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Below is a story of revenge. It’s a story of how I discovered how incredibly sweet revenge could be. It’s a story for Kaitlyn Mae for whom this Blog is name, that she know that revenge is bad. But most of all for baby girl, revenge is SWEET.
Before, some background.
Grandmother once worked for Western Electric. Worked there fifteen years in fact. Western Electric was then an “arm” of mighty AT&T. At the time AT&T was a great monopoly that controlled all the phone service, from concept to finished manufactured product.
Western Electric made the phones for vaunted AT&T. There were, in those long ago days, few varieties of phones for the consuming public because, hey, AT&T was in charge and they decided what to offer. Under the guise of insuring that the phones actually worked with AT&T’s phone lines.
The public could then purchase phones in colors which was a big deal beyond the normal black of the era. But it cost an extra buck a month for a red phone.
The day after reaching fifteen years of service, one month after I finished college going on night school for thirteen years on Western Electric’s dime, and a week after the true story below, I QUIT!
Gave them all the thumb (okay, maybe it was the finger) and walked off. One year later the government busted the monopoly.
I made good money all those years as a keypuncher, payroll clerk and quality control inspector respectively. The company paid for my college degree. Now I have a handsome pension awaiting me should I make it to age 65.
Western Electric is now known as Lucent Technologies for those too young to remember.
There used to be a commercial for Western Electric a long time ago. The song used was a play on Arlo Gurthrie’s “Hello America How are You”. Only in the Western Electric commercial the lyrics were:
Western Electric helps you to say hello”
I always loved that commercial.
Forthwith-
Icky-Pick Revenge
To those who say revenge is wasteful, a useless exercise in emotion, I say phooey. In fact, revenge is often a solution to a problem by making it stop. Which happened as a result of my one great entry into the act of revenge. But more important, so important that even the memory causes my heart to hasten and my muse to smile, a proper and well-timed act of revenge often brings an exhilarating rush of emotion as strong and as wondrous as that brought by the mightiest drug.
At least that's how I felt. Which makes me mention that I am a female and I'm going out on a limb here, but I don't see females as the best sex as concerns acts of revenge. Women aren't great perpetrators of revenge is what I'm saying here and I'm not sure why. I do know that myself am solid middle-aged and in all of my life I've only perpetrated one act of revenge but my very female-ness is at the core of its beauty. Female-ness both in terms of the situation upon and female-ness in terms of how great is was to this female who still relishes the memory fondly.
I was but a young lass, bright, ambitious and eager. It was in the midst of the women's lib era and with the mindset of the times, I enthusiastically accepted the offer of a position in the company's quality control department.. A department that until me, had never had a female employee.
Again, I don't know why except that is was a time when the females of the work force tended to clerical and secretarial jobs. Much like today, in fact, though the "revolution" was supposed to change all that. At any rate, I was undaunted. If a man could do it, I could do it.
Which I could.
Though I'll admit to a complete change in work environment for this young lass in that it was right inside of the hot factory and involved such as touching wires together and rolling big reels around. I was eventually able to do the job quite well. Experience makes most of us better but make no mistake, my lack of experience was very evident in myself as the first female quality control inspector in mighty AT&T.
In due course another female quality control inspector, also new, joined the department and now there were two very inexperienced quality control inspectors all about. The fact that we were both female should have been irrelevant. Which, of course, it was not.
For our male colleagues were constantly amused at our female selves getting shocked due to improperly grounding a cord, or struggling to roll a giant reel, or showing a wariness when walking down the cat walks. Two inexperienced males would have been just as amusing but the scenario was perfect for a department of male chauvinists to amuse themselves if not by observation, then by outright nastiness.
Over the months the males in the department became outright hostile. Their hostility, I understand in retrospect, was a combination of the changing times then affecting their own employment lives. At the time I was a widow with a two year old and was struggling as well. I just wanted to get by.
So my female colleague and I suffered the insults, rudeness, cold silences and, at times, outright violence. Sure we complained to our supervisor but Joe, he was a nice guy. Having risen to his position in the "good ole boy" network of AT&T, he had no idea how to handle the problem.
"Keep your chin up," he would tell us with a twinkle in his eye. "They are trying to get to you. So if you let them get to you then they will win."
My female colleague and I would walk away meekly. Why did we have to suffer such acts as telephones left off the hook and silent on the table when a call came through for either of us? That is correct. The male employee would tell the caller "hold on" then simply lay the phone on the table without notifying either of us. The entire department did this. It was a male group thing. Yet here was our supervisor acknowledging that the vast majority of his employees were misbehaving but ordered us to accept it.
We tried, my colleague and I. We really did. We stopped complaining to the boss. We commiserated. Not one male in the entire department would speak to us unless absolutely necessary. They would hide our tools. They made fun of us with the shop supervisors. It was an awful and depressing way to be employed.
I considered giving it up.
One fellow in the department, formerly a total nerd type and himself the butt of mockery until the females took over, took his disdain of the females quite seriously. His acts of hostility were very visible. Visible, noisy, scary and dangerous. For every morning he entered the quality control cage and put on quite the show. He would throw his wire snips across the cage, the heavy things whizzing over our heads, missing sometimes by milli-inches. My female colleague and I would duck and this action, of course, amused the males no end. Which caused the nerd turned hero into a total nut job who would throw tools all around, slam drawers until they broke and throw tantrums at will .
My nerves were frayed. We kept our chins up as supervisor Joe suggested, but keeping them up was making the chins better targets for the tool throwing nerd.
Yet another former nerd, a total male package of dullness, liked to do practical jokes. His gig was scaring the females thus providing his male colleagues with endless mirth. If either my female colleague and I were in a test cage with the door open, the dull package like to slam the door shut behind us. Which caused us to have to phone a shop worker to unlatch it from the outside as the testing cages were designed.
It was a cold day in February that I call my day of revenge and the day ranks right up there with my wedding and the birth of my first child. Fame, fortune and a mighty respect would follow my revenge, which is as it should be.
The sequence of events as they began is a bit blurry in my memory. But the actions that culminated are crystal clear as if they happened yesterday.
It was around lunch time. The shop was noisy and I had a headache. My baby had been sick that morning and I worried about this. I sat at my desk and calculated defective percentages. I was quiet, competently working, bothering no one. There were other elements in my life on my mind but I was functioning, doing a job. Just earning a living. There were no other inspectors in the office as I sat and did the paperwork.
In walks the nerd. Right at the opening of our long, shared cubicle, he chucks a pair of wire cutters across the office, whizzing over my head, setting off an outrage unmatched, not ever in any way, by either the incredible hulk or Charles Manson.
I thought of my sick baby and her dead father. I thought of the peacefulness of an entire office to myself and the soothing regimen of quiet paperwork. I thought of this alleged human being who thought it his divine right to whiz heavy tools over my head whenever he had a whim.
I picked up my wire cutters and sent them whizzing over his fat head. He stood stock still, his tiny brain trying to assimilate my motion of a sudden rise, a quick grab at my desk, my hand in the air, the cutters whispering by his face.
Which was fine with me because I was not done with him yet. I reached to my desk again for the first object in reach. It was a can of icky-pick, a sticky goo used to clean the wires for testing. The stuff had the feel, color and consistency of snot.
I then marched to his desk and began to methodically fill each of his desk drawers with icky-pick. I dumped my entire can in his top drawer and slammed it shut, slammed it hard, for effect.
"Who the hell do you think you are that you can throw tools and slam drawers any time you want, " I screamed. "How about I show you what it's like to work with that kind of behavior."
While I screamed I was grabbing any can of icky-pick I could find and dumping the contents into the nerd's drawer. Slamming, screaming, dumping icky-pic. Soon the action attracted the shop personnel. A nearby shop supervisor came in and tried to calm me down. I was having none of it.
"I will not calm down. I have put up with this idiot's behavior for over six months and now I'm giving him some of his own."
The shop line workers were starting to assemble outside of the cubicle, curious and enjoying the spectacle.
"She's right," I heard one female line worker shout. "Those guys treat those girls awful."
Another voice, male this time, "Darn right. I've seen that guy throwing tools all around that cubicle. If it were me I'd have done what she's doing a long time ago."
The words felt so good. The drawer slamming felt so good. The thump of the icky-pick felt so good. Six months of misery and I delighted that the bad behavior didn't go unnoticed.
Just then my female colleague ran into the office. Her face was pale; I could tell she'd just had a horrific scare.
"Guess what dull package just did to me?"
"My God. What?"
Her fear was palpable. Whatever practical joke dull package had perpetrated, there was nothing funny about it.
"He slammed the door shut on the high voltage cage. While I was in it!"
I could not believe my ears. Of all the horrifically ugly things to do in the factory, locking someone in a the high voltage cage was the worst.The design of the cage is such that a tester cannot close it from the inside. A reel is wheeled into the cage. The inspector then enters the cage, hooks up all the wires to the testing leads, then steps outside the cage to deliver the test. The door can then be closed and the latch put firmly in place. Pressing the test button will deliver 10,000 volts though the wires. Enough to kill a human. In fact, a man was killed in the high voltage cage just a week prior to this incident. He was eating his lunch while testing a reel. He asked a colleague to close the door for him because he didn't want to leave the cage. Somehow, maybe with the help of a moist tomato, 10,000 volts went through his heart and killed him.
Throughout the following week we went to countless safety meetings and a new discipline was in place as regarded all testing cages. Only dull package, maybe he didn't get the message. Because he slammed the door on my female colleague and left her totally trapped.
Remembering recent lectures about not moving if the door somehow closed, she trembled but remained in place. Dull package laughed. Some shop workers came by, saw what was happening, and unlatched the cage.
It was perhaps only 30 seconds of terror but they were eternal seconds. My female colleague had no choice but to stand still and suffer the ridicule of dull package. Dull package must have died and thought he went to testosterone laden hero heaven.
I had my setting in place. I looked outside the shop window. The crowd grew. Nerd was in total shock, his desk drawers full of icky-pick, his eyes wide and unblinking. I heard the shop supervisor tell someone to call the company nurse.
They were taking nerd out on a gurney and dull package just pulled the dumbest stunt of a lifetime.
By this time someone got Joe the nice supervisor on the phone.
"Pat, come on up to my office. Let's talk about it."
What the hell was Joe going to talk to me about? About grinning and bearing? Grinning and bearing dangerous tools thrown over our heads and now being locked in the high voltage cage?
I knew I had the setting. The timing was perfect. Joe came back to the inspectors' cage to confront me in person.
"I want to see (insert whatever the company's president's name was, I forget here)."
Joe blanched. He was darn near as pale as my female colleague and maybe as frightened.
"Come on, Pat. Be reasonable."
"I've been reasonable long enough, Joe. I've grinned and beared it. I've smiled through the silence. I've tried to understand it. I talked to my mother about it. I've called Phil Donahue. I'm being UNreasonable now. Now I'm taking it right to the top."
Looking to the shop supervisor I said, in a quieter voice but still loud enough to entertain the shop workers, "If (insert President name) doesn't come to see me in ten minutes I am going to call 60 Minutes. My wouldn't they love a story about mighty AT&T and their male employees locking innocent females up in high voltage cages."
You know, I think the shop supervisor believed me because he was now paler than both Joe and famale colleague.
Being that this was my one and only lifetime act of revenge, I'm not sure if the sweetness comes from the amazing results or the act itself. Because for sure dumping that icky-pick and slamming those drawers was about the finest time I've ever had.
But after that wonderful day, Joe got a demotion. Two new supervisors were assigned to the quality control department. Management treated me politely. Sure they probably resent the scene I made and I'm pretty sure that if I'd stayed around I'd have went nowhere in management. Still, they had to treat me with respect because, one, I was right. And two, I did have a damn good story to tell 60 Minutes.
Another great thing, all of my colleagues elected me union representative. They treated me with respect and hey, I really think they elected me because they thought I was the best "man" for the job.
Which I was.
The best thing about this wonderful event is my decision to walk away from that world forever.
I'd worked for the company fifteen years. I had a vested pension. They paid for my college degree, earned through 13 hard years of night school.
The day of the icky-pick, AT&T, the "company", whatever my mind's image-became naught but a collection of frail human beings to me. I no longer needed the corporation.
It's been 35 years and I've been on my own ever since.
Sometimes I do temp work. I write and make a few bucks. I am a consultant. I'll do projects.
I'm in demand. I'm free. I have to make a buck and I do.
Because when the chips were down it was me that handled it and from then on, it's only me I count on.
More Reminisce HERE
Kaitlyn Goes on Vacation
Just some pics of baby girl having fun.
KAITLYN LIKES ICE CREAM!More Kaitlyn Mae posts HERE
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