10/07/04’s illustrious band:

Slap Factory

Brought to you by my first job after grad school.

Did I ever tell you about my first post-school job here in the Twin Cities? At that little suburban bunker I’ve come to refer to as the Slap Factory? No? Well, if you’ve ever wondered whether there’s any job worse than retail, it’s customer service. And here’s proof.

The year: 1993.

The situation: Recent earner of master’s degree in English moves to Big City and needs a job.

The skills: Composition, grammar, punctuation, parsing 18th-century British novels, basic page layout.

The obvious solution: A job installing, conducting training for, and supporting pharmacy software.

Yeah, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had worked in my parents’ drugstore during junior high, and I had a few basic computer and people skills, and the head of the company figured that added up to great qualifications. Turns out she was dead wrong. The skill most needed to do the job was an ability to eat poo for up to 12 hours at a time, smile, and ask for more. It’s a skill I never developed.

Employees at the Slap Factory had three main duties. The first was to carry our proprietary software to pharmacies in the metro area and surrounding states and install it on the clients’ computers. This involved extensive travel and a lot of hardware setup, which we carried out while adhering to the company’s business semi-formal dress code. My first installation assignment found me atop a six-foot ladder stringing computer cable through a dropped ceiling while middle-aged men gazed thoughtfully at the hem of my skirt. Having had a proper moral upbringing, I was a champ at keeping my knees pressed tightly enough together to crush diamonds from coal, so Victoria’s Secret was not revealed. But this was just the first of many uncomfortable situations into which the job would thrust me. It was my third day of employment.

The second duty was to train the client pharmacists and their staff in the use of the software. The vast majority of our clients were men in their 50s who were not happy with the changes the digital age was wrecking on their profession and who had accepted computers into the pharmacy only grudgingly. They didn’t want to have to learn yet another new set of skills to use our software -- which was CRAP, by the way -- and they certainly didn’t want to learn from little girls.

That’s right, these guys referred to my coworkers and me as girls always, as little girls often (it was an all-female company). Fresh off the PC plantation of graduate school, I bristled anytime anyone called me anything but a woman. Sure, they made sexist jokes, disparaged our credentials, and openly insulted us in front of staff and customers. But the workplace is no place for displays of temper, or so I thought, so I made a valiant effort to smile a lot during training and cajole the gents into learning something all the same.

Our third duty was to serve as the help desk for the clients once we’d left them on their own with the CRAP software. We answered the phones and talked them through the numerous problems the program suffered. We all made frequent use of the “hold” button on our phones, too, to grit our teeth for a few moments when the callers called us f***ing b*tches for not training them properly. And then we put our smiles back on and sweetly explained how to press “enter.” The boss assured us that yes, we were absolutely required not to protest the verbal abuse, because the customer is always right.

As you might imagine, stress levels in that office ran pretty high. Between the exhausting travel, the CRAP product, 40% of the staff going through menopause, and the turf battles between the smokers and the nons, it was downright tense in there. We all used the F word freely when not on the phone with clients, so freely that I had trouble editing myself when talking to my mother. Add to that the fact that the boss, known as Mom to her dysfunctional family of worker bees (I could never bring myself to call her that), and Marie, one of the more experienced employees, had never really gotten along, and you can understand why I began to feel ill at the thought of heading for the office in the morning.

Things came to a head at a staff meeting one morning about six months after I took the job. Boss and Marie disagreed about something, and the discussion grew more heated than usual. First one’s voice rose, then the other’s. Then one of them stood up. Then the other. Then one came around the table toward the other, who met her halfway. I watched in horrified fascination.

Then Boss thought she heard the F word being hurled at her rather than near her, and WHACK! she slapped Marie across the face.

They began to grapple, and I had to leave my own chair to pry them apart. “Ladies, please!” was all I could think of to say. After a moment’s stunned shock, Marie grabbed her coat and fled the office, Boss’s handprint already bright red on her cheek. Ignoring the –30 temperature, she walked half a mile in dress shoes to a filling station where she could call her husband to come pick her up. She phoned me later that afternoon to say she’d be taking the following day off but would return to work the day after that.

Return she did -- to find a letter of dismissal waiting on her desk. Marie was fired for insubordination. She sued immediately, but I didn’t stick around to see how things came out; I put a few resumes in the mail that very day and was outta there within weeks. So far this remains my most dramatic workplace memory.

Today around the world: October 7 is Goodwill Day in Namibia.

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