The Typing Pool

Anyone who has watched Mad Men has seen a depiction of a corporate office that more closely resembles the environment in which I began my career than that of any current-day workplace.  This is perfectly logical, as the 1960’s were, in fact, chronologically closer to the 1980’s than the 1980’s were to the present day. 

Envision, if you will, the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.  Subtract the in-office liquor cabinets and trysts, the pointy push-up bras and other 60’s fashion items, and the blatant racism/sexism/homophobia.  Keep the smoking, the rotary dial phones, the wide-open, cubicle-free “bullpen,” the occasionally drunken executives and employees (who imbibed at local watering holes, not infrequently involving three hour Friday “luncheons”) and the more subtle end of the sexism spectrum; et voila, you are picturing my first job.

In those heady days preceding adoption of the personal computer and e-mail in the workplace, “typing” (the term “keyboarding” hadn’t yet been coined) was a specialized skill, generally possessed only by female clerical (sorry, office support) personnel.  My work as a newly-minted professional involved a great deal of correspondence, which I wrote the old-fashioned way, putting pen to paper.  The most informal memos went out the door in that form – in envelopes, addressed in longhand cursive.  Everything else went to the Typing Pool.

Our Typing Pool consisted of five or six women who had worked for the company as typists, probably, on average, 20-30 years each.  During times when the workload wasn’t sufficient to keep them all busy, they would read magazines or knit at their desks. This was considered perfectly acceptable. They typed, and that was all.  Such was corporate life in pre-Lean-Six-Sigma days.

As is typically the case with any team, some of the typists were, well, better than others.  We, as their captive clients, had no control over which typist handled our work.  It was the luck of the draw.

Kathy was the best. Her work was fast and accurate. Helen was… well, Helen had issues.  An older woman with a severe hearing impairment that made communication extraordinarily difficult, she had a few, shall we say, personal hygiene challenges (picture a lipstick-cheeked Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest” who smelled bad) in addition to being a shitty typist. Manuscripts that went to Helen typically came back bearing globs of liquid “White Out,” clumsy attempts at masking the small subset of mistakes that she was actually able to identify on her own.  They may as well have gone into a black hole.

Alternatives to using the Typing Pool were few.  None were sanctioned.  On rare occasions, when I really, truly needed to get something typed up quickly and accurately without risking losing my work to the black hole, I had two options: ask a personal favor of our manager’s secretary (sorry, administrative assistant) who happened to be a crack typist; or, as a last resort, find an empty desk that was equipped with an IBM Selectric typewriter (the kind with the little round letter-ball; they were state-of-the-art machines, and there were a few around for various specialized purposes) and – slowly, clumsily, carefully – type it myself.

The foregoing is an historical account, to the best of my recollection. Only the names have been changed. The story that follows is fictional.  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The year was 2013.  At Sharon’s company, and across corporate America, constant evolutionary change had long been the norm.  This year was no exception.  The deck chairs had been rearranged yet again, this time fairly significantly, and Sharon hadn’t fared particularly well.  Her team had been disbanded, the scope of her authority curtailed.  Worse, it seemed to Sharon and her colleagues that the trigger had been pulled prematurely.  Projects were on the drawing boards, but were not yet shovel-ready.  It appeared that senior management hadn’t quite figured out what to do with these folks, and many others like them, in the interim. 

They considered taking up knitting.

Fortunately, or so it seemed, a short-term assignment came along.  The band of misfits would be busy for awhile.  It wasn’t exactly challenging or intrinsically satisfying work.  The main task was data entry – or, as it would have been called thirty years ago, “typing.”

For weeks, Sharon and her co-workers sat at their desks, copying information from printed spreadsheets into a truly god-awful, poorly designed application.  Working, as they did, in the software development industry, they recognized bad design in a heartbeat: to create a new record, they had to first create a fully-populated “shell” containing hundreds of subordinate records, then delete the ones that were not desired.

In English: imagine walking into a supermarket to buy a loaf of bread.  But the only way to accomplish that is to remove every loaf of bread from the store shelves, load up several grocery carts with all of the loaves, wheel each of the carts to the checkout line, one at a time, then, finally, select the particular loaf that you want from the cart in which it resides, and hand it to the cashier. Having done all that, you must then bring your newly purchased bread out to your car, put it in the trunk, turn around and go back into the store, and repeat the entire procedure to obtain a quart of milk.  The process was just about that inefficient, slow, and frustrating.

As a result, the short-term assignment that had originally been estimated to last a few days dragged on for weeks. The performance of the application was so poor that minutes would pass between transactions.  Sharon and the rest of the crew found themselves staring at the little “please wait” spinning-beach-ball icon, really, most of the time. Their minds wandered.  They exchanged instant messages to pass the time:  “Thank God for my iPod.”  “Shoot me now.  No, really.”  “I’ve lost the ability to blink.”

Eventually, the wheels of corporate bureaucracy began moving again.  Sharon was able to move forward with a project assignment that, while nowhere near as challenging or satisfying as her old job, at least provided her with an opportunity to think.  Her colleagues, similarly, landed on their feet in various roles, still cogs on the giant, impersonal corporate wheel, albeit positioned differently.  The Neo-Typing Pool was no more.

In 2013, virtually anyone with an ‘office job’ has access to technology and tools that would have made Don Draper’s head spin, even when sober.  Yet it has always been, and remains true that people are the ultimate determinants of the success or failure of an enterprise.  The socially acceptable, yet at times tremendously counterproductive and even harmful office behavior of the 1960s’ Mad Men; the unabashedly rife-with-waste and, by today’s standards, highly manual processes of my 1980s office job; and the demoralizing underutilization of our fictional friend Sharon in the supposedly enlightened, “lean,” highly competitive, hurry-up-and-wait world of 2013 – all share the basic fact that there is clearly, always, room for improvement.  The best of us will continue striving to bring that about, despite circumstances that may render our efforts difficult, thankless, and sometimes futile.

And one day, sooner or later, we will move on.