Working

by Studs Terkel

  At first they doubted my word, being black and being young. The woman was white. They told me to document my feelings. They didn’t know if it was a personality prejudice or black against white. So I documented it. I showed this point and that point . . . So they said okay. They knew I didn’t particularly care for doing it. They knew my feelings. I told them she was a good woman. They said, “You can’t let personal feelings come in. We’ll give her about five months to shape up or ship out.” She was put on probation.

  That’s the thing you get in any business. They never talk about personal feelings. They let you know that people are of no consequence. You take the job, you agree to work from eight thirty to five and no ifs, ands, or buts. Feelings are left out. I think some of the other supervisors are compassionate, as I think I am. But they take the easy way out. You take a person that’s minimal, you rate him as average. He’ll get a raise in six months. When you write a person as minimal, the person won’t get a raise and he’s subject to lose his job. Everybody takes the easy way out and just put down a person’s average. This takes away all the pressures. I felt it has to be one way: be truthful about a person ‘cause it’s gonna come up on ’em sooner or later. I look at people as people, person to person. But when you’re on a job, you’re supposed to lose all this.

  If it’s a small organization, you don’t need anything like that. You don’t need appraisals. Everybody knows everybody. In a larger company people become pawns. These big corporations are gonna keep on growing and the people become less and less. The human being doesn’t count any more. In any large corporation it’s the buck that counts.

  In this case, we could’ve moved her to an area in which the job wasn’t as demanding. Someplace where she’d never have to worry about firing and not worry about somebody like me watching her. Give her a job that she has a potential for, where she can do her optimum, where she could have a slower pace. Why put her where you have so much youth and speed?

  I don’t see this job as status. Okay, I got twenty people under me. That’s not status to me. Status is being the man at the top. Not just to be another pawn. You’re not at the bottom level. You’re on the step right above it. But there are fifty more above you. So there’s really no status to this job.

  But what does the guy at the top do? He’s chairman of the board. I don’t know if that’s a particularly nice feeling to have—five thousand people under you, two billion dollars in assets, and a handful of men watching it. What are they doing while you’re gone? Being up there is something I couldn’t ever envision.

  After spending two years in the service he had worked in a neighborhood realty office. “Managed property, screened out people who were acceptable and who weren’t. The neighborhood changed to where it was pretty rough, so I decided it was advantageous to leave.

  “I hadn’t planned on making this a permanent thing. Just stay here six months and go back to school full-time, accounting. But I got married, so I had to remain. I’m undecided now. I have a few business courses, but I stopped taking them and just work on the humanities. See if there’s anything there I’d prefer to business.”

  I’m usually at the desk by eight ’, half an hour before work starts. Getting set up for the day, writing programs, assigning different jobs to different people. When they come in we take a head count. You see who’s late and who’s not. You check around and make sure they start at eight thirty and not go in the washroom and powder their nose for fifteen minutes. You make sure when they go for breaks they take fifteen minutes not twenty. You check for lunch hours, making sure they take forty-five minutes and not an hour. And that they’re not supposed to make personal telephone calls on the bank’s phone. All you’re doing is checking on people. This goes on all day.

  The job is boring. It’s a real repetitious thing. I don’t notice the time. I could care less about the time. I don’t really know if it’s five ’ until I see somebody clean up their desk. At five I leave for school. It’s always the same. Nothing exciting ever happens.

  It’s just this constant supervision of people. It’s more or less like you have a factory full of robots working the machinery. You’re there checking and making sure the machinery is constantly working. If it breaks down or something goes wrong, you’re there to straighten it out. You’re like a foreman on the assembly line. If they break down, replace them. You’re just like a man who sits and watches computers all day. Same thing.

  Just like Big Brother’s watching you. Everybody’s watching somebody. It’s quite funny when you turn and start watching them. I do that quite a bit. They know I’m watching them. They become uneasy. (Laughs.)

  A man should be treated as a human, not as a million-dollar piece of machinery. People aren’t treated as good as an IBM machine is. Big corporations turn me off. I didn’t know it until I became a supervisor and I realized the games you have to play. When you were a clerk, you didn’t have no worries. You just had to do your job. You just had to worry about signing in on time and signing out on time. You just knew you had a job to do and to do it.

  I won’t be there forever at the place. Working in a bank, there’s no thrill in that. I didn’t run home and say, “Ma, I’m working for a bank now. Isn’t that wonderful?” I’m still searching. I do move around. I never sit at the desk. That’s one thing I could never do is just sit. Maybe that’s what my next job will be, something where I can move around. Maybe a salesman . . .

  Quite a few people stay after work. I look at ’em every day when I walk out the door. (Laughs.) I’m not that way. They are the older generation. They stay there just to make sure the work is all caught up. I can’t see that. The older ones are much more dedicated than the younger ones. I can’t ever envision a time where we’ll go back to a period where when a man starts out in a business he’s dedicated to it for the rest of his life. I can’t envision a man staying with a company forty years. That’s over with.

  A man can go to school for three years and change his profession any time he gets good and ready. He might be a clerk pushing papers all day, but he also goes to this computer school. And he’ll probably go to another corporation, where he’ll get better pay. A lot of men of the last generation are just content with their jobs. They never look for any other place.

  I promised I’d never let myself get an ulcer. Money isn’t worth that. But that woman really bothered me. She was nice, gentle. But it was something I had to do and I told her it had to be done. I told her people had been carrying her all along and just marking her average. She sat about two desks away from me and I was helping her most of the time. Her pay wasn’t going up or anything. I think she appreciated me telling her.

  PETER KEELEY

  “I sell draperies. I’ve done that for many years, In the past I’ve manufactured them. It was my business. It’s no longer my business. I sell the product I used to make. It was a come down when I went broke. I don’t believe it is today. I believe it is an adjustment to age. I think it’s a victory. There’s many men in the same condition, have given up and just rotted. Quite a few of my old friends. Not me.”

  He is sixty-five years old.

  “Originally, I started selling in New England. Broad silks. Small stores, hardheaded New England Yankees. It was quite an education. If you can sell them, you can sell anybody. ln 1941 they moved me to Pittsburgh for forty dollars a week. I became branch manager. I was quite successful—until the present day.”

  The company I was running the business for sold out to a corporation on the west coast—a merger. I was dropped. It was company policy: no man older than forty-five. Everybody was merging. A lot of people got dropped by the wayside. I didn’t bounce. That hurt my ego. It hurt me in twenty directions. I got cold feet, scared. It was a year ago, November. I was sixty-four. Many friends drop you, many people don’t know you. You have to fight your own way—which I’ve done all my life. I’m damn well adjusted now.

  I brought this branch from about a hundred thousand dollars a year to a million and
a half. There was no great shakes over that. I was frantically, insanely mad. (Laughs.) I spent four months going insane. Another month, I probably would burn the building down and kill myself. I blamed everything on everybody.

  These days I’m drawing $128 a week for a company I’m handling inventory for. And purchasing. He has a seventy-thousand-dollar inventory, about a hundred thousand yards. No fabric can come in, be cut, go out without me knowing it. I work very hard until about noon.

  I run a little business of my own and make about three hundred dollars a month—a decorating business, a tiny company. A few jobs here and there. I work on this a couple of hours in the afternoon. I very seldom go out to lunch.

  I call my customers cold turkey. I look in the book and call ten people: “Do you want draperies or don’t you?” You’d be surprised. (Laughs.) It’s like the guy that said to twenty girls, “Would you go to bed with me?” Nineteen said no, but one said yes. (Laughs.)

  I use a telephone directory, I read the paper. Here’s a new office building. I’ll call the builder, the architect, or the company that’s gonna manage it. I get a lead off that. Usually I get nowhere. All of a sudden you get that one guy and you have him. General Electric, a nationwide corporation, right? They got my name out of the Yellow Pages: Kee of Pittsburgh. The head porter—they now call him superintendent of maintenance—this janitor called me up and said, “This is General Electric. We want to have our offices decorated.” They didn’t know me from Adam. It was a lead out of a phonebook. That’s one way.

  I say, “This is Kee of Pittsburgh. My name’s Pete Keeley. May I speak with the doctor?” You never talk to him, he’s busier than a dog with fleas. So you talk to the nurse. “How about your draperies? I want to make some money off you. I can make about forty bucks on it. But you’ll be satisfied.” That’s a good pitch. Either she’ll think you’re crazy or she’ll say, “Okay, come on up.” I never say I’m the cheapest. He can go to Penny’s, you can go to Sears and get it cheaper, but you won’t get me. I just cannot sell a cheap fabric. It always had to be the best. We’re talking now about very small stuff, very small business. (Laughs.) I can get the job, maybe one out of ten, one out of twenty. That’s enough. If I got ’em all, I wouldn’t be talking to you. I’d own the building. I pick up about five a month. I’ve never used the stereotype approach. “My name is Pete Keeley. I’m Kee of Pittsburgh. I want to make some dough off you.”

  I try to pick carefully. I just feel it. I won’t take a dentist who’s been there forty-five years and cleans his drapes every five years. That’s not the guy to approach. When I hear of new buildings, I may drive by and get the list off the front.

  All my life, everytime I make a cold call, I’ve had cold feet. Whether I call the president of General Motors—as I have in the past—or on a little mama-and-papa store, the same butterfly, always. If you make enough calls and make the butterfly fly away, you’re gonna hit. One out of ten, twenty. Like the old guy that sells doughnuts. If he makes enough calls, he’s gonna sell a doughnut.

  They hang up on me many times. A baseball player doesn’t bat more than .300. When he hangs up on me, I say, “Look, Kee, what did you do wrong with this guy? Theoretically you’re a genius in selling.” Then I’ll say to myself, “I did nothing wrong. I’m a genius. This guy’s a dumb son of a bitch.”

  I’ve never felt humiliated. I got into a fistfight once with the head buyer of a store in Boston. He was a very nasty son of a bitch. He told me I was overpriced and no damn good. He and I resented back and forth, right there on the fifth floor. It ended in the elevator. The merchandise man separated us. The only time I got mad at a buyer. A lousy buyer is a buyer who won’t buy from you, but there’s no physical combat. We both got arrested. (Pause.) Maybe he did humiliate me. (A longer pause.) The more I think about it . . . It’s the only time of my life I ever resorted to violence—in selling.

  It’s been a very bad year emotionally. I worried a lot, I sweat a lot of blood, and spent a lot of sleepless nights. Because of this let-out, this comedown. I felt it. I knew it was comin’. I knew the policy of this coast company. I didn’t do anything about it. I should have. It’s a shock to an egotist. All of a sudden you find you’re not the smartest guy in the world. (Laughs.)

  It’s much easier to say, “Mr. Keeley resigned from X Company,” than it is to say, “Mr. Keeley was dropped by X Company.” (Pause.) Just like that, they dropped me. They handed me a couple of checks. “We regret this, Mr. Keeley, and thank you, good-by.” That was it.

  I should have made the change myself when I had the opportunity. When a man has a responsible position, there are many offerings open to him. When he’s out of it, these offerings disappear. They’re gone. To look for another job when you have a job is not too difficult. But when you haven’t got one, to look for a job—that was my mistake. I felt I failed bitterly. It came close to destroying me.

  I have no regrets. I never met a man yet that didn’t make mistakes. I feel I’m a tremendous success—to a point. Monetarily I’m no success. But mentally I’m a tremendous success. At sixty-five I’m still selling. I can’t help it. You can’t give up something you love. I’m doing it to keep my mind awake and clear. I’m doing it to keep myself alive.

  “The word sell is the key to my life. I was a scared boy. I couldn’t even talk on the phone. I’d sweat blood, I’d perspire, I’d fall down, I’d have to go to the bathroom. I’d walk around the building twenty times and smoke two packs of cigarettes. I never had the nerve to go in. I was a complete introvert. But the minute I found out people liked me and I liked them, I started selling. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. You have to like every slob that ever was. There’s something in every guy.”

  I ran up against an unbeatable fact with a large corporation—age. Competence didn’t enter into it. Nothing entered into it. No, uh-uh. I don’t look forward to retirement. It would kill me. There is no such thing as retirement. It’s a slow death.

  Maybe I’m still trying to prove something. I’ve had a very bad stock in life. I went to grammar school four years late. I finished high school at night eleven years late. I went two years to college, twelve years late. I was trying to catch up. I’ve had to prove a lot of things later than other people did. Every man has to have a victory in something. To me, my life’s a victory. Now at this moment I can sell you whatever I want to sell you. But I still have something to prove . . . and I’m not sure what it is.

  LOIS KEELEY NOVAK

  Peter Keeley’s daughter. She is a schoolteacher. She has been seated nearby, listening to her father’s reflections.

  My dad lost his business the year I was married. (To him) I remember you coming home and sitting on the bed. You had to fire all those people. He had to post a notice: their employment was terminated. It was the end of Kee of Pittsburgh. I’d never seen a man cry. That really frightened me. Nineteen fifty-six. I thought my father was the wisest man that ever lived. He was always telling me how I could do all these things. He used to help me with math. I used to dread those sessions at the kitchen table when my father would help me. Actually I resented it. I wondered, Could I ever be as intelligent, as successful as he was?

  I was a sophomore in college when everything went down the drain. I never thought it would happen. It was like the end of the world. We had those great plush years. I remember the house. The kid’s say, “Is that your house?” The schools we went to, Palm Springs, inviting your friends down for the weekends, swimming pools, fancy dresses. It was all tied up with my father. Finally I had to face my father being a real person.

  And when it happened a year ago, his discharge, I knew it. My mother told me on the phone, “Please come home. Something’s wrong.” I knew it, but it was a strange feeling. My father’s work was the key, my father’s success was the key to how we lived.

  LARRY ROSS

  The corporation is a jungle. It’s exciting. You’re thrown in on your own and you’re constantly battling to survive. When you learn
to survive, the game is to become the conqueror, the leader.

  “I’ve been called a business consultant. Some say I’m a business psychiatrist. You can describe me as an advisor to top management in a corporation.” He’s been at it since 1968.

  I started in the corporate world, oh gosh—’42. After kicking around in the Depression, having all kinds of jobs and no formal education, I wasn’t equipped to become an engineer, a lawyer, or a doctor. I gravitated to selling. Now they call it marketing. I grew up in various corporations. I became the executive vice president of a large corporation and then of an even larger one. Before I quit I became president and chief executive officer of another. All nationally known companies.

  Sixty-eight, we sold out our corporation. There was enough money in the transaction where I didn’t have to go back in business. I decided that I wasn’t going to get involved in the corporate battle any more. It lost its excitement, its appeal. People often ask me, “Why weren’t you in your own business? You’d probably have made a lot of money.” I often ask it myself, I can’t explain it, except . . .

  Most corporations I’ve been in, they were on the New York Stock Exchange with thousands and thousands of stockholders. The last one—whereas, I was the president and chief executive, I was always subject to the board of directors, who had pressure from the stockholders. I owned a portion of the business, but I wasn’t in control. I don’t know of any situation in the corporate world where an executive is completely free and sure of his job from moment to moment.