CHAPTER 189: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET STARTING OVER AT SIXTY BACK WHEERE I BEGAN 2003

 CHAPTER 189, BACK WHERE I BEGAN?  

I was out at Mercantile Press. Sometimes I would see old Mr & Mrs. Bye shopping in the super market at Branmar, but me never spoke to each other.  It was time for me to move on and find new employment and in March 2004 I did. It was a mistake. If ever one tried smashing a square peg into a round hole, this was such a time.  I don’t know what I could have been thinking.

I  long had social anxiety, especially when it came to the telephone. Since I was a child I hated the telephone, couldn’t stand talking on one. If I  did it had to be kept it very short and I seldom called out. I started with the telephone where you didn’t dial a number, you asked an operator to connect you and we were on a party line, where you could hear other people’s conversations. 

Ironically, I owed much to those old telephone switchboards  After World War II it inspired Florence Utt to start a school to teach switchboards. As things progressed, she expanded her subjects, it was her IBM Tab Operation school I graduated from in 1959.

I wan’t comfortable using such a device as a telephone until I got Apple FaceTime and Zoom. Never had a problem with those. Seeing the people was like being in the room with them.

But I accepted a job as an Administrative Assistant, and it involved more phone work than I cared for. I was given a computer printout go names, and dread, telephone number.  These VIP from his area and I was expected to call them and ask for money.  Two big  no-no’s to me. 1. Calling people I don’t know on the phone. 2. Asking them for money.  I just procrastinated and procrastinated, hoping this chore would somehow go away. 

I was now working at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Center and the big annual charity ball was in the works.

I had a desk on the twelfth floor, what had been the executive for when I came to work there as Wilmington Trust back in 1980. Wow, I had made it to the twelfth floor.   I was okay with organizing the physical stuff and delivering thins to the ballroom for display, but the telephone floated above my head like th Sword of Damocles.  I didn’t like the job and I discovered the manager didn’t much like me.

She gave me  a review at the and of three months, my trial
period, and it wasn’t good at all, although it was criticizing me with tasks in which I had never been involved . One was a computer program that some woman came in daily to run. I had never run that program, but I was taken to task on my review for errors made in it. I was blamed for other things I had nothing to do with.  A week after that review I resigned.

I took a long walk through Wilmington thinking about what to do now. I had started the job run March and I left it  win May. I hadn’t liked the job and I knew I was wrong for it to begin. I did get to check out the Ball before I resigned and I didn’t like that kind of fund raising. I believed the organization does good work, but why the big social Ball to raise funds. 

It is by invitation. They send out invitations to all the VIPs and all shots in the area. The invitations are not chem. They are on very expensive paper and in very expensive envelopes, and everything is engraved mailed first class. These go to well-off and prominent persons. They want these people to purchase a table for the event. The tables closest to the front cast $35,000. The next level cost $25,000. Even the  individual tickets cost more than I could afford.

You get a catering dinner, some dancing and a few speeches for you money. Plus there is a large silent auction where guests can put in bids. They offered quality items, autographed jackets and team tops, a NASCAR ran car  experience, original painting, first class trips and other
items.

My feeling is these are well-off individuals, so they could give a nice donation too the cause and save us the expense of hiring a hall, catering a meal,  having a dance band and collecting the items for bid.  But these are people who want to be seen and get their photo in the society pages. 

As I mentioned the invitations were costly. My manager, who was over the whole office received the boxes of invitations from a printer. She hire a number of young people to stuff the invitations into the engraved envelopes. But as this was being performed someone noticed that the invitations did not include the time, date or place of the ball.  All had to be reprinted at great expense  and then rushed through stuffing in order to be mailed in time that they would arrive at the intended addresses before the actual Ball began. Very embarrassing, a mistake that should have been discovered when the progtam was approved, but wasn’t. 

The manager remained as manager, but I had resigned and no one was able too blame this on me. 

Now Laurel and Noelle had joined the staff of the Delaware Humane Association on A Street in Wilmington, where they would become VetTechs.  In future years.

That happen at JDRF then, I do not know. I was out and about with out a job again.