Thursday, October 1, 2015

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (43)

What made me glad that the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] clerk-typist job was just a temporary travel season job and not a permanent one was that there was one catch to it: Although Steve, the department head, seemed somewhat hip culturally and related to people in a non-authoritarian, egalitarian way, the assistant supervisor in the department--a white, culturally straight, humorless woman in her 30's named Carol (who wore glasses and who would not likely have been considered physically attractive even by most culturally straight men) who supervised me--related to the workers she supervised in an authoritarian way.

Ironically,  Carol's way of supervising her female and male "underlings" resembled very closely the managerial style that the U.S. radical left feminist women of the 1970's then criticized U.S. male managers for using, when relating to the women workers they supervised.

But as the months went by and the speed in which I completed typing my assigned passenger manifests increased, the time I had to converse with my co-workers increased. And one result was that the C.I.E.E. office conversation and atmosphere became more to reflect the general concerns about the meaningless of the baby-boom generation's 9-to-5 workweek life, under the current U.S. economic capitalist set-up, that the 1960's counter-culture had raised.

So the assistant supervisor, Carol, probably began to feel more isolated on the job and left out of the office conversation that the younger, less culturally-straight workers in the office were having; in part due to the kind of "meaningless of work" conversation/discussion I was bringing into the office each workday.

And when the department supervisor, Steve, wasn't watching, she seemed to react to her growing sense of being left out of the office conversation, by continuing to supervise me in an uptight, authoritarian, out-of-date, unpleasant way, whenever she needed me to type some new passenger manifest for her.

Then, when Steve somehow contracted hepatitis in the middle of the summer and wasn't around the office awhile to checkmate, when possible, Carol's bullying assistant supervisor managing style, the catch and negative aspects of my C.I.E.E. clerk-typist travel season job became even more obvious and pronounced.