Job Titles
It is January, so it is the time for filling out forms. Many services require an update to their files in order to make sure that you pay them promptly when they bill you. Whether it is for the contract with the HVAC service provider or, for most of us over 65, our doctors, whenever we check in for our appointment, we are presented with a multi-page form to complete. Why they can’t preprint the form from last year’s information and have us simply check off if what they have is still current, I don’t know. This is the digital age, isn’t it?
One of the things they persist on asking is about employment. It might seem a leap of logic that if you have shown up for a Medicare appointment, asking for your employer seems a bit worse than redundant. Just below the line asking for your employer there often is a line asking for Job Title. Here is where I like to get creative and put down something like Geezer Golfer or Ardent Scribbler. Of course, this will only confuse the twenty-something receptionist with the iridescent pink nails who has to look up from her phone to read my illegible scrawl.
Still, the question of job title got me to thinking about the titles of all the jobs I have had. Some of them were quite descriptive and embodied what I was doing while others were artifices of corporate organization charts. Still, I thought I should take inventory of those that I have had.
Before I go on and incur the wrath of one of my offspring, I should say that saying one is a father or husband does not constitute a job. I took my roles as father and husband seriously and it is because of those obligations that I accepted and sometimes had to endure the pitfalls of many of the jobs that I have had.
Back when I was still in high school, I worked as a part-time delivery boy as a driver at a stationery store. I drove a VW van to deliver paper products around Westfield, Plainfield, and Scotch Plains. I was making $1.50 an hour and putting the money toward flying to complete my Private Pilot rating.
During the summer after my first year of college I expanded my delivery boy efforts to include Manhattan. Back then, the company I worked for had a Univac computer the size of a barn that produced address labels for magazines like Yachting. Through the miracle of metal tape drives and vacuum tubes they could produce stick on labels that had to be hand delivered to the magazine subscription offices. That this was a job and that the firm employed dozens of people to produce these tiny strips of paper is in today’s era of ezines and online computing simply mind boggling.
During the remainder of my college days, I was a line foreman at a manufacturer of oil burner nozzles. Werner and Hans one-time rocket engineers with ties to Peenemünde ran a plant that supplied the Northeast with custom nozzles for the oil burner trade. These tiny, but complexly designed bits of stainless steel and brass had to be carefully polished and tested. It was my job to test and accept each one by shooting Shell insecticide base through then and viewing the spray pattern while in the background several of the older German workers hummed the Horst Wessel Lieder.
After college was when my job titles began to have real meaning first as a US Navy Ensign, then as a Naval Flight Officer, Command Electronic Countermeasures Officer flying EA-6B Prowler aircraft in Vietnam. My naval titles went up the line from LTjg, to Lieutenant, then Lieutenant Commander before the Navy placed me in the retired reserve, whatever that meant.
By that time, though I was back in civilian life which in retrospect was probably a mistake. Nonetheless, at Dean Witter and Company I passed my securities licensing tests and became an Account Executive. Nice title, but no money. Soon, with wife and kids in tow we were on our way back to New Jersey with the promise of property upon which to build a house. First, though I had to get a job.
I became an insurance agent with John Hancock. I quickly began setting sales records. This business was likened to coal mining since we had to work in the dark at night so as to be able to visit with families to sell the product. My family life suffered. It did not help that my then mother-in-law began to spread poison to my wife that she believed my nightly insurance appointments were cover for extracurricular affairs. Would that it had been since I was out in all kinds of weather traipsing about the wilds of North Jersey in search of a sale.
Given the dearth of management talent in the office I was quickly promoted to Staff Manager. This title, like many I was to wear in the future made me a sort of den mother to a group of inept and recalcitrant insurance agents for whom I was responsible. It was up to me to get them out selling. The fact that the only times when they made sales was when I was with them and in fact doing the selling on their behalf quickly soured me to the work. Still, I had all the licenses that one could have in the business, so I began to look around.
I jumped ship to a commercial insurance office where the title of Account Executive (always shorthand for salesman) was bestowed on me. At least in this job I could work during the day and my mother-in-law could shut up, but the damage she had done to us as couple was irreparable.
I was chaffing at the role of salesman when suddenly I found myself interviewing for a management position with the Vanguard Group of Investment Companies. With my marriage on the rocks and the need to provide for my kids I took a job as the Telephone Sales and Service Manager running a telecom department. Sales exploded and so did the number of people I was managing. Within nine months I was made Assistant Vice President, then in the following year Vice President. For me as a thirty-two-year-old this seemed to be top of the heap. Vanguard sent me off to get an MBA and as soon as I got the degree, internal politics pushed me out.
Next came a move to Boston and Pittsburgh as President, geez President, of Mellon Mutual Fund Services Group. The whiz kids at Mellon who had created this entity failed to understand how it was supposed to make money and as Mellon lost over a billion in one quarter that year, the fact that we were hemorrhaging money as well did not bode well for El Presidente. So, I jumped ship.
Bank of Boston need a Division Executive to run its mutual fund operations and with my background and the fact that I was available, back to Boston I went. I broadened my expertise to include not only fund operations, but the custody of assets in foreign countries.
I was in Paris when the word came down that about two hundred mid-level executives at the bank were to be axed to help stem the flow of blood from the corporate coffers as this bank, too began to crater.
Six weeks later I was standing on the corner of Aldermanbury Square in London being offered the title of Senior Vice President of Marketing for Standard Chartered Equitor. It was a mouthful, but it meant that I was back on the hustings scarring up funds from US investment companies who were active in the Asian markets.
It was a good gig, but I was always travelling and away from home four days a week. Worn out, I was lured away to become President of STW Financial Service, a financial software developer located near Denver. This seemed ideal. As a family, we could live in the foothills of the Rockies, hiking, skiing, fishing, and enjoying the best of life. Well, here again, I misread the runes.
The software the firm had developed was crap, the owner of the firm decided to flee the United State to become an Irish citizen and a Bermudan resident, and I was out of a job. For a while I delivered newspapers and gave some thought to becoming a barista, or maybe a fly-fishing guide.
I thought I had landed a big job when I was whisked to Moscow to become a senior executive in one of Boris Yeltsin’s cronies’ banks. More than likely, I would have ended up a bullet-ridden corpse in the trunk of a car, so I went to LA and became (once again) a Senior VP of Marketing at a fixed income management firm.
To take this job, I again had to leave my kids behind, not the least because their mother had filed for divorce and with a $2400 a month child support nut, so I needed a real job. To say that there was so little to do in this position once I got the basics moving would be an understatement. One of our associates moved to San Diego and soon a call came for me to join a fast-paced tech investing firm there.
A huge signing bonus and a hefty salary saw me simply trade one VP title for another. Who was it who said the title of VP wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit? Well other than the paycheck, the job was thankless. When I stood up for a female member of my staff who had been molested by a client, I was quickly shown the door. This was my second layoff and the first time I could add Unemployed to the titles on my resume.
But things did not stay static. I was recruited by a local investment firm that wanted an executive with international background. Of course, after I was hired that was the last place that they put me. After reading my in-depth analyses of their prospects for developing international investing it was clear that hiring me into such a position was going to break someone’s favorite son’s rice bowl.
Still, I weathered the storm and brought order to an area of client service that had previously endured high employee turnover. But then came 9-11 and in its aftermath, there was another corporate bloodletting. Out on my ear, again I could add Unemployed Part Deux to the resume.
It was time for me to be self-employed, so with my wife, we bought into a business opportunity to own a sign store. Everyone needs signs. That is true but opening a business in a strip mall the week that the entire county burned, and the employees of the anchor supermarket went on strike might not appear auspicious. Still, I built the revenue stream up to half a million a year in eighteen months. Of course, that meant nothing to the SBA so getting more capital to expand was not going to happen. We sold the business, and I went looking for another job.
I took a job as an Accountability Coach with a firm that developed trusted financial advisors. Selling again, and what was worse the owner of the firm was using the business to buy Ferraris and a mansion overlooking the Pacific. Attrition took its toll of the staff and soon I leapt back into the insurance and financial products sales business.
I rejuvenated the Account Executive role as I began to go broke again. It was too late, of course, but I rued the day I left the Navy. Soon, it was time to reapply for unemployment.
I tried working nights at a bowling alley, but that had to be the worst I could do. My ex #2 decided she didn’t want the kids anymore and they came to live with me in California. Well, that was the end of marriage #3.
Nobody wanted a fifty-something white MBA’ed ex-executive who knew more than the people to whom he might report. Money was dwindling when I realized that my widowed father was slowly being consumed by COPD.
With my unemployment blocked by a Senate filibuster and only my sixteen-year-old to care for, like Tom Joad I packed my truck and we headed east. My son opted to go back to his mother and so I ended up back in New Jersey.
It took a month, but there was a real job. Chief Operating Officer for a unit of Rutgers. Wow, I thought I was going to get paid to laze about as a member of academia. Au contraire I was working for Dr. Frankenstein and the place was a mess. I had begun to realize that my chief talent in business and the reason that so many people hired me was that I was asked time and time again to attempt to raise the Titanic with a bicycle pump.
After too many years I came to realize that I was not a job title, but a person. I was many things that never appeared on an organization chart. Flier, student, lover, husband, father, provider, and near the end caregiver.
But by 2014 though, I took on the only job title that I valued – that of writer, novelist. My retirement from the corporate rat race was made easy by knowing that whatever it might say on some business card was worth that proverbial bucket of spit. It turns out that none of the jobs that I had since leaving the professional navy had any real meaning to me. They were simply the way to make the money necessary to support my children.
If I had been selfish, I would have begun writing years before. I would have tried to define my life in my terms, not that of some hiring manager. I was wrong in accepting less than I could be even if it had meant I could not provide as others and the courts expected I should.
In the end, I have put my energies into writing in the hope that for the children at least, they might know that man, that often absent father.
