What We Learn on the Job

My first jobs were at IBM: four summers during college.

Back in those days, at a time when IBM was flush with cash — before desktop and laptop computers became a thing — any child of an IBM employee who was a National Merit semifinalist automatically was awarded a Thomas J. Watson scholarship. And on top of that, IBM also gave its scholarship winners a summer job paying about twice minimum wage for all four years of school.

As I said in an earlier post, this is how I paid for the majority of my college expenses.

I was thinking recently about two of those summers, which I spent in the same department. (Names of people are changed, though many of them are probably deceased now.)

In my second summer, I was assigned to a department that managed the parts supply to the manufacturing floor. It had two kinds of employees: expediters and analyzers. I don't know why the work was divided this way, but there was a clear class division between the two. Expediters had only high school educations and had worked their way up to their position from something lowlier, while almost all analyzers had college educations and may have come to their jobs right out of college.

Expediters were much more physically active, walking all over the plant to check on things and talk to people. Analyzers stayed in the department looking at data on "the tube" — the dumb terminals attached to the mainframe or mini computer that managed the parts inventory tracking system — and printing out long runs of green-and-white listings to look for problems.

My first summer in that department, I was assigned to work with two men about my dad's age or maybe older, named Bernie and Chucky. We walked all over the plant to check in with the managers of various manufacturing departments and with the parts warehouse.

Bernie and Chucky were kind to me, though I think they were generally annoyed that women had been introduced into the department. They told me there had been either an actual or threatened lawsuit against IBM about gendered division of labor, and after that the company began integrating women into more roles in the company.

There was one woman expediter named Doreen, who was a former secretary. She walked all over the plant the same way Bernie and Chucky did, though she didn't have a partner or a summer sidekick. Doreen was about their age, and she wore polyester pantsuits and sensible shoes. She had glasses. They thought she was all right.

On the other hand, they couldn't stand Georgia, the other woman expediter. She was also a former secretary, though much younger — at most 30, and pretty. She dressed nicely and wore heels. I don't think she did anything to offend them except be herself. To this day I remember Bernie saying about her, "I wish my shit didn't smell." I was still 18 at the time and a bit sheltered. Those words really stuck with me.

Today, I think Georgia couldn't have won with them no matter what she did.

In my second summer in the department, the IBM HR assigned me to work with the analyzers instead of the expediters, which seemed like a stupid decision to me, since I knew how to do the expediter job. The analyzers sat around a lot more, and I was their gopher, which was fine.

There was one analyzer, Joan, who I think came from a non-college background. She provided a bridge with the expediter side of the department. I don't know how she came to be an analyzer, but she was liked by all.

There was a new analyzer, a young woman named Roxie, who came to it right out of college, and I know Bernie and Chucky thought she was a waste of a salary. That did appear to be the case, though I don't remember how recently she had started the job. The other youngish male analyzer, Ward, owned a harness-racing horse, if that tells us anything about his class difference with the expediters. It appeared he and Roxie were dating.

I don't remember what the work was during my time as an analyzer the way I do from my summer as an expediter. I marked up a lot of printouts, I think.

The things I remember the most were the class and gender divisions and tensions, even though at the time they seemed just the way things were.