Because by that time in November the weather was wintry-cold that year in New York City, besides "dressing corporate" and culturally straight in a suit and tie, I also had worn a winter coat to work. And after I arrived at work each day, I hung my winter coat on a hanger in the Wall Street stock brokerage firm office's coat closet, next to the coats of the permanent employees, including the coats of the firm's white male executives.
So on the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, I went to the firm's coat closet, took what I thought was my own winter coat, and left the office for the 4-day holiday weekend. But it turned out that, by mistake, I had taken home from the coat hanger and worn a winter coat of one of the firm's white male executives, who was about the same size as me; because his coat--if you didn't notice the inside label--looked very much like the cheaper winter coat that I had mistaken it for. And inside one of the pockets of the white male executive's winter coat I had mistakenly thought was my coat, were the keys of the white male executive.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I realized that I had mistakenly taken the white male Wall Street executive's winter coat instead of my own coat and also now had his keys. But since both the office of the temp agency I worked for and the Wall Street office of the temp agency's client that I had worked for were closed until the Monday after Thanksgiving--and neither the temp agency nor the temp agency's client yet used answering or voice mail to record phone calls when their offices were closed in the 1970s--I had to wait until the Monday morning to contact my temp agency placement counselor and let her know what had happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment