in my career—and my life--and a time to reflect on my own reactions to this ego hit.

The corporate law firm in DC had been instructive.  One of the lawyers who hung around with some of my friends at the firm—many of them, but not all, legal assistants (paralegals) as opposed to we lowly secretaries—did not make partner because, he was told by his committee, he “socialized too much with the underlings.”

Mostly, he hung out with young associates like him, but he semi-dated a “floating” secretary—she would work at the firm on her summers off while earning a microbiology degree, so that gave her a step above most of the secretaries.  Most secretaries, unlike previous times, were untouchables in the dating department for lawyers.  Oh, plenty of affairs happened, but none of them I knew of saw the light of day.  Legal assistants, on the other hand, were given a higher rung on the caste ladder because they were required to have a degree, while legal secretaries were not.  Legal secretaries, however, had to type and take shorthand at lightning speeds, skills so valuable our salaries—but not our human worth, apparently—far exceeded that of the legal assistants.  Denise, who sat in the cubicle next to me, had a Master's Degree in Psychology, but she made much more as a secretary than she could in her field.  

I had a few dates with a forty-two-year-old attorney at the firm when I twenty-eight—but he refused to have intercourse with me, demurring in Clintonesque form. Everything else on the smorgasbord was A-OK, though.  Finally he told me, “I’ve dated secretaries before.  I’m done with that part of my life.”  Needless to say, the smorgasbord closed.

My problem is that I tend toward naïveté.  I think it has something to do with my ADHD and other neuroses, but that’s another episode.  I always expect people to treat other people--no matter what their job might be, or lack of job--with basic respect.  I loved how in India, everyone bowed to one another and said, "Namaste"--"I salute the divine in you."  But India, of course, has lived under the caste system for thousands of years, only now banishing it by law (but, let's face it, not by many of the rank and file).

My naivete translates to my job choices as well. Instead of choosing, say, rocket science as my major, I picked English. My dad, after all, was an electronic engineer, and in my far distant past, third grade, actually, I scored in the 99th percentile in abstract reasoning on a standardized Iowa test).  But I loved Literature, plain and simple, and I loved the craft of writing.  I hadn't yet fallen in love with woodland plants and fungi, or things might have been different.

I earned a Master’s Degree in English and then achieved my Dream—to teach college English. I was a professor in a small college in Appalachia, a job that even fulfilled the social worker inside me, the one who’d always wanted to help the disadvantaged in our society.  Our student body included many students recruited from the inner cities, as well as local kids who grew up in mountain "hollers," and I knew no better way of empowering these young people than through reading and writing.  I enjoyed being a professor and even received a modicum of respect from some people (even students, occasionally). 

“A modicum of respect.”  Yes, I realize this sounds like someone entirely invested in her ego.  As I type this now, I can see that I still am, though I’d argue I’ve come a long, long way and can now see, in Buddhist fashion, that it’s all meaningless, really.

Except that I have to work every day, and I can’t meditate the whole time I’m doing it. 

Before reaching (and then, being cruelly separated from) my Dream*, I got a second Master’s Degree in Library Science.  Yes, there is, indeed, a Master’s Degree program in Library Science.  I should have realized I’d chosen another not-so-respected profession (because, I’m afraid, it has typically been inhabited by females—story to come on that) when I heard the snickers over the “science” part of my degree title from others.  Actually, I can’t blame them for that—it’s kind of a stretch.  Library “science” includes many systems and tries to, in scientific fashion, taxonomize knowledge.  Actually, the result is an unwieldy and overly laborious process to catalogue and shelve books—but it works—and for a large print collection, it’s essential.  It is, fortunately and unfortunately, being rendered to antiquity because of searchable information on the Internet and other databases. Yet indexing, first cousin to cataloging, remains a skill librarians are well suited for--and good indexing is essential for relevant results of a search.  A pseudo-science, perhaps.  (A plug here for non-Internet research:  Do not forget print sources of yore and even now when conducting research, or you will miss vast amounts of knowledge.  I do not believe you can know your subject without doing both types of research.)

Shortly after starting work as a reference librarian—a faculty position, mind you—a sociology prof asked if I’d come to his class and tell them  the students about my work.  I was flattered.  I was also teaching English courses at the University in the evening, so I felt comfortable doing it.  But the man introduced me thus:  “We’ve been discussing different strata of society, and today we have a librarian with us.  Now, librarian, as you know, is a pink collar job .…”  I stumbled through the rest of the hour, mostly just mad at myself.  I’d done it again!  Ended up in a position in which others looked down on me, YET AGAIN.

Of course, what position exists that is not looked down upon?  Even the President of the United States gets very little respect this time around.  (Remember when we were chastised and called unpatriotic for questioning one utterance out of George W. Bush's mouth?  So frustrating to see that disaster of a war come back and haunt our economy and Obama's Administration—though he, meanwhile, needs to stop kowtowing to corporate interests as well; he’s been disappointing but is certainly better than anyone else running.)

Doctors are criticized by their patients, and they have their own caste system, I’m sure.  What was the class standing of the guys who ended up (so to speak) in proctology, for instance?  It’s kind of like teaching English.  Yes, I was a college professor, but I taught freshman composition, low man on the academic totem pole.  Grunt work all the way, but utterly, desperately needed to be done well.  Very little respect from other disciplines, even its own—every comp professor wants to jump to lit classes, except for the naïve, deluded ones.  What was my PhD concentration?  You guessed it—composition.  I'm beginning to sound like a glutton for punishment--but I did not choose my career goals with degradation in mind, I assure you.

But because I have chosen these "less than" jobs, I really should not chafe when others look down on me for my menial services as a medical librarian in a hospital.  I can’t feel bad when they ask me to quantify my time.  “Do you have a time card?” I was shocked to be asked in my first meeting with my new boss.   I don’t think she realizes that medical librarians with master’s degrees are considered “professionals”—that reference librarians in universities are faculty.  I haven't said such a thing, of course—and I finally thought, Well, what of it?  She has an MD, and that trumps you no matter what, Girlfriend.  She’s brought that issue up again today, thus triggering this ranting retrospective about respect.

So I started a timetable, and I will list what I do, though it’s difficult to quantify time when you’re conducting research on copyright, for instance, which I had to do today.  But I have to be practical.  At fifty-two, chronically ill, and in a pink-collar job (despite the many men in the field today), I have to buck up.  I’m an underling again after all these years and all this education.  But, again, what of it?  I’m lucky to be working.

Working toward, attaining, and losing a career Dream, a Vocation, if you will, has trained me to be humble, if it's still a little hard, deep inside, to feel that way.  Everyone, I would argue, likes to feel valued.  I want to work as long as I can.  I can no longer afford to take umbrage at others’ under-estimation of not only my abilities but my passion for doing things well.  I can only do things well and hope that respect follows.  And if it doesn’t, I won’t be working much longer anyway, looks like.  Chronic kidney disease (GFR under 60 for the past four months) has been added to my personal Life List.

And if I manage to retire with my cottage, my garden, my woods, and my books, I will have earned all that I need or want to earn at this point.  I agree with Cicero:  "All you need in life is a garden and a library." Jack-in-the-Pulpits, despite the officiousness of many of their namesake, care very little about one’s station in life.  That’s why I like hanging out with them and their woodland pals.  In the meantime I’ll just do my job and expect a future when I will no longer have to, because that chapter of my life will be closed.  I’ve looked at the projected life expectancy of someone with my kidney numbers, and let’s just say that I do not need to spend the next decade aspiring to more respected positions in my career.  But I need every penny I can get while working to put toward the day when I can no longer do so, respect or no respect.

As Carl Jung apparently said, “Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.” Since I'm now, like it or not, in midlife, it's time to turn away from the things of the world, the getting and spending.  I'm ready, if I could just figure out how to pay my mortgage.

* Read "FAIL!!!" episode in three parts--only two written as of now--for the full story.