It's Friday

 2/5/2021

I'm blogging today, before noon. I'm so proud of myself. This morning, I changed things up a bit. Instead of watching the news, which is frankly down right depressing. Nope, today I watched a more peaceful show "The British Baking" show. You know what amazes me about this show, is that there is very little measuring of ingredients. The bakers just take out their jars, and pour the ingredient into the bowl. How on earth do they do that? Perhaps, what we don't know is that the jars only hold enough flour, etc., for what that particular challenge is.  

For today's chore, is going to be to pull out all the plastic tops and bottoms. I'm going to stack them on the table. If I have an orphan, out it goes. When Jeff and I were working, we would take our lunches in a plastic container. And, now since we don't work, I should only keep "x" numbers of these containers. On one site, it says to keep only 7 of most of your plastic containers. 

First, I worked on my clothes, and did a fine job of organizing the remaining clothes in my closet. At first, I wanted to arrange the clothes by the arm length - sleeveless, etc. Thinking about it now, I'm probably going to rearrange my clothes by color. How cool would that be?

I have already set our Tivo to record the Super Bowl on Sunday. For me, I basically watch for most of the time, really great commercials. I understand baseball, it's not the least bit complicated. But, football is entirely a different game. There are markers, violations (I guess you could it that), and some marker thing that does something! Yup, you can see that I don't know "jack" about football. Now, the sport has  women, who are coaches and referees, and that's huge. Another step up the ladder for women!! And, yes people that also means a break in the glass ceiling.

Today's women don't have to put with all the nonsense, that we older women did. You don't have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom, for example (it's really true). I have a job, first one actually, and I would bring in roses from Dad's yard. Before I knew it, the roses were removed from my desk. Why? Because one of the partners decided he liked the roses, and off they went. Women, in the early 70's basically put up with a lot of shit.

I had a boss once, that actually threw a stapler across the room, and missing my head by inches. When you had a baby, you were given 6 weeks to return to work. Or, you already know the alternative. 

At one job, which luckily didn't last long, I was working for someone who had been hired to do statistical work. One morning, he gave me a box of something (can't remember what) that I was supposed to come up with an answer of how many of "x" were in the box.

In that same position, one of the men challenged me to take a very large number, and divide it until I got to zero. I'm not very good at math, so I literally spent hours, trying to do this. Which after all the laughter died down, they told me that the beginning number would ever get to zero. So, how stupid did I feel. I finally went to HR and explained that I couldn't work in that department. They found me a milder department, and then everything was better.

For one interview, I walked literally somewhere between 5 and 10 miles away. I had on heels, and was late for my interview. Since I had no money, I walked to and from the interview. And, it was the middle of summer. By the time I finally got home, my Grandmother took one look at my feet, which were blistered, and took over helping the blisters to heal.  At this same job, my description was typist, The company was a title company, and my job was to type out all the measurements (if you will) of a particular piece of property. Something like, the north west side of the property is parallel... While you typed, you were making holes in the punch tape. Before we could go home at night, we had to show the floor manager, how many properties we had done for the day. Eventually, I was called into the real manager's office, and was fired. He told me, that I would never, ever be able to find a job that involved typing, simply because I wasn't any good, nor would I ever be able to support myself at typing. Boy, did I prove him wrong.

I remember going back to my desk. There were standard paragraphs that went into the beginning of every title. Okay, now I'm back at my desk, and I'm only 18 and still full of spunk, so I took scissors and cut into every piece of tape that I could find. Obviously, if a future employer wanted references, I cringed having to use the title company as a reference.

 I made my living for more than 40 years typing on typewriters, and on computers. Once the age of computers came along, all of us in the office, had to learn how to use this thing.

As the years went by, I worked for many companies, and my skills at "typing" became better and better. My last job was at Marriott headquarters, working for an attorney. I was able to type as fast as he spoke. That's a skill I was very proud of having. 

Unfortunately, as the years went by, and my memory lessened doing things like using a computer, became and still is, a struggle. At one time, I didn't have to look at the keyboard, my fingers knew which key to push. Today, I can still type fast, but if I have to use a symbol on the keyboard, I literally have to search for it. This is very depressing to me. Even so, I type every day.

Happy Friday and I hope that all of you will have a nice weekend. Since I don't know which teams will play on Sunday, I'll just watch the game, until I fall asleep!

P