In some ways, I've been a working adult for the normal amount of time -- since I graduated from college, I've had under a year, total, of unemployment, and most of that has been spread out in one or two month increments. And yet, in other ways, having bounced from graduate degree to graduate degree, my history as a Worker, as one of the Employed is unusually tenuous and temporary. I've held a series of temp jobs and part-time jobs, and rarely have I held any job that might be described as "career-track."
When I came to the realization about six months ago that I am, at this point, pretty much a career secretary, it was a surprise. I remember (and I think I've blogged about this before) a phase when I was little -- maybe five or six -- where I would play at being a secretary. I would lay out pencils and paper and generally pretend to be organized. I didn't have a lot of idea of what secretaries did at the time, but now that I've been one for so many years, I wasn't too far off. Pretending to be organized eventually develops into being organized, and being very very organized (and having lots of pencils and paper) is kind of the secretary’s primary task. That and typing, which I also played at once we got a typewriter.
Actually learning to type was a little bit agonizing when I embarked on it the summer before ninth grade by using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing-- still the only actually Mavis I've ever encountered -- but by now I find typing tests, somewhat reassuring. Here is a skill in which I am almost totally confident I excel -- perhaps not by the standards of the seventies or even the eighties, but certainly by today's standards. Taking a typing test reaffirms it -- of all the things in the world, this one --an actually valued skill -- I am good at.
There are a number of satisfactions to being a secretary. There’s the organization, for one. To someone of my particular bent, knowing that you have the mandate and the opportunity to keep a whole job role tightly under your control is extremely satisfying. You know where the stationery is and when it needs to be ordered. In your keeping, in a little box, is the spare front door key. Through your phone, through your ears and your eyes, and your voice, passes much of the business of the day – you’re a gate, as much as a gatekeeper, transferring business from one place to another. You’re the server, organizing some packets of information and sending them out where they need to go, and keeping others for whenever they might be needed.
And there’s the discreteness of the job. I am, as it turns out, one of those people who like a job you can leave when you go home and pick up again in the morning when you come in. That’s a kind of neatness too. The idea that you spend much of your life at work, so it needs to be meaningful, relies on an understanding of human lives as narratives, with work being one of the most important stories we tell with our bodies, with our time. But if your life is instead like a drawer, full of differently shaped and textured objects, work is simply one among many – in my case a dull, polished stone – certainly not as shiny or exciting as, say, the cat’s cradle of my friendships or the curved shell of my marriage, but with no more importance than those things either, and with no sharp edges or reaching strings to impinge on anything else.
And then – and this might be the key given my particular personality, there’s the way a secretary is both more and less than a person. This is, of course, both an advantage and a drawback, but I’ll think about the advantage side today. As the receptionist or the secretary, you’re the first face of an organization. When someone phones in, it’s your voice they hear, your understanding they must address in order to get where they’re going. When someone comes in the door, it’s your desk they see, your eyes they meet, your hand and voice that tell them where and when to proceed. At that moment, you are the organization. You’re its network and its voice. But then, of course, that also makes you less than a person, than a personality. As a facilitator, a server, a network, you’re not an individual, but a set of gateways and storage areas. In a sense, we all operate that way – in culture at large women, particularly, are often seen as conduits through which male aggressions and connections pass. But in my job role (and it is no accident that this is a job role that is almost always coded female), that kind of betweeness is built in.
And I’ve always been a connoisseur of the between. Although some of my affection for airports has dissipated after having flown quite a lot in the past few years, I still find myself fascinated by their contradictions – the place that’s only a space between leaving and arriving, a place where people can’t help but sit and eat and rage in close proximity to one another. Now that I live in a country so much farther north, dusk and dawn seem even more dramatic to me – by this point in the year, the sun seems to set continually from eight o’clock to nearly ten, and dawn begins to insinuate itself on night as early as four o’clock. I haven’t yet ceased to find these changes amazing – they are a great consolation for the changes of the seasons, and make you realize how important seasons actually are.
So I suppose in some way it’s no surprise that I’ve ended up in a job where I am constantly expanding and contracting the parameters of the self. In my personal world that negotiation has been one of the primary concerns of my life. No wonder that I have found a way to work within it.
When I came to the realization about six months ago that I am, at this point, pretty much a career secretary, it was a surprise. I remember (and I think I've blogged about this before) a phase when I was little -- maybe five or six -- where I would play at being a secretary. I would lay out pencils and paper and generally pretend to be organized. I didn't have a lot of idea of what secretaries did at the time, but now that I've been one for so many years, I wasn't too far off. Pretending to be organized eventually develops into being organized, and being very very organized (and having lots of pencils and paper) is kind of the secretary’s primary task. That and typing, which I also played at once we got a typewriter.
Actually learning to type was a little bit agonizing when I embarked on it the summer before ninth grade by using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing-- still the only actually Mavis I've ever encountered -- but by now I find typing tests, somewhat reassuring. Here is a skill in which I am almost totally confident I excel -- perhaps not by the standards of the seventies or even the eighties, but certainly by today's standards. Taking a typing test reaffirms it -- of all the things in the world, this one --an actually valued skill -- I am good at.
There are a number of satisfactions to being a secretary. There’s the organization, for one. To someone of my particular bent, knowing that you have the mandate and the opportunity to keep a whole job role tightly under your control is extremely satisfying. You know where the stationery is and when it needs to be ordered. In your keeping, in a little box, is the spare front door key. Through your phone, through your ears and your eyes, and your voice, passes much of the business of the day – you’re a gate, as much as a gatekeeper, transferring business from one place to another. You’re the server, organizing some packets of information and sending them out where they need to go, and keeping others for whenever they might be needed.
And there’s the discreteness of the job. I am, as it turns out, one of those people who like a job you can leave when you go home and pick up again in the morning when you come in. That’s a kind of neatness too. The idea that you spend much of your life at work, so it needs to be meaningful, relies on an understanding of human lives as narratives, with work being one of the most important stories we tell with our bodies, with our time. But if your life is instead like a drawer, full of differently shaped and textured objects, work is simply one among many – in my case a dull, polished stone – certainly not as shiny or exciting as, say, the cat’s cradle of my friendships or the curved shell of my marriage, but with no more importance than those things either, and with no sharp edges or reaching strings to impinge on anything else.
And then – and this might be the key given my particular personality, there’s the way a secretary is both more and less than a person. This is, of course, both an advantage and a drawback, but I’ll think about the advantage side today. As the receptionist or the secretary, you’re the first face of an organization. When someone phones in, it’s your voice they hear, your understanding they must address in order to get where they’re going. When someone comes in the door, it’s your desk they see, your eyes they meet, your hand and voice that tell them where and when to proceed. At that moment, you are the organization. You’re its network and its voice. But then, of course, that also makes you less than a person, than a personality. As a facilitator, a server, a network, you’re not an individual, but a set of gateways and storage areas. In a sense, we all operate that way – in culture at large women, particularly, are often seen as conduits through which male aggressions and connections pass. But in my job role (and it is no accident that this is a job role that is almost always coded female), that kind of betweeness is built in.
And I’ve always been a connoisseur of the between. Although some of my affection for airports has dissipated after having flown quite a lot in the past few years, I still find myself fascinated by their contradictions – the place that’s only a space between leaving and arriving, a place where people can’t help but sit and eat and rage in close proximity to one another. Now that I live in a country so much farther north, dusk and dawn seem even more dramatic to me – by this point in the year, the sun seems to set continually from eight o’clock to nearly ten, and dawn begins to insinuate itself on night as early as four o’clock. I haven’t yet ceased to find these changes amazing – they are a great consolation for the changes of the seasons, and make you realize how important seasons actually are.
So I suppose in some way it’s no surprise that I’ve ended up in a job where I am constantly expanding and contracting the parameters of the self. In my personal world that negotiation has been one of the primary concerns of my life. No wonder that I have found a way to work within it.
Labels: identity, liminality
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