evil Tamara Baum

You know I don’t have anything today, so I am going to slip in a story I wrote to a friend just lately about how I tried to break into the straight white collar world.

After I got my data processing certificate in 1980, I was a little miffed to discover that I would have to write a resume and wear a suit. Well fine, if that was what was called for, I wrote the resume and bought a suit, and did the rounds of whoever seemed like they needed computer programmers, and despite the resume and the suit, nobody wanted anything to do with me.

Hum. My sister was living in San Francisco and surely there were computer programming jobs up the ass out there. I could just mail those companies resumes, but I had this thought in my head that they wouldn’t want to bother with somebody who wasn’t living there. So I flew out there, maybe I changed the address on my resume so that it would look like I was living at my sister’s, I don’t remember.

But the important thing was I would be arriving in person, that would impress them ever so much more than opening an envelope to see my resume. But as it turned out, I never got further than the teenage girl at the reception desk. Nothing doing. I did go to a head hunter in a fancy office. 

Tamara Baum was her name, we had a little conversation, about crossword puzzles I believe, and just some general chit chat at which I thought I was witty, and it felt like we were kind of friends.

But she had nothing for me either and I got on the big jet plane back to Champaign. Back to tending bar at the House of Chin, my dream computer job just clouds in my coffee.

But then there was a phone call. Of course I didn’t have a phone, so probably they called my sister who must have had the House of Chin phone number, so she called them and either I was there or she left a message and I called her on a pay phone. But the thing was, I had a job as a programmer in San Francisco if I wanted it!

Well not precisely, nothing is a sure thing, but Tamara was pretty sure it was mine for the asking, I just had to show up for the interview a few days hence. Well shit, I was almost broke. Paying for the flight to San Francisco would take me down to nothing. And it wasn’t even a sure thing. Should I risk it?

My sister thought I should, my parents thought I should, and really I thought I should. Isn’t that what life is all about, taking risks, following your dream?

I got on the big old jet airliner, and the next morning I was wearing my interview suit walking the downtown streets of San Francisco, looking like everybody else walking to their white collar jobs. Did I look like one of them to them? I was a little afraid that one of them would see right through me, and yell, “You’re not one of us Hippie, get off our sidewalks and go back to where you came from!”

But nobody did, and I got to the place and somebody there told me to sit in this room and wait. And I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and finally after maybe forty-five minutes I approached somebody timidly, and they were like there had been some kind of mixup or something, but they didn’t seem terribly upset by it and ushered me into the room of the great man who would be almost surely giving me my precious computer programming job.

Immediately afterwards and in the years since I have wondered about that long wait. I had been reading these books about interviewing and getting a job, there were all these things like what to do if they asked you what your worst fault was, and there were all these little tricks the interviewers might pull to test you, and one of them was to leave you waiting and if you passively accepted that, it meant that you had no mettle and probably were not anybody they wanted to hire. I have always wondered if that was the case, but I will never know.

Anyway it turned out that the job was not really a computer programming job, it was more like changing the tapes on the computer and keeping paper in the printer, and maybe sweeping up afterwards. And it was no sure thing that they wanted to hire me, in fact it wasn’t even a job yet, just something they were thinking they might do in the future.

Of course I kept my composure, but I was outraged. Those cocksuckers! They had deceived my friend, Tamara Baum, who had then led me astray. The first payphone I came to I rang up her number, wait till she heard about this. But strangely she wasn’t in when I called, and even more strangely she wasn’t in when I called from my sister’s house, and I think maybe I called once more before I figured out what was going on.