Missed Opportunities (or were they?)

For a long time there was only one telephone company---Bell Telephone---and to land a job with them was akin to striking the mother-lode.

I applied for a job with Bell-Tel some time in late 1976 after returning from a month-and-a-half of picking fruit in Hood River Oregon and Yakima Washington, and I recall that omnipresent logo -- on the building, in the lobby, on the stationery, and in the indoctrination film I was forced to watch. At the end of a brief interview, the job boiled down to this: You would have to work as a phone operator for for your first two years with the company (not great, but OK), and phone operators were required to work all shifts, seven days a week, including holidays (you mean I might have to work Christmas? Or 4th of July? Or Thanksgiving?) Yes, you may have to work those holidays, but you will be paid double your hourly wage.

So I declined employment with Bell-Tel because I really wasn't mature enough at the age of 24 to make a serious lifestyle change. Eventually I would come to see the wisdom of working long hours, of sacrificing time for money, and of saving while you were young---but by then I was no longer young. In the absence of any one profession in which to grow and have a "career," it made sense to work 60- or 70-hour weeks while you were able to, and earn time-and-a-half, or double-time pay, pay which you had no opportunity or chance to spend. But hey, I thought I could always try again with Bell-Tel and other large U.S. companies (IBM, GM, GE, etc.), and once you managed to get your foot in the door, you would be set for life . . . and we all know how that turned out . . . I had similar delusions when I'd begun working for a large pharmaceutical firm in the '80s.

I had another offer to make lots of money when I was living again in north Jersey a few years later. The job was with a printing firm, and again it meant working seven days a week in pre-press, stripping negatives and making plates with lots of overtime as the dangling carrot, but even by my late 20's I still wasn't interested in sacrificing all that time. And I already had a 40-hour week job as an editor, and while the editor only paid a fraction of what the printing gig would have paid, I was pretty much doing what I enjoyed and didn't want to give that up. But I do wonder how my life might have turned out differently if I'd had the maturity and discipline to have taken one of those jobs. For instance, I might have settled down earlier---married, bought a house, had kids earlier. I would have had some material success at a younger age, but then Bell-Tel was broken up, and the printing company folded, and the printing industry overall declined and was not the field to be employed in, and the skills I would have picked up in either company would not have been marketable, would have been pretty much useless, like the typesetting and copy editing skills I had which kept me employed through much of the 80's. So who really knows, things might have turned out roughly the same either way, and by not opting to work all those free hours in my 20's, I at least had more of my 20's to enjoy.