Jersey Central Power & Light....job #3

Four of us from Lockheed ended up at JCP&L - which we started to call "Lockheed North". We had a lot of fun and the work was easy. The best part is that there was one other girl in the professional ranks. A FRIEND!! Wooo Hooo! She was even a level up from me, so I felt that she had really succeeded! Within a year or so, there was a reorganization and I ended up working for Karmela. For the couple weeks before I started to report to her, the guys would tell me that working for Karmela would be a problem. No one could tell me why and I was getting very nervous. Was she a witch? Would she give me all the grunt work to do? How would I deal with this? There were even whispers of "cat fight"!

I showed up for work that first day as a member of her team to find a huge bouquet of fresh daisies from her garden on my desk to welcome me to the group. I was floored! How bad could this woman be if she greeted me with flowers?? She gave me my assignment which was to fix the problems created and left behind by the (male) buyer who had moved on. His desk was a real mess! Requisitions had been shoved into the back of the drawers like a 3rd grader who didn't want to do an assignment. Internal clients were calling daily to find out why they hadn't received their orders. I didn't want to air dirty procurement laundry and tell them that my predecessor had hidden the requisitions, so I worked quickly and within a few months had the desk running like a top.

At one point, Karmela asked me if I wanted to play hooky the next day and go to north jersey to an amusement area. Wow. Sure! We had fun at work, too. Suppliers just weren't used to women managers or buyers yet. At one point, we (Karmela, a male colleague and I) visited a potential supplier at their offices. The three of us were having a conversation with the supplier but the supplier kept speaking to the sole male with us (who also reported to Karmela). Finally, at the end of the meeting, the supplier turned to the male buyer and told him to "bring the information back to your manager". I couldn't help myself....I looked at the supplier and told him that he'd already told our manager and pointed to Karmela. He paled. Karmela told the supplier that he shouldn't expect an order to be forthcoming.

Another fun experience was when we released an RFP for bathroom supplies, including toilet paper. We asked for samples of the paper the suppliers were quoting so that we could ensure the product was satisfactory. Imagine the two girls sitting at a small conference table with a dozen rolls of toilet paper all around us. How to check it out? Brilliant idea! We gave each of the other buyers on the floor a roll and told them to "go for it" and let us know which one they liked best! One roll was too thin. Another "might as well have had wood chips in it". Like Goldilocks, we eventually found the one that was just right.

Lunchtimes were fun, too. Rousing games of Hearts took place almost daily over sandwiches and sodas. Boys vs girls. Karmela and me against Ron and Herbie. It took a while to get into the groove, but we devised a very complex bidding system that really had nothing to do with normal bidding in Hearts. We had a system going where we knew exactly what cards were in the other's hand. For YEARS we didn't lose a game. It took Ron and Herbie that long to figure out that we were cheating and they finally refused to play any more. By then, we'd had enough anyway. It was too easy to fool them.

Not everything was fun and games, though. One of my managers "forgot himself" (his words), when he smacked me on the ass to tell me to "go to it" on a project. His look of absolute shock was telling and I don't think he meant to do it. It was as if I was one of the boys on the football team leaving the huddle. It was, however, terribly inappropriate.

During this time, the EEOC called me with good news! RCA was making a monetary offer to make my case go away. $1500. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it paid off my car loan and left me a few bucks to go shopping. Done! I had to sign a waiver that "from the beginning of time to the end of time" I wouldn't publically divulge the terms of the settlement. To put this into context, many women in the late 1970s and early 1980s were appearing on the hugely popular Phil Donohue show (think of this as the early version of the Oprah show) to tell their tales of workplace discrimination. RCA was ensuring that I didn't go that route. I took the deal. A few weeks later, some of my former female RCA co-workers called to tell me that they'd received a raise and it wasn't the normal raise time. I felt like a hero!

I'd been at JCP&L for about 2 years when a position opened up in their Materials Management group managing pole/line hardware inventory in two large and about 35 smaller warehouses in the state. I wanted it. I was totally bored by this time in purchasing and was looking for something new. I went to see the hiring manager, Kirk, and told him I was interested. He looked surprised but told me to apply. Also applying for the slot were an accountant and an engineer. Our Hearts playing buddies all put up "campaign" posters to cheer on the accountant (a friend of theirs). They would chant "go Lou go Lou" when I walked by. Kirk interviewed me and the others and I really thought the accountant would win the job. My father said that the engineer would definitely get it (well, ok, he's an engineer, too and was a bit biased). HA! Karmela spoke to Kirk and told him I was the best of the lot and I got the job.

Kirk ended up being my biggest supporter besides Karmela. When he took me to the northern area warehouse to introduce me around, the warehouse manager refused to look at me. He eventually told me at that first meeting that he didn't think a woman could do this job. I asked why. His comment was that women couldn't drive an order-picker vehicle (similar to a fork lift). Of course, my job would never have required that I drive this kind of equipment, but I looked at Kirk who shrugged his shoulders and mouthed to me "are you going to put up with that sh*t"? I asked the warehouseman for the keys and a hard hat. After a quick lesson, I drove the machine to the bin location (of course, near the top of the warehouse) and grabbed the item he had asked me to find. Once I was on the ground again, I handed him the widget, the hard hat and walked out of the warehouse. He was left holding the widget with his jaw on the ground. Kirk told me later that he apologized profusely (to Kirk, of course, not me) and for the rest of my tenure there would bend over backward to do anything he could for me.

This was the beginning of computers in the workplace. 1981. We introduced "business to business" ordering using our computer to access a supplier's computer via a dial up modem that you had to fit the telephone handset into. It was very modern and technologically innovative for the time. The supplier's tech group couldn't figure out how to do this, so Kirk and I went to their shop and handled that side of the set up, too. The biggest problem they had was how to let us see our pricing but not their cost. We had them set up a rudimentary data base with their cost hidden from view.

We then got Wang word processing! Just amazing! It was my job to design, develop, program, write instruction manuals and train the secretaries how to use my new purchasing system. I also had to be the one to take away their typewriters. Several of the ladies hid their typewriters so that I couldn't find them. This was the start of my techie career.

I designed the purchasing system that allowed not only the printing of purchase orders onto custom forms but also captured data for use at year end. How much money did we spend on different items? How much money did we spend with minority suppliers? We could now run a report at the end of the year rather than manually gathering the old purchase orders and manually adding columns of numbers. A real time saver.

Eventually, other departments in our building wanted the same kind of Wang equipment and I was promoted into the Information Technology department. I ran the system, helped other departments program their requirements and even helped the maintenance guys figure out how to run the necessary cables. The only downside was that I had to stay late once a week to manually run back ups of the system. The huge data platters were heavy and I had to open the main server, put in the back up platters and sit at the terminal while it ran. I eventually had a guy to help me by taking a turn every other week.

One morning after Fred ran the backup, my telephone started to ring off the hook! Everyone in the building was upset because they were missing data. FRED!!? What the heck did you do? Ooops. He ran the back up backwards - replacing all of the data on the disks with week old back up data. Erased. One week of work for the entire building....erased. You'd think that Fred would have been fired. Or at least reprimanded. Instead. He was named to be my new boss! NO FREAKING WAY!! Obviously, I found another job outside the company, gave notice and left. Fred was then given TWO people to take my place and a raise. I just couldn't believe it.....

But I was on to my next job. Number 4.

Moving on to Lockheed Electronics....job #2

My new job at Lockheed Electronics was really just a continuation of the one at RCA. I was the only "girl buyer" on the floor among a dozen or so middle aged white men, most of whom just didn't understand the concept of equality. "Hey honey, would you go grab me a cup of coffee?" "Hey miss, bring me an ashtray, would ya?" "What? You don't like the smell of cigar smoke at 8AM? What's wrong wit cha?" I was known as "the libber" or "that girl who thinks she's a buyer". For our Christmas grab bag (we could still have Christmas parties, not holiday parties), I received a pair of mens boxer shorts because I really wanted to be a man. (I gave a tin cup and pencils to the cigar smoking guy who spent all Friday afternoons lining up his breakfast, lunch and dinner dates with suppliers for the next week! I could give out the abuse as well as take it.)

There was a pipe smoking buyer in the office, too. He lit up first thing in the morning and chain smoked his pipe all day. At least he was pleasant to me (like he would be to a lap dog). There was a man who chain smoked cigarettes (Camels) all day hacking up globs of phlegm. That poor guy was hugely obese, was diabetic and shuffled around in bedroom slippers because of the damage that diabetes had done to his circulation.

My manager was a nice guy to me because he had daughters my age. At Christmas, the suppliers asked for our license plate numbers and told us all to leave our car doors unlocked in the parking lot. I received some nice bottles of wine. When I found a gift certificate to Macys in my car (a big no-no), I gave it to my boss, who told me to put it in my pocket book and go spend it because I had put up with a lot of crap all year.

During this time, I called the EEOC and had them start proceedings against RCA for wage discrimination. My father still worked for RCA and as a top executive, had an office at corporate headquarters in New York City. He heard about the EEOC investigation at staff meetings in the city and kept me posted as the noose tightened on the manager who had locked the door and screamed at me. I was still nervous and not altogether sure that there wasn't a super secret black list of problem women in business that my name was on somewhere. As it turned out, the wheels of justice turned slowly and I had moved on yet again before that issue was settled.

One at a time, in 1979, several of my young male colleagues had moved on to work in procurement for Jersey Central Power & Light Company in Morristown. Finally it was my turn to get the call, and I happily gave my two week notice and left.