For more than eight years, I was a self-employed writer. I somehow strung together several book projects which allowed me to pay the rent at my duplex in Travis Heights—but barely. In early 1998, I was visiting my CPA, Susan Salling, to discuss income taxes. It is the nature of accountants’ jobs to learn more than they want about the lives of their clients, and Susan knew all about mine. She gave me some stern advice: “Stop the bleeding.” I concurred, so I gave up the freelance life (at least on a full-time basis), went out and got a real job.
I was hired as a proofreader/editor at the McElroy Translation Company, located just a few blocks west of the state capitol. This firm, which came into existence in the late 1960s, purported to be able to translate any document from any language into any other. We occasionally got requests to translate a poem from Lithuanian into Yiddish or a birth certificate from Serbo-Croatian into Urdu, but mostly we dealt in nuts-and-bolts things like patents going into or out of English; the other languages were primarily Japanese, German and French.
I spent five years at McElroy, which allowed me to stabilize my finances. It was an interesting place to work, although some of my colleagues had their eccentricities. Most of them were harmless but not always. I recall a young woman named Jennifer who joined the company soon after I did. She was in the word processing department for no more than three months for reasons I will now explain. Jennifer was not only heterosexual (soon to marry a guy named Ben) but attractive. She was slim, and had blond hair and blue eyes. It was her misfortune to work amid a number of husky, brown lesbians, and they were brutal. They treated Jennifer so unkindly that she felt compelled to quit. Had she been inclined, she could have filed suit on the basis of discrimination due to race and sexual orientation—that is, because she was a European-American heterosexual. Let it be recognized that victims and victimizers come in all shapes, sizes and colors.
Jennifer had long since left the scene when our general manager, a lady named Kim, decided to have every person in the company attend a session in “sensitivity” training. It may have lasted a couple of hours or half a day, but I really do not remember. There was speculation that Kim made this decision because it would lessen the company’s vulnerability in case a discrimination suit were filed. Although I sat through the session, I fumed. Quite simply, I found it insulting to be told to respect my co-workers. I already knew that and practiced it on my own.
I don’t think anybody said a word about the departed Jennifer during that little workshop. Had the domineering, brown lesbians been sensitive toward her? Obviously not, but political correctness ruled out that situation being redressed. I found the whole thing offensive and absurd since the deeply rooted assumption was that only European-American heterosexual males—that describes me well—are capable of discriminating and thus only they—we— are in need of sensitivity training.
When I left McElroy, there was a departure interview with a woman who ran an independent human resources company. She had been around for a while and was aware of some of McElroy's “dirty laundry.” She asked me to tell her what I knew, and I could have given her an earful but I declined. I refer not only to the Jennifer episode but to stories about people who were still employed at the company. Again the lady asked, and again I refused to dish. She knew I had some information, so she tried a third time. Although I had no incentive to cover for any miscreants—and certainly not for those women who had mercilessly hounded Jennifer—I wanted to take the high road. I pleaded ignorance.
Add Comment