Pour yourself a cup of ambition

In honor of Administrative Professionals’ Day, here’s an excerpt from Chapter 7, which is about how to cope with feeling stuck and frustrated at your job:

A few years ago, long-time Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown described a game that was played at one of her first jobs. Still a high school student, the eighteen-year-old Helen Gurley was working at radio station KHJ in Hollywood, California. The game was called “Scuttle,” and it began when all the men in the office with time to kill would select a female coworker and set upon her as a group. They would chase her down the halls, up through the music library and back around to the announcing booths. Once she’d been caught, they would hold her down and remove her underwear. End of game. Everyone would disperse and get back to work. “De-pantying was the sole object,” Gurley Brown recalled in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. No complaint was ever filed, and no scuttler was ever reported to the director’s office. Some women chose to cope with the practice by wearing their nicest underwear to work.

Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? After a series of secretarial jobs — Gurley Brown had seventeen in a row, she confesses in her 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl — she finally landed a position where her boss recognized her talent. She was close to 30.

There’s lots to be said about feeling unempowered, underutilized, and anxious at work — and for that, please buy the book — but I’ll just say this: The fuss about today’s young women not appreciating second-generation feminists enough (and by extension, not being excited enough about Hillary Clinton)? Perhaps a fair charge. Although, just a tip: Complaining to someone “You should appreciate me more!” is basically the same as nudging them to look for reasons for why they don’t.

But here’s where the women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s do have a point: The fact that you can go to work today and not have your underwear forcibly removed is thanks to them. The sexism, condescension, and general level of bullshit they dealt with, back when most women in the office were “secretaries” — off the charts by today’s standards. Nothing we experience now, in your average office, compares. A bright young woman, climbing the ladder in a white-collar workplace anywhere in the developed, Western world today, is one of the most comfortably situated people to have ever walked this planet. Enjoy it, ladies.

And now, please also enjoy this trailer for 9 to 5:

Dolly’s a national treasure. (And looks a bit like a blond Leighton Meester in that closing shot. Freaky.) This also reminds me I need new shoes.

more outsourcing

No original writing for the rest of the week; instead, more lengthy quotations from people who — clearly — have more discipline than I. This one I’ve used in the book, in Ch. 7, which is subtitled something like “Helen Gurley Brown on Having One’s Underwear Forcibly Removed.” It’s not what you think (either the Ch. or the quote). It’s about personal charm, and a number of people who’ve read early copies of HTBU have remarked on it. It starts out slight but winds up as rather a challenge:

“Being sexy is being charming, and if you can sum up what charm is, I think it’s total awareness. A charmer has her antenna up and valves open at all times. With sensitive radar she detects what the other person wants to hear and says it. And she senses what he doesn’t want to hear and refrains from saying it. Charming people, either men or women, are usually warm-blooded, affectionate and compassionate, but they are also thinking ahead all the time….

“I had lunch the other day with a charmer, accompanied by her mother. Two of the girls in the party had babbled ten minutes or so about their new office manager whom the mother didn’t know. Presently the charmer said, ‘You know, Mother, he’s kind of like Joe Winslow at the bank…sort of Prussian.’ Mother was back in the conversation.

“This particular charmer, so accomplished she should package it, puts everything in terms of you. ‘You would have loved it.’ ‘You would have fainted.’ In describing a gown she saw at the opera she says it was a little deeper than your red velvet coat. She remembers what you told her last time and asks questions this time. It’s appalling the things people can forget you told them (like your left fender had just been bashed in and your insurance has expired) and never ask you about it in subsequent conversations.”

From Sex and the Single Girl (1962).